Astral Codex Ten

Mann

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Mann

Article

Mann is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between April 30, 2021 and August 05, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “in subsequent chapters of Vogt’s biography, Mann goes out of his way to show”; “Mann writes that Vogt, like his buddies”; “Given the life story Mann depicts for Vogt”. It most often appears alongside COVID, acedia, Against Nature.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: April 30, 2021
  • Last seen: August 05, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet
April 30, 2021 · Original source
Some books really stick with me. Like, literally, stick with me: I’m one of those people with pretentious literary tattoos. So far, just two books have been meaningful enough for me to permanently etch their totem on my skin: the glyph of the underground postal service from The Crying of Lot 49, and the line "Everything Is Permitted," Jean-Paul Sartre’s misquoting of Dostoevsky’s take on atheism from The Brothers Karamazov. (I wasn’t kidding about pretentious!) People have all sorts of reasons for getting tattoos – mine are there for some of the standard superficial ones (looking cool and tough, obviously), but also to act as little daily mantras for how I want to live and think about the world. To this very short list of inked paragons, I’m thinking of adding a new one: a few stylized stalks of wheat in honor of Charles Mann’s The Wizard and the Prophet.
Inline links: misquoting
Though Mann insists from the start that the book is not meant to advocate for or condemn either side, it was initially difficult for me to read it as anything but two-and-three-quarters cheers for Wizardry (more on the "initially" later). Part of this comes down to the challenge inherent in the genre: the book is structured first as a biography of Vogt and Borlaug ("Two Men"), then as an overview of how their Prophet and Wizard ideas play out in the modern-day battles over what to do about food, water, energy, and climate change ("Four Elements"). Starting the book with the personal and professional lives of these two men is a good way to show the very specific local contexts in which their ideas originated. Unfortunately, it’s also a good way to make Borlaug look like a saint, and Vogt like kind of an asshole.
The fact that Vogt’s first entry into the public sphere is rallying the public against anti-malaria measures leaves a pretty bad taste in my mouth, as I’m sure it does for any of Mann’s Effective Altruist aligned readers. It would be one thing if Vogt were concerned about the detrimental impact of malaria on humans AND the detrimental impact of malaria prevention methods on bird life. But in subsequent chapters of Vogt’s biography, Mann goes out of his way to show that Vogt’s influences and contemporary members of the environmentalist milieu – for example, Madison Grant, co-founder of the Bronx Zoo, organizer of the United States national park system, and author of the charmingly named The Passing of the Great Race, beloved by Hitler – were, to put in mildly, extremely uninterested in the wellbeing of all humankind. Instead, they were obsessed by fears of an unchecked Malthusian population explosion, race mixing, and a resultant societal degeneration that could only be stopped by halting (read: starving out) population growth. Which people deserved to live in harmony with nature in the ensuing pastoral utopia and which would be relegated to the dustbin of history was not an exercise they left to the reader. Mann writes that Vogt, like his buddies, was "loudly scornful of the ‘unchecked spawning’ and ‘untrammeled copulation’ of ‘backward populations’ – people in India, he sneered, breed with ‘the irresponsibility of codfish.’"
Inline links: Madison Grant
Your Book Review: Exhaustion
August 05, 2022 · Original source
As Anna Schaffner explains it in Exhaustion: A History, you will find yourself in good company. The book has testimony from Charles Darwin, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, and Thomas Mann, amongst others, giving accounts of their chronic pathological exhaustion.
This led to the development in the 19th century of a new, vaguely defined illness known as neurasthenia. It was, in the conception of the time, an illness of overworked and played out nerves due to their overstimulation at the hands of industrialisation and modern society. A neat rhetorical trick was employed by physicians at the time, who claimed that sensitive and creative people doing brain work were more susceptible than those in the working classes. This is an important change, as it begins the move away from the moralistic conception of exhaustion and produces a blame-free, stigma-free conception of an illness which has a tendency to strike the special and the smart. It is no coincidence that many of the writers and thinkers I mentioned earlier that suffered from exhaustion (James, Woolf, Mann, Wilde et al) are all concentrated in this era – they all were diagnosed with neurasthenia. As Darwin announces and elaborates on the theory of evolution, more attention is paid to the idea of inherited weaknesses in nerves, culminating in cultural accounts like Huysmans’s Á rebours (Against Nature), which described the final, exhausted, idle throes of generations of inbreeding in the person of a decadent, hypersensitive and exhausted noble recluse.
Inline links: Á rebours
Opposite them are a mix of (some of) the sufferer’s frustrated partners, carers and family members who have difficulty with living with someone who has chronic disability. This can include the individual’s doctor, who sometimes deals with chronicity poorly. The fringes of this group start muttering darkly about mass psychogenic illnesses and fads, access to insurance and compensation, and prefer to use the term chronic fatigue syndrome but with audible air quotes. You may think this is strawmanning the anti-CFS group, but Schaffner has the medical/psychiatric historian Edward Shorter to set us straight:
Inline links: poorly