For more than a decade Dr. Igor Panarin, a Russian academic, has been predicting that sometime around 2010 the United States will collapse, splintering into separate states, some of them controlled by foreign powers. Outside of Russia, no one's put much stock in his crackpot and stereotype-based theories—until now, that is. Who are the newest members of the Igor Panarin fan club? Tea partiers who’ve rallied against the Obama administration's policies and blasted the president for pushing a "socialist" agenda. And he's especially big among tea party activists in Texas, who have hosted Panarin and promoted his work.

In Russia, Panarin, who hosts a weekly radio show, is considered a mainstream expert on the United States. Like Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Panarin used to work for the KGB. He clearly has the support of the Kremlin, for he teaches at* the school that trains Russia's diplomats. And since the election of Barack Obama last November, Panarin has found a new audience in America among far right activists, many of whom believe Obama is destroying the country.

While the extreme availability of information today should presumably have highlighted its relative paucity in earlier periods, historians--most notably Ann Blair--have in fact extended the concept of "information overload" all the way back to the sixteenth century, arguing that while we now associate the phenomenon with the internet, the printing press had a comparable effect. Until its invention, most literate people had access to relatively little written material. They could manage to read literally everything they could get their hands on. After Gutenberg, however, books multiplied rapidly, and soon many libraries became too large for their owners to read more than a small percentage of the texts. It became necessary to devise strategies for dealing with the excess. Scholars invented systems of note-taking, methods of summarizing and skimming, and principles of triage. As Francis Bacon famously remarked: "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, with diligence and attention." That is, among other things, a comment about coping.

We cope in the same way; and anyone who identifies Wikipedia with the end of civilization should be reassured to learn that early modern Europeans already possessed an impressive arsenal of intellectual crutches and shortcuts, some of them quite dubious. By the seventeenth century there already existed a large genre of reference works, compendia, and reading guides, so as to lead the uninitiated through the increasingly dense thickets of learning, sometimes at breakneck speed. Some readers made use of little else, with classical compendia particularly prized for the quick simulacra of learning that they provided. As Jonathan Swift advised young critics, "Get scraps of Horace from your friends, / And have them at your fingers' ends." More serious scholars put together their own guides and reference works. Ann Blair has shown that many of the greatest Renaissance thinkers had no compunction about attacking their books with scissors, cutting and pasting what they considered the crucial passages into commonplace books or card files for easy reference.

Colbert ... worked to restrict the public flow of information, and here he set particularly long-lasting precedents. He made secrecy his byword, and insisted that no one outside government had any right to a knowledge of its workings--particularly its financial workings. Soll depicts him at work ensuring that no Paris printer could learn Greek or Latin without official approval, so that potentially seditious classical scholarship would remain under close surveillance. He shows Colbert striving to suppress Richard Simon's pioneering critical treatment of the Old Testament--one of the first attempts to treat Scripture as a historical text--and promoting the idea that "history should serve only to conserve the splendor of the King's enterprises." While Louis XIV abandoned other elements of Colbert's information system, he happily retained all of these.

. . .

The path from Colbert to the Enlightenment needs further investigation. So, for that matter, does the path to the Enlightenment from the scholarly forms of information management studied by historians such as Blair. How does our relationship to formal knowledge change when we do not read through a book from start to finish, submitting ourselves to its logic and authority--when we impose our own organizational scheme on it through sophisticated forms of note-taking and the use of reference guides? The suddenness and completeness of the shift from one form of reading to another should not be exaggerated, but the phenomenon still has clear importance to the development of what we call, however imperfectly, modernity. The still more radical challenge to reading posed by the electronic dissemination of texts likewise promises, in the long run, to have profound effects on our broader intellectual universe.

The great irony about Colbert is that the ways of knowing that he championed would ultimately prove incompatible with the social and political values that he defended. He himself, of course, did not see any contradiction between a utilitarian perspective and a system of absolute monarchy grounded in the divine right of kings, brutal religious intolerance, and social privilege; but later generations would see a flagrant contradiction, and act decisively to resolve it. In this sense, the aristocrats and the scholars who saw Colbert as an alien, threatening presence in their midst had things exactly right. It is true, as Jacob Soll claims, that in the short term the French monarchy benefited from Colbert's ministrations, and might have benefited still more if his "system" had persisted after his death. From another perspective, however, he was less the state's servant than one of its gravediggers.

Graunt was particularly interested in the causes of death, especially "that extraordinary and grand Casualty" the plague, and in the way people lived under the constant threat of devastating epidemic. For the year 1632, for example, he listed nearly sixty different causes of death, with 628 deaths coming under the heading of "aged." The others range from "affrighted" and "bit with mad dog" (one each) to "worms," "quinsie," and "starved at nurse." There were only seven "murthers" in 1632 and just 15 suicides.

. . .

After commenting on the incidence of accidents -- most of which he asserts are occupation-related -- Graunt refers to "one Causalty in our Bills, or which though there be daily talk, [but] little effect." This casualty is the French-Pox -- a type of syphilis -- "gotten for the most part, not so much by the intemperate use of Venery (which rather casuses the Gowt) as of many common Women." Graunt wonders why the records show that so few died of it, as "a great part of men have, at one time or another, had some species of this disease." He concludes that most of the deaths from ulcers and sores were in fact caused by venereal disease, the recorded diagnoses serving as euphemisms. According to Graunt, a person had to be pretty far gone before the authorities acknowledged the true cause of death: "onely hated persons, and such, whose very Noses were eaten of, were reported ... to have died of this too frequent Maladie."

Around the age of five, Alissa Rosenbaum's mother instructed her to put away some of her toys for a year. She offered up her favorite possessions, thinking of the joy that she would feel when she got them back after a long wait. When the year had passed, she asked her mother for the toys, only to be told she had given them away to an orphanage. Heller remarks that "this may have been Rand's first encounter with injustice masquerading as what she would later acidly call ‘altruism.’ " (The anti-government activist Grover Norquist has told a similar story from childhood, in which his father would steal bites of his ice cream cone, labelling each bite "sales tax" or "income tax." The psychological link between a certain form of childhood deprivation and extreme libertarianism awaits serious study.)

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Only within the Beltway popcorn popper could Gingrich, whose serpent tongue and ogre ego did so much to polarize discourse in the 1990s and abort reform, be considered a foxy catch. Only in Washington, D.C., could Gingrich, a magpie of futurist jargon and a bumptious opportunist, pass himself off as an iconoclastic force and centrifuge of ideas, a cross between Buckminster Fuller and Che Guevara leading a commando raid on the buffet table.

spielerfrau

Соврамерлит — детище двух принципов. Первый насаждается на литературных факультетах США, где студентов учат максиме "пиши что знаешь". (Ее недостаток в том, что самые яркие переживания автора в студенческие годы зачастую связаны со студенческими годами как таковыми; по словам редактора из ведущего издательства Farrar, Straus & Giroux, среднестатистическая рукопись из сотен, приходящих на ее адрес каждую неделю, это "роман аспиранта о любовной жизни аспирантов".)

Второй принцип интереснее. Это общая одержимость американской культуры понятием "аутентичность" и последующая озабоченность биографией автора как залогом аутентичности произведения. Именно эта любовь к roman a clef во всех своих проявлениях, это инфантильное желание знать, что так все и было, приводит к странному слиянию мемуара и романа, являющемуся главным признаком соврамерлита. На уровне популярной беллетристики это означает, что едва ли не любой жизненный опыт за пределами академического годится для того, чтобы нанизать на него сюжет о триумфе инженю.

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