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On “A Canticle for Leibowitz”

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Re: On “A Canticle for Leibowitz”

#21

Post by andrewmutz »

_dw7s wrote: post #19
cableshaft wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you actually measure the world, however, then by almost any measure things are better now than they have been in the past (two notable exceptions are climate change and democracy vs autocracy). Or US life expectancy, or healthcare/childcare/university costs (in the US), or homicides (in the US), or suicides, or population growth (arguably a good thing for climate change, but most people aren't choosing to put of…

The whole better off trope has been popularized by people like Hans Rosling in books like Factfulness. You can read reviews from experts to figure out what's wrong with it. But I've often seen these arguments in the context of 'everything is going great, there's nothing to worry about' with arguments such as 'we had the most people lifted out of poverty ever in history'. In my view that's just capitalist koolaid to k…

> The whole better off trope has been popularized by people like Hans Rosling in books like Factfulness

Hans Rosling is right.

And the success of the world does not mean we shouldn't work to improve it. It means we shouldn't be doomers and think the world is falling apart.

Max Roser said it well with "The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better."

https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better

Re: On “A Canticle for Leibowitz”

#22

Post by fnordpiglet »

I read this book when I was a teenager simply because the title sounded cool. I was in for a real surprise - it blew me away. Memories. I don’t get that feeling often when reading any more - maybe age, maybe rarity of the books quality.

Re: On “A Canticle for Leibowitz”

#23

Post by decebalus1 »

andrewmutz wrote: post #21
_dw7s wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole better off trope has been popularized by people like Hans Rosling in books like Factfulness. You can read reviews from experts to figure out what's wrong with it. But I've often seen these arguments in the context of 'everything is going great, there's nothing to worry about' with arguments such as 'we had the most people lifted out of poverty ever in history'. In my view that's just capitalist koolaid to k…

> The whole better off trope has been popularized by people like Hans Rosling in books like Factfulness Hans Rosling is right. And the success of the world does not mean we shouldn't work to improve it. It means we shouldn't be doomers and think the world is falling apart. Max Roser said it well with "The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better." https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-a…

> the success of the world

Which part of the world is succeeding? What does that actually mean? 'Success of the world' is such an empty statement. What did it succeed at? Destroying our habitat?

> does not mean we shouldn't work to improve it

Most of the more brilliant minds in the current industrialized world are working on making more money for someone (themselves or others). Who's working on actually improving it? And improve it how? By making the world a better place 'through minimal message oriented transport layers'?

> It means we shouldn't be doomers and think the world is falling apart

Nobody is saying one should be a doomer or whatever. Doomer implies losing all hope. What I'm advocating is losing hope for the current system, not for the world.

Re: On “A Canticle for Leibowitz”

#24

Post by _jal »

tablespoon wrote: post #6
_jal wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The book itself is the prediction.

> The book itself is the prediction. The book itself is literature. To see it as a prediction and especially as a failed prediction seems simpleminded (in the techie-futurist way).

(A) I don't see it as a failed prediction, that's the author's view. Me, I think history is a long time compared to the time we've lived with WMD.

(B) The type of literature in question is called an allegory. To see an allegory as a prediction is... aligned with why people write them. I wouldn't call picking the wrong definition to support an argument simpleminded; perhaps friction-seeking would be a good term.

Re: On “A Canticle for Leibowitz”

#25

Post by ilamont »

badcppdev wrote: post #18
ilamont wrote: post #12

But we didn’t blow ourselves back to the stone age in the 50s and 60s. This fate turned out to be not quite as inevitable as “A Canticle” would seem to suggest. Yet evidence pointing to this outcome was all around us during the Cold War, right up to the late 1980s. Development of new and more potent weapons. Serious accidents or near accidents - one crazy one I remember hearing about was one side almost launching a r…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chrome_Dome Crazy times. 1960 - 1968 The United States flew nuclear armed bombers to the borders of the USSR 24 hours a day. Imagine if 'insert country name' flew armed bombers to the border of 'insert western country name' every day in 2022.

IIRC it was going on even longer than that, although perhaps on a reduced frequency. My barber worked at an air base in North Dakota late in the Cold War and mentioned something about that.

Re: On “A Canticle for Leibowitz”

#26

Post by xoxxala »

In the early 90s, I read all of the Hugo winners at the time. A Canticle for Leibowitz was one of my favorites.

A few years later, it was one of the three major influences we used when making the original Fallout (along with Road Warrior and City of Lost Children).

Re: On “A Canticle for Leibowitz”

#27

Post by ASlave2Gravity »

a_e_k wrote: post #11
ASlave2Gravity wrote: post #5

Easily one of my favourite novels. It's riddled with beauty; there is a lens held up to the shepherding of knowledge that made me really appreciate what it means to be a scholar. It's a wild ride and I think a book people should read. My fav quote, "When you tire of living, change itself seems evil, does it not? for then any change at all disturbs the deathlike peace of the life-weary.”

Definitely one of my favorites, too. There's an elegiac quality to it that I haven't quite seen in any other novel. I have a number of quotations jotted down from it, but since this a tech site I'll restrict myself to sharing this one that I sometimes think of when dealing with a recalcitrant machine or mysterious bug: "That contraption--listen, Brother, they claim it thinks. I didn't believe it at first. Thought, im…

Elegiac is the perfect word for it!

It's a lovely quote too. I remember reading the novel and thinking, 'Holy shit, he's hit the nail on the head!'

I'd happily run a class on it. Whenever anyone asks for a reading list, it's often on there.

I take the novel as a mystic work, much like Meister Eckhart's works. It's a pendulum swing between the secular and the sacred.

Re: On “A Canticle for Leibowitz”

#28

Post by gumby »

cableshaft wrote: post #13
andrewmutz wrote: post #4

Most of what you read on the news and social media would have you convinced that civilization is declining or collapsing. If you actually measure the world, however, then by almost any measure things are better now than they have been in the past (two notable exceptions are climate change and democracy vs autocracy). What does this mean? Why the difference between the measurable state of the world and the doomer disc…

> If you actually measure the world, however, then by almost any measure things are better now than they have been in the past (two notable exceptions are climate change and democracy vs autocracy). Or US life expectancy, or healthcare/childcare/university costs (in the US), or homicides (in the US), or suicides, or population growth (arguably a good thing for climate change, but most people aren't choosing to put of…

The US is only 5% of the population. On a global scale all of those factors are improving.

Just as the Gibson quote went: "The future is already here -- it's just not evenly distributed"

Re: On “A Canticle for Leibowitz”

#29

Post by bslorence »

JackFr wrote: post #14

I very much enjoyed ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’ when I read it, but in looking back while it was tremendous for middle school me, it doesn’t hold up. The whole “Fall of Rome/Dark Ages/Western Monasticism preserves civilization” narrative just isn’t true and is a misreading of Western history. That’s a post-hoc framing created in the late Renaissance/early modern era.

Interesting take, I would have thought that the early moderns were not too interested in vindicating monasticism. Do you have particular thinkers in mind here?

Re: On “A Canticle for Leibowitz”

#30

Post by billjings »

xoxxala wrote: post #26

In the early 90s, I read all of the Hugo winners at the time. A Canticle for Leibowitz was one of my favorites. A few years later, it was one of the three major influences we used when making the original Fallout (along with Road Warrior and City of Lost Children).

> A few years later, it was one of the three major influences we used when making the original Fallout

Really burying the lede here! :)

I loved that game, and I'm not completely surprised to hear that A Canticle For Leibowitz had that kind of influence. Fallout was very much its own thing, but Children of the Cathedral had that same postapocalyptic monk vibe.

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