Writer's Diary
8/1/24
My courtyard is one of the most extraordinarily peaceful places in Manhattan, I think. I mean, peaceful for Manhattan. I'm sure someone from the countryside wouldn't think so. But it works for me. I'm reading a biography of John von Neumann called *The Man from the Future*. I'm adding the book as a datapoint to my claim that that Europeans who were educated before World War I, or latest before 1930, were astonishingly more intelligent than we are.1
I shouldn't just say Europeans—but anyone who received that style of education: grounded in classical physics and classical languages, entering fields that were undergoing revolutions: modernism, literature and art, quantum theory and physics, and eventually nuclear physics, astrophysics, and so on.2
In all my reading about the history of ideas and the history of culture, I keep drawing the same troubling conclusion: splendid, baroque, highly educated cultures tend to destroy themselves… tend to explode at the moment they create a synthetic intellectual splendor.
Reading about Central Europe and Central Europeans in the early 20th century is like learning the upper limits of civilization. It feels similar to reading about Mandarin China, Ancient Greece, or Golden Age Spain.
I feel that way about America in the 20th century. The gap between our economic means and what we actually produce suggests a sadistic desire, a preference for pain, destruction, and deconstruction—a skepticism towards the value of human spirit.
Because we do have the material means to bring together the best of civilization.
We could have classical buildings and classical libraries in almost every home (the cost of books is a fraction of what it would have been 200 years ago, for instance; ditto building materials). We could afford to have a train system like Japan's. We could have a nuclear fleet like France's. We have enough trains and musicians to have classical music and jazz, songwriters and cafes and restaurants and private homes. We could split the difference between traditional agriculture and industrial agriculture. There's so much actual abundance at our fingertips, but it just doesn't happen.
The amount of work people have to do has actually decreased on a linear basis from 1900 to 2024, but this apparently is not an enticement to self-enrichment.