Go my friends write a book and bring back the tradition of the pamphleteers
I’m going to try to persuade you to write a book. To start with, just as background context, I wrote a book. If you haven’t already seen it, you can get a PDF copy by clicking here. By making it free and going to pains to give out copies I’ve thus far managed to distribute 20,000+ electronic copies. I am so glad I did this- it has become a source of comfort in my life. For this and other reasons, I think more people should do it. Or at least more of the right kind of people. I think that we should bring back the grand tradition of the pamphleteers- writing essays and books on things that matter and making an effort to distribute them.
If you share my broad outlook- left with a sense that what the world needs is more loving-kindness and we need to organize for this- I hope you join in and think about writing a book and distributing it as best you can, whether for free or otherwise. If not a book, at least some writing.
This is an essay on the merits of doing that. Unfortunately, because it’s an essay by me recommending something I’ve done, it probably comes across as a bit prideful in parts. I do apologize for that, but I think this is important enough that I want to go on anyway.
You must write
I think it’s very important that thoughtful people start writing. Start now and setup a blog. Substack isn’t a bad choice if you’re considering your options.
We live in a weird time. It’s pretty clear that this world cannot last. Environmental devastation, a new great power, rising inequality, falling birth rates, a curious mixture of political rage and apathy, delicate supply lines, an economy surely fragile in its intricacy, vulnerability to pandemics, rising artificial intelligence, political gridlock, looming transhumanism, sluggish real wage growth, declining economic growth, Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom Brando, "The King and I", and "The Catcher in the Rye" Eisenhower, Vaccine, England's got a new queen, Marciano, Liberace, Santayana, goodbye, We didn't start the fire
So there’s an urgent need to begin thinking about what will come next, because something’s coming, whether we think about it or not. Yet no one much is thinking. when I go on Twitter, and I look at the people who think of themselves intellectuals, I see mostly historical parodies. Many thoughtful parodies. Many smart parodies. Even some wise parodies, but parodies nonetheless. Parodies of kinds of thought that are already dead. The historical reenactment of thinking which is no more thought than the historical reenactment of the battle of Gettysburg is battle.
Examples. On the left I see people pretending to be 19th century Anarchists and I see people pretending to be Leninists. In the center I see people pretending to be post-war liberals, and people pretending to be 90’s era optimists. On the right, always masters of historical LARPing, I see people pretending to be Birchites, people pretending to be Nietzsche, people pretending to be mystically inclined fascists and people pretending to be sharp tongued 13th century Russian archbishops. About the only movement which is truly of our time is the strands of hardline identititarianism, and nothing good is going to come of that.
There’s no way out of the facsimile of thought but trying hard to think. Yes, you risk becoming another parody yourself- the distorted image of a mode of thought already dead, yet what alternative is there but trying to think? The only way through the mire is to trudge through the mire.
It’s time to start talking with each other. It’s a time for reading groups. A time for politics in the pub. A time for organizing lectures and debates. Above all, it’s a time write and distribute that writing, not just to disseminate thinking but because, in many ways, you haven’t started to think about something until you start writing about it. And even if no one reads your stuff initially, all that time you spend writing is time spent refining and precisifying your thoughts is never wasted. I know from experience that very often the experience of writing, which felt like writing missives to the void at the time, comes to matter later.
And please believe me when I say this again for emphasis- it is no artful hyperbole: you do not know what you think about a subject till you start writing about it.
Specifically, you should write a book
There is an old quote that allegedly comes from thousands of years before the birth of Christ, but more likely actually comes from about 1908 AD.
“We have fallen upon evil times, the world has waxed old and wicked. Politics are very corrupt. Children are no longer respectful to their elders. Each man wants to make himself conspicuous and write a book.”
My initial reading of the part about the book is that the author is simply expressing something many of us intuitively know, viz those people who perpetually want to write a book are, to use a technical term fucking annoying and this is a joke at their expense, hyperbolically asserting that their ambitions reek of the decay of all things. I certainly get it- there’s something grandiose about the perpetual ambition to one day write a book. Something presumptuous about thinking that although you’re not even sure what the book is about, you simply must write one.
I still think that is what the quote author meant, to a large degree, but I think there’s something else going on here too. Our anonymous 20th-century jokester has captured a deep truth, viz, there is a link between social transformation and writing a book. Outside of organizing a protest or strike, it’s probably the paradigmatic way of trying to shake things up, and with good reason.
On fairly generous assumptions- at my back of the envelope calculation based on polling data, the median person reads 200 books in a lifetime, (I think it’s probably closer to 100). Of these, the overwhelming majority of books are not socially engaged. Let’s optimistically estimate that the median person reads 20 books on social matters in their life. Those 20 books are going to form the basis for a lot of their thinking and rhetoric on those subjects. If you write a book and get just a thousand people to read it, particularly if it is well-written and insightful, your impact on their lives and on “the conversation” may be a lot more than you realize.
A quote attributed to the CIA’s “Chief of Covert Action” in the Atlantic, which unfortunately I have been unable to confirm the authenticity of, holds:
“Books differ from all other propaganda media primarily because one single book can significantly change the reader’s attitude and action to an extent unmatched by the impact of any other single medium.”
It’s no mystery why. Consider my book “Live More Lives than One”. It’s 70,000 words long, meaning that, as an audiobook, it would be about 8 hours long. Now imagine there was a lecture series on something that you wanted to hear by choice- one lecture per night for eight days. Each lecture lasted an hour, and you attended each day. I suspect that lecture series would linger in your memory for a long time.
Little quips you read in a book seal themselves onto your brain and remain there, ready to drop in conversations. For example, today I read in The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber with David Wengrow the following argument, words to the effect of: It is a bit silly to debate whether humans are fundamentally good or evil, because good and evil are words we invented to compare humans, thus debating whether humanity as a whole is good or evil is a bit like debating whether humanity as a whole is fat or thin. I have always been dissatisfied with debates about the moral character of humanity in total, finding the goalposts very hard to define, but I never felt like I could adequately express that dissatisfaction. Now that I’ve read this, it’s in a book, it’s sealed away in my brain, and it will immediately pop up anytime anyone mentions this perennial debate from now on. I am changed for the better. But of course you agree I am changed for the better- I don’t have to convince you of the benefits of reading books for the world, but why, then, should I have to convince you of the benefits for the world of writing them? The one all but necessitates the other.
But, you say, this doesn’t follow. Yes, you concede, the value of reading means there must be a value of writing, but this need only be at the average, not the margin. there are already plenty of books. It’s not like readers have exhausted the existing stockpile. There are already plenty of books, including of the humanistic, intellectually curious, leftism you’re trying to propagate, philosophy bear. Why add to this huge number?
Because I’m not just asking you to write a book, I’m asking you to write a book and then push and push others to read that book you have written. You can’t do that with existing book, because you’ll never be able to propagate someone else’s pamphlet as passionately as your own. Writing a book then pushing it out on others as passionately as you can is making a contribution to our stagnant conversation that merely advocating for others books can’t match, because you’ll never advocate for anything as well as your own stuff.
Economies of scale
There’s another way to frame it that brings us again back to the specific virtues of books. It applies especially to anthologies of essays, but similar reasoning works for continuous pieces. If an article you wrote went viral and was read by 20,000 people, it would make your month. Think how much better it is if dozens of your articles went viral and reached 20,000 people. This is effectively what happens if a book containing many essays reaches a lot of people.
Of course, the difficulty here is that most people don’ finish books, so you can’t assume that each reader has read each essay (or anything even remotely close to that!) but even so, you get the reasoning in outline. There’s a power in this sort of bundling that merely putting all your essays on one blog doesn’t match.
In a period where the blogosphere is dead, very active distribution is necessary if you want people to read what you write. The bundling offered by a book is a great method for this, you only have to give them one bit of writing and you have given them many.
This still applies to books that aren’t anthologies of essays, because a book-length treatment of something is almost always a collection of parts that could be separated into different essays on related topics, etc., etc.
These fragments I have shored against my ruin
What about the personal benefits of writing a book? I quote yet another book, yet another ghost that will forever yarn and jibber in the mind.
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
From The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot
Exactly what the quote means in context is difficult to say, but I have always interpreted it as a statement by Eliot that the poem is the “fragments I have shored against my ruins”. We’re given a certain quantum of talent, time, and opportunity. Our time dwindles, and maybe our talent does as well, and I don’t want to get close to the end only to die sad that I didn’t do more. A book is a persistent achievement.
It’s often been remarked that we’re all going to die, and this is a reason to do things. Let me add to this further. Either we will die young, in which case it would be doubly tragic if we hadn’t left anything at all, or we’ll die old, in which case, it will also be doubly tragic because we’ll get to the end and count the opportunities we left fallow. Apart from raising a child, writing a book is one of the best ways to fight the voice that tells you that you haven’t done anything.
Now let me be clear, that voice is a liar. People are constantly doing things for themselves and others that matter and count. Every person intersects with the lives of others in countless ways, and it’s often the people who worry they have done the least who have done the most. I am not saying that writing a book will make you are a more worthy person, but it is a good tactic for shutting that voice up. Recently I was contemplating the possibility of coming to an awful end, and I thought, oh well, nothing the world can do can make people unread my book. It’s a comfort.