Recent reading
Aug. 23rd, 2017 10:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
luzulaOn the Abolition of All Political Parties by Simone Weil (original in French, read in Swedish)
Hmmmm. What a weird book. It's a mix of thoughtprovoking things, some of which I agree with, and things which felt quite alien to me. There's an afterword which explained her thinking more and put it into context, which was helpful to me. A typical passage would go like this (I'm paraphrasing, obviously):
Simone Weil: A party is bad because it requires its members to agree to the whole party program and thus yield to the authority of the party. The party becomes its own purpose.
Luz: You have a point! I don't think a political organization should strive to make people think the same on every single point--it's better to have a platform of a few things that people agree on and concentrate on that.
Simone Weil: If the party becomes its own purpose, that is idolatry, since only God can be a purpose in himself.
Luz: Er. *is not religious*
There's not actually much religious stuff, but some of the text is an attempt to abstractly and logically deduce things about human nature and about society, which I always have a hard time with. She seems to think social pressure is always bad, but I'm not sure I agree. Some social pressure is obviously bad, but if there's social pressure to wash your dishes and not just leave them in the sink where they annoy other people, or to not have sex without consent, isn't that a good thing? Also she claims that passion, and especially collective passion, is bad for politics. Yes and no? I do take her point about countries becoming polarized between different political groups (this feels very topical...) but is anyone actually detached and unemotional when they do politics? Would it be better if they were? I think her point is that if you're detached you can more easily see what the common good is, rather than being caught up in your own interests. But isn't there also value in sharing a common purpose with other people and being uplifted by that?
Sju dagar i maj by Micke Evhammar (Seven Days In May, only available in Swedish)
A week in the life of a group of construction workers in Sweden. One is middle-aged with a broken-down body, one is a racist who hates the immigrants who are taking the jobs, one is a young temp worker who is annoyed with the racist and who is sacked for following the safety guidelines, one is a team boss and an immigrant who came in the 90's from Yugoslavia and is not actually hated by the racist because I guess he's integrated now, and one is a young Arab temp worker who replaces the one who got sacked. One of these people die at the end in a workplace accident, which is carefully set up by several Chekov's guns. There's a lot of interesting detail about construction work and how it's divided into several different professions--the author is a construction worker himself. It's a good book!
Hmmmm. What a weird book. It's a mix of thoughtprovoking things, some of which I agree with, and things which felt quite alien to me. There's an afterword which explained her thinking more and put it into context, which was helpful to me. A typical passage would go like this (I'm paraphrasing, obviously):
Simone Weil: A party is bad because it requires its members to agree to the whole party program and thus yield to the authority of the party. The party becomes its own purpose.
Luz: You have a point! I don't think a political organization should strive to make people think the same on every single point--it's better to have a platform of a few things that people agree on and concentrate on that.
Simone Weil: If the party becomes its own purpose, that is idolatry, since only God can be a purpose in himself.
Luz: Er. *is not religious*
There's not actually much religious stuff, but some of the text is an attempt to abstractly and logically deduce things about human nature and about society, which I always have a hard time with. She seems to think social pressure is always bad, but I'm not sure I agree. Some social pressure is obviously bad, but if there's social pressure to wash your dishes and not just leave them in the sink where they annoy other people, or to not have sex without consent, isn't that a good thing? Also she claims that passion, and especially collective passion, is bad for politics. Yes and no? I do take her point about countries becoming polarized between different political groups (this feels very topical...) but is anyone actually detached and unemotional when they do politics? Would it be better if they were? I think her point is that if you're detached you can more easily see what the common good is, rather than being caught up in your own interests. But isn't there also value in sharing a common purpose with other people and being uplifted by that?
Sju dagar i maj by Micke Evhammar (Seven Days In May, only available in Swedish)
A week in the life of a group of construction workers in Sweden. One is middle-aged with a broken-down body, one is a racist who hates the immigrants who are taking the jobs, one is a young temp worker who is annoyed with the racist and who is sacked for following the safety guidelines, one is a team boss and an immigrant who came in the 90's from Yugoslavia and is not actually hated by the racist because I guess he's integrated now, and one is a young Arab temp worker who replaces the one who got sacked. One of these people die at the end in a workplace accident, which is carefully set up by several Chekov's guns. There's a lot of interesting detail about construction work and how it's divided into several different professions--the author is a construction worker himself. It's a good book!
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-27 12:45 pm (UTC)Definitely adding Sju dagar i maj to my to-read list over on Goodreads!
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-27 12:52 pm (UTC)To be honest I find some of what she's saying hard to understand, and some of it I disagree with, but some of it is intriguing to me.
I hope you enjoy Sju dagar i maj! It's a quick and easy read, but also thought-provoking.
(no subject)
Date: 2017-08-27 01:04 pm (UTC)And am looking forward to Sju dagar i maj! Really need to broaden my reading horizon, since I pretty much stick to scifi and fantasy if I go looking for books on my own. Always good to try something different once in a while (but first I'll have to get through the 30+ books lying around my apartment unread...)