Seems the French regard the good ol’ shiny wrapper round a paperback as a bit daring, to judge from a piece in Le Figaro. Can this one really be an example of what worries them? (It’s the 2009 winner, Trois femmes puissantes by Marie Ndiaye.)

Are they “behind” us with other forms of in-yer-face promotion?

Dr Phillips, (whom God preserve, of New Jersey) sends us their summary of a piece from Scientific American (sub required for full article).

Key Concepts:

* A new type of service industry has emerged to meet the needs of the millions who play online fantasy games such as World of Warcraft.
* Players called gold farmers amass game “currency” to sell to other players for a fee.
* This controversial practice violates the rules of play but has become a means for hundreds of thousands of developing world players to earn a wage comparable to that of factory workers.

What strikes the good doctor is the parallel between this remarkable trade and the practice of religion. Both require a mass of believers and a group of exploiters like the wily mob in mediaeval times  (typified by Chaucer’s Pardoner) who sold indulgences and saints’ relics. Myself, I’d go for a relic, that way you at least get a bit of bone, albeit from a pig. Indulgences you take on trust, and what if you went directly to hell, no hanging about, wouldn’t you spit?

Richard Heeks, a scholar in the field of development informatics, has a piece worth reading on the economics of gold-farming. Another form of wealth transfer from the rich to the developing worlds.

New forms, old (psychological) content? People are suckers for the intangible, more specifically, symbolic systems of reward and status. One example, Louis XIV’s construction of Versailles, with its mandarin protocols, rituals and titles. While the French nobles competed over the position of turd-carrier to the Sun King they weren’t about to go all Frondist on him. Napoleon worked a similar trick with his medals and uniforms for the revolutionary army.

Two older books by Johan Huizinga would bear re-reading in the context. The Waning of the Middle Ages and Homo Ludens were much read in the 1960s, a decade keen on theories of play.

The intellectual sophistication of the tradition seemed incontrovertible; and I was not yet familiar with the stylistic cunning of apologetics and polemics, modern or medieval, which can spin into existence a vast and intoxicating literature without ever examining its own foundations. I was a liberal, but an infirm one–infirm liberalism being the liberalism that fails to engage its enemies on the left as ferociously as its enemies on the right. It is hard for a young man to walk away from the satisfactions of radicalism, in the way that it is hard for a young man, say, to understand Middlemarch. So I read widely in the Marxist tradition, despite my belief in the inadequacy of a materialist view of life and the absurdity of the idea that justice may be established by means of a dictatorship. I half-wanted to fall under its spell, to find a small place in its saga.

That captures exactly a few years in which I tried to understand Brecht and the Brecht-cult in theatre studies.  The more I read of Brecht, the more I came to hate the man and to understand that, like any commissar, he would say or do anything, licensed by the belief that what was good for Brecht was good for the down-trodden. ( My views of the work are more nuanced, but don’t belong here.)

The lure of a ‘humane’ Marxism operated strongly on my generation, anti-capitalist, anti-liberal as we were – and ignorant of both. When I eventually came across Leszek Kolakowski, the great critic of Marxism, whose recent death is the occasion of Wieseltier’s piece, I had already come to my senses. I wonder if Kolakowski is read by those in our English Departments – both in schools and universities – who peddle ‘Marxist’ approaches to literature? Or are they too busy spinning ‘into existence a vast and intoxicating literature without ever examining its own foundations’?