Tag: culture

Double, triple, quadruple hypothesis

from the first chapter, “Parole, Parole, Parole,” of Tobias Jones’s The Dark Heart of Italy (2003):

As I began studying postwar Italian history, it became obvious that surrounding any crime or political event, there are always confusion, suspicion, and “the bacillus of secrecy.” So much so that dietrologia has become a sort of national pastime. It means literally “behindology,” or the attempt to trump even the most fanciful and contorted conspiracy theory. Dietrologia is the “critical analysis of events in an effort to detect, behind the apparent causes, true and hidden designs.” La Stampa has called it “the science of imagination, the culture of suspicion, the philosophy of mistrust, the technique of the double, triple, quadruple hypothesis.” It’s an indispensable sport for a society in which appearance very rarely begets reality. Stendhal wrote about it in The Character-house of Parma: “Italian hearts are much more tormented than ours by the suspicions and the wild ideas which a burning imagination presents to them.”

Consider, as counterpoint, Moravia’s short story “Non approfondire” (Don’t delve too deeply). Compare, of course, the “hermeneutics of suspicion.”

There is an interesting discussion of the word at the Language Log, and it’s the subject of a column in the Economist from 2011.

The cultural Cold War

Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (2014)

Greg Barnhisel, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy (2015)

Loren Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History (1993)

Sarah Miller Harris, The CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the Early Cold War (2016)

John Krige, American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (2006)

Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (1993)

Christopher J. Phillips, The New Math: A Political History (2014)

Carroll Pursell, Technology in Postwar America: A History (2007)

Gregory A. Reisch, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science: To the Icy Slopes of Logic (2005)

Giles Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture (2016)

Valery N. Soyfer, Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science (1994)

Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (1999)

Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War (1999)

Duncan White, Cold Warriors: Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold War (2019)

Stephen J. Whitfield, The Culture of the Cold War (1991)

Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurtlizter: How the CIA Played America (2008)

Audra J. Wolfe, Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science (2018)

Audra J. Wolfe, Competing with the Soviets: Science, Technology, and the State in Cold War America (2013)

Not to take root

Cioran, amidst admiration for Borges, Anathemas and Admirations, 1976:

I have never been attracted to minds confined to a single form of culture. “Not to take root, not to belong to any community”: such has been and such is my motto. Oriented toward other horizons, I have always wanted to know what was happening elsewhere; by the time I was twenty, the Balkan skyline had nothing more to offer me. This is the drama, and also the advantage, of being born in a minor “cultural” space. The foreign had become my god—whence that thirst to travel through literatures and philosophies, to devour them with a morbid ardor.