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Meanwhile, the sale of large tracts of land to commercial agroforestry companies entails both the dispossession of forest-dwelling locals and the disruption of their ecosystem-dependent local forms of production and harvest. This often leaves the rural poor with no choice but to push further into the forest at the same time that their traditional relationship with that ecosystem has been disrupted. The result is that survival increasingly depends on the hunting of wild game or harvesting of local flora and timber for sale on global markets. Such populations then become the stand-ins for the ire of global environmentalist organizations, who decry them as “poachers” and “illegal loggers” responsible for the very deforestation and ecological destruction that pushed them to such trades in the first place. Often, the process then takes a much darker turn, as in Guatemala, where anti-communist paramilitaries leftover from the country’s civil war were transformed into “green” security forces, tasked with “protecting” the forest from the illegal logging, hunting and narcotrafficking that were the only trades available to its indigenous residents—who had been pushed to such activities precisely because of the violent repression they had faced from those same paramilitaries during the war. The pattern has since been reproduced all over the world, cheered on by social media posts in high income countries celebrating the (often literally caught-on-camera) execution of “poachers” by supposedly “green” security forces.

— Social Contagion by Chuang

Take, for example, the case of the Spanish Flu, one of the deadliest epidemics in history. This was one of the earliest outbreaks of H1N1 influenza (related to more recent outbreaks of swine and avian flu), and it was long assumed to have somehow been qualitatively different from other variants of influenza, given its high death toll. While this appears to be true in part (due to the flu’s ability to induce an overreaction of the immune system), later reviews of the literature and historical epidemiology research found that it may not have been that much more virulent than other strains. Instead, its high death rate was probably caused primarily by widespread malnourishment, urban overcrowding, and generally unsanitary living conditions in the affected areas, which encouraged not only the spread of the flu itself but also the cultivation of bacterial superinfections on top of the underlying viral one.

In other words, the death toll of Spanish Flu, though portrayed as an unpredictable aberration in the character of the virus, was given an equivalent boost by social conditions.

— Social Contagion by Chuang (Page 23)

It is very difficult to give any sociological explanation for the rise of the Romantic movement, although it ought to be done. The only explanation I have ever been able to discover arises from looking at who these persons were, particularly in Germany. The truth is that they were a remarkably unworldly body of men. They were poor, they were timid, they were bookish, they were very awkward in society. They were easily snubbed, they had to serve as tutors to great men, they were constantly full of insult and oppression. It is clear that they were confined and contracted in their universe; they were like Schiller’s bent twig, which always jumped back and hit its bender. There was something about Prussia, where most of them came from – about this excessively paternalistic State of Frederick the Great’s, about the fact that he was a mercantilist and therefore increased the wealth of Prussia, increased her army, made her the most powerful and rich of all the German States, but at the same time pauperised her peasants and did not allow sufficient opportunity to most of her citizens.

It is true, too, that these men, most of them children of clergymen and of civil servants and the like, received an education which gave them certain intellectual and emotional ambitions; with the result that, since too many jobs in Prussia were held by persons of good birth, where social distinctions were preserved in the most rigorous manner, they were not able to attain full expression of their ambitions, and therefore did become somewhat frustrated, and began to breed fantasies of every possible kind.

— The Roots of Romanticism by Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy, John Gray

Music, then, is seen as abstract, detached from life, a form of direct expression, non-mimetic, non-imitative, and at the furthest possible remove from any kind of objective description of anything. Nevertheless, the Romantics did not think that the arts ought to be unbridled, that one should simply sing whatever comes into one’s head, paint whatever one’s mood orders one to paint, or give completely undisciplined expression to the emotions – they have been charged with this by Irving Babbitt and others, but mistakenly. Novalis says very clearly, ‘When storms rage in the poet’s breast, and he is bewildered and confused, gibberish results.’ A poet must not wander idly all day in search of feelings and images. Certainly he must have these feelings and images, plainly he must allow these storms to rage – for how indeed can he avoid it? – but then he must discipline them, then he must find the proper medium for their expression. Schubert said that the mark of a great composer is to be caught in a vast battle of inspiration, in which the forces rage in the most uncontrolled way, but to keep one’s head in the course of this storm and direct the troops. This is quite clearly a far more genuine expression of what artists do than the remarks of the more unbridled Romantics, who were unaware of the nature of art inasmuch as they were not artists themselves.

— The Roots of Romanticism by Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy, John Gray

There is no province in which this attitude is more evident than the field of music, about which I have not yet had anything to say. It is interesting and, indeed, even amusing to watch the development of attitudes towards music from the beginning of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century, particularly in France, music is regarded as a fairly inferior art. Vocal music has its place because it heightens the importance of the words, religious music has its place because it contributes to the mood which religion is meant to induce...supposed drama and all art to have some kind of mimetic quality, that its function was imitation of life, imitation of the ideals of life, imitation of imaginary beings, ideal beings, not necessarily real beings, but still some kind of imitation, some kind of relationship to actual events, actual persons, actual emotions, something which was there in reality, which it was the business of the artist if necessary to idealise, but at any rate to represent as it truly is. Music, which had no meaning by itself – it was simply a succession of sounds – was clearly non-mimetic. Everybody saw that. Words had something to do with the words spoken in ordinary life, paints had something to do with colours perceived in nature, but sounds were very dissimilar to the sounds heard in rustling forests, or to birdsong. The kinds of sounds which musicians used were clearly much remoter from any kind of ordinary human experience than were the materials used by other artists.

— The Roots of Romanticism by Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy, John Gray

In this respect the Romantics could be either progressive or reactionary. In what might be called the revolutionary States, the radical States created after the French Revolution, they were reactionary, they called for the return of some kind of medieval darkness; in reactionary States, such as Prussia after 1812, they became progressive, inasmuch as they regarded this creation of the King of Prussia as a suffocating, artificial mechanism which stifled the natural organic thrust of the life of the human beings imprisoned by it. It could take either form. That is why we encounter revolutionary Romantics and reactionary Romantics. That is why it is impossible to pin Romanticism down to any given political view, however often this has been tried.

— The Roots of Romanticism by Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy, John Gray

Then, in the distance, a drum line. Twelve snares. Ten bass drums. Ten tubas. Sixteen trombones. Five sets of cymbals. “One, two! One, two three, four! Impeachment. Here we come!” And in marched Tom Steyer, the man who had helped mainstream putting Trump on trial with the Need to Impeach group that he bankrolled. Steyer had a big smile on his face from thinking the criminal had finally been caught, and from the high school band that his campaign had hired for his big entrance.

— Battle for the Soul by Edward-Isaac Dovere (Page 256)

This was the candidate whom all the others were supposed to have been so scared of? one of her struggling rivals said in September, eyes going wide at the thought that anyone would support her. “She has no core.”

— Battle for the Soul by Edward-Isaac Dovere (Page 254)

Every time Biden couldn’t figure out how to break through, the answer was to think about naming a running mate. This time, he called Deval Patrick.

— Battle for the Soul by Edward-Isaac Dovere (Page 251)

By then, calls had been coming in for Patrick, asking him to think about jumping in late. The pieces all seemed to line up: His wife had responded well to treatment. Biden was pathetic. Sanders was talking about the right problems, but not the right solutions. Warren was coming off more strident and determined to outsmart everyone than the thoughtful, pragmatic person he knew from Massachusetts. Buttigieg wasn’t catching with Black voters. Harris and Booker weren’t catching with anybody.

— Battle for the Soul by Edward-Isaac Dovere (Page 252)

“Iowa is just a thing to Biden, a thing in his head,” Ricchetti would tell people. “He thinks bad things are going to happen there.”

— Battle for the Soul by Edward-Isaac Dovere (Page 244)