Dennis Hollingsworth

Revolutions

Highly recommended: Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast. You'll find it in your favorite podcast app.

Mike Duncan is a historian and author of several projects, including this podcast series that I've tunneled into recently. At 300 episodes and counting, Duncan is engaged in a granular crawl into the history of revolution, the history of Modernity, actually. The episodes are all roughly thirty minutes each, easy to take in piecemeal.

Here's an outline:

- English Revolution spanning from the Kingdom of Charles Stuart to the Restoration (1600)
- American Revolution from the Stamp Act to the Bill of Rights
- French Revolution from the end of the Ancient Regime to Napoleon
- Haitian Revolution from the establishment of Saint-Dominique to the Haitian Declaration of Independence
- Revolutions against the Spanish Empire in the Americas
- Revolutions in Europe, 1830's - 1848
- The French Commune of 1871
- Mexican Revolution
- Russian Revolution

The Haitian, Mexican and Bolivarian Revolutions were especially enlightening.

What am I gleaning from Duncan? Modernity is a bewildering swarm of ego contra ego, a great blooming, buzzing confusion... more so than the usual take of history as a record of bad behavior because the cast of actors on the stage of history was vastly expanded from the previous ambit of decisions made by an elite. Modernity is revolution itself. People, groups, factions, rivalries, all struggling, checking, vying blindly against one another.

It loitered long and drawn out until it became a torrent, the Classical encasement ruptured and Modernity sprung out in gushing cascades of revolution, one after the other... Hobbes' war of "...of every man, against every man" but in slow enough motion to prevent inhibition due to horror overload.

"The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the very end of life, our location of all things in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same space."
-William James
Principles of Psychology (1890)

I learned a long time ago from I don't remember where or even if this is indeed a fact, that when babies get overwhelmed, they resort to gazing at their hands.