Steve Harris
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Bhutan

4/9/2021

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I’ve been lucky enough to travel to lots of obscure corners of the world, far beyond European Capitals and famous sites of natural beauty. But one place to which I have returned over the years is the mountain kingdom of Bhutan and there’s a good chance I will go back again pretty soon (post-Pandemic).

There was certainly some component of exoticism in my decision to go for the first time, 23 years ago this month. Recently married, I was eager to get back to my earlier pattern of wanderings. I prevailed on my bride to join me in this exploration (although the itinerary’s delight in announcing the availability of hot-and-cold running water almost put her off). Six years later, we went again and, while I went off with most of the group on a trek in the mountains, she stayed in “town” and we arranged for her to teach a decorative arts workshop in the local middle school. Ten years after that (2014), I went for a third visit, this time introducing three dear friends of long-standing to the place and people they had heard me talk about for many years.

One of the main draws for me has been to witness and learn from Bhutan as one of the few places which is connected to the global sprawl of modernity, but which is trying to consciously manage its own encounter with that epistemology. Western imperialism and the sparkly lures of capitalism and technology have swamped most parts of the world; most local cultures didn’t stand a chance. Plastic shoes and T-shirts with knock-off logos can be found in the most startling locations on earth. This is not to say the Bhutanese are wholly averse to the things we take for granted, but they do so (if I may overgeneralize a bit) thoughtfully and with a commitment to maintaining their culture while they interface with the wider world.

Part of this is due to the profound resonance of Buddhism. Bhutan is part of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition (the name Bhut-an actually means the “end of Ti-bet”). It is the only country that has Buddhism as a state religion. The country’s isolation until the later 20C has enabled the religion’s continued vibrancy and the reverence of the people makes it stunningly different from the noise and bustle of e.g.,  Bangkok or the sensation in nearby Nepal of being overrun with tourists. Buddhism is embedded in Bhutan in a way hard for those of us from a “modern” Christian-rooted, secular-trending culture to fully grasp.

Bhutan has become (relatively) famous for its concept of “gross national happiness,” which was articulated by the 4th King (the now-retired father of the current King) in 1972. GNH has since been adopted as the government’s foundational policy goal. It symbolizes a priority for the qualitative over the quantitative, for social and cultural harmony over economic development. This is a laudable aspiration, but one should not confuse Bhutan with Shangri-La. By Western development standards, Bhutan is a poor country and there are serious issues about its treatment of Nepali and other Hindus.

Nor is Bhutan immune from modernity (nor COVID (although it was well-managed)). During our second trip (2004) we visited the first (only?) disco in the country. By 2014, electrification had reached a considerably majority of villages and I had to remind our local trip leader that extended conversations with his friends on his mobile phone disrupted the purpose of our trek. Some of the ills of modernity (medical and moral) have come along with internet access.

These developments are important reminders that the Bhutanese are not there for our touristic pleasure, like the re-enactors in Colonial Williamsburg. We might wish to see the way life “used to be,” but the Bhutanese are no less entitled to electrification and inoculations than are Texans or Turks. At the same time, while the colorful festivals and quiet temples continue to exist for the people, not for tourists; they are amazing at several levels.

Beyond the culture at a broad level, Gina and I have been fortunate to connect to individuals who have shown us immense kindness and generosity. These experiences, on walks, in homes, or in more formal settings are worth at least as much as the sites and public events. These sorts of things do happen in travels to Australia or other parts of Asia, etc. but there seem to have been more of them in Bhutan than the time we have spent there would predict.

Yes, London is different than New York, and San Francisco is different from Shanghai, but Bhutan’s different-ness is different. It is not primitive (a la tribes in New Guinea or the Amazon), but it is not-so-modern. Therein lies its ability, for those of us from the “West” to open doors of serenity and perspective. To be sure, its different-ness has lessened some over the years that I have been going; but watching the process (progress?) has been rewarding on its own terms.

I have been working with the Bhutan Foundation on some projects relating to democracy education and tree planting; and lately, we’ve talked about me making a fourth visit (perhaps next year) to check them out. Something to look forward to….

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Who Lost Hong Kong?

4/2/2021

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The fate of Hong Kong has been a continuing lesson in geopolitical history. A small fishing village in the early 19C was settled by British and other Europeans in the course of opening up the “China trade,” a more-or-less organized British colonial administration began in 1841. China was forced to formally cede the island (and allow British drug pushing across its country) as part of the resolution of the First Opium War in 1843. The Fourth Governor of the colony, Sir John Bowring, is generally assigned responsibility for launching the Second Opium War with China in 1856 which further enhanced British imperialist designs in East Asia. As the Chinese Empire decayed across the 19C, European powers seized increasing chunks of territory and trading rights and, in 1898, China was “convinced” to lease a chunk of the mainland across from Hong Kong Island to the British for 99 years.

British control (except when ousted by the Japanese for four years) remained even through the decades of revolutionary turmoil in China and the consolidation of power by the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. However, when the lease on the “New Territories” expired in 1997, a much-reduced British Empire faced facts and ceded the island back to China under a complex arrangement that promised the maintenance of Hong Kong’s quasi-democracy for fifty years. (I’ve always been slightly amused that the British Imperial government was a champion of democracy for a colony.)

Now, China is cracking down on the small components of democracy preserved under the deal with the UK in 1997. Given British global power, and Chinese aggressiveness in a variety of international contexts, the limiting factor is not the threat of Prince Charles and the Royal Navy bombarding Shanghai, but rather the risk of undermining the important role Hong Kong capital markets have played in financing Chinese domestic growth, international trade, and investments outside of China; in other words, international capital markets. A second significant concern for the Chinese is reinforcing those in Taiwan who will insist that China would never peaceably re-integrate that island, thus leaving China with few non-military options for re-asserting formal control over that erstwhile province.

We will hear a robust lip-service favoring democracy from banks, investors, and their entourages, but they remain focused on preserving the access to the giant profit potential controlled by the China. So, it falls to the “Western powers,” various NGOs and the commentariat to defend democratic ideals and practices and it’s not clear how high up their priority list Hong Kong lies. Brexit has ensured that, history notwithstanding, Britain can’t be any more effective than Poland in altering Beijing’s behavior. As a result, there’s little reason to be optimistic about Hong Kong’s fate.

China may continue to move aggressively to enforce its recent “Security Law,” restricting eligibility for democratic groups on Hong Kong’s Legislative Council or cracking down further on dissidents and protestors. Hong Kong’s status as a “Special Administrative Region” may remain, but become increasingly superficial and nominal.

In contemplating this likelihood, I was reminded of another political implication of Chinese history: the impact on US domestic politics of the triumph of the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949. At that time, in the height of the early Cold War paranoia, the issue of “Who Lost China?” was a fearsome cudgel used to attack the Truman Administration and other designated targets who were “soft on communism.”

This episode was a typical manifestation of the right-wing delusion that America controls the world and our power and will are sufficient to determine the fates of other nations (i.e., that we could have prevented the Chinese Communists from winning). Rather than face the limits of American power, it’s much easier to blame domestic political opponents for adverse geopolitical results.

I expect we will see a similar situation once Hong Kong is returned to its pre-1843 status as a normal part of China. Since there is a good chance this will happen while we have a Democratic administration, I rather suspect Biden/Harris/Blinken et al. will be blamed for “losing” Hong Kong.

As if.

* As if the US had sufficient power and political will to prevent it from happening.
* As if the Trump administration’s
o Gratuitous trade war with China didn’t make it harder for us to press China on other issues (including Hong Kong).
o undermining of American international standing and alliances did not make it much easier for China to extend its influence and power in the region.
o mishandling of COVID didn’t weaken the US economy and global stature.

None of this will prevent Trump and Trumpians from blaming Democrats, Socialists, (did I hear the word “pinkos’?). Hell, Kevin McCarthy may reconvene a Congressional Committee on Un-American Activities.

As I have noted elsewhere in this blog, the rise of China is a long-term phenomenon with a lot of momentum behind it. Hong Kong, as the British recognized in 1997, is too small to stand alone next to such a giant neighbor. So, the fifty-year promise of autonomy that the British negotiated at that time was always aspirational rather than likely.

Still, history is full of surprises and it would have been interesting to see a more robust/irritating Hong Kong political culture for a few more decades. It might have made a real difference, especially if China were to change in surprising ways in the future.

As it is, we can only watch and wait (with pro forma protestations). Dominoes are falling; Taiwan may be next, but don’t blame Joe (or Barack).

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Reparations

3/26/2021

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I’m not quite sure what to make of the effort, active in recent years, to secure “reparations” for slavery and related bad acts which are a essential and problematic part of American history. The scale of these evil deeds has been so widespread and profound as to demand some extraordinary recognition.

Perhaps it is my legal training that recoils a bit at the thought of “reparations” in the sense of writing a check to individuals who were not the direct subjects of slavery. Or the thought that a Korean businessman, whose family has been in the US for 65 years, should be responsible for a portion of the payment. And if the reparations are for the larger, more amorphous set of “racist” actions which encompass formal slavery and so much more, down to and including the present (by myself included, I’m afraid), then I get tripped up over the question of who is deserving of recompense and who should be responsible. And how to calculate “damages.” And where to draw the line as between the actions taken against Black Americans and those taken against ____-Americans, of which there is a lengthy list. There are dozens of other questions and complications which would need to be thrashed out.

Indeed, a second level of concern lies in the easily envisioned litigatory morass over eligibility and a second set over liability that would take decades to work out (at no small administrative cost and no small enrichment of the bar). I’m afraid our society would be consumed with the process and, as a result, the meaning of both the underlying deeds and the compensatory societal gesture would be lost. To what end?

Finally, as a historian, it seems that those who find reparations due for the nation’s “original sin,” embodied in the Constitution since 1787, are playing fast-and-loose with alternate history. If the Founding Fathers had not agreed to allow slavery to continue, then there’s a high likelihood that the US of A would never have gotten off the ground. Reparations advocates seem to want to assume that we have our current country and everything else that happened was the same, but for that one grave error. Stated differently, would it have been better if the Northern states set themselves as a slavery-free country and a set of Southern states had gone their own way, preserving the “peculiar institution?” Who then would be responsible for what might have happened? Moreover, I’m wary of taking the moral standards of one era/culture and applying them to another. It’s too easy to be smug and, at least implicitly, argue that “we” have it all figured out and are in a position to judge others from another time.

I’m more inclined to leave the monetary issue aside. Part of my concern with “reparations” is that it could easily turn the events and attitudes of race and power into a variety of tort, a “class action” for something like securities fraud or product liability. If Hannah Arendt assailed Nazism for its “banality of evil,” then what is more banal than litigating claims and “solving” the problem of slavery with a check. How easy to “wash our hands and walk away” after the money has changed hands.

Pointing fingers is also a great means of avoiding looking hard at our own behavior. The debate has already started to turn into a distraction from the more fundamental and important work of remedying the embedded racism in our (and other Western) societies and improving our common future.

What is left to be done then? Our media-saturated, legal-formality-obsessed society has wrung the meaning and pain out of “apologies.” As Richard Nixon said: “I accept the responsibility, but not the blame.”

Nor does it quite make sense for us in the 21C to apologize for actions taken by those (long-dead) in the 17C-19C. We need to own our own issue somehow, to recognize the evil from our own perspective and use our recognition of history as a starting point (or, rather, a re-starting point) for ourselves. We need to own it simply, without too much qualification or counterpoint. We need to ground it in our core values (historical and, hopefully, current). We need to make it hard to deny.

So, here’s my take:

We believe that all persons are created equal and that they are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is the premise and aspiration of our society and of the government of the United States of America which is the expression and instrument of our society. As we look back over the past 250 years, we have not lived up to this aspiration and have harmed millions of people in dozens of categories as a result. We have harmed ourselves as a society as a result.

Three groups: Blacks, women, and native Americans (as measured by the duration, depth, and extent of our shortcomings) have suffered the most; many others were harmed as well. For a society that claims to value hard work and the individual, we have far too often used categorization as a substitute for close consideration and applied simplistic characterizations; in a word, we have been lazy.

We are ashamed of these acts and omissions which have demonstrated our shortcomings, including the enslavement, murder, theft, oppression, discrimination, abuses of law and power, hatred, and infliction of harms to the lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of our fellows.

It is the policy of the United States of America to treat all persons with respect, to write and enforce laws which treat everyone fairly, and to afford citizens and others the rights to which they are entitled under our laws and our principles.

I don’t have illusions about Congress passing such a resolution (certainly without inserting enough caveats, qualifiers, and exceptions to eviscerate its spirit and triple its length); but I believe this statement is one to which we can all aspire. Then, let’s get to work to make it real.

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Sci-Fi Governments

3/19/2021

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I read science fiction…a lot; and I have since I was a kid. Sometimes for the wonder of it, sometimes for the excitement of a good space opera, but mostly because, like History, it’s a good way to get perspectives on myself and our society/world. I will touch on this sci-fi theme from time to time, but today I want to talk about a couple of ideas about government.

I actually don’t see much insight in the construction of the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek, or the Imperial Senate in Star Wars. They are part of the furniture, as it were, much less interesting than the Vulcan mind-meld or droids. Almost everybody else uses some slight variant on the US, the UN, warring empires, or some other historical model. It’s not surprising that most SF writers treat governing structures as an afterthought. They are mostly about the technology or non-human cultures or human stories in an extra-terrestrial setting.

So I was intrigued to find a couple of stories in which the governing structure of the world actually plays a significant part. Dave Hutchinson’s Europe in Autumn (the first of four volumes in the “Fractured Europe” series) and Malka Older’s Infomacracy (the first of three volumes in the “Centenal Cycle”).

Hutchinson posits a world in which Europe is fractured into scores of small states, with varying sizes and relationships, which set the backdrop for a half spy thriller, half sci-fi, half fantasy (yes, that’s three halfs!). It’s a sort of anti-EU. He doesn’t really wrestle with the issues of coordination on commerce or climate, or constant border crossings (by physical or semi-magical means), but the dynamics of international relations are more fluid, which complicates things nicely.

In Infomacracy, (almost) the entire world is divided up into cells of 100,000 people. Each “centenal” has its own local government and representation in a global federation. However, there is a parallel structure: the “Information” which is responsible not for global day-to-day government, but is charged with ensuring the integrity of the system as well as providing objective information to all centenals and their citizens. There’s plenty of fun tech twists and spy/thriller aspects, as well.

In both cases, I enjoyed the usual literary aspects of the books, but what stuck with me was each author’s willingness to tackle the question of how will groups of people organize themselves in the future. I was interested in the multi-national systems each offered, and the often-elided issue of bureaucratic coordination, but principally in the idea of localizing government. I touched on this point in my recent posting on democratic federalism.

Both Hutchinson and Malka propose systems based not on the nation-state, but on smaller groupings. We see hints of this in the centrifugal force spinning up in the soon-to-be-disunited-Kingdom, as well as a wide range of separatists movements around the world. Scotland may not be viable as a fully independent country, but if some portion of governmental functions are delegated upwards to the EU, it could be feasible. Most separatist movements are doomed to failure. First,  because they are nationalist in vision (on a smaller scale than their home countries) and merely replicating the problems of legitimacy which they attack in their current larger home state. Second, because there is no governmental structure to provide an umbrella for the non-local and scale-dependent functions which are necessary in the modern world.

If we don’t assume that the nation-state is the default mode of organization of human societies, then we can look back on the 300+ components that comprised the Holy Roman Empire where the Emperor had limited powers and the operative power in many statelets was localized. We can remember that China, France, India, and most other older (pre-1800) states were composites of different sized components, amalgamated at different times and means (conquest, dynastic marriage, etc.), who integrated into a more-or-less coherent whole over decades or centuries, melding customs, languages, money, and ideas. For hundreds of years, the Roman Catholic Church offered another model of social organization, with a separation of an over-arching ideological regime, combined with small temporal (&, by the way, feudal) organizations.

As we look forward, neither the US nor the EU are very useful models. The building blocks of the former were states that were pretty darn similar in outlook and culture; not a great starting point for the current global diversity. For the EU, the embedded diversity of its members cultures insisted on veto power and incrementalism, despite the shock of two world wars that might have sent Europe down a more integrated path.

The charm of the global structure in Infomacracy is that none of the 10,000+/- centenals has much clout on the global level. Their interests (historical, ethnic, commercial, ideological, geographical) are too diverse to allow for too much consolidation and bloc-voting. In both books, local political entities are sufficiently small to enable individuals to disconnect freely from their home base and land elsewhere.

Of course, for both these newer models, as with the bulk of historical examples, the idea of geography remains central. Rules are determined by a bunch of people on a particular piece of land. It’s easy to understand why this approach has been common, but less easy to see its relevance in an internet-dominated world which has “destroyed distance” and where many of the facets of human life are determined far away (whether by corporate organizations in work, or Amazon-delivered commerce). Why is geographical neighborhood the best rationale for political organization in the 21C?

These two books push at some new ideas, but we need some governmental thinking that “boldly goes where no one has gone before….”


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Royal Families

3/12/2021

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The recent kerfuffle over the Harry/Meghan interview demonstrates that the fascination with monarchy continues well into the 21C, even in a country that started a war rather than remain under the rule of a single man/family. It’s both bizarre and entirely natural at the same time.

After all, monarchies have been the predominant form of human socio-political organization over the past five thousand years, even after the size of these groupings got sufficiently large to require a fair amount of bureaucracy and infrastructure. As far as we can tell, the alternatives, usually oligarchies, with (very) occasional popular republics have been few on the ground until the last 100 years. The American experiment was not repeated outside the Western Hemisphere to any significant degree until the French completed their 82-year (1789-1871) revolution and settled down.

While the British (and later other second-tier European countries) maintained the monarchical form, they gradually transferred effective political power to (more-or-less) democratically elected governments. It wasn’t until a whole raft of monarchies blew themselves up in the second decade of the 20C (China, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, the Ottomans) that the republican form really took hold globally. Indeed, by 1920, there were hardly any real monarchies left of any size.

The monarchical form remained in many places and has only occasionally been ejected since then (Iraq, Iran, Greece, Albania, Spain (for a while), Cambodia). In most places, royal powers have been almost entirely eliminated and the primary function of the royal family is best interpreted, in the words of one observer, as a piece of “performance art.” In most countries, the family has “performed” their “art” pretty well, eliding the occasional scandal (Juan Carlos of Spain being the most recent exemplar). Encore performances by former royals continue to the amusement of aficionados of the obscure:
* Three claimants to the French throne (a Bourbon, an Orleans, and a Buonaparte) are still mucking about.
* The head of the House of Osman (who never lived in Turkey) “ruled” from 2009-2017, but his day job was as a librarian in New York City.
* The Tsarevich George Romanov just got engaged in January and it was thought appropriate to note that his fiancée (a nice Italian girl), was a “hereditary noblewoman.”

Outside of Europe, there are hereditary Rajas or Sultans in Malaysia, Kings and Emirs in various Arab states, the Emperor of Japan and a smattering of others (Bhutan, Lesotho, and Morocco). The Arab states are mostly dominated family oligarchies. Most keep a pretty low profile, but he current King of Thailand lives mostly in Germany and appears to be a fine example of a dissolute martinet.

In terms of other dynastic rulers (leaving the Bush family aside), we have the sui generis case of the Kim family of Pyongyang.

And then there is the British royal family, whose pomp, wealth, and column-inches matches all the others families combined (excepting the Sultan of Brunei). Without getting into the current set of personalities or heraldic quirks, the incumbent is currently Queen of sixteen commonwealth countries. She is the great-great-granddaughter of Victoria, who had more German than English blood (since diluted and polished with a couple of name changes). This highlights one of the great mysteries of monarchy: the significance of bloodlines. Here we are in the 21C, long past any adherence to the “divine right” of kings, yet multiple websites will give you the rank order of the 1200 or so current potential inheritors of the British crown (of whom, I’m sure, several are within six degrees of Kevin Bacon). As if. When covered with uniforms, slathered about with titles and medals, they have little to differ from the Masons or Scientology, cult-wise.

Other than the fact that they put on the best show in town (in terms of both ceremonies and tabloids).

One could argue that the British are the world champions of nostalgia and have carried on supporting the family even after their last great propagandist: Winston Churchill invoked their 1000+ year imperial continuity in 1940. One could argue that the Mountbatten-Windsor family is even more important, now that Britain is bereft of both empire and European integration. As a national symbol, with immense brand value (take that McDonalds!) they may well be worth the not inconsiderable sums paid by the taxpayers every year to support their operations.

However, if you include the amassed wealth held by the family (which is in addition to that held by the state (Buckingham Palace, Windsor Palace, etc.)), most of which was taken so long ago (by conquest, confiscation, and other exercises of royal power) that it has been effectively “laundered,” it is another story. A story that is hard to justify in the real world of hunger and unemployment that is daily life for many of Her Majesty’s subjects. No wonder that they have been quite good at eviscerating socialism.

There are certainly larger problems in the world, more glaring defects from common sense and morality than grasping after the evanescent remnants of royal and imperial glory. North Korean tanks, Thai elephants, the trooping of the Queen’s color guard—they’re all of a piece.  Evidence of a widespread yearning for family and tribe (even as a spear-carrier), and for a connection to history. Royal families give their nations that not inconsiderable comfort of mythos in the face of a cold, rational, republican, bureaucratic world.

They don’t make any sense. Ah, well….



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History of Globalization

3/5/2021

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Next month, I will be teaching a 6-part course on the history of globalization. I hope you'll join OLLI/SF and enroll in the course. Here's what we will talk about:

500 years ago, most people had little contact with, awareness of, or impact beyond a tiny, nearby group of people. Today, germs, technology, and news make us all connected. If globalization is a historical process, How did it happen? Was it inevitable?, Is it reversible?

Our six sessions will look at the connection and movement of people, things, and ideas and conceptions of the world and explore them in chronological development from the earliest days of humanity to the 21st Century. By taking a long and broad perspective, we can do a better job of understanding what forces are behind this phenomenon, separate the significant trends and factors from the detours, reversals, and “bumps in the road,” and see some ways in which these forces and trends may work in the future.

We shouldn’t be surprised that the world has become increasingly integrated since the first diaspora of humanity tens of thousands of years ago. Wonder, curiosity, diverse interests and tastes have driven technology and adventure for millennia. Opportunities for a new and better life (and some profit along the way) have spurred people to travel or move. Rumors, new things, and new ideas caused people to think about people and places outside their home areas.

These actions were premised on an implicit understanding that there is great diversity—both environmental and cultural—in the world and if one person can enjoy and benefit from it, so can another, because (despite our diversity) we are all part of the same system. Now, these principles were not so often recognized at the time, and even more rarely stated expressly; but they are there if we look hard enough. And we have to be careful here, because getting inside peoples’ heads is hard enough even when you have lots of direct experience of their behavior. LP Hartley famously said: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” So, figuring the mindset of
* a 17C Dutch trader,
* a 12C Indian lascar,
* a 19C African woman taken prisoner and thrown on a ship for a few weeks only to arrive in Charleston, South Carolina, or
* a 15C Chinese imperial bureaucrat

calls for speculation…and humility on the part of the historian.

This is the frame that we will use to see some portions of the past. After all, “globalization” is not actually a “thing,” like a chair or the Republican Party. It’s a concept, and label (and a relatively new one at that) that we use to describe a bunch of events and activities. And, as is common when lots of people talk about something (especially the modern media), they use the same word but have different meanings behind it in their heads. So, we will try to be clear about what we are talking about.

It is also important to remember that “globalization” is not some divinely-mandated goal for humanity nor, usually, even some clearly stated human goal. There is a great book about the British empire called “The Absent-Minded Imperialists,” we might say the same thing about “globalization.” Whatever aspect we are discussing just happened—usually for good, but highly local and specific, reasons (like fleeing oppression, spreading the Gospel, or developing a taste for tea)—but without any sense that “globalization” was 1) something, 2) something desirable, or 3) something which a particular actor wanted to accomplish. Finally, while there may be some fundamental factors that tend towards broader inclusion and integration, nothing is inevitable; particularly the steps along the way so far.

As a result, in an important sense we can’t look for the drivers of globalization per se. We can look for and we will talk about steps and aspects along the way that, when they are stacked together, comprise what we (in the 21C) might call “globalization.”

In this 21C, most historians have changed their perspective form what most of us experienced back when we were in school (when all this stuff was still relatively fresh!). How many people here took a class in “Western Civ?”—We learned all about how Europeans “discovered” America and the Philippines and everything else. This was part of a broader story about how Western “civilization” took over the world and brought great things: science and Christianity among them. The downsides of European empires were downplayed; world Wars I and II were anomalous hiccups in the march of progress. Well now we try not to be so euro-centric. After all, there were plenty of people who knew what was happening in Molucca and Madras and Mexico before the Spanish/Dutch etc. showed up. The balance sheet on empire is decidedly uncertain. The perspectives of Africans and indigenous peoples elsewhere are no less valid or interesting than Columbus’ reports or Winston Churchill’s dispatches from South Africa or India. To be sure, there was a period where Europe was the hub of the world, but there was also a time when that locus of power was in Asia or the US of A; so a little open-mindedness is called for here. Actually, for most people, most of the time, Europe either wasn’t a thing, or it wasn’t known, or it wasn’t all that important.

So, this course is about us—all of us. And about how did we (that Dutch trader, Indian lascar, African woman, and Chinese bureaucrat) start talking to each other, eating each other’s food, and thinking about some specific other (and all those other others that we never met, only imagine, but whom we know occupy our world together).
 


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Historical Fiction and History

2/26/2021

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The touchstone of historical thinking is to present “what actually happened.” Or so prescribed Leopold von Ranke in 1824 as our conception of history was taking its modern form. “Historical fiction” was only just getting going about that time (e.g., Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe). So, it’s not likely Ranke was thinking about distinguishing history from historical fiction; at least not “fiction” as we know it now. He was more concerned with mythologies and, even more, with writings that purported to be accurate histories, but which were guided more by ideologies (national or religious) than by a devotion to the facts.

Still, as a historian, I have to say that I love well-done historical fiction. By “well-done,” I mean more than the quality of the writing and the dimensionality of the characters. Really good historical fiction has to be “factual,” as far as it can and it has to make use of the novelist’s skill in implanting the reader into the scene and the characters’ mentalité from an earlier period. Very few historians are good at these arts and, having reading a fair number of monographs and articles, the percentage of good scholarly history works which are “page-turners” is quite small.

(I also want to insert a nod and distinction vis-à-vis “alternative histories” (e.g., Len Deighton’s SS-GB about England after a successful Nazi invasion, or  Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union about a post-Israel Jewish settlement in Alaska). These are often fun, but they are future-oriented, speculative fiction, set in the past; they send the world off on a new vector and, thus, are illustrations of the vast complexity of the world and human choices. They can also be a useful route to understanding the “meaning” of events by highlighting the assumptions which are embedded in “history as it actually happened.”

In terms of historical fiction as such, just borrowing a historical setting for a story isn’t enough. By this standard, even Tolstoy wasn’t a great historical novelist. War and Peace has been overpowering readers with its characterizations, intricacies, and philosophical insertions (more about which in a later posting) since it was published in 1869. It is set during the Napoleonic Wars, starting in 1805 and culminating in Napoleon’s grand and disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812-13. However, it’s hard to see Prince Andrei and Natasha et al. as distinctly creatures of the early 19C (ditto for Tale of Two Cities). Portraying the mindsets of earlier times wasn’t the goal for either Tolstoy or Dickens, it seems to me, and so it’s not fair to judge them by that standard.

I feel quite differently about Hillary Mantel’s trilogy centered on the life of Thomas Cromwell during the tumultuous years of the reign of Henry VIII in the early to mid 16C. I read the three books last year, starting with Wolf Hall (which, together, are even longer than W&P!) and they are excellent as novels and psychological character studies. Rigorously researched (as far as historical facts were available), they shine even more as attempts to transport the reader to the different mindset prevalent in Tudor England. Their interior vividness carried me further than yet another retelling (“factual” or “fictional”) of the complications of the royal life and death of Anne Boleyn. The “fiction” part of historical fiction is, generally, “fill-in-the-gaps,” which, given our limited access to the conversations (much less thoughts) of most historical actors, is the only way to get at that detail and texture of humanness. A few created characters are only literary license and hardly detract from the effort to understand what it was like to be the confidant of Henry VIII.

By contrast, I read Diarmaid MacCulloch’s hefty biography of Cromwell right afterwards. Mantel notes that she utilized MacCulloch’s work in her own research. It’s a fine piece of biographical writing, but it doesn’t sing or envelope the way that Mantel does. It’s also entirely true (at least within the parameters of historical aspirations). Mantel makes no such claim. As she has acknowledged, she invented a few characters and virtually all the detailed scenes, interactions, and dialogue. MacCulloch allows himself a smattering of historian’s interpretations and speculations.

So, which is closer to the “truth”? MacCulloch wins on footnotes, but because, as a historian, he limits himself to plausible/reliable/documentable sources, there is much outside his reach. Mantel, unconstrained, gives us an immediate connection with the past; the predicate to a type of historical understanding unavailable to those who stay within the academic discipline.

As a history teacher, I often remark that gaining this immediacy, this connection with the mentalité of another era, is the historian’s greatest challenge. It’s especially hard for young people who usually lack enough of their own history to have a perspective on the differences wrought by time. But, at any age, the ability to unthink our modern milieu is tough enough. L.P. Hartley, the English novelist, notably said: “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.” As a result, writing history (fact or fiction) is akin to translation from one language to another. We are limited to the tool-kit of the English language which, in either its British or American versions, falls short in conveying the formidable langue Francais or the complexity of Mandarin or the nuanced angst of Yiddish.

Of course, the suggestion that we history teachers might use historical fiction as a vehicle by which our students could understand history is fairly heretical. Perhaps it is lack of imagination, perhaps it’s just a pedagogical rigidity. I once suggested to an early modernist colleague that they use Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle in conjunction with standard historical works to explore the world of the 17C. In addition to increasing the chances of students actually reading (it’s a rollicking good tale), it’s likely the students would have understood that world/period in a more visceral way than a textbook, or even a primary source. Moreover, it would have provided the opportunity to show the difference between history and fiction, and framed the same types of analytic/critical thinking skills as some actual “history” of that period. My colleague wouldn’t bite: “but it’s not true!, we can’t use that.” Too bad.

History (whether scholarly or popular) isn’t true either; although we aspire to truth. It’s just that writers of historical fiction approach truth from a different angle.
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History of Globalization

2/19/2021

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I'm pleased to announce that I will be teaching a public Zoom course this Spring via the OLLI Program. We will cover the history of globalization from the (very) ancient to the 21C. The course runs 6 weeks (starting April 5) on Mondays from 1230-230 PDT.I  hope you'll clink on the link below,  join OLLI, and sign up.
Harris on Globalization
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Democratic (small-d) Federalism

2/19/2021

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Last year (October 9), I wrote about the long-term crisis facing the country in the form of a US Senate that was out-of-whack with democratic principles; a Senate where the 582,000 people of Wyoming had the same clout as the 30 million of Texas (ditto: Delaware with California). For constitutional reasons this is not easily changed, but today I talk about a few ways to think about better allocating this power.

The incremental solutions involve letting each state have one senatorial seat (just for chuckles, let’s include DC and Puerto Rico), so that’s 52. Then the balance could be distributed on the basis of population, so that California would have six in total, and Texas would have five, New York and Florida four each, 27 with two or three and 21 with one. Or, more modestly, you could divide the states into three groups and give three seats to the those in the top third, two seats to those in the middle, and one to those states in the bottom third. Both these approaches are plausible, sensible, and inadequate to meet democratic norms.

The underlying problem is the hoary notion that we are the United…States; a group of independent jurisdictions who have banded together to deal with common problems and the external world. The debates at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 are full of concerns about the joining of the 13 states into one union. The previous system (the Articles of Confederation) had proved inadequate to most people at the time and a greater degree of integration was the core of the new Constitutional structure. The elites in each state secured their power in the new government by reserving half of the legislative power to themselves (as chosen by their representatives in the state legislatures).

Somewhere between the Civil War and WWII, it became pretty clear that this wasn’t actually the case anymore. The national government was dealing with a majority of significant issues and, more importantly, people identified as “American” more than they did as Floridians or Michiganders. However, our national mythology is pretty sturdy, so we like to pretend that states are not only important but essential to the organization of our society. This was perpetuated by such anti-democratic inter-state contests such as Miss America and the staunch supporters of the University of Texas Longhorn Football Team and of its many counterparts.

Now, there is much to be said for localism/tribalism and, indeed, for local political communities to control local political issues; but promoting those groups to national political status is problematic, since they vary widely in size and equal power (one person, one vote) is the essential element of democracy.

Many countries have this federative aspect to their histories; smaller pieces were amalgamated and, over time, merged into a national whole. The exceptions are those (usually ex-imperial colonies) that were defined as a whole for administrative purposes at the time of their creation and those whose amalgamation is relatively recent. The result is a strong “federalism” and can be seen not only in the US, but also Belgium, Canada, and Germany. The US is the oldest of these and so, its founding structure is most outdated.  

There is another rationale for constitutional federalism, however, that isn’t rooted in historical quirks and which retains considerable vitality today: separation of powers.

When most of the people who think of separation of powers (admittedly a small group), do think about it, they think (a la Locke and Montesquieu) of keeping the executive, legislative, and judicial powers independent of each other. All well and good. However, the idea of dispersing power to different groups can also operate at the ‘vertical’ as well as the more traditional ‘horizontal’ mode. We have lots of experience with constitutionally protecting states’ rights and powers from federal overreach. There is no reason why this can’t continue and no reason why its continuation has to depend on the use of states as electoral constituencies for the federal legislature. In other words, the two aspects of federalism: electoral and administrative, can be handled differently. The distribution of power and responsibility to the states can be constitutionally protected; electoral districts for the Senate can be different.

Senators and Representatives from large states and small states have a long history of arguing  to limit federal overreach. Indeed, such an argument isn’t based on the state-defined nature of their electoral district; it’s based on a belief that too much power in any one power center is dangerous to others and to individual liberties.

In other words, Senators and Representatives can be effective in representing the individuals and local communities in their constituencies, regardless of whatever intermediate political entities those individuals are also part of. No one worries that a Representative’s district covers three cities and parts of two counties; why worry that a Senator represents parts of multiple states.

What would this look like? In principle, the solution is no different than what we have for US representatives: (more-or-less) equally-sized electoral districts. At the current level of population, this would mean fifty districts of about 6.6 million people each. Some would be entirely within one state (e.g., the Senator from Houston), but most would overlap multiple states (e.g. the Senator from Washington-Baltimore).

Imagine if California changed its Constitution so that each of the 58 counties had one State Senator, whether LA County (10M people) or Amador (~1100 people). It would be held up as a travesty of democracy and struck down as unconstitutional. Well, the Article I of the US Constitution cannot be, by definition, unconstitutional; but it’s still a travesty.


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Contingencies

2/12/2021

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One of the challenges of teaching history is getting students to appreciate that nothing is inevitable (yes, yes,…death and taxes). We are so embedded in the world we know that it is difficult to imagine an alternative. What would things be like if John Wilkes Booth had tripped on stage that night in Ford’s Theater? What would have happened if my dad had already had plans when his brother asked him if he wanted to join a group (which happened to include my mom) going to a Red Wings hockey game?

Alternate histories can be fun, but they are (inevitably) inadequate. The world is too complex for anyone to capture a comprehensive picture of the changes from a butterfly flapping its wings twice instead of once or the implications of a member of Hitler’s staff unknowingly moving a briefcase that held a bomb to the far side of a heavy oaken table leg, leaving the Fuhrer to fight another day.

My favorite example is the famous incident in Sarajevo in June, 1914. Serbian assassins had planned to throw what we would call a hand-grenade under the car in which Archduke Ferdinand rode to a banquet from the train station. The bomb rolled too far and exploded in front of the second car. The Archduke sped away to his banquet, but afterwards decided it would be appropriate to visit the injured driver of the second car in the hospital. The Archduke’s chauffeur didn’t know the route and made a wrong turn. He stopped to back up and get back on the right road. As it turned out, he stopped the Archduke’s car right in front of a café in which Gavrilo Principe, another of the Serbian conspirators, was sitting, trying to figure out what to do since their initial plan had gone awry. Hmmm…Principe saw the Archduke stop, stood up took out the pistol he had in his pocket and shot the Archduke and his wife dead.

So, World War I started because of a fluke. If the barista had taken another few minutes preparing Principe’s macchiato, no assassination, no confrontation between Austria and Serbia, no revving up of the German military plans, no invasion of France, etc. etc. etc.

Now the broad geopolitical trends might well have pushed Europe into a war at some point, but not that war, at that time, with that particular configuration of technologies, manpower, and alliances. Everything since then is different. Among other things, my grandfather would not have gone to France to drive an ambulance for the US Army and returned safely home to the life that eventuated. Instead, he would have gone over two years later, met and married a French countess from the Loire (et maintenant, un centenaire plus tard, je vous ecrirais en Francais).

But here I am (writing in English) trying to get students to understand that if everything is different, then extracting meaning from the world around us is a fool’s errand. If we define ourselves from our cultural milieu (ok, un peu mot francais) and that milieu is the product of a fluke (as I have shown), then we can’t be too sure we know who we are—as individuals, groups, countries etc.

Of course, most contingencies are closer to the hockey-game-date or butterfly-wing-flapping variety than Von Stauffenberg’s briefcase bomb or Principe’s pistol; but the lack of drama doesn’t make them less powerful. They’re just harder to see.

I was fortunate a few years ago when students in one of my historical (not-quite-) reenactment classes made the point for me. It was the last day of the 1787 Constitutional Convention. The student playing George Washington was stalling the final vote (he didn’t think he had enough support to approve the adoption of the Constitution and one of his supporters had texted him that he was stuck on a BART train and would get to class as soon as he could). Finally, I had to force Washington to call the vote. As the period expired and the Convention Secretary was about to announce the results, the door flew open, the supporter dashed in, looked at a delighted Washington, and voted “Aye!”

As the next group of students came into the classroom, our group was in an uproar. I ruled that the vote counted and, as it tipped the balance in one state from abstain to “aye,” the Convention now had the nine votes required to approve the Constitution as a whole. In the end, a far better lesson than I could ever have designed.

That’s the history of what happened. However, there are so many different stories that can be told from those facts: the power of individual perseverance, the influence of student commuting patterns, or George Washington’s savvy time-management. If all this had happened IRL, no Constitution (at least not adopted in 1787), a different line of development for 13 small states on the east coast of the American continent, etc. etc.

With the weight of history bearing down on us, it’s hard to see that it all could easily have been different. We’re hungry for the (apparent) certainty, for the epistemological security that history brings.

Living day-to-day, we’re buffeted with instant interpretation and media hyperbole. The fate of the universe is made to depend on small things. In 2016, we were told that but for a swing of 80,000 votes, Hillary would be President and we could avoid all the dire predictions (generally accurate, as it turned out) about the implications of a Trump presidency. Last year, we saw the end of that particular worldview and a “return to normalcy” with Biden’s win. But Joe only won because 45,000 votes (in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) swung his way. Is America a different place because of 80,000 votes, or 45,000?

I suspect the same is true with regard to the events of January 6. Let’s imagine that Trump had said what he said and the crowd had marched as they marched and the Capitol police had kept the fences up and all we had was a loud protest/demonstration on fringes of the Capitol for a few hours. It’s not likely that we would have seen more than a tiny fraction of the hand-wringing about the state of the nation which has dominated the news for the past month. Yet, would the state of America and the meaning of democracy in the 21st century be all that different?

So, yes, there is contingency and there are underlying trends and patterns. The art is figuring out which is which.

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    Condemned to Repeat It --
    Musings on history, society, and the world.

    I don't actually agree with Santayana's famous quote, but this is my contribution to my version of it: "Anyone who hears Santayana's quote is condemned to repeat it."

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