Condemned to Repeat It

Centric

9/30/2022

Roughly 400 years ago, Copernicus and Galileo (and a few others) insisted that our (i.e. European culture’s) understanding of the cosmos was out of kilter with what they observed. The Biblical conception put the Earth as the starting point of everything. This “geo-centric” model was certainly consistent with that of other ancient cultures, but the Bible made it orthodoxy within the West of what we call the “early modern” era. There were some disputes over this new-fangled idea. The Catholic Church of that time was especially rigid, feeling the pressures from Luther and what we call the Protestant revolution of the 16-17C. Eventually, however, they came around to accept what was plainly observable and repeatable in terms of how planets moved and other astronomical phenomena. The only thing that made sense was that the Earth moved around the Sun. It wasn’t until later that astronomers developed theories and demonstrated how the Solar System fit into the Milky Way (18C) and that the Milky Way was part of something much larger (our awareness of things outside our galaxy is not much more than a 100 years old). As the picture illustrates, we now understand our (relative) physical location in the universe.

A bit over 200 years later, Darwin knocked humanity off its perch again, revising the model of how we fit with other plants and animals in the world. Again, we were no longer the starting point (as in Genesis), but were one of millions of species that developed (evolved) over millennia into our current state. One of the ideas that the 20C will likely be known for in the future is how various thinkers used “modern science” to revive ancient beliefs about the relation of humanity and the rest of nature. Once again, we were “ordinary,” just part of the bigger picture. We refer to the “Gaia hypothesis” and “ecosystems” to reflect our awareness that neither the universe nor the world is NOT just about us.

Other scientists in the first part of the 20C further torqued our understanding of how we fit. Einstein’s relativity theory (1905, 1915), Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (1927), and Godel’s incompleteness theorem (1931) said, respectively:
* There is no fixed understanding of the universe; all our observations depend on where we are and how fast we’re moving.
* We can’t even measure both our location and our speed at the same time
* We can’t prove our way out of whatever epistemological box we’re in.

Even on the “social science” side, anthropologists, led by Franz Boas at Columbia, insisted that we (i.e., the dominant Western culture (again)) had to stop evaluating all other cultures by how they measured up to our practices, history, and values. Hmm, that means that we have to respect others and not look down on them because of their differences from us. Unlike physics and biology, this effort at de-centering is ongoing. Indeed, a fair amount of history work in the last few decades is all about looking at what happened (imperially, internationally, and domestically) without starting from a stance in which we (the dominant Western culture) are patting ourselves on the back. This old style (we call it “Whig History”), made for great self-congratulatory stories in which some combination of God, luck, hard work, and good breeding (don’t get me started) led more or less ineluctably to the present day on (what Churchill called) “the sunlit uplands” of civilization. Lately, when we look at the same series of events without the filters of self-righteousness, perhaps there is less to be smug about. Such are the perils of taking multiple perspectives into account. It’s all very disconcerting.

Wow! It’s no wonder we’re all in existential angst. Life was a lot simpler to understand when we thought we were the center of everything and we could rely on whatever we saw to accurately describe things. Of course, some folks continue to believe that the Bible is the literal truth and reject either its metaphorical power or its place in history (i.e. as the product of humans who wrote down what they understood at the time 2000-3000 years ago). Such is the power of coherence and narrative.

I am one of those who think that the world is understandable and, increasingly, understood; even if I accept the possibility that there may be some “divine” force who set things up. God, as they say, works in mysterious ways; and there’s no reason he/she/it can’t construct creation via evolution or gradually reveal the mysteries of life and the universe one step at a time and arrange for their publication in various scientific journals every month. A good child of the Enlightenment, I subscribe to Kant’s challenge: “sapere aude” (“dare to know”), even as I am aware that I (and Kant, too) am a product of a particular, highly contingent development of human events (aka “history”).

So, just as Einstein’s observer doesn’t have any solid place to stand, I, too, am floating. It’s not entirely comfortable. I have to tolerate relativity, uncertainty, and incompleteness. I have to go forth without the expectation of knowing more than I do now; and make the best of it.

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Beyond Left and Right

9/23/2022

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Human bilateral symmetry is about as embedded source of metaphor as we are likely to find: “on the one hand…, on the other hand….” So, it’s no surprise that many basic dichotomies of life and ideas beyond “black and white” revert to the pair of “left and right.”

In modern political discourse, the left/right framework has become standardized since the debates in the National Assembly of the great French revolution of the late 18C. There was no particular meaning associated with the locational choice; like-minded folks sat with their fellows. It so happened that those more oriented towards change sat to the left of the presiding officer’s chair and those more aligned with the embedded structures (King, Church, nobility) sat on the right.

The nomenclature of political parties (not to mention their policy predilections) as they emerged in the early 19C in the US, Britain, and France varied considerably and was complicated by the rise of socialist/worker/progressive parties later in the century. Globally, a sort of vague consensus emerged about the meaning of these terms, especially given the wide variation in national political histories and groupings around policies and personalities.

Currently, France continues its revolutionary tradition, with the workers/change parties sitting to the left of the President’s chair. However, in Britain, at least, the Government/majority party sits to the right of the Speaker’s chair regardless of party, while in the US, the Democrats sit on the left of the Speaker’s chair. So, we’re past the point of straightforward political geography.

Most of the world uses the left/right distinction as the principal ideological dichotomy, although the terms “liberal” and “conservative” (both words very much in quotes) are more common here in the US. It’s hard to figure out how to categorize “Democrat” and Republican” over time. Radical Republicans opposed slavery and championed the rights of former slaves in the 1860s, but by the 1930s, Democrats were the party of the underclass, pushing for more radical change.

Political groupings such as the “Green” parties (especially in Europe since the 1970s) have pressed for new angles of political classification. With the demise of Soviet Communism in the 1990s, traditional dichotomies in the West have faced (with limited success) the need to redefine themselves. All this occurred well before the Trumpian revival of US nativism/populism hollowed out the GOP to the point of using the epithet “RINO” (Republican in name only) as a dismissive against those who, twenty years earlier, constituted the heart of the party.

In the 21C, new modes of geopolitics, COVID, radical Islam and other terrorists, the incipient climate catastrophe, and dissatisfaction with politic-economic inequality have made clear that traditional labels and mental frameworks make less and less sense. Meanwhile, the media and political commentariat struggle to find the language to describe the positions of individuals and groups that can fit in a twenty-second sound bite.

Semantic chaos is one result. But, more fundamentally, participants, whether elected or electorate, are wandering and wondering how and where they might fit. “Big tent” political parties seemed the norm in the 20C (Rockefeller and Goldwater; Humphrey and Stennis (just to take a couple of pairings from the 1960s), but the tents of both Dems and GOPs are swaying and fraying pretty badly.
This lack of coherence is pushing an even deeper level of change. The idea of the “loyal opposition,” the implicit acceptance of shared political norms—what might be called the social glue of the political system—seem to be dissolving. “Opponents” (especially from the perspective of “Trumpians” (I don’t know exactly what to call them) seem to becoming “enemies.” As such, they are excluded from the tribe and subject to unlimited exercises of power by those who have it. This is a profound change in attitude in the history of US politics. It is redolent of the troubling analysis of Carl Schmitt, whose The Concept of the Political (1932), was an attack on the essence of modern (bourgeois, parliamentary, liberal) structures of domestic power. It’s no wonder Schmitt was aligned with the Nazis on many issues, or with Fascism more generally.

When we hear that “the US is a republic, not a “democracy,” from those of a Trumpish bent, therefore, we have to wonder what kind of distinction they’re trying to make and be wary about the status of those who are not in the “Republic.”

Schmitt’s amoral, free-floating tribalism depends solely on self-definition and the contingent amassing of power. It rejects both ethics and profitability as the basis of domestic order (the precarious balancing of which has been the mission of liberalism for 200+ years). Political parties (at least in the Western, contested, sense and distinguished from the one-party models of Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, and more recent authoritarians) thereby become irrelevant. The efforts of “principled” “Conservatives” (e.g., Liz Cheney, Bill Kristol) to salvage the old guard look to be washed away and even unprincipled conservatives (e.g. Mitch McConnell) are barely hanging on. They, at least, are aware of their problem. Kevin McCarthy and a host of current and wannabe Trumpian pols remind me of nothing so much as a gang of ideological zombies.

As noted above, it’s not as if these groupings had much vitality lately, anyway. Whether Trump stands by in 2024, runs and loses, or runs, wins, and dies; his grip on the GOP is of limited duration. It’s hard to see how it reconstitutes itself, especially since most of the folks with brains have been pushed out.

The Dems have a different set of problems, but they’re more “normal” problems: staleness, inadequate coalition building, and a dearth of leadership among them. Fifteen years ago, Obama came out of pretty much nowhere and solved these problems, at least for a little while. He has no obvious successor (although I kind of like a “Michelle-Buttigieg” ticket).

Whoever tries to stake a claim to leadership in the US will need to devise a new political language. Between frontal assaults and natural obsolescence, the old terms don’t cut it anymore. “Left” and “right” and a whole bunch of others can be consigned, in Trotsky’s phrase, “to the dustbin of history.”

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Journal of a Blog Year.2

9/16/2022

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Two and a half years into the plague of COVID and two years since the start of this blog project. Last year, I used Daniel Defoe’s “Journal of a Plague Year” title to riff on my reflections on the year then past.

By now, the writing of the blog as turned not into a burdensome routine, but a discipline of thinking and writing. Mostly, the mix of history, law, politics, and education has been the same; but I’ve had to pay increasing attention to not repeating myself. I apologize for redundancies (I hope at least for consistency), but with more than a hundred entries under by belt, I hope I may be excused for the occasional lapse.

By now, you are likely familiar with my wry/acerbic style, including a few quirks like using multiple phrases/separated by slashes/rather than commas and an aversion to spelling out “century.” These are benefits of not having a copy editor with a slavish insistence on the Chicago Manual of Style. I’ve tried to keep footnotes to a minimum, too.

One highlight of the year was my 50th high school reunion, which occasioned some serious thoughts about the pace and path of my life and on how I try to comprehend the passage of time—not in the abstract, but as the sum of me so far.

COVID has certainly demonstrated a variety of historical adages about uniqueness, contingency, and continuity. Putin’s misadventure in Ukraine has demonstrated (again) Hegel’s comment that “The only thing we can learn from history is that people don’t learn from history.”

Still, I hope we can learn from Historians!

I know I can learn from you, so keep the comments coming.

Here’s the summary of the year:

Date   Title: Subject
9/17/21   A Few Good History Books: 10 great reads for smart general readers
9/17   Recalling Democracy: Why California’s electoral recall system is a failure
9/24   Big Picture: Historical Frameworks
10/1   Names and Places: How geographic names are culturally imperialistic
10/8   The Pace of Science: Patience in an age of miracles
10/15   Me First: The “trickle-down” illusion
10/22   Monopoly Power: Regulating big business to keep the government in power
10/29   Existentialism: Coping under dire threats
11/5   America as an Empire: The limits of our adherence to democracy
11/12   Fragility and Sclerosis: Our precarious modern culture
11/19   US Mail: Improving the postal system
11/26   Western Civ: Why the old standby history course doesn’t work anymore
12/3   Welfare State: Who takes care of us?
12/10   Brexit II: UK shoots itself in the foot; surprised it can’t walk
12/17   Non-Geographic Districts: Where you live shouldn’t determine how you can vote
12/24   Lysistrata: Opportunities for radical action
12/31   Pascal’s Wager: You bet your life (everyday!)
1/7/22   Rights and Responsibilities: The need for social and constitutional balance
1/14   Age Expectancy and Horizons: Better health has changed how we see the world
1/21   Nationalism: The bugbear of modern politics
1/28   A Few Good SF Books: Some fun and provocative reads from the future
2/4   Elbridge’s Progeny: The apparent irresistibility of gerrymandering
2/11   Ungovernability: Do we take societal success for granted?
2/18   Biggest Problem: Where to start for constitutional reform
2/25   Ukraine: Putin’s evil folly
3/4   Construction Zone: Does nation-building work?
3/11   This Means War: How do we define war in the 21C?
3/18   Limits to Growth: Sometimes, more is less
3/25   Little Brother is Watching: A bigger threat to privacy
4/1   Middle Kingdom: China’s perspective on the world
4/8   Failed States: Why the European political model often doesn’t work
4/15   A History of the Future: The way we think about the future has changed over time
4/22   In the Shadow of History: Don’t just read the historical headlines
4/29   Social Darwinism: The abuses of good science
5/6   Revival of the Fittest: What’s worth keeping after the apocalypse
5/13   [omitted]: Blogus interuptus
5/20   Denial: Can we handle the truth?
5/27   The Meaning of 50: How to use a high school reunion
6/3   Sound Tracks: The music of your life
6/10   Public Opinion: How do we know what “the people” think (before polling)
6/17   Games Historians Play: Why I use games in history classes
6/24   The Meaning of 50 (Part II): Post-hoc reflections on the Reunion
7/2   Rights and Wrongs, Roe and Wade: Finding a solution to the uncompromisable
7/9   Inequality: How to read Thos. Jefferson
7/16   Inequality (Part II): How to read Thos. Piketty
7/23   Wonders of Modern Medicine: Gratitude and frustration
7/30   Precedential Seal: Why are we fixated on history?
8/5   Smith, Sieyes, and Darwin: 3 thinkers who created modernity
8/12   Outta’ Sight: What you can’t see can hurt you
8/19   Military Economics: War is (crazy expensive) hell
8/26   How is Now: My upcoming course on modernity
9/2   State of the States: Do we really need our 50 states?
9/9   Post-Boris: The UK is really Trussed-up

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Bye, Bye, Boris!

9/9/2022

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Well, the Brits don’t have Boris Johnson to kick around anymore. And, unlike Richard Nixon, the originator of the phrase, hopefully he will not have a comeback to plague Britain and the rest of the world again.

Yes, it’s time for my annual commentary on the state of the Union (aka the United Kingdom of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland) cobbled together beginning in the 15C and teetering on the brink of dissolution.

In my post a year ago, I decried Johnson and the Conservative Party for the incredible feat of three increasingly awful Prime Ministers. The chain has now been extended to four, with Liz Truss stepping in. Even Boris had style and chutzpah and an Eton education. Truss seems to lack these and even what pathetically passed for integrity in the Johnson administration. Originally a “remainer” (i.e., anti-Brexit), she dutifully switched and, as Johnson’s Foreign Minister, has been as hard-nosed as most in the on-going effort at quasi-extrication.

Speaking of which, Brexit has proved to be a disaster, with the impact on the UK economy already running at 5% of GNP and no clear solution to the Northern Ireland conundrum, much less the bottlenecks in transport to France and a host of other bureaucratic SNAFUs. Johnson’s Brexit fudge (to pretend that he wasn’t de facto abandoning the loyal Northern Ireland Protestants who (for reasons unclear other than habit) would rather be with England than with the EU) would only work if the Brits kept quiet and let the Northern Irish continue their relatively successful economic integration with the Irish Republic. But no! Johnson (and Truss) have insisted on “principle,” baldly asserting that they would never cut off the Orangemen. So, they propose to unilaterally change the deal they signed with the EU and if the Northern Irish economy gets a further hit and Britain’s lengthy history as a champion of the rule of (international) law gets tossed too; so be it.

The broader economic impact of Brexit of being cut off from easy access to continental markets is a self-inflicted, unforced error has been compounded by COVID and the energy/food inflation which Britain now faces (much worse than ours). You might blame Putin and the little coronavirus buggies for these crises, bur Brexit weakened the country socially and economically (not to mention skewing the politics) to such a degree that the resilience that might have dealt with these externally-caused problems was already exhausted.

Underneath all this is the fact that Britain has been getting by on its history since WWII. Its long-term decline in politico-military terms has been well recognized for decades. At least their EU membership (1973-2020) helped keep the economy reasonably well-off and allowed for a graceful slide into a second-class “has-been” Euro status.

Fundamentally, the economic problem is quite pervasive and not really reparable. At the end of the day, all national economies rise and fall on their own productivity. For centuries, the British (as well as other Euros, the US, Russia, etc.) boosted their economies on the backs of the low-cost land, commodities, and labor of others (usually of a darker hue). The Brits spent a good chunk of their accumulated pile paying for WWI and WWII. Following which, being overdrawn morally as well as financially, they proceeded to dis-imperialize as well. Neo imperialism kept things going for a while, but now, fundamental economic factors such as factor convergence and the revival of the Chinese, Indian, and other Asian economies has left the Brits entirely to their own devices.

All of this is reasonably clear now, in the 21C. I recently came across, however, a rather prescient essay, written by none other than George Orwell in 1947. Orwell was plumping for a socialist integration of Europe, but in diagnosing the problem faced in the immediate post-WWII years, observed that “the European peoples, and especially the British, have long owed their high standard of life to direct or indirect exploitation of the coloured peoples.” But he noted, it was hard to see how British workers could enjoy the middle-class lifestyle to which they aspired “if we throw away the advantages we derive from colonial exploitation.” (He was vehemently anti-imperialist as well.) Whether “thrown away” or forced to divest their empire, the Brits ended up without and they’ve been scrambling ever since.

As I noted some time ago in this blog, this is the (or, at least one) meaning of globalization. Market integration mans that things will average out and the relatively luxurious lifestyle (on a global scale) of even “working class” people in the UK cannot be maintained under the pressure of this factor convergence. The same is true, broadly speaking, in the US also.

The British response has been a curious mix of trying to run away from the complications of globalization while maintaining the image/legacy of their former globe-straddling selves. The theory of Brexit was to reassert control; i.e. they wanted to be “big fish in a small pond.” But they’ve tumbled to two problems: 1) they can’t be the imperial masters anymore, even within the UK, what with Northern Ireland gravitating towards the Irish Republic and the Scots continuing to make noises about an independence referendum; and 2) their former economic advantages are evaporating even faster. The industrial revolution was kick-started with British coal and you can’t burn that in the 21C (even if the economics worked). Maritime trading empires are run from everywhere on (Greek or Liberian-registered) ships built in Korea, carrying Chinese goods and financed by global capital markets.

Beyond the strength of its cultural/linguistic inertia, England would be pretty much of a jumbo-sized Belgium (except even Belgium is in the EU). So, it doesn’t look good; although, to be fair, the Dutch have managed pretty nicely even though their global heyday was in the 17C.

We might wish Boris well, but the blond mop and fine phrase have worn out their welcome. The long-term problems are not the fault of the recent batch of Tories. Truculent Truss will have her day, but she’s got no clue how to get to 2025, much less figure out how to lead her people (or even her party) gracefully along a decline into ordinariness. Even Charles is gritting his teeth, since he is taking the crown just as it all comes crashing down. Hail Britannia! God Save the King!

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State of the States

9/2/2022

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Early last year (021921), I did a piece on “Democratic Federalism,” decrying the anti-democratic configuration of the Senate. It was part of my ongoing series of comments on the US Constitution. I argued that even though the States were an essential part of the history of the creation of the country, they are the wrong basis for choosing federal representation. Today, I argue that regardless of history and current national politics, they play an important role in our constitutional structure and need to be not only continued, but strengthened.

One of the great risks of modern civilization is the overconcentration of power in the government. Indeed, most of the 20C was taken up with fighting wars against two forms of totalitarianism: Fascism and Soviet-style Communism. A combination of bureaucratic inertia and accretion, technologically-driven scale economies, national security angst/paranoia and the attractions of the “welfare state” have made modern government increasingly powerful and intrusive in virtually all aspects of modern life. Just because many conservatives have gone off the deep end in terms of their opposition to big government doesn’t mean that their core concern should be discarded. George Orwell’s 1984 was an early warning of the tendency of most forms of the modern state (i.e. “state” in the generic sense of a polity, not the US flavor of a particular lower level government (for which I will use capitalized “State”) to converge. Orwell’s Big Brother” operated in similar ways in all three of the countries he described.

In the US model, our principal defense against this risk is the “separation of powers” and the deployment of governmental powers across three branches with “checks and balances.” But also embedded in the Constitution is the idea that the national government remains limited to the specific powers delegated to it by the document and that the powers not specified remain with the People and the (originally 13) States. Since the original Constitution was created by representatives of independent States, this makes sense: the people created the States and the States agreed to delegate a chuck of their authority to this new federal government.

200+ years of changes in how the world works has flipped this model. Lincoln and the Civil War stand for the proposition that it is the nation that is primary, not the States; and the nature of commerce, regulation, and global security issues have taken care of the rest. However, other than the overriding of the power of the States in the Civil War Amendments (13, 14, 15), we still have a Constitution that pretends that the States are in charge.

A better constitutional path forward would be to recognize the primacy of the federal government, but expressly preserve and enhance the powers of the States. This would provide not only a bulwark against over concentration of power at the national level, but would support one well-established benefits of our current structure: the States as “laboratories of federalism.” The benefits of getting new ideas generated from a variety of sources, and trying them out at a relatively small scale has been repeatedly demonstrated, whether in terms of taxes, regulations, or social policy.

The bigger challenge is to define the sphere of State authority and protect it from federal intrusion, even while ensuring the preservation of individual rights enshrined in the federal constitution. Some policy areas can be most effectively handled at the state level, adapting to local needs and circumstances. I don’t want to have to deal with Washington, D.C. when I have pothole on my street, or get a building permit, or figure out what should be taught in local public schools. Indeed, most of what States do now is in accordance with this approach. However, both education and housing seem to have been taken over by the national government without much clear benefit. Usually, the regulation comes in the form of conditions on a federal transfer payment, but the effect is the same. It would make sense to push the federal government out of much of the operational policy for these areas and, as well, cut federal taxes and let the people of a State decide how much to spend (and tax) in these areas.

Indeed, one insidious effect of our current system is that States have been able to get away with poor tax policies because they get an array of federal subsidies. This is bad economics and undermines the importance of State-level political culture.

It would be important to make clear that the delineated sphere of State responsibility would not be subject to federal intervention, other than to protect Constitutional rights. It would also take some work to clearly demarcate between the two jurisdictions at an operational level in whatever spheres were carved out.

From a theoretical perspective, instead of the current model we would have a system which recognized that the power flowed from the People to both the States and the federal government, not (as now) only indirectly to the federal government via the States.

Another interesting benefit would be in the configuration, administration and operation of State governments. Work-arounds, such as the Port Authority of NY & NJ show that our current metropolitan areas demand coherent management. The economic and cultural lives of people in Gary, Indiana, or Arlington, Virginia, or Vancouver, Washington, or East St. Louis, Illinois all attest to the deleterious effects of being stuck with our current state boundaries. Our current dependence on State configurations as the basis for Congressional representation has stifled the logical arrangement of the States in terms of meeting the needs of the population as it is distributed in the 21C. Splitting overly large States (e.g., California, Texas and Florida) and reconfiguring around our modern urban-centered way of life could also improve how States need the needs of their citizens.

All of this is interesting and radical and worth thinking about. But if we’re going to have an underlying constitutional arrangement that meets our needs, rather than those of our 18C predecessors, this should be part of the mix.

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How is Now

8/26/2022

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On the night of August 4, 1789, the newly self-constituted National Assembly, meeting in the King’s tennis court in Versailles, abolished the feudal system of France, declaring an end to the mish-mash of rights and power, inherited by the “nobility” over the ordinary lives of most French subjects. It also abolished the inheritance of public offices and reconstituted those powers in the State. It was a shift towards order and rational administration. It was an essential part of the massive disruption of the great French Revolution dated from that year. It was one component of the start of the modern world.

In 1735, Carl Linnaeus published his two-part naming system for plants and animals, simplifying a confusing mix of taxonomies compiled by natural philosophers gathering samples around the world. By 1758, his tenth edition included over 10,000 entries divided into another creation: the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. He went on to invent the index card. Several steps towards bringing order to the increasing onslaught of information being gathered.

In 1825, George Stephenson opened the Stockton and Darlington Railway in the English Midlands, carrying both freight and passengers. By 1829, his “Rocket” locomotive set a record, by running at up to 30 mph.

In the 1850s, Baron Haussmann rebuilt central Paris, Cerda designed a new Barcelona, and George Bazelgette constructed a mammoth public sewage system for London. Cities were growing and the resulting complications had to be addressed.

Since then, technology and social change have built on each of these developments. Most places are (at least nominally) democracies. Google and Wikipedia (and many specialized sites) organize and classify exponentially greater mounds of information. Chinese bullet trains routinely run at more than 200mph. Most of (a much larger) global population live in cities.

The modern world is different from what came before. Radically so in many ways. If we look at the last 250 years—more or less—we can’t but be struck by the nature and extent of these differences. These changes have gone far beyond just “a bit more of the same.” That is to say, they are qualitative, not just quantitative. Even so, the changes are hard to see, because our lives take most of them for granted. So, it’s like asking a fish to describe the water in which it swims.

So, for three weeks in October, I will be giving a series of talks about what happened and what it all means. I call it: “How is Now.” If you live near SF, you can get the details and register for the course here. It’s part of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, an organization where I have given several other courses.

There are innumerable other events we could cite. We cannot say that the modern world was born in a day. From early in the 18C to the middle of the 19C, thousands of steps were taken that we, looking backwards, describe as the birth of the modern era (although there are many historians who would say we need to start in the 15C with the Renaissance, Gutenberg, or Columbus, or at least in the 17C, with Newton and the English Revolution. But, we’re going to try to keep things a bit more contained and manageable and focus on the 19 & 20C. Many of the events, like Stephenson’s Rocket, were planned, some, like the National Assembly’s abolitions were seen at the time as major changes in the world. The English poet, William Wordsworth, in Paris during the early days of the great Revolution, wrote : “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!” Most, however, were not dramatic or self-conscious.

In these lectures, we will try to stop swimming and look around, take some different perspectives and use some different frameworks to see what this water of modernity looks like.

What do I mean when I talk about the “modern world?” There are a bunch of characterizations that come to mind: capitalist, urban, global, democratic, individualized, rational, technologic, state-driven, and dynamically changing. Now, you can’t extract any one or two of these and say: “ these the are keys;” they’re all interconnected.

But we have to start somewhere and put all of this in some sort of (artificial) order. In the first talk, we will start with the modern mentality; how do we think different. Then we will look at the physical world: our bodies, the globe and how we interact. The second and third talks will weave back and forth between economics, politics, social life, and culture.

In each case, we will look at
* both the material world and the epistemology,
* a comparison of “then” and “now,”
* some of the key developments in each area
* and how they set up where we are today in the 21C.

I hope you’ll come join us, expand your brain a bit, ask some questions, and share your own experience of how all this came about.

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Military Economics

8/19/2022

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Why did Russia attack Ukraine? Will China go after Taiwan? These are the 2022 versions of a long-standing issue: Why start a war?

Based on some historical examples (bearing in mind that I’m a Historian of Modern Europe), the point of this piece is to argue that the phrase “military economics” is about as much of an oxymoron as those other standbys: “military justice” and “military intelligence.” Whether looked at from the perspective of the nation that instigated the conflict or that of the elites of any active combatant, war makes no sense and it is usually triggered by what can only be called (if loosely) national insanity.

In the old days (i.e., pre-French Revolution), the principal purpose of war was conquest; amassing more land and people to the greater glory and wealth of the monarch and elites. This was also an era when economic thinking (such as it is) was in its infancy, without the analytic tools and statistics which enable us to assess such political moves and outcomes. After the British-led coalition finally put Napoleon down in 1815, wars of conquest were either localized (within Europe) or exported to take control of empires around the world. For the following century.

During this time, war became more complex, bureaucratic, and industrialized. At the same time, the European economies became more intertwined and globally integrated to such a degree that Ivan (Jan) Bloch famously wrote a massive treatise in the 1890s arguing that inter-European war made no sense given the interdependence of industrial economies. This gave some support to those who that that modern European civilization had matured and that humanity had moved to a new stage; hopes that were dashed by WWI.

The lack of strategic thinking that led the WWI combatants, especially Austria-Hungary and Germany, to instigate the war has since become legendary spawning a vast critical literature. But among the errors made was the dismissal not only of Bloch’s rationale, but also of an assessment of the economic strength of the combatants which, outside the most optimistic (naïve?) scenarios, would lead to their eventual economic (and therefore military) exhaustion. While Austria and Germany might have fought Britain and France to a standstill, the entry of the US, despite the (semi-coincidental) exit of Russia put the Allies far ahead of the Central Powers.

Indeed, the only pre-cursor of significant industrialized warfare prior to WWI provided ample demonstration (if anyone had been looking) of the need to assess the relative economic power of combatants. This was, of course, the US Civil War, in which the military prowess of the South was insufficient to defeat the Union and, in due course, the larger, industrialized and economically progressive infrastructure of the Union overwhelmed the agrarian Confederacy.

World War II provides an even better example, even accounting for Hitler’s strategic blunders (somewhat offset by his good fortune and the moral collapse of France). Once Britain woke up (even if quite late in the 1930s), its industrial production was formidable. When you add in the heft of the newly (if slowly) modernizing Soviet Union; much less the plurality of US military-industrial might that was devoted to Europe, it was really no contest.

It is true that the Nazi domination of Europe enabled it to draw upon a wide array of resources beyond the formal Axis reach. What we don’t know is whether, if Hitler had been more circumspect, Germany could have leveraged these resources over the long term or whether the enforcement costs of totalitarian oppression, coupled with the reduced productivity of subjected peoples, would have proved insufficient to a resurgent Allied power. (The South’s inability to mobilize the considerable manpower of its economy (for obvious reasons of not arming its slaves), may provide a clue here.)

Much the same could be (and indeed was said at the time) about Japan and its effort to out-gun the US in the Pacific.

Germany’s failure opened the door to its successor in totalitarian oppression manifested in the Soviet Union’s mid-century empire in Central Europe. While it secured control over these countries more for reasons of providing a bulwark against future invasion from the West and it’s conquest was nominally vis-à-vis Germany (rather than Poland, Hungary, et al.), the effect looked to be based on goals of pre-modern military conquest, albeit with an intense ideological overlay.

While the “Cold War” featured less shooting than its 20C predecessors, the degree of (both military and economic) competition remained high. As with the Confederacy and (likely) a longer-term Reich, the Soviets faced a uphill battle; and lost.

None of this is to make any argument about inevitability or imply that any one of these military enterprises was “doomed to failure.” There are so many ways things could have turned out differently (e.g., British mid-19C commercial/imperialistic triumphalism aiding the South, French collapse at the Marne in 1914, a few lucky torpedoes at Midway, German aviation and rocket technology in the ‘40s, or a US loss of nerve after WWII, to name a few scenarios). So, we can never know: what if…?

Which leads us to today’s crises where it’s difficult to find a scenario in which Putin is really better off for having taken on Ukraine. Russian losses are already substantial and it’s hard to see how even a series of military successes will end up given the Russians a net profit on the deal. Much the same can be said of China and Taiwan. In both cases, even assuming successful conquests, the economic destruction (and domestic force losses) make for an awfully tall bill to pay and a (very) long time needed for recovering those costs (not to mention occupation/oppression costs and lost productivity in the newly-(re-?) conquered territories).

So, it seems that Bloch was right. It just takes a while to prove in his calculations that such projects have a net loss and, in the meantime, we can only look sadly on as the delusion of would-be conquerors causes so much death, loss, and destruction.

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Outta' Sight

8/12/2022

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When people stopped considering aspects of the natural world—Sun, Moon, oceans, rivers, mountains, woods—to be gods to be appeased and supplicated, it became relegated to proto-scientific consideration and became objectified as, basically, dirt. The Bible makes clear that “down here,” humans (actually, men) were in charge and everything else (animals, plants, waters) was here for our benefit. The “scientific revolution” in 17-18C Europe, solidified the objectification of the world (“disenchantment” is part of modernity).

So, it’s no surprise that the emergence of global capitalism in the 17-19C and its intellectual handmaiden “economics” found no place for the natural world in its calculations except as a variety of property to be owned and exploited. Indeed, a substantial part of the huge generation of wealth during this time (esp. in Europe and the US) was due to the monetization of extractable commodities (e.g., coal, silver, gold, oil), not to mention the land itself (yes, and exploitation of humans, too!).

Europeans expanded their empires by declaring that land not considered “owned” (i.e., a form of property) and “occupied” (i.e., used/managed in the way that Europeans understood it) was considered “terra nullius” (“empty land”), available for imperial claims. Similarly, such land was brought into “civilization” (i.e., private ownership) and subsequently handed out to military conquerors or potential homesteaders. Indigenous groups (on all continents) were given short shrift.

Most of this happened before late 19C economists even formulated the concept of an “externality,” and recognized that economic analysis was incomplete since it did not take into account certain costs and benefits. And, as has been common in the social sciences, such problems are generally ignored (or at least relegated to a back corner of theoretical discussion.) There was no simple way to value or incorporate e.g., clean air or water, ambient temperature into economic calculations. This was due in part to the fact that property and actions (e.g., dumping toxic waste) had been going on since before science determined that these actions had real (and deleterious) effects. In addition, those who caused these effects (often the wealthy, but even poor folks dumping personal waste in the streets) always had a lot of social inertia and ignorance behind their behavior. Finally, who was to force the inclusion of these externalities? If it was the “government,” then such actions smacked of intervention, contrary to laissez-faire liberalism.

The results, despite decades of incremental fiddling with what is “external” and what not (bottle/can deposits started in 1971), the results of pretending that the rest of the planet was available for use/extraction/dumping at “no cost” are evident to anyone who’s looked at a thermometer lately. It’s particularly ironic that the same politicians who blather on about the superiority of the “market” are the same folks who are afraid of market-based solutions for carbon.

Externalities are also a leading indicator of why the whole project of “economics” is fundamentally flawed. It’s easy to make equations work when you just assume away any number of complications (aka the real world). It’s only in the last few decades that real progress has been made on dealing with the fact that people make decisions for non-rational reasons (see my posting a while back on Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow). Wow! Stunning! Just imagine that sentiment and emotion affect spending/investment decisions (see, e.g., Victoria’s Secret or Elon Musk)! Sometimes, raising the price increases demand! Oops. Most economists are well intentioned, to be sure, but it would be great to stop pretending they actually knew what they were talking about. After all, it’s (relatively) easy to model a world populated with rational robots and with a large garbage chute into which all manner of unpleasant and complicating costs can be dumped and thence ignored.

Kurt Godel (my favorite undersung 20C thinker) pointed out (1931) that you can’t validate any system of ideas from the inside. In other words, economics can’t prove that economics is accurate (or, as Godel showed, even mathematics can’t prove that mathematics is accurate), so the only way to have confidence is to make a truck-load of assumptions and simplifications.

Of course, there’s always the classic experiment in ignoring externalities performed by/for/on the communist countries during the 20C. Marx said that markets were evil and the State would manage all production and consumption. Lenin theorized along the same lines, but once he took over the USSR, he backed off eliminating markets entirely; it seems that State planners actually couldn’t visualize and manage the entire economy. But after Lenin died, Stalin drove modernization hard (and brutally); five-year plans and all that. Even after Stalin and the brutality gave way to bureaucracy, they never really got a handle on the complexity of the world. Those nasty externalities (freedom, fashion, technological change) got in the way and, in the end, came back to eat up the once-vaunted Soviet state.

I’ve noted elsewhere that modernity is much about the difficulties of recognizing and coming to terms with the complexities of the world. It’s psychologically challenging, whether you’re talking about organizing a dinner party, or planting crops with changing climate, or a central banker designing a program of “Quantitative Easing.” We all get headaches just trying to conceptualize things, so it’s no wonder we often go for simplifying assumptions (e.g. assume no inflation) to make it through.

But the externalities are out there. We can’t wish them away. Whether it’s planetary carrying capacity, or Soviet suppression of ‘decadent’ American jazz, merely to pretend differences and complications and unknowns aren’t there is a conceit. Barring some climatological miracle, as the Soviets were fond of saying, capitalism will be consigned to the ash heap of history for ignoring certain externalities. We can take small comfort that, for the same reason, the Soviets got there first.

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Smith, Sieyes, and Darwin

8/5/2022

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Smith, Sieyes, & Darwin

Much of modernity can be seen in the discovery of the power of the self and of individuals to act (in economic, political, and social spheres). The material aspects—technology, industrialization, speed, cities, globalization—sit on top of the conceptual and ideological components: democracy, rationalism, identity, capitalism, and the critical stance. It is a fool’s errand to try too hard to pick any of them apart; they’re intertwined and we haven’t the historical tools or sources to do so.

So, rather than assign any definitive status as the causative foundation of certain ideas and conceptual frameworks, this essay uses three well-cited Europeans to capture an essential component of this status/stance/outlook we call modernity. The three—Adam Smith, Emmanuel Sieyes, and Charles Darwin—each reframed human self-understanding in profound ways. They did so at different dimes and in different contexts and with different purposes, but there is a common thread: they crystallized a way of thinking in which ordinary people could understand their own power to define and change the world and, in so doing, undermined the traditional power structure of Western society (and, thereby, the world).

By “power,” I mean simply the ability to change the actions of another person, whether directly or indirectly, via force, threat, persuasion, inspiration or creating a physical or psychological environment in which it’s easier to drive on the right rather than the left. Traditional power structures (aka the “ancien regime”) in organized societies in every culture were centered on monarchs, nobility, clergy, and soldiers; much less so on merchants and almost all ordinary folk seemed to and acted as if they had almost no power at all.

History has been defined as “the study of change over time;” and you define power as the ability to produce change, then history is the story of power. History tells us that things (i.e., power structures) have changed a lot starting the late 18C. We call it “modernity.”

Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) placed all of us in a framework of the division of labor in which each person had some power which could be fitted into a globally integrated market mediated by the famous “invisible hand.” No individual (all of us Mandevillean bees (1)) need have any great vision or plan, but we all fit together and created a whole greater than the sum of the parts. Individuals do not inherently have much power in this conception of the world, but each has some, whether we choose to think about it or not. Liberalism, in its initial conception, was all about protecting this individual power.

The Abbe Sieyes (1789) in the midst of the erupting French Revolution asserted the same point from political perspective. “We the people” (2); “we” are the nation, “we” are everything, he said. “We” (if we only wake up and act on the basis of this realization) should and can be in charge. We may be a “sleeping sovereign” most of the time, but as long as we define the rules and don’t let our rulers forget, our power within our realm is unlimited.

The implication of Darwin’s work (1859) is that the easy assumption of divinely intelligent design that underlay all our human cosmology was, in fact, an abdication of the role of individuals in nature. The power of creation was not the work of some guy with thunderbolts over the course of six days; instead, it was incremental, unconscious, and inherent in all living things. (3) Darwin pushed God to the back, if not entirely out of the picture. He also required that we see ourselves—individually and together)—as part of the world, not above it.

In all three cases, the gist of the story is: we are/can be/should be in charge (at least of ourselves). The power to create and change the world is in all people, even if it can only be understood by looking not at the individual, but at all people en masse. The power does not depend on self-awareness, although such self-awareness certainly enhances and accelerates that power. (4)

The story of how these conceptualizations spread out from the relatively small number of direct readers of these documents is much of the story of the 19 & 20C. This spread was not simply a matter of intellectual history and debate among the great thinkers of the day. Sometimes it was a matter of the zeitgeist. Sometimes it was a matter of un- or semiconscious change of actions and practices: the language of the “working class,” the idea of the “nation,” the (eventual) environmental movement, and the pursuit of “liberty” to enable changed minds and changed lives to move forward. Sometimes this essential humanism was overdone and perverted (e.g., the “me generation,” conspicuous consumption, the transformation of nationalism into empire and genocide).

The incremental and haphazard nature of this spread is evidenced by wars, anxieties, denial, arguments, and back-sliding that continues in this 21C. Arno Mayer (5) spoke of the “Persistence of the Old Regime” to remind us that the apparent drama of the fall of the Bastille misleads us into thinking that revolution happens quickly and effectively. In fact, human change takes an awfully long time.

I suspect that there is something deeply psychological in our reluctance/resistance to come to terms with “it’s just us.” The “old regime” of faith, as embodied in ancient cultural constructs from Christianity to Islam to Buddhism, has persisted. There has rarely been a shortage of “supernatural” explanations of the world in either high culture or junk TV. The problem with recognizing one’s own power is that it’s harder to blame someone else when things are complicated or go wrong. There is great comfort in believing someone else is looking out for me and will “fix” the problem du jour. Time to wake up!

(sorry about all the FNs this time!)

1 Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (1714).
2 (To use the American constitutional formulation that was actually more about elites than ordinary folks.)
3 “Social Darwinism” was a 19C effort to apply human intent to this exercise of creative power. Eugenics was a 19/20C effort to deploy technology to the same effect.
4 As both Kant and Marx stressed, in different ways and contexts.
5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arno_J._Mayer

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Precendential Seal

7/29/2022

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Virtually every culture places a high value on tradition. It is a practice (one might say it’s a tradition) that was established and, indeed, recognized, long before the advent of the modern practice of history in the 19C. Part of this has been embodied in such cultural artifacts as ancestor worship, more recently, under the influence of the English common law, the concept of judicial precedent has meant that the law should lag broader cultural change. Nostalgia, too, draws on the longing remembrance of things past.

Modern “scientific” (i.e. rational, fact-based, and critically-assessed) history seeks to ensure that the precedents cited are, in fact, accurate and contextualized. If we are going to invoke the past as a basis for thinking about the present and the future, at least we should get it right, after all. Still, I can’t help but wonder how useful all this reliance on the past really is. Just because something happened doesn’t necessarily make it meaningful today.

My favorite examples of this comes from the practice of sportscasters and political commentators. Citing the all-time record of the Harvard-Yale game (Yale leads 68-61-8) is a nice factual filler, but so what? None of the players on the field has been there for more than 3 prior games, few of the coaches more than 10. How, then, does the past have any effect on the present? Teams wrap themselves in “tradition” (or, at least, the construct/extract any possible positive angle or statistic). The same is true for countries, of course, as well. Political analysts talk about historical electoral patterns and here they have a little more to go on, since many voters in a particular election have voted for some extended period in the same place. But this is easily overblown and recalling how thus-and-such district voted thirty years ago or more doesn’t tell us squat. Even without the malleability of parties (the Democrats opposed civil rights for Blacks in the 19C), the shifting of district boundaries, the changing values of the electorate, and the changing nature and meaning of the issues, most of this historical precedentalizing is pretty worthless. (and, don’t get me started on investment advisors who talk about how the Dow has moved since the Great Depression….)

As you might expect, the precedential value of historical analogizing gets weaker as time goes on. There are many interesting stories of ancient Greece/Rome/Persia/China, and it may be enlightening to see how things have evolved since their glory days, but there is little beyond the lifetime of the living that is actually useful by way of guidance as to how to proceed.

In other words, we have to take great care to see if really old stuff is sufficiently like their contemporary counterparts to make the connective effort worthwhile. In other words, such stories—by fixating on similarities which are superficial or nominal—also risk creating the impression of a meaningful continuity when none exists. Casual comparisons of Vladimir Putin to Hitler, Kaiser Wilhelm, or Louis XIV disguise and distract more than they enlighten.

We also need to be wary of valuing venerability for its own sake and avoid another form of arid antiquarianism which is fine for Wikipedia listings or the Guinness Book of World Records, but which doesn’t actually tell us much about how to live today. (To adapt Hegel’s famous aphorism, the only other thing that we can learn from history is that everyone likes to wrap themselves in their own (preferably lengthy) history.)

Another relevant legal concept (dating from ancient Athens!) called the “statute of limitations” which basically says that legal cases (whether for breach of contract or the commission of a crime) have to be filed within a specified period (affectionately known as the “you snooze, you lose” principle). These laws express an underlying societal view that we shouldn’t get caught up in history too much. Even if a wrong was done, our society needs to move on. Implicitly, this means that there is something more important than the “facts” or the “truth” of a particular case. It might be good to have a similar rule for citing precedents when trying to assess current events.

Many uses of history, especially in geopolitical or nationalist contexts, run afoul of this principle. Creative scholarship to demonstrate or rebut the claims of, e.g., China to most of the South China Sea, or both Israel/Jews and Arabs/Palestinians/Nabateans to various chunks of the Mideast, or Russia to Ukraine, all seem to be based on the idea that history matters, even if it’s thousands of years old. In fact, such “historical” claims are more a reflection of the modern (human?) tendency to seek validation from the past (instead of dealing with the current “facts on the ground” and the current people involved).

Similarly, invoking concepts, e.g., “democracy,” and pretending that the word meant the same thing in Athens in 403bc as it did in Philadelphia in 1787 or Tiananmen Square in 1989 or Tahir Square in 2011 risks watering down the importance of time-and-place; the context and culture that are crucially different.

There are multiple reasons to be wary of old history; but we shouldn’t dismiss it entirely. First, while ancient history has limited relevance to the present, there are a lot of good stories which engage students and any number of myths to be exploded. Olmecs, Mongols, and pre-Roman Franks are all legitimate subjects of historical research and study. Second, when done carefully, finding conceptual similarities between the ancient and the modern can be fruitful in exploring the high-level contextualization of human experience. Indeed, there is no other way to demonstrate that in terms of “human nature,” we humans haven’t made much “progress” in the last 10k years.

Finally, I’m well aware that many of the problems of historical analogy noted above apply equally well to events of the modern era. Actually, that’s one key benefit of all historical study: to show how the past, however recent, is still a quite different place than the present

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