Condemned to Repeat It

Feelings

11/25/2022

No, this is not a riff on the maudlin, lounge-lizard standard from “Cats” in the 1980s. It is about a phenomenon that we all encounter every day and which is embedded in our public discourse; i.e., the conflation of feelings and solutions.

More or less contemporaneously with the Andrew Llyod Webber hit, John Gray wrote a book called “Men are from Mars; Women are from Venus.” The core concept (which Gray unfortunately pitched in a gendered frame), is the vast gap between the way people express themselves and what is understood by their listeners.

All of us process the world from both emotive and analytic perspectives. But most of us have a default mode (I’m definitely more towards the “analytic” end of the spectrum; and rate much more towards the “thinker” end of the Myers/Briggs spectrum than the “feeler” end). We may also express ourselves more from one stance and hear others from another. These differences are a recipe for a vast range of “failures to communicate.” Regardless of your own preferences and tendencies, it takes some real attention to parse what people really mean underneath what they are saying. Expressions of unhappiness may appear as the rejection of plans which are not (apparently) connected to the source of the discontent. Ideas are advanced that are more a manifestation of angst or delight than any assessment of the need for or cost/benefits of the nominal proposal.

If I were a professional psychologist, I would vector off into a discussion of how this shows up in personal or business relationships or friendships (familiar to anyone who has a spouse, child, or business associate). But as an observer of the political culture, I can’t help but notice that much of our current cultural confusion is tied to this problem. I was particularly struck by the attention to poll numbers earlier this year which showed an uptick in Biden’s “approval” rating. The commentariat was quick to draw potential implications for the mid-term elections, but it seemed to me that these results were a great example of my point.

The nominal polling question was: “Are you satisfied with the President’s performance of his job?” But most folks don’t know what the President does or even what he has the power to do. The global economic upsets caused by the war in Ukraine and the pandemic are but the most recent examples of events which profoundly affect people’s lives over which the President has little control. Hell, as Trump discovered to his frustration, the President is barely in charge of the Executive Branch, much less the whole US Government—much, much less the economy and the vectors of global infection.

Most people were actually answering a different question: “Are you happy about your current life and prospects?” (i.e. based on health, family, jobs, views on abortion or who won the 2020 election). In other words, they were giving a “feelings” answer to a “solutions” question. This obviously doesn’t tell us much about whether Biden is actually doing a good job or even what people’s opinions of his work and policies.

Much the same can be said of the reaction to Trump both during his Presidency and since, both by supporters and detractors. Indeed, he has made a political career out of not really caring about the merits and policies but giving voice to the anxieties of a fair number of Americans. (Much the same can be said of a host of other world leaders who tap into the same visceral fear in many of their citizens.) At the time of his first campaign, there were those who said that the Dems erred by taking him literally, but not seriously; while his supporters took him seriously, but not literally. I think there is a lot to this framing, but rather than using a Red/Blue (or even, per my recent post, a Left/Right) dichotomy, I suspect the real demarcation is between those that are analytical and those who resonate more with their feelings (at least when it comes to politics). How that split maps into the political spectrum is an interesting question (for another day).

Trump is hardly unique in this regard, even among US political leaders. You may call it “political license” or disingenuity, but leading with comfort and reassurance rather than policy specifics seems to be a prerequisite to electability rather than a disqualification. Neither Wilson nor FDR expressed a desire to go to war, based on their assessment of the public mood, even as they recognized the realities of global affairs. People vote for psychological security, confidence and comfort rather than briefing papers.

You may consider that this is but one more example of me “tilting at the windmills” of our 21C human world; but I regularly find it useful to think in these terms when listening to others talk, whether politicians, spouses, friends, or others. I’m not sure that I understand their feelings, but if I can at least pause rather than responding to their literal/nominal statement; I find that I’m better off.

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Passions and Interests

11/18/2022

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      Albert Hirschman, a scholar of unusual insight, wrote The Passions and the Interests to explore why capitalism was considered a profound opportunity for social change (not just economic) in the 18C. it’s kind of an obscure topic and a considerable amount of context is helpful to make sense of it, but it recurs in my thinking from time to time, so I thought I would say why.

      In my recent piece Das Kapital, I talked about how it is useful to see capitalism as an epistemology rather than merely a socio-economic system. In this light, capitalism can be seen as a structure of values centered on markets and money, which leaves altruistic, long-term, and (non-quantifiable) sentimental values to the side. In terms of (at least European) history, the emergence of capitalism from an economic perspective is reasonably easy to trace. On the other hand, what’s not so clear is articulating why it is different from what came before. After all, greed isn’t exactly a recent development as a human motivation, nor is commercial activity a new practice.

      What was new is the attitude about such things and the way in which those who practice trade/commerce/entrepreneurship/finance have been regarded by their fellows.

      The gist of Hirschman’s argument is that in the aftermath of the religious wars which raged across Europe in the 16-18C, shifting human mentality away from the profound and disruptive religious passions towards the (seemingly) ordered, measurable “interests” in a prosperous life here in earth. Thus, (what we have come to call) capitalism was seen as an improvement, as a path forward out of the thicket of contending religious beliefs. It was cleaner, more rational, and much less deadly.

      This is an “intellectual history” sort of framing. A more “cultural history” perspective would emphasize the declining authority of Christianity, riven by the Reformation, in which a host of Protestant sects challenged the incumbent Catholic church and whose ongoing debates (and wars) sapped the attention and energy of most of Europe’s principal political, religious, and intellectual elites into a closed competitive environment. Those seeking a way out, inspired by the “scientific revolution,” had to craft a way of looking at the world without the lens of religion. Turning people’s attention towards money seemed like a good way to go; even if that meant pushing aside traditional Christian disparagement of wealth (“It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”) and condemnation of usury.

      All this, as a matter of historical analysis is, of course, without moral judgment. We historians try to describe what happened at a particular time and place without importing the values of the present day or the awareness of what happened after.

      The 18C writers that Hirschman talked about didn’t spend much time addressing the risks/downsides of their suggestion. It’s not likely that they foresaw the extent of their triumph: the relegation of religion to a contained sideline in human affairs, the globalization of their impact, and the all-consuming “passions” that the pursuit of their “interests” ultimately engendered. Regardless of what they foresaw, it’s certainly not fair to blame them for what we have done with their suggestion that people think a bit differently (no more than it’s fair to blame Marx for Lenin or Stalin or Jesus for the Crusades). Indeed, it’s a rare idea or philosophy that, valid and useful in its own right, can’t easily be taken to excess.

      Now that “capitalism” has had a good run of two or three centuries, it would be surprising if it hasn’t gone a bit “off the rails.” We’ve learned a great deal about its limits and abuses. The world has changed (partially as a result of the dominant capitalistic outlook). And, to a considerable extent, the elevation of (average) human living conditions is so far beyond what anyone in the 18C likely imagined, that we should consider values and perspectives that have been left on the wayside in the meantime. I have spent no little time taking about the real costs of treating the planet as a “free” resource from which we can take valuable stuff “off-book.” Similarly, this past summer, I talked about the dramatic disparities in wealth both within countries and globally. There are legions of thinkers who have decried modern capitalism for its damage to “human” values, whether in terms of aesthetics, religion/morality, or social cohesion/personal psychology.

      In our current febrile environment, it’s hard to imagine a serious, intentional, and meaningful discussion along these lines, but I can’t think of a better time to try. As we try to conceive of what’s next, we need to remember how deeply immersed we are in this outlook; so much so that we are, likely as not, going to create a new epistemology that eventually will have its own problems. Let’s not pretend to too much wisdom or make simplistic claims of panaceas; but merely try to do it better next time.

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8 Billion

11/11/2022

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Next week, according to UN predictions, the world population will hit 8,000,000,000 people. That’s about three times what it was when I was born, with a projected peak of over 10B by the end of this century.

I’ve talked about population demographics before since I see this as a key factor in so many issues facing the world: food, water, wages/jobs, climate impacts, international migration, inequality, and general standards of living.

What would the world be like if there were 2.7B people (as when I was born) instead of 8 or 10B? Is there really any doubt that they would, on average, be a lot better off? Is there any doubt that the planet would be better off? We wouldn’t be in so dire a climate crisis, for starters. Average living standards would be higher, reducing the principal pressure on political unrest. To be sure, such a different socio-economic configuration of humanity would present other problems, but it’s hard to see them as dire and deep as our current situation.

This is perhaps the ultimate example of the “tragedy of the commons,” a phenomenon articulated in the 19C (although probably known de facto by ordinary folks for much longer) which gained currency in the mid 20C as the expression of the economic practice of the overuse of a free shared resource. It turns out, that use of fresh air and water are part of the “commons” and most modern societies at least aspire to include access to energy and a “good” standard of living in the list, as well. For each parent/family, there are, of course real costs to raising a child. But the expectation that each new person has a “human right” to air/water/power/subsistence effectively places a tax on the society’s supply of those resources over which the society has no direct control. Thus, we now understand that the scope and complexity of the “commons” is much greater than we accounted for so far. This tension is then expanded on a global basis.

The combination of a sense of global “equal rights” with the realization that there are limits to what the planet can support, means that we each share a responsibility for achieving a sustainable level of human population. Another way of looking at this is to recognize that the benefits of children are presumed to be predominantly private (i.e., they accrue to the individual child/person and its family), but there are significant public/shared costs (i.e. economic externalities).

On the other hand, attempts by governments to manage their populations date to the 19C, as well. French anxiety over being overtaken by Germany in the late 19C is perhaps the best-known example, leading to wide-spread debate and a range of government pro-growth policies. In the 20C, many countries provide tax or other benefits to subsidize children. More recently, China imposed a 1-child limit for decades beginning in the late 20C (now reversed). There is no sense that these governmental policies considered the global resource implications. Indeed, in an increasingly democratic age, procreation is usually seen as an essential component of personal freedom (certain portions of the US notwithstanding). I suspect there is also an unspoken assumption that countries with the most people will have a bigger voice in global affairs; an incentive for growth to be sure.

So, this presents a real and significant quandary. How to balance overarching issues of global inequality/justice, national economic growth/opportunity, and the impact of additional people on the planet? Western countries (which have already generally stopped growing) are in no moral position to demand less developed countries to reduce their population. Indeed, those less developed countries generally don’t have strong enough states to implement such a policy in any event. Overall, we face the conundrum that everyone would be better off with fewer people but there are no means to get there.

In saying this, I am rejecting the approach of some who think we are better off with more people. William Macaskill, noted Oxford philosophy don, takes this stance in his recent book “What We Owe the Future.” He makes a pretty good case for explicitly expanding the scope of our moral responsibility to include the many billions of people yet to come. He is well-attuned to the climate problem, but argues that more people means more brains means better solutions to our problems. I guess that this is true in the abstract, but not in the middle of a long-term resource crisis. Nor am I enamored with the faith in techno-solutions this seems to imply. Most broad human problems arise not because of lack of ideas, but due to a lack of will to implement the perfectly sensible solutions already on offer.

Of course, in the real world, the issue is not merely comparing where we are now with some lower level of population, but how we are going to get from A to B. In the Book of Exodus, God smites down the first-born of each Egyptian family. That’s one approach. The Bible also refers to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as heralding the “End Times.” That’s another. I think some version of this—war, plague, or famine caused by direct human action or climatic effects—is actually the most likely. Finally, unforced attrition is certainly possible. Even the lowest UN projection of population by 2100 sees the planetary total peaking at 8+B by 2060 and then dropping to 6+B by the end of the century. One way or another, the next 100 years is likely to see dramatic changes in population levels with profound implications for economics/capitalism/climate/geopolitics. Sitting here early in the 21C, we can only guess at how that future world will approach the tensions described here. All sorts of SciFi scenarios come to mind; ranging from the “Hunger Games” to “Logan’s Run” to various birth licensing schemes.

Humans have freely reproduced for millennia without consideration of the planet or their fellows. This is likely to change—one way or another—in the future; but social inertia will likely push that future out to a point that we can’t quite see yet.

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November 04th, 2022

11/4/2022

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Inertia

Peter Burke, an important British historian, once suggested (a bit tongue-in-cheek) that much of the Enlightenment was really just the formalization of commonly held knowledge.1 I suspect he really thought it was true, but had better things to do than deal with the brouhaha of staking such a claim in the academic debates. I tend to agree with him. History, as we know, is written by the winners; but it’s also written by the intellectuals, who inherently tend to overvalue “formal” knowledge and downplay the practical learning of farmers, mechanics, midwives, etc.

I was thinking about this the other day when I was reading a piece on “path dependence.” This is a term, developed by a pair of economists in the 1980s which has gained broader currency. To me, the concept is just the formalization, in modern social science jargon, of the well-known if less impressive sounding concept of “inertia,” itself a term appropriated from physics and applied to an innumerable list of social/historical phenomenon; both merely being the formalization of common-sense observations that are deeply embedded in all cultures..

To put it in straightforward terms: things change slowly because people think and act habitually. Economists may be disappointed that most folks don’t run cost-benefit analyses on everything they do. They do what they do and think what they think because that’s what they (we) learned from our parents or a older sibling or girlfriend, etc. This may show up in how I perform my daily ablutions, or how I load the dishwasher, or cover cooking pots. And, once I start to shave from left-to-right, I continue to do so, even if I might learn some years later that it would be more efficient to shave top-to-bottom.

The classic example cited by the promoters of “path dependency” is the very keyboard I am using to type up this posting. It’s a standard “QWERTY” keyboard, developed in the 19C to be sufficiently inefficient as to minimize the jamming of manual typewriters. Even after that technology improved, long before many of us learned (kinda) how to text with two thumbs on a small virtual keyboard, it was shown to be inefficient as a means of communications; but, that’s what we all learned, so that’s what we all do (still). The costs of change are too high. The same was said of the US decision not to switch to the metric system in the 1960s. As a result, we spend a lot, directly and invisibly, in dealing with the rest of the world who made the switch. But we DO have Myanmar and Liberia on our side, and we ARE the US of A, so that should be enough justification. “Path dependency” or inertia?

There are two things that I take from this situation. The first is that social science mentality often gets in the way of good history and people’s understanding. The second is a reminder that most of the time, social change, particularly attitudes, change very slowly.

One of my first professors when I started down my current history path, Tony D’Agostino, explained to me that social scientists and historians were two separate breeds. The former start with an elegant mathematical model of human behavior (in economics, psychology, or political science), they then neatly package the available data, plug them into the model and come out with descriptions and predictions. The latter insist that there are few (if any) useful models of human behavior, so all we can do is try to get each story out for consideration without expecting things to line up coherently. Historians agree that it would be great to be able to model human behavior, but that it’s a fool’s errand. Social scientists think historians muck about in the dust way too much and come up with interesting but meaningless stories.

While my own inclinations are closer to social sciences than most historians, I still recoil from the idea of modelling, for example, the ways wars start. I’ve read way too many discussions of flukes and weird personal proclivities to have much confidence that we can come to some profound comprehensive conclusion. Still, as a Historian, I tend to steer away from “path dependency,” and stick with focusing on human habits.

And, as a Historian, I can tell you that there is not much evidence to support the idea of rapid social change. I’m not speaking here of fashion (e.g. hemline location), but, rather, the way people think and the way societies operate. We refer to the French Revolution as one of the great turning points of modern history. However, if you look at the vagaries of French history in the 19C, you can see it actually took until the 1880s (i.e. almost 100 years) to establish a stable republican form of government. Women began agitating for political rights in the US in 1848, but it took 70 years for them to break through the accumulated inertia of male-dominated power structures and attitudes to finally achieve the vote after WWI. That was over a hundred years ago and many women would say that a lot of attitudinal adjustment still lies ahead.

The central struggle of modernity—between rationality and faith—has been going on for hundreds of years and billions of people continue to find the literal word of God (Jesus/J*hweh/Allah) a better guide to understanding the world than the combination of evidence and reason which (if you’ll pardon the expression) God gave ‘em. And, stay tuned, Marx and Lenin might yet still be right about the broad course of human history, even if they missed many specifics and muffed the implementation so far.

Revolutions (whether political or epistemological) are oft proclaimed. Political revolutions are (often) morally imperative. They are also, historically-speaking, usually futile. Things just take a while to absorb. There is change in the world, but when you look at from a little distance and allow the turmoil du jour to settle down, there’s no escaping the power of inertia. The laws of thermodynamics tell us that there is no escape from inertia (even when you call it path dependency).

1 Burke, Social History of Knowledge, p. 14.

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Heartland

10/28/2022

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If you’re ever wondering about Vladimir Putin’s geopolitical savvy, you could do worse than start with a remarkably prescient essay written by a staunch British imperialist of the early 20C, Sir Halford Mackinder. One of the founders of modern geography and an important contributor to developing the very concept of geopolitics, Mackinder wrote his essay, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” in 1904, arguing not only for a geographic perspective on international politics in general, but also insisting on the importance of eastern Europe and western Asia in the long-term arrangement of the Great Powers.

Fifteen years later, Mackinder urged the victorious Allies to pay attention to the region as they sorted out things during the Versailles Peace Conference after WWI. He articulated the core of his thinking, the “heartland theory,” this way: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.” He saw the “heartland” as a great swath of territory ranging from Moscow to Basra on the Arabian Sea thence east to cover what we call the “stans” and much of Siberia. The “World Island, of course is Eurasia.

In the center of the Heartland lies what is now Ukraine.

It’s not clear how much of agricultural economics Mackinder foresaw (have you checked the price of bread lately?), nor that he had any conception of the importance of the oil to be found in and on the southern fringes of the Heartland. (Oil wasn’t discovered in the Middle East until 1908 (and in Saudi Arabia until 1938)). So, we might call him lucky in setting forth this theory. On the other hand, both the Russian Empire and the British Empire (via India) had been mucking about in the region since the late 19C in the so-called “Great Game” of geo-political jockeying. In any event, Mackinder’s key point to the Brits, the French, the Germans, the Americans, and the Russians, was that geography matters and in his modern world of the early 20C, statesmen had damned well take on a global perspective (not merely one focused on European Great Power politics) in general and on the Heartland in particular. Hitler got it, too.

Now there’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then: three world wars (I, II, & Cold), the decline of Europe, the flourishing of Soviet Russia, the global reach of the US, the eventual re-emergence of China. The latter’s “Belt-and-Road Initiative” represents their awareness of the benefits of attention to the region. The US has been deeply involved across the region for 80 years, too.

If you stretch and tug Mackinder’s boundaries a bit, there’s little doubt that the Heartland is very much at the center of global affairs today. Furthermore, if you draw a circle around this region, from the Eastern end of the Mediterranean to the north of the Indian subcontinent to the Gobi desert to very gates of Kiev, you’ll find a disproportionately high concentration of global hot spots:
* Israel and Palestine
* Civil war in Syria
* Iraq and Afghanistan each edging into anarchy
* Iran on the cusp of another revolution
* Saudi Arabia embroiled in a civil war in Yemen
* 75 years of tension between India and Pakistan
* On-going rumblings between India and China
* Chinese suppression of Turkic peoples in its far west
* Perennial instability in the “stans” of Central Asia

And now, Russia launching a disastrous and destructive invasion of Ukraine.

We may be past the era of one country controlling the whole of this region. The best the US can likely do is support others to keep China from swinging its weight around too much. But the importance of the “pivot,” as Mackinder described it, will remain. Even after oil becomes a much smaller factor in global politics in a few decades, even after modern globalization has seemingly rendered much of geography secondary to webs of interconnection, even after Putin has extracted himself (or been himself extracted) from the Ukrainian debacle, the Heartland will remain central.

American distaste for far-flung foreign involvement, honed over a century of reluctant interventions may find its apotheosis in the Heartland. The threat of US engagement in WWI was enough to drive the Germans to despair and an armistice, we were essential to setting the world in order when Japan and Germany marched in the 1930s and 1940s. Vietnam and Afghanistan were costly temporizing steps. But, despite the whining of latter-day isolationists (especially of the Hawley-Cruz-McCarthy school) and the inability of “he-who-shall-not-be-named” to comprehend the nature of strategy and geopolitics, other than the US, there is no one else on the stage. (And there won’t be until India gets its act together (which will take 30 years or so at least)).

So, the Heartland is important (and, per Mackinder, has been so for many centuries); the US is the only global power, and the many overlapping and conflicting local maelstroms promise no relief or coherence. In other words, it’s not pretty but we have no real choice to be involved, unless we want to pretend that we can crawl back into our pre-modern autarkic shell.

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Das Kapital

10/21/2022

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The term “capitalism” has to rank right up there on the list of concepts with so many definitions and elaborations that they have become pretty meaningless for serious conversation without a great deal of caveating. References in the popular literature/press are even more untethered (and, therefore, useless). While preparing for my upcoming lecture series on the modern world, I have wrestled with this morass and have emerged, if not unscathed, then at least with more cogent thoughts than when I went into intellectual battle.

There are two fundamental problems.

First, as a person with some economic/financial/business literacy, I understand capital as an essential factor of production, part of the triad of “land, labor, and capital” which is the basis for any enterprise. Capital implies cash and a “capitalist” would therefore be someone who supplied the cash (aka an investor) in a business undertaking. However, translating this micro-economic framework into a macro politico-economic system is awfully awkward. In other words, calling someone a “capitalist” (i.e., a rich investor) doesn’t tell us much about their philosophy or the nature of the society in which they operate.

Second, as a person with some historical/philosophical perspective, I can’t avoid Karl Marx, whose turgid prose sprawled across what we now count as economic theory and history and socio-political engagement. For Marx, capitalism is a system in which the means of production are generally owned by individuals (or their corporate proxies); i.e. there is private property and the factors of production (land, labor, and capital) are interchanged through markets, with the outputs ending up in the hands of consumers. Marx’s problem was that a group of “capitalists” took over the means of production and thereby disempowered (and alienated) workers without capital. [My thanks to a piece by Pablo Gilabert and Martin O’Neill, which has helped me with this model.]

All well and good in terms of a plausible (if controversial) economic theory.

However, if we want to understand capitalism as a central component in the creation and deployment of the modern world, these approaches don’t really flesh out its impact or explain its history.

It is important to understand capitalism because since the demise of its two principal competitors during the 20C—communism and fascism—capitalism has become pretty much the only game in town; the winner (as it were) of the three-part series of wars (WWI/WWII/Cold War) of the 20C (this is what Francis Fukuyama meant when he famously proclaimed “the end of history” in 1992). It’s also important looking forward because the foundations of capitalism—private property and markets—have been the premises of the way humans relate to the planet and our resultant climate predicament.

Liberalism and democracy also enter into the mix. The three are not really separable and their confluence makes it difficult to juxtapose capitalism (separately) with the two other politically-oriented ideologies noted above.

So, building on Marx and others, we can describe capitalism not just as a description of economic relationships, but more fundamentally as an approach to the world or way of thinking based on economics. Stated differently, in a capitalist society we define ourselves and evaluate others and determine how to act across our lives principally from an economic perspective: morals are secondary to money.

I should hasten to add that I am speaking at a pretty broad level of generalization here and acknowledge the existence of many exceptions both in terms of populations, individuals, particular actions. Still, the reliance on an economic framework within which to see the world does seem an essential characteristic of our modern world.

While capitalism is a world-wide phenomenon, with particular flavors and practices arising in different cultures, its global predominance is due principally to its rise in Western Europe in the so-called “early modern” era (i.e., 1400-1800). Europeans, inspired by this approach to living, marshalled technologies and resources to seize control of the planet and its various cultures, thereby demonstrating, inculcating, and embedding capitalism ubiquitously. Even as Westerners relinquished formal control in the mid-20C, the informal tentacles of capitalism remained as the basis of the culture and economies in countries whether formally colonized (e.g. India) or not (e.g. China).

It's a bit of a mind-stretch to consider how capitalism came to dominate Western/European culture to such an extent (a topic I will revisit in an upcoming posting). We tend to think of medieval and early modern Europe as a Christian culture with certain moral values and there are a lot of pieces of the story as to how European minds shifted from one to the other (again, acknowledging overgeneralization). It may be that the reaction to the corruption of the Catholic Church which occasioned the Reformation undermined the established order sufficiently to create an opening for a new kind of thinking; not just a new set of values and practices, but a discarding of the metaphysic/theoretical in favor of the operational. Out with Jesus, morality, and the hereafter; let’s focus on the present and measurable realities of power (per Machiavelli) and markets.

I should insert here a brief apologia for Adam Smith, often characterized (blamed?) as the father of capitalism. While his analysis was sound and immensely influential, his own views were grounded in a moral universe (read his “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” not just his “Wealth of Nations”).

But, in any event, here we are. As with most other historical analyses, it doesn’t do much good to assign blame, either to earlier practitioners or those (us?) of the current day.
Environmentalists champion the inclusion of natural resources (broadly construed) into the market mentality; thus, calls for carbon credits or natural capital or some mechanism to handle the riches of outer space or the sea floor. Even as I endorse these approaches, I recognize that they inherently concede the fundamental premise to capitalism. And it may well be that there is no better alternative. It’s not as if the energy, freedom, and mind-boggling improvements in the human condition occasioned by capitalism should be summarily dismissed.

As we look across the last 250 years, approaches such as romanticism, socialism/Communism, fascism, and a raft of religions have sought to slow the juggernaut or ameliorate its excesses. Each has had, to date, but a marginal effect.

Nor can we go back to some prelapsarian idyll. At least we can’t engineer our way back there. A planetary collapse may force us to; but that road, however likely based on civilizational inertia, is pretty ugly and unpredictable, to put it mildly.

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It's Broke

10/14/2022

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The History biz is broke. Whether characterized as a discipline, an institution, or a profession, much of what we do and what we claim to do isn’t working very well. In many ways, our challenges are part of broader issues of academe or society at large. That only means that we need allies; not that we can wave the problems off as “beyond us.”

We can usefully look on History as manifesting in three modes: pedagogy, publishing, and public engagement. I’m not sure if piecemeal remedies will suffice or a more wholistic approach will be necessary, but I suspect that without a fair amount of more concentrated attention, each of the legs of our tripod will fail.

The way we teach students is beset with serious difficulties, particularly from those—both within universities and across the general population of students and their parents— who see history as disposable or ignorable as an essential part of education. Enrollments continue to drop (as do departmental FTEs) as universities increasingly emphasize vocational training at the expense of the “liberal arts.” Students’ media-reduced attention spans undermine our traditional emphasis on serious reading and analysis. We still have too much superficiality and name/date memorization in our assessments, especially in the “coverage”-based intro surveys that constitute and increasing percentage of our undergraduate butts-in-seats. We spend too much time training graduate students who can’t find jobs.

Most of us love to research and to write. Exploring and extending our understanding of the past is an essential part of what we do. However, a large portion of our time is spent chasing minutiae, often in the context of dissertations, that, after years of labor, show up in uncited articles or rarely-read monographs. The incentives for much of this work comes from our guild mentality and from the demands of an academic publishing industry each of whose three arms—journals, monographs, and textbooks—are seriously dysfunctional in its own right. Hundreds of hours of research, writing, and editing are effectively unpaid. Increasing prices tax the budgets of our libraries who are their only (& captive) customers. And don’t get me started on the racket of textbook prices, frequent “new” editions, and electronic bells-and-whistles.

The nature and purpose of history is under sustained attack across our society. We all remember the era when “deniers” were pretty much confined to the issue of the Holocaust, but now they’re widespread, reflecting not only an apparent existential angst, but also a disdain for “experts” of any flavor and truth in general. “Woke” wars and “cancel” cultures put a premium on controversy and performance; relegating a calm consideration and balanced judgment to the sidelines. This phenomenon threatens our political culture to be sure, but it also reinforces the disregard for academic history. Moreover, if “everything has a history,” and we understand that history is a set of constructed stories then the selectivity of the data points behind much of what passes for popular history, particularly in the media (but also the judicial penchant for “originalism”), undermines the judgment and balance which we Historians try to bring to the process.

All this (admittedly daunting) situation leads me to wonder about our viability as a discipline/institution/profession. I have to wonder who’s trying to rethink the publishing model. I have to wonder how many members read about efforts like the AHA’s “Freedom to Learn” anti-censorship initiative and think “Grossman’s got that covered; I don’t have to do anything on that front.” I have to wonder whether we’re spending too much time in the archives and too much time enjoying our intra-disciplinary intellectual debates and not enough figuring out how better to teach—in the classroom and out.

Nor are we well positioned to deal with the crisis. We are an undisciplined discipline. Our professional brains aren’t well wired for strategic thinking and enterprise management. We’re more apt to ponder than to act. Jealous of our “independence,” we view group work (aka “service”) as a requirement of academic employment, made all the more difficult by COVID, the time-suck of university governance, and the ever-shrinking roster of tenured faculty whose pro rata burden inexorably edges up. On top of all that, our senior members have job security and a short-enough career runway that there is little incentive to lift our eyes beyond the horizon. With rare forays into significant national projects, most of our time in “service” is spent either within the futile confines of departmental politics where more effort is put into rewriting by-laws or with the slightly broader framework of similarly-situated humanities departments or university Senates than coming up with better ways to engage our students and the public.

Since we’ve chosen to work in a discipline/institution/profession that isn’t hierarchical (or even managed), most of us who are concerned toil away in our own way, working on our own projects; noble and perhaps incrementally useful, but neither together nor coordinated. If these efforts don’t prove enough to change how we teach, and communicate with the public soon enough, then our independence and academic freedom will be cold comfort.

Few of these concerns are new, but they are piling up. As with humanity amid the climate crises, History is much akin to the proverbial frog in the pot of heating water. We like to think we’re smarter than the average schnook; we’ll see….

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Flush

10/7/2022

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I was recently speaking with a friend who is slightly older than I am. Having just emerged from the restroom, it would have been ordinary for me to engage in a discussion (as persons of a “certain age” often do) of what we might genteelly call “bowel efficacy.” So, I think I surprised him when I expressed my gratitude, instead, for indoor plumbing.

“Everything,” as they say, “has a history;” and so does shit. But I’m more interested in the story of shit removal than the substance itself. One of the most remarkable aspects of the modern world has been the extension of the average human lifespan and, while nutrition and health care have been major contributors to this phenomenon, so, too, has been public sanitation.

More tangibly, we can easily, via pictures and drawings get a sense of what pre-modern life looked like. We have some of the actual objects (often available in antiques stores) that were used. Historians and anthropologists have generated voluminous descriptions of life in Renaissance Italy, medieval Japan, or among Amazonian tribes. A few historians have even produced sonic reproductions—historical soundscapes—of early modern Paris. But even going to slum in contemporary Kolkata or some farm in Ghana will not give you the smell of the past. One of my favorite historical cartoons shows two elegantly-dressed gentlemen strolling in the gardens of 18C Versailles. One says to the other: “Yes, it might seem like a ‘golden age,’ if we didn’t have to deal with all these lice.” I have talked before about the importance of “mentalité”—state of mind or epistemology—in understanding the past and, therefore in understanding the nature and meaning of progress from that past. It’s no less true of olfactory sensations than other aspects of how we lived now/then.

How much of the drive to improve domestic and public sanitation was driven by these olfactory concerns and how much by a sense of the impact on public health is difficult to determine. Much of the work was started before modern germ theory had been developed and accepted (Pasteur, Koch, Lister in the late 19C). Indeed, public health concerns fostered the development of germ theory.

During an extended cholera outbreak in mid-19C London, John Snow used newfangled statistical analyses to show that germs were being passed through the water system. In addition to attacking the specific issue of cholera, it was an important instigation to the massive project of constructing London’s sewage system so that dirty water was not put back into the Thames until it had been treated and then deposited downstream of the metropolis. Joseph Bazalgette oversaw the project from the late 1850s and it wasn’t completed until 1875.

London was a busy place in the 1850s, epitomized by the great Crystal Palace exhibition which ran during 1851 (and which was the first “world’s fair), bringing the wonders of the modern age together, showing off British technology, trade, and imperial grandeur. It was the first “world’s fair” and the Crystal Palace itself (although destroyed in the 1930s), was the inspiration for our own Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

There were many remarkable exhibits on display, but among the concessionaires on the grounds of the Crystal Palace was a public pay toilet. Apparently, it was buried when the Palace was moved to South London after the Exhibition, but was rediscovered in 2016. A visit cost one pence; well worth it to many who were touring the vast show. Indeed, it seems that 675,000 pennies were collected (more than 10% of the total number of visitors).

What can we make of these three more-or-less contemporaneous events in London in the 1850s?:
* A perspective on basic bodily functions and their relation to public health.
* Some important steps towards making proactive public health management a basic governmental function.
* Components of a plumbing system.
* A decline in disease and an improvement in longevity.

The foundational characteristics of modern (“first-world”) living is often buried in the long list of things which we all take for granted. This list has to include the wonder of the municipal plumbing network.

Generically, gratitude is a great attitude to have at whatever age. It often takes some attention amid the schedule and aggravations of the day to recall and reclaim this stance. So, regardless of my bowel efficacy du jour, I try to take this opportunity to be grateful for these scientists and engineers and their plumbing successors who provide us with this daily blessing.

As I rise from the “throne,” I reach back, press a lever for a second and … flush.

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Centric

9/30/2022

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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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