Steve Harris - Condemned to Repeat It

A Few Good History Books

9/17/2021

People sometimes ask me for book recommendations. As a card-carrying History nerd, I have read a lot, but I wouldn’t inflict many of them on an unwary public. A lot of “professional” History books are reworked doctoral dissertations—highly focused and deeply embedded in the discipline’s debates on how to think about history, with much less attention to “what actually happened.” They are useful, but only for a particular purpose. Many others a grand synthetic surveys; again, useful for a (different) particular purpose. Many are oh-so-eager to demonstrate their erudition, often at the expense of clarity. Of course, there are a lot of fine books out there, but most are aimed at folks (like me) who start every new book by looking at the bibliography.

On the other side, there is a lot of “popular” History: lots of biographies, frequent superficiality, much that is “half-baked,” and, sometimes, just plain wrong.

So, here is a list of ten books that I really like (in alphabetical order). As a modern Europeanist, with some interests in world history and a bent towards political stuff, my working collection draws from a small sample of what’s listed in the History section of any University Library. (I only have about a dozen books on the French Revolution out of several thousand that have been written.) I don’t have much US history, for example, and relatively little covering the period before 1500. I have tried to avoid the overly hefty tomes (although I was tempted by E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (a classic weighing in at 800+ pages)). Some items on the list are books I have used in my classes, some are “popular,” but each is well-written and has something interesting to say (sometimes revelatory) to the kinds of people who are likely to be reading my blog.

1491, Charles Mann (2005): What was going on in the Western Hemisphere before Columbus and the rest of the Europeans showed up? Actually, quite a bit more than you might think. A mix of science, history, current affairs, and anthropology written is a lively way (Mann is a journalist), with things that will make you rethink how our part of the world came to be how it is. His sequel, 1493, continues the story of the impact of Europeans and is also quite good.

Against the Grain, James Scott (2017): A stunning rethink of how “civilization” arose, with a particular focus on the Fertile Crescent. What was the relationship between agriculture, society, and the State? How have the fundamental structures of human existence survived and morphed over the past 8,000 years. Scott melds new discoveries and a willingness to push the interpretative “envelope.”

Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings, Amy Kelly (1957): Gender, politics, and society in medieval France and England. Beautifully written, this is more than a biography of a remarkable woman and her families.

The Great Cat Massacre, Robert Darnton (1984): A collection of studies of French culture (mostly 17/18C) that combines great stories and with historical analysis. Darnton, shows how Historians should work to extract insight from particular pieces of historical evidence and gives us a real sense of how peoples’ minds were changing as modernity was being developed.

The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman (1962): Of the dozens of books on the origins of WWI that I have read, this is still the most engaging, bringing the events of the summer of 1914 alive. It’s hardly the whole story, but if politico-military history can be a “fun read,” this is it.

Mosquito Empires, John McNeill (2010): Did bugs turn the tide of the American Revolution? You’ll have to rethink the relationship between the geographic/biologic/natural environment and traditional politico-military history with this remarkable study of war and malaria in the Western Hemisphere in the 16-19Cs.

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Paul Kennedy (1987): Long before this hour of apparent American global decline, Kennedy showed how we fit a pattern over the past 500 years. Spain, France, Britain, and Germany have gone before us. Any success of imperialism is, at best, temporary.

Sapiens, Yuval Harari (2011): A sweeping interpretation of human history from the beginning through the future (better, in my view, than Harari’s other books). Engaging, startling, and fun to argue with.

The Scientific Revolution, Steven Shapin (1996): A brief (popular) survey that begins with one of the great lines in history writing: “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution and this is a book about it.” If you’re up for a heavier lift, Shapin’s Leviathan and the Air-Pump blows apart the idea that the whole idea of scientific thinking developed in isolation from the political/religious turmoil of early modern Europe.

The Sleepwalkers, Christopher Clark (2014): The best rethink of the origins of WWI brought out in the spate of books marking the centenary of the start of the war. Not the easiest read among the books on this list, but full of new ideas and insights on this essential event from a broader perspective than Tuchman.

Of course, there’s more where this came from (as you know if you’ve been in my study). I certainly don’t claim that these are the “best” books out there (matters of taste, too). So, I’m happy to make more recommendations, especially if you can tell me what you like or dislike about any of the initial list above.

Check ‘em out!

Recalling Democracy

9/17/2021

Hillary Clinton famously lost the election of 2016 by 80,000 votes in three states, less than one-tenth of one percent of the number of eligible citizens who did not cast a ballot in that election. In the subsequent “blame game,” many said that those who did not vote had no right to complain about the results. It’s hard not to agree with that sentiment, even without going so far as to urge legally-mandated voting. At least as a general philosophical principle, urging all citizens in a democracy to participate in this essential act seems pretty straightforward.

Among the results of that fateful choice five years ago was the election of a man/party/tribe for whom democratic norms seem pretty dispensable. The great hue-and-cry of late 2020 and early 2021: “Stop the Steal” essentially argued that “If we don’t win, then the election was rigged” and is illegitimate. This attitude undermines a shared sense of participation and confidence in a process that is fundamental to any political community.

Which brings me to our recent Recall election in California.

Much can be said about the misshapen constitutional process which led to this expensive charade. Much more can be said about the (generally) pathetic group of “wanna-be’s” who sought the Governor’s seat, as well as their sponsors and the sorry remnant of the party of Earl Warren (and even of George Deukmejian). The former is a typical legacy of good intentions and legislative inertia. The latter… well, ‘nuff said. Neither was surprising or disappointing.

However, I am pretty disappointed in our (un-recalled) Governor and his party machine for their stance on how Democrats and other supporters (and other opponents of the recall) should vote on the contingent question of who should become Governor if Newsom was, in fact, recalled. (Some of my California friends have heard from me a bit on this issue, so I apologize to them for any redundancy).

Their party line was to sit it out, i.e., to take the risk that Newsom would not be recalled. This is, in the event, what happened; and, so, the whole thing appears academic. He wasn’t recalled, even though, for a while, the issue appeared to be in doubt. If he had stumbled (perhaps another dinner at the French Laundry or a COVID spike-plus-economic downturn), we could have had Caitlyn Jenner, or Larry Elder, or (could it be possible…) worse.

This “tactical” voting argument was arrogant and disdainful of our democratic process and a pretty close cousin of the “Stop the Steal” gang. As best I could figure, they were concerned that endorsing any plausible alternative would increase the chances of losing on the threshold recall question. They didn’t trust voters to vote “no” on the recall AND choose the least bad alternative if the recall were successful. They thought we’d be distracted by the possibility of a (non-horrible) Democrat on the list of replacements and decide to toss Gavin out. Perhaps, they were just pissed that they got caught in a lame-brained constitutional provision that was hi-jacked by right-wing crazies.

These might be nice arguments in the abstract, but “Don’t vote” doesn’t cut it in a democracy, particularly from a party that has championed voting rights and processes, particularly from a party that was (rightfully) upset with many non-voters in 2016. It would have been a cold comfort to have awakened on September 15 to a smiling Governor-elect Elder. The (current) Governor and his coterie would have to be counted among those who “could not complain” as “Governor Elder” ditched mask mandates, cut funds for environmental repairs and welfare benefits, and endorsed Texas-style abortion regulation. Nor could they have complained that the vote was “rigged” or that Governor Elder’s tenure was illegitimate. As it was, over 4 million people voted on the recall but abstained on the choice of a potential replacement.

Politics is, as they say, “the art of the possible.” It’s all about making choices from among competing ideals and principles. Democracy is about getting everyone in society to participate and to endorse/tolerate the results. The California Dems didn’t stand up for the process this time, to their shame. Gov. Newsom has a lot to be proud of; he showed some real political guts on the gay marriage issue, for example; but this time around, he was just another pol.

Last year, I wrote about the decayed state of US political parties. The implosion/kidnapping of the GOP has been the dramatic lead in that story; so much so that the not-quite-as-parlous state of the Democrats has pretty much gone unnoticed. It wouldn’t be such a bad thing if they both disintegrated. Regardless of your policy proclivities, however, we need political institutions—including parties—and leaders who support the democratic system, and not just on a tactical basis. This is why the Dems’ call for abstention on the 2d part of the Recall is so troubling. The more both parties pretend politics is war, that opponents are enemies, that electoral “victory” is the only thing that matters; the greater our social peril.

Journal of a Blog Year

9/10/2021

In 1722, Daniel Defoe (more famous for Robinson Crusoe) published A Journal of the Plague Year, adapted from his uncle’s journals from 1665 when a wave of bubonic plague swept London. We have had our own “plague year” (it looks more like two years at this point), but in keeping with my approach, I have used historical references and current events merely as starting points for my essays. Thus, this first anniversary edition is called: A Journal of a Blog Year.

So, a year ago (Sept. 13, 2020 to be precise), I started this blog. It was a personal challenge: to see if I could discipline myself to write 900-1000 more-or-less coherent and interesting words every week. I hope that, beyond my own benefit, this blog has stimulated some thinking and reflection on your part. Some of you have been kind enough to comment and even to get friends and family to sign up for the weekly notifications.

As I look back over the process, the entries have been a combination of long-held ideas and beliefs and topical responses. In each case, I have tried to flesh out my ideas so that they make sense to my (relatively intelligent and well-read) audience; even if you’re not ‘inside-my-head.’ I have seen my style (lots of asides/parentheticals/multi-slash words) evolve. I have tried to balance topics between history, politics, law, philosophy, education, and related areas. I’ve done my best not to beat the same drum twice; although sometimes, I’ve sidled up pretty close to previously-made points/themes/angles.

Sometimes the ideas accumulated faster than the words to express and develop them. Sometimes an idea came and the piece was done in an hour. Sometimes I had to struggle to “meet the deadline.” Some essays were inspired by what I read in my main news sources (NYT, Economist, Atlantic, links posted in FB by my friends); but more often they presaged what I later read in those places.

Even the (relatively few) entries that have been stimulated by recent events are really more about long-term issues and perspectives, so as I was reviewing the list below while writing this entry, I was struck that, while far from “timeless,” almost all are still current and relevant. I still stand behind my critique of Brexit and of the Afghanistan war, for example. If you missed a few along the way (unlike most op-eds in the NYT etc.) they may be worth reading. (you can go to the ‘archives’ section to the right of this entry and click on the appropriate month of publication)

9/13/20: Welcome - This Blog Project.
9/14:Thoughts on the Semester - Pandemic Teaching.
9/15: Brexit - The Fall of Britain.
9/19: Global Pandemic.1 - COVID and the world.
9/20: Condemned to Repeat It - Santayana and all that.
9/26: Anomalies and Exceptionalism - What is “normal”?
10/4: Ending American Imperialism - Repairing one of our country’s defects.
10/9: A Democratic Crisis - Demographics colliding with institutional inertia.
10/16: Global Pandemic.2 - COVID, Science, and History.
10/23: The Comforts of History - Do we rely too much on history?
10/30: Agendas - What to do after the election.
11/6: The Path Forward - Nation-building in 21C America.
11/13: Party Time - Our obsolete political structure.
11/20: Stories - The distortions of historical coherence.
11/27: Triage - Power, Wealth, and Pandemic Priorities.
12/04: The Laws of History - The limitations of using the past as a guide to the future.
12/11: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes - Do we need a 4th branch of government?
12/18: Rising and Falling Powers - Dealing with American Decline.
12/24/20: The Word for Our World is Forests - We can do something significant about climate change.

1/8/2021: Judgments - Consigning Trump to history.
1/15: Role Model - Will the US be the inspiration of the world?
1/22: In Media Res - Making sense of the information deluge.
1/30: Democracy in America - Is it a fluke?
2/5: ConCon.2 - Can we change our government without a revolution?
2/12: Contingency - God plays dice with the universe.
2/19: Democratic Federalism - Rethinking the Senate.
2/26: Historical Fiction and History - Are facts always important?
3/5: Globalization Course - How do we see our world?
3/12: Royal Families - Atavistic Fantasies.
3/19: Sci-Fi Governments - Different political models from the future.
3/26: Reparations - Error, shame, and money.
4/2: Who Lost Hong Kong? - A future foreign policy debate.
4/9: Bhutan - One extraordinary place.
4/16: Pop Culture - So many more people.
4/23: Global Democracy - Why it’s a long way away.
4/30: Avocational Education - A quandary for most universities.
5/7: Electoral College - Some obvious fixes.
5/14: Three-State Solution - Thinking outside the box in the middle east.
5/21: Representing the People - A radical change for Congress.
5/28: Forever Wars - Are our ideas about war outdated?
6/4: ______- Americans - Ethnicity and labels.
6/11: De-merit - Do we live in a meritocracy?
6/18: Google U - Accreditation where accreditation is due.
6/25: History and Truth - The long road from one to the other.
7/2: Gettysburg - Lincoln’s choices… and ours.
7/9: Changing the Past - Why we construct mythologies.
7/16: Limiting the Leviathan - A case for smaller government.
7/23: Accounting for the Future - How to think long term.
7/30: Thinking Fast and Slow - Kahneman’s classic is worth a read.
8/6: AI, vay! - Is the Borg coming? Is resistance futile?
8/13: The Complexity of Liberty - Modernity has made it harder to be free.
8/20: Territorial Imperative - People and dirt
8/27: Too Early to Tell - Historical framing
9/3: Back in the Classroom - Returning to face-to-face teaching

I haven’t counted, but I’m guestimating that the total is about 45,000 words, about half a book’s worth.

Going forward, I may release myself from the once-a-week constraint. I may try some shorter (400-500 word) entries as well. I’d love to see your comments more; particularly disagreements and challenges. I’m certainly open to suggestions for topics as well.

Thanks for coming along so far. I hope you’ll stick with me going forward, too.

Back in the Classroom

9/3/2021

We’ve been back in the classroom for two weeks now. It’s definitely strange. I can’t say that I am happy to see students’ “bright smiley faces,” since smiles (and frowns and other expressions) are hidden from view.

With vaccine mandates, daily symptom self-check, and everyone masked, I’m not anxious about teaching “live.” It’s definitely more fun than Zoom and, as importantly, it’s better for the students, their learning and their social experience of college, too.

I don’t think we’ve settled into the “new normal” quite yet. Only about half the normal number of classes are being held live on campus; a significant number of instructors and students having opted for full or partial Zoom courses for the balance. Of the 63 regular undergraduate courses offered by the SFSU History Department, 29 will be regular face-to-face, 13 will be partial f2f and partial on-line, 6 will be live on Zoom and 15 will be fully on-line/asynchronous.

I’m teaching three courses this semester, but with “social distancing” in mind, the University has capped the number of students in each room, so classes are smaller. I’m actually teaching fewer students than in past terms when I only taught two courses.

Of course, no one knows how long the current arrangements will last. The summer Delta surge raised fears of relapsing back to all-Zoom classes and we’re hardly out of the woods on that score (much less Lambda and subsequent variants). At least we all know what Zoom classes look like (having done them for two-and-a-half semesters), so an urgent transition/reversion should be pretty straightforward unlike April, 2020 (seems like a decade ago!) when we did a blind flash-cut. Still, there’s no denying that the Damoclean sword is hanging over us all.

On top of all that stuff, the University moved our entire department across campus and has demolished our old building (no sorrow there!). So, we have (newer and smaller) offices, a new layout, and only a small percentage of the faculty on-site every day (less dallying, too). Oh, did I mention there is a new copier to be learned and the fact that they cut our admin staff by 25%. Let’s just say our departmental recovery curve will be shallower than we might have hoped.

Here’s some anecdotal reportage:
* The first day, at least five students asked me for directions to a particular rooms. In each case while they were in the right building, they hadn’t yet figured out that one is unlikely to find Room 3xx on the first floor.
* While there is a fair amount of bustle, the relatively small portion of students on campus means that hallways are not so crowded and there was no line at the student union cafeteria at 12:20. (same food as before, but they’ve closed the seating areas, so everyone is eating outside (fine for now; not in December, though).
* Students and faculty are required to self-verify on-line every day before they come on campus. Then they can enter any building (masked); except (for unknown reasons) the Library, where Covid status must be verified to enter.
* My feet are a bit sore from standing/pacing 4 hours a day. Zoom classes are much more sedentary.

Students seem to be pretty happy/excited to be back live (Although my sample is skewed since I’m only seeing the ones who decided to come back.) Discussions are lively, students are eager. The freshpersons, of course, have never been in a college classroom before; but we have some sophomores who Zoomed all last year and are getting their first taste of campus life. Some freshpersons who had gone back to high school last spring find that while there is a change to college life, the (masked) classroom experience isn’t so different. Perhaps the COVID shock has put the formerly ‘big’ transition into a new light.

Everyone in my classes has been good about masking (one slipped mask was promptly remedied on request). Fortunately, there haven’t been any confrontations.

Talking through masks is generically a challenge. Even though I have a large and projectable voice, I have to bear the mask in mind when talking in class, even if the groups are relatively small. Some students, who often ‘underproject’ their voices in the normal course, need more frequent reminders to speak up. Since many students aren’t so good at raising hands and I can’t see their mouths move, it’s sometimes unclear who is talking, but eventually, we will work this out.

Similarly, it’s usually a multi-week project to get sufficiently familiar with students’ faces to match them with names. With Zoom classes, I could get a handle on a good number (at least among those students who activated their cameras). Now, it’s definitely harder since masking limits the ‘recognizable square inches’ of everyone’s faces; so this is another area where I will cut myself (and others) some slack.

The University now is wrestling with the parameters for the Spring Term. While everything, of course, is subject to change, we will see if it decides to keep the current level of live activities, nudge things up, or return to “normal” operations. Even if the latter, I expect that some higher level of on-line courses (maybe 15%) will be part of the “new normal.” All of that will lead to a complex calculus of class sizes, and number of courses offered which means, as usual, us lecturers are sitting on a bubble to see how many courses we are hired to teach.

However, that is all administrivia in the moment. It’s good to be back. We still have the “normal” challenges, and we can’t be sure how the COVID shock will play out in the psyches of students or faculty over time.

But, overall, most folks seem to have smiles (under their masks).

Territorial Imperative

8/27/2021

I was recently reading about the plight of certain Pacific Island nations whose lands (atolls, sand) are at risk of permanent immersion due to rising sea levels. We in the US might lose a few hundred square miles of land (mostly along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts) and, while expensive, we could handle it. If Tonga loses 300 square miles, they’re all on stilts and snorkels.

So, some in these countries (in addition to screaming loudly about global warming) are trying to imagine what their country would be like in such a scenario. One leader bought about eight square miles in another island country to move a bunch of his people. Others are looking to former colonial masters for a right of refuge. Such migrations would be wrenching to both individuals and cultures.

But, what happens to the country? If Tuvalu’s islands sink, is there a country anymore? Under international law, a country’s right to control a large chunk of ocean adjacent to its territory (the “exclusive economic zone”) presumes that there is some land to be adjacent to, …. hmmm. What about the government? During WWII the Poles, Norwegians, Dutch, and French (among others) established a “government-in-exile” (usually in London) to hold the flag up until the Nazis could be defeated. That was fine for a five-year gig, but anyone care about the government of Kiribati if half the Kiribati’s were living in New Zealand, the rest scattered and no hope of returning for centuries?

In the sci-fi environmental disaster film “The Day After Tomorrow,” the US (and much of the northern hemisphere) is buried under massive glaciation and the US government sets up (more-or-less) permanently in Mexico. Somewhere between these scenarios, it’s feasible to see millions of climate refugees moving across borders on a (more-or-less) permanent basis.

From my politico-legal-historical perspective, this raises two sets of questions: First, will this require some change to international law to set standards for the treatment of minorities/migrants who would be arriving in unheard of numbers. Second, to whom would those individuals (former) citizens of Bangladesh or Costa Rica or Ethiopia or Norway look for their government? The flip side of which is whether other continuing governments would recognize a “permanent” government in exile with no territory?

The history of international law is replete with instances (mostly from the 19 and early 20C) of efforts to secure formal legal structures for minorities within the legal systems of their ‘historical’ countries. European powers leaned on China, Turkey, and several Latin American countries to secure these rights as part of their informal empires. In the aftermath of WWI, with a host of new boundaries crating large chunks of “alien minorities on the “wrong side,” extensive provisions were made to protect, e.g. Magyars in Rumania or Germans in Poland. So, the precedents exist, but they’re not auspicious. The first the product of imperial coercion, the latter fell apart as the League of Nations’ system collapsed in the 1930s. But, human rights thinking has become more firmly established since then, so there will certainly be a push for some organized standards of treatment.

The question of the continuation of countries (and governments) raises a different set of problems. The modern system of states (since the 17C Peace of Westphalia) has been premised on territorial control. You can’t be a country without some land; land which you control exclusively. Historically, this led to the development of much more detailed thinking about and enforcement of boundaries which previously had been kind of squishy (in the SW Alps, one couldn’t be quite sure if you were in Italy or France). By the 20C, with much more thinking in terms of clearly defined and cartographically demarked national jurisdictions, we only expect border controls (customs and immigration).

States have become increasingly jealous of their status and quite wary of the risks of relaxing the standards of being a state, lest the Catalans (or Scots or Tigrayans or Texans) try to split off. They’re not likely to be too accommodating of an idea that you can have a country without land and they’re quite sure that they’re not giving up any of theirs.

The Pacific Island countries that are most at risk range from small to tiny by any measure, so they’re not likely to be able to swing very much weight in getting the big rich countries let them continue. Even if Australia were of a mind to give 100 square miles of land to Tonga, it’s not clear how “independent” the Tongans would then be. Moreover, since there is likely to be aboriginal claims to such a chunk of land, Australia wouldn’t want to forcibly oust any current residents/claimants; lest they re-create the Palestinian problem in the Outback.

A set of re-glaciated Scandinavian countries would have a better chance, given their wealth, European links (and whiteness). They’re not likely to get any land since Europe is already pretty crowded. Still, one can imagine a “virtual Sweden” housed in an office complex somewhere in Berlin. With electronic connections and cultural outreach, perhaps they could preserve a sense of nationhood while sponsoring visits to the “homeland” now buried under a mile of ice? Would the Swedish diaspora continue without a “real” home and critical mass of community or would the last real remnant just be a set of “embassies” housed in each Ikea store around the world?

The internet/telecommunications revolution has empowered all sorts of communities, creating new institutions and ways people interact and feel connected. The nation-state model of global organization that has dominated the world for the past several hundred years is feeling pressure from many directions, as I have discussed previously. Perhaps the plight of Tongans or Maldivians will spur new modes of thinking along this vector, as climate change is certainly pushing us to rethink so many other aspects of how we live.

Too Early to Tell

8/20/2021

In 1971, Chinese Premier Chou En-Lai was asked for his opinion about the impact of the French Revolution on Western Civilization. He replied: “It’s too early to tell.” At least that’s the version I first heard. Given all that followed from the events of 1789, it seemed a sage and profound assessment from an urbane world statesman looking back over the previous 180 years.

It turns out that while Chou was quoted accurately (thus distinguishing the comment from the raft of apocryphal quotes too often bandied about), the originating inquiry may have been lost in translation. It seems that Chou thought the question was referring not to the Bastille etc., but to the riots and demonstrations that had paralyzed Paris in 1968; a recent event, noteworthy in its own right, but one that has resonated less deeply across the years.

The (mis-) quote is, nonetheless, too juicy to constrain it to the facts of the 1971 discussion.

Indeed, the essence of the quote is at the heart of what historians do. We interpret and reinterpret (and reinterpret, and reinterpret…) the known facts about historical actors and developments. It’s called “revisionism,” and while it may connote a disregard for the “true” (i.e. original) interpretation, revisionism is really nothing more than a long-running debate about how to make sense of the past.

The French Revolution (1789 version) is itself the best exemplar of this. Debates about the relative weight of cultural, social, intellectual, economic, and political causes and effects constituted a notable percentage of French historical output for over 200 years. Ditto for assessing the causes of WWI, or the reasons for the US defeat in Vietnam (or Afghanistan), or (literally) thousands of other historical questions.

Given that History shows us that human events twist and turn in all sorts of unpredictable directions, the question of whether a particular event was beneficial or evil depends on when you are asking (among other things). The responses to such a question about the French Revolution would have garnered different answers in 1789, 1791, 1793, 1799, 1815, 1820, 1848, 1871, and so on at least until late in the 20C (the French love to argue!).

For a more current example, the current death/illness toll from COVID seems appalling (and we’re quite a way from getting things “under control”). That’s the way it seems in the summer of 2021. Still, it’s easy to imagine a scenario in which our collective COVID experience teaches us how better to be prepared for pandemics so that the next one, instead of causing 100M deaths, only causes 10M. A History written fifty years from now might well say that COVID19 wasn’t such a bad thing, after all.

I was thinking about how and when we make judgments as I was recently reading a discussion of the impact of Western Modernity on the world: the Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment program and all that. Lots of important discoveries and inventions: Rembrandt, flush toilets, optical perspective, electricity, representative democracy, emojis.

The mainstream, “conventional” thinking has been that this has been a good thing; enabling more people to live longer, healthier lives with greater freedom. To be sure, there has long been an undercurrent of dissent, from Pope Pius IX’s encyclical Qui pluribus to Nietzsche and a range of other spiritual and popular thinkers. Still, most of the PR for modernity has been good.

The recent spate of floods and wildfires have highlighted the environmental and global costs of our cultural religion of “progress,” development, and modernity. It’s not so clear how well Modernity will fare in the Histories written a hundred years from now (or whenever we recover/escape from the climate crisis).

At another level, the whole concept of “too early to tell” begs the questions of who is making the judgments and why they need to make judgments about the meaning or moral significance of historical events/developments in the first place. Of course, it’s the winners who write the history and who is a “winner” at any particular point will vary (ask the French about their fights with the Germans in 1870, 1914, and 1940). Assessments will differ by political outlook, economic status, gender, nationality, etc. I’ve written before about historical judgmentalism, so I won’t repeat that commentary here.

If, as the 20C English Historian E.H. Carr wrote, “history is a dialogue between the past and the present,” then it’s never “too early tell.” We are where we are, and we have to frame and understand the past from our own perspective. It’s not a little hubristic to think that we are uniquely possessed of the true understanding of, e.g., the French Revolution

The flip side is that it’s always “too early to tell.” Just as we look back on the assessments of those events made in the bourgeois Third French Republic at the turn of the 20C, or the differing mid-20C characterization that reflected the influence of the French Revolution on the Russian Revolution of 1917, in order to criticize their historians’ take on history; so, too, will 22C historians look back on our (post-fall-of-communism) early 21C interpretations and sigh. In other words, future generations will make their own judgments in light of their own concerns and intervening developments. (Those of a slightly cynical nature might perceive that all this is merely to justify a “Historians’ Full Employment Act.)

In this way, History isn’t all that different from Science. In 1903, the Nobel prize-winning physicist Albert Michaelson said “The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and … the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.” He was saying, in essence, that for physics it wasn’t “too early to tell.” This was, of course, before we had relativity, quantum mechanics, black holes, etc. Oops.

The Complexity of Liberty

8/13/2021

Claims by anti-vaxxers that government public health mandates infringe their liberties have been a recurring feature of the 2021 pandemic story. Lock-downs, injections, masks, and social distancing have been the tools of choice of epidemiologists trying to limit the COVID carnage. I’m not going to get into the (non-) science of the debate here, nor delve into the pretty amazing moves by Govs. DeSantis and Abbott to prevent local officials from protecting local public health. Neither shall I linger over the delicious irony of such protest statements as: “Keep your government hands off my Medicare.”

Rather, my focus is on the evolving nature of liberty in the modern world.

Now, as Isaiah Berlin pointed out (“Two Concepts of Liberty,” 1958), there are many meanings and shadings of the term “liberty” (and its conceptual sibling: freedom). Berlin focused on two essential aspects of the idea in his essay; distinguishing “negative” liberty, i.e. the ability to do something without interference, from “positive” liberty, i.e., the ability not to be constrained. These can easily be in conflict. My freedom to sleep peacefully sits juxtaposed with my neighbor’s freedom to play dance music at 2 AM. Limiting her freedom will likely enhance mine. But they are not always so. For example, limiting my freedom to ride my motorcycle without a helmet does not apparently enhance anyone else’s freedom to ride/drive.

One can trace the development of these concepts (as Berlin does) over time by reference to the usual canon of political thinkers over the past several hundred years. But it struck me, listening to the anti-vaxxers, that the nature of modern human society and, in particular, our proclivity for science and analysis has made both flavors of liberty more problematic over the same centuries, without concerning myself with their intellectual history.

Our (modern Western) society has become vastly more complex over the past 500 years. Global supply chains are a fine example of the relationship between, e.g., the price of tea in China and the availability of the latest iPhones in Chicago. Whether conceived in terms of transportation, communications, media, markets, or otherwise, more people (and the factors that affect their lives) are connected to my life (and the things, ideas, foods, weather that affect mine) than would have been the case 100, 300, or 600 years ago.

There is a second angle to this complexity which multiplies these (mostly phenomenological) effects. The advancement of science and analysis has radically increased the awareness of the number and nature of these causal chains. In the 16C, the weather in (what is now) Indonesia had visible effects on the price of pepper in Amsterdam. Our tools, however, for understanding (or even measuring) that weather were pretty limited then. Nor were we able to connect the presence of monsoons in the Indian Ocean with the size of peppercorns.

Now, we understand (and measure and observe in detail) the extent to which cutting down Indonesian forests affects local rainfall and local agricultural productivity. Now, we understand how rubber prices or consumer demand for palm oil drives the need to clear Indonesian forests which affect, in turn, the local weather and agriculture. Prior to the discovery of germ theory in the 19C, there was no connection between coughing and communicable diseases. Now, we understand how viruses move from one person to another. Did the elimination of lead from housepaint result in a drop in criminal activity when boys raised in ‘cleaner’ homes grew up unaffected by that poison?

Science has enabled us to see and understand these connections. We even have a conceptual model for such relationships, although we can’t figure out the specifics. The “butterfly effect” tells us that the flapping of a single butterfly’s wings in the Himalaya will have some impact on rainfall in the Andes some time later.

The pandemic and the climate crisis have both slammed us in the face with the complexities of the world. Even if we solve both, we won’t easily ‘unlearn’ the nature of those connections and their appearance in all sorts of circumstances.

This new realization is hard to digest. It is, literally, mind-numbing. And, when overwhelmed, it’s unsurprising that we deny and reject; and then construct a world which is simpler and more manageable. This explains, in my view, much about anti-vaxxers and climate deniers, both on specific topics and science in general. It hurts and they just want it to STOP!

This deeper, richer knowledge also inevitably makes liberty/freedom a smaller, more difficult claim. More difficult because complexity smashes simplistic categories (e.g., race, gender) and understanding these complexities requires brain power and attention. Smaller because, as we learn of the greater range of effects of our actions on others and theirs on us, the choices that preserve/maximize liberty are more constrained. Should I be free to raise peanuts in my backyard? Even if my downwind neighbor suffers anaphylactic shock as a result? Should my freedom to farm be constrained to enable his freedom to breathe?

Stated simply, science (i.e. increased knowledge of causes and effects) is at war with liberty. Awareness of interconnections and interdependency means we have to think more about how our actions fit into the world. And a modicum of conscience means that we will choose not to do somethings we previously saw ourselves as free to do. Alternatively, society will choose to tell us not to do them as it balances our liberty with that of others.

In either case, complexity makes simple models of liberty useless. We are far from the mythic “state of nature” in which there was unlimited freedom. There is no point in blaming anyone for this, or to attack government or science, or to blame “socialists” for valuing community or philosophers for pointing all this out. We will just have to juggle the headache of complexity as best we can.

AI, vay!

8/6/2021

Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) seems on the cusp of changing everything. At one level, it’s not really clear how AI is different from the “computing” which has been a part of our lives for the last fifty years. At another level, however, the ability of computers to function based on multiple, deeper levels of programming feels different to us human users of their capabilities.

As with pretty much any technology, AI is simultaneously disruptive, helpful, amazing, and problematic. We have been working with word processing technology since the 1970s (I remember learning how to use a Wang system in the early 1980s). Now, we (most of us) start typing or speaking into our phones and we are prompted with the most likely completions of the words or phrases we begin. Sometimes really helpful; sometimes laughable, sometimes just a pain.

Accounting and other programs transfer data so that an increasing amount of mundane/routine work formerly done by clerks (remember them?) are now automated. As AI capabilities grow, their impact is moving up the labor market ladder. “Expert systems” (really just huge databases running through very fast processors) are proving to be better diagnosticians than most doctors. “Coding” (i.e., writing software) was once done by a small group of Silicon Valley geeks. Then it was “off-shored” to lesser paid geeks in India. Now, computers are enhancing the ability of the geeks to write code faster using the same kind of auto-complete suggestions we know from our phone messaging. Soon, the databases will be filled with enough experience that they will cause most of that work to be done in a fully automated way.

Military drones are developing along similar lines. There is an emerging ethical debate about whether a human must be in the final decision loop about whether to take out some terrorist/undesirable, lest we too quickly fall into the sci-fi world of robots choosing to take out all humans on their road to evolutionary triumph. Most of this debate is just noise. Someone (human) had to program the software for the flying car/Quicken/terminator. There are certainly issues about the criteria to be used in deciding whether to launch a missile against some jeep convoy in Western Afghanistan; but that’s not a new ethical question (ask any Special Forces sniper!). There are some issues about the quality of the human programming so that the drone is set to do the “right” thing, but that’s not an ethical issue either. Still, it makes for a juicy/ominous media story, so it gets hyped-up.

Whether AI will offer us new types of capabilities and actually present us with fundamentally new questions seems doubtful. In 1854, Dr. John Snow compiled information about the location of Cholera victims in London. He used the then emerging capabilities of statistical analysis to develop a theory of what might be causing the deadly outbreak. It was an early example of applied information processing, using cutting-edge techniques and data structures; and it changed the world in important and continuing ways.

Perhaps a more interesting question is whether computing power/AI will reach the level of being able to match economic markets as processors of information. Traditionally, I expressed my interest in buying a box of cereal by going to the market and determining whether I wish to spend $4 a box for Kellogg’s or $3 for the Safeway house brand. The “market” (the generic market, not Safeway the grocer) sees my action and Kellogg and Safeway adjust their output accordingly. Now, Facebook tells Safeway how long I linger over their ad for cereal and Safeway can (pre-market) translate that into their plans for production down the road. Soon, someone will be able to tell that men of a certain age who look at buying a Tesla and go see Hamilton will drink more whiskey in the next month. It’s no wonder that Google, Amazon, etc., are investing billions in figuring out how best to make AI work.

When you overlay the feasibility of governmental access to and consolidation of all this info, it’s possible to imagine that the concept projected by early 20C Marxists and other Socialists will be realized. There was a big debate among global intellectuals at the time. The triumph of liberalism was premised on the belief that the market was the best mechanism for operating an economy; that it was too complex to be rationalized and managed by humans and politics. The Soviet process (5-year plans and all that) was designed to replace the market with intelligent conscious decisions made by the State. Market substitution didn’t work back then, but what if that failure was only because Communist theory outpaced computational realities? The Soviet Union collapsed under its “internal contradictions,” and market capitalism went on its (our?) merry way. I’m sure there is a think-tank in Beijing figuring out how an economy could be operated (and controlled) by Chairman Xi; even if Marshal Stalin didn’t have the petaflops of computing power at his disposal when the Socialist paradise was projected. Could an AI-driven State replace a mid-21C market mechanism?

It’s not just the economy. Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002) used AI capabilities to foresee and prevent crimes; a field in which we are now functioning at an aggregate level, even if we can’t ID specific perps in advance. Other sci-fi authors have written of future wars in which two combatants’ computers face-off to see who triumphs. And, of course, there’s the “holodeck” on Star Trek: TNG in which immersive gaming and entertainment is supercharged.

The later 20C saw all sorts of claims/fears that automation and computers would replace people. It’s coming to pass, even if a few decades later than and in not quite the same way that some pundits forecast. It’s a good bet that most of our prognostications will be off a bit as well. Perhaps an AI-based prediction algorithm will do better....

Thinking Fast and Slow

7/30/2021

Ten years ago, Daniel Kahneman published Thinking Fast and Slow, certainly one of the most interesting and useful books I have ever read. It explodes, in a very rational and scientific way, the myth of the rational person that underlays not only much of how we understand our day-to-day interactions with others, but also how the social sciences (including History) purport to understand human behavior.

At one level, we all know that other people are crazy/make-no-sense/full-of-idiosyncrasies. At another level we expect them to be reasonable/sensible. Kahneman lays out, in a pretty accessible set of stories, the ways in which we are unreasonable. The book draws on years of research on how people make decisions, which led to his Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002. He’s also co-written a new book, Noise (which I haven’t read).

Just to take few examples, he shows how we:
* we are more averse to risk of loss than logically makes sense.,
* our decision making depends on what we did or read just previously (i.e., what’s ‘in mind’),
* construct stories that seem to make sense, even without evidence or contrary to the evidence we have, and
* project rosier outcomes than are likely because we would all like to live in a best-case-scenario world.

The issue of story construction is of particular concern to historians since we are all about constructing stories. We (as a species) are generally pretty desperate to live in a sensible world and coherent stories help us do that. Kahneman points out that this drive causes us to ignore facts that don’t fit the pattern, or create stories and then find the “facts” that make the story neat-and-tidy.

It’s sort of like looking at constellations in the night sky. We can find Orion’s belt or the “Big Dipper” easily enough, but extrapolating from a few points of light into a warrior with a sword or the Big Bear (aka “Ursa Major”) is an act of human projection, based on a particular culture and astrophysical location. One historical analogue (to which I have previously referred) cites Western/European/American “progress”/power over the past 200 years as the baseline of a story of moral superiority (rather than an anomaly in a broader global pattern). At a more personal level, historians also construct stories in which historical actors make sensible decisions when, in fact (like us) they often act based on subconscious prejudices (cultural or genetic).

How many war plans were implemented because of over-optimistic assessments? Ask Kaiser Wilhelm or Robert McNamara! Historical analysis that starts with the (usual and implicit) assumption of rational behavior is pretty likely to be off the mark. This model of rational intentionality is also popular because it facilitates the “blame game.” Even though at some level we know that almost all bad stuff is caused by error rather than malevolence, finding a villain is much more satisfying (and a convenient distraction from looking at our own comparable shortcomings.

This kind of decision-making (Kahneman calls it “fast thinking”) is so common in our everyday lives that we have to consciously try to pay attention to it. This is, of course, much easier to do with other people’s behaviors (spouses are especially useful in this regard). Do we avoid a particular driving route because—once—there was a big back up? Do we avoid foods that—once—caused a stomach upset or headache? Without knowing whether the traffic was the result of a particular accident or construction issue or whether our gut might have reacted to another food/germ/external tension, we can’t make much sense out of a single data point. And few of us have the concentration to study such situations to really understand systemic commuting patterns or gastric dynamics.

In fact, it’s pretty easy to see other people’s non-sensical thinking in all sorts of ways. But the more important lesson from Kahneman’s book is that I do it, too. My unique combination of predilections, biota, and culture are no more exempt from the common human brain-wiring patterns than anyone else’s. By their very unconscious nature, they are hard to see, but my own mishegas (to use a technical term) is no less risible.

An important reminder of humility, to be sure.

At a social level, even without the overlay of all the current political angst, these ordinary human mental patterns help to explain why vaccination rates are lower than one might hope/expect, why people focus on closed-network/self-reinforcing media circuses, and the difficulty of shifting epistemologies, among a host of other phenomena. Fear and inertia play a much larger role in people’s thinking than we like to acknowledge. (Oh, and my own, too!!) (as I have to repeatedly remind myself). The problem of over-optimistic projections leads to our apparent surprise (for the thousandth time) at budget overruns or delays when it comes to construction projects (whether a new kitchen or a multi-tier bridge).

Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for the work that he and Amos Tversky did to help economists begin to shift from their founding/core assumption of economic decisions by rational people. His book is worth reading, even if parts of it are a bit abstruse. Don’t feel you need to read it cover-to-cover. Find the stories (often of experiments they ran) that highlight how people actually think/act/decide in particular situations. You’ll likely find yourself in some of these situations and, if you can remember that, then it will be time well spent.

Accounting for the Future

7/23/2021

The recent and dramatic pile of rubble from the condominium tower in Miami provides gruesome evidence of the short-term mentality that haunts modern society. It is of a piece with the 2007 collapse of the I-35 highway bridge in Minneapolis, the decades of national engineering surveys showing underinvestment in maintenance and repair of our national physical infrastructure, and numerous other examples from both the public and private sectors. Even the proposed federal “infrastructure” legislation, currently being over-politicized in Washington, will only make a modest reduction in the backlog of work to be done.

The Champlain Towers Condo association (and thousands of similar groups around the country) failed charge high-enough monthly dues to prevent large “special assessments” to fund major repair/construction projects in the face of resistance from resident/owners. This is entirely comparable to the issues facing state and local governments and school districts, and the country as a whole. Private owners such as condo associations will now be forced by their insurance companies to attend to their finances to a much greater degree than previously. Unfortunately, public entities have consistently eschewed the basic principles of depreciation accounting for capital assets for decades (even if they have the ability (usually) to fund such projects with long-term bonds).

If a company builds a factory for $10M and the factory is expected to last for 40 years, then accountants will require the company to recognize that they are effectively spending $250k/year on the factory. A prudent company will store up enough cash so that when the building’s useful life is over, it will have the resources to replace it. This is called depreciation.

Depreciation as a concept actually didn’t exist until the late 19C. The surge in large-scale investments driven by the “industrial revolution” and the lengthening horizons of businesses (due to perpetual corporations and longer-lived individuals) both fed a need for financial managers to think differently about “capital” expenditures as compared with on-going operating expenses. Depreciation has long been required in tax accounting and for the audits of public companies.

However, governments don’t like to think about it. Elected officials typically have a time horizon somewhere between the length of their current term in office and the length of time they might “serve” in total. The longer the time horizon, the mistier things become and the rationalizations for “kicking the can down the road” flow more freely. The result is “deferred maintenance;” which is a nice bureaucratic term meaning “we only fix potholes when they’re large enough to swallow a bus, even if it costs us five times as much.”

This refusal to deal with the long-term costs of physical infrastructure is but one scandal of public finance; but it is matched by elected officials’ refusal to deal with accrued pension liabilities. Here, too, short-term electability means placating public sector unions with fat pension schemes, and then not worrying about how those pay-outs will be supported in a few decades. Again, governmental agencies aren’t held to the same basic accounting principles as the private sector.

The mid-20C US boom—in population, buildings, the Interstate Highway System, and economy in general—would have been the ideal time to bake in sensible policies requiring reserves for such things (i.e., depreciation accounts, fully-funding pensions and health care costs). As it is, a lot of stuff got built and now, in the 21C, those buildings are reaching the end of their useful lives and the expanding body of governmental employees is retiring.

Just as with the Champlain condo owners, the real responsibility lies not with the governing board, but with the electors. Invisible expenditures are less popular than a shiny new cultural center and we would need to expect a different breed of political candidates to bravely promise to pay for the full (life-time) costs of such investments or to propose the taxes to pay for them.

Several states have “balanced budget” constitutional requirements and a similar sort of approach would work here as well. Let’s prohibit public capital expenditures unless they’re funded for their full lifetimes. If we make such requirements part of the baseline of government operations and therefore politically invisible, we would not end up with collapsing bridges or buildings or bankrupt municipalities when the inevitable bills come due.

This is hardly a new phenomenon. There is probably a good social history research project in compiling all the adages across time and cultures which are variations of “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

The burden, as so much of the results of the anomalous era of Western “progress,” will fall on those now under 40. It’s a similar story with our environmental blindness. As a broad culture, we have taken deeply-embedded human traits (e.g., greed, gluttony) and leveraged them on the economic growth and technological wonders of the past 200 years. Typical adolescent behavior: “we’re gonna live forever,” or “we can do it, therefore we will do it” (but here by an entire set of societies).

Those born in the last 40 years—Gen X’ers, Millenials, Gen Z’ers, Gen Alphas (in the lingo)—will reap the whirlwind. They’ll be paying the bills for road repairs, Social Security, and storm/fire damage. They’ll have to figure out what to do when Phoenix runs out of water or the State of Illinois goes bankrupt. It will be interesting to see the political trade-offs they will make between the programs and services which we are used to receiving and covering the costs of disaster recovery (especially since insurance companies will either charge way too much for premiums or will have gone bankrupt themselves).

The same vernacular that came up with cute names for each “generation” will need to undergo some revision. Our group—Boomers—followed the WWII-era “Greatest Generation”, but we (i.e., Western society for the past 200 years) have all been marching down this path. I don’t think we’ll be so fondly remembered.

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

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

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