Steve Harris - Condemned to Repeat It

Outta' Sight

8/12/2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smith, Sieyes, and Darwin

8/5/2022

Smith, Sieyes, & Darwin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(sorry about all the FNs this time!)

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

Precendential Seal

7/29/2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wonders of Modern Medicine

7/22/2022

The early 20C American poet, T.S. Eliot, was struggling to express some of the banality of modern life when he wrote “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons.” (“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915)). A century or so later, looking back on most of a life, I may be fairly said to measure our lives out in medical dosings. Indeed, in some ways my effective age may be measured out by the number of pills I take each day, with some added factor for the pills ready at hand for some known risk complication, plus a small fraction for the bottles in the back of the “medicine chest” previously prescribed and kept (regardless of potency date) against potential recurrence of prior ailments.

That I can marshal this small army of chemical bullets is the ordinary evidence of the “wonders of modern medicine” that keep me alive (or reduce my pains and fears). They are part of the vast armory of devices, techniques, and procedures that are a stunning reminder of my personal, physical fragility. At the same time, they are the basis of the amazing increase in human longevity worked by the application of many branches of the “scientific revolution” which has characterized the modern world over the past five hundred years and especially over the past two hundred.

The concept of inoculation against disease (smallpox) came to the “West” from the Ottoman Empire in the 18C. Germ theory was developed in the 19C. A complex of chemistry, biology, metallurgy and other materials sciences, epidemiology, physics has (incrementally, but seemingly continuously) advanced our knowledge of bodily malfunctions and the potential for prevention or remediation.

As a layman, I have to say that it's awesome. As the great SciFi writer Arthur C. Clarke once said: “Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.” And so it seems: laparoscopic surgery, CRISPR gene-splicing techniques, drugs with all manner of unpronounceable names (the FDA lists over 100,000). The deluge shows no sign of letting up: genetic treatments, drugs personalized for each individual, robotic surgery (although we are still waiting for Dr. McCoy’s tricorder on Star Trek).

It's easy to take it all for granted (especially for those with some decent health insurance). Since it all seems like magic, it’s hard to accept that there are limits. There’s frustration when a battery of orthopods, physical therapists, and acupuncturists using MRIs (3), X-rays (2), creams (2), exercises (at least 6), electro-shock, hypervolt, and drugs (at least 4), finally throw up their hands after a year and say that the cause of the pain near my right knee is “patella-femoral syndrome.” You know you’re in trouble when they use the word “syndrome,” because “syndrome” is doctor talk for “We don’t know what is hurting you.” Even worse is the ever-popular diagnostic dismissal: “you’re getting older.”

So, part of the resultant unhappiness is the physical pain, part is the uncertainty, part is anger at a body that (apparently) continues to age (i.e., break down), and part is the disappointment that the “wonders of modern medicine” don’t go so far as to solve my particular ailment.

My historian’s perspective tells me that things are getting better all the time and my personal experience confirms it. New therapies are coming on line every year. We all know versions of story A) in which someone (just a bit older than me) was born with a serious condition that, had she been born ten years earlier, she would likely have died quickly and had she been born twenty years later, she would be pretty healthy and spared a life of seizures and treatments. Or, in story B, a friend diagnosed with cancer is living a pretty complete life following innovative semi-customized treatments that may well have killed her ten years earlier. Or, in story C, a few weeks ago, I had a cardiac procedure that was first done forty years ago and has since expanded and specialized and is now “routine,” and I went home that afternoon.

Does forty years make it “old hat” or is it still “gee whiz”?

I suspect that taking the “gee whiz” approach is likely to contribute to a health-fostering “positive mental attitude;” so, I will stick with that. In the meantime (and, hopefully, for a considerable time thereafter), I will be counting out my life in pills.

***
Btw, while I’m talking medicine, can I express my bewilderment at the advertising for relatively uncommon ailments? I’m sure smart people who have studied such things believe that this is cost effective, but its amazing to me that the relatively small number of people with “moderate-to-severe rheumatoid arthritis” (~1.5M in the US have some degree of RA, so the “moderate-to-severe” group must be well under 1M; let’s just call it ? of 1% of the population) are worth all that airtime/ink. And then there’s all the bad news portion of the ads which consist of disclaimers and warnings (75%), pretty pictures and optimism (15%), and specific therapeutics (10%) (plausibly required by the FDA); again, it’s hard to see how this makes for an effective way to convince people to ask for the treatment. Big Pharma’s profits are legendary, but still…. It’s a mystery

Inequality II

7/15/2022

Last week, I talked about Jefferson’s postulate that “all men are created equal” as the basis for the formation of the US and an important contributor to the creation of democratic modernity on a global level. All well and good for a legal/political analysis and a story of incremental progress over the past quarter-millennium. But there is much more to the story of (in)equality, so this week, I bite off a bit more.

Of course, Jefferson’s statement is patently ridiculous. Whether in terms of height, strength, empathic capability, mathematical agility, or any number of other aspects, all people are not created equal; we are each radically different. So, Jefferson wasn’t making a statement about biology or psychology; rather, he was positing the formal structure of a society and its relationship to each of the individuals which comprise it, manifested in its legal and moral structure. As an aspiration, he looked to build a society in which each person was seen and dealt with equally by the state/government/body politic.

But, just as we are each born with different capabilities/attributes, when nurture is added to nature—different family environment, different physical environment, health/wealth/culture—things spin even more wildly.

In particular, I was thinking about social and economic aspects of inequality, the subject of the hefty (both physically and intellectually) recent volume: Capital and Ideology by the French economist Thomas Piketty. There is much to like in this book, as well as much to criticize. Still, it is striking when Piketty writes history as if equality is not measured by the formal legal structure of a society. He makes the point (implicitly) that we are so embedded in the state-centered, legally-defined, rights-oriented epistemology of modernity that we easily brush aside the vast and deep differences in standards of living (whether compared domestically or, even more so, internationally) and characterize ourselves as an ethical and successful society.

He also (expressly) makes the point that the era of “Atlantic Revolutions” (English (1689), American (1776), and French (1789) (not to mention others in Europe and Latin America in the first half of the 19C)) was, unsurprisingly about throwing over the idea that each person’s life was effectively determined by the status (clergy, nobility, commons) into which they were born. From the perspective of a ‘dialectic’ view of history, these revolutions were about getting rid of monarchy and formally embedded privilege. What remained were a variety of mechanisms, principally the sanctity of “private property” but also including slavery and imperialism, by which the “haves” continued to “have” and the “have nots” didn’t.

You don’t have to buy into his set of solutions (which he calls “participatory socialism”) to be impressed with the data-based analysis he musters to support his characterizations of economic inequality (again, both within and between countries) over the past 200+ years. Piketty also points out that while racist thinking has played a considerable role in this process, it is not the root of economic inequality. Indeed, he argues (as I have in earlier postings) that much of the current discontent among “working class”/less-educated whites in the US and Europe is a reflection of their belief that they are being left behind by economically advantaged/better educated cosmopolitan elites. And that this discontent represents a broad and fundamental challenge to the stability of “advanced” societies.

The point of all of this is to force us to reassess what we mean by “equality.” The French writer Anatole France said, late in the 19C: “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread.” In the end, it is a question of whether the superficial quality of the law is morally sufficient. Engraved on the front of the US Supreme Court building is “Equal Justice under Law,” in case you were wondering what our official national priorities really are.

We know enough to know that the theory of “meritocracy” with which many of us grew up not only covers up all manner of embedded bias/advantage/privilege, but, by its very mechanistic nature also skews our moral thinking, allowing us to conflate individual worth with “success.”

It is no small matter to wrestle with these concerns at both a personal and at a societal level. It is far from simple to articulate the kind of restructuring of society implicit in a more substantive equality and to turn aspirations and slogans into concrete proposals. Is it sufficient, for example to aim for a substantial narrowing of income and wealth inequality over the next fifty years? Or do we need to start with the definitive goal of averaging it all out ASAP? Do we conceptualize and act on a national basis or a global one? Would I be comfortable living on 10% of my current net worth (still hugely more than national (much less global) averages)?

It is daunting to contemplate how to make the changes necessary to accomplish these goals. It’s not so clear precisely where we should be heading and the tactics of dealing with educational opportunity, tax structures, income redistribution, environmental, racial, and post-imperial justice are problematic to be sure. But it is more clear where passivity will lead, both in terms of personal integrity and societal cohesion.

In this way, the question of equality/inequality is not so different from the principal subjects of this blog: democracy, environment, and candor about who we are and what we want. These are all tough, steep roads to be walked; but, as my good buddy Chairman Mao once said: “A thousand mile journey begins with the first step.”

Inequality (I)

7/8/2022

Twelve score and six years ago, Thomas Jefferson postulated that “All men are created equal.” If he had been a better academic writer, he would have dropped a footnote alerting us to the fact that the term “men” was subject to multiple definitions and that he was using it in a particular way. (He might also still be waiting for his publisher to digest the peer review comments on his draft.) Since then, Americans have argued about what definition to use (including fighting a long and bloody war on this question).

Looking back, as we read the Declaration of Independence, we can easily criticize the hypocrisy of this slaveholder and exploiter of power over women. From that perspective, we can read Jefferson’s use of “men” to be limited to “White” males. And, of course, that’s true; but Jefferson’s point was not about race or gender or excluding certain types of each from power,

Rather it was about blowing up a central pillar of virtually all human societies, particularly those in Europe in the 18C: the domination of political societies by royalty/nobility/aristocracy. Whether he foresaw or would have endorsed the kind of approach to rights and citizenship that we have in the 21 C are interesting but separate questions; it’s not at all clear that he was a MLK “I have a dream” sort of guy.

In this way the Declaration falls into line with Magna Carta, that other staple of the story of “democratic progress” (an overloaded and simplistic version of which Historians refer to derisively as “Whig history, featuring large doses of inevitability and self-congratulatory moralizing). Magna Carta (1215) was NOT a democratic document. Yes, there were some references to the treatment of ordinary folks in medieval England, but the Barons did not force King John to the table at Runnymede (about five miles from Heathrow Airport) for the good of the common man. They were about protecting themselves and limiting the power of the Crown.

Similarly, the Declaration of Independence was not about democracy in the sense of “one-person, one-vote,” it was about rejecting the power of the Crown (actually more anti-Parliament than anti-King) and allowing the (white male) British citizens of the thirteen colonies to run their own show. In order to reject the deeply embedded ideas of fixed social status, the inheritance of power, and a whiff of the “divine right of kings,” Jefferson had to tear down these claims of privilege. For this purpose, “all men are created equal” is a tersely powerful claim.

Since then, with no small amount of work, risk and historical contingency (aka “luck”) they (we!) made it work.

This is not to say that the Founding Fathers achieved political utopia (nor have we). The American “Revolution” was about recognizing the shift of power from one set of white males to another set of white males. It is to say that they achieved their goal from their own perspective and resolved the largest issue facing them. The fact that later generations took their creation and moved it in a particular direction was not their fault or glory (depending on your perspective).

Still, if Magna Carta’s effort to constrain royal power grabs was a plausible and useful predicate to the Declaration, then the Declaration has been a plausible and useful predicate to the development of modern political society in the US (and the world). It took a further 90 years to make clear that Africans held in slavery were (at least nominally) included in that “all men” who were created equal. It has taken a further 150 years to make much of that nominal equality more real. It took most of the 19C to break down the legal limits on the rights of women, and almost 150 until they had the right to vote, and that, too, is a work still very much in progress.

It was only when the status and treatment of these two major segments of our population were significantly addressed that other aspects of “all men” could be dealt with. Thus, we now wrestle with questions of the status and treatment of those with less common gender identities and preferences.

All of these developments reflect changes in the popular epistemology; i.e., in the interpretation of “all men” and the implementation of that premise in law and practice. Throughout this time, the words have remained the same, but it clear that their meaning has changed. Even the 14th Amendment, the greatest constitutional change since 1787, merely says that “all persons” shall be entitled to the “equal protection of the laws.” In the aftermath of the Civil War, even though there is no mention of Africans, African-Americans, Negroes, Blacks, or former slaves, it was clear that the words meant something different than they had previously and now included these people.

The (lapsed) effort to adopt the “Equal Rights Amendment” in the late 20C (which expressly referred to sex) was seen as necessary because the judicial interpretation of the Constitution didn’t fully recognize such equality. Virtually all of its purpose has been accomplished through revised judicial interpretation and widespread social and statutory changes. (although these are perhaps at risk per Justice Thomas’ rationale in overturning Roe). These are the evidence of epistemological change and they co-evolve. As generations rise and fade, the culture in which they are raised nudge them in different directions. For example, I was raised to refer to women as “Mrs.” or “Miss,” which I doubt is the case for most folks born in the last 40 years.

This process of change is not smooth or one-way, as the election of an African-American as President fourteen years ago and his replacement by a misogynistic and racist individual provide ample testimony. Such changes require attention and effort…and patience.

All of which is to say that Jefferson’s words are still sufficient, but it is up to us in the 21C to say what we mean by “all men are created equal.”

Rights and Wrongs, Roe and Wade

7/1/2022

The leak of the Alito draft opinion in May this year accelerated the inevitable strident debate on the legal treatment of abortion in this country. It was a dress rehearsal for what we are seeing now, but the leak didn’t change anything and the opinion finally released last week got some things right and some things wrong.

What it got right was process and structure. What it got wrong was the impact on millions of people.

The legal status of abortion in the US has been set for almost fifty years by a court decision that had to stretch to find constitutional justification for immunizing women for the terminating a pregnancy. It preempted state regulation of abortion prior to fetal viability.

The substance of Roe—the line-drawing and moral balance it struck—make a great deal of sense to me (and, apparently, to the majority of Americans). The thought that the government should regulate a person’s control of their own body (in the absence of a) other criminal activity or b) harm to another person) seems a direct application of the core principle of personal liberty on which our country and most other modern liberal democracies are founded.

At the same time, the thought that the government should allow the death of a fetus is also deeply troubling. Of course there are important issues of viability and “personhood” here. They are further complicated by the advances of medical science that has been bringing forward the date of fetal viability.

So, we have two sensible, plausible principles in the abstract that run directly into each other. It’s hard to say there is a plain, ethical “right answer.”

This clash of principles is fundamentally complicated by the sex-based difference in who writes and who is affected by such regulations. If both men and women got pregnant, then the tensions noted above would still be present; but sex differences inevitably skew everyone’s analysis. In fact, millennia of patriarchy have led to laws written almost entirely by men and broader social values also articulated almost entirely by men. While this has begun to change over the past 50-ish years, since social inertia is even more embedded than are legal provisions, our traditional worldview is still very much with us.

This is an intractable analytic problem since women will always be the only subject of abortion regulation. Simply stated, there is no objective (sex-neutral) stance on this issue. Men’s conception (so to speak) of the impact of governmental intrusion into an individual’s body can never be as organic as can women’s and it would require a concentrated empathetic effort to approximate it. Getting past the embedded social inertia of patriarchy to do so is difficult indeed.

In any event, ideally this issue of moral balancing should be a matter for legislative action rather than judicial. But even back in the 1970s, the politics of abortion were fraught (although placid by today’s standard). The Court’s intervention effectively took the issue off the political table for decades. This is not to ignore the many efforts at regulation that have been advanced, particularly in the past thirty years. But there was virtually no activity in Congress on this issue, and most people viewed the relevant governing rule to be judicial, not legislative.

I have written before about the problems that result from the disenfranchisement of the political process. It’s not healthy for the body politic. It alienates people from their democracy and makes the judiciary an easy target. It also facilitates reliance on the judiciary and made it easier for those who are “pro-choice” to not pay as much attention to legislative solutions (e.g. codifying Roe) as they might have. This decision has already incited a new activism, but it’s way too early to tell whether the response will have the necessary staying power or breadth of engagement with the wide range of challenges our society faces. Although, the other recent decisions—on the EPA’s powers (& therefore the climate disaster), various voting-related rulings, and gun control—will broaden the group who see a fundamental constitutional problem.

One problem is inertia. Existing rules—whether legislative or judicial in origin—continue along and they are difficult to change, regardless of the will of the “majority.” Our system has become sclerotic and change is difficult. The Roe Court preempted this inertia and jumped to a plausible, sensible compromise solution to the conflict of two sensible principles. “Pro-choice” forces have to come to terms with the fact that there are many in this country who would draw the line elsewhere and that overcoming the vehemence of the “pro-life” forces will be a difficult and perhaps impossible task, but it must be a political task, not a legal one: changing legislatures, changing constitutions are the work of the day (and the decade). Here, as in many issues, table-pounding is of limited use.

Another important angle is that a “conservative” court whose rationale speaks to historical traditions as the premise for law is also enamored of “originalism” in judicial interpretation. There are many problems with originalism, not least that it assumes a clarity of historical interpretation that almost all historians disavow. It is ironic that this decision and the “penumbra” it casts over dozens of heretofore seemingly well-established rights (as pointed out by the dissent) will likely be an important part of the spur for modernizing the country’s laws and constitutional principles. The more things get out of whack with reality (which is the essence of conservatism) the greater the opportunity for some sort of revolution. This decision increases the tension on the social cohesion implicit in a democratic society.

In the short term, I don’t have any simple solution to all this. I think a Roe-ish statute (a la the Collins-Murkowski bill) would make the most sense, but our politics is far too poisoned to get to a sensible compromise. But we’ve got to get to work to see what is possible. More broadly, we have to take on the fundamental test of democracy: getting enough people to care about the nature of their (our) society to write rules and build a culture which is willing to work together

The Meaning of Fifty.2

6/24/2022

The great fiftieth reunion has come and gone. Back in ’72 we might have predicted that it was going to happen, but had no frigging idea what it meant; indeed, we had little sense of the concept of fifty years at all and no patience to contemplate it. Even incremental reunions along the way seemed to exist on their own, with no apparent connection to prior or subsequent events on the list. Indeed, the most common refrain was on the absurdity of it all. For me, this reunion brought home that my self-mythologizing of my life is far more fragile and constructed than I might like to think.

So, before I go too far down that trail, congrats and thanks to those who, over the past 18 months or so, chatted up the idea and then did the unglamorous work of putting together what will likely be a model for other alumni classes in terms of events and esprit de corps. I was glad to be part of the team.

As in the past, we were—entirely justifiably—self-congratulatory. Back then, we knew we lived in unusual times and were given rare opportunities to learn and live with instructors and a campus of extraordinary beauty.

This time, we had about 80 folks present (almost half of those still around), a remarkable showing especially since only about 15-20 still live in the Metro Detroit area. We had gracious hosts from our class for some special evenings, a well-executed program from the School, musical talent, and an outstanding guide to the revival of the city of Detroit (an amazing story of history, demographics, collapse, and innovation).

As a historian, the saga of Detroit’s mid-century power, late-century decline, and recent resurgence illustrates the cyclical nature of many historical phenomena and the futility of prediction based on blithe extension of current trends. In the end, I came away optimistic; having seen the effects of intelligence, inspiration, and effort that stand as a rebuttal to the easy despair of our current national/global situation.

We were fortunate to have with us one of our teachers with us for the weekend. He (too) was young then (fresh out of college) and was part of the English Department which gave me great gifts of literature, criticism, creativity, and the discipline of writing. As a professor now, I was especially glad to be able to thank him (as did many others) for his work and to give him a glimpse of his effect on me and the world (which is the secret and rarely-found food of all teachers).

I had noticed, as early as my tenth reunion, that the campus, even if a bit more buffed up than in my day and graced with all manner of new facilities, seemed smaller than when I was bustling through as teenager. The new buildings and refurbished interiors made clear the distance from then ‘til now. We were there, in the words of one school song: “shorter in wind as in memory long,” but it wasn’t ours anymore (if it had seemed so at the time). The school, the students, the styles were clearly of this time and era; and, in that way ordinary. Our memories—of different clothing, different music, different sophistication, and different presence—stood out for their difference (not to say ancientness): faded ghosts running down the same hallways.

Of far greater richness was the time—three-days—of hugs and back pats, winks and knowing smiles, some grimaces, some tears together. How can words capture the immersion in memory? All the cliches are rampant: in the mind’s eye hair is longer, fuller, darker; faces fresher; steps springier.

Even richer was the chance, if only for an hour, to leave those cliches to the side and have some serious talk and reflection about our state(s) of mind. I was gratified that about 30 folks came together to push past the glad-handing and make an effort to see ourselves and each other. We have now all returned to our “normal” lives; but I, for one, feel a bit more anchored, both to my past and to my fellows. The time has come, as I said to the group, to “put down the baggage” of the competition and insecurities of that youth. Getting some understanding of the intervening years/lives of all those with whom I worked and played has helped to clear away those ancient burdens and see my self (both then and now) more clearly.

As our discussion ended, I challenged the group: The clock is ticking. There will be fewer of us at the 60th. When we re-gather, let’s report back on how will I account for the intervening decade (beyond the inevitable physicalities)? How will I leverage what I learned long ago (and since)?

Back in 9th or 10th grade English class, we read and had to memorize Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan” (1816) [it was an English-inspired prep school, after all].

I can still recite it (mostly). The closing lines read:

Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight ’twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Part of my mission was to find the boy who was entranced by that language, to reconnect to the energy and the possibilities it splashed across my consciousness; to push the intervening years aside a bit and look forward as I did then.

Games Historians Play

6/17/2022

Just so you know, in the last few days, I’ve been a Jesuit, Cardinal, and Pope; then an English Viscount. IRL, I just got back from Boulder, where I attended a conference of history professors who play games. In class. And get paid for it!

Actually, we spent four days talking about how to teach using historically-embedded live-action role-playing games in history (and other) courses, mostly by practicing playing the games ourselves. This time, I played one game based on the Trial of Galileo (17C Italy) and another based on the Industrial Revolution (19C England).

In the first game, I was Christoph Grienberger, an Austrian Jesuit mathematician in the College of Rome. I played Vatican politics so that I was elected Pope (the first Jewish guy to do so since St. Peter!) and tried to protect Galileo, but the conservatives were unhappy and elected an antipope! In the second game, I was Viscount Melbourne, the aristocratic magistrate of Manchester in 1817-18. I tried to keep the peace between workers and merchants, all the while investing in the newfangled industrial factories. I made a pile of money and ended up with a fine country estate and a splendid house in the city as well. I had to “read the Riot Act” to the disgruntled workers and sentence one troublemaker to be banished to Australia.

For over 20 years, Reacting to the Past has used these games to teach history, critical thinking, and communications skills in classrooms in over 500 colleges across the country. The group now deploys more than 25 published games (including instructor’s manuals, student gamebooks, and individual character roles), and has over 100 games in development addressing situations from pre-history to the 21st century and engaging students with primary sources from dozens of cultures. Through structured debates and the motivating elements of collaboration and competition, students teach themselves and one another about conflicting ideas and motivations from political, social, strategic, and cultural inflection points in history. Check it out here.

It's not “re-enacting,” i.e., replicating history. Students are not obligated to do what “actually happened” in history. Sometimes, Socrates is not convicted by the Athenians. I’ve had Constitutional Conventions where they couldn’t agree on a document and the US stayed under the Articles of Confederation. Sometimes, slavery is abolished; sometimes not. Sometimes, World War I starts “on schedule,” sometimes peace is maintained. Students get to see that individuals matter and if they don’t speak or vote, their side will more likely lose.

I’ve been part of this group since 2017 when I stumbled across some of the game books at a publisher’s table at a regular historians’ conference. I was looking for some way to get my students more engaged in their own learning. What I found was a remarkable community of teachers and a way to combine fun with history. I’ve been to a bunch of conferences since and was glad when we re-emerged from COVID to gather again this past week. It was the first time I’ve been in a room with dozens of historians in over two years (oh, we also have teachers of philosophy, politics, economics, communications, rhetoric, literature, etc.).

I use several games regularly in my courses: Athens 403BC and South Africa 1993 feature in my freshman seminar on the history of democracy; Philadelphia 1787 is the focus of my course on US Constitutional history (along with a short game on the 13th Amendment); a game on the diplomatic crisis leading up to WWI was the culmination of my 19C International History course. I have also run games on the English Glorious Revolution in 1689, the French Revolution in 1789, Kentucky’s decision on secession in 1861, as well as some short introductory games.

I really love using this way of teaching (and it is not (obviously) because I don’t like to give lectures)). Student’s (most of them at least) read primary sources and argue about the issues of the day. They have to figure out practical politics of teams and factions, negotiate deals, based on the beliefs and the goals that their characters actually had. I sit in the back and watch, guide, and grade. My workload is actually about the same as a “regular” class, but what I do is different. I’m more of a coach to their learning than the font of wisdom and knowledge which is the usual stance of university professors. More importantly, students come away with a deeper knowledge of some segments of history as compared with whatever they might retain (usually not too much) from lectures, especially in terms of the context and mentality of the time and place we’re studying. They have fun and they learn more (not a coincidence).

As for me, I get to work with authors of the games I am playing and trade tips and ideas with others who are running games. As a recovering lawyer/business guy, I’ve also been able to help the organization improve its structure, management, and strategy.

Overall, Reacting has been great for me as a teacher and as a colleague. Based on many of their comments, it’s been terrific for my students too!

Vox Populi

6/10/2022

It seems that much of what passes for ‘news’ these days is really just reporting on what people (ordinary folks, that is) think, whether via structured polling or person-in-the-street interviews that purport to represent the sensibilities of a broad group. From one perspective—as a tool to predict political or commercial activity—there might be some substance here, but more often, not. When compounded—one media story reporting on what other media are reporting or reaction to such reports, I usually have the sense that (per McLuhan) “the medium is the message;” i.e., that all this airtime/ink/electrons are being spilled to create and validate media power rather than actually tell us something. Particularly useless in this regard are the reports of what “the people” think about thus-and-such factual matter (e.g., whether COVID is a bigger threat than the flu or whether China will leverage the Russian debacle in Ukraine), as if public opinion could change (or create) the real world of epidemiology or geopolitics. Just as bad are reports which (in the interests of “fair and balanced” news reporting) offer opinions on “both” sides of some issue as if the presence of some “controversy” justifies coverage when often it’s merely a tool for the media to hype up the adrenaline in order to get us to watch.

I suppose that this noise is, to some degree, the product of the modern global culture (fetish?) of democracy. It’s not enough that the masses should choose the President, but now they should also tell us what is true or good.

Looking across the world, it’s striking how much the mantra of “public opinion” seems to count, even in countries with considerably less “democracy” than the Western model. Since relatively few countries experience popular revolutions (as compared with military coups), the substantive weight of the “people” in such countries wouldn’t seem to matter much. Does anyone expect marches in Beijing, Moscow, or half of Africa to topple the existing power structure? Popular unrest might prompt insiders to launch a coup, but that aint democracy. So, what does it matter? In other words, “public opinion” (as mediated/defined/invented?) by the press represent anything real or is it just a construct for the chattering classes/politicos?

From a historical perspective, it is hard to find countries where democracy was more than an aspiration before the 20C. Thus, it has always been intriguing to me to see references to “public opinion” in the19C, even in Britain or France (which had as much of a claim to democracy as any (even with only small fractions of the population having a vote)). So, it’s important to read the phrase “public” as meaning “the powerful outside the formal governmental structure” rather than fall into the anachronistic trap of thinking of the subjects of a Gallup poll or the number of “re-tweets.”

Most modern historians would argue that there wasn’t even such a thing as the “public” until the late 17C (England, France, Netherlands, US). The 20C German writer Jurgen Habermas articulated the concept of the “public sphere” to describe the emergence of a group of people who developed and debated opinions on the political and cultural issues of the day, often in the context of salons, newspapers, and newfangled coffeehouses, they were outside the scope of official discussions within the royal court, but including an open-ended group of people, beyond a private dinner party; thus: “public.” It’s hard to imagine the birth of modern democracy without such a space and so, the “public” and its opinion became an essential part of the model.

Very often, pre-20C (indeed, pre-WWII) “public opinion” really meant whatever the leading media of the day said it did, sometimes based on their own views, sometimes based on (the very limited range of) the people they talked to. Sometimes, “public opinion” was a shorthand, used by leading public figures to project their own views and clothe them in the garb of popular support (when it really was just the views of three fellows at the club last night). All-in-all, not worth very much except to create the impression of democracy.

Now, we have polls—lots of polls—which tell us with apparent statistical validation what it is that “the people” think. For many reasons, they can be (at best) a coarse diagnostic tool for understanding our society and its politics. Certainly, they provide fodder for breathless news reports (e.g., “exit polls” for those who can’t wait a few hours for the actual election results) or for the apparently more considered question of whether “the people” have a “favorable opinion of______.” Such questions conflate people’s feelings (i.e., whether they are happy about the state of their lives) with something more objective and analytic (i.e., whether the President is effectively addressing the issues of the day or implementing his promised agenda). It’s all part of the commodification/marketing of politics.

The extent to which we now commonly take polls for politics is symptomatic of the superficiality of modern democracy (both a bug and a feature). The specialization/division of labor inherent in periodically-chosen representative democracy is based on the complexity of modern life and the inherent limited education and short-attention-span of most of the electorate. At best, polls can only provide a directional indication for policy (another reason why California’s law-by-referendum process is so cockamamie).

“Public opinion” is a great concept—in theory. But it is redolent, in Shakespeare’s phrasing, of “sound and fury, signifying nothing” or, to paraphrase the famous line about the effectiveness of advertising: “half of it is meaningful; we just don’t know which half.” It provides news filler, rationalizations, and a substitute for sound thinking. Whenever someone cites it to persuade you of something, makes sure your wallet is secure

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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