Steve Harris
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Reparations

3/26/2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, here’s my take:

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

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

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

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

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

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Sci-Fi Governments

3/19/2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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Royal Families

3/12/2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They don’t make any sense. Ah, well….




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History of Globalization

3/5/2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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    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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