Steve Harris
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Some Legacies of Empire

5/25/2023

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I’ve been doing some work lately on the process by which the British Empire disaggregated, in the mid-20C (mostly from1945-71). During that time over forty new countries achieved their formal “independence from the “mother country” (this list excludes the “settler” colonies: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, where the descendants of European settlers had been dominant by at least early in the 19C and which were more-or-less recognized as independent states by 1931). All of these other newly-independent states started out as republics or constitutional monarchies, generally under the rubric of the “British Commonwealth of Nations.” Since then, however, almost all have struggled to maintain a democratic form of government, with a variety of coups, strongmen (or women), authoritarian regimes, and corruption.

It’s not just the British, the same could be said of the countries from other formal European empires which ended in the 20C: Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman, French, Dutch, Belgian, American, Russian (in no particular order).

Even beyond a comparative framework, this is not a surprise. As I have noted previously, democracy is hard; and even those places which claim the strongest traditions and practices have faced some serious challenges of late. Most such places took many generations to construct a society and an economy that enabled democratic political institutions to emerge.

The British, it seems, understood this. As late as the 1940s the general sense was that it would take even the most developed African and Caribbean countries a couple of generations to be “ready” for independence. (Understanding and evaluating why imperial masters had not done much about this situation is a separate point.)  A variety of factors intervened, including local demands (some violent), pressures from the two superpowers (both the US and the USSR were at least to some degree opposed to other countries’ empires), and British moral and economic exhaustion. Things moved much faster than projected and by the 1970s, the unraveling of the Empire became mundane.

A lot of the pressure for independence came from local communities and leaders who were reacting to British condescension/paternalism/oppression. Whether their societies were “ready” to be independent from a British perspective and by the standards of the West generally, wasn’t really the issue. Indeed, any claims to “objectivity” on the part of imperial bureaucrats had to be dismissed, at least for domestic political reasons and (usually) personal ambitions of the new leadership. Moreover, the sorry state of European culture in the aftermath of the slaughter of WWI, Nazi brutality, and the treatment of colonial peoples generally undermined the moral foundations for any claim that white Euros had a better sense of what it took to be a proper modern state and society.

On top of that was some appreciation that, regardless of their value as models in the abstract, the European states and their international system were a product of their particular geography and history which was not at all an obvious basis for comparison with the African and Asian cultures which had seen little engagement with modernity until the 19C. This manifest in efforts to articulate a “third way” (between the Western liberal democracy and Soviet state-centered systems). But whether confined to theoretical explorations or expressed in the practice of government and state organization, nothing seemed to take hold with any solidity in terms of a political culture that could support sustained economic development. There are lots of reasons for this dead-end, but I’m not here to point fingers.

Indeed, I suspect that the historical contingency of western liberal democracy/capitalism and its outcome made the emergence of a democratic culture (however “liberal” or “socialist”) in these former colonies pretty much of a non-starter generally. Regardless of the viability or value of this particular model; nonetheless, it does seem that few if any of these new “countries” was coherent enough to establish a stable and beneficial political culture (which I take to be the baseline for any viable state).

The historical focus of my research project is on how the Euro imperialists thought—at the time and from their own perspective—they could go about promoting democratic norms and forms as these colonies barreled towards and into independence on the world stage. In particular, I’m trying to understand how the Brits got Ghana, Malaysia, Sudan, and other places ready to be international actors—with foreign policies, ambassadors, and a sense of the world.

There seems to be a lot of historical analysis of the “constitutional” issue at the end of empire; i.e. how was power transferred and what domestic political structures could be built to “receive” independence and govern the new country. I suspect that there are a bunch of studies of how the Kenyans took over their railroads, or the Nigerians built an army, or Jamaicans managed trade. I’m looking in another corner, but not just at the perspective of bureaucracy, administration, and protocol. I’m also interested in whether and how the British—whether through their Colonial Office, the emerging Commonwealth Office, or the Foreign Office—sought to help these folks see the world.

After all, Gambians had been involved in running ports, and folks in Botswana had been dealing with agricultural issues for a while (even if under imperial supervision). But, the conduct of foreign policy had been always reserved to the British and—unlike a host of “ordinary” domestic issues—this had been handled from London on an Empire/Commonwealth-wide basis. There was scant room for (or interest in) even the most sophisticated colonials to participate in the UN or be part of an embassy staff.

And yet, sometimes with a little engagement with international organizations or the emerging “non-aligned” movement of countries dancing between the US and USSR, sometimes with seemingly little warning, a host of countries were expected to deal with the broad and dynamic scope of the world.

The condescension from London notwithstanding, it was a tall order. Likely made only marginally easier by tidbits of training once it became clear that independence was actually going to happen.

So, I’m going to dig into this set of questions and circumstances and see if I can do what Ranke said was the historian’s job: find out what actually happened.

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Human

5/19/2023

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It’s getting harder to be human. Whether you count “humanness” from when we elbowed out Cro-Magnons and Denisovians (35-40 millennia ago) or, from Socrates, Shakespeare, or the philosophes of the Enlightenment (more recently), we’ve had a pretty good run. Perhaps, as I have argued vis-à-vis capitalism and the environment, too good a run. But perhaps we’re at the threshold of something new.

It’s not so clear what this newness will consist of, much less whether it’s “better” than the humanity we’ve been doing for a while now. Indeed, it’s pretty much impossible to evaluate, even if we had a clear picture of the future. Its strangeness makes our mentalitè obsolete and our resentment of this newness skews our ability to understand, much less “objectively” assess what life might be like, or take a stance on whether the new is even “human.”

There are many possible perspectives on what it is to be human: physical appearance, sexual reproducibility, social connection, legal status, percentage of standard DNA, some combination of intelligence and language, the presence of a “soul,” and a gaggle of attributes/abilities we might look far, such as curiosity, tool-use, poetry, and an affinity for ice cream.

Virtually every one of these aspects can now be accomplished by some (human) creation/invention; so “human” might better be defined as some collection of multiple features, not just a single one. But what to include on the list? Is there one aspect that is really critical?

Bio-engineering, which encompasses in vitro fertilization, cloning, CRISPR gene-splicing techniques, sophisticated prosthetics, and organ replacement pretty much leaves only the brain as a part or function of the human body that cannot foreseeably be constructed/replicated/replaced (so far!).

Chatbots can write creditable poetry, music, and literature; comparable devices can paint and sculpt. If these creations cause “humans” to respond emotionally and intellectually, what does it matter that they were midwifed out of a computer using a rich set of inputs from prior “human” experience. What else is “art”? Wouldn’t a rose planted and tended by a robo-gardener smell as sweet?

The challenge is not confined to pseudo-Shakespearean sonnets. Big data-driven replication of everything we do is foreseeable. From coding to design, to teaching, to legislating, barrista-ing, and taxi-driving, homo ludens (man who works) is, sooner-or-later set to be superseded.

In 1993, Vernor Vinge, mathematician and SciFi writer wrote an essay called “Technological Singularity.” He said “Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.”  [Hmmm …thirty years: 1993-2023]. The broad concept was picked up by Ray Kurzweil and more broadly popularized
In his 2005 book, The Singularity is Here, in which he lashed together trends in computing, bioengineering, nanotechnology, and robotics/AI to forecast the end of the biological era of humanity.

If we are out-done in terms of world changing techne; if we are losing the Darwinian competition for reproducibility/survivability, What’s left?  And, is this next stage “bad”? Creation for self-satisfaction seems solipsistic. Similarly narrow are those “utopias:” intellectual idylls and environmental utopias that seem more defined and valued by projecting what we (as a species) have thought would be great for thousands of years than any “objective” standard of idealization and progress. Indeed, one might ask (with Godel), whether we are even capable of defining what “human” is, since we are, by definition, in the middle of it.

A hundred years before Vinge, in The Time Machine (1895), H.G. Wells talked about humans diverging into two species: the dark, mechanistic, and oppressed Morlocks and the ethereal and effete Eloi. The former seem useless and the latter seem pointless. So, Wells could see that fin-de-siècle humans couldn’t make sense out of what such a future might hold; even if he could see that it would be radically different. I’m not sure we’ve really advanced the ball much since then. Our dystopias depict the mass of humanity teetering on the brink of de-evolution, while some  (usually small) percentage  live a glamorous life; a combination of lotus-eaters and videogamers/virtualrealityists.

If so, we had better figure out something else; some other angle on “human” existence. Is it enlightenment (somewhere between Kantian and Buddhist) at either a personal or societal level? Or, perhaps, our collective job is just to keep the species going until we can figure out something better along the way? After all, as I noted last week, enlightenment is a “process” and there’s no reason to think we have cracked the code quite yet. Who knows what we might discover/figure out/invent. Indeed, to take a more optimistic slant, if we’ve come this far in the last 100,000 years, we might get to some real answers in the next several billion years before the Universe shuts down. It might take us a while, but it could keep us busy in the meantime.

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Growing Up

5/12/2023

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I’m a big fan of enlightenment; both the historical era/phenomenon and in terms of personal development (from a certain angle, of course, they’re the same). Historians generally refer to the (French/European) Enlightenment to encompass a robust list of thinkers who flourished and influenced European culture in the 18C. This list usually features Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Diderot, and, among non-Frenchmen: Hume, Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, and Immanuel Kant.

In the middle of all this flourishing of ideas, Kant responded to an inquiry: “What is Enlightenment?” with a brief essay in 1784. He characterized enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity,” adding “Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another.” He noted that “Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so many…gladly remain immature for life…. It is so convenient to be immature.”

A brief scan around the world 240 years later shows pretty clearly that enlightenment, using Kant’s description, is very much a process and not an event (certainly not a singular historical event). There are those who would argue that, technology and stacks of scientific “knowledge” notwithstanding, we are only marginally more “enlightened” than were the denizens of the 18C and that “progress” (the self-proclaimed goal of many thinkers of that era) remains pretty thin on the ground (at least of the moral variety). Kant didn’t know much about technological development (pre-industrial revolution, and all); but he thought that, with ‘enlightening’ leadership and the discarding of blind adherence to religiously-constrained understandings of the world, we humans would move forward.

Kant’s use of the concept of “maturity” shows that he understood the parallel between individual human development and the path of the species. Eighty years after Kant, the English philosopher Herbert Spencer advanced the idea that the education of the individual echoed the evolution of humanity towards modern civilization. I don’t know if this idea works with what we understand these days of psychological development (or of what we understand of the “civilizing process” for that matter). Still, I think there’s something significant here.

Beyond the accumulation of data/memories and the laying down of thought processes, individual human maturity does seem to imply some changes in attitude towards the world. There is the accommodation of the presence of others in the world, including an extensive line of thought seeing humans as social animals, often with an ability to embody morality and altruism. I think there is also a notable tendency for people, as they “grow up” to move past instant gratification and think in the longer term [N.B. I am definitely not making any blanket statements here that either individuals or the species always do so.]

I suspect that it has something to do with the capacity to imagine the future. As we move thru and past the constant change of adolescence and approach the (relative) stability of adulthood, we can more easily see ourselves as adults (partners/parents/etc.). Our own parents shift from being part idealized role models and/or semi-adversarial bosses to people whose roles and behaviors we can (increasingly (if we’re lucky)) understand. Being socialized into increasingly institutionalized settings reinforces the ability to contextualize ourselves in larger frameworks. At a practical level, this shows up in planning (college, budgets, careers, relationships).

So much for Steve’s theory of individual development. I doubt Kant had this in mind when he wrote about human maturity, but I think the point is the same. The question he might raise is whether this broadening of perspective is, at the species level, the meaning of enlightenment.

Our societies are increasingly filled with programs for long-term financial support and health care. We invest not only in businesses but in infrastructure. We imagine the future in detail and we scenarioize, plan, and speculate about it. Our demographics, particularly our increased longevity, makes us each personally more aware of what the world will be like decades hence (our selfish gene has to be more future-oriented than it used to be).

Another way of asking the question of where we are as a species, enlightenment-wise, is to take a look at how much we feel responsible for the future. There are plenty of people and groups of people/countries who still fulfill the role that Kant described: laziness and cowardice make it easy to be immature. Altruism is especially hard when you’re not already top dog (either in capitalistic or geopolitical terms). Competition (again, of either variety) provides a compelling distraction from self-care and long-term perspectives.

Sometimes, people don’t grow up until they hit a wall or get a great shock. Kant was optimistic about enlightenment continuing, even incrementally. However, he (and the rest of the philosophes listed above) didn’t have much sense of the mind-boggling effectiveness of the technological branch that enlightenment from religion and the ancien régime enabled. They likely thought that there would be plenty of time to continue our incremental progress and that we would, in due course “grow up.” We’ll see….

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Half a Baby in the Hand...

5/6/2023

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In the Bible (1 Kings 3:16-28), Solomon famously challenged two women claiming to be the mother of an infant to cut the baby in half as an equitable split if they could not agree on who the actual mother was. The real mother demurred, preferring her son to live, even if not with her.

Such clarity and integrity (by both Solomon and the mother) is wonderful for such teaching stories, but finds rare application in the real world of modern geopolitical diplomacy. What is more common is hard-fought negotiation both as between the governments involved, each wrapped up in recursive theories of power and appearance, and intense politics within each state as various bureaucratic and political groups demand priority for their particular concerns. In the last 150 years or so, the lawyers have gotten heavily involved, leading to a lot more verbiage. One example of strategic clarity can be found on a napkin on which Winston Churchill scrawled out the allocation of influence between the British and the Russians over the various countries of central Europe in the aftermath of WWII. Stalin famously looked over Churchill’s proposal and put a big check mark on it and, as they say, “that was that.”

This all happened at a bilateral summit in late 1944 in Moscow. A year later, after V-E Da, it was implemented and, a year after that, Churchill went on to decry the impact of what he was the first to call the “Iron Curtain” which had “descended over Europe. (Unlike the mother standing before Solomon, he was quick to disown his parentage.)

I mention all this because regardless of the outcome of the current Ukrainian offensive, it is unlikely that they will retake all the territory which Russia has seized since 2014 (including Crimea). And yet, for many reasons, the war must come to an end.

Of course, everyone involved—the fighters, their allies, and the commentariat—is busy taking a position on what the shape of the peace should be; almost all of which is more a reflection of each one’s desired public perception at this point in time or an expression of hopes and fears, rather than an indicator of the ultimate shape of the peace agreement. As is seemingly inevitable in these circumstances, all sorts of historical precedents are being trotted out (nationalist claims, geopolitical history, the ever-popular appeasement trope, noble claims of the priority of freedom, etc.), almost none of which tells us anything about how to handle this situation.

While I am a supporter of Ukraine’s efforts, I am sufficiently far from the front so as not to claim the right to an opinion on what President Zelenksyy should do. Regardless of his decision, the second-guessing will go on for some years.

Of all the scenarios being bandied about, it’s hard to envision a wholesale collapse of the Putin regime, followed by an abject apology and a fully compensatory peace treaty. The last time the Russians sued for peace was in 1917 when, in the aftermath of the Soviet Revolution, Lenin agreed to give up 34% of the population and thousands of square miles to the Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey and their allies. It didn’t end well and laid down a precedent the echoes of which would be hard for any 21C Russian government to avoid. It’s a nice dream, nonetheless.

Much more likely is some armistice and the acknowledgment by Ukraine that Russia will control some of the territory heretofore considered Ukrainian. I say “heretofore” advisedly, since the borders in this part of the world have been pretty fluid over the past several hundred years and their relative stability from 1921 (after the Russian Civil War) until recently has been unusual and deceptive. Indeed, Crimea was part of Russia until 1954, when it was transferred to the Ukrainian SSR.

All of which is to say that facts on the ground in the 2020s will determine where borders are drawn; not history, not ideals, not “principles.” It will be interesting to see if Zelenskyy (or Putin for that matter) has the moral clarity of the mother in the Biblical story. Or, put another way, the geopolitical clarity of Churchill, who wrote off much of central Europe in 1944, understanding that there was no means by which—principles and sacrifice notwithstanding—Britain or the US was in a position to do anything about Russian dominance of that region; and he salvaged what he could.

“Realpolitik” has a bad reputation for disregarding morality, justice, affinity, and principle. But teeth-gnashing and hand-wringing don’t win wars (otherwise MSNBC and Fox would conquer the world). I suspect that Russia will, in fact, collapse, but later rather than sooner; a victim, as Lenin would have said, of its internal contradictions. There will be further ebb and flow of power and control over this region (as most others) over the longer term. Sweden and Lithuania were once great powers in this part of the world. Russia has had an extraordinary run of 300 years at the upper levels of the global pecking order. Few these days pay attention to the decline of Sweden or Lithuania. Chinese historians of the 22C will likely pay similar levels of attention to Russia of the early 21C.

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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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