Steve Harris
  • Home
  • About
  • Courses
  • Research
  • Other Sites
  • Contact
  • Condemned to Repeat It

Precendential Seal

7/29/2022

1 Comment

 
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

1 Comment

Wonders of Modern Medicine

7/22/2022

1 Comment

 
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
1 Comment

Inequality II

7/15/2022

0 Comments

 
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.”

0 Comments

Inequality (I)

7/8/2022

0 Comments

 
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.”

0 Comments

Rights and Wrongs, Roe and Wade

7/1/2022

1 Comment

 
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

1 Comment

    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."

    Archives

    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020

      Sign up for alerts when there's a new post

      Enter your email address and click 'subscribe.'
    Subscribe

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly