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How is Now

8/26/2022

On the night of August 4, 1789, the newly self-constituted National Assembly, meeting in the King’s tennis court in Versailles, abolished the feudal system of France, declaring an end to the mish-mash of rights and power, inherited by the “nobility” over the ordinary lives of most French subjects. It also abolished the inheritance of public offices and reconstituted those powers in the State. It was a shift towards order and rational administration. It was an essential part of the massive disruption of the great French Revolution dated from that year. It was one component of the start of the modern world.

In 1735, Carl Linnaeus published his two-part naming system for plants and animals, simplifying a confusing mix of taxonomies compiled by natural philosophers gathering samples around the world. By 1758, his tenth edition included over 10,000 entries divided into another creation: the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. He went on to invent the index card. Several steps towards bringing order to the increasing onslaught of information being gathered.

In 1825, George Stephenson opened the Stockton and Darlington Railway in the English Midlands, carrying both freight and passengers. By 1829, his “Rocket” locomotive set a record, by running at up to 30 mph.

In the 1850s, Baron Haussmann rebuilt central Paris, Cerda designed a new Barcelona, and George Bazelgette constructed a mammoth public sewage system for London. Cities were growing and the resulting complications had to be addressed.

Since then, technology and social change have built on each of these developments. Most places are (at least nominally) democracies. Google and Wikipedia (and many specialized sites) organize and classify exponentially greater mounds of information. Chinese bullet trains routinely run at more than 200mph. Most of (a much larger) global population live in cities.

The modern world is different from what came before. Radically so in many ways. If we look at the last 250 years—more or less—we can’t but be struck by the nature and extent of these differences. These changes have gone far beyond just “a bit more of the same.” That is to say, they are qualitative, not just quantitative. Even so, the changes are hard to see, because our lives take most of them for granted. So, it’s like asking a fish to describe the water in which it swims.

So, for three weeks in October, I will be giving a series of talks about what happened and what it all means. I call it: “How is Now.” If you live near SF, you can get the details and register for the course here. It’s part of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, an organization where I have given several other courses.

There are innumerable other events we could cite. We cannot say that the modern world was born in a day. From early in the 18C to the middle of the 19C, thousands of steps were taken that we, looking backwards, describe as the birth of the modern era (although there are many historians who would say we need to start in the 15C with the Renaissance, Gutenberg, or Columbus, or at least in the 17C, with Newton and the English Revolution. But, we’re going to try to keep things a bit more contained and manageable and focus on the 19 & 20C. Many of the events, like Stephenson’s Rocket, were planned, some, like the National Assembly’s abolitions were seen at the time as major changes in the world. The English poet, William Wordsworth, in Paris during the early days of the great Revolution, wrote : “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!” Most, however, were not dramatic or self-conscious.

In these lectures, we will try to stop swimming and look around, take some different perspectives and use some different frameworks to see what this water of modernity looks like.

What do I mean when I talk about the “modern world?” There are a bunch of characterizations that come to mind: capitalist, urban, global, democratic, individualized, rational, technologic, state-driven, and dynamically changing. Now, you can’t extract any one or two of these and say: “ these the are keys;” they’re all interconnected.

But we have to start somewhere and put all of this in some sort of (artificial) order. In the first talk, we will start with the modern mentality; how do we think different. Then we will look at the physical world: our bodies, the globe and how we interact. The second and third talks will weave back and forth between economics, politics, social life, and culture.

In each case, we will look at
* both the material world and the epistemology,
* a comparison of “then” and “now,”
* some of the key developments in each area
* and how they set up where we are today in the 21C.

I hope you’ll come join us, expand your brain a bit, ask some questions, and share your own experience of how all this came about.

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Military Economics

8/19/2022

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Why did Russia attack Ukraine? Will China go after Taiwan? These are the 2022 versions of a long-standing issue: Why start a war?

Based on some historical examples (bearing in mind that I’m a Historian of Modern Europe), the point of this piece is to argue that the phrase “military economics” is about as much of an oxymoron as those other standbys: “military justice” and “military intelligence.” Whether looked at from the perspective of the nation that instigated the conflict or that of the elites of any active combatant, war makes no sense and it is usually triggered by what can only be called (if loosely) national insanity.

In the old days (i.e., pre-French Revolution), the principal purpose of war was conquest; amassing more land and people to the greater glory and wealth of the monarch and elites. This was also an era when economic thinking (such as it is) was in its infancy, without the analytic tools and statistics which enable us to assess such political moves and outcomes. After the British-led coalition finally put Napoleon down in 1815, wars of conquest were either localized (within Europe) or exported to take control of empires around the world. For the following century.

During this time, war became more complex, bureaucratic, and industrialized. At the same time, the European economies became more intertwined and globally integrated to such a degree that Ivan (Jan) Bloch famously wrote a massive treatise in the 1890s arguing that inter-European war made no sense given the interdependence of industrial economies. This gave some support to those who that that modern European civilization had matured and that humanity had moved to a new stage; hopes that were dashed by WWI.

The lack of strategic thinking that led the WWI combatants, especially Austria-Hungary and Germany, to instigate the war has since become legendary spawning a vast critical literature. But among the errors made was the dismissal not only of Bloch’s rationale, but also of an assessment of the economic strength of the combatants which, outside the most optimistic (naïve?) scenarios, would lead to their eventual economic (and therefore military) exhaustion. While Austria and Germany might have fought Britain and France to a standstill, the entry of the US, despite the (semi-coincidental) exit of Russia put the Allies far ahead of the Central Powers.

Indeed, the only pre-cursor of significant industrialized warfare prior to WWI provided ample demonstration (if anyone had been looking) of the need to assess the relative economic power of combatants. This was, of course, the US Civil War, in which the military prowess of the South was insufficient to defeat the Union and, in due course, the larger, industrialized and economically progressive infrastructure of the Union overwhelmed the agrarian Confederacy.

World War II provides an even better example, even accounting for Hitler’s strategic blunders (somewhat offset by his good fortune and the moral collapse of France). Once Britain woke up (even if quite late in the 1930s), its industrial production was formidable. When you add in the heft of the newly (if slowly) modernizing Soviet Union; much less the plurality of US military-industrial might that was devoted to Europe, it was really no contest.

It is true that the Nazi domination of Europe enabled it to draw upon a wide array of resources beyond the formal Axis reach. What we don’t know is whether, if Hitler had been more circumspect, Germany could have leveraged these resources over the long term or whether the enforcement costs of totalitarian oppression, coupled with the reduced productivity of subjected peoples, would have proved insufficient to a resurgent Allied power. (The South’s inability to mobilize the considerable manpower of its economy (for obvious reasons of not arming its slaves), may provide a clue here.)

Much the same could be (and indeed was said at the time) about Japan and its effort to out-gun the US in the Pacific.

Germany’s failure opened the door to its successor in totalitarian oppression manifested in the Soviet Union’s mid-century empire in Central Europe. While it secured control over these countries more for reasons of providing a bulwark against future invasion from the West and it’s conquest was nominally vis-à-vis Germany (rather than Poland, Hungary, et al.), the effect looked to be based on goals of pre-modern military conquest, albeit with an intense ideological overlay.

While the “Cold War” featured less shooting than its 20C predecessors, the degree of (both military and economic) competition remained high. As with the Confederacy and (likely) a longer-term Reich, the Soviets faced a uphill battle; and lost.

None of this is to make any argument about inevitability or imply that any one of these military enterprises was “doomed to failure.” There are so many ways things could have turned out differently (e.g., British mid-19C commercial/imperialistic triumphalism aiding the South, French collapse at the Marne in 1914, a few lucky torpedoes at Midway, German aviation and rocket technology in the ‘40s, or a US loss of nerve after WWII, to name a few scenarios). So, we can never know: what if…?

Which leads us to today’s crises where it’s difficult to find a scenario in which Putin is really better off for having taken on Ukraine. Russian losses are already substantial and it’s hard to see how even a series of military successes will end up given the Russians a net profit on the deal. Much the same can be said of China and Taiwan. In both cases, even assuming successful conquests, the economic destruction (and domestic force losses) make for an awfully tall bill to pay and a (very) long time needed for recovering those costs (not to mention occupation/oppression costs and lost productivity in the newly-(re-?) conquered territories).

So, it seems that Bloch was right. It just takes a while to prove in his calculations that such projects have a net loss and, in the meantime, we can only look sadly on as the delusion of would-be conquerors causes so much death, loss, and destruction.

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Outta' Sight

8/12/2022

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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.

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Smith, Sieyes, and Darwin

8/5/2022

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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

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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."

How is Now

Military Economics

Outta' Sight

Smith, Sieyes, and Darwin

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

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