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Heartland

10/28/2022

If you’re ever wondering about Vladimir Putin’s geopolitical savvy, you could do worse than start with a remarkably prescient essay written by a staunch British imperialist of the early 20C, Sir Halford Mackinder. One of the founders of modern geography and an important contributor to developing the very concept of geopolitics, Mackinder wrote his essay, “The Geographical Pivot of History,” in 1904, arguing not only for a geographic perspective on international politics in general, but also insisting on the importance of eastern Europe and western Asia in the long-term arrangement of the Great Powers.

Fifteen years later, Mackinder urged the victorious Allies to pay attention to the region as they sorted out things during the Versailles Peace Conference after WWI. He articulated the core of his thinking, the “heartland theory,” this way: “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.” He saw the “heartland” as a great swath of territory ranging from Moscow to Basra on the Arabian Sea thence east to cover what we call the “stans” and much of Siberia. The “World Island, of course is Eurasia.

In the center of the Heartland lies what is now Ukraine.

It’s not clear how much of agricultural economics Mackinder foresaw (have you checked the price of bread lately?), nor that he had any conception of the importance of the oil to be found in and on the southern fringes of the Heartland. (Oil wasn’t discovered in the Middle East until 1908 (and in Saudi Arabia until 1938)). So, we might call him lucky in setting forth this theory. On the other hand, both the Russian Empire and the British Empire (via India) had been mucking about in the region since the late 19C in the so-called “Great Game” of geo-political jockeying. In any event, Mackinder’s key point to the Brits, the French, the Germans, the Americans, and the Russians, was that geography matters and in his modern world of the early 20C, statesmen had damned well take on a global perspective (not merely one focused on European Great Power politics) in general and on the Heartland in particular. Hitler got it, too.

Now there’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then: three world wars (I, II, & Cold), the decline of Europe, the flourishing of Soviet Russia, the global reach of the US, the eventual re-emergence of China. The latter’s “Belt-and-Road Initiative” represents their awareness of the benefits of attention to the region. The US has been deeply involved across the region for 80 years, too.

If you stretch and tug Mackinder’s boundaries a bit, there’s little doubt that the Heartland is very much at the center of global affairs today. Furthermore, if you draw a circle around this region, from the Eastern end of the Mediterranean to the north of the Indian subcontinent to the Gobi desert to very gates of Kiev, you’ll find a disproportionately high concentration of global hot spots:
* Israel and Palestine
* Civil war in Syria
* Iraq and Afghanistan each edging into anarchy
* Iran on the cusp of another revolution
* Saudi Arabia embroiled in a civil war in Yemen
* 75 years of tension between India and Pakistan
* On-going rumblings between India and China
* Chinese suppression of Turkic peoples in its far west
* Perennial instability in the “stans” of Central Asia

And now, Russia launching a disastrous and destructive invasion of Ukraine.

We may be past the era of one country controlling the whole of this region. The best the US can likely do is support others to keep China from swinging its weight around too much. But the importance of the “pivot,” as Mackinder described it, will remain. Even after oil becomes a much smaller factor in global politics in a few decades, even after modern globalization has seemingly rendered much of geography secondary to webs of interconnection, even after Putin has extracted himself (or been himself extracted) from the Ukrainian debacle, the Heartland will remain central.

American distaste for far-flung foreign involvement, honed over a century of reluctant interventions may find its apotheosis in the Heartland. The threat of US engagement in WWI was enough to drive the Germans to despair and an armistice, we were essential to setting the world in order when Japan and Germany marched in the 1930s and 1940s. Vietnam and Afghanistan were costly temporizing steps. But, despite the whining of latter-day isolationists (especially of the Hawley-Cruz-McCarthy school) and the inability of “he-who-shall-not-be-named” to comprehend the nature of strategy and geopolitics, other than the US, there is no one else on the stage. (And there won’t be until India gets its act together (which will take 30 years or so at least)).

So, the Heartland is important (and, per Mackinder, has been so for many centuries); the US is the only global power, and the many overlapping and conflicting local maelstroms promise no relief or coherence. In other words, it’s not pretty but we have no real choice to be involved, unless we want to pretend that we can crawl back into our pre-modern autarkic shell.

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Das Kapital

10/21/2022

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The term “capitalism” has to rank right up there on the list of concepts with so many definitions and elaborations that they have become pretty meaningless for serious conversation without a great deal of caveating. References in the popular literature/press are even more untethered (and, therefore, useless). While preparing for my upcoming lecture series on the modern world, I have wrestled with this morass and have emerged, if not unscathed, then at least with more cogent thoughts than when I went into intellectual battle.

There are two fundamental problems.

First, as a person with some economic/financial/business literacy, I understand capital as an essential factor of production, part of the triad of “land, labor, and capital” which is the basis for any enterprise. Capital implies cash and a “capitalist” would therefore be someone who supplied the cash (aka an investor) in a business undertaking. However, translating this micro-economic framework into a macro politico-economic system is awfully awkward. In other words, calling someone a “capitalist” (i.e., a rich investor) doesn’t tell us much about their philosophy or the nature of the society in which they operate.

Second, as a person with some historical/philosophical perspective, I can’t avoid Karl Marx, whose turgid prose sprawled across what we now count as economic theory and history and socio-political engagement. For Marx, capitalism is a system in which the means of production are generally owned by individuals (or their corporate proxies); i.e. there is private property and the factors of production (land, labor, and capital) are interchanged through markets, with the outputs ending up in the hands of consumers. Marx’s problem was that a group of “capitalists” took over the means of production and thereby disempowered (and alienated) workers without capital. [My thanks to a piece by Pablo Gilabert and Martin O’Neill, which has helped me with this model.]

All well and good in terms of a plausible (if controversial) economic theory.

However, if we want to understand capitalism as a central component in the creation and deployment of the modern world, these approaches don’t really flesh out its impact or explain its history.

It is important to understand capitalism because since the demise of its two principal competitors during the 20C—communism and fascism—capitalism has become pretty much the only game in town; the winner (as it were) of the three-part series of wars (WWI/WWII/Cold War) of the 20C (this is what Francis Fukuyama meant when he famously proclaimed “the end of history” in 1992). It’s also important looking forward because the foundations of capitalism—private property and markets—have been the premises of the way humans relate to the planet and our resultant climate predicament.

Liberalism and democracy also enter into the mix. The three are not really separable and their confluence makes it difficult to juxtapose capitalism (separately) with the two other politically-oriented ideologies noted above.

So, building on Marx and others, we can describe capitalism not just as a description of economic relationships, but more fundamentally as an approach to the world or way of thinking based on economics. Stated differently, in a capitalist society we define ourselves and evaluate others and determine how to act across our lives principally from an economic perspective: morals are secondary to money.

I should hasten to add that I am speaking at a pretty broad level of generalization here and acknowledge the existence of many exceptions both in terms of populations, individuals, particular actions. Still, the reliance on an economic framework within which to see the world does seem an essential characteristic of our modern world.

While capitalism is a world-wide phenomenon, with particular flavors and practices arising in different cultures, its global predominance is due principally to its rise in Western Europe in the so-called “early modern” era (i.e., 1400-1800). Europeans, inspired by this approach to living, marshalled technologies and resources to seize control of the planet and its various cultures, thereby demonstrating, inculcating, and embedding capitalism ubiquitously. Even as Westerners relinquished formal control in the mid-20C, the informal tentacles of capitalism remained as the basis of the culture and economies in countries whether formally colonized (e.g. India) or not (e.g. China).

It's a bit of a mind-stretch to consider how capitalism came to dominate Western/European culture to such an extent (a topic I will revisit in an upcoming posting). We tend to think of medieval and early modern Europe as a Christian culture with certain moral values and there are a lot of pieces of the story as to how European minds shifted from one to the other (again, acknowledging overgeneralization). It may be that the reaction to the corruption of the Catholic Church which occasioned the Reformation undermined the established order sufficiently to create an opening for a new kind of thinking; not just a new set of values and practices, but a discarding of the metaphysic/theoretical in favor of the operational. Out with Jesus, morality, and the hereafter; let’s focus on the present and measurable realities of power (per Machiavelli) and markets.

I should insert here a brief apologia for Adam Smith, often characterized (blamed?) as the father of capitalism. While his analysis was sound and immensely influential, his own views were grounded in a moral universe (read his “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” not just his “Wealth of Nations”).

But, in any event, here we are. As with most other historical analyses, it doesn’t do much good to assign blame, either to earlier practitioners or those (us?) of the current day.
Environmentalists champion the inclusion of natural resources (broadly construed) into the market mentality; thus, calls for carbon credits or natural capital or some mechanism to handle the riches of outer space or the sea floor. Even as I endorse these approaches, I recognize that they inherently concede the fundamental premise to capitalism. And it may well be that there is no better alternative. It’s not as if the energy, freedom, and mind-boggling improvements in the human condition occasioned by capitalism should be summarily dismissed.

As we look across the last 250 years, approaches such as romanticism, socialism/Communism, fascism, and a raft of religions have sought to slow the juggernaut or ameliorate its excesses. Each has had, to date, but a marginal effect.

Nor can we go back to some prelapsarian idyll. At least we can’t engineer our way back there. A planetary collapse may force us to; but that road, however likely based on civilizational inertia, is pretty ugly and unpredictable, to put it mildly.

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It's Broke

10/14/2022

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The History biz is broke. Whether characterized as a discipline, an institution, or a profession, much of what we do and what we claim to do isn’t working very well. In many ways, our challenges are part of broader issues of academe or society at large. That only means that we need allies; not that we can wave the problems off as “beyond us.”

We can usefully look on History as manifesting in three modes: pedagogy, publishing, and public engagement. I’m not sure if piecemeal remedies will suffice or a more wholistic approach will be necessary, but I suspect that without a fair amount of more concentrated attention, each of the legs of our tripod will fail.

The way we teach students is beset with serious difficulties, particularly from those—both within universities and across the general population of students and their parents— who see history as disposable or ignorable as an essential part of education. Enrollments continue to drop (as do departmental FTEs) as universities increasingly emphasize vocational training at the expense of the “liberal arts.” Students’ media-reduced attention spans undermine our traditional emphasis on serious reading and analysis. We still have too much superficiality and name/date memorization in our assessments, especially in the “coverage”-based intro surveys that constitute and increasing percentage of our undergraduate butts-in-seats. We spend too much time training graduate students who can’t find jobs.

Most of us love to research and to write. Exploring and extending our understanding of the past is an essential part of what we do. However, a large portion of our time is spent chasing minutiae, often in the context of dissertations, that, after years of labor, show up in uncited articles or rarely-read monographs. The incentives for much of this work comes from our guild mentality and from the demands of an academic publishing industry each of whose three arms—journals, monographs, and textbooks—are seriously dysfunctional in its own right. Hundreds of hours of research, writing, and editing are effectively unpaid. Increasing prices tax the budgets of our libraries who are their only (& captive) customers. And don’t get me started on the racket of textbook prices, frequent “new” editions, and electronic bells-and-whistles.

The nature and purpose of history is under sustained attack across our society. We all remember the era when “deniers” were pretty much confined to the issue of the Holocaust, but now they’re widespread, reflecting not only an apparent existential angst, but also a disdain for “experts” of any flavor and truth in general. “Woke” wars and “cancel” cultures put a premium on controversy and performance; relegating a calm consideration and balanced judgment to the sidelines. This phenomenon threatens our political culture to be sure, but it also reinforces the disregard for academic history. Moreover, if “everything has a history,” and we understand that history is a set of constructed stories then the selectivity of the data points behind much of what passes for popular history, particularly in the media (but also the judicial penchant for “originalism”), undermines the judgment and balance which we Historians try to bring to the process.

All this (admittedly daunting) situation leads me to wonder about our viability as a discipline/institution/profession. I have to wonder who’s trying to rethink the publishing model. I have to wonder how many members read about efforts like the AHA’s “Freedom to Learn” anti-censorship initiative and think “Grossman’s got that covered; I don’t have to do anything on that front.” I have to wonder whether we’re spending too much time in the archives and too much time enjoying our intra-disciplinary intellectual debates and not enough figuring out how better to teach—in the classroom and out.

Nor are we well positioned to deal with the crisis. We are an undisciplined discipline. Our professional brains aren’t well wired for strategic thinking and enterprise management. We’re more apt to ponder than to act. Jealous of our “independence,” we view group work (aka “service”) as a requirement of academic employment, made all the more difficult by COVID, the time-suck of university governance, and the ever-shrinking roster of tenured faculty whose pro rata burden inexorably edges up. On top of all that, our senior members have job security and a short-enough career runway that there is little incentive to lift our eyes beyond the horizon. With rare forays into significant national projects, most of our time in “service” is spent either within the futile confines of departmental politics where more effort is put into rewriting by-laws or with the slightly broader framework of similarly-situated humanities departments or university Senates than coming up with better ways to engage our students and the public.

Since we’ve chosen to work in a discipline/institution/profession that isn’t hierarchical (or even managed), most of us who are concerned toil away in our own way, working on our own projects; noble and perhaps incrementally useful, but neither together nor coordinated. If these efforts don’t prove enough to change how we teach, and communicate with the public soon enough, then our independence and academic freedom will be cold comfort.

Few of these concerns are new, but they are piling up. As with humanity amid the climate crises, History is much akin to the proverbial frog in the pot of heating water. We like to think we’re smarter than the average schnook; we’ll see….

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Flush

10/7/2022

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I was recently speaking with a friend who is slightly older than I am. Having just emerged from the restroom, it would have been ordinary for me to engage in a discussion (as persons of a “certain age” often do) of what we might genteelly call “bowel efficacy.” So, I think I surprised him when I expressed my gratitude, instead, for indoor plumbing.

“Everything,” as they say, “has a history;” and so does shit. But I’m more interested in the story of shit removal than the substance itself. One of the most remarkable aspects of the modern world has been the extension of the average human lifespan and, while nutrition and health care have been major contributors to this phenomenon, so, too, has been public sanitation.

More tangibly, we can easily, via pictures and drawings get a sense of what pre-modern life looked like. We have some of the actual objects (often available in antiques stores) that were used. Historians and anthropologists have generated voluminous descriptions of life in Renaissance Italy, medieval Japan, or among Amazonian tribes. A few historians have even produced sonic reproductions—historical soundscapes—of early modern Paris. But even going to slum in contemporary Kolkata or some farm in Ghana will not give you the smell of the past. One of my favorite historical cartoons shows two elegantly-dressed gentlemen strolling in the gardens of 18C Versailles. One says to the other: “Yes, it might seem like a ‘golden age,’ if we didn’t have to deal with all these lice.” I have talked before about the importance of “mentalité”—state of mind or epistemology—in understanding the past and, therefore in understanding the nature and meaning of progress from that past. It’s no less true of olfactory sensations than other aspects of how we lived now/then.

How much of the drive to improve domestic and public sanitation was driven by these olfactory concerns and how much by a sense of the impact on public health is difficult to determine. Much of the work was started before modern germ theory had been developed and accepted (Pasteur, Koch, Lister in the late 19C). Indeed, public health concerns fostered the development of germ theory.

During an extended cholera outbreak in mid-19C London, John Snow used newfangled statistical analyses to show that germs were being passed through the water system. In addition to attacking the specific issue of cholera, it was an important instigation to the massive project of constructing London’s sewage system so that dirty water was not put back into the Thames until it had been treated and then deposited downstream of the metropolis. Joseph Bazalgette oversaw the project from the late 1850s and it wasn’t completed until 1875.

London was a busy place in the 1850s, epitomized by the great Crystal Palace exhibition which ran during 1851 (and which was the first “world’s fair), bringing the wonders of the modern age together, showing off British technology, trade, and imperial grandeur. It was the first “world’s fair” and the Crystal Palace itself (although destroyed in the 1930s), was the inspiration for our own Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.

There were many remarkable exhibits on display, but among the concessionaires on the grounds of the Crystal Palace was a public pay toilet. Apparently, it was buried when the Palace was moved to South London after the Exhibition, but was rediscovered in 2016. A visit cost one pence; well worth it to many who were touring the vast show. Indeed, it seems that 675,000 pennies were collected (more than 10% of the total number of visitors).

What can we make of these three more-or-less contemporaneous events in London in the 1850s?:
* A perspective on basic bodily functions and their relation to public health.
* Some important steps towards making proactive public health management a basic governmental function.
* Components of a plumbing system.
* A decline in disease and an improvement in longevity.

The foundational characteristics of modern (“first-world”) living is often buried in the long list of things which we all take for granted. This list has to include the wonder of the municipal plumbing network.

Generically, gratitude is a great attitude to have at whatever age. It often takes some attention amid the schedule and aggravations of the day to recall and reclaim this stance. So, regardless of my bowel efficacy du jour, I try to take this opportunity to be grateful for these scientists and engineers and their plumbing successors who provide us with this daily blessing.

As I rise from the “throne,” I reach back, press a lever for a second and … flush.

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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."

Heartland

Das Kapital

It's Broke

Flush

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.