Urbanisation and health

A recent paper Urbanization — An Emerging Humanitarian Disaster warns that the health of people in fringe urban slums is poor and subject to various risks. Since most of future global population growth is likely to be in cities, this massive increase in a very at-risk group has serious health implications.

One of the vast changes from the industrial revolution has been urban life becoming safer than rural life. Until the development of modern sewerage, understanding of hygiene, vaccinations, etc, cities typically had death rates higher than their birth rates and could only maintain or increase their populations via regular influx from rural areas. If such influx stopped for any reason, cities would shrink.

The paper uses infant mortality rates for Kenya (one of the better-run sub-Saharan African states) as an example of risk factors. The rates (in deaths per 1000 infants) are:

Rural: 113
Urban (excluding Nairobi): 84
Nairobi: 62

Clearly, in general, Kenyan cities are safer for new-born infants than country life. This, of course, constitutes a powerful reason to move to the cities.

But the grim statistics contrast the infant mortality rate in high-income areas of Nairobi with the informal settlements:

High income: <10
Informal settlements: 151

The “informal settlements” have infant mortality rates 15 times those of the high-income parts of Nairobi and about a third higher than rural Kenya.
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The term informal settlements flags a key issue. The tendency of those with power to discriminate against newcomers is a major problem in urban policy around the world. In developed countries, such as Australia, it is regulatory control of land supply creating increased house prices. In developing countries, it is a failure to provide useful property rights at all.

This can be due to excessively complex and poorly adjudicated land laws, as in Bangalore in India where the Indian state is so incompetent in its administration of land law that there is effectively a black market in establishing and adjudicating land ownership. Or it can be because the state cannot be bothered to provide any useful avenue at all for allocating property rights. Either way, the settlements are “informal” because they have no formal status and so cannot enter into arrangement that require formal status, whether market arrangements or political arrangements. In the words of the urban health paper:

These slums, which are making up an increasing proportion of growing cities, lack not only most basic government services but also political recognition; as a result, so do their inhabitants. These residents are usually tolerated and their presence tacitly accepted, but the local government generally ignores them, accepting no responsibility for accounting for them in planning or the provision of services.

Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, and his Institute Liberty and Democracy, has pushed this issue of formal recognition and clear property rights for many years. (He has some striking comments on financial derivatives as a property rights failure.)

People in these informal settlements have economic property rights. But, without legal sanction, they cannot use any service or transaction that requires legal support and cannot legally protect what they have. This not only denies them access to basic services, it also denies them access to financing or any transactions other than of a “bazaar” (immediate swap) variety. Their assets become trapped as things they control but do not own. They are left with their labour as their sole income source in a situation where there is a huge supply of similar labour and they are highly vulnerable to coercion or other forms of predation. The lack of clear and enforced property rights is not a trivial issue.

Moreover, they live without the typical support networks they have left behind in moving from rural living to urban slum life. In the words of the urban health paper:

Though in most countries health care is more limited in rural than in urban areas, the urban environment may lack health support often provided in rural settings while also posing new risks. For example, for women and children, the rural environment provides a community of kinship that often ensures physical safety, food security, and the availability of child care. Without these safeguards, many women’s mobility is limited in urban areas. Mobility and child care assistance from more experienced women allow mothers to perform two of the three steps that are theoretically fundamental to health care utilization: identifying illness and seeking care (the third being delivering care).

The higher infant mortality rates of informal settlements make, alas, perfect sense.

This property rights non-coverage persists because power-holders are not sufficiently motivated to do anything about it. Formal recognition would require foregoing the opportunities for corruption high levels of official discretions create, they would reduce the advantage of the incumbent elite in access to decision-makers and formal recognition of their assets, they would require a much higher level of genuine service by the state and resiling from some of the grander pretensions of government.

Which is not so far from why regulation-induced constraint of supply persists in developed countries such as Australia: incumbent homeowners like the higher values for their houses, it induces a higher level of political donations (licit or illicit) by developers to gain access to decision-makers, it reduces infrastructure demands on government and protects pretensions to be able to "fairly" control urban growth in an “environmentally sound” fashion.

There is, however, a very big difference between official discretion over land use compared to lack of effective property rights and any formal recognition. A difference measured in infant mortality rates of 151 per 1000—in one of the better-run developing countries. But that dramatic difference is also a point Hernando de Soto has been making for quite a while.

Emotional Vampires

Albert J. Bernstein’s Emotional Vampires: Dealing With People Who Drain You Dry, which a friend put me onto, is the best extended use of an analytical metaphor I have come across.

Bernstein is a clinical psychologist and business consultant—the illustrative vignettes in the book are based on both family and business scenarios clearly derived from his years of experience. The prose is clear and direct and the book is clearly structured to be as accessible to as wide an audience as possible. It is also extremely practical and unsentimental. One of the repeated lines is

always remember that attempting psychotherapy on someone you know you will make you both sicker.

The analytical conceit is to characterize manipulative people as vampires. So he lists (in Chapter 3: The Way of Vampires) the various characteristics of emotional vampires: Vampires are Different; Vampires Prey on Humans, Vampires Can Change Their Shapes, Vampires are More Powerful in the Dark, A Vampire’s Bite Can Turn You Into A Vampire and my favourite: Vampires Can’t See Themselves In The Mirror.

The book is based on a basic distinction:

When people are driving themselves crazy, they have neuroses or psychoses. When they drive other people crazy, they have personality disorders (p.3).

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He examines the five most likely types of emotional vampires to trouble one’s life—Antisocial, Histrionic, Narcissistic, Obsessive-Compulsive, Paranoid. Each is briefly described in Chapter 1 (The Children of the Night) and the bulk of the book is divided into a section on each, though he notes early (p.14) that most difficult people are blends of two or more types. The first line that leapt out at me was at the end of the initial brief description of Obsessive-Compulsives:

The second-longest wait in the world is for Obsessive-Compulsive to make a decision. The longest is for them to utter even a single word of praise (p.8).

Bernstein says that emotional vampires—particularly when acting up—are emotional two-year olds and the ways of dealing with them are the same:

setting limits, arranging contingencies, being consistent, keeping lectures to a minimum, rewarding good behaviour and ignoring bad, and occasionally putting them in time-out (p.14).

One of his big lessons is, actually, they don’t think like you:

If you interpret what they say and do and according to what you would feel if you said or did the same thing, you’ll be wrong almost every time. And you’ll end up drained dry (p.17).

He lists the basic social rules of emotional vampires as:

My needs are more important than yours; the rules apply to other people, not me; It’s not my fault, ever*; I want it now; If I don’t get my way, I throw a tantrum (p.18).

In Chapter 4 (Dark Powers) Bernstein explains how hypnosis works, starting with a killer first impression (p.23) and then working via misdirection, identification, isolation, control, alternative reality, false choices (pp24-26). The danger signs of hypnosis are:

deviating from standard procedure, thinking in superlatives, instant rapport, seeing the person or situation as special, lack of concern with objective information, confusion (pp27-29).

The final warning:

if you think you can’t be hypnotized, you probably already are (p.32).

Each Type then gets its own Part. These follow a standard pattern of description, checklist of likely symptoms, analysis, mechanisms for dealing with, therapy for. Part I deals with Loveable Rogues—the Antisocials. As Bernstein points out, a bad label since they are highly social, it is other people they don’t care about.

Antisocials are the simplest of vampires, also the most dangerous. All they want out of life is a good time, a little action, and immediate gratification of their every desire (p.33).

Bernstein divides Antisocials into Daredevils, Used Car Salesmen, Bullies.

Part 2 is Show Business, Vampire Style—the Histrionics, seekers of approval and attention. Part 3 is Passive-Aggressive Vampires (deliver us from ghoulies and ghosties and people who are only trying to help p.109). They are pathological givers who submerge part of their personality—from themselves. Bernstein criticises the self-esteem push:

the same thing that is missing in all Histrionic creations—namely, an attempt to go below the surface and deal with the self in all its complexity (p.117).

I was a bit worried by this section, because I have long been aware of passive-aggressive patterns in my behaviour (which is, of course, a sign of not being an emotional vampire: that I have long been well aware of it). The Therapy For ... section was enlightening. Indeed, I had a cheering experience the other day. Something annoyed me, I expressed anger and moved on. I didn’t repress nor angst afterwards. I just did. Yay! (Of course, learning to operate your emotions in a different way can lead to some adjustment wobbles**: but you note any such and continue to learn.) But my issues come from a pathological upbringing where expression of emotion (any affection from my parents, any anger or other negative emotion from me) was profoundly suppressed (of course, they were permitted to express anger and I was permitted to express agreement and acceptance).

Part 3 is Big Egos, Small Everywhere Else—the Narcissists.

More than loving themselves, Narcissists are absorbed with themselves. They feel their own desires so acutely they can’t pay attention to anything else.

One of the book’s strengths is Bernstein points out the positive aspects of the various Types:

There may be narcissism without greatness, but there is no greatness without narcissism (p.130).

The description of what it is like to be a Narcissist is fairly scary:

They can’t feel connected to anything larger than themselves, because in their universe there is nothing larger than themselves (p.131).

As Bernstein puts it,

emotional Vampires are people who have for one reason or another abandoned the struggle with the Narcissistic dilemma. Antisocials ignore it because it’s no fun. Histrionics pretend they never act in their own self-interest, and Narcissists believe that what’s good for them is all that exists. Vampires are forced to prey on other people for the answer that the rest of us must struggle to find within ourselves.
What’s the answer? Another great rabbi summed that up:

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Narcissistic vampires break the Golden Rule, without so much as a thought. Does that make them evil or oblivious? Your answer will depend on how much damage they do to you.
The easiest way to get drained is to take Narcissists’ inconsideration personally, to get upset over what they must be thinking to treat you the way they do. The most important thing to remember is that Narcissistic vampires are not thinking of you at all (p.132).

In a nutshell,

to a Narcissistic vampire, other people are either prospective purveyors of Narcissistic supplies or invisible (p.136).

Bernstein divides Narcissists into Legends (with talent like theirs, who needs performance? and Superstars (You’ve got to love these guys! Worship them actually). The former are often highly creative and Bernstein is particularly unsentimentally practical about what creative really means (pp.146-7). He reminds us that

Narcissists are condemned to live in a world where nothing is bigger than their own egos (p.150).

Someone who deeply traumatised me seems a mixture of Loveable Rogue Anti-Social (Daredevil sub-variety) and Narcissist (Legend sub-variety). So I found the Narcissist section particularly striking.

The next Part is Too Much of a Good Thing—Obsessive-Compulsives. This where it got really scary. As soon as I finished reading the general description of the class I immediately rang the friend who put me onto the book to tell her I had been reading about my mother (and to thank her for putting me onto the book). The recognition bells started ringing with the first line

Can you imagine a vampire who drains you by working hard, being conscientious, and always doing the right thing? (p.179)

and just builds from there.

Obsessive-Compulsive vampires are deathly afraid of doing anything wrong. To them the smallest crack in their perfect facade leaves them open and vulnerable to all the seeping horrors of the universe.
Obsessive-Compulsive vampires see their existence as a battle against the forces of chaos. Their weapons are hard work, adherence to rules, scrupulous attention to details, and the capacity to delay gratification into the next life if need be. …
Obsessive-Compulsive vampires want to create a secure world by making everybody Obsessive-Compulsive. Only then can they be safe from themselves.
Here’s their secret: Inside every Obsessive-Compulsive is an Antisocial trying to claw its way out … The internal battle is too terrifying for them to face, so they force their gaze outward. At you. As long as Obsessive-Compulsives vampires are safely protecting you from your base impulses, they never have to look at their own (p.180).

What’s it like to be a Obsessive-Compulsive vampire?

Can you imagine how lonely you’d feel being the only competent person the planet? (p.181).

What are they like to be around?

Obsessive-Compulsive vampires believe punishment is synonymous with justice. Punishment is the only strategy that Obsessive-Compulsives know for controlling their own behaviour or that of other people. It is the only one they want to know.

Why punishment?

Punishment is clever device which allows good people to do bad things without seeing themselves as evil (p.182).

Their obsessive and compulsive desire for order is at war with the disorderly nature of the human. (And the emotional chaos they cause is, of course, “proof” of how much their control is “needed”.)

Mother was an almost text-book case. As was my boss at the job where it all went bad for me. I had never worked out how to deal with my parents except by moving cities, so I was pre-programmed to not handle (in fact, to revert to childhood patterns) when I ran into an Obsessive-Compulsive vampire boss.

(I told my friend that it was no wonder I had such trouble dealing with "emotional vampires" since I was pre-drained. She responded that I was already anaemic. Quite.)

Bernstein doesn’t deal with the issue of what it is like to have one of these emotional vampires as a parent—that is, someone with authority over you and considerable power to affect your own emotional development. But the book is aimed at adults having to deal with other adults.

Bernstein divides Obsessive-Compulsive vampires into two versions, Puritans and Perfectionists, but regards how to deal with them as imposing very similar problems and responding to very similar techniques.

Part 5 Seeing Things That Others Can’t (Paranoids) I read mainly for completeness, since I have not had significant dealings with any such. But then he made a comment about the strong Paranoid tendencies in Science Fiction, Paranoids and Narcissists being the two great sources of creativity (p.210), and it struck me that elements of the Paranoid mindset he was describing—the intolerance of ambiguity, the need to put everything in a vindicating pattern, the vacillation between naivety and cynicism—are not exactly absent from the Group Mind aspects of contemporary Progressivism, or political movements generally.

Bernstein divides Paranoids into Visionaires and Green-Eyed Monsters but regards the strategies for dealing with them to be very similar.

He concludes with a brief summing up of the varieties, their effects and most important elements in coping strategy—control, connection, facing your fears

the path to safety always goes through fear rather than away from it.

So

when you are dealing with vampires, there is always another choice, even if it’s only walking away ... the things that you’re most embarrassed to discuss are the things you most need to share ... when you’re dealing with vampires, the choice that seems most frightening is usually the right one (p234).

The key feature is understanding and counteracting the mechanics. There is no point speculating about how they got like that. Particularly not in seeing them as suffering some sort of sickness, because that leads one to accommodate them and their behaviours should never be accommodated (p.234). The only very partial caveat I would make is that identifying the patterns and so how it affected you can be—if allied to ways of dealing—empowering.

Bernstein’s concluding section for each Type on how that type of emotional vampires can get better I found particularly helpful since he makes it clear how difficult it is, a long term project. And never (assuming you are not one yourself) your project.

I found the book particularly helpful because, while I had identified many of the patterns of behaviour and outlook, I did not have an analytical framework in which to place them. I now do.

An extremely enlightening, accessible and helpful book.

* If it is not their fault ever, then it must be yours. Something that is never a conclusion for them, but an “obvious” premise built into the structure of the universe.
** The day I really got over anxiety patterns, I was late to the school because I was too relaxed—having squashed a dysfunctional mechanism and not yet fully developed the replacement. Getting over not expressing anger, I became harder on students. It is just a matter of being aware and adjusting accordingly.

Re-Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age

Given the level of social transformation and the extent of European rule at the time, anyone theorising about historical patterns from about 1840 to about 1970 was likely to be very impressed by the rise of the West. The subsequent retreat from Empire and Asian economic surge is likely to make one more sanguine. There is quite a scholarly debate currently going on about the ‘rise of the West’. From the C19th onwards, it was largely taken as read that the West rose and that this was a result of internal, and distinctive, features of Western/European society. What these features are might have been debated, but the general framework was largely accepted.

In more recent times, two overlapping lines of criticism have arisen, both seeking to dispute claims of Western distinctiveness. One is that the West/Europe was actually much more dependent on external influences than has been previously acknowledged. The other is that such rise that did occur was (mostly or entirely) a temporary epiphenomenon. The second line of criticism extends the first.

Andre Gunder Frank’s Re-Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age strongly argues for both lines of criticism. He starts early, with a discussion of whether regarding Europe as even a genuine continent is a bit of overblown Eurocentrism (p.2), in passing endorsing that any claim of European superiority was ultimately based on race (p.4, also p.324).

I find two things revealing about the debate. First, it does force one to think more carefully and precisely about the success of Europe and Western civilisation. Second, it is quite revealing about the current sociology of Western academe.
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It is, for example, probably no accident that Frank, R. Bin Wong, Janet Abu Lughod, Kenneth Pomeranz (John M. Hobson is an exception) are all Americans or resident in the US. No matter how politically progressivist one’s outlook, it is easier to think of Europe as declined and peripheral from an American perspective. Since the participants are all very impressed by the success and capacities of Asian societies (they are sometimes known as the “Californian” school), they somewhat reflect patterns within the US, of West Coast folk tending to look to Asia, East Coast folk to Europe (and, perhaps, Texans looking towards the developing world).

More particularly, there is a distinct “running down” of Europe, which Frank does at length. Europhobia replaces Eurocentrism. Frank goes on and on about the backwardness and economic incapacity of Europe. Talk of Europe being “backward” or “underdeveloped” evokes modern differences between, say the US and Chad. But one of the result of the great transformation we call “the Industrial Revolution” was to enormously increase the differences between the standard of living of countries. Prior to it, differences in average standards of living were much lower than they currently are. According to Angus Maddison’s estimates, the ratio of per capita GDP between the poorest area in the year 1500 (Africa) and the richest (Western Europe, which Frank would dispute) was 1:1.9. In 1998, it was 1:19 (Africa to US/Canada/Australia/NZ). Talk of European “backwardness” provides striking rhetoric, but it gets in the way of the analysis.

Frank displays that irritating habit common in modern academe whereby non-Westerners happily get allocated “hurrah” words but “boo” words are put in shudder-quotes while Westerners happily get allocated “boo” words but “hurrah” words are put in shudder-quotes. Claims of European superiority are allegedly based on race, but Frank’s own repeated claims of Asian superiority are apparently not. Frank also complains at length about the Eurocentrism of Western-created social science without considering why it was largely Western-created (or at least came to be Western-dominated) in the first place.

I find the wider debate, which Frank discusses, about “world-systems” tedious. It encourages unhelpful reifications. (Such as Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt’s prolonged wail about the evil capitalist world system frustrating the politics they like. A frustration that has nothing to do with any evil world system and everything to do with the politics they like not working due to humans not being as they want them to be, there being no reliable cognitive elite able to lead the way to social nirvana, the required information processing being beyond any centralised system, which also suffer deep problems of suppressing preferences and conflicts of interest.)

Such reifications Frank mostly avoids, since he is very interested in practical issues such as flow of money, trade, ideas. He is particularly critical of notions of “mode of production” as getting in the way of empirical analysis (Pp 322-3, 330ff). But even his talk of a world economy I find a little overstated—I would prefer to talk of (expanding) networks of trade interaction.

Frank argues at length, with much extremely useful information, that we need to think in terms of a world economy, and one in which Asia (India and particularly China) were at the centre of. He is deeply interested in interactions between the parts of the economy and the possibilities of long-run cycles across the entire Afro-Eurasia (and, after 1500) world economy. (He is a strong supporter of the notion of long, Kondratieff-style cycles across said economy.) He is largely persuasive about the former and at least intriguingly suggestive about the latter.

His geographical categories are rather problematic (“Europe”, “Asia”) while his tendency to shift boundaries of consideration as convenient mar his analysis. For example, he lumps Europe in with Africa and Americas and suggests they were less productive than Asia (P.156): almost certainly, but what about Europe alone?

Despite his deep concern for trade patterns, Frank is mainly struck by the scale of economic phenomena. Asia’s “dominance” turns out to be a strangely passive thing. Which allows him to acknowledge but downplay the increasing ambit of European trading activity. Yet scale is not enough on its own—Russia, for example, was perennially at a lower level of economic development (and was seen as such), no matter how large the scale of its activities.

The section I found most informative and fascinating was his discussion of money flows, mainly silver (Pp 133ff). This is where Frank’s Europhobia is most striking. Frank claims at length that the “lucky” discovery of American silver was the only thing that allowed “backward” Europe to participate in the global economy with any seriousness. He acknowledges that a major effect of the influx of silver into the economy was to improve China’s ability to export (since its goods were silver-cheap), so that Western export of silver from Americas stimulated production and population growth in Asia (Pp 157-158).

Yet nowhere in the book does he consider the necessary corollary: that the influx of silver from the Americas in Europe made European goods silver-dear. The inability of Europe to export manufactures to Asia was not a sign of European “backwardness” or “incompetence”, it was a natural effect of the massive flood of silver. Frank is so blinded by his Europhobia he actually quotes Adam Smith (Frank is fond of quoting Smith at length) in which Smith cites the lower price of silver (which means higher price of goods) in Europe (P. 173) and yet fails to draw the obvious corollary. Frank is happy to cite Smith against Europe, but not for.

This analytical failure then deeply flaws his entire analysis. For example, Frank sees the American silver boom as the lucky break from which European success followed. It permitted them to participate in the world economy “for free” and lowered the price of money making capital much cheaper (Pp 295-60). European export uncompetitiveness was “counterbalanced” by silver (P.292). No, it was caused by silver. Frank also fails to grapple with the huge question of differential performance within Europe. If silver was so central, why was it the Dutch and then the English who were in the forefront of European commercial expansion from 1550 onwards, not Spain or Portugal? Even with Spain and Portugal, the early period of Portugese success (Manuel the Golden) was not based on access to the Americas or American silver (though one takes Frank’s point they were still bit players even in the Indian Ocean).

But Frank suffers the problem that bedevils the “California school”. Yes, China was biggest single actor in economic system for centuries, probably millennia. Which makes its failure to continue to be so even more startling. The more peripheral Europe is painted as, the more startling its triumph becomes. The danger in critiques such as Frank’s is that they don’t “explain away” Europe’s startling success so much as not explain it at all. Even where one concedes luck, the question arises why Europe was able to exploit the opportunities that came it way to such a stunning degree.

I have previously discussed the curse of American silver. There is nothing like a huge natural resource bonanza to distort your economy and institutional development (a problem Australia suffered a mild version of when it picked the demonstrably inferior—given that protectionist Victoria had had a much worse 1890s recession than free trade NSW—Deakinite policy package over the free trade alternative).

The pattern as I see it is that the wealth of Iberia, however deleterious to its long-run development, generated various responses in European states. The French crown responded primarily by continuing the typical grand strategy of agrarian polities of trying to expand the territory under its control and directly attacking Spanish power. Lacking suitable contiguous territories permitting them to do that, the Netherlands and Britain responded by maritime attacks and investing in capital, particularly suitable institutions. This proved to be the long-term winner. That Europe had a range of states in continuous and relatively stable (but intense) competition helped drive both expansion and transformation. That it had a greater diversity of political institutions gave social selection more to work with.

What Europe had been developing since early in the medieval period was the habit of adapting other people’s ideas. Frank is aware of Europe being first civilisation to trade with (and thus interact with) entire globe (P.177). But he fails to grapple with the significance of this. A civilisation with a long history of adapting other people’s ideas that becomes the first to interact with the entire globe has achieved a huge advantage.

But Frank has an excellent point in suggesting that history has been read too much backwards. That is, European global dominance in the C19th was so dramatic and so broadly-based that scholars read too much into it and did so too far back. Marx, Weber and so forth were too “chrono-centric”, too impressed with current circumstances. Europe’s advantage accrued slowly, but then with increasing speed. Thus, as Frank notes, military technology does spread so that European military advantages before 1600 were minor. Even up to 1700 they are not striking within the Asian context. But Europe came to dominate military innovation to an extent that other civilisations (with the revealing exception of Japan) were unable to match.

Frank notes that Chinese economic growth was largely expressed in a rising population (P.156). Europe much less so (P.164). This suggests that European growth may have been more intensive (i.e. China produced kids, Europeans produced capital: presumably children in Europe were “dearer” and comparatively less produced. Though European population growth then took off after 1750.)

Frank’s argument is that prior to 1800 Europe is peripheral—yet its silver flows are central to the world economy (thus Frank argues that the Ming’s dynasty’s fatal crisis was ultimately due to a drop in American silver production). Europe is peripheral—yet by 1700 dominates three continents (Europe and the Americas) and by 1800 also dominates India is about to dominate a fourth continent (Australia). Europe is peripheral—yet its Atlantic economy is about to catapult it into global dominance. It is one thing to say European dominance was much slower than people acknowledge. It is another to bunch it all up to some sudden 1800 take-off (Frank is very emphatic that there is no sort of European hegemony before 1800 [P.332]). If Europe was so “lucky” to have its American conquests, but so “backward”, how come Asia was doing so well (as Frank keeps telling us) with only one continent? (Gee, they must have been really, really clever.)

It is, after all, somewhat plausible that having three, soon to be four, continents to play with somewhat important to European success. But why did they end up with those continents to play with? And why not Spain & Portugal as the leaders of European development? (As they got the most extra-European land first and so had it longest.)

Frank points to population/land-resource ratio as a cause for Europe being a high wage economy. Correct in general. Yet there are clear problems. England and Holland were the most densely populated, so should have had lowest wages, yet had the highest wages. Moreover, wages in Ireland were much lower than in Britain. Europe’s population was going up, so wages should have been going down (as they did in the late C13th). But it is not at all clear that this was happening. The compensating factor was increased capital (including the social capital of improving institutions). And this before the industrial revolution began to seriously affect the British economy. Institutional change was a striking European strategy: outside Europe it was engaged in much less and much later.

Frank wants to turn institutions into responses to underlying economic forces (P.325 et al). At one level, yes. Hunter-gatherer societies do not have institutions in the sense that industrial societies do. Nevertheless, he dramatically underestimates the key importance of institutions. Latin America is about a century older than Anglo North America as a European settlement yet the latter is much richer. The difference was Latin America was lumbered with Iberia-derived institutions, Anglo North America with British-derived ones.

Frank wants to equate Europe’s “free good” of silver with contemporary US’s “free good” of printing dollars other folk want, though he concedes that American productivity has a role in that (P.356-6). But why is the US so productive compared to, say, Brazil? Why do folk “over-invest” in American dollars? Because they want the security of its institutions which they judge stronger than their own.

Frank discusses how Asian labour was cheap, European labour was dear. (Europe the “backward” economy with expensive labour!) Frank notes the argument that, in agrarian societies, increased population leads to increased inequality (p.305). Frank argues that Europe had more equal and dearer wages, which encouraged capital substitution. But again, why the Netherlands and Britain specifically?

Frank argues that the Industrial Revolution (which he concedes was very much a new phenomenon) was a result of European interaction with the global economy (P.345). To a large degree, I agree. Apart from anything else, the way out of the “Gregory effect” of uncompetitive manufacturing exports due to their goods being silver-dear was mass production to drive their unit costs right down. Yet European actions still have to be understood in terms of actions within the European system, not least because that is where their trade and military activity was concentrated. (Perhaps the most striking thing about the European colonial empires is that they were acquired while the bulk of European forces remained in Europe deployed against other European powers and even those forces deployed overseas were often largely deployed against other Europeans.)

There is a hint of this when Frank tries to grapple with why Europe seems to be in a prolonged up phase while Asia is in a prolonged down phase in the last two centuries (Pp 349-50). But not enough. It is, however, surely a striking question why all the large non-European states who dominated Eurasia in 1600 (the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Iran, Mughal India, Ming China) either collapsed or went into decline between 1640 and 1740.

While I have spent a lot of time criticising Frank (and the “California school” literature), I do not want to leave the impression they are completely wrong. Frank’s immensely readable and informative book has been one of the most fun and enlightening books about global history I have read. The work of Frank and other “California school” scholars are very useful correctives. I agree with the following:

There were fluctuating but extensive Afro-Eurasian trade networks: the role of Europe was largely peripheral in these before 1500.
Europe learnt a lot from other civilisations and was not notably inventive (as distinct from adaptive) before at least 1500.
Europe’s expansion into Americas and creation of an Atlantic economy was important.
The Industrial Revolution was essentially a C19th affair.
Europe’s economic dominance took a long time to arrive.
Being ruled by someone else is not naturally conducive to development.
Analysis should start with the evidence, not presuppose it.
History needs a global framework to be most useful.

So they provide important and useful corrections. But, as is often the way with scholarly corrections, they overstate their case.

Consider the strange emphasis on the way Europeans treated non-Europeans in the “it was racism really” critiques. By far the worst slaughter for purely racial reasons was perpetrated by Europeans against fellow Europeans. Europeans practised maritime predation on each other (and Islam, as Islam did back) before they did so further afield. If one wanted to see how disastrous European rule could be for local inhabitants, one need go no further than Ireland. For the brutality of war, the Wars of Religion. The notion that Europeans treated non-Europeans systematically worse than they treated fellow Europeans is nonsense. (Though probably has extra plausibility in settler and former imperial societies, particularly ones with a history of slavery.) What is needed is genuinely universal analysis, not an inversion that replaces European virtue with European vice, Eurocentrism with Europhobia.

Who’s afraid of Cowboy Capitalism?

If one follows economic statistics moderately closely, there is little that is surprising in German reporter Olaf Gersemann’s book Cowboy Capitalism: European Myths, American Reality. Alas, there is a huge amount of ignorance, wilful and otherwise, and obfustication parading as mainstream commentary about. And it is certainly useful to have such a variety of statistical indicators in one place.

This is an update of a previous book by Gersemann comparing the US and Germany, with the comparison here being extended to the US vis-a-vis Germany, France and Italy, the major economies of ‘Rhineland capitalism’ since 1973. Gersemann is happy to concede problems with the American model of ‘cowboy capitalism’ – lack of health insurance for millions, continuing poverty of single mothers and their kids, dysfunctional public school system, ridiculously high management salaries. But, he writes:

these phenomena are not, for the most part at least, the price Americans pay for freewheeling, dynamic cowboy capitalism. They could all be solved or ameliorated without the United States’ moving more than an iota toward European comfy capitalism (p.206).

Gersemann’s point is that, on a very, very large range of economic and social indicators, the US has persistently outperformed the ‘comfy capitalism’ Europeans and this is a result of deliberate choices on both sides. These choices are, in part, because of a network of myths about the US which are very widespread in Europe. His aim is, by piling indicator on indicator, to demolish said myths and to get Europeans to think more intelligently, and in a more informed fashion, about the different choices and their consequences.

What I found most moving was his demolition of European complacency over the comparative labour market performance. He makes it absolutely clear that, particularly in terms of opportunities for the disadvantaged, the US labour market outperforms the Rhineland economies to a degree which is scandalous.

What I found most striking was his (related) examination of different attitudes to government safety nets. In the US, poorer folk are less enamoured and the wealthier more enamoured of government safety nets. Gersemann suggests this may follow from poorer Americans having a rational grasp of their high levels of opportunities to recover from problems and the richer having an equally rational grasp of their possibilities for downward mobility. Conversely, in Rhineland Europe, poorer folk are more enamoured of safety nets than the richer. Gersemann suggests this may follow from poorer Europeans having a rational grasp of their very real dangers of economic exclusion and richer Europeans having a rational grasp of their insulation from nasty eventualities. (Since poorer voters outnumber richer voters, Europe engages in more redistribution and the US less.) In keeping with this, the US’s redistributive activity is far more targeted on the disadvantaged than is the case in the Rhineland economies (pp 196ff).

Well-written and accessible, Cowboy Capitalism is an excellent compilation of reality.

The Treason of the Intellectuals

Julian Benda’s The Treason of the Intellectuals (recently republished in a new edition) is an examination of, in Benda’s words of how:

Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organisation of political hatreds. It will be one of its chief claims to notice in the moral history of mankind.(p.27).

Written in the 1920s, Benda’s basic thesis is that the modern age has been one of a great increase in both the social ambit and depth of feeling of political passions:

To-day political passions show a degree of universality, of coherence, of homogeneousness, of precision, of continuity, of preponderance, in relation to other passions, unknown until our times(p.28).

The first part of the book—The modern perfecting of political passions—puts the case that the modern age is notable for the extent (particularly in the degree they have penetrated all ranks of society) and intensity of its political passions. (Benda, or perhaps his translator, at times writes of democratic when he means demotic.) The second part—Significance of this movement—nature of political passions—briefly examines political passions as melding two sorts of desires—the desire for some material interest and the desire for a sense of distinctive status.

The bulk of the book is in the third part: The “clerks”—the great betrayal. By clerks, Benda means all those directed towards things beyond simple material interest—art, science, general intellectual activity. Their betrayal is a simple one—abandoning any sense of disinterested concern for truth or reason and subordinating what they do to specific political passions. Benda argues that some sense of the universal is inherent in any serious intellectual activity (p.162). He particularly concentrates on nationalist passions, but he refers more than once to class passions having the same adulating subordination.

This is very much a live issue. Contemporary science is clearly not immune from such pressures. While W. H. Auden was someone who very much came to reject such utilitarian art, having fallen prey himself to the temptation of it.
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Benda sees this subordination as a general phenomenon. He spends, for example, considerable effort detailing the way churchmen have come to subordinate any sense of a general Christianity to the convenience of national claims (pp172ff). Benda summaries his argument at the end of the section in the reasons for the change in the clerks:

The imposition of political interests on all men without exception; the growth of consistency in matters apt to feed realist passions; the desire and possibility of men of letters to play a political part; the need in the interests of their own fame for them to play the game of a class [the bourgeoisie] which is daily becoming more anxious; the increasing tendency of the “clerks” to become bourgeois and to take on the vanities of that class; the perfecting of their Romanticism; the decline of their knowledge of antiquity and of their intellectual discipline (pp 176-7).

These are factors which he regards as being

bound up with the very nature of the modern world (p.177).

Benda spends considerable time analysing and denouncing the clerkly extolling of the overt subordination of moral strictures to the “right of nations”. This seems to me to be something that is nowadays much less applicable. On the contrary, the demand that their countries adhere completely to designated moral restraints has become much more the flavour of contemporary political intellectualising. Conversely, his discussion of various forms of pacifism (pp186) seems to be very much spot on, including his identification of vulgar pacifism (simple contempt for soldiers and soldering) and mystic pacifism (an undifferentiated hatred of war regardless of purposes). Benda notes that one gets both those who support their country, even when it is in the wrong and those who don’t support their country, even when it is in the right:

the frenzy of impartiality, like any other frenzy, leads to injustice (p.188).

Benda regards the Romantic impulse

to exult feeling at the expense of thought (p.171)

to be particularly intellectually corrupting and to be intimately connected with the decline of classicism (p.172). Again, very much live issues. The political correctness phenomenon precisely attempts to censor thought and expression in the name of appropriate feelings.

The continuing feature within intellectual culture is the worship of the strong (or at least omni-competent) state. Benda denounces the tendency to worship the state as the epitome of the nation, regardless of justice, to the extent of extolling an amoral realism that claims supreme virtue for its wars along with an abiding contempt for those who fail to go along with this worship. He notes that it makes perfect sense in the absence of a sense of anything greater. The experience of two World Wars has undermined the martial amoral realism, but not the tendency to worship a strong state—strong for “compassion”—with similar contempt for anyone who suggests that the instrument is not worth the moral grandeur so invested in it. The amoral realism still operates—in the denial of any moral feeling or good intentions except for folk like them.

And Benda’s general thesis about the subordination of a sense of wider principles and the importance of their disinterested application also seems highly applicable. Just to take one example, those who sneered at Ronald Reagan’s categorisation of the old Soviet Union as the evil empire now work assiduously at portraying the US as the evil empire, where a successful overthrow of a murderous, aggressive dictator and a ham-fisted attempt to construct an Arab democracy is somehow “proof” of the depths of its evil, yet no amount of tyranny or systematic mass murder was proof of the Soviet regime’s. (Even though there is some fascinating statistical evidence about the significance of the Soviet Union in promoting armed conflict—while one could argue it was primarily the existence of two poles of global power which generated the dynamic, that would be to be too glib about the nature of the Soviet state.)

Writing from 1924 to 1927—before the full horrors that Leninism was to unleash on the world—Benda somewhat over-concentrates on bourgeois insecurities and their effects. On the other hand, the (rational) fear of Leninism-cum-Stalinism was to give strength to extreme politics playing to such insecurities that would exemplify everything Benda was saying.

His point about “wanting to be bourgeois” is a very powerful one. Much of modern progressivist politics represents classic middle class sneering at uppity workers, with academics and other progressivist intellectuals leading the charge. Denouncing “urban sprawl” gets much of its emotional oomph from horror at the workers wanting houses-with-gardens. Spruiking public transport way beyond economic plausibility is all about sneering at the working class male cult of freedom-through-the-motor-car. The fights over immigration are built around castigating as racist the perfectly rational desire of the working class to resist the downward pressure on their living standards from imported competition. And so on. At each stage, the “higher motives” of the advocates of putting-the-boot-into-working-class-aspirations are contrasted with the base motives of the vulgar workers (the proletariat becomes rednecks phenomenon). Despite the fact that, as disproportionately inner city types with income derived from sources that largely do not compete with immigrants, the policies they advocate patently favour their collective interests. Such collective interests are dressed up in terms of an appeal to higher standards, but the intellectual effort supporting them involves little more than that.

Nor should Benda’s concern about loss of classical heritage be dismissed. A great virtue of a “classical education” is that it did give a sense of standards and ideas that operated across time and across very different societies. If nothing else, it provided more chance that dressing up old ideas in new clothing would be more easily spotted.

One of the striking things about the essay was that its analysis of intellectual life was one in which modern intellectual debate is almost entirely a Franco-German affair, with the odd Italian or Spaniard getting a look in. Apart from one reference to the "nation of Shakespeare", Benda does not refer to a single Anglosphere writer or thinker.

The last part is entitled Summary—Predictions. In it, Benda predicts that this intellectualising of realism—by which he means abandonment of any sense of higher standards beyond those convenient for political passions—will lead naturally to

the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world (p.183).

It may even lead, through eventual victory, to the abolition of all war in a unified society of pure materialism. But the loss of any sense of higher standards beyond such realism he fears may be irrevocable. That is, that there may never been another Renaissance where a sense of such things is re-grasped, for he regards the appeal of such realism to be very strong—indeed, the natural outlook of most people.

Benda’s essay is bracing in its pessimism. It also makes one much more conscious of changes in intellectual perspectives that one might not otherwise consider. Despite shifts in context since—in part precisely as a result of what Benda was analysing—it very much remains a tract for our times.

The Messenger

Of course Christianity is a morally superior religion to Islam.

Love thy neighbour

is clearly a superior moral precept to

If thy neighbour does not believe as you do, nor has submitted to those who do, you can kill him, take his property or enslave him.

Which is a rather different thing from saying that Christians are better than Muslims. The logic of belief is not the same as the logic of believers. Christians often fail to live up to the second precept of their religion, Muslims often fail to live down to the more noxious precepts of their own. Still, it is clear enough which have the morally better set of precepts to live by, though—as the long retreat of Christianity (and Buddhism, and Hinduism and …) before Islam over the first 1000 years of Islamic history shows—it is also clear which (given equivalent levels of technology) is better set to spread.

Tariq Ramadan’s The Messenger: the Meanings of Muhammad is a prolonged meditation on the life of Muhammad, seeking meanings therein for our time (a long tradition in Islam: in some ways, the very basis of Islam). Reading The Messenger allows one to better appreciate how different Islamic religious tradition is from Christian (or Jewish) religious traditions. They may all be Abrahamic (or Mosaic) monotheisms, but it is a mistake to see them as having the same dynamics, particularly regarding the role of religion in politics.

Tariq Ramadan is the very Westernised face of Islam: he holds an academic position in a Western university, lectures in the West and The Messenger is clearly aimed at a Western audience: both Muslim (there is a definite subtext of finding references in the life and Revelations of the Prophert to help being a Muslim in the West) and non-Muslim (there is a definite subtext of finding reassuring congruences for interested Westerners). The term Islam, Ramadan explains, means submission, but also peace and whole-hearted self-giving (p.1).

Ramadan is at pains to point out Muhammad’s concern for nature, his generous attitude to women (openly seeking their advice, appointing a woman to lead household prayers, permitting them to fight). The Prophet’s self-effacing reasonableness is constantly stressed. Muhammad comes across as a man of great spiritual charisma and personal decency. Ramadan conveys the attractiveness of Muhammad and his message well.

So this is Islam in its least confronting form. Which is still pretty confronting, if one considers the implications of what Ramadan is saying.
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It is clear from The Messenger and elsewhere that Muhammad Arabised monotheism. Through accepting his Revelation and Prophethood, Arab (and later) Muslims claim the entire prophetic tradition from Adam, through Abraham and Jesus with Muhammad, an Arab, as its capstone and completion. The Qur’an, the Book of Signs recited in Arabic, as the direct Word of God made all previous Scriptures superfluous.

As part of this taking of possession, descent is claimed from Abraham’s son Ishmael. The Arabs are the great nation that God promised would flow from Ishmael (p.3). Abraham's confrontation with God, the willingness to sacrifice his son, is said to have taken place in the Mecca region and Abraham and Ishmael are supposed to have built the original shrine at Mecca themselves (p.3). Jerusalem itself is appropriated, because that is the point from which Muhammad’s night journey to Paradise left Earth. Arabia (specifically Mecca) is the beginning (Abraham) and the end (Muhammad) of the prophetic tradition. Which is why The Messenger starts with the story of Abraham and Muhammad as a descendant of Abraham (p.3).

By claiming to complete the prophetic tradition that is explicitly identified with that of the Jews and the Christians, conflict is essentially built-in, since it is a claim to possession and completion of the same tradition. The failure of Jews and Christians to accept Muhammad’s message becomes a wilful failure.

This is essentially the same basis for conflict as that between Jew and Christian—that the Jews produced the Messiah then failed to acknowledge Him—which is reflected in the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. Except that Christ and His disciplines were all themselves Jews. And they were all simply preachers and teachers. Which is why all one gets in the New Testament is some hostile words. (Though, as Christians acquired temporal power, the alleged crime of deicide led to a long—if erratic—history of brutality and massacre. Biologised Jew-hatred then led to even greater horrors.)

It is perfectly true that parts of the Qur’an suggest tolerance for the people of the book (as long, of course, as they accept Muslim rule). It is also true that Muslim empires early in their rule practiced rather more toleration of their Jews and Christians than became the pattern in Christendom after the Carolingian period. But that was when Muslims were also a minority ruling populations who were mainly other monotheists (Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians). The longer time marches on, and the more dominant Muslims become in the surrounding population, the more wilful the Jewish and Christian refusal to accept the final Revelation becomes and the less reason to tolerate the same there is. In our times, the Jewish flight from Muslim lands in the Middle East is now being followed by by a Christian flight. While the first great megacide of the C20th was of a Christian dhimmi group in a Muslim empire. Emphasising the universal nature of the message of Islam increases the inherent conflict, rather than reducing it.

In the case of Muhammad—who rapidly became a political and military leader—and the Qu’ran, the rhetoric and the actions against Jews are harsher than in the New Testament. The combination of more power and greater cultural distance is not a happy one. In The Messenger, the military conflict with Jewish tribes is presented as resulting from the Jewish tribes treacherously failing to keep agreements with Muhammad—i.e. was not the Prophet’s fault, not the fault of Islam.

It is quite clear from The Messenger that Muhammad had much more contact with Judaism than Christianity, hence (apart from its universalism) Islam is rather more like Judaism than Christianity. Such as halal being very similar to kosher in content and role. But a Judaism not transformed by the disasters of the Babylonian Captivity and the Diaspora, so still a religion of social order aspiring to law-giving status. In Islam, a judge is a religious figure. Which again goes back to origins of Islam: Ramadan gives us a case of Muhammad appointing a judge for Yemen and asking on what basis he will make his judgements. His appointee responds: first the Qur’an; if the answer is not there, the tradition of the Prophet; if the answer is not there, he will give an opinion. An answer Muhammad is happy with (p.199). In Christianity, canon law is men attempting to regularise principles enunciated in Scripture. It never aspired to be the basis for all law, since that would be against Scripture. Shar'ia is God's law and is the first basis of law.

Islam is not, as disaster led Judaism to become, a religion of community order accepting being embedded in wider social orders it does not control. Though some versions of Islam—such as the Ismailis—have essentially gone down same path, becoming a religion of community order. And for the same reason: being a permanent minority.

Since Islam has appropriated the Jewish prophetic tradition—indeed, proclaims itself to be the completion of that tradition—it also appropriates any claim to Jerusalem. Christianity, by reverting to being the religion of moral order that is proclaimed in the New Testament—rather than including Old Testament territorialism—can live with Jewish claims to Jerusalem with relative ease. Indeed, Jerusalem as a Jewish city—as it was in the time of Jesus—can seem entirely fitting. There is nothing particularly self-contradictory about Christian Zionism. Islam by contrast, as a universal religion of social order and one, moreover, that specifically takes possession of the Jewish prophetic tradition, naturally finds any Jewish claim to Jerusalem an inherent affront. Zionism becomes naturally a religious affront to Islam in a way it simply isn’t to Christianity.

For Muhammad was not merely a preacher, he was also a ruler and conqueror. Ramadan points out that the Prophet regarded inner jihad (struggling with one’s wrongful impulses) was greater than outer jihad (waging war for Islam) (p.194). But that obscures the deeper point: for Muhammad fighting a war is on the same spiritual continuum as self-control. In Islam, laws about war are part of the religion, and part of the religion from its earliest days. The religious duties of Islam include war. The entire notion of the divisions of the world in Islam reinforce this.

And, though Ramadan elides the point, aggressive war for Islam. It is not some sort of weird accident that, after his death, Muhammad’s Companions engaged in the greatest outburst of religious conquests in human history, including designated warriors for the expansion of Islam. Or that religious conquest continued to be central to the history of Islam for the next thousand years. They were a continuation of the Prophet’s ministry.

Yes, it is clear enough that the suicide bombers of our time are committing great offence against what the Prophet said about fighting wars, just as the oppressive treatment of women in the Prophet’s homeland is an offence against how he treated women. But neither come out of nothing in Islam.

Consider submission. Ramadan points out that various Companions found submission to the Revelation of the Prophet a burden at times. It was not only a message of spiritual liberation.

In Islam, virtue is based on submission: the more thorough the submission to the Revelation and sayings of the Prophet, the greater the virtue. But the submission has to be appropriate to the level of the person. So a good woman has to submit more than a good man: an unbeliever more than a believer. It is a layered pattern of submission.

Which makes it also a pattern of domination: men dominating women; believers dominating unbelievers. Making submission the central theme brings domination as the natural consequence. Such patterns of domination become the pattern into which Islam naturally falls.

So claims by a Jewish state to equal status, claims by women to equal status, claims by gays to equal rights, all become religious affronts. Even more affronting if they come out of, or exemplify, a social order which is much more successful than God’s social order. The response to which clearly has to be more strict adherence to God’s social order—the Islamist move.

Paul Berman has written a very long essay on Ramadan: which is as much about the reaction of liberal intellectuals to Ramadan and Islamism as Tariq Ramadan himself. It includes a passage that brings out the essential problem of parading a C7th ruler—no matter how charismatic, how personally modest and reasonable—as the epitome of moral, spiritual and political understanding:

Sarkozy brought up … the proper punishment for women who commit adultery. … what about Tariq Ramadan, Sarkozy asked? What is his own position? … Ramadan, in Buruma's account, "replied that he favored a moratorium' on such practices but refused to condemn the law outright."

Sarkozy: A moratorium.... Mr. Ramadan, are you serious?

Ramadan: Wait, let me finish.

Sarkozy: A moratorium, that is to say, we should, for a while, hold back from stoning women?

Ramadan: No, no, wait.... What does a moratorium mean? A moratorium would mean that we absolutely end the application of all of those penalties, in order to have a true debate. And my position is that if we arrive at a consensus among Muslims, it will necessarily end. But you cannot, you know, when you are in a community.... Today on television, I can please the French people who are watching by saying, "Me, my own position." But my own position doesn't count. What matters is to bring about an evolution in Muslim mentalities, Mr. Sarkozy. It's necessary that you understand....

Sarkozy: But, Mr. Ramadan....

Ramadan: Let me finish.

Sarkozy: Just one point. I understand you, but Muslims are human beings who live in 2003 in France, since we are speaking about the French community, and you have just said something particularly incredible, which is that the stoning of women, yes, the stoning is a bit shocking, but we should simply declare a moratorium, and then we are going to think about it in order to decide if it is good.... But that's monstrous--to stone a woman because she is an adulterer! It's necessary to condemn it!

Ramadan: Mr. Sarkozy, listen well to what I am saying. What I say, my own position, is that the law is not applicable--that's clear. But today, I speak to Muslims around the world and I take part, even in the United States, in the Muslim world.... You should have a pedagogical posture that makes people discuss things. You can decide all by yourself to be a progressive in the communities. That's too easy. Today my position is, that is to say, "We should stop."

Sarkozy: Mr. Ramadan, if it is regressive not to want to stone women, I avow that I am a regressive.

Some six million French people watched that exchange. A huge number of Muslim immigrants must have been among them—the very people who might have benefited from hearing someone speak with absolute clarity about violence against women. Ramadan couldn't do it. Here was his Qutbian moment, the moment of frisson. The seventh century had suddenly appeared, poking out from beneath the modern rhetoric of feminism and rights.

This is the fundamental tension with modernity. At the heart of Islam, even in the Western-friendly Islam of Tariq Ramadan, is the claim that fundamental principles of social order—including the basis of law—were worked out—for all time—in C7th Arabia. And modernity shrieks that that is not true. While Islam remains a religion of social order—which has always been, right from its beginnings—its relationship with modernity will always be fraught.

Ramadan’s reasonableness ends up showing how profoundly true that is. The Messenger is a highly readable and informative book about the founder of Islam: perhaps more informative than the author quite intended.

ADDENDA This post has been edited to correct an error in attribution.

The Seven Daughters of Eve: the iceman telleth

The Seven Daughters of Eve by Bryan Sykes is a book on using DNA to chart human history by the geneticist who was the chief genetic investigator of the Iceman.

The team developed technique for identifying DNA from very old biological samples (typically teeth). The book tells the tale tracing the ancestry—and thus the apparent migration routes—of various human populations, starting with the puzzle of where Pacific Islanders had come from. In particular, tracing mother-daughter lines through mitochrondrial DNA which is passed from mother to daughter.

Sykes is good at explaining the science and recounting his own experiences. The book is highly informative on how genetics can trace human history. Sykes did an internship as a journalist and has a journalist’s eye for the engaging anecdote and the use of personal interest angles (such as controversies between scientists).

Sykes was also involved in identifying the remains of the Romanovs, which makes a great little DNA who-was-it.

The central idea of the book is the identification of seven “clan mothers” from whom the entire European population is descended—hence the title of the book. Seven chapters are devoted to invented biographies of the “clan mothers”. These are a bit twee and somewhat sanitised.

The major scientific controversy in the book is the conclusion from the study of the genetic origins of Europeans that the neolithic farmers largely intermarried with the existing paleolithic hunter-gatherers rather than supplanting them as Cavalli-Sforza argued. There has been some tendency for genetic research to discover intermarriage rather than one population supplanting another.

Apart from being an engaging story of scientific controversy—which Sykes and his team won when Cavalli-Sforza conceded that the neolithic farmers were responsible for about 26% of the genetic base of the European population—this section was of particular interest to me since the Rulers and Subjects presentation I developed incorporated Cavalli-Sforza’s claim of farmers supplanting hunter-gatherers (which certainly has been the pattern elsewhere—such as Australia). The rate of the spread of farming across Europe was still very slow, so one suspects that pressure from farmers may have driven the hunter-gatherers to take up farming in self-defence.

But that is much of the fun of the growing use of DNA to expand our understanding of our history. Before the Dawn is a more broadly informative book than Seven Daughters, not least because Sykes’ shares the contemporary academic tendency to be a bit rose-tinted about the violent bits of the early human story. Even so, Seven Daughters is a fun and informative read.

Betrayal

Betrayal: the Crisis in the Catholic Church by Boston Globe reporters covers the Catholic church child-sex abuse scandal. The scandal was concentrated in—but hardly restricted to—the Boston archdiocese, the only US archdiocese where Catholics are a majority of the population and the Cardinal Archbishop was expected to be a tribal leader.

At some point, gay folk tend to take the hateful, deceitful and hypocritical nature of the Catholic Church—and particularly the Church hierarchy—for granted. Yet the story that Betrayal tells is so shocking and outrageous, that it goes beyond one’s worst expectations. The title itself comes from a quote from Cardinal Archbishop Law, driven out of office by the scandal:

Betrayal hangs like a heavy cloud over the Church today.

The book starts with the Rev John J. Geoghan case as the trigger point for the public explosion of the scandal. Geoghan was an unrepentant serial predator. In a court case, the role of Cardinal Law in protecting Geoghan came to light. A story about a child molesting priest became a story about the Church hierarchy protecting a child molesting priest which became a story about a pattern of abuse, abusers and the complicity of the hierarchy.

Which turned out to extend way beyond Boston and way beyond Cardinal Law—Bishops resigned in the US, Poland and Ireland (p.4). The moving of accused priests from parish to parish was a common pattern (p.5). The Santa Fe archdiocese and Dallas diocese were both threatened with bankruptcy over law suits from victims (pp.42-3).
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There is a chapter on the Geogham case. Geogham was a completely un-self-reflective offender: regularly being accused, regularly being moved and “cured”, regularly re-offending. A pattern ultimately extending across decades.

A chapter on the pattern of cover-ups follows. Then a chapter on the predators, focusing on various individual priests. One Paul Shanley is a pin-up boy for everyone’s prejudices. Openly gay, sexually radical, connected to the man-boy “love” movement, Shanley publicly and flagrantly contradicted Church doctrine. Yet was protected every bit as thoroughly as any other of the paedophile priests. Doctrine wasn’t important: protecting the authority of the priests and the standing of the Church was.

The chapter on the victims is fairly harrowing. Then a chapter on the eruption of the full extent of the scandal in to the public limelight—particularly after the Boston Globe Jan 31 2002 report that scores of priests were involved—and the resulting public anger.

Chapter 6, The Decline of Deference looks at the damage in the standing of the Church. One theme is that career women—naturally pre-disposed to be a bit askance at the claims of the Church hierarchy—were important in various breakthrough prosecutions and judgements. While married men had been very much part of the soft-complicity the Church had relied on (such as exempting priests from mandatory reporting laws, p.134). However, once the extent of the problem became increasingly obvious, it was precisely such married men who felt most betrayed and very angry.

Kevin Burke, DA in Essex County puts it well:

… what really struck me, in communications with the archdiocese, was that there was never any concern shown for the victims. Not the slightest nod of concern for these young people whose lives were turned upside down by this abuse. In hindsight, it’s striking and shocking that Church leaders failed to meet their moral responsibility. … They weren’t sorry for what happened to those kids. They were sorry they got caught. I don’t think the cardinal and the rest of the hierarchy ever really got that they were dealing with kids here. I don’t think they see that even today. They see them as adults coming forward, not as kids to whom this despicable stuff was done (p.130).

As does Attorney-General Reilly:

What really offended me was knowing how the Church had been harsh on and intolerant of people who had done things which, by comparison, paled in significance. Look at the way the Church treats divorced Catholics, like pariahs, not allowed to remarry in the Church. Look at how intolerant and tough they were on gay people< (p.130).

Or on a 72-year old nun who was evicted for baptizing two boys:

This was a nun who gave her life to the Church. And then look at how they treated priests who raped children. We throw this word abuse around, and it’s a nice, inoffensive word. In many of these cases, it wasn’t abuse. It was rape. They were raping children. Where’s the indignation? Where’s the moral outrage? The intolerance and the hypocrisy of the Church lies at the heart of a lot of this. All of this came to a slow boil for me. To be covering up for those who rape children while being so judgemental of others, the hypocrisy is just breathtaking (p.131).

Of course, both protecting paedophile priests and expelling the nun protected the authority of priests. While dealing with the pain caused by Catholic doctrine would imply the Church had been wrong on major matters, with all sorts of implications for its authority.

The chapter ends with a chilling case of a brother and sister whose abuser was prosecuted. The prosecutor in question became a judge and was shocked, ten years, later to find the girl suicidal and the boy working on the streets as male prostitute (pp 138ff).

A chapter on Cardinal Law follows: his ambition (he wanted to be the first American Pope) and moral failure. Then a chapter on sex and the Church, including issues such as homosexuality, celibacy, use of in-house treatment centres and seminary training. (The last has clearly improved greatly in recent years.) The wish by the hierarchy to scapegoat homosexuals and homosexuality was clear early on. Not helped by a refusal to separate paedophilia from homosexuality, despite lots of evidence that homosexuality has no more to do with paedophilia than heterosexuality does.

It is certainly true that much of the betrayal of trust with adolescents was homosexual and that the priesthood is disproportionately homosexual. But the priesthood always has been. St Peter Damian denounced a secret “sodomite” church-within-the-church in the C11th. Ladurie’s classic study Montaillou reports networks of homosexuals who were urban and clerical. Given that Catholic doctrine decrees no social place for the same-sex oriented—and for centuries the Church successfully laboured so that there would be no public place for them—where else did they have to go except the Church?

The ninth and last chapter is about efforts for change in the Church either encouraged or created by the scandal. It includes the (correct) suggestion that the Cardinals would likely choose an elderly successor to John Paul II upon his death, in part to encourage decentralisation from Rome, since long reigns encourage centralisation (p.201). An Afterword brings things up to date.

There is no equivalent in the Protestant Churches in the US for this sustained indifference by the Catholic hierarchy to the molestation and rape of children. In the words of a sociologist who studies clerical misconduct:

There are absolutely no Protestant equivalents … You don’t have rapacious serial predators and the Protestant establishment doesn’t tolerate it the way the Catholic establishment has (p.167).

Why? Betrayal reports rather than analyses. Still, conclusions can be drawn.

The most obvious reason is a simple, even banal one: the Protestant establishment is overwhelmingly married-with-kids. They were much more likely to empathise profoundly with any abused children and the parents because they were parents themselves.*

The second reason is the centrality given to priestly authority. It is clear that, again and again, protecting the authority of the priesthood trumped protecting children. It is the same outlook which effectively holds that one can kill any number of Jews and not get excommunicated (Hitler, Himmler, Heydrich and Eichmann were all born and raised Catholic, none were ever excommunicated): but threaten priestly authority and excommunication will be wheeled out.

There is a third, less obvious, reason: the patterns of Catholic doctrine.

Catholic doctrine on sex is not a structure of morality based on human purposes, but one of taboos based on form and function: one based profoundly on ignoring people’s (inconvenient) feelings and aspirations, no matter how intense and heartfelt. Not merely ignoring them, but deeming them of no warrant (or worse).

Any system of taboos parading as a system of morality must be fundamentally based on the denial of human feeling and aspirations, no matter how intense such feelings. The Catholic hierarchy were just doing what comes naturally according to the underlying patterns of Catholic doctrine. It was just a matter of ranking taboos, and the taboos of priestly authority and the standing of the Church came first.

So, again and again, people in priestly authority steeped in Catholic doctrine ignored the (inconvenient) intense feelings and experiences of the victims of sexual predators, not despite being steeped in Catholic doctrine but as a natural consequence of being so steeped. The (inconvenient) experiences of the children—not matter how intense—could be (and were) systematically treated to be of much lesser importance, indeed discounted and ignored: sacrificed to maintaining priestly authority. Thereby following the underlying pattern of Catholic doctrine: with no parental feelings to counteract them.

A couple of thousand years ago, some words were uttered to another group who thought rules about forms and taboos were the best way to serve God: were, in fact, the Word of God. Words that have certainly not lost their potency.

* One may then well wonder if that does not have wider implications for Catholic doctrine. Yes, of course it matters for Catholic doctrine that it is the creation of celibate males. That truth-is-true regardless of who propounds it shields Catholicism from considering this point. If however, Catholic doctrine is seen as something other than merely The Considered Truth, that doctrine on sexual matters is only-decided-by-celibate-males immediately becomes more problematic.

Montaillou

Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error is one of those books that, if you are seriously interested in medieval history, looms as A Text To Get Around To Sometime.

And yes, you should. As far as I am aware, it is the only anthropological study of a medieval village. LeRoy Ladurie realised that, since the Inquisition asked much the same questions an anthropologist would (though for different reasons), a complete enough set of records from the Inquisition about a parish would provide the material for an anthropological study of medieval village. Which is what Montaillou is.

That would make it valuable in itself. What makes it a treasure is being done by a lucidly perceptive and highly knowledgeable medieval historian.
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He starts by giving a brief history of Catharism, introducing us to the severe and efficient Jacques Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers from 1318 to 1325 and then Pope Benedict XII--thanks to whom the Inquisition was so diligent and the records so comprehensively preserved in the Vatican archives--before outlining the local geography.

Then we move into Part One The ecology of Montaillou: the house and the shepherd which sets the scene. The book’s chapter headings are very anthropological: (Environment and authority; the domus; A dominant house: the Clergue family; the shepherds; the great migrations; the life of the shepherds in the Pyrenees; the shepherd’s mental outlook).

Part Two of the book (An archaeology of Montailou: from body language to myth) takes us through life patterns and beliefs. From, as the chapter headings say, Body language and sex to Magic and the other world.

Montaillou was a mountain village, somewhat out of the way. It had limited law-and-order and protection issues. Apart from the village bayle (bailiff), who represents manorial authority, and the local chatelain, the nobility is peripheral to the day-to-day life of the village. They were free peasants rather than serfs.

Since the village is divided between Catholics and Cathars, the main thing folk need protection from is the Church, with its tithes (being more vigorously enforced) and its Inquisition. Throughout the book , the presence of the Inquisition, and the fear and danger of its informers, is palpable. Anyone familiar with writings on and from modern police states will recognise the patterns immediately. But, then, the medieval Church pioneered so many of the techniques of modern totalitarianism: enforced ideological conformity, show trials, censorship, propaganda, agitprop. The destructive effect of informers is just part of the package.

But it is also a slower process, one rather less pervasively brutal than later efforts. Some of the individuals we meet end up burned at the stake, but only a few. Prison, penance, wearing of yellow crosses are much more common punishments.

The local priest belonged to the dominant family (his brother was the village bayle). They had connections, particularly to the court of the Count of Foix. The priest was also an inveterate womaniser and a Cathar. (The Inquisition got both of them in the end, they died in prison.) As the twin pressures of tithes and Inquisition squeeze, their local regime eventually cracked and fell.

The sources are very forthcoming about sexual habits and outlooks of the village. One is struck by how “modern” so much of their sexual behaviour and outlook is. Such as the peasant woman who opined about sex with the priest

I liked it. And so it could not displease God. It was not a sin (p.159).

Which seemed to express the peasant consensus—if it was consenting and not a sin (and not incest), it was fine. Folk formed temporary unions. Marriages failed (though ending via separation rather than divorce).

There were even homosexual networks in the urban areas (p.144), who mostly do not get bothered (apart from the occasional burning at the stake, that is). Though the discussion is somewhat marred by Ladurie apparently having a “recruitment” model of homosexuality in his head.

The Church was not very successful at inculcating its sexual taboos in popular attitudes. Not helped by priests often being particularly sexually active (in both the womanising and the homosexual networks) and having a reputation for being sexually active. But then priestly celibacy was about stopping priestly marriage. Concubinage seems to have been largely ignored.

This is not to say the populace was not interested in matters religious. They were often deeply interested. Ladurie notes the pervasive concern for salvation—which does not seem to have been merely a product of the obsession of the examining clerics. The peasants of Montaillou concerned themselves with salvation much as contemporary folk do about happiness. And there were peasant freethinkers, who denied Church doctrines comprehensively.

The Church was faced with genuine religious competition. The Cathar parfaits or goodmen had significant local influence, and often provided a higher moral tone than local priests. The Inquisition broke Catharism in the end, but it took decades.

Ladurie also makes it quite clear that folk wandered back and forth between Catholicism and Catharism, with certain amount of “mixing and matching”. It was a fight as much within as between people. The point also made in Duffy’s excellent study of a Reformation parish in England, The Voices of Morebath; in John Zaller’s work on mass opinion and by Alan Wolfe about what contemporary American attitudes show about the “culture wars”

Such base similarities with modern behaviour and outlooks also come out of another famous study of a parish, Eamon Duffy’s wonderful The Voices of Morebath. What was very different was their limited sense of the outside world, their sense of how the universe worked (different, but surprisingly unmagical) and the social structure they were embedded in. Delousing, for example, was a common social activity. One important for how the gossip networks operated.

It was a society organised around the domus, the household. As Ladurie points out, one did not marry an individual so much as the domus. Love matches occurred, but they were not always possible. And marriage was very much preferred for the raising of children. Though we do meet a single mother who struggled to support her children by wine selling. Alms giving was also important.

It was also, as Ladurie points out, a world where men and women lived in a completely shared cultural matrix. It was later, with the C16h introduction of parish schools, when their cultural experiences became more distinct, part of the pattern of the decline of the status of women in the post-medieval period.

In The Subversive Family, Ferdinand Mount makes the point that relying on Church sources to understanding popular attitudes to love, marriage and other areas of Church doctrine is much like trying to divine Soviet popular attitudes from reading Pravda. Ladurie’s Montaillou lets us hear the voices of the peasants under the questioning of the Inquisitors, and provides a rare light into popular outlooks, as well as the patterns of life, in the medieval period.

Cultures Merging

I admire the work of economic historian Eric Jones. So it was with some pleasure I took possession of his latest book, Cultures Merging: A Historical and Economic Critique of Culture. Particularly as I had been doing some writing and thinking on the public policy implications of cultural diversity (partly as a result of some empirical results from the housing consultancy work I had previously done). I read a considerable slab of the book eating a kangaroo lasagne in a café with a very English name (The Gravy Train) run by an Austrian immigrant in one of the most ethnically diverse areas (Footscray region of Melbourne). Which was very apposite, given the books is very much interested in the ways cultures adjust, interpenetrate and change.

I find Eric Jones’ general analytical approach congenial. History matters, incentives matter, selection pressures are central to understanding what happens. There is no cognitive elite who just know what is right. Such claims are typically self-serving.

Cultures Merging is a serious attempt to grapple with understanding how to analyse the causal significance of culture. There are many difficulties to deal with, starting with how to accurately observe culture in operation. Prof. Jones argues against both cultural nullity (culture as causally irrelevant epiphenomenon) and cultural fixity (cultures as continuing unchanging).
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The first part of the book is about analysis of culture. Thus Prof. Jones discusses the revival of cultural explanations among scholars (including some economists), analyses cultures as fluid and sticky, as tending towards mediocrity (due to limited selection pressures), the ways in which they merge and interaction with institutions.

There are lots of striking observations—such as citing an analysis pointing out Christianity encouraged behaviour patterns which made life easier for the urban poor in the Roman Empire (Pp 94-5). Or citing an estimate that, prior to railroads, land transport was typically 15 times dearer than water-borne transport (p.88). Information and travel costs are clearly important to the way cultures evolve. Larger language areas have definite advantages. He notes that the more recently settled regions (the Americas and New Guinea) have about half the surviving languages (p.93). Falling information costs are clearly very important in modern trends in cultures.

Prof. Jones notes that it was the rise of a reading public (already clearly expanding) which gave the printing press’s arrival in Europe such an impact (p.100). Longstanding Chinese advantages in disseminating farming techniques dissipated once significant numbers of European farmers could read for themselves (p.101). He regards the striking thing about American culture being its syncretism which, coupled with powerful means of dissemination, generates fears of cultural contamination by others (Pp 86-7).

Prof. Jones politely disagrees with the “California school” which seeks to downplay European achievement and boost China, noting some conceptual problems and contrary empirical evidence (Pp 112ff). Such as indications of superior European economic performance prior to industrialisation (Pp 113-114). He is particularly impressed by the rise in Europe of the rational search for novelty (Pp 116-117). He is kinder to Hobson than I am, but Prof. Jones concentrates on substantive critique rather than Hobson’s sillier indulgences.

Prof. Jones notes that the West achieved a level of impersonal, decentralised institutions in excess of other civilisations. Which provided major advantages. But the continuing expansion of centralised institutions is resulting in increased resources being applied to compliance and monitoring, including the absorption of talent by bureaucracies. He is concerned that too much law may undermine social order (P. 132).

The second part of the book is concerned with commentary, a survey of the present. Prof. Jones covers cultures of immigration, East Asia’s experience, cultural responses to economic changes plus cultural protectionism.

He notes that the US is more ecologically variant than Europe and regional divergences on attitudes to public policy are generally greater than between European nations, something concealed by a common language (P. 138).

He argues against continuity as default assumption. He sees the American melting pot as continuing, just not an instantaneous process (P.148), an instance of the problem that cultural change can be hard to observe. He regards Australia as clearly an immigration success story, examining in particular the very high rates of intermarriage (P. 155).

Prof. Jones notes Japan’s willingness to put Japanese forms on Western ideas and analyses the relatively recent origins of various aspects of Chinese business culture in terms of adaptations to pathologies of the Chinese state (P. 168ff).

While very much generally in favour of choice and opportunity, he notes that such things are not necessarily costless. For example, seven centuries of decline in the rate of violence in Britain started to reverse from 1950 (Pp 200ff). He notes the evidence that Europe is a secularist oddity (Pp 202ff) rather than falling religious practice being the “natural” social outcome of modernisation. He suggests that the West’s (and particularly the US’s) cultural omnipresence may be a major cause of Muslim-Western tension, noting the lack of Muslim resentment of East Asian success (Pp 208ff). Acknowledgiong the disaster area that is Middle East/Arab government, he is sceptical of explanations in terms of “Islam” (Pp 210ff). While Prof. Jones considers that doctrinal rigidity may have some effect (Pp 212) he notes that the West triumphed in the cultural struggle of the Cold War (P.213) and sees the problems of Arab countries as being amenable to better public policy (P.218).

Prof. Jones cites Hitler and Stalin as experts at the politics of exclusion on grounds of alleged incompatibility (P.242), He displays considerable scepticism about the claims for cultural protectionism and cites evidence that commercial/private provision is perfectly capable of supporting high levels of cultural provision, including high culture (Pp 244ff).

Considering Prof. Jones’ comments on the cultural vibrancy of the West, and the US in particular, the low state of much of contemporary academe seemed a counter-example. But, then, academe is not actually a counterexample, because it is the classic milieu for ideas protected from consequences (i.e. suffering poor, even perverse, selection pressures). A point which, in a more general form about wealthy Western societies, Prof. Jones notes himself, particularly in his conclusion (P.266)—amusing for me since I often point out to students that, being a wealthy society, we can afford almost any level of stupidity.

Prof. Jones concludes by arguing that cultural analysis must proceed on the basis of considering a wide range of examples and keeping a particular eye on dynamic effects, rather than comparing paired cases and working from social snapshots. Look closely, and it is the variety (both within and between) and (at times astonishingly swift) variability of culture which is striking. Prof. Jones concludes that while culture may act as a brake or a filter, it is unlikely to be an active cause of change.

This is not a book offering a high level of theoretical abstraction. Rather is a very informative aid to thinking more precisely and more intelligently about culture.