History of Islamic Societies (1)

Ira Lapidus’s A History of Islamic Societies has become a contemporary classic history. Originally published in 1988, with a second edition in 2002, it is a one-volume history of an entire civilization from its origins to the present.

Background
The book begins by setting the context in a brief but brilliant survey of the growth of human societies in the Middle East. I am not as convinced as Lapidus that priestly rule predates kingly rule in Mesopotamia, but he sets the scene between local structures of family and clan and integrative forces of empire and faith very well. This is a history very much focused on institutional structures and developments—very much to my taste in these matters.

I also disagreed on the matter of Palmyra: while it is clear enough that the Roman Empire (and Sassanid Empire) both alternated between relying on a tributary buffer state and direct rule, Palmyra’s demise also had something to do with its attempt to conquer the Roman East.

Lapidus then describes the situation in Arabia leading up to Muhammad’s preaching, disunited and caught between two large (monotheist) civilisations—the Christiann Eastern Roman Empire and the Zoroastrian Sassanid Persian Empire—with Mecca being the key commercial and religious centre.

I was particularly struck by Lapidus’s summary of religious developments. Briefly delineating the shift from animism to a concept of gods as distinct personalities controlling natural forces, he draws a striking contrast between pagan and monotheist conceptions. That the former sees a fragmented self in a fragmented world, the latter an integrated self confronting a world controlled by a single divine personage.* The former doing little to bind people beyond ties of blood, the latter providing ties of belief to trump ties of blood (pp16-17). (Particularly attractive, of course, to those who lacked such strong ties: such as the clanless in the city of Mecca, or situations where ties of blood were not enough to integrate a relevant community, such as the feuding oasis of Medina.)

Beginnings
Into this was born Muhammad, whose life is the subject of Chapter 2. Which includes a helpful genealogical chart, showing the family connections to the later Umayyad, Abbasid and Fatimid Caliphal families. Lapidus conveys an acute sense of the context in which Muhammad operated, what was new, what was adaptation of existing, what stuck and what didn’t and how Muhammad created the fundamental pattern of Islam—a mixture of personal belief and membership of a community of believers. Reading Lapidus’ account, one can see how Muhammad confronted the imperatives of preaching, which molded his message.
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Muhammad, through preaching and conquest, unified Arabia, something never before done. After he died, the “Patriarchal” or “Rightly Guided” caliphs destroyed the Persian Empire and conquered the richer and more populous half of the (Eastern) Roman Empire. We see how the Arab-Muslim imperium expanded, operated and evolved over time and its effect on trade patterns:

the net effect of the Arab conquests was prosperity in Iran, a redistribution of the pattern of development in Iraq and the economic decline of Mesopotamia, Syria and Egypt (p.40).

The principle of dynastic succession in Islam was established with the triumph of first the Umayyads and then the Abbasids. The Shi’a also accepted dynastic rule, but argued for Ali’s family. When his family was dethroned from the Caliphate, a dynasty of religious leaders was established until the disappearance of the twelfth Iman. The kharijis, who argued for Caliphs elected by the Muslim community at large—holding office only so long as they were sinless in doing so—were never able (despite some temporary successes) to manage the sustained organising efficacy of the dynasties. Muhammad—the ultimate charismatic personal ruler—failed to create an institutional structure able to entrench any alternative to dynastic rule.

This more personalist and familial structure has all sorts of on-going implications. Particularly given Islam is a central organising principle in society, including of military forces.

One of the great strengths of Lapidus’s work is that one builds up a good sense of Islam’s evolution over time, its institutional structures (particularly Chapter 10) and recurring patterns. Until quite recently, in Islam, the Ulema functioned as the organizing hierarchy. Waqf as the vehicles of welfare/charity. Sufi brotherhoods did the bulk of teaching/preaching/parish work. There was not even a remote equivalent of Catholic monasteries within Islam as technological innovators and disseminators.

Classical Caliphate
Lapidus takes us through Cosmopolitan Islam (the Islam of the imperial elite, including literature and science) and Urban Islam (the Islam of the religious elite, including law and theology). He considers the dynamic nature of the development of Islamic civilisation, both imparting and absorbing, and the underlying continuities:

The Islamization of the Middle East did not transform the basic institutions of the economy, or of family, tribe, and empire. Rather, Islam seems to have infused inherited institutions with a new vocabulary, concepts and value preferences, as well as a new definition of personal, social and political identity. (p.100).

Islam both united and divided. The C9th attempt to establish Caliphal doctrinal authority by declaring the Qur’an to be a created thing, and therefore its interpretation subject to Caliphal authority, was defeated. The transcendent nature of the Qur’an was asserted, leaving interpretation in the hands of the ulema. This both damaged the authority of the Abbasid caliphate and entrenched the division between courtly/cosmpolitan/imperial Islam and urban/religious/scholarly Islam (p.102).

It was likely also not good for the further development of Islamic science. The form of Christianity that most worships The Word of God—also in opposition to centralised doctrinal authority—is the most anti-scientific (though, ironically, is strongest in the most technophile of societies, which adds to its adherents' sense of being culturally besieged). But to not accept the Qur’an as the transcendent Word of God became to be not Muslim.

Abbasid rule ran into succession problems. It then developed slave soldiers—a major innovation in Middle Eastern history—that further isolated it from the surrounding society (p.104).

Bureaucratic and small landowning elites who favoured centralized government were replaced by large-scale landowners and military lords who opposed it (p.111).

The Caliphate increasingly lost control of peripheral regions. Finally, in 945, it lost control of Baghdad itself.

Warrior rulerships
With the collapse of the Abbasid empire, Islam was transformed, in similar ways as Latin Christendom had been transformed by the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the C5th. Though not as disastrously: the economic decline was not as great, except in Iraq where the agricultural collapse was not completely recovered from until C20th (p.110). Unified rule was replaced by small states. The conversion of the Turks (which moved ghazis away from that frontier, undermining the defence against the Turks [p.117]) led to Turkish rule, injecting the further instabilities of nomad rule (back) into Islam. As well as the creation of the institution of the Sultanate, reducing the Caliphate largely to a source of legitimacy (p.121).

Middle Eastern Islam has done best under “universal” rule—the alternative is unstable, conflicting rulerships.

Lapidus plays particular attention in his narrative to the taxation arrangements (which consumed up to half of peasant incomes, p.37). Including the (disastrous) impact of various forms of iqta (tax farming). One of the notable patterns of Eurasian history outside Europe and Japan is the way that imperial regimes tend to fissure and the dramatic ebb and flow of realms. The tax-farming-warrior model resulted in elites that were poorly connected to their wider societies. Both fissure and replacement were thereby made easier.

Hence much of Islam did not so much have a series of stable states, as a series of fluctuating rulerships. The most obvious exceptions—that is, those areas were more stable state-structures evolved—being Iran, Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco. The last four all having geographical coherence. The first cultural distinctiveness, though it took some centuries for an Iranian state to be re-established.

Lapidus interweaves a very useful discussion of the difference between the political and property forms of medieval Latin Christendom and of post-Abbasid Islam, comparing and contrasting European feudalism with Middle Eastern “equivalents” (esp. pp123ff).

Breakdown of Abbasid rule coincided with breakdown of local social structures. A breakdown that encouraged mass conversion to Islam since local landowning notables no longer provided effective protection or a supporting matrix for previous religions (p.143). With the development of a mass Islamic peasantry, the ulema came to take on the role of protective notables. But, being neither a military nor a territorial elite, were not the basis for communal self-government. Power rested with nomadic conquerors and slave warlords (p.145).

Political literature became about what made a good prince:

the underlying premise of Muslim “political literatures” is that the good state is the product of good human beings (p.155).

Islam developed sophisticated legal and philosophical systems, but very much as personal ethics: with deep ambivalences about public life’s corruptions, and other divergences, from Islamic ideals. A religion that was so much of-the-world was also one that had deep problems developing any sense of the world having independent and legitimate logics. Islam has never developed a full equivalent of Augustine’s City of God and City of Man distinction. But then, the Qur’an has nothing remotely similar to Matthew 22:21.

Lapidus regards the Middle Eastern origins of Islam as crucial in its formation and in the way it has impacted on other regions it has spread to (p.193). In Part II, Lapidus surveys Muslim society and its basic structures. He then looks at the ways Islam spread and the impact of Europe

the crucial common factor in the decline of Muslim regimes was the rising power of Europe (p219).

Lapidus divides his story into regions and looks at historical development of Islam in each of the regions its has spread to from the C10th to the C19th. Looking first at the Middle East, then Central and Southern Asia, then Africa. Including the population and trade crash when the Mongols conquered Iran and Central Asia.

In Part III, which is almost half the text, Lapidus looks at Islam in the C19th and C20th, again by regions.

(I continue this in my next post.)

* James Ault draws almost exactly the same contrast between the integrated life of the fundamentalist Christian’s he studies and fragmented life of the academics and urban professionals from which he came. That modern progressivism is—in some ways—a revival of pagan perspectives is a point various folk have made.

Guest post on Norton and Foucault

I have a guest post at skepticlawyer elaborating how Rictor Norton gets stuck into Foucault and some related matters.

The Pocket Psycho

An older and wiser friend lent me The Pocket Psycho, a distillation of author John Clarke’s Working with Monsters (which I haven’t read).

The Pocket Psycho is deeply sensible and very informative. I am glad to say I have never worked with a workplace psychopath (they are, as Dr Clarke says, quite rare—psychopaths are estimated to make up 1 to 3% of the male population and 0.5 to 1% of the female population). But, as Dr Clarke sets out, they can be devastating in the psychological effects (not to mention the careers) of their victims. Indeed, one of the by-products of the book was to make me feel much better at how damaging for me working with a disastrous manager was. (That his management style manifested the same type of personality dysfunction as my mother’s parenting made things rather worse.)

In penultimate chapter Mistaken Identity? Dr Clarke notes that most dysfunctional employees are not psychopaths and provides some information on personality types (including the Type A, B, C and D model – I am type C) and the more common other forms of personality disorder – Passive-Aggressive, Narcissistic (estimated to be less than 1% of the population, majority males) and Histrionic (estimated to be 2 to 3% of the population, half male, half female). He carefully warns against misdiagnosis.

The rest of the book sets out the damage organisational psychopaths can do (to people and organizations), how to recognise them, how to deal with them (including simply leaving) and how organizations can seek to minimise their negative impact. Dr Clarke’s tone throughout is very sensible and grounded in practicality. He writes very clearly and accessibly. The Pocket Psycho is thus a useful and informative small book.

Summer work

The business has suffered from a drop in marketing efforts: October was very busy but November is relatively light, so income may be a bit tight over summer. Hence, I am available for summer work, if anyone has some.

Tribalism, conquest and the benefits of canon law

That the Middle East is a region subject to regular conquest (both external and internal) has long seemed to me to be crucial to understanding the current Middle East. There is a sense in which it is a region whose volkerwanderung never ended.

Ibn Khaldun postulated regular conquest of urban centres by tribal peripheraries as being the central dynamic of history. A recent review essay of a new book (which I reviewed here) on tribalism in the Middle East puts ibn Khaldun's model well:

… outlying tribes tied together by traditional kinship solidarities conquer, settle, and rule a state. In time kinship loyalties loosen, the rulers urbanize and grow effete, their state loses control over distant tribes, and the cycle begins again.

Regular conquest means regular "institutional flattening". One never moves out of the pattern of the predatory state:

… traditional Middle Eastern states are more like magnets, exerting force on territory near the center, while losing power with distance. The Ottoman Empire (and the British) ruled the tribes loosely, demanding an annual tribute but generally leaving them to govern themselves. ... The traditional relation of the state to the peasant, notes Salzman, "is that of the shepherd to his flock: the state fleeces the peasants, making a living off of them, and protects them from other predators, so that they may be fleeced again." Salzman asks us to think of traditional states as "cliques determined to impose their power for the pleasure of dominance and the profit of extortion."

I would argue it is no accident that it was civilisations on the unconquered fringes of Eurasia (Western Europe and Japan) which developed remarkably similar institutional arrangements, creating or speedily adapting modernity. States constantly confronted with the danger of pastoralist conquest (Russia and China) developed unifying autocracies in self-protection (not entirely successfully in the case of China, given two of its last three dynasties were conquering pastoralists) which proved somewhat less adept at dealing with modernity.

The problem for the Eurasian autocracies was, if central power became limited, the whole structure became susceptible to conquest. There wasn't the sustained social space to develop the dense web of institutional balances that generated modernity. Indeed, both Co20th Russia and China were then subject to internal conquest by a centralising ideology that engaged in yet another (and particularly virulent) round of institutional flattening. Leninism wasn't a release from the cycle, it was a particularly vicious manifestation of it.

So the history of the Soviet Union conformed to Ibn Khaldun's model of predatory rule. First, a group bound by common feeling (asabiyyah) seizes power (Lenin), then the ruler separate himself from the original group to entrench his own power (Stalin), then the system slowly decays as group solidarity fades and corruption erodes social resilience and regime power (Khruschev to Chernyenko) until it finally collapses (Gorbachev).
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This wider pattern of vulnerability was particularly strong in the Middle East. The stagnation of Islam is a striking feature of modern history. To take a particularly emphatic example; in 1450 Gutenberg created the first movable-type printing press in Europe. By 1500, over 200 cities and towns in Latin Christendom had printing presses. The first printing press in Muslim North Africa was not set up until 1832. It took a few years for the printing press to reach the Christian side of the Mediterranean, a few centuries for it to cross to the Muslim side.

There is something in the argument that natural law theory (the notion that God was a "constitutional monarch" who conformed to set rules in dealing with his Creation) gave Latin Christendom an intellectual advantage, particularly in the development of science, over an Islam where the mainstream view became that any such suggestion was an unreasonable limitation on Allah's absolute sovereignty.* But it was an advantage that Latin Christendom shared with Orthodox/Greek Christendom without having much in the way of beneficial intellectual and technological effects for the latter. Favourable institutional structures seem more important. Though that Islam had a single legal model (sharia) while Christendom was free to develop a much greater variety of legal models meant that Christendom had a wider range of possibilities for the selection processes of history to work on.

Confronted with regular conquests and states that were either strong and predatory or weak and predatory, the social response was the "balanced opposition" of tribalism. A network of lineages, tribes, clans and families that provide shifting networks of support to provide protection and status.

Which leaves the state marooned from positive associations:

The Ottoman Empire (and the British) ruled the tribes loosely, demanding an annual tribute but generally leaving them to govern themselves. To a remarkable extent, this holds true today. While the precise degree of centralized power ebbs and flows, tribes living in what are often quite large territories on national peripheries exist largely free of state power.
Far from viewing this as a disability, Middle Eastern tribesmen consider life beyond the state as the surest way to avoid dishonorable submission. Statelessness is an essential condition of dignity, equality, and freedom.

With all the strife that "honor codes" involve. And the pull of such codes is very strong:

Even when an individual is inclined toward modern attitudes, the need to protect the honor of the group draws him back to tradition. Salzman tells the story of a Druze serving in the Israeli army who shot and killed his sister to preserve family honor.
The young woman had lived in America for several years and returned to visit her family wearing Western garb. Her brother was inclined to ignore this, until his uncle's loud complaints about their endangered family honor were heard by the neighbors. Salzman's point here is that honor depends less on the action itself (e.g., wearing earrings) than on public knowledge and response. What's notable, however, is that the key characters in this honor killing are a relatively modernized young man and his sister. Experience in the Israeli army and time in America had worked a change on both. Yet the responsibility of each individual for the honor--and therefore the safety and prosperity—of the group as a whole makes it difficult to break away from tradition.

One can see why Middle Eastern Jews fled the newly independent Arab countries in such numbers. There was literally no place for them. No overlapping lineages, no common identity. One can also see how problematic creating Lebanon out of varied groupings has proved to be.

It also gives reason to be grateful that the Catholic Church had such strict rules about consanguinity. It shut off the re-braiding of kinship systems as an alternative source of protection and support in Latin Christendom after the Roman collapse. Instead, much more formal relationships became binding features of social life. Investment in maintaining and improving a common social space slowly and gradually created the dense institutional networks from which modernity arose.

To the extent that we take such things for granted (perhaps too much). It certainly becomes extremely difficult to enter into the mindset where such common social spaces are far more attenuated and subject to very serious competition for provision of basic social order:

Yet even settled tribes preserve the classic kin-based ideology of feuding and alliance, precisely because they might someday be forced by economic necessity—or by war with the state—to pick up and move. The further nomads are from the settled life of a state, the more they rely on kin-based, segmentary, balance-of-power principles to keep order. So even after settlement, Bedouin preserve classic segmentary kinship ideology as a kind of "social structure in reserve" for times of movement, crisis, and conflict.

Islam is a conquest religion, which is why it proved to be so suitable for a region of conquests:

In a sense, Islam's founding triumph was to raise the stakes of balanced opposition by uniting all the Arab tribes in an ultimate feud against infidel outsiders.

In its first 1000 years, Islam aggressed (generally very successfully: the Reconquista was the only successful sustained counterattack prior to 1683) against every single culture it came up against. It was only meeting more effective predators which brought that to a halt. And the jihadis think it is time for history to revert to its "proper" pattern.

How much the underlying tribal model pervades Islam is a fascinating question. One could argue that Bengali or Malay Islam is a rather different beast because it is in a very different social context. But most of the money for Islamic missionary work (including within Islamic countries) comes from a country where the underlying tribal model is very strong.

Whatever the answer, it is very important to understand the very different understandings of the state and political life that pervade much of the Middle East.

*It is worth noting that the relevant pictures of God conformed to the underlying social understanding of political authority which then likely fed back into said social understandings. This is connected to Avner Greif's point that Christianity grew up in a settled, law-bound Empire while the Prophet (and Islam) had to build political authority.

Off to Canberra

I am driving to Canberra from Melbourne early tomorrow (Saturday) morning and am not back until Monday afternoon, so there may be some interruption to posting.

The occasion is a friend's annual cocktail party, a great chance to catch up with old friends.

So, hope you have fun too!

Digging up weapons

A couple of years ago, coming back from Spring War, Vandel, Margi and I stopped in with Sir Aedward and Yolande (also known as pointyhat). Sir Aedward is a sword enthusiast and I asked him about good books. He recommended Oakeshott. So, when I saw it on sale at a past Festival, I ordered a copy.

The Archaeology of Weapons: Arms and Armour from Prehistory to the Age of Chivalry is a fun read. Oakeshott is a genuine enthusiast who wears his learning lightly and conveys his enthusiasm well.

He also has a good practical sense. Weapons are to be used after all. Armour has to work.

One point of caution: the book is over 40 years old and scholarship has moved on a bit. The Goths=proto knights and the it’s-all-about-stirrups are a touch dated. (But I’ve had my rant about stirrups.)

But those are quibbles. The book is an engaging mass of information—Oakeshott even discusses shield strapping—and anyone interested in the history of weapons, particularly medieval weapons, and armour should read or purchase this book.

The Myth of the Modern Homosexual

Rictor Norton’s The Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity is a wonderful example of using history and historical knowledge to demolish overweening theory.

The overweening theory being demolished being social constructionist views of homosexuality: the notion that the modern identity of the homosexual is an entirely modern construction, with no counterpart in previous or other human societies. Myth is yet another contribution to “Foucault is crap” scholarship.

Norton demolishes simply by building up evidence upon evidence of societies having a concept of same-sex oriented people; of people living out same-sex orientation long before modern times; of the experience of people recognising themselves when hearing of, or reading of, same-sex oriented people; of persistent patterns of behaviour. It is clear that Norton has absorbed and considered an enormous amount of material. (Norton is also the editor of the delightful collection My Dear Boy: Gay Love Letters Through the Centuries.)

Because there has been such a huge amount of suppression of material – on top of normal losses from the passage of time – Norton is particularly explicit about historical methods – about using evidence, working out what it can tell us – and very sensibly so.

Often, simple biographical details or elementary textual analysis is enough to demolish the social constructionist approach, which is (to be polite) not well-grounded in the historical evidence.

While Norton is polite about it, Myth is a further contribution to a burgeoning literature – from Irwin’s demolition of Said’s dreadful Orientalism, William Coleman’s exposure of shoddy research among the critics of “economic rationalism”, Keith Windschuttle’s exposure of outright scholarly fabrication in indigenous history – revealing how, provided one appeals to contemporary academic prejudices, one can get away with (indeed build careers on) almost any amount of scholarly junk.*

Beyond demolishing social constructionism, Norton provides the reader with a very full sense of the variety and persistence of queer life and culture.

Some of the chapter titles are delightful: Queer BC (Before Constructionimsm), It’s Just a Phrase We’re Going Through, The Great Queens of History. Part One (Social Constructionism and Other Myths) takes us through the evidence for homosexuals and homosexual life well before the modern period.
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Norton insists we have to read historical evidence carefully but intelligently: all part of the debate about the role of historical imagination. Thus, one can read married men having male lovers on the side (e.g. Alexander the Great) as having a polymorphous sexuality, and that was what was accepted as some sort of norm. Alternatively – Norton’s view – bisexual so often means just “married homosexual”. (That is definitely his view of Alexander.)

We also have to interrogate labels against what actually happens. Thus, the “boy-wives” of various cultures, it turns out, could be older than teenagers (p.87). Norton points out cases of relationships between adult men, in the Classical world particularly, being labelled “pederastic” (p.86ff).

Norton is very much against any notion of the omnipotence of words (p.98) for

[t]he absence of language does not necessarily mean the absence of conceptual thought (p.99).

Words have to be coined in the first place, and many borrowings happen precisely because a new word fills a gap in conceptual labelling.

Nevertheless, words used can be revealing. Norton takes us through neutral terms for homosexual sex/love in Greek, Eastern Roman and Chinese usages (pp 100ff). Both active and passive homosexual roles were labelled in many languages (pp 104f). The Inquisition was concerned with sodomites’s essential nature, not merely acts (p.104).

His discussion is very wide ranging. When he notes the deprecating nature of Norse attitudes to homosexuals (men “letting the side down” by being “womanly”) it is a useful reminder that, while all monotheisms are homo-hostile, not all homo-hostility is monotheistic.

One of Norton’s themes is that the 1940s and 1950s, in the US particularly, were more repressive to homosexuals than the first third of the C20th had been. (Which, one could argue, thereby encouraged activism: many of the pioneering homophile organizations were founded in the 1950s.)

Elsewhere in Part Two (The Nature of Queer History), Norton takes us through the long, erratic, history of legal repressions: a history of intermittent enforcement of laws, with long lapses and a tendency to “clumping” (p.137ff). He constantly makes the point that these repressions revealed the prior and continuing existence of homosexual subcultures. Far from parading such repressions, authorities often clearly wanted homosexuals to be invisible, and frequently engaged in strenuous efforts to keep them that way.

The social constructionist view is that the notion of “the homosexual” was created by police and medical authorities. A proposition the evidence just doesn’t support.

Norton also takes apart tedious attempts to blame “capitalism” for homo-hostility (pp 93ff). As he points out, the rise of modern capitalism led to (or at least coincided with) decreasing severity of laws against homosexuality (p.140).

Suppression of evidence is a major problem for the historian of homosexuality. Pronouns were often changed precisely because of likely (and typically correct) homosexual readings of writings. All part of a long history of suppression, mistranslation or excision of writings, letters, art, artefacts, biographical facts, anthropological data. By the Church, by authorities, observers, families, people themselves.

In Part Three (Queer Culture), Norton sets out his notion of queer culture as being effectively an ethnic culture where family does not provide training in how to handle stigma (p.267).

Again, a lot of material is covered. I was amused to read that St Aelred of Rievaulx stated that Christ and John were married (p.221). But one of Norton’s central points is that the same patterns and comments come up again and again.

There are many nice quotes. For example, from William Beckford on a hanging of a sodomite in 1816:

I should like to know what kind of deity they fancy they are placating with these shocking human sacrifices (p.275).

But, then the Catholic Church had come up with, and propagated, the notion that the Divine required slaughter to Incarnate long before Columbus sailed West and Europeans met the bloodthirsty gods of Mesoamerica.

Norton makes the point that homosexual persecutions don’t come from the general public, they come from specific moral crusader or crusaders (p.248). Reading this, it made me wonder whether various reports of same-sex unions even being blessed by priests likely represent local eruptions – or survivals – of acceptance of human affective variety beyond the reach of more doctrinally pure authorities. (Norton cites various reports down the centuries of same-sex unions being accepted in parts of the Balkans.)

Norton cites Boswell more than I am comfortable with, but none of his arguments rest on Boswell’s thesis or evidence.

Norton also notes, though offers no particular explanation for, the extensive documentation of fairly open homosexuality in Muslim countries. I would argue that Muhammad’s universalising of conquering tribalism produced a layered inequality (male over female, believer over infidel, free over slave) that gave social space for (formally unequal) same-sex relations to persist in a context where women were largely excluded from public space. (In effect, producing similar social arrangements to those of classical Greece.)

Norton argues that historical accounts of large numbers of homosexuals in particular societies should be largely accepted. I am less convinced, merely because of the greater salience of what is different if one comes from a society where such things are much less open.

As Norton points out, the “queering” of San Francisco seems to have started with lots of WWII Navy and Army discharges, which created a “critical mass” which then attracted more queers to a socially friendly environment. Norton argues that migrating and other travelling humanity may be transmitting queer cultural patterns (p.260).

Norton argues that, as queer sex is not reproductive, it is a specifically cultural phenomena (p.271). He argues for same-sex marriage – beyond matters of equal rights – as part of queer cultural heritage (p.287). For supporting it, not because it’s new, but precisely because it’s not.

Myth I found an enjoyable book at many levels. For the mass of information it provided, for its demolition of dreadful 1970s academic fashion and for its sensible wrestling with the dilemmas of evidence and historical imagination. It both informed and provoked. The Myth of the Modern Homosexual is a useful and engaging text.

* The “defend the profession” talk in response to Windschuttle’s revelations, and the focus on methodological questions about historical imagination, gave every impression that, with the possible exception of plagiarism (itself a sin against intellectual property), Australian academic history as a profession recognises no scholarly sins, merely ideological ones.

From animism to neo-animism

Animism, using the term in a broad rather than technical anthropological sense, is the natural hypothesis that, since we move because we are alive, and animals move because they are alive, that things in nature (such as wind, clouds, lightning, moon, sun) move because they are animated by living presences. That is, that everything which moves exists on the same metaphysical continuum. It is hardly surprising that animism seems to be the normal first stage of religious perspective, given the first human societies lived so embedded in nature.

With the growth of farming and herding, societies which managed nature to a greater or less extent, more separatist conceptions of divine and of the human began to emerge. It has been argued, quite reasonably, that Catholicism’s very non-animistic notion of an ordered universe in which God and humans were deeply metaphysically distinct from the natural world we live in, helped the birth of science by fostering the notion of the universe as being law-governed, with discoverable natural laws.

Since modern science tends to undermine the view that we are metaphysically distinct from other animals, and the world around us, it is not surprising that neo-animism (in the form of environmentalism and neo-paganism) is on the rise. As Etienne Gilson noted:

A world which has lost the Christian God cannot but resemble a world which has not yet found him.

But environmentalism is a hard religion:

I find I'm often chastised for not taking global warming seriously enough by people who in their own lives produce far more carbon dioxide than I do.

It does, however, have its own vindicating and apocalyptic future. Not merely global warming, but also the faith that Malthus will come true one day (in the sense of some disastrous “Malthusian” population crash even though that is not really what Malthus said). The huge increase in population and average standard of living and all the other difficulties since Malthus originally published his Essay on Population (and Malthus’s own back-pedalling in later editions) notwithstanding. One just re-interprets sacred doctrine.
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And it also has virulent denunciation of heretics and infidels. We really do seem to be the religious animal. Science may be good at answering “how?” questions, but we persist in being concerned with “why?” ones and if previous answers to those questions lose force, we shift to new ones.

Not that I think environmentalism as such represents any sort of moral advance. One of the arguments against claims that the loss of religious belief is some looming moral disaster, a drastic run-down of our sustaining cultural capital, is that human societies are showing a broad, sustained tendency to lower levels of violence and cruelty. I would argue that a widening sense of moral reciprocity is an important part of this (a common thread in Steven Pinker’s suggested explanations of better government, increasing length and felicity of life, increasing mutual gain possibilities and expanding range of empathy).

God, after all, has often been used to deny moral reciprocity, to deny empathy—and notoriously still is among the Abrahamic religions to homosexuals: gay pride in Jerusalem managed to unify Orthodox Jewish, Christian and Muslim religious leaders in Israel/Palestine in their common hatred for a small minority (though they seem to have lost that argument). It is not surprising that the Abrahamic religion that is least based on reciprocity is also the most violence-positive in its basic doctrines (Islam) and has notably violent inter- and intra-state politics, though a large part of that may be the resource-politics effect, both for increased violent conflict and more autocratic politics and intolerant religiosity.

So, the religiosity of environmentalism is far from being an inherent moral positive. But the moral problem I see with environmentalism is that it puts non-human considerations before people. This is not a good place to base one’s moral judgements from. It is certainly not a good basis for public policy. For its discounting of the costs imposed on people—and its discounting of the standing of what people want—makes it that much easier to justify controlling, or otherwise restricting, more and more of people’s lives.* And restricting freedom is noxious in itself and generally not a successful long-term policy.

Moving away from animism was generally a moral advance: moving towards neo-animism is likely to be very much not a moral advance.

* That is, after all, precisely how anti-homosexuality arguments operate: discounting both what they want and the costs imposed on them.

God and Philosophy: Western philosophy without a yawning gap

I have, ever since I first become aware of it, loathed the politics of Plato’s Republic with its all-controlling Guardians and everyone in their controlled place. It has always struck me as the ur-text of totalitarianism.

It was reading Etienne’ Gilson’s God and Philosophy which enabled to see how Plato’s loathsome politics flows from his metaphysics. Gilson summarises Plato on ideas as:

Truly to be means to be immaterial, immutable, necessary and intelligible. That is precisely what Plato calls Ideas. (p.24)

Naturally, if ideas are so wonderful, then they are more “real” than mere transitory people: to have a “true grasp” of such wonderful ideas gives on a status far beyond that of ordinary mortals. Platonic Guardians here we come.

Hence the politics of “my ideas are more important than people”. Not merely in the sense of ways of making people lives better, but in the sense of disregarding the actual consequences of one's ideas for people, of requiring people to conform to the ideas.

Add in an appropriate amount of Revelation, and we get the principle of the priestly “gatekeepers of righteousness” of I am important because I am conveyor of God’s ideas and God’s purposes, which are definitely more important than erring sinners. But, of course, a Nazi gauleiter or Leninist commissar is working off the same dialectic as any persecuting cleric, with a great deal more mechanisms of social control at their disposal.

Gilson is a delightfully clear writer, even in translation, and covers a lot of ground with great economy. Being a Catholic philosopher, he has a firm belief in truth and thus of the history of philosophy as “a handmaid to philosophy” (P.xx): having ascertained what philosophers have written leaves us with the question of whether they were correct.

Of course, working out what particular philosophers did hold can be a tricky business, and Gilson has a nice discussion of trying to work out what Thales meant when he said water was the first principle and all things are full of gods (Pp 1ff). Which allows Gilson to take us on a journey through Greek ideas of gods and divinity and how Greek philosophy, in its critical rationality, undermined belief in the Greek and Roman deities without leaving anything much in its place. Gilson holds that people can be brought to worship almost anything as long as they can see it in some sense as a somebody: what they cannot be brought to worship is a thing (p.37). Not entirely convinced of that, but it is surely true that classical philosophy did leave a belief-vacuum into which, of course, Christianity poured itself.
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Starting with the very non-philosophical statement of Yahweh to Moses “I am Who am”. Gilson holds Moses’s statement He who is and Plato’s statement That which is to be the dividing line between Greek and Christian philosophy: Christian philosophy accepting a supreme principle (God) who is also a Person (p.42). Christian philosophy was the use of the techniques and concepts of Greek philosophy to express ideas that “had never entered the head of a Greek philosopher” (p.43).

So much so, that St Augustine reads Plotinus (specifically the Enneads) and somehow sees the Christian Revealed God therein (p.48). Gilson defines the issue for Christian philosophy as posed by St Augustine nicely:

That is why, from the time of Saint Augustine up to our own days, human reason has been up against the tremendously difficult task of reaching a transcendent God whose pure act of existing is radically distinct from our own borrowed existence. How can man, who out of himself is not, living in a world of things which out of themselves are not, reach by means of reason alone, “Him who is”? Such is, to a Christian, the fundamental problem of natural theology. (p54)

The answer of modern philosophy is, in effect, you cannot and so we should attend to other questions.

When I did philosophy at Sydney University, it was taught as first there was Greek Philosophy, then there was Descartes and modern philosophy began. Nothing much of philosophical interest happened in the one-and-half-millennia in the middle. It was all bound up with a Revealed God and the ultimately theological concerns of scholastic Aristotelianism and we need not go there.

There was a couple of things wrong with this. First, much of our modern political thought arises out of medieval thinking. There is a direct line of intellectual descent, for example, from Pope Paul III’s 1537 Bull Sublimus Dei to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (John Kilcullen has a very useful webpage on medieval political and moral thought.)

Secondly, people such as Descartes, Locke even Hume are reacting to Aristotelianism. If one does not consider the development of Aristotelianism, one is paying attention to only half the philosophical conversation.

So, attention should be paid. Though, to be fair, as Gilson points out, Descartes himself proceeds as if his only intellectual predecessors were the Greek Philosophers.

Which brings us to St Thomas Aquinas and his development of Aristotelian thought whereby:

The self-thinking Thought of Aristotle has certainly become an essential element in the natural theology of Saint Thomas Aquinas, but not without first undergoing the metaphysical transformation that turned him into the Qui est or “He who is” of the Old Testament” (Pp 62-3)

based on analysis of what it means “to be”. To be is taken to be an act, “the acts of all acts” (p.65) with a metaphysics that reverses the order of human knowledge:

…we first conceive certain beings, then we define their essences, and last we affirm their existences by means of a judgement. But the metaphysical order of reality is just the reverse of the order of human knowledge: what first comes into it is a certain act of existing (p.64).

Which is, precisely, of course, what Bacon, Descartes, Locke, Hume etc denied, hence modern philosophy.

Gilson holds that Aquinas made metaphysics existential, concerned fundamentally with what exists, where existence is understood as an act:

From its earliest origins, metaphysics has always obscurely aimed at becoming existential; from the time of Saint Thomas Aquinas it has always been so, and to such an extent that metaphysics has regularly lost its very existence every time it has lost its existentiality (p.67).

Gilson’s puts Aquinas central metaphysical concept quite nicely:

… existence is not a thing, but the act that causes a thing to be and to be what it is (p.70).

The famous (or infamous) existence precedes essence.

In moving to modern philosophy, Gilson starts with the point that medieval philosophers were all clerics of some variety, while modern philosophers have been overwhelmingly lay folk (p.74). Descartes changes the subject of philosophy, from Aquinas’ attention to divine wisdom to:

... an altogether different sort of wisdom, namely knowledge of truth by its first causes to be attained by natural reason alone and directed towards practical temporal ends (p.76).

Given the brutality of the religious strife that had divided Europe, all from people claiming they had the Revealed truth correct, and the riot of new knowledge confronting Europe of the age of Discovery, hardly a surprising shift in focus.

But, as Gilson points out, the effect was to bring philosophy back to the Greeks as if nothing much had happened since them (p.77). Gilson holds that this could not be fully done, because a modern philosopher operated in the context of the Christian God in a way a Greek philosopher simply did not (Pp78-9). The result was to create “a stillborn God”, God as “Author of Nature”:

Assuredly, the God of Christianity had always been the Author of Nature, but he had always been infinitely more than that, whereas, after Descartes, he was destined to become nothing else than that (p.89).

One ends up with a situation where the God of philosophy is not the God of theology: for example, in such a thinker as Malebranche (p.97).

Gilson pays no attention to Islamic or Jewish thinkers. Still, it is a striking thing that the rejection of Aristotelianism had overlapping effects in both Islam and Western civilisation on the matter of causation. Al Ghazali, arguing against Islamic Aristotelianism, essentially claimed that the God of the Philosophers was not the God of the Qur’an. He has a famous passage where he writes:

... our opponent claims that the agent of the burning is the fire exclusively;’ this is a natural, not a voluntary agent, and cannot abstain from what is in its nature when it is brought into contact with a receptive substratum. This we deny, saying: The agent of the burning is God, through His creating the black in the cotton and the disconnexion of its parts, and it is God who made the cotton burn and made it ashes either through the intermediation of angels or without intermediation. For fire is a dead body which has no action, and what is the proof that it is the agent? Indeed, the philosophers have no other proof than the observation of the occurrence of the burning, when there is contact with fire, but observation proves only a simultaneity, not a causation, and, in reality, there is no other cause but God.

Which is Humean causal skepticism centuries before Hume. Except that al-Ghazali’s version is a little less silly than Hume’s. Both Hume and al-Ghazali wrote down their arguments in the perfectly rational belief that various causal processes would ensure so people could read and understand their arguments. Al-Ghazali at least has God to hold things together. (Though that surely still leaves the question of what is meant by God causing things?) Hume has nothing, yet patently proceeds as if causality operates in a reliable, indeed predictable, fashion. “Happenstance regularity” is surely sillier than “regularity in nature being just God’s customary practice” (the mainstream Islamic position: not one favourable to the development of science).

Gilson argues that the real break in the line of philosophy comes with Kant (p.110).

Coming after the Christian philosophers, Descartes, Leibniz, Malebranche and Spinoza found themselves confronted with this new problem: How find a metaphysical justification for the world of seventeenth-century science? As scientists, Descartes and Leibniz had not metaphysics of their own. Just as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas had to borrow their techniques from the Greeks, Descartes and Leibniz had to borrow their techniques from the Christian philosophers who had preceded them. Hence the vast number of scholastic expressions which we meet in the works of Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza and even Locke. All of them freely use the language of the Schoolmen in order to express nonscholastic views of a nonscholastic world (Pp110-1).

With the Christian God still operating as the supreme principle for the intelligibility of nature.

Kant changes both the subject and the language of philosophical enquiry. With the criticism of Kant and the positivism of Comte we no longer have a God who is an object of cognition. The metaphysical “why?” question goes away, to be left with the scientific “how?” (p.132).

Gilson notes that the scientific resistance to metaphysics has some justification:

Just as science can play havoc with metaphysics, metaphysics can play havoc with science. Coming before science in the past, it has often done so to the point of preventing its rise and blocking its development. For centuries final causes have been mistaken for scientific explanations by so many generations of philosophers that today many scientists still consider the fear of final causes as the beginning of scientific wisdom. Science is thus making metaphysics suffer for its centuries-long meddling in matters of physics and biology (Pp128-9).

But, as he points out, it does leave epistemology in a very unsatisfactory state (one which has hardly got less unsatisfactory since Gilson wrote God and Philosophy).

Gilson further observes:

A world which has lost the Christian God cannot but resemble a world which has not yet found him (p.136).

As we consider the patently religious impulse involved in much environmentalism, a sort of neo-animism, we can see a repeat of rational critique creating a vacuum into new forms of religiosity (environmentalism, Pentecostalism) or revised takes on old forms (fundamentalism) move. The meaning of things, the “why?” questions, clearly will not go away.

Gilson stands four square for the philosophical synthesis of Aquinas. Whether we want to join him there, God and Philosophy is an excellent short, but intellectually full, journey through Western philosophy from the Greeks to the C20th, without leaving a very large gap in the middle.

ADDENDA I have edited this post slightly to make it clearer.

Buddhist film festival

From Friday evening to Sunday afternoon, went to three films and a talk in the Buddhist Film Festival held at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in their Fed. Square facilities.

Friday afternoon, started with the Festval's opening film, The Dhamma Brothers, a fascinating look at the introduction of Vipassana meditation into a maximum security prison in (of all places) Alabama. The head of psychology in the Alabama prison system was looking for ways to calm prison populations and came across a gaol in India that had achieved some success with Vipassana mediation. Since there is a worldwide movement (including in Oz) he was able to find two experienced practitioners to run the 10-day course for him for about 40 inmates.

The film takes us through the operation of the course, reactions by inmates (who tell their stories, being upfront about their crimes), prison officers, the gaol Warder, etc. There was a lot of scepticism beforehand and rather more support otherwise. Of particular interest, many of the participants wanted to continue to practice and met once a week to do so.

But, this is Alabama. Various Christian chaplains complained that the course was “teaching Buddhism” and the meetings were banned. Then there was a change in administration and it was back on. While the personal stories were quite inspiring, I was intrigued by the public policy politics involved. Clearly, the director of psychology is both an open-minded and quietly persistent chap.

Given that one of the charities the film festival was funding was the Buddhist Council of Victoria’s prison visiting service, a very appropriate film to open the Festival with. (The Council organised the film festival, the second Buddhist film festival.)

The next film I saw, later that evening, was Meditate and Destroy, a film about young Noah Levine, who wrote the book Dharma Punx. His memoir of how a drug-taking, juvie-returning, graffiti artist found dharma. The film was exuberant fun, including some great use of Second Life™ animation for portraying past events in his life quite powerfully. Noah Levine now runs courses in juvenile detention centres plus courses for young addicts and former addicts.
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Noah is the son of Buddhist author Stephen Levine, which made me very sceptical about Levine senior, given how angry and dysfunctional Noah’s adolescence was. As the film progressed, it became clear that he had not been raised by his father (his parents divorced when he was quite young). His mother, a little indirectly, took responsibility for “not being there” much for young Noah. Noah freely confessed that being a punk was a rebellion against a hippy father but it was also his father teaching him a meditation technique over the phone when he was “in Juvie” which Noah credits as being a key moment in his path out of what was clearly a very fraught situation. (It also turned out that his father had had similar drug-and-detention issues when he was young, which Noah had not known about.)

I was struck by how intense (as in lots of deaths) the punk scene was in Santa Cruz (not the pattern in Melbourne punkery) and how open and lively many of the people were in speaking about their experiences. Noah’s best friend turned out to be particular fun, giving Noah a fair bit of friendly shit on camera.

Saturday, went to a talk by the Abbott of the Braybrook temple, Senior Venerable Tic Phuoc Tan OAM entitled The Buddha Code (Dharma Talk) explaining the language of the gestures of Buddhist statues. I was, alas, a little sleepy so did not catch the whole thing. The (youngish) Abbott was, however, quite engaging, even if English was clearly not his first language. He mostly coped with the technology. So, right hand (sun) over left hand (moon) means meditation. Hand open and down means giving/charity. Hand grasping forefinger means wisdom. Hand touching ground means calling the Earth to witness (the Buddha’s enlightenment). Both hands with fingers steepled and intertwined means balancing contradictory forces. The lotus flower represents enlightenment coming out of the mud of the earth.

Usually, the thumb represents spirit, the forefinger fire, index finger air, ring finger water, little finger earth. So thumb with forefinger (fire) means passing the fire of knowledge. Thumb with index finger (air or nothingness) means enlightenment, thumb with ring finger (water or gentleness) means compassion. Doing so with hand down means offering these things. Postures also had meaning, but I did not retain them.

Sunday afternoon, saw The Devotion of Matthieu Ricard. Matthieu Ricard is the son of a French surrealist painter, Yahne le Toumelin, and well-known French philosopher, Jean-Francois Revel. I have just finished reading The Monk and the Philosopher, which was the main reason I wanted to see the film since I thoroughly enjoyed the book. The film was both about his life, particularly is very unexpected turning to Buddhism, and his current work. He is active as a translator for the Dalai Lama, in publishing books on or from Tibetan Buddhism, in being a test subject for neuro-cognition research (he has a Ph.D in molecular genetics) and in fundraising, and organising, for projects (mainly clinics and schools) in Tibet and Nepal as well as being an active photographer. He comes across as a very real, but happy, person living a worthy life with an excellent sense of humour.

I enjoyed the Festival. Having done a lot of reading and viewing, particularly just recently, on Islam, dealing with Buddhists and Buddhism is a considerable relief. It is not that Buddhism lacks a dark side, it certainly has that, it just that its central message is much more immediately useful and far less fraught. The tone is simply a lot lighter, one is dealing far more with happy people and open-handed compassion, rather than very patriarchal, very authoritarian, control with a whole lot of violence, and getting along with others, issues. Buddhist practitioners in prison seem inherently a lot more reassuring than Muslim outreach in prison.

At a more personal level, I found the Festival encouraged more self-examination about my own attachments and the problems thereof. A useful thing in itself.

Those Terrible Middle Ages: sticking up for the medieval

Various folk have been waging a (mostly losing) fight to rehabilitate the medieval. Against them are all those down the years who, in their attachment to the Classical heritage, have seen the medieval period as an interlude of darkness until Western civilisation “returned” to its classical roots during the Renaissance. It is not helped that medieval political arrangements seem very different to our own: far more so than those of Classical Rome or Greece, which helps the classicist case.

Then there is simple chrono-centrism—we are so much cleverer than them because we’re later. (Modern academe is rife with this: I have heard a speaker at an academic conference criticise Bernard Lewis on the grounds that he was so old he was an undergraduate in the 1930s, so obviously deficient in his understanding—to the clear approval of the audience. Apparently, further study does not make you more perceptive: a truth many academics certainly demonstrate daily.)

These strands can come together in a potent brew—the medievals did all sorts of things differently from us, so they must have been dumb. And history is a story of progress, so the further back you go, clearly the worse things are. A story of progress: except for the Dark Ages of course, so the medievals must have been really bad.

Feudal sometimes seems to mean lacking whatever I think my period has achieved. To C18th historians, feudal often meant obscurantist, lacking in rationality, rationality being conceived of as congenial consistency. To C19th historians, feudal often meant anarchy and disorder. Conversely, English constitutional history was always inclined to a somewhat more rosy view, at least about such things as Magna Carta and Simon de Montfort.
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C20th historians and economists increasingly tended to try and understand the medieval in its own terms—there is something of a cottage industry in economic history in teasing out the rational adaptation to circumstances underlying medieval institutions. The wider intellectual culture still seems to be inclined to dismiss it as a period of ignorance, superstition and incapacity. The recent growth of the “California School” of historians trying to explain how the West didn’t really rise—and certainly not by any worthy efforts of its own—owes some of its resonance to such attitudes. (Corporations as a post-medieval creation indeed. That would be a surprise to the corporation of the University of Oxford, recognised as such in 1231. Or those who traded in shares of the dams on the Garonne River which—when its final form of the Societe Toulousaine d’Electricite du Bazacle was nationalised by the French government after WWII—had been a limited company for almost eight centuries.)

Regine Pernoud’s Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths is a fun book sticking up for the medievals. Pernoud spent most of her career as an archivist at the French National Archives, and her passion for primary sources certainly comes through. Not in ostentatious quoting, but in insisting that scholarship should go back to such sources and by telling tales of her own experience in prominent historians repeating falsehoods that a trip to the archives could dispell.

Pernoud starts of with some of her own experiences in happily accepted myths about the medieval period, and then takes us through various forms of myths and debunks them in various chapters suitably labelled (Clumsy and Awkward, Torpor and Barbarity, Of Frogs and Men, Women without Souls, The Accusing Finger) before moving on to make a plea for a better sense of history and better teaching of history (she has a few suggestions).

I rather enjoyed it all. Pernoud has a lively writing style. She also has a moderately Catholic perspective, but it does not notably get in the way. The book very much concentrates on the French experience, but that has a certain corrective value in itself.

I did have some cavils. It is easy to show medieval serfdom was a superior state to outright slavery. Nor is her assertion that it was also superior to post-medieval serfdom in Russia and Eastern Europe hard to support. Trying to portray it as a form of benevolent welfarism rather overstates the matter, however.

Perhaps her strongest point is in showing how much of what the medieval period gets blamed for actually occurred in the post-medieval period. The case of Gallileo, for example. In particular, Pernoud argues that the rediscovery of Roman law had various deleterious effects—such as on the status of women and the tendency towards monarchial absolutism. She points out that there are plenty of medieval references to women speaking and voting in various assemblies but that Roman law’s more patriarchal conception of male headship of households was very antipathetic to such. That women had to be granted the vote in the late C19th and C20th was not some dreadful medieval legacy. Her discussion of such matters is a useful corrective to simple-minded notions of linear history.

Those Terrible Middle Ages is an enjoyable, informative and accessible promotion of a more informed understanding of the medieval period.

Apologies for less posting

Apologies for the drop-off in posting. I have been sick and busy (self-employment, no sick leave) which means a lack of energy to post in the evening when I get home.

Things should start improving as I am feeling better (good) and work is falling off (not so good).

Not getting the American Revolution

What do we know about the Obama Administration?

That it does not much believe in freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the rule of law, inconvenient monitoring of human rights, can be astonishingly morally tone deaf, as well as commercially clueless in a way that can be deeply damaging to its favoured friends, is happy to use the tax, spend and regulatory power of the state to buy corporate support and support astonishing levels of deficit spending in ways whose affects are apparently worse than its own projections of doing nothing based on ludicrously unfounded multiplier assumptions.

An Administration can recover from policy setbacks. What it cannot recover from is disastrous political instincts. After all, with the Presidency and both houses of Congress firmly in Democratic hands and time marching on, the Administration is surely running out of excuses.

The only thing going for the Obama Administration at the moment seems to be that their official opponents are even more politically clueless (via here). That, along with Obama’s intelligent, articulate charisma (and, I suspect, a certain wish that the first African-American President succeed) is keeping his polling favourability ratings up fairly well.
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But Obama as Carter-redux is looking more plausible by the day. (Except, of course, President Carter was sounder on human rights.) I do not remember a time when US federal politics so completely manifested my fundamental principle of the division in American politics:

US politics is divided between two Parties who can accuse each other of “not getting” the American Revolution, and both be completely correct.

(Of course, that Obama’s political career was partly made on opposing Dubya’s attempt to export the American Revolution at the point of a smart-bomb to Mesopotamia and the Hindu Kush may further complicate matters. But I am not even going to touch foreign policy.)

Yet, on the subject of “not getting” the American Revolution, it is hard to go past Pat Buchanan:

Moreover, the alienation and radicalization of white America began long before Obama arrived. He acknowledged as much when he explained Middle Pennsylvanians to puzzled progressives in that closed-door meeting in San Francisco.
Referring to the white working-class voters in the industrial towns decimated by job losses, Obama said: "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations." …
America was once their country. They sense they are losing it. And they are right.

One cannot understand how much Pat Buchanan does not “get” the American Revolution without understanding the crucial difference between patriotism and nationalism. Patriotism is love/support/commitment to one’s country, to a polity with a certain territory. It presumes nothing about ethnic identity. Nationalism is love/support/commitment to one’s nation, conceived as an ethnic identity which should have a polity. Nationalism holds, for example, that no Jew can be a true member of any nation (other than Israel). Patriotism does not bar anyone who is willing to support their country.

This distinction is crucial in the case of the US because the United States has never been a nation in an ethnic sense. Not only was it not a solely British founding, the United Kingdom itself was ethnically and religiously diverse. The US, alone of all the great polities of its time, was founded around a set of ideas: ideas expressed most famously in the Declaration of Independence but also in the Preamble to the US Constitution. To be a patriotic American is to support the country founded on those ideals: hence the oath of allegiance being to the Constitution that expresses them. Indeed, the US fought a brutal Civil War over what those ideals meant: particularly over the contradiction of a Revolution based on natural equality and protection of property establishing a United States within which there were people who were property.

The US has never ceased to fight over those ideas. As a WWII veteran so eloquently and movingly states, the current fight over legal equality for the same-sex attracted is the latest manifestation of the battle as was previously fought over race, sex, religion, slavery.

Any attempt to base American identity on race, on ethnicity, on some identity that separates who cannot and cannot be a “true American” beyond their, at least implicit, commitment to something within the grander American project, is a betrayal of the American Revolution. That without even considering Andrew Sullivan’s point about how pervasive black influence is on “white” America.

Pat Buchanan was a disastrous failure as a candidate for the American Presidency (0.4% of votes cast) and arguably helped, with his strident 1992 Republican Convention speech, Clinton to beat Bush senior. Both effects, I would suggest, being because Buchanan so very, very obviously does not “get” the American Revolution.

Cleverer conservatives understand this, including fellow Catholic conservatives:

The anti-culture which the counterculture spawned or gave the opportunity of a lifetime used race/power as simply a weapon against the real foe of those against culture — religion/authority. And the foolish white racists of yesterday failed to realize that choosing to fight over the former meant choosing to lose the fight over the latter.

To be sure, Poulson wants to abandon the effortless virtue of race while standing on the effortless virtue of sexual orientation, and his point about religious culture was previously deployed against Catholics, but at least he understands how self-defeating—indeed, in American terms, self-refuting—the race dynamic is.

As should be obvious, I have grave concerns about the political instincts of the Obama Administration: apparently an amalgam of Chicago-machine politics and academe pc with all the latter's self-righteous obliviousness. That does not mean one cannot realise that many of his opponents are worse.

In recent decades, the Republicans have done best under Reagan for the Presidency and “Contract with America” Gingrich for the Congress. Both “got” the American Revolution in a way none of the current Republicans seem able to get anywhere near.

Obama might be Carter-redux, but without the equivalent of a Reagan or a Gingrich, the Republicans will continue to flounder in their own bubble of deeply misguided delusions. Leaving ordinary Americans, in effect, trying to work out which side of mainstream politics is less of a betrayal of the American project. The articulate, charismatic black man of mixed race has an inherent advantage in that judgement, for what speech has so eloquently personified the American Project as I have a Dream? Buchanan is so profoundly wrong he cannot even begin to see that.

But Buchanan is a patent political failure. The real question is why so many Republicans seem so similarly blind: so apparently utterly unable to understand past Republican success, let alone understand the country they aspire to lead.

ADDENDA That self-declared conservatives continue to way outnumber self-declared liberals in polling just highlights the Republican failure. (H/t gaypatriot).

Ayaayn Hirsi Ali makes the point about the nature of US patriotism quite nicely:

America has the advantage that when you become a citizen, you pledge loyalty to a Constitution that's about ideas and not about ethnicity. Because of that, Americans do not feel shy about teaching new Americans why citizenship is important, why patriotism is important, pride about the Founding Fathers. That's an easier sell than taking pride in the history of France, for instance.

(H/t Bruce Bawer.)

ADDENDA 2: Kyle has a nice post about divisions among conservative elite and base contrasting with far greater unity among liberal/progressive elite and base. Part of what is going on in that, I suspect, is that US progressivism (like progressivism across the West) is to a significant degree about signaling one is one of the Virtuous: a sense of Virtue itself based on a sensibility anchored in ideal aspirations, on a realm of the mind (see my post on beliefs as status markers). So, dissenting on marker-issues exposes one to loss of status. Conservatives, on the other hand, are committed to preserving a diverse inheritance from the past. Given that which part of that inheritance one is committed to and what degree can patently vary, getting unity is inherently harder (and greatly aided if there is a sense of common threat).

The Crusades: the Struggle for the Holy Land

Regine Pernoud’s The Crusades: the Struggle for the Holy Land was originally published in 1959, so does not represent the latest scholarship. It is also clearly mainly written for a lay audience.

Pernoud happily sees Islam as retrograde compared to Christianity, but still manages to provide more details about the Muslims than, say Riley-Smith’s more recent book. There is considerable overlap between the two books—right down to which passages from which chronicles are quoted—though Pernoud limits herself to crusades to the Holy Land, Egypt and Constantinople from the First Crusade to the fall of Acre in 1291, while Riley-Smith is much more comprehensive. Pernoud is only interested in crusades to outre-mer (literally over-sea). Riley-Smith also covers Spain, the Baltic states and crusades against fellow Christians.

Pernoud is centrally interested in how the crusades were experienced and understood by folk at the time. She gives a strong sense of how the crusades were lived.
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Pernoud starts off with a brief summary of the history then an examination of the appeal and perils of pilgrimage. Having set the scene, she moves on to the Pope who preached the First Crusade, Urban II. (Various contemporary versions of his famous speech are available here.) She then looks at the poor, the barons, the churchmen and the women: each with their own chapter. Followed by one (The Grain and the Chaff) which considers villains (Reynald de Chatillon gets quite a go) and villainies (such as the slaughter of Jews in European cities) and contemporary reactions thereto.

Pernoud then continues on to three chapters on technical methods: of organising conquest, of engineering and building, and of financing. Then two chapters on The Spirit of Conquest, covering kings and merchants and the Fourth Crusade as well as the attempts against Egypt (which make more sense when one realises that Muslims probably only became a majority of the population around about this time). Then onto Mysticism and Politics covering a chapter on St Francis in Egypt (The Monk and the Sultan), one on Frederick II Stupor Mundi (The Crusader without Faith) and one on St Louis (The Perfect Crusader).

The final part, The End of the World, deals with the final fall of the Crusader kingdoms and and concludes with a chapter on the last sputters of the crusader impulse to outre-mer, The Planner and the Saint. The former was French lawyer Peter Dubois, who provided an elaborate plan for elevation of the power and status of the French monarchy to support the re-establishment of outre-mer as its colonies. Shorn of its crusading and Council of Europe (chaired by the French King) aspects, its main interest is that it sets out much of the program Philip the Fair was to actually follow. The saint is Raymond Llull, who advocated crusade via preaching. She reports, as does the Catholic Encyclopedia, that he died being stoned by a mob at Tunis and holds him to be the precursor of the missionary impulse that was to later become (and still is) so important in the history of Christianity. But, then, what was St Paul if not the first missionary?

Pernoud is a very lively writer, with an eye for the striking: very interested in conveying a feel for the complexities of the period. Of making the medievals full beings in complex societies, rather than cardboard cut-outs available for us clever and wise moderns to sneer at. She does not care much for Eleanor of Aquitaine (fair enough). Apart from that, her presentation of the more prominent personalities is fairly conventional. Thus Guy of Lusignan is ineffectual to the point of incompetence, Reynald de Chatillon is a charismatic brute, Gerard of Richefort destructively selfish, Cardinal Pelagius incredibly arrogant, Frederick II untrustworthy and generally impossible to deal with. Judgements which, to be fair, are straightforwardly based on the chroniclers of the period.

Pernoud draws a sharp contrast Frederick II with Saint Louis. Again, one based firmly on period sources.

I like good populist history: works that bring history to as wide a readership as practicable. For intellectual life generally, if one looks at the articles, essays and books that have been seriously influential, it is those written for the intelligent lay audience which have tended to have the greatest impact. Scholarship should not be an insular little game, played for the oh-so-clever cognescenti, while the ignorant peons slave away to support the interests of their betters. It should be the research and testing ground from which knowledge gets distributed to the wider culture. Regine Pernoud obviously believes in accessible history and she practises it well. Good for her.

Kingdom of Shmeaven

I recently listened to an excellent presentation by Dr Darius von Guettner from Melbourne University at the History Teachers Association of Victoria conference on The Crusades: An Act of Intolerance or an Act of Love. He used Sir Ridley Scott’s film Kingdom of Heaven as a talking point. So I thought it worthwhile posting an updated version of my review of Kingdom of Heaven originally posted in another place.


So, Ridley Scott thought that there are far too many stupid myths about Jerusalem and the Holy Land, and the answer to this is a new set of stupid myths. Really, why do directors muck around with the history, particularly when the history itself is much more intelligent and engaging than their bastardisations? I could forgive it in Gladiator because (1) it is a much better film and (2) it was a redoing a previous film. Strangely enough, the bit I found most offensive in Kingdom was not the democratisation of knighthood (that just took all the point out of knighthood) but parading young Balian’s blatant refusal to take responsibility as a noble act. There comes a point when concern for your own moral purity becomes indulgence.

I watched Kingdom of Heaven in its cinema release with a group of medieval re-enactment friends, including one who is far more knowledgeable on the Crusades than I (and it being a long time since I read Runciman’s three volume History of the Crusades though she informed me I should read Jonathan Riley-Smith which I have since done and thoroughly enjoyed). Her bursts of laughter at particular points of violence to the historical record were particularly amusing.
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I restrained myself to whispering to friend that I hoped the next two-hander I fight in SCA combat uses the "high guard" position Godfrey(!) of Ibelin taught Balian (“dead” to a cut to the body while my shield is planted on his sword is my prediction) and exclaiming out aloud, when Balian leads the defence of the breached walls of Jerusalem:

yes, throwing your shield away, that’s what you do when you lead a charge.

The siege warfare detail bits were well done. The cavalry charge was crap, but that seems standard for Ridley Scott (the cavalry charge in Gladiator was crap too) and for Hollywood generally (if anyone knows of a film which does a pre-1820, and particularly a pre-1550, cavalry charge properly, I would delighted to know about it—I am told that Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky does cavalry charges well). Shock cavalry charged knee-to-knee (or even knee-behind-knee). They were not swirling mobs, nor a bunch of individual riders heading in vaguely the same direction.

A friend later commented that the best bit was:

truly you leave out the best bit...You are forgetting the scene where Balian DEFEATS FOUR ARMOURED OPPONENTS ARMED WITH SWORDS AND SHIELDS, WHILE WEARING NO ARMOUR AND ARMED WITH A CERAMIC POT!!!!!!
...:-)
If Balian had handed out more ceramic pots to his garrison, they may have kept Jerusalem from the infidel until Richard Cour de Leon arrived with reinforcements.

I quite enjoyed the portrayal of Saladin, which was within the long-standing tradition of Saladin-as-paragon. Orlando Bloom was fine for the role as written but was just no Russell Crowe, though I was so busy trying to remember relevant bits of history that I couldn’t really just sit back and enjoy the film.

As for Guy of Lusignan (Martin Csokas who also played Celeborn in LOTR), my period-expertise friend made the excellent point that he managed to go off and found the Kingdom of Cyprus, which his dynasty controlled until 1489.

I suspect I would have enjoyed the film if I had either known a lot more, or a lot less, of the specific history. I preferred A Knight’s Tale – it’s a lot more sheer fun. As I did Elizabeth: the movie is so much fun, you forgive its historical bastardisations (such as running two different Duc d’Anjou together⎯the gay cross-dresser was not his brother who courted Elizabeth⎯or portraying Walsingham as Elizabeth’s great dark fag—what every good girl needs to get ahead).

Others have had similar reactions to Kingdom of Heaven as I. The second review is particularly amusing.

There may also be a certain larger cluelessness:

Libertas’s Murty says that a publicist for Ridley Scott’s expensive 2005 flop about the Crusades, Kingdom of Heaven, asked her and her filmmaker husband, Jason Apuzzo, for advice on marketing the film to conservatives and Christians. Invited to a press screening along with representatives of various Christian groups, the two watched in disbelief as the movie opened with a Catholic priest beheading a woman and stealing her rosary—and went on in that vein, while also presenting the Muslims as noble and wise. “Every single person directly associated with the Church in the movie is a murderer or a liar. They really thought this would appeal to Christians,” Murty recounts. “Some of these people live in this completely sealed world in West Hollywood and didn’t register how offensive the movie would be.”

This compilation of responses from academic historians of the Crusades is informative and amusing (particularly the conjunction therein with some Muslim responses).

I am told that the Director’s cut is a better movie. Possibly, but I do not believe the bastardization of history can be retrieved.