Tuesday, January 30, 2018

The Illusion of free banking

A May 2014 Skepticlawyer post that I failed to cross-post to here slightly updated.

Reading Fragile by Design: The Political Origins of Banking Crises and Scarce Credit by Charles Calomiris and Stephen Haber is a rewarding experience, not only in what it says but in the thinking it stimulates. As one comes to appreciate how immense the damage done by central bankers has been--causing the Great Depression, Japan's "lost decades", the Great Recession, the Eurozone crisis--which, I should clarify, is not the subject matter of Fragile by Design, free banking (in the sense of a banking regime without a central bank) becomes more and more attractive.

Especially as there are two excellent examples of how successful free banking can be, both covered in some detail in Fragile by Design. The first is Scotland from the late C17th until the mid C19th, when the privileges of the Bank of England were (partially) extended into Scotland, and Canada from the 1860s to the creation of the Bank of Canada in 1934. In both cases, free banking generated stable, efficient banking systems able to provide high levels of credit to their economies.

Case closed therefore?

No, a monopoly in issuing banknotes is not a necessary feature of a stable banking regime.

Alas, no. Central banks are ubiquitous in modern economies and for a simple reason--no state is willing to forego the financing advantages having a central bank gives it. A tame banker is a boon during fiscal emergencies--this is why they were created, starting with the oldest, the Sveriges Riksbank (founded 1668, the fourth oldest bank still in existence), and the second oldest, the Bank of England (founded 1694, the ninth oldest bank still in existence).

In both the above cases of free banking (Canada and Scotland), the free banking regime operated under the shelter of a central-bank-financed state. In the case of Scotland, part of the United Kingdom from 1707 onwards but sharing a common monarch since 1603 (apart from the Interregnum, when they still shared a government), the English-cum-British war machine, debt-financed as necessary via the Bank of England since 1694, protected Scotland and its free banking system (as Calomiris & Haber point out). In the case of Canada, part of the British Empire, Canada and its free banking regime was protected by the Royal Navy, also debt-financed as necessary by the Bank of England since, well, 1694.

Royal Navy: financed through the Bank of England,
also protecting free banking Scotland.
So, both the flagship cases of successful free banking regimes are also examples of why they are so rare. It is possible to have a free banking regime--in a subordinate jurisdiction protected by a central bank debt-financed war machine.

Since states are not going to give up their central banks, the trick becomes to determine the best policy regime for a given central bank to operate under. NGDP level targeting--maintaining a smooth trend in aggregate spending/aggregate income--is the best on offer at the moment. As Lars Christensen points out, it would mean that the business cycle was entirely driven by supply shocks; as Scott Sumner points out, it would allow policy to largely leave things be; and, as the experience of Australia and Israel demonstrate, can lead to very flat business cycles even during other people's (demand-shock caused) Great Recessions. (Yes, technically, the Reserve Bank of Australia runs a broad inflation targeting policy regime, but it largely operates as an aggregate spending smoothing policy regime.)

So, free banking: lovely idea, not going to happen. And the standard examples of why it is a lovely policy idea also demonstrate why it is not going to happen (except in subordinate jurisdictions able to have their own banking arrangements protected by central bank debt-financed as necessary war machines).

Friday, January 26, 2018

A comment on border walls

This is based on a comment I made here.

The success of Israel and Hungary in putting up border barriers has been cited as evidence in favour of President Trump's proposed Mexican border wall.

West Bank barrier.
A counter-argument raised against such citing is that those walls are much smaller than the Trump proposal. It is true that the US-Mexican border is 3,201km long, while Israel has 1,004km of border barriers (708km on West Bank, 245km on Egypt border and 51km on Gaza border) and the Hungarian border barriers are 523km (175km on Serbian border and 348km on Croatian border)--actually, slightly less if one includes natural barriers.

What is missing in this simple comparison is relative populations. Israel has 1,004 km of border wall with a population of 8.5m, so 8,500 people per km of wall.

Hungary has 523km of border wall with a population of 9.8m, so 18,700 people per km of wall.

Hungarian border barrier.
The US-Mexico border is 3,201km long and the US has a population of 325.7m, which would be 101,800 people per km of wall.

Given that Americans are also, on average, richer than Israelis and Hungarians, the proposed Mexican border barrier is, in fact, “smaller” with respect to population and GDP than either the Israeli or Hungarian cases.

Overstayers
Another argument sometimes mounted against border barriers or border enforcement is that a significant amount of illegal immigration comes from visa overstayers and other people who have legally entered for one purpose but extend their stay beyond their legal entitlement. While this is true, it is no argument against border barriers, which can (as the Israel and Hungarian cases demonstrate) be very effective in stopping illegal border crossings. That they do not also stop overstaying merely tells us that such barriers are not a complete solution to all illegal immigration.

It is also reasonable to regard the two types of illegal immigration differently simply because the overstayers have at least passed some level of entry scrutiny. Moreover, it is a bit difficult to do things such as various forms of infrastructure when you don't even know how many folk are in the country. (And the notion that the social infrastructure of being a successful country is infinitely flexible, so can deal with any level of inflow of any type, strikes me as just nuts.)

Incorporating or denigrating
The Australian and Canadian experiences suggest quite strongly that effective efforts against illegal immigration can actually help the pro-immigration cause because it does not make ordinary voters feel they have no say. Making voters feel helpless and ignored is not good for politics in general and the politics of immigration in particular. While de-legitimising considering the downsides from migration helps along the process of spectacularly screwing up migration policy.

Design proposal for Mexican border barrier.
Of course, if your main operative concern regarding immigration is to show how righteous you are, then making the "unrighteous" feel helpless and ignored, indeed, rubbing their noses in how much their views (and votes) don't count, may be much of the attraction in the first place. (The term undocumented migrants is a nicely Orwellian way of saying "and your votes shouldn't count", though it is only part of the use of language to promote voter irrelevance on migration matters.)

But that sort of moralising arrogance, and contempt towards fellow citizens, is not helpful; however strong and appealing it may be among "progressive" folk. It helps give support for the very populist politics that they so deride; but even that can also be a good outcome for them, as it "confirms" their contempt for their fellow citizens which has become so much an integral part of contemporary "progressive" politics.

Far from comparative size stopping the successful Israeli and Hungarian border barriers being evidence for a Mexican border wall, the Mexican border wall is (relative to population and GDP) actually as "smaller" proposal than either.


ADDENDA: An unusually sensible piece on The Wall.
An amusing post about the success of physical barriers.
The latest poll is from 2012, but includes previous polls and suggests strong support for enforcing laws against illegal immigration.
[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

Tuesday, January 16, 2018

Luke Cage: a view from Harlem

With the expansion in cable television, and the even more recent rise of online television, we live in a golden age of television. The range of TV series, including high quality TV series, available is unprecedented.

Marvel v DC
I have a weakness for police procedurals, crime shows and superhero shows (though not the animated versions). Among the "big two" comic conglomerates, DC comics has had a longer record of TV success than Marvel, though Marvel has started to expand its television presence. DC is doing particularly well in TV series at the moment. From the success of Arrow (2012-), DC has spun off The Flash (2014-), Legends of Tomorrow (2016-) (the core of the so-called Arrowverse) plus creating Constantine (2014-15) and Supergirl (2015-). From the DC imprint Vertigo Comics comes Lucifer (2015-), which is the most wickedly funny of the various current set of comic series (as is only proper).

DC's most iconic comic characters are Superman (1933) and Batman (1939). In terms of current TV series, Supergirl is, of course, Superman's cousin while Gotham (2014-) is the story of the path, starting with the death of the Mr & Mrs Wayne's, of Bruce Wayne to becoming Batman. The previous great C21st DC superhero TV success being Smallville (2001-2011), the story of Kal-El/Clark Kent's path to becoming Superman. 

Outside the Christopher Nolan Batman films, Batman Begins (2005), The Dark Knight (2008) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Marvel has done much better in recent films than DC, both in fan/critical response and box office. The standout exception for DC being Wonder Woman (2017), which was not merely a great superhero film, but also a great war film. Otherwise, the recent DC outings have been too dour, too pedestrian: reasonable B-grade films, although with block-buster budgets, but nothing special.

Apart from the first Captain America film, The First Avenger (2011), the various Marvel Cinematic Universe films have been more fun, better received by the fans, and generally bigger box office than the recent DC film efforts. My favourites are Doctor Strange (2016) and Deadpool (2016), but I have enjoyed them all.

Their film success has encouraged Marvel to produce various TV series. They started with a direct leverage from the successful Avenger movies, with Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013-) and Agent Carter (2015-2016) plus a group of specifically New York focused series; Jessica Jones (2015-), Daredevil (2015-), Luke Cage (2016-), Iron Fist (2017-) who converge in a group series The Defenders (2017-). Marvel has also launched The Punisher (2017-) as well as an explicitly X-men series, Legion (2017-). 

I have been watching (on DVD); Arrow (2012-), The Flash (2014-), Legends of Tomorrow (2016-) and Gotham from DC comics plus Daredevil (2015-), Luke Cage (2016-) and Jessica Jones (2015-) from the Marvel universe.  I have also been watching, and greatly enjoying, Lucifer (2015-).

In the case of Jessica Jones (2015-), I only watched it because some of the events referenced in Luke Cage (2016-) happened in the first season of Jessica Jones (2015-). Although I watched all the first season of Jessica Jones (2015-), I found it at times a difficult watch. Not because it was not well done--it is very well done--but because the mind-controlling psychopath Kilgore (wonderfully played by David Tennant) was an uncomfortable villain while I found Jessica Jones's abrasive inability to manage people effectively frustrating: too much overt emotion, too little thinking it through. Luke Cage's caring calm was distinctly more engaging.

Man in a hoodie
Luke Cage is an unusual superhero in at least two respects. First, no mask: he is just an African-American man in a hoodie. Second, no special name; Luke Cage is the name he already goes by around first Hell's Kitchen, in Jessica Jones (2015-), and then Harlem (though it is not his legal name).

That Luke Cage is of African descent is less unusual: Marvel is bringing out a Black Panther film this year. Luke Cage does have special powers (bulletproof and unusually strong), the result of a freak medical experiment/accident, but that is hardly an unusual superhero back story.

(As an aside, I have come to very much dislike the use of white and black as racial terms. As journalist William Saletan nicely puts it, race is not a causal unit. It does not even bundle causal units together in other than the crudest of fashions. The terms white and black strip people of their cultural and civilisational heritages--we do not, after all, use the term yellow races any more. In the case of the US, white bundles people of European heritages together while black bundles people of various African heritages together--whether the descendants of slaves who have been in what is now the US for centuries, more than enough time for ethnogenesis; more recent Afro-Caribbean migrants further removed from the experience of slavery and with no Jim Crow in their history; or recent African immigrants who tend to be highly educated and highly successful.)

The character of Luke Cage was introduced in Jessica Jones (2015-) where he ran a bar in Hell's Kitchen. By the time the Luke Cage series starts, he has moved to Harlem and is sweeping hair in a barber shop and dishwashing at the Harlem Paradise nightclub.

People and place
As a TV series, Luke Cage has some notable features. The first is much less of "quick cuts" approach to scenes and shots in this online series than is usual in TV shows: there is much more lingering use of camera angles. Second is the on-screen music is much more front-and-centre. In particular, the scenes at the Harlem Paradise night club include guest singers, whose talents are showcased rather than touched-upon background. But not only there: a rap artist rapping at the end of a radio interview gets the same showcasing.

The third is a very solidly African-American perspective. This is a series very much placed in Harlem, and the history of Harlem is not one of slavery or Jim Crow; they were things that happened elsewhere. There is much reference to "black" history in the series, but it is a running reference to the achievements of notable African-Americans. The invoked public history is a heroic history of example and achievement, not a victim history of oppression.

A recurring touchpoint within the series is that of missing fathers. Only about 30 percent of African-Americans are now born in wedlock. If one wants to see communities experimenting with large-scale dispensing with fatherhood, then African-American communities are it. Not encouraging examples, and certainly Luke Cage as a TV series treats missing fathers as a lack, a failure, a flaw and a burden.

A continuing theme in the series is the use of the word nigger (or nigga).  Luke Cage (Mike Colter) himself refuses to use it, and Mariah Dillard (Alfre Woodward), the Harlem councilwoman with the crime family background, announces to her night club-owning crime-boss cousin Cornel "Cottonmouth" Stokes (another fine performance by Oscar-winner Mahershala Ali: but all the leads are well-played) how much she despises the word in one of the first scenes of the series. Cottonmouth himself says in that same scene that "it is easy to underestimate a nigger, you don't see him coming". The characters who embrace crime and violent street bravado are the ones that bandy the word about.

Civilised order versus gangster barbarism is very much a theme of the series (roughly as many African-Americans identify as conservative as identify as liberal). Doing work is a character positive, as is running a (small) business. Liberty versus coercion is also a theme in the series; though coercion in the broad, not merely state coercion. The oppressed/oppression language of politics which African-American life is so often framed by appears lightly in the series, and then in the context of cops and young black males.

But the series refuses to indulge in easy racial stereotypes--the most dire case of police brutality is between a large African-American detective and a teenage African-American boy, while good and evil, strength and weakness are treated as orthogonal to race or ethnicity. The police themselves are portrayed as people, not stereotypes.

The writing and acting are generally excellent. But fine acting has become the norm in the better TV series from the US. The days when you watched American shows for the bang-bang and car chases and British shows for the acting and the wit have long since passed.

Fathers may be significantly absent, but family is not. Cottonmouth's erratic, almost febrile, violence makes so much more sense as you learn his (and his cousin's) family backstory. While Luke Cage's own family drama turns out to be central to the story arc of the first season (and, it is hinted at in the last episode, perhaps longer).

The contrast between a grandmother who corrupted her family and a father who failed his sons is another example of the series refusing to indulge in easy stereotypes. As is detective Misty Knight's (Simone Missick) wrestling with being in the system yet dubious of it after she is confronted by betrayal from within it and Luke Cage's example outside it.   

Natural versus imposed diversity
I enjoyed the intelligence and story-first approach of the series. It is also an excellent example of the correct way to do "diversity": make sure story comes first and diversity comes naturally out of it.

If one is clever about it, one can successfully alter, for example, the sex and race of iconic characters. A classic example is Lucy Liu's wonderful Joan Watson in Elementary (2012-) which--like the mostly superb Sherlock (2010-)--gives us a contemporary Sherlock Holmes; but a recovering drug addict Sherlock who lives in New York and has a sober companion hired by his father as a condition of living in one of his brownstones foisted on him. Enter the (former) Dr Joan Watson who has giving up being a surgeon to be a sober companion and through whose eyes we find out about Sherlock. The dynamic works and is a great basis for storytelling. It is also nice to see two attractive (heterosexual) characters of the opposite sex in a strong and dynamic relationship with absolutely no hint of sexual tension.

(Pausing here for fan joke: Joss Whedon, Steven Moffat and George R.R. Martin walk into a bar and every character you've ever loved dies.)

Both DC and Marvel comics have falling readerships. Marvel in particular has gratuitously failed to leverage the success of its movies. There has been too much of "we command the cultural commanding heights and we are going to show our institutional dominance" approach of expanding diversity by obliterating historical voices (as in gratuitously changing the sex/race/sexual/gender identity of iconic characters) and too little increasing the range of voices with their own inherent stories.

In other words, too much of the rebooted Ghostbusters model and not enough of the Mad Max; Fury Road example. The two films' respective IMDB ratings (5.3 and 8.1) and box office results ($229m worldwide on a $144m budget--it failed to make its production budget in the US--versus $379m worldwide on a $150m budget; remembering that you have to add on about 50% to the production budget to include distribution costs) indicate which is the more successful road to go down.

Because it is the path more respectful of story: respectful of function and purpose which is audience-directed, not gratuitously imposed moralising, which is self ("look at us") directed. Luke Cage is first and foremost good storytelling, which is how it is able to invoke people and place so well, and do it with a clear and engaging voice.


[Cross-posted at Skepticlawyer.]

ADDENDA: Ooh, the irony, the lesson:
Every year, the LGBTQ+ advocacy group GLAAD recognizes and awards a selection of television shows, films, and books that feature powerful portrayals of queer people. This year, a number of Marvel’s comics were recognized for the contributions they’ve made to queer culture, but those nominations were bittersweet for one incredibly disappointing reason: They’ve all been cancelled.

Tuesday, January 9, 2018

The founding falsities of postcolonialism

In his discussion with anthropologist Philip Carl Salzman, evolutionary psychologist and YouTuber Gad Saad offers (at 8.48) the following:
By the way, in terms of generative grammar, whenever when I see the word 'post' before anything then that raises a flag that it's bullshit. So post = bullshit; postmodernism, postcolonialism, post-structuralism. So, maybe Chomsky can one day weigh in on why the introduction of post implies that we are going to generate nonsense.
As it happens, Chomsky is not a fan of postmodernism: he is too much of a member of the Enlightenment left for that.

I have been less than impressed with my encounters with postcolonialism. It seems to be based on three fundamental errors: the Marx Mistake, the Lenin Error and the Fanon Fallacy.

The Marx Mistake
Marx's conception of the state, so memorably set out in Chapter 1 of The Communist Manifesto (pdf) (1848) held that:
The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
A useful (if somewhat grammatically challenged) summary-discussion of the Marxist approach to the state is here and a pithy summary is here. At its simplest, the underlying causal structure is that the production technology produces the class structure which produces the state. So that, while there is some scope for independent action by holders of state power, the class structure is prior to, and helps structure, the state.

Which is, for most of human history, simply false. For most of human history, the dominant creator of class structure was the state itself because the state was, until very recently, the dominant generator of surplus (that is, resources beyond the needs of basic subsistence) and surplus is the basis of social hierarchy.

Human societies, up until the break out of human productive capacity beginning in the 1820s, were basically Malthusian in their dynamics. More production led to more babies. The only way to systematically extract surplus was to extract resources before they were used to support more babies and, until very recently in human history, by far the dominant extractor of surplus was the state itself.

The state was originally an extractive parasite which needed to keep its host population controlled (or at least docile) and producing, as set out nicely in historical anthropologist James C. Scott's recent work Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earlist States. Political economist Omer Moav and his colleagues have been developing models of original states as using coercive extraction to get (pdf) around Malthusian constraints including the importance of how vulnerable crops were to expropriation (pdf).

As an aside, whether states have stopped, and to what degree, being extractive parasites requiring docile-and-producing populations is very much a live question. One can, for example, reasonably see the decay of Detroit as a parasitic (mainly city) state apparatus bleeding the life out of a weak civil society undermined by economic changes that the state impedes adjustment to.

Historically, the only competitors to state taxation in producing surplus was various forms of non-state labour bondage (serfdom and slavery) and trade. The former because key to labour bondage is to extract surplus from labour generally paid at subsistence levels; expropriating, as much as is practicable, any scarcity premium from labour. (There is some complexity with regard to use of slaves in more skilled situations [pdf], but it is still about coercive extraction of surplus.) Some of the surplus was then used to maintain the control over those in bondage, the rest to support elite social niches.

While this could create social groups that the state had reasons to bargain with, the support of the state itself was usually required to maintain the labour bondage. The Black Death (which greatly increased the scarcity value of labour because it killed people, not land, machines or coins) failed to see a return to serfdom in Western Europe as the various crowns failed to support the smaller landlords in their demands to re-impose serfdom because it was not in the various crowns' interests to do so.

Trade also produced surplus because it was too variable (essentially, too risky) to be reliably babied-away and often required larger (i.e. surplus-including) social niches to operate.

Even in societies with significant non-state control of surplus, avoiding autocracy and tyranny was a perennial concern, precisely because of the continuing power of the state apparatus. But the entire issue of how to manage state power becomes a non-issue if one believes altering the class structure eliminates the problem, because the state "ultimately reflects" the underlying class structure. The entire history of Leninist tyranny flows from that misconception, in tandem with the necessity to hugely concentrate power to achieve the justifying social transformation.

By stripping away private economic activity, Leninist states were not being cutting edge modernisers, they were being profoundly atavistic. So much so, that the one remaining full-deal Leninist state is a hereditary theocratic autocracy (with deified rulers--an eternal President and eternal Secretary-General): the most atavistic version of the state.

So, a founding mistake of post-colonialism has been to fail to see the state as an structure with its own support and dynamics, not as some reflection of class or race. (Note that class-analysis is inherently superior to race-analysis because class analysis does actually connect to, or bundle together, things which could reasonably be causal units: race does not.)

The Lenin Error
The Lenin Error flows from the Marx Mistake. This was to see imperialism as primarily an economic-class phenomenon.

Imperialism is fundamentally a state phenomenon. Imperialism is what states do, whenever they able to do so in an extraction-positive way. States of all types of social arrangements and economic bases have engaged in imperialism. As soon as there was states, there was imperialism.

As historian Niall Ferguson has observed, imperialism is the least distinctive feature of Western civilisation. The remarkable things about Western territorial imperialism are:
  1. How successful it was.
  2. How comparatively little effort that success required.
  3. How much richer post-Imperial Western societies became.
Atlantic littoral European states (plus Russia) managed to occupy, directly or via neo-Europes, most of the globe. That is a striking level of success, unparalleled in human history.

Yet, at no stage, was the major military effort of any European society deployed against a non-European or neo-European society. European global expansion was achieved while European military forces mostly faced off against other European military forces.

Both these features are products of the same feature: Europe developed incredibly effective states. Since imperialism is what states do, those European states with avenues of geographic expansion (Atlantic littoral states and Russia) produced very, very successful imperialism. Hence also the greatest danger to European states being other European states, and so being where most European military effort was focused.

Looking at the alliance structure among the European Great Powers prior to the Dynasts' War (1914-1918), if extra-European imperialism was the key thing, Britain should not have been allied to France and Russia, who were its main imperial rivals outside Europe. It was internal European state dynamics which drove the alliance structure because the biggest threat to any European state was other European states.

And what happened when the European states abandoned those territorial empires? They got richer. Indeed, some of the richest European states never had any colonial possessions outside Europe (Switzerland being the most striking example). While the state with the longest extra-European empire (Portugal) was one of the least-rich of European societies by the time it lost its empire. 

Imperialism had much less to do with the wealth of European societies than trade (which did not require an empire; though sufficient state effectiveness and military power could certainly motivate imperial expansion to capture revenue from trade) and production within Europe (which also did not require an extra-European empire). 

If we see imperialism for what it is, a manifestation of state action, then the history of European imperialism becomes much more explicable. Moreover, one can see that European imperialism is an unusual manifestation of imperialism (albeit still state-based), which is a much wider historical phenomenon that has no intrinsic connection to being European, to "whiteness", or to capitalism. 

Not that Western states entirely gave up imperialism as they gave up their colonies. It is just that Westerners were, and remain, much better revenue-extraction targets than non-Westerners, so Western states shifted more to colonising their own societies. That Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898), as Chancellor of the Second Reich, and Eduard von Taffe (1833-1895), as Minister-President of the Austrian Empire, were founders of the welfare state is something to pay a bit more attention to.

Successful imperialism came late to Euro-Mediterranean Christendom cum Western Civilisation. From the C7th to the C16th, it mostly lost ground to a civilisation genuinely structured, from its origins, for imperialism, Islam. But, if one is committed to the Lenin error of imperialism as an economic-class phenomenon, then the imperialism of Islam vanishes from sight, as it is based on religion; particularly Sharia (from its origins, and in its nature, an imperial legal system), marriage laws and the consequences of polygyny in generating predatory males with no local wife prospects whose external aggression was then sanctified (including expropriating infidel women). Hence Islam, which was born in imperialism, aggressing against every culture and civilisation it came up against in its first millennia: something it never rejected, it just came up against European states who had (after a millennia) evolved into better predators. Mainstream Islam is a religion of dominance: which is the source of all the difficulties Islam is currently generating. 

The Fanon Fallacy
The Fanon fallacy comes from Frantz Fanon's (1925-1961) writings, particularly his The Wretched of the Earth (1961): some apposite quotes are here. The Fanon Fallacy is to mistake rhetorical justification for something's underlying nature. In particular, to see imperialism as a "white" phenomenon.

First, race is not a causal actor. It does not even bundle causal units together in a useful way. Plenty of Europeans were the victims of imperialism by European states (the Irish, Highland Scots, Welsh, Bretons, Basques, Catalans, Corsicans, Slovenes, Slovaks, Czechs, Croats, Estonians, Lithuanians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Ukrainians ...).  Hardly surprising, as imperialism is what states do, not races.

Indeed, the Dynasts' War (1914-1918) was not sparked by extra-European imperialism, it was sparked by intra-European imperialism.

I call it the Dynasts' War because it was sparked by dynastic regimes under pressure from social changes, regimes that attempted to harness mass sentiment to preserve their regimes and ended up being swallowed by those sentiments: having mobilised mass sentiment requiring vindication-by-victory, they were then trapped by those same sentiments, so forced to continue the war to the bitter end (of their regimes). I dislike the term World War because the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) and the Seven Years War (1756-1763) were at least as global as the 1914-1918 conflict.

It is true that racial arguments came to be used (mostly after the fact of conquest) to explain and justify European and neo-European imperialism. But justificatory rhetoric says something about audience for the rhetoric and the purposes of those using the rhetoric, it does not explain the underlying thing. Moreover, it is normal for imperialisms to have a central group who are mobilised to support the imperial project by status, career, resources and rhetoric.

In particular, it is normal for imperial state societies to generate justificatory rhetoric which exults the imperial culture and denigrates external or peripheral cultures. Chinese intellectuals, for example, did so for millennia; something that James C. Scott discusses in his wonderful The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia.

The Fanon Fallacy takes the (largely ex-post) imperial rationalisation and sees it as structurally central: it functionally accepts (though morally reversing) the racial framing of later European imperialism and mistakes it for the underlying causal reality.

In fact, race is a counter-productive rhetoric for imperialism to adopt, as it seriously impedes incorporating the conquered into the imperial project. Racial conceptions of imperialism--compared to, say, religious or cultural ones--generate a much sharper contrast between conquerors and conquered while obscuring the nature of imperial conquest, turning it from a state action into a race action.

What destroyed European territorial imperialism was the consequences of the Dictators' War (1939-1945), particularly the interruption of colonial control due to conquest of European metropoles and Japanese expansion and Nazi imperialism giving imperialism a bad name among the populations of imperial powers while validating resistance to imperialism. Other factors included: the increased cost (both physical and moral) of control due to the spread of communication, transport and military technology; the falling benefit of territorial control due to both the expansion of communication and transport technology and (despite the two great wars) continuing expansion of productive capacity in Europe and the neo-Europes relative to many imperial holdings (particularly in Africa).

US naval hegemony providing a guarantee of access to oceanic trade also helped to reduce the benefit of extra-European territorial control. Inside Europe, the consolidation of ethnic nations meant that states could achieve a higher revenue/expenditure trade-off if their citizens shared a common language and culture. All of which was about the dynamics of states and domestic politics and nothing to do with race.

Between the Marx Mistake of failing to see that states have generally been central to class structures (a pattern that Leninist states, ironically returned to and exemplified), the Lenin Error of seeing imperialism as class-economic phenomenon rather than first and foremost a state one and the Fanon Fallacy of mistaking the largely ex-post imperial rationalisation of race as a causal feature of imperialism, it is not surprising that I have been serially underwhelmed by post-colonialism as a basis for analysis.

The Wiped Slate
But wait, there's more. There is considerable scholarly evidence that pre-colonial patterns and institutions have continuing effects on contemporary human societies (see here, here, here, here, and here). Including that whether a culture used plough-based farming or not influences contemporary attitudes on the status of women. Or that the length of time since a human population adopted farming has a significant long-term impact on average life expectancy.

This is not to claim imperialism and colonialism had no continuing effects--see here (pdf) for a study on how being ruled by the Ottomans continues to have adverse institutional effects. But there is an obvious importance gain for postcolonial studies to talk up the effect of colonialism on previously subject peoples. Which leads to what we might call the Wiped Slate Effect: treating colonialism as if it was by far the dominant moulding experience of colonial societies and that experience as unrelievedly negative. Clearly not true--Afghanistan (until the Soviet-Afghan War of 1979-1989), Iran (apart from the brief Anglo-Soviet occupation 1941-6) and Thailand were never subject to European territorial occupation, yet are hardly profoundly different from their neighbours, who were subject to such occupation.

The Lenin Error and the Fanon Fallacy both encourage tendencies to the Wiped Slate Effect. But so does Marx's view of modes of production being socially dominant, as in this 1853 piece on British rule in India:
All the civil wars, invasions, revolutions, conquests, famines, strangely complex, rapid, and destructive as the successive action in Hindostan may appear, did not go deeper than its surface. England has broken down the entire framework of Indian society, without any symptoms of reconstitution yet appearing. This loss of his old world, with no gain of a new one, imparts a particular kind of melancholy to the present misery of the Hindoo, and separates Hindostan, ruled by Britain, from all its ancient traditions, and from the whole of its past history. ...
Those family-communities were based on domestic industry, in that peculiar combination of hand-weaving, hands-spinning and hand-tilling agriculture which gave them self-supporting power. English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.
Lenin, of course, derived his analysis from Marx.

Which is not to say that Marx in anyway romanticised what the British found in India:
we must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies. We must not forget the barbarian egotism which, concentrating on some miserable patch of land, had quietly witnessed the ruin of empires, the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties, the massacre of the population of large towns, with no other consideration bestowed upon them than on natural events, itself the helpless prey of any aggressor who deigned to notice it at all. We must not forget that this undignified, stagnatory, and vegetative life, that this passive sort of existence evoked on the other part, in contradistinction, wild, aimless, unbounded forces of destruction and rendered murder itself a religious rite in Hindostan. We must not forget that these little communities were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of elevating man the sovereign of circumstances, that they transformed a self-developing social state into never changing natural destiny, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Kanuman, the monkey, and Sabbala, the cow.
The British were part of the arc of history heading in the proper direction:
England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.
Here we see Marx the historicist, who did so much to infect the social science and humanities with the bug of moralised ideology, where approved (typically highly moralised) framing dominate fact and evidence, whose proponents look for footnotes to fit in with the framing rather than following the evidence wherever it leads. Framing dominating fact is something that the Marx Mistake, the Lenin Error and the Fanon Fallacy are all manifestations of and which post-colonialist analysis is pervaded with.

Fortunately, there is still plenty of empirical scholarship out there which is far more useful in understanding the world around us than any amount of portentous post-colonialism parading as useful scholarship.


[Also posted at Skepticlawyer.]