The Undoing of Thought

If one is puzzled by “progressive” Western opinion’s nonchalance in the face of fascism with an Islamic face, with how racist its anti-racism so often seems to be, with its apparent indifference to the plight of Muslim women or Muslim gays, then read Alain Finkielkraut’s The Undoing of Thought and all is revealed.

Finkielkraut takes us through the intellectual history, and its underlying logic, whereby Enlightenment universalism became transmuted into its opposite.

In Part One—The Roots of the Human Mind—Finkielkraut starts, much like Benda (to whom the book is part homage and part continuation and updating), with Herder and de Maistre. A combination of German Romantics and French Theocrats who, by appealing to unconscious affinities against Enlightenment rationalism, were involuntary innovators who founded the human sciences (p.28).

Well except for, one notes, economics: but, like Benda, intellectual debate for Finkielkraut is a Franco-German affair. Apart from Franz Fanon and de Maistre—who both wrote in French—all the thinkers he cites are French or German. The Anglosphere—apart from, as with Benda, Shakespeare—is an intellectual no-go area.

Yet it is perverse to discuss modernity, even in terms of history of ideas, so utterly unconcerned with the Anglosphere. The Anglosphere creates modernity. Key Franco-German thinkers (such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Marx) are clearly reacting to—and deeply influenced by—their experience and understanding of the Anglosphere. The French Revolution itself—the archetypal “modern” political upheaval—is, in all sorts of ways, a consequence of, and reaction to, the American Revolution. (Even though, in crucial respects, both Revolutionaries and Counter-Revolutionaries fail to understand it—a continuing theme in European intellectual history.) The Continentals are so often much more parochial than they realise.

Like Benda, Finkielkraut sees the Alsace-Lorraine dispute as crucial in its influence on intellectual debate. In particular, by reawakening the debate between nation-as-contract and nation-as-spirit (p.30), which Finkielkraut regards as a crucial dichotomy.
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He discusses the case of Goethe who, on reading a Chinese novel, was struck by how accessible the characters and their motivations were. Thereby completing his journey away from his earlier German Romanticism to seeing ideas and language as providing a more universal bridge across cultures (pp35ff). The artist (or thinker) may be born in a culture, but what they do should is to aspire to transcend it. Goethe had rejected Herder.

But, in German intellectual circles, Herder won. The acquisition of Alsace-Lorraine by the Gernan Reich helped make the cult of origins a patriotic duty. Nation-as-spirit won over nation-as-contract. With the later, brutal consequences that, as Finkielkraut notes, Benda predicted (p.46).

Part Two—Generous Betrayal—is about the intellectual reaction to the horrors of the Second World War and colonialism. Finkielkraut starts with the setting up of UNESCO which seemed to be motivated by the universalism of the philosophes. But this soon became very much not so. The reaction against the most brutal particularism of all was not a re-invigorating of universalism but an even more intense worship of particularism. The Second Death of Man (p.59) done in the name of A Dewesternized World (p.53). What began as a critique of fanaticism became a critique of Enlightenment thinking.

Finkielkraut takes a statement by Claude Levi-Strauss commissioned by UNESCO in 1951 to be a sign of the shift (pp55ff). The universalism of the Enlightenment was criticised as an instrument of imperialism, and thus oppression. It was, Levi-Strauss said, ethnocentric. The war against barbarism became a war against the concept of barbarian. With anthropologists leading the way:

Once [anthropologists] had flattered Europe’s vanity. They set about henceforth to nourish its guilty conscience. Savagery, barbarism and primitive man: these were just so many hateful and condescending stereotypes whose intellectual validity anthropology had undermined (p57)

The war against ethnocentrism pervaded the human sciences (again, economics is ignored). The discipline of History broke the notion of historical continuity, telling us not to see ourselves in the past (pp59ff), which became another country. Sociologists stressed the pluralism of our fleeting culture (pp60ff).

Finkielkraut lists the ways this new perspective meant agreeing with Herder. With a major divergence:

Herder had spoken above all for his own people; the philosophers of decolonisation speak for the Other. Compounding, as it were, for the sins of their own tradition … (p.65)

But mirroring the logic still replicates the logic. So we have, in A portrait of the Decolonised World the result that:

There has been no place for such a collective subject in the logic of colonialism; now, in the logic of cultural identity, there was no room for the individual (p.68).

Hence:

With monotonous regularity these liberation movements have thrown up repressive regimes. This is because they have based themselves on the mystical notion of collective fusion rather than on the juridical conception of contract. They have drawn on political romanticism and conceived liberty as a collective attribute rather than as individual possession (p.70).

Now, one can well argue that ideas do not have such overwhelming causal primacy. But they can aid or resist trends.

Of the two European versions of what a nation is, the Third World has massively opted for the worse one, and done so with the active blessing of Western intellectuals (p.73).
... for culture as task … they substitute culture as origin (p.79)

part of

the great transformation of culture into cultural identity (p.81).

Finkielkraut considers the mixed role of Marxism in all this. Marx deplored nationalism but also denied any notion of social contract, insisting the key feature of society was conflict (p.71). Leninism (particularly under Stalin) resurrected national identity. But in Marxist terms—of something determined by the underlying processes of life, not something that was in anyway chosen. Having undermined the notion of nation-as-contract, Communism's death took with it the notion of a world common to all (pp 72-73). Which leaves nation-as-spirit free reign.

And so the strange convolutions of “anti-racism”.

The word racism, in fact, is deceptive. It brackets under the same label two sorts of outlook whose genesis, logic and motivation are completely dissimilar … The former holds that civilisation is unitary: the latter maintains that there are multiple ethnicities that cannot be compared. It may be true that the first outlook leads to colonialism; but the second culminates in Hitler (p.75).
With the substitution of the cultural for the biological conception of the collectivity, racism has not been abolished: it has simply returned to its starting point (p.77).

While

the annihilation of the individual is called “liberty”; and the word “culture” serves as a humanist standard for the division of the human race into collective, inaccessible and irreducible entities (p.83).

Where Benda was more inclined to see material interest and status-seeking, Finkielkraut is more concerned with the logic of ideas and more intellectual motives. But they are not incompatible perspectives—patterns of ideas, for whatever reason they are adopted, do have inherent logics to them. Finkielkraut discusses the effect on education and notes the irony in Claude Levi-Strauss, having helped set the trend off, then causing offence in a later lecture (to UNESCO in 1971) because he fails to shift his ground (p.78). For:

The more the anti-racism of today resembles the racism of yesterday, the more the word “race” itself become sacrilegious (p.81).

Either way, the pattern of modern intellectuals displaying their moral and intellectual superiority by proclaiming their critical distance from their own culture, and then displaying their moral and intellectual superiority by extolling other people’s attachment to their cultures, is certainly dissected in highly informative way. Since the universal really is inherent in serious intellectual activity, but universalism itself is denied, one gets this Janus-like shifting of ground whereby one's own culture is critiqued in the name of universal principles but other cultures are endorsed in the name of the denial of universalism. Particularism as a universal principle. So criticising Muslims is Islamophobia while criticising Christians is just what sensible folk do.

Despite having been written in 1988, Finkielkraut’s essay is greatly illuminating about the apparent blindness of so many intellectuals in the West to fascism with an Islamic face. Particularly the puzzle of why, among progressivists, derivatives of Hitler’s ideas (studiously repackaged—such as shifting from the Jewish people being the world’s most problematic folk to the Jewish state being the world’s most problematic state) seem to have more sway than derivatives of Lenin’s. Such as insisting on the primacy of identity and culture; romanticising nature; particularising science—contemporary “anti-capitalism”, is much more like Hitler’s than Lenin’s. Indeed, Lenin’s ideas mainly still have influence where his and Hitler’s overlap—such as the notion of a vanguard, the most obvious area where Lenin’s ideas still have influence (and, indeed, greatly influenced Hitler), or contempt for Christianity. But Hitler understood modernity a lot better than Lenin did, since he had to grapple with it much more complexly.

Part Three—Towards a Multi-Cultural Society—extends the critique to multiculturalism. Finkielkraut’s headings summarise his argument rather well: The Disappearance of the Dreyfusards (p.90)—i.e. those who decried xenophobic particularism in favour of chosen allegiance and individual dignity—A Pedagogy of Relativism (p.93), Culture in Pieces (p.99), The Right to Servitude (p.102).

Part Four—We are the World. We are the Children—extends the critique to postmodernism. The thesis, as his first heading says, that A Pair of Boots is a Good as Shakespeare (p.111). Where multiculturalists are about cultural fixity, the postmodernists are about cultural fluidity: a mix-and-match consumerist cosmopolitanism. But with no sense of anything universal, we are left with His Majesty the Consumer (p.118) and “A Society Which Has Finally Become Adolescent” (p.123), one engaged in the worship of youth (pp 125ff). Finkielkraut quotes Fellini:

Only a collective delirium could have led us to regard fifteen-year olds as embodying all the master virtues (p.128).

But if the past has no authority, why not worship the ignorant energy of youth?

Surely Finkielkraut is correct to note that those who decry consumerism have been most avid in undermining the supports for any genuine alternative. Ever since it arose out of the wreckage of Classical civilisation, the intellectual and cultural basis of Western civilisation has been structured around a shifting oscillation between Christianity and the Classical heritage. If both are rejected, what remains? A shifting parade of meretricious moralism, constantly repackaging itself as “cutting edge compassion”, the better to preside over status-seeking self-interest. A shallow intellectual consumerism that replicates and encourages what it professes to despise and has no serious sense of its own origins.

(There is certainly not any concept of Truth to appeal to: that is outmoded and oppressive.)

The final part is a single paragraph, entitled The Zombie and the Fanatic (p.133). The Fanatic being the person locked into their own culture under theories that refuse

access, under pain of high treason, to doubt, irony or reason—that is to say everything which would help him break free of the collective matrix.

The Zombie being the person who is also bereft of access to higher aspirations, but enjoys a leisure industry that reduces culture to the production of entertainment.

Intellectual activity giving way to a terrible and mocking encounter between those who refuse see their own culture and civilisation as having any claims, nor accept any universalism that might be appealed to, and those who insist on the primacy of their religious prescriptions sanctified as “culture”: a nice summary of Europe’s current predicament, written almost 20 years ago.

The Undoing of Thought is an essay that does give one most furiously to think.

The Iron Cage

Part of the problem of reading histories of the contemporary Middle East, and particularly of Israel and Palestine, is that one has to know the history in order to read the history. The questions inspire such passion, and involve such complexities, that it is very difficult indeed to find genuinely accurate histories. And dangerous to rely on any without enough background knowledge to assess what they are leaving out.

But read enough different histories and a more complete picture begins to emerge. Rashid Khalidi’s The Iron Cage: That Palestinian Struggle for Statehood is an intelligent and literate Palestinian history. It has some fairly dramatic flaws, but it certainly expands one’s understanding of the history of the Palestinians. And how Western support for the representative principle in the Middle East has always been subordinate to strategic considerations.

Khalidi is writing against Abba Eban’s classic bon mot that

the Palestinians never miss a chance to miss a chance

arguing strongly that the Palestinians were greatly constrained and disadvantaged by external constraints and internal fissures. Starting with the British refusal to institute any sort of elective politics in Palestine. He succeeds in making one much more aware of the constraints Palestinians were operating under.

On the other hand, he also argues strongly that the Palestinian cause has persistently suffered from poor leadership, particularly compared to their Zionist opponents. Indeed, he is often highly perceptive about the failures of Palestinian leadership and the reasons therefore. This does, however, rather end up suggesting that Eban’s bon mot has more force in it than Khalidi is prepared to explicitly acknowledge.
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While Khalidi is very aware of the power of the post-Holocaust anti-anti-Semitism “narrative” in working in Israel’s favour in the West, is quite blunt that any solution is going to have to take into serious account the concerns and fears of Israelis and clearly admires the energy and efficiency of Zionist leadership, Khalidi still ends up being somewhat patchy in his analysis of Jewish-Arab interactions in Palestine. For example, Khalidi notes that Palestinian society under the British Mandate was more economically developed than in Syria or Egypt. He notes the huge influx of capital and skill the Jewish settlers brought with them. No connection is made between the two facts.

His points often are often less convincing than they might be because he leaves out aspects of the context. For example, even if the British had been full bore on the representative principle, why would it have had different outcomes in Arab Palestine than it did in the rest of the Arab world? He notes that Palestine and Lebanon are the only two Arab countries that have experienced a peaceful change of government via elections. Which begs the question of why?

He sees the crucial advantages of the Zionist movement being well-organised international support—it was originally a manifestation of Western society and well-connected within it, unlike the Palestinians. A much greater level of skills and resources—Zionism was very much a manifestation of modernity, again unlike Palestinian society. With a clear focus—a Jewish state that was a secular democracy. Again, the appropriate political form was never a settled issue in Palestinian politics (and still isn’t). This allowed the Zionist cause to triumph, despite being outnumbered within Mandatory Palestine prior to 1947.

Khalidi’s history cuts in and out. He is very informative on matters up to 1935 (leaving aside issues such as his very bland presentation of the various anti-Jewish riots). For events from about 1935 onwards until the 1980s, The Iron Cage is not really a history, because too much is left out. The Arab Revolt happens, but how and why is not explained. Its consequences are dealt with. Khalidi is very careful to delineate how partial Arab military support against the Zionist cause was in 1947-48.

After the catastrophe of 1947-48 until the 1980s, what we get is thematic observations. So, for example, yes, the notable class was (largely) eclipsed, but not as completely as suggested. Not least given Yassir Arafat himself, whose origins are not dealt with at all and whose rise to prominence is dealt with extraordinarily perfunctory.

Khalidi is very perspicacious about the consequences for the PLO of its expulsion from Lebanon in 1982 and the isolation and aging of its leadership in Tunis. He notes that terrorism as a tactic has great moral and political costs for the Palestinian cause. Though he fails to connect that explicitly with the degree of support that the US provides Israel. He notes how Bush II’s administration, despite Bush’s explicit support for a Palestinian state (the first US President to do so) has, conversely, been the most pro-Israeli US Administration. Yet that level of support was surely precisely because of the Bush Administration’s conception of the War on Terror.

He argues that the PLO explicitly accepted Israel’s existence from the late 1980s onwards, though he notes that there was sufficient ambiguity—not least in the persistence of terror attacks on Israel—to give those sceptical about such acceptance things to point to. Khalidi argues that the continuation of Jewish settlements on the West Bank is, in fact, making a two-state solution less and less viable. But he doesn’t draw the connection that the presentation of such settlements as a defensive measure gains power, particularly within Israel, precisely because of the continuing terror attacks on Israel. Nor does he distinguish between the creation of a Jewish Jerusalem and other settlements.

He sees Western hostility to the Hamas government as an attempt to destroy Palestinian democracy. A deeply implausible claim, since the financial boycott has support even from the EU—not normally a source of pro-Israeli policy—and is entirely predicated on Hamas accepting Israel’s existence.

He claims that Barak’s offer at Camp David during the waning months of the Clinton Adminisration was a “take it or leave it” one, yet makes no comment about Arafat’s failure to make any sort of counter-offer. A failure that lead to the complete collapse across the US political spectrum of any interest in dealing with Arafat and gave the claims of Sharon and Olmert that they had “no one to negotiate with” plausibility. (Claims that the election of the Hamas government gave new life to.) Though Khalidi does admit that Arafat’s political style worked very well in Arab politics, but badly in a Western context.

Even though Khalidi is often dramatically selective, he can also take Israeli perspectives and concerns seriously. That the huge wave of Jewish refugees to Israel meant that fewer and fewer Israelis had any memory of events before 1948 strikes me as a telling point. Of course, there is still the interesting question of why Jews fled Arab lands in such astonishing numbers.

I would certainly recommend that anyone interested in understanding the Israel-Palestinian dispute read The Iron Cage. And Khalidi’s argument that a two-state solution is becoming increasingly less viable due to Israeli policy, yet there is a dramatic lack of serious thinking about the alternative, makes for sombre reading. But it is also very much a book to read critically: it is only partially a history and is a partial history.

Welfarism as a substitute for imperialism

(This is an expansion of a comment I made here.)

That imperialism and capitalism have no particular connection to each other is perfectly obvious from history. The Soviet Union was an imperial state, as was Mao's China.

What capitalism—a system where the means of production are substantially exchangeable in markets—did do is make imperialism easier. Capitalism is very good at producing capital, the produced means of production. The more resources—particularly, the greater the organizational capacity—a society (and more particularly the state) has at its disposal, the easier various forms of public policy become. What is striking about Western imperialism is both its extent—controlling most of the globe at its height—and its comparative ease. Western states conquered most of the globe even though their armed forces were mostly kept at home facing off other Western states. They could do so because their effective organizational capacity—the technology they could use, the control they could exercise, the resources they could deploy—was greater than the peoples they dealt with, even without disease advantages.

Even more to the point, imperialism is simply what rulership typically does if it can. From the earliest days, when rulership developed, it would seek to increase its control of peasants, trade nodes and trade routes to increase its power and wealth. The notion that there is a "proper" territorial limit to states—beyond just their capacity to control territory—is something of a modern invention.

What we lack is much sense that there is a proper internal limit to the ambit of state action. Welfarism is, in a sense, internal colonialism. Indeed, the sort of people who built careers in imperial administration and spruiked for imperialism are not so very different from those who build careers in welfare bureaucracies and spruik for expanding public social welfare programs. And foreign aid programs.
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The period when "de-colonisation" began was also the period of the Marshall Plan, of LSE socialism in the UK which fed into, for example, India’s permit raj. As de-colonisation marched along, it did in conjunction with the postwar expansion of welfare states. It is hardly surprising a very state-led notion of development became dominant. After all, a very state-led notion of the way to social improvement was dominant in domestic public policy too.

So, as Western states abandoned the notion of imperial expansion, or even imperial control [imperialism have been particularly discredited when Europeans themselves experienced the Nazi version of it], and retreated back to their “proper” territorial boundaries, they expanded their ambit within their own societies. The former imperial states became welfare states colonizing their own societies.

The notion of welfarism as internal colonialism may seem confronting, even offensive. (Though, perhaps, less so to those who have read some of Theodore Dalrymple’s jeremiads.) So, let me give an example where the pattern of internal colonialism is patent.

In Richard Trudgen’s Why Warriors Lie Down and Die—which should be compulsory reading for anyone interested in indigenous policy—there is the illustrative tale of the Galiwin ’ku fishing industry in the Northern Territory of my own country.

The Galiwin ’ku fishing industry consisted of several small fishing boats made from local timbers at Galiwin ’ku by the Yolηnu and mission staff. The Yolηu named these boats with holy names from their clain or riηgitj nation alliance. The boats were owned by the mission but were skippered and crewed by different clans. Some small clans would come together in a riηgitj alliance to make up a crew. …

These clan groups would use the boats and sell their catch to the mission for processing and re-sale to other places. The people clearly understood that what they caught was theirs until they sold it to the mission and they benefited directly from their catch. From the point of sale on, it belonged to the mission. This arrangement satisfied the legal requirements of both the Yolηnu and Balanda systems of law.

When the mission at Galiwin ’ku handed the fishing industry over to the Yolηnu council in 1974, everything proceeded well for a while because the mission staff also transferred to the council. For most Yolηu nothing really changed. Then in 1975 it was decided to get a loan from the government to develop the industry. The Aboriginal Development Comission ‘decided’ to bring in a consultant to look at the viability of the loan and how it could increase the efficiency of the industry. Following the consultant’s recommendation, one big, modern fishing trawler replaced the small boats. In the dead of night, the small boats were burned on the beach and one was cut adrift, to ‘convince Yolηu of the need to move up to the big boat’. Within six months the whole fishing enterprise at Galiwin ’ku had collapsed and Galiwin ’ku became an importer rather than exporter of fish products.

… from a Yolηu perspective the collapse happened because the separate clans and nation alliances found it impossible to work under one Balanda boss on the trawler, as the trawler captain now had to be licensed. Moreover, Yolηu were insulted and grieving over the destroyed boats. With no clear lines of ownership the people could not see that any authority had passed to them.
…
To expect all the clans at Galiwin ’ku to believe they collectively owned the fishing company was like telling twenty-six Balanda companies that they collectively owned an industry incorporated as an association. … But this is not how community structures were set up. … The Yolηu fisherman did not see themselves as working for their own gain anymore; in fact, many now thought that the captain of the new trawler would reap the dividends. They had just become wage earners, and the incentive to work and build the industry for their own benefit was gone.

On top of all this, people had become confused about where these wages came from. In the past they saw a clear trade with the mission—so much fish for so much money. This trade was what the Yolηu were used to. Now they got wages no matter how many fish were caught. The steps in the development of a cash economy, with its system of wages-for-labour, are many. The Yolηnu were catapulted into the cash economy with little preparation.

With all this confusion, only conflict could occur, and economic development through industries like fishing was lost. (pp47-8)

By any measure, that is “development” colonialism at its worse, and it was done by the government of a very successful liberal democracy to its own citizens. (As it continues to do.)

Limits to the effective internal ambit of state action exist: if we learn nothing else from the history of the Soviet Union and the failure of Leninism, we should learn that. But, just as in the heyday of imperialism those who attacked imperialism as fundamentally wrongheaded were often a despised minority, so it is today that those who cast doubt on the effectiveness and appropriateness of welfarism are dismissed as wrongheaded. The notion of wise and beneficent officials bringing benefits to the needy and benighted is a beguiling one. What, after all, is foreign aid but welfarism for foreigners (with much worse accountability than the domestic variety: hence its appalling record of failure).

Welfarism has had some apparent success in reducing aged poverty: success elsewhere has been less notable. Almost 130 years of welfarism in Germany, for example, has failed to eradicate poverty. (Via norm, who categorises the issue as a failure of capitalism, a common outlook that insulates "good intentions" welfarism from effective accountability [since without acknowledgment of the possibility of failure there can be no accountability].) One notable study found reasonable evidence that increased public spending up to 1960 (which was mainly on various forms of infrastructure) seemed to be associated with improved socio-economic outcomes: spending since 1960 (which has increasingly of a transfer variety) has been much less clearly beneficial.

One can also wonder about the other effects of welfarism. For example, murder rates in England have been declining for about seven or so centuries. Since the 1950s, they have about doubled (pdf). As the British state has expanded its ambit of operation, its performance in a basic public good (protection from crime) has clearly deteriorated. Doing more and more is not conducive to maintaining levels of accountability in any particular area. That is without considering whether policies are working at cross-purposes, something more likely to occur the wider the ambit of state action.

Not that critics of (domestic) welfarism have had no sway at all. Welfare reform in the US could not have happened unless critical voices had some persuasive effect. But the US is unusual among developed democracies in the openness of its policy debates, the extent to which domestic policy is subject to public pressure and the richness of its social analysis research. Moreover, such reform was mainly concentrated in areas where most citizens did not feel themselves to be actual or potential beneficiaries.

Rulership tends to expand its ambit until it meets some constraint. If people believe the state has unlimited capacity to “do good”, then there is no limit to its proper ambit of action. It is only a sense of limits to state action—either moral limits or capacity limits—combined with the willingness and capacity to enforce such limits, which can stop rulership doing what comes naturally to it: expanding. The welfare state is a manifestation of that principle. Democracy does not stop that principle operating. On the contrary, by identifying state action with the popular will it undermines the legitimacy of limiting state action. Though the notion that democratic accountability is both so complete, and so elastic, that it can function with equal facility no matter how large the ambit of state action gets, hardly bears much in the way of serious consideration.

Someone once said that history does not repeat, but it does rhyme. That the age of Western imperialism was followed by the age of Western welfarism (both domestic and foreign) is not as much of a change in underlying dynamics as people might think.

ADDENDA Additions in [square brackets].

Rulership and the paradox of politics

What is the state? An operating state is the monopoly-authoriser and dominant-holder of legitimate coercion in a given territory. Which makes social predation natural to it twice over – since exploitation worth the name requires coercion and lack of alternative. There is good reason why Mancur Olson started his analysis of the state on the model of the stationary bandit. But mere wealth extraction is not the only form of predation – a Rhomaioi ("Byzantine") state persecuting Jews and monophysites or (even more so) a Khmer Rouge state creating the "new society" by mass murder is being more predatory than some Eurasian potentate squeezing vast wealth out of masses of poor peasants. Predation is imposing your wishes on others to your benefit without genuine regard for theirs. Extraction of wealth is only one possible wish (though a common one, with a wide utility). Indeed, greed is a more self-limiting motivation than the search for some social perfection. (Burning heretics, gassing Jews or slaughtering "bourgeois elements" destroys exploitable social resources.)

Rulers trade-off provision of public goods for material and other returns – a certain level of social order, of roads, bridges, external defence etc. increases one’s take: both the current level and persistence of same. Rulers' coercive power makes it easier for them to make the trade-off to their own advantage. If the balance is persistently more towards provision of public goods and less towards predation than the general historical pattern, then one must look to more specific restraining factors.

Choice of ruler – by revolt against, other replacement of (such as elections), or flight from (also known as competitive jurisdictions) – are the main constraints. Representative government institutionalises ruler-replacement, and thus political competition, to the benefit of the citizens. (Though, as Paul Collier points out in his TED talk on the “bottom billion” the empirical evidence is that electoral competition is bad for poor governance resource-economies but checks and balances on power are good.) But such government is itself a product of previous constraints. Constraints including revolt (Dutch War of Independence, English Civil War, Glorious Revolution of 1688, American War of Independence, French Revolution …). A history that extends a long way (e.g. the English Peasant Revolt successfully halting aristocratic attempts to wind back peasant rights to pre Black Death arrangements). With some innovations on the way through, such as Edward I deciding that Simon de Montfort’s Parliament had social consent advantages which worked for the crown as well as against, both following on from Alfonso IX of Leon and Castile calling for merchants to elect representatives to councils of magnates to discuss taxing arrangements. But we have to ask why social consent in that form was useful: it was not a consideration than occurred to any Son of Heaven, Caliph, Sultan, Khan or Raja. Earlier, Classical city-states invented citizenship by trading political and civil rights for military effort, and so on. Processes that fluctuate back and forth (e.g. post-medieval monarchs with permanent income sources and standing armies no longer needing social consent via representative institutions until income demands exceeded income constraints, as fatally happened to both Charles I and Louis XVI).

A central long-term problem for rulers is that they must rule through agents, who have their own agendas. Early on in a new regime, identification of agents with the regime (what Ibn Khaldun calls asabiyya or common feeling) tends to be strong, with a high degree of ruler attention to what could go wrong and to instruments of agent-control. Over time, complacency sets in, the number of agents tends to grow (there are always reasons – policy, patronage, power, position – to have more bureaucrats/officials), control becomes more difficult – not least because agents collude and, in their own interests, wear away at the ruler’s instruments of control – corruption and waste becomes more widespread, so efficiency and effectiveness of rulership declines. Rulership becomes both more predatory overall (as agents extract more and more for themselves) and less effective. At some point, efficiency and effectiveness decline to the point where the old regime falls to some more competitive predator and a new system of rulership is imposed (often externally), which then goes through the same cycle.

The most recent major state to display the cycle was the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (which suffered the cycle particularly strongly for having all its social eggs in the government basket). First, a group bound by common feeling (asabiyya) seizes power (Lenin), then the ruler separates himself from the original group to entrench his own power (Stalin), then the system slowly decays as group solidarity fades (loss of commitment by agents) and corruption (loss of control of agents) erodes social resilience and regime power (Khruschev to Chernyenko), until it finally collapses (Gorbachev).

But the cycle extends back to the dawn of civilisation (such as the effectively universal Roman imperium slowly reversing the citizenship deal of rights for support – as mass military provision was no longer required – until the predation/public-good-provision balance fell below that necessary to sustain social resilience against external pressure). The history of Chinese dynasties displays this pattern, as do the waves of pastoralist conquest across Eurasia going right back to ancient Mesopotamia. Indeed, in China, the two patterns merged together, China becoming more prone to pastoralist conquest over time; of the last three dynasties who conquered all of China, two – Yuan (Mongol) and Qing (Manchu) – were of conquering pastoralists, which no previous unifying dynasty had been. (Ibn Khaldun, along with Mancur Olson, are all you need to read to understand these patterns.)

A classic example of not thinking through this dynamic is much commentary on Diocletian’s division of the Roman Empire into Western and Eastern halves in 285 AD. People say ‘the Empire became too large for one person to control’. Really? The Roman Empire had not changed in territory substantially since Augustus (r. 27 BC - 14 AD). (Trajan, r.98-117, had been the last Emperor to add any bits to the Empire, most of which was not retained; the only previous addition being Britannia under Claudius, r.41-54). It is much more likely that almost three centuries of bureaucratic metastization made the Imperial bureaucracy too unwieldy an instrument of control – particularly when Diocletian himself expanded centralised control: hence the East-West division and the attempted Augusti/Caesar structure.

The constraints (both practical and competitive), or lack thereof, on the predation/public-good-provision trade-off, and the inherent principal-agent problems of rulership, are key underlying dynamics of rulership and its patterns of waxing and waning. Nor does representative government solve the problem – it just shifts the balance, and not irrevocably. Consider, for example, wasteful and inefficient government education systems, with their inherent tendencies to declining productivity (pdf). (Or even declining quality – as far as we can tell in Australia, relying on anecdotal evidence: the regulator also being the main provider, there are no reliable, regular public indicators of year-to-year performance.) Or that the representative principle has both waxed and waned in European history – to a pretty low level, by 1770. (Or, come to that, by 1941.) The current pushes to have more matters decided by judges, by unelected international bodies (or even unelected international judges) and to have certain policy options excluded as wicked regardless of majority wishes – such as the praise of bipartisan immigration policy when it excludes majority preferences for lower immigration and the denunciation of bipartisan immigration policy when it reflects majority wishes for exclusory border policies – all represent attacks on the representative principle.

The paradox of politics – that we need the state to protect us against social predators but the state is itself the most dangerous of social predators – can never be resolved, only managed more or less well.

ADDENDA: This post has been amended to make the logic of the argument clearer.

Why Globalisation Works

I much enjoyed Martin Wolf’s Why Globalization Works.

Wolf, chief economics correspondent of the Financial Times, is keen to enlighten and explain. One of the first points he emphasises is that land and territory still matters. Transport costs may have fallen, communication costs plummeted, but that does not make where you live, and what laws and institutions you live under, irrelevant. On the contrary:

By 1980, the most important determinant of one’s prosperity was not one’s class or profession, but where one lived (p.151).

Part of what he is up against is that the knowledge class has a strong tendency to deprecate commerce: a tendency that dates back to priesthoods ancient and medieval and thinkers such as Plato and Confucius. Hence the appeal of collectivism. Werner Sombart, who started as a Marxist and ended a Nazi, wrote in 1915 that war

is necessary in order to prevent the heroic outlook from falling prey to the forces of evil, to the narrow, abject spirit of commerce (p.125).

The words change, as does which particular form of moral grandeur is appealed to, but the underlying antipathy remains. Since globalisation is largely about trans-border markets, it attracts anti-market sentiment.

Being very much a sceptical Enlightenment sort of fellow (as economists overwhelmingly are), Wolf thinks history has much to teach us. He reminds us of the period 1919-1941 and what a disaster a US unengaged with the world was (p.128).

Wolf has little time for the silly term ‘neo-liberal’ (which is abuse parading as analysis) and points out how many non-liberals have engaged in liberalising measures (p.133). Then there are the striking results, such that possession of large amounts of oil is a disaster for development (p.149). Institutions and policies are far more important than natural resources for social outcomes. Or that the top 100 transnational corporations generate 4.3% of Global GDP, up from 3.5% in 1990 (p.223) while the top 50 corporations employ 0.2% of the world's labour force and 1.6% of OECD countries' labour force (p.225).

Wolf is a very clear writer. His book is full of of course that follows things, such as productivity rising faster in manufacturing than services, with demand for manufacturing rising slower than for services, has the natural consequence of falling employment in manufacturing. As he says,

manufacturing is the new agriculture (p.179).

Wolf examines critically various complaints about globalisation under a series of great chapter headings (Incensed about Inequality, Traumatised by Trade, Cowed by Corporations, Sad about the State, Fearful of Finance) demonstrating the lapses in logic and (even more) failures of observation which motivate most of these criticisms. A quote from A Report of the International Forum on Globalisation I found particularly striking:

If people grow their own food, produce their own necessities and control the conditions of their lives, the issue of price becomes irrelevant (p.173).

The notion that people living a subsistence existence – thus with radically attenuated choices about use of time and material conditions with life expectancies to match – are "more in control" is bizarre. This represents such a radical contempt for market relations and human achievement that I am left wondering about a mentality so blind it seems incapable of even elementary observation. There was a period in European history when economic relations were of the type described – the period of the "manorial" economy. It was not a golden age of human happiness and control over one’s own life. This is status-through-critique taken to its reductio ad absurdem.

One of Wolf’s key points is that it is precisely those places which have been least touched by globalisation which tend to be worse off, though the key factor is the quality of the state one lives in. Wolf concludes with a plea:

The view that states and markets are in opposition to one another is the obverse of the truth. The world needs more globalisation, not less. But we will only have more and better globalisation if we have better states (p.320).

Quite.

The Invention of Sodomy

Gay Catholic academic Mark Jordan’s The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology is an intensely scholarly study of the invention and development of the term sodomia (sodomy) in medieval theology.

In fact, a little too intensely scholarly: Jordan lays on the perils of recovering the past a little thickly, especially the need to have a “real scholar” do it. And I cannot work out why he spends his fourth chapter on a close (indeed claustrophobic) examination of Alan of Lille’s Plaint of Nature. The passing references to it later in the book don’t seem to warrant a chapter whose only point which seems at all germane to the central argument of the book—that Alan of Lille does not use the term sodomia when his subject matter would seem to require it, yet has this inconsistent horror (p.167) of what he cannot name—could have been covered in a couple of paragraphs. But it is a terribly scholarly chapter. Though I did like his comment, late in the book, that modern scholars on medieval texts tend to be both dunce and jades—they typically know far less of the context than do the authors but are familiar with a bewildering variety of texts, notions, languages and tastes unknown to medievals (p.173).

Jordan takes us through the medieval theology of sodomia, a term he cannot find in any source (and he does seem to have read very widely in medieval and patristic theological texts) before the C11th theologian Peter Damien. Eugene Rice cites a C9th monk but it is reasonable to give Peter Damian credit for popularising the term.
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Jordan starts—A Prelude after Nietzsche—with various methodological issues and foreshadows his eventual conclusion:

If I am right, the category “Sodomy” cannot be used for serious thinking. It certainly cannot be used for rethinking what Christian theology has to say about human sex (p.9).

He then looks at the hagiography and cult of C10th martyr St Pelagius, a beautiful adolescent who was martyred for refusing the sexual advance of Cordoban Ummayad Caliph Abd al-Rahman III in 925 or 926. His interest in not in what actually happened to St Pelagius (now, probably not discoverable) but in how his story was written up and presented. Particularly in the often somewhat elliptical way the Caliph’s passion for Pelagius is described and the concern over Pelagius’s physical beauty and what it signified.

Elliptical but not unknown. Same-sex desire was a form of luxuria.

Erotic disorder is caught up in a system of causes with opulence, which is itself viewed as feminising, and with arrogance, which is at the root of all spiritual disorder (p.17).

As categorisation of sin developed, sexual sins were to gather increasing pride of place.

The term sodomia is not used, but one of St Pelagius’s hagiographers, the canoness Hrotswitha of Ganderheim (in Saxony), describes the key sin of the Caliph as being disfigured by Sodomitic vices (p.28).

Which leads into Chapter Two, The Discovery of Sodomy. Peter Damien’s alleged coinage (or at least popularising development) of the term, done in deliberate analogy to blasphemia, the most explicit sin in denying God. It is a theological term, and one of condemnation. To go against the procreative/natural form is to deny God.

Jordan describes this usage as the culmination of a processing of “thinning” (taking away details, qualifications, restrictions) and condensed various simplifications into a single category. Why invoke Sodom? Because Genesis 19 is the epitome of divine retribution. And, moreover, divine retribution for self-indulgent arrogance—this is how, for example, Jerome categorises it. Ambrose takes further the notion that it is about fleshy indulgences.

Augustine takes it further still and, though he still sees Sodom as a case of general depravity, he draws the explicit lesson that it is better that (female) daughters of Lot be violated than (male) angels be. In doing so, Augustine makes the crucial move to focus on a very narrow (indeed, bizarre) construction of the story (in flat contradiction to the references to Sodom in the Hebrew Scriptures and by Jesus) that has since become so familiar. Augustine was following in the steps of Jewish natural law philosopher Philo of Alexandria, who is the source of connecting the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah to non-procreative sex. But Philo does not figure in Jordan’s work. Nor does the general anathematisation of same-sex activity by monotheist religions.

The next chapter examines Peter Damien’s Book of Gomorrah where the term sodomia is, Jordan claims, coined. Jordan examines the rhetoric, the logic and sources (or lack thereof) in Damien’s work and Peter Damien’s concern that there is a “Sodomitical Church” within the Church. (A very modern concern, though arguing that a priest who has sex with someone he is hearing confessions from is a form of incest—the priest being spiritual father—is much more about very medieval concerns about incest, defined extremely broadly.) Damien is frantically concerned with the degree of corruption of the Church, with the attraction of the sin. But it is still seen as an activity, repentance from which can redeem the Sodomite (though not make him a fit officer of the Church). Or maybe not—Damien seems in genuine doubt on this point. Jordan notes Peter Damien regularly strays into talking of Sodomite as a type of person.

The fourth chapter is the why is it there? chapter on Alan of Lille’s Plaint of Nature. We then move to a chapter on The Care of Sodomites, looking at medieval confession manuals, starting with Paul of Hungary’s Summa of Penance which gets a touch obsessive about the “sin against nature” (any ejaculation not into a womb), now labelled ‘sodomy’—it takes up about half his text and is denounced in the most absolute terms. Paul plays games with quotes from Augustine to get the result clearly desired. Paul thinks the sin utterly abominable—God damns it, so to do it is to deny God—but is also concerned that it so attractive that talking about it too much and too clearly may spread it. Jordan notes a pattern of silences in various manuals.

Another manual considered is William Peraldus’s Summa of the Vice and Virtues, the main work of Dominican synthesis prior to Aquinas. While not as obsessive as Paul of Hungary, Peraldus is perhaps even more concerned that speaking openly of Sodomy for fear of spreading it. Sodomy becomes a sin that cannot be mentioned, a unique category:

to hold that there is a very important sin against which the faithful cannot be warned is to make preaching and confession a game of charades (p.111).

A sin of suffocating silences. Which comes together in his image that Sodomites are mute before the Throne of God at the Last Judgement:

“They cannot speak to excuse themselves on account of ignorance since nature itself taught the law they transgress to brute animals” (p.112).

(Displaying an ignorance of nature as it actually is that, for example, hunter-gatherer societies living embedded in nature don’t.) Sodomites cannot speak before God (p.112) and Sodomy cannot be spoken of.

The sixth chapter is an examination of Albert Magnus’s writings. Albert Magnus saw sodomy as a sin against grace, reason and nature (p.126). He applies a theory of organ teleology, to the extent of arguing that since humans are the only ones whose females has vulvas to the front, proper sex has to be frontal (p.131). Jordan argues that Albert applies his understanding of medical knowledge (for which he was famed) in a quite inconsistent way. Jordan is again interested in the silence and exclusions in Albert’s works.

In the chapter on Thomas Aquinas, Jordan’s frustration with both Aquinas and the modern misuse of him is very clear:

Thomas Aquinas is not so often read as brandished. He has become more emblem than author (p.136)

and

no exegetical strategy has done more violence to Thomas’s texts than the strategy of trying to guess what he might have said to some modern dilemma. Thomas ends up saying what his readers wanted to say before turning to him. This is called “Thomism”. (pp156-7).

For Aquinas, the pleasure of the unnatural is deeply troubling (p.156). The key terms for him are sexus (anatomy/physiology), usus (right use) and delectatus (dangerous pleasure). Aquinas does not have modern concept of sexuality (which presupposes the connective role of sex). For Aquinas, divine law fills in silences and ambiguities of natural law (p.157). Sodomy is wrong in part because it is not bounded. Right sex is bounded, sin is not so. Jordan argues that this removes the realism of sin.

Jordan concludes in his A Postlude after Ambrose by examining how the theology of sodomy shows

unstable terms, unfaithful descriptions, inconsistent arguments (p.160).

He asks why the pervasive inconsistencies (p.167)? Homophobia is not an explanation

but a placeholder for an explanation (p.167).

These failings leave a Catholic theologian (or any Christian generally) wrestling with the issue of a deeply problematic tradition (p.170). Jordan attacks the descent of many branches of Christianity into “fertility cults”, arguing that the Gospel notion of love is “deeply unbiological” (p.174).

Jordan concludes:

We might even suspect that Sodomy came into existence as a category just because of that failure. To invent Sodomy was to invent a pure essence of the erotic without connection to reproduction. It was to isolate the erotic in its pure state, where it could be described in frightening colors and condemned without concession. “Sodomy” is a name not for a kind of human behaviour, but for a failure of theologians. “Sodomy” is the nervous refusal of theologians to understand how pleasure can survive the preaching of the Gospel (p.176).

I found Jordan tended to spend so much time on detail that he was much less successful at drawing points together. He also very much assumed that the reader had at least some theological background. He was certainly less than apt at conveying classical natural law thinking but whether that was a failure of conception or execution I am less certain of. Still, there are useful nuggets to be found.

The Return to Camelot

I borrowed from a former housemate The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman by Mark Girouard. It read like a much older book than something originally published in 1981. It was an amusing and informative passage through the various forms of medievalist and chivalric revivals in Britain from the C18th on. It makes quite clear that folk at all points of the political compass became quite taken by medievalism and chivalry: from neo-feudalists, through conservative revivalists to Imperialists, working men’s associations and Christian socialists. From school reformers to the founding of the Scouting movement.

A couple of the chapters seem to wander off into areas of rather thin connection to direct interest in medievalism and chivalry. But, generally, the book kept to its theme well. It was informative rather than profound. That said, it was almost as useful on the rise of the concept of the gentleman as it was on neo-medievalism. The author is alive to the inherent absurdity of a society that had risen on trade and commerce producing an elite who (at least in their rhetoric and often more) looked down on trade and commerce.

Indeed, though Girouard is not enough of a medievalist to realise this was a very post- medieval affectation. The C18th, and especially C19th gentlemen, had far distaste for trade than actual English medieval knights and magnates did. Being deeply practical folk, medieval lords and knights were very alive to the revenue benefits of trade and industry.

Though that in England only the actual holder of the title was noble, all the rest of the family being legally commoners, produced quite different dynamics from continental Europe where all members of a noble family were legally noble.

The rise of what has been called ornamentalism (particularly in the administration of India), the shift from the East India Company’s use of an expanding urban middle class to the Raj’s reliance and shoring up of the Indian Princes, is seen as being deeply influenced by the chivalric revival.

The romanticised vision of medieval society that still influences contemporary attitudes clearly flows from this prolonged neo-medieval revival. (Late last year, a quite eminent conservative Australian historian patently found my suggestion that knightly society was based on an exchange of labour for protection an excessively functional view of medieval society. He seemed to have some notion of it being an ‘organic’ or ‘natural’ society.) A neo-medieval revival that essentially came crashing down as the effects of the mass slaughter on the Western Front rippled through society.

Still, the book is a fun read. (For entirely personal reasons, finding out that Sir Walter Scott’s estate on which he lavished so much neo-medieval attention was called Abbotsford was amusing at lots of levels.)

Pandering parading as analysis

Economist John Cochrane has been taking on himself to speak up for mainstream economics against various reactions to the global financial crisis and consequent recession as can be seen from various papers and contributions. Notable among these is his paper on fiscal stimulus. In a recent paper, he critiques Paul Krugman's piece on what went wrong with (macro)economics in the NYT.

Krugman-the-columnist is a notoriously partisan pundit, as can be seen from his partisanship rankings from 2002 and 2003, having been the most partisan-Democrat top commentator from 2002 to 2005, though he has dropped back in recent times due to being underwhelmed by Barack Obama. But Paul Krugman is also a prominent economist: Nobel Laureate indeed. So, if he is writing about economics-as-such in a newspaper is he being serious economist or partisan pundit?

Cochrane's answer is clearly the latter:

Most of all, it’s sad. ... It’s a disservice to New York Times readers. They depend on Krugman to read real academic literature and digest it, and they get this attack instead. And it’s ineffective. Any astute reader knows that personal attacks and innuendo mean the author has run out of ideas.

In part, what Cochrane does in his response to Krugman is explain and defend what economists have developed, particularly the efficient market hypothesis.

The efficient market hypothesis is very easily misconstrued. In particular, that it is some sort of claim that markets are perfect, which is nonsense. No human institution can be perfect, because no human institution can have all desirable qualities. In Cochrane's words:

There is nothing about “efficiency” that promises “stability.” “Stable” growth would in fact be a major violation of efficiency.

All the efficient market hypothesis (EMH) says is that markets use all available information. Which does not sound like much until one works through the implications. One of which is, as William Easterly states, economists correctly predicted that they could not correctly predict.
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In Cochrane's words:

It’s fun to say we didn’t see the crisis coming, but the central empirical prediction of the efficient markets hypothesis is precisely that nobody can tell where markets are going – neither benevolent government bureaucrats, nor crafty hedge-fund managers, nor ivory-tower academics. This is probably the best-tested proposition in all the social sciences. Krugman knows this, so all he can do is huff and puff about his dislike for a theory whose central prediction is that nobody can be a reliable soothsayer.

Given that there are a lot of predictors out there, it is always possible to find someone who apparently got it right. The trick is then to go back and check what their general success in prediction is. The EMH does not bar someone doing better than the market on any given occasion, or even several occasions: just doing it persistently and reliably as other than chance (unless they have information persistently not available to other participants, such as this study of US Senator's share holdings doing unusually well [pdf], remembering that such people's actions also transmit information to the market).

On the stability point:

It is true and very well documented that asset prices move more than reasonable expectations of future cashflows. This might be because people are prey to bursts of irrational optimism and pessimism. It might also be because people’s willingness to take on risk varies over time, and is lower in bad economic times. As Gene Fama pointed out in 1970, these are observationally equivalent explanations. ... Crying “bubble” is empty unless you have an operational procedure for identifying bubbles, distinguishing them from rationally low risk premiums, and not crying wolf too many years in a row.

I must confess, that while I take the point about identifying such things at the time, nevertheless, it seems clear enough that there is such a phenomena as asset price bubbles.

Information and the limitations thereof is crucial:

It’s the central prediction of free-market economics, as crystallized by Hayek, that no academic, bureaucrat or regulator will ever be able to fully explain market price movements. Nobody knows what “fundamental” value is. If anyone could tell what the price of tomatoes should be, let alone the price of Microsoft stock, communism would have worked. ... The case for free markets never was that markets are perfect. The case for free markets is that government control of markets, especially asset markets, has always been much worse.

There is nothing about being a regulator or political decision-maker which improves matters. On the contrary:

Remember, the SEC couldn’t even find Bernie Madoff when he was handed to them on a silver platter. Think of the great job Fannie, Freddie, and Congress did in the mortgage market. Is this system going to regulate Citigroup, guide financial markets to the right price, replace the stock market, and tell our society which new products are worth investment? As David Wessel’s excellent In Fed We Trust makes perfectly clear, government regulators failed just as abysmally as private investors and economists to see the storm coming. And not from any lack of smarts.
In fact, the behavioral view gives us a new and stronger argument against regulation and control. Regulators are just as human and irrational as market participants. If bankers are, in Krugman’s words, “idiots,” then so must be the typical treasury secretary, fed chairman, and regulatory staff. They act alone or in committees, where behavioral biases are much better documented than in market settings. They are still easily captured by industries, and face politically distorted incentives.
Careful behavioralists know this, and do not quickly run from “the market got it wrong” to “the government can put it all right.”

A lot of what has been going on is wishful thinking. Of not wanting to look into the implications of congenial framings:

If you believe the Keynesian argument for stimulus, you should think Bernie Madoff is a hero. He took money from people who were saving it, and gave it to people who most assuredly were going to spend it. Each dollar so transferred, in Krugman’s world, generates an additional dollar and a half of national income. The analogy is even closer. Madoff didn’t just take money from his savers, he essentially borrowed it from them, giving them phony accounts with promises of great profits to come. This looks a lot like government debt.
If you believe the Keynesian argument for stimulus, you don’t care how the money is spent. All this puffery about “infrastructure,” monitoring, wise investment, jobs “created” and so on is pointless. Keynes thought the government should pay people to dig ditches and fill them up.
If you believe in Keynesian stimulus, you don’t even care if the government spending money is stolen. Actually, that would be better. Thieves have notoriously high propensities to consume.

Then there is the question of what ideas policy makers are actually using:

The sad fact is that few in Washington pay the slightest attention to modern macroeconomic research, in particular anything with a serious intertemporal dimension. Paul’s simple Keynesianism has dominated policy analysis for decades and continues to do so. From the CEA to the Fed to the OMB and CBO, everyone just adds up consumer, investment and government “demand” to forecast output and uses simple Phillips curves to think about inflation. If a failure of ideas caused bad policy, it’s a simpleminded Keynesianism that failed.

There are lots of ways our thinking can go wrong and the more abstract, or the more emotional, or both, the more ways it can go wrong. Which is why external tests and sources of rigour are so useful:

No, the problem is that we don’t have enough math. Math in economics serves to keep the logic straight, to make sure that the “then” really does follow the “if,” which it so frequently does not if you just write prose. The challenge is how hard it is to write down explicit artificial economies with these ingredients, actually solve them, in order to see what makes them tick. Frictions are just bloody hard with the mathematical tools we have now.

The problem is, it is very congenial to think you just know what other people should do. Particularly if it gives jobs, influence and power to people like you and takes such away from people not like you. Ideas which get in the way of that are deeply irritating.

It is made worse by the sheer difficulty of some of the issues, particularly monetary economics. The power of a simple narrative, of simple framings, is not to be underestimated. Fiscal stimulus is a very simple idea. Monetary policy is much more complex to get one's head around.

That all problems in markets are "market failures" is another simple idea. That regulations and interventions have market effects is a more complex idea.

That good people believe X and bad people believe Y is another simple idea. Krugman is pandering to a lot of powerful simple ideas. Which are made even more powerful if one can pass them off as showing how clever and knowledgeable one is. I understand John Cochrane's irritation.

Preconditions of democracy

Came across this 2006 essay by Charles Boix on democracy and inequality of fixed assets.

The essay is an inquiry into the preconditions of democracy, and a very useful and informative one too. Boix holds, as I do, that oil, not Islam, is the great curse of Middle Eastern government and politics:

it is not nationalism or even religious animosities that explain the current violence in Iraq — but rather oil, its geographical distribution, and the loss of its political control by the Sunni minority that monopolized the state until two years ago.

Boix is sceptical of religious (and thus, by implication, cultural) explanations of failure to achieve democracy:

It is worth remembering that not many years ago Catholicism was (wrongly) believed to thwart liberal institutions in Southern Europe and Latin America

and

if we take into account the large Muslim populations of countries such as India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Turkey, the majority of the world’s Muslims live now under democratic regimes.

Which is hopeful in its way.

Refuting any Weberian assumptions about religion and politics, Catholic countries are not any more likely to be authoritarian. A growing proportion of Muslims does not jeopardize democracy either, once we take into account the structure of the economy and the weight of fixed natural resources. Democratic instability grows only with more ethnic fragmentation, but this result takes place only in middle income economies.

Because the number of examinable cases is building up, it has become more possible to do serious statistical analysis in political science.

A classic example of this is Paul Collier’s work on the “feasibility” thesis regarding civil conflict. As a recent paper co-authored by him (pdf) concludes:

The three new variables point to the primacy of feasibility over motivation, a result which is consistent with the feasibility hypothesis. The feasibility hypothesis proposes that where rebellion is feasible it will occur: motivation is indeterminate, being supplied by whatever agenda happens to be adopted by the first social entrepreneur to occupy the viable niche, or itself endogenous to the opportunities thereby opened for illegal income.

In an earlier paper (pdf), Paul Collier writes:

When the main grievances - inequality, political repression, and ethnic and religious divisions - are measured objectively, they provide little or no explanatory power in predicting rebellion. In most low-income societies there are many reasons for grievance, but usually these do not give rise to rebellion. Objective grievances and hatreds simply cannot usually be the cause of such a distinctive phenomenon as violent conflict. They may well generate intense political conflict, but such conflict does not usually escalate to violent conflict.
By contrast, economic characteristics dependence on primary commodity exports, low average incomes, slow growth, and large diasporas are all significant and powerful predictors of civil war. These characteristics all make rebellion more materially feasible: they enable rebel leaders to buy the guns and feed the soldiers, and furthermore to perpetrate large scale killing without themselves being killed in the process. A viable private army, which is the distinguishing feature of a civil war, is extremely expensive to maintain over the long periods that such wars typically last. Where a private army is viable, the agenda of its leadership could potentially be anything.

Always, look to incentives and capacity.

Noting that the evidence about economic development favouring democracy is firmer when viewed at a given time ("cross-section" as statisticians would say) than over time ("longitudinally"), Boix argues very persuasively that inequality in fixed assets is hostile to democracy, because it means that a wealthy minority has much to fear from democracy. Mobile assets do not have the same effect, because they can run away from expropriation. So, the more an economy is dominated by fixed assets (land, natural resources) and the more unequal such holdings are (fairly inevitable with oil and other such natural resources), the more likely authoritarian government is. Unless, such as in the case of Norway, democratic institutions and norms are already firmly established.

With democracy:

If too much is at stake — that is, if bets are too large — the incentives to cheat become irresistible. Similarly, the participants in elections will assent only to the rules of the democratic game if the effects of the electoral outcome do not fall on any of them too heavily. The losers will submit to the electoral result if what they forsake at the moment of defeat is not too excessive, that is, if it does not threaten their living standards or political survival. Likewise, the winners will not exploit their preeminence to redraw the electoral mechanisms (to diminish the uncertainty of future elections) only if the value of the offices they hold and the political decisions they make is not too large.

Which is why the advent of Leninism was so bad for democracy. Leninism raised the stakes of the political game so high, that the serious prospect of a Leninist victory made the abandonment of democracy as too risky much more likely. If—as was the case in Germany, Italy and Spain—expropriation of landed property is widely supported on the political left, then, in fear and desperation, landowners (large and small) are much more likely to turn to a Mussolini, Franco or Hitler to save them. Where such expropriation is not widely supported on the left—as in France, Northern Europe and the Anglosphere—then fascist, authoritarian conservative or national socialist politics never broke out of the political fringe.

Of course, there is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here, as the expropriation policies may be a response to large inequalities in the first place. As Boix notes:

Big landowners have always opposed democracy, whether in Prussia, Russia, the American South of the nineteenth century, or Central America in the twentieth. By contrast, for democratic institutions to prevail, at least before industrialization, there had to be a radical equality of conditions. The Alpine cantons of Switzerland in the Middle and Modern Ages or the Northeastern states of the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are cases in point.

On the other hand, it was small peasant landowners that gave Mussolini, Franco and Hitler break-through mass support.

The difference between fixed assets (vulnerable to expropriation because they cannot run away) and mobile assets (less so because they can) in explaining outcome is very important. As Boix illustrates nicely from the case of South Africa:

While opposition to democracy ran high among the Afrikaner farming communities, it hardly existed among the English-speaking financial and industrial elites, who could easily (and actually did) move their capital abroad. In fact, over the postwar period, South African prospects for democratization improved as part of the Afrikaner community gradually moved from farming to industrial and financial activities — that is, from holding fixed assets to investing in mobile capital.

Boix’s analysis is not comforting regarding East Timor, with its natural gas and oil “bonanza”:

the discovery of natural resources is fatal in already authoritarian or weakly democratic societies. Unconstrained by any domestic mechanism of control, the existing political and economic elites alone benefit from those natural riches. The new wealth reinforces their political muscle. It reduces, too, any incentives to follow economic policies that may foster growth and industrialization. Were the latter to succeed, new social and economic strata might arise that could in turn challenge the existing political status. In short, illiberal countries that suddenly strike oil or any other mineral wealth become trapped in authoritarianism. This is the standard story of many oil- and gas-rich Middle Eastern and North African countries. It is the tale of all the former Soviet Union states in Central Asia. It partially explains the fragile nature of liberal institutions in Russia. It fits the pattern of violence and dictatorship that devastates many African nations. And, in combination with appalling levels of inequality, it is behind the turmoil of several Latin American economies, such as Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia.

Understanding the preconditions for democracy is obviously worthy and useful. It is not necessarily all that cheering, however. Revolutions based on expropriation do not lead to good places and the substitute of foreign intervention has its own pitfalls and preconditions. The Middle East may not get much better until the oil doesn't matter.

Eight years on

I am not good at anniversaries of things I have been around for, so the 9/11 anniversary rather passed me by until I began to read lots of online anniversary posts. (Such as this one, which has good amateur footage with comments-as-it-happened.)

That Sep. 1 was the 70th anniversary of the German attack on Poland and Sep. 3 was the anniversary of the Anglo-French declaration of war on Germany I remembered, but not 9/11.

The war the Nazi (and then Soviet) attack on Poland initiated a World War that last six years. It was a "conventional" attack in the sense of 950,000 Polish defenders were overwhelmed by 1.5m German and 467,000 Soviet attackers seizing Poland's territory and dividing it between them. But it was also an ideological war, in that the ensuing World War became a three-way contest between Nazism, Leninism and liberal democratic capitalism for dominion over the human future. The war, in six years of struggle, eliminated Nazism as a contender leading to the Cold War between Leninism and liberal democratic capitalism that resulted in the defeat, through its own internal collapse, of Leninism. Which now exists only as pathetic states of hereditary rule (Cuba and North Korea) or a system of increasingly anachronistic rule over reborn-as-capitalist states (China, Vietnam, Laos).

Since Japan officially surrendered on Sep. 2 1945, the War known as World War II lasted almost precisely six years. Eight years after 9/11, NATO forces are still fighting in Afghanistan, Coalition forces are still providing security in Iraq.

By the end of World War II, Mussolini had been killed by partisans, Hitler had committed suicide and Hideki Tojo, after a failed suicide bid, was, like the other surviving Axis leaders, in custody awaiting trial and eventual execution. Osama bin Laden is notoriously still alive, almost certainly somewhere in the tribal areas of NW Pakistan.

On the other hand, the struggle against the jihadis is much smaller in scope of operations, in resources, in just about all ways, than World War II.
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The term World War II is not very accurate. The Seven Years War was also a global war, in many ways more so than World War I in terms of where serious fighting took place, though not in the proportion of the World controlled by combatants.

The jihadi war is global in a way, in that the jihadis acknowledge no neutral territory, though attacks are concentrated where there are significant numbers of Muslims. Given the declared jihadi aim is to struggle for a world where the sovereignty of Allah is acknowledged everywhere, the concept of "neutrality", except as a temporary truce, is not part of their lexicon.

The jihadis resemble both of liberal democratic capitalism's great C20th opponents. The similarity because Islam and Bolshevism was noted by Bertrand Russell back in 1920:

Bolshevism combines the characteristics of the French Revolution with those of the rise of Islam. ... Marx has taught that Communism is fatally predestined to come about; this produces a state of mind not unlike that of the early successors of Mahommet. ... Among religions, Bolshevism is to be reckoned with Mohammedanism rather than with Christianity and Buddhism. Christianity and Buddhism are primarily personal religions, with mystical doctrines and a love of contemplation. Mohammedanism and Bolshevism are practical, social, unspiritual, concerned to win the empire of this world".

Both Islamism and Leninism share what Francois Furet called the revolutionary illusion:

Modern society … is characterised by a lack of politics in relation to the private, individual existence. It is blind to the idea of the common good, since the members of society, consumed with relativism, have their own individual ideas of the common good and modern society can conceive of it only in terms of a taste for well-being, which divides its members rather than unifying them and thus destroys the community supposedly constructed in its name. The revolutionary idea is the impossible attempt to circumvent that calamity.

They are also morally instrumentalist, universalist doctrines.

Still, the jihadis, despite being universalist when Nazism was explicitly not, more resemble Nazism than Leninism. They are atavistic, as any doctrine that says the peak of understanding of how to organise human social order was achieved in C7th Arabia must be. Nazism, with its blood-and-soil mystic militarism, was also atavistic: seeking to reverse the entire direction of Western civilisation, which was for land-and-violence as bases for wealth and power to retreat.

The jihadis, including Hamas and Hezbollah, are the contemporary analogues of fascism and Nazism: modernising revolts against modernity (seen as alien, anti-religious and Western), preaching an atavistic (and anti-traditionalist) form of Islam, promoting a cult of death and violence, engaged in brutality and murder; the rhetoric of violence backed up by deeds of violence—in Hezbollah’s case with a uniformed paramilitary, straight-armed salute and all. (Osama bin Laden even has the war veteran mystique working for him that both Mussolini and Hitler did.)

The consequences of the Nazi-Soviet attack on Poland are still unfolding: Russo-Polish relations and American-Polish relations are still profoundly influenced by it, for example.

Eight years after 9/11, the struggle with the jihadis still goes on. But, of course, that struggle well predated 9/11. Well before Sep. 9 2001 there was the 1994 AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires, the 1998 US Embassy bombings in East Africa, the attack on the USS Cole in 2000. 9/11 did not start the conflict, it is just when the US and its allies really took notice.

Since it was the 1991 Gulf War which led to the al-Qaeda declaration of jihad against the US and Americans, there were many senses in which Iraq was "unfinished business", intertwined with the anti-jihadi struggle. One of the most obvious consequences of the consequences of 9/11 (the NATO attack on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the Coalition attack on Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq) is that the jihadis went back to doing what they do most—killing fellow Muslims. The first jihadi aim is to get control of the ummah, of Islam. If one wants to understand the conflict in Iraq after the Coalition occupation, the Algerian Civil War provides a revealing comparison about the jihadis. Just as the jihadi aim of universal acknowledgment of the sovereignty of Allah admits to no neutral nations, the jihadi way of prosecuting their war admits to no distinctions between military and civilians as targets.

The jihadis (with the very partial exception of Sudan) control no state. They do have "statelets": Gaza, Hezbollah, the tribal areas of NW Pakistan. They use modern technology but their technology (as is that of Islam-the-civilisation generally) is entirely derivative. They have reach within the ummah—given that the only part of their package not sanctioned by Islamic orthodoxy is suicide bombing (and even that appeals to the warrior-martyrdom element in Islam). It is precisely because rejection of liberal democracy (with its sovereignty of people, female-equality, gay-equality, religious freedom and equality) offers Islamic clerics a rejectionist "gatekeeping" role in Islamic communities that jihadi and jihadi-friendly thinking continues to have institutional support within Muslim communities.

The jihadi program is profoundly unappealing to most folk, including most Muslims: in Afghanistan, polls suggest the Taliban only has about 6% support. In Iraq, al-Qaeda was defeated when Sunnis defected, appalled by its homicidal oppressiveness. What the jihadis have going for them is homicidally intense belief and the divisions of their enemies. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, finding a reasonably decent way of self-governance that can cope with modernity remains deeply problematic, though currently more so in Afghanistan. (As, of course, it is across Middle-Eastern Islam.)

In the West, domestic politics are more important in all senses. First, because the jihadis are just not that big a threat, (though an Iranian nuclear weapon could change that) and secondly because the jihadi phenomenon is so often understood through domestic framings. Whether the "anti-imperialist" Left insisting on its broken-record of Blame The West First or crass anti-Muslim/"anything goes to defend our own" tribal patriotism. The collapse of fertility in many European countries provides a longer-term factor which probably encourages jihadi confidence and both reflects and reinforces a lack of European self-confidence.

This is certainly not anything like the Crisis of the Third Century, let alone the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. But the struggle against the jihadis will go on, part of the larger issues of how does Islam cope with modernity and what happens if Europe continues to have significant areas of demographic collapse. (Though the collapse in fertility in Iran suggests that the issue may be even more complicated.)

One thing we can be sure of, NATO abandoning Afghanistan would not end the struggle, though it would embolden the jihadis enormously and greatly weaken the West’s ability to attract allies within the Muslim world. Druze warlord Walid Jumblatt provides an excellent illustrative example of the pressures in current circumstances (via Michael J Totten): how much worse would they be if the West simply abandoned Afghanistan?

In many ways, this is a battle of revolutions. The jihadis want their own versions of the Iranian Revolution, again and again and again. The US is, in effect, trying to export its Revolution to Iraq and Afghanistan, just as the British previously attempted to export the Glorious Revolution to both places.

Lebanon, the venue of so many people’s proxy wars, is where this dynamic is played out:

but the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon has yet to defeat the Iranian Revolution in Lebanon.

All part of the biggest curse of all in the Middle East, the perennial lack of stable rulership that is anything other than a form of predatory autocracy and the strategies that go with that:

The essence of Syria’s strategy is the destabilization of its surroundings to increase its own regional leverage. Yet this cuts in many contradictory ways. Iran cannot be happy with the prospect of a sectarian war in Iraq; Syria’s efforts in Iraq are also alienating the United States at a time when the Obama administration has engaged Bashar Assad to bring about a change in his regime’s behavior; Egypt is fed up with Syria’s and Iran’s encouragement of Hamas’ intransigence, which has neutralized Egypt’s role in inter-Palestinian reconciliation talks; Saudi Arabia and Egypt are unhappy with Syria’s obstructionism in Lebanon; and both Syria and Iran are eying each other with quiet suspicion to see which of them might open a full-scale dialogue with the United States before the other does.

Around and around we go. This is a struggle we cannot walk away from, it will just follow us home. As it did on September 11 2001.

Tournaments: the display of a martial elite

Juliet Barker’s The Tournament in England: 1100 - 1400 is a highly informative, well-written book marred by a dubious conclusion.

After starting with a chapter on Early Beginnings, the book treats the tournament thematically, dealing successively with The Tournament and War, The Tournament and Politics, The Tournament and the Church, The Tournament as Spectacle, The Tourneying Society, The Forms of Combat, Tournament Armour before coming to a brief Conclusion. As Barker notes, since English knights and squires travelled extensively to tourney, the book includes lots of references to continental tournaments.

I spotted one error – Barker claims that mail was lighter than plate armour (p.168), which anyone who has held both knows is simply not true. Mail was technologically simpler, easier to get on and off and highly flexible. It was also typically heavier, ran the risk of being embedded in the flesh if hit hard enough and did not encourage blows to glance off.

Barker is at pains to point out the seriousness and practicality of tournaments. Which, given the effort and expense involved, not to mention danger, makes perfect sense. The followed were all killed in tourneys: Prince Geoffrey of Brittany, fourth son of Henry II (1186); Geoffrey de Mandeville, earl of Essex (1216); Gilbert Marshal, earl of Pembroke (1241); William, son and heir of John Warenne, earl of Surrey and Sussex (1286), John Hastings, earl of Pembroke (1390), at least four members of the Mortimer family – and that is just the most prominent (p.162).
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We are told that the estate of Roger Mortimer included three helms for jousting, one for war and six for tournament (p.165). There are moments of humour, such as John of Gaunt, as tournament judge, ruling a particular tactic not illegal, merely unchivalric (p.164). Or William Marshal having resort to a blacksmith so his battered helm can be removed from his head (p.164). The more like actual war a form of tournament combat, the more honour accrued to it. Thus jousting – one-on-one charging with lance – had the lowest status (though barriers were not added until the C15th [p.175]). a plaisance (with blunted weapons) had less status than a outrance (full weapons).

The Church severely disapproved of tournaments, regarding them as spectacles of sin, regularly excommunicating those who participated and denying church burials to those killed during them. But the knightly addiction to them wore the Church down, Pope John XXII finally withdrew the remaining prohibitions in 1316 (p.83) after which tournaments flowered even more strongly.

Barker’s book provides much useful context. It is a hardy perennial of historical comment to blame French defeats at the hands of the English on the arrogance and over-confidence of the French knights. Yet the evidence Barker adduces suggests that, based on tourney experience, French knights did tend to be the best trained and equipped – as individual and small group warriors. Since tournaments were relatively common, and large set-piece battles comparatively rare, the English advantage in army command-and-control and combined arms was somewhat obscured until the one of those rare set-piece battles happened.

Familiar features of medieval life show up: the difficulties of organisation (taking 3 years to organise a particular challenge tourney [p.158]), long-running court cases, intrigue and rebellion (troubled English kings such as Henry III, Edward II and Richard II regularly prohibited tournaments for fear of the plotting that might take place at them).

But tournaments trained knights for war – a major reason why Richard I decided to licence them in 1194 (p.17). They provided opportunities for patronage (which Edward I and Edward III particularly took advantage of). They provided opportunities for knights and squires to demonstrate their skill – whether to each other, great lords, or the opposite sex. They demonstrated the effectiveness of knights, they embodied their social role and conception of themselves.

Both Classical Rome and medieval Latin Christendom had as their greatest spectacle people fighting each other. Yet the differences were profound. With gladiatorial combat, death and dominance was the point. It was slaves and condemned criminals fighting and dying (or just dying) for the pleasure of the Roman citizenry. It was about the ultimate in brutal, public subordination.

With tournaments, it was the elite (up to and including Kings and Emperors) fighting to display their prowess – to each other and, increasingly, to the general populace. Death was demonstrably a risk (the last significant personage to die in a tournament was King Henri II of France in 1559), but it wasn’t the point except as a risk. Skill and honour were the point. And money: a successful tourneyer could make considerable sums through ransoms and prizes, though an unsuccessful one could lose considerable sums.

The ruling elite of medieval Latin Christendom was a warrior elite. That it was a Christian society complicated this, but the knights basically won in the end. They dominated the peasantry, the peasantry was the mass of society, so the social surplus was largely directed to knightly ends (with lots of tussles with the Church). Tournaments rose from the C11th with the rise of the knightly class and disappeared in the C16th with their military eclipse. The sheer resources put into tournaments show how important they were to the ruling elite. That the knightly romance was the dominant literary form – outside the direct products of the Church – expressed this further. Indeed, medieval histories often read like medieval romances because the doings of the same group were central to each and because they, or people who aspired to be as they (in the Low Countries, the urban merchants ran their own tourneying societies, some of whom were consequently knighted), were the audience for the same.

The medieval period of Latin Christendom is, ultimately, the knightly period. They are what make it most distinctive from what came before, what came after and what was elsewhere. (As did the samurai of Japan: both societies stop being medieval when the warrior class loses its distinctive role and transmutes into an officer class.)

None of this is surprising: how and what coercive force is wielded is a fundamental feature of any society. A life-and-death matter. The first basis of power.

Which is why Barker’s lame conclusion is so irritating: Tournament’s

survival must, to a large extent, be attributable to the powerful ideology of the romances as typified in romances. Without it, the tournament must have been suppressed, despite its value as military training. With it, the tournament becomes not simply a military exercise but rather a celebration of all the values that chivalrous society held dear (p.190).

It reflects well on The Tournament in England: 1100 - 1400 that it provides such a mass of intelligent evidence that one can see this does not work. I know intellectuals are always inclined to spruik the value of ideas – it’s what they deal in. But medieval society was, in many ways, a deeply practical society. It was mostly too poor and too competitive to be much else (even the investment in prayer was a form of practicality: with such limited ability to control their environment, of course it looked like a reasonable investment).

Yes, medieval society is also marked by the amazing power of belief. But great lords went to great expense and considerable personal risk for tournaments even before the flowering of romances. As Barker herself points out, the English crown was just about the only one powerful enough to make any prohibition stick, and even it had problems (pp7ff). And Richard I gave in, because tournaments seemed to be giving French knights a military edge (p.17). Which is how medieval society worked – the proliferation of polities forced authority into competition which meant greater provision of public goods to buttress authority and a slow motion constraint on their ability to restrict freedoms.

Yes, of course, medieval romances encouraged the tournament. But they also reflected outlooks grounded in the very social role and sense of identity of the knightly class. Something so useful to and for the key military figures of any realm hardly needed romances to keep it alive. Even with Church disapproval – though it might well be that the Christian gloss (and more than gloss) of the romances helped the Church get over its opposition.

Still, that's ultimately a quibble. The Tournament in England: 1100 - 1400 remains a very useful and informative work.

The Book of the Tournament
The Book of the Tournament has become a classic SCA text. I have the first edition (no pictures). As the author says, it is:

done in elements of style of from several 13th to 15th century sources, inspired by King Rene’s "La Forms et Devise d’ung Tournay," Geoffrey de Charnay’s "Libre de Chevalerie,’ and Raymond Lull’s "Book of Chivalry and Knighthood."

The book is beautifully put together, nicely written, very considered, I find it a quietly inspirational text. That the honour-system of SCA fighting – the self-judging of blows received – is ultimately a point of courtesy to your opponent as much as honour to yourself is a telling point. That the true victory is not winning but upholding the virtues of tournament, is even more so. Prowess is only one chivalric virtue, and not the greatest. It is a book I would heartily recommend to any SCA fighter, anyone interested in chivalry and to martial artists generally.