Constantine’s Sword

James Carroll, the author of Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews – A History is a former Catholic priest. This only one of innumerable personal details one learns from what is a very personal book.

Which helps makes it a long-winded book, as does the author’s writing style. It also provides a very immediate and personal wrestling with issues of faith, the nature of Christianity and the role of the Jews in Christian history that concern the author.

Constantine’s Sword is very focused on the issue of the Holocaust, the Shoah and the questions (personal, theological, historical) it provokes. Part One, A Cross at Auschwitz, discusses the controversy over the erection of a giant Cross as a memorial at Auschwitz, a controversy which weaves in and out of the narrative throughout the book.

The rest of Part One is a discussion of Carroll's personal history and the shifts in his awareness that there are deep problems, even now, with the Catholic attitude to Jews and Judaism, resting on the proposition that Jesus was the Messiah and the Jews, as Jews, rejected Him: to the point of being God-killers. The latter claim rather lets the Romans off the hook: a theme of the book is dissecting the effects of the Roman Empire’s embrace of Christianity (and Christianity’s embrace of the Roman Empire). With that embrace, blaming the Empire for Jesus’s death became even more problematic. If a defeat (crucifixion) can be become a victory, then a victory (adoption by the Empire) can become a defeat.

The most shameful error in the book is where Carroll writes that the Vietnam War ended in 1973 (p.51): a prime example of the repellent American narcissism of so many American progressivists. The Vietnam War ended in 1975. (And, for the people of Kampuchea, the horror was just beginning.) It was merely direct American involvement that ended in 1973. What increases the irony is that it is at the tail end of a discussion about Carroll, as a Catholic, “not getting” Jewish perspectives.

In Part Two New Testament Origins of Jew Hatred, Carroll takes Christian Jew-hatred right back to the beginning, examining Jew-hatred in the New Testament. During which Carroll conveys well the Catholic notion that Scripture is a creation of the Church (understood as the community of Christian believers).

In Part Three Constantine, Augustine and the Jews Carroll examines what the Christianising of the Roman Empire meant for Jews and Augustine’s role in enunciating a theology that permitted the Jews to survive, but not to thrive.

Part Four From Crusades to Conversionism looks at the Jews as the first (and regular) victims of the Crusades and the theology of Anselm (the crucifixion as the great salvation act with the monstrousness of it projected onto the Jews), Abelard (who held that the life of Jesus was the important thing: which Carroll regretfully calls a “minority report” theology) and Aquinas (who held that the Jews rejection of Christ was not an act of ignorance but of deliberate defiance).

Part Five The Inquisition: Enter Racism examines the baleful effect of the Black Death and the scapegoating of Jews, the Reconquista in Spain – where a resurgent Christianity imposed an intolerant dominance – the forced conversions of Iberian Jews and the creeping insecurity that such conversions were sincere, which led to the "tainted blood" laws and the notion that all Jews were tainted by the “crimes” of their ancestors. Carroll also looks at effects of the Reformation – Calvinism tended to have good effects for Jews – and Jewish responses to patterns in Christian attitudes.

Part Six Emancipation, Revolution and a New Fear of the Jews looks at the Enlightenment, secularism and revolutionary tumult and the growth of modern anti-Semitism. In Chapter 41, Voltaire and the False Promise of Emancipation examines the anticlerical Voltaire denouncing the Jews for being religious. Secularisation could bring new grounds for reviling Jews. Carroll concludes by considering Catholic influences in the Dreyfus affair and noting that Dreyfus’s widow was sheltered (unknowingly) by nuns while her granddaughter Madeleine refused to flee and was killed for being Jewish.

Part Seven The Church and Hitler examines the rise of eliminationist anti-Semitism, the relationship between the Church and Hitler, the problematic behaviour of the Church in the face of the Holocaust and the fate of Rome’s Jews. The Part ends with the case of Edith Stein, a Catholic convert of Jewish ancestry who is an official martyr of the Church. But, as Carroll points out, she becomes a way for the Church to talk as if a Catholic is the archetypal Holocaust victim – Edith Stein, Holocaust martyr becomes image of both diversion and self-exoneration for the Church

Part Eight is a call for a Vatican III with various proposed agenda items, each getting a chapter. As with the rest of the book, this Part shows no awareness of how Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, have become primarily developing world religions. The concerns of a liberal Western urbanite are not their concerns.

A gay man reading about Jew-hatred, particularly Catholic Jew-hatred, is likely to be struck by lots of ironies. After all, the accusations of Jew-hatred (that Jews deny God, are abominated by God, that they should not exist, that treating them equally threatens the basis of Christian civilisation, that they are potent corrupters of social order) and those of the anathematisation of same-sex acts and orientation are very similar. With the extra irony that all the major themes of Catholic anathematisation of same-sex acts and orientation among men were pioneered by Jewish priests, rabbis and writers.

St Paul was the link whereby one, and only one, part of the Holiness Code made it into the New Testament. A part wildly uneven in its burdens (there is no cost in its strictures if you are of the other-sex oriented majority) and which is radically disconnected from the ethic preached in the Gospels. It is the most Jewish, the most Old Covenant, part of the New Testament.

To add to the ironies, St Paul’s rhetoric about “unnatural” lusts (the notion that something can be para physin, against nature, has no precursors elsewhere in Scripture) is clearly a reference to Plato’s natural law thinking, including Plato’s (false) claim that animals of the same sex do not have sex with each other. Plato enters Christianity in its earliest written passages – and on the basis of a simple empirical falsity. And does so, most likely, via Philo Judaeus, a Jewish writer.

Carroll sets out how the Christianising Emperors enacted various oppressive measures against the Jews: the same Emperors did the same against “sodomites”. The parallels abound.

Constantine’s Sword is a very informative and thoughtful study. The very high personal content I found less irritating than I expected, because it is used to personalise the themes of the narrative quite effectively.

The Looming Tower

It is an old saw that journalism is the first draft of history. New Yorker writer Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 is a fine “first draft” of history based on many interviews and wide reading.

Wright has the advantage of having lived and worked in Cairo for two years. He is extremely informative on the Egyptian background for many of the al-Qaeda central figures. But so he is about Saudi Arabia and bin Laden’s own background.

Wright is not attempting to be deeply analytical, just usefully empirical, which he is: there is perceptive analysis, it is just worn lightly. He simply tells the story and the analysis comes, almost in passing, from that. Thus Wright does not attempt to fully explain the intense animosity to the US that bin Laden successfully taps into, he just reports it. We do find out that, for example, a Yemeni who was an important al-Qaeda figure, was hugely ignorant about the US, which he nevertheless blamed as the source of evil in the world. The intensely patriotic Arab-American Muslim FBI agent who was his interrogator was able, by his example, by knowing his Muslim theology, by breaching that ignorance, to get lots of information from him.

There and elsewhere, Wright conveys how effective a good interrogator can be. Which reinforces how unutterably stupid the authorisation of waterboarding and other such “mild” torture is: feeding martyr complexes, doing great damage to America’s moral stature, for no needed gain.

Wright is telling two sets of stories. One is of Sayyid Qutb, Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden and various Islamist terrorists. The other is the US counter-terrorism effort. Particularly the story of John O’Neill, the New York based FBI counter-terrorist squad head who was greatly concerned by bin Laden years before the wider American bureaucracy, and Carl Michael Scheuer, the equally fixated CIA operative. Alas, the two got along badly at both personal and bureaucratic levels (the cop who wanted to convict bin Laden, versus the “spook” who wanted to kill him), and badly with other members of their own organizations. Exacerbated by neither the FBI nor the CIA playing well with other bureaucracies.

A constant theme of The Looming Tower is how different parts of the US security and intelligence bureaucracy knew crucial bits of information and completely failed to tell other agencies. If the FBI and CIA had shared information properly, if either had passed key information in their possession on to border security, there is an excellent chance the 9/11 plot would have been foiled. (An interview with Michael Scheuer on rendition is here.)
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But bureaucratic process imperatives persistently overrode any sense of common purpose. To some extent the FBI-CIA conflict was inherent. The FBI thought like cops—the point is to get evidence and convict people. The CIA folk thought like intelligence operatives—information that becomes evidence is compromised intelligence and the simplest way to get rid of an enemy is to kill him, particularly given all the thorny jurisdictional issues. This expresses a tension that is at the heart of counter-terrorism. The jihadi regard themselves as being at war, but they blot out the difference between warrior and murderer. They wear no uniform. They deliberately target civilians and hide amongst them. So do we treat them as soldiers or as criminals?

In old-fashioned international law, they would come under the same ambit as soldiers caught in action not in uniform—be subject to summary execution. The purpose of which was precisely to force soldiers not to look like civilians. But not all jihadis are caught in flagrante delicto. And you want information from them—the lack of reliable human or other intelligence (and the screw-ups that causes in itself) is one of the themes of Wright’s book. Hence all the problems of Gitmo and of “catch and release”.

If one was to apply standard Anglosphere policy from the abolition of torture in the C17th to the dying away of summary execution in the mid C20th, the policy would be:

(1) jihadis caught in action not in uniform in war zones would be summarily executed after being given a chance to become information sources instead.
(2) Those caught in war zones in more ambiguous circumstances would be detained and processed by military tribunals for a range of outcomes from execution, indefinite detention to release.
(3) Those executed would be treated as the British learnt to do: buried in pigskins.
(4) No use of any form of torture whatsoever. Learn to be clever interrogators.
(5) Domestic terrorism is simply a criminal matter.

But summary execution was tainted by the Nazi example, just as non-uniformed combatants were ennobled by the example of the resistance to Nazism. Even so, international law gave fighting in uniform protections for good reason.

Takfiri ideology

Wright starts the telling of the story with Sayyid Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood and the slow development of takfiri ideology (p.124ff). One of the minor themes running through the story is sexual horror. We are treated to Sayyid Qutb being appalled by the materialism, irreligiosity and brazen sexual licence of the US epitomised by—a church dance in a Presbyterian church hall in a small town in the US in 1948. (Admittedly, a fairly socially liberal small town, but still.) Qutb is one of key intellectual figures in the development of modern Islamism. If a Presbyterian church dance in 1948 in small town US appalls him, it is safe to say that nothing the West could do (short of converting to a very strict form of Islam) was or is going to appease him and his ilk.

Which is, of course, the real demand. The ultimate sin of the West is to be not Muslim and extremely successfully not Muslim. Particularly after the collapse of Communism, the Christianity of the US was especially offensive (p.171). Qutb’s earlier recounting of his experiences in the US includes some very implausible claims about (hostile) knowledge by everyday Americans about happenings in Islam. One strongly suspects the pervasive lack of knowledge about, or interest in, the Islamic world was far more confronting for Qutb: hostility was a more comforting thought than indifference.

In fact, every time I read about Qutb’s life, I wonder a bit more about that sexual horror. He never married, claiming he could never meet any woman up to true Islamic standards. A delicate, softly-spoken fellow, there is an old witticism about the man who can never meet the right woman, though it could just have been early romantic disappointment, as Wright implies (p.9). In the case of Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 attack, there is even more reason—which Wright takes note of (p.307)—to think that conflicted sexuality might have underlain his hyper-religiosity. It is, after all, something that other forms of monotheism have experienced (the wildly disproportionate tendency of Catholic priests to be same-sex oriented, for example): an inevitable result of monotheism claiming that variance in sexuality is against God, so driving gay boys to prove they are good little boys really, that God doesn’t hate them because they love God so much and are so keen to do His work (however they conceive that).

In the Middle East, liberal parliamentarianism was an import from the West that became hopelessly compromised by complicity in Western domination. Qutb and other Islamists were strong against British (i.e. infidel) domination of Egypt. Alas, the secular nationalists led by Nasser overthrew the monarchy and took power. Which then led to a struggle between those who looked to Islam as the answers to the conundrums of modernity and those who looked to other imports from the West (socialism, secularism, nationalism). That struggle led to Qutb’s trial and execution.

The Muslim Middle East became a three-way struggle between traditional monarchies (generally allied to the West), secular nationalists (generally allied to the Soviet bloc) and Islamists. Traditionalist monarchies fell to secular nationalists in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Northern Yemen and Iraq. Sadat made peace with Israel and switched Egypt to the Western camp, the Soviet Union collapsed and secular nationalism became undermined by its economic and nationalist failures (particularly regular defeat by Israel).

But the Islamists were successful nowhere until the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Sunni Islamists successes since have been limited to Sudan and Hamas’s more recent electoral success and seizure of Gaza. They did win elections in Jordan and form a government: but the Hashemite dynasty was clever enough to let them run the drains, etc, turning them into ordinary politicians and taking the gloss off. (They lost the next election, once Jordanian voters worked out the king had actually meant the elections.) They probably won an election in Algeria, but the secular-nationalist military blocked them, leading to a brutal civil war in which the Islamists were crushed. Just as the Ba’ath regime in Syria had brutally crushed a Muslim brotherhood uprising in Hama.

Wright takes us through the convulsions of Egyptian politics through the life of Qutb and then of Zawarihi. In the long, losing, struggle against the Egyptian regime, some Islamists developed the notion that their (Muslim) enemies were takfiri, so not really Muslims, so the proper object of war without limit. Anywhere ruled by such folk was not Islam really, it was the House of War. Which excused the real adherents of Islam from the Islamic restrictions on legitimate war when fighting such enemies, an outlook with a deep affinity to chaos and barbarism, as Wright notes (p.159).

So the modern terrorist jihadi ideology was born. Epitomised in the purposes of al-Qaeda:

1. Establishing the rule of God on Earth
2. Attaining martyrdom in the service of God
3. Purification of the ranks of Islam from the elements of depravity (p.302)

Soviet invasion

Then the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

The history of Saudi Arabia and the impact of the Soviet invasion is examined through the lives of Prince Turki, long-time head of Saudi intelligence, and Osama bin Laden.

Saudi Arabia is the odd-kingdom out. The al-Saud family had come to power fairly brutally (effectively creating the polity) and in alliance with an extremely severe form of Islam. Not a new pattern in Islam. What made this case different was oil. Oil created the American connection, it made the Kingdom (and the al-Saud family) fabulously wealthy (and fabulously corrupt) and provided the money for Salafi Islam to become dominant in Islamic missionary efforts, supplanting the much more syncretic Sufi traditions. Saudi Arabia is not traditionalist so much as damn-near religious totalitarianism, particularly given the al-Saud family tends to rely on ever more strict adherence whenever it feels pressured. This very narrow and intolerant version of Islam is what is preached in many Western mosques, because it has Saudi oil money behind it.

When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the Saudis saw it as part of a Soviet drive to the Gulf. They poured money into supporting the muhajideen, matching American support dollar-for-dollar. The support was typically funnelled through the Pakistani ISI. The very pious Osama bin Laden, part of a Yemeni family that had become a wealthy part of the Saudi establishment, saw this as a defence of Islam against atheist communist infidels. His father had very successfully used Aramco and Royal patronage to build a major construction and business empire in the Kingdom. Osama helped raise funds and began to organise Arab fighters. These were mostly unsuccessful as fighters (sometimes farcically so), but gave Osama a lot of contacts, some military experience and jihadi veteran cred.

The Soviets pulled out, the muhajideen won (and promptly started fighting amongst themselves). Then the Soviet Empire collapsed. To folk such as Osama, this was easily read as being a result of the great Islamic victory, on the pattern of the collapse of the Persian Empire under Muslim assault in the C7th, that:

Faith is stronger than weapons, and the ticket to enter the sacred zone where such miracles occur is the willingness to die (p.120).

(The C7th as the ultimate pattern for everything being an especially strong belief of the wahhabi Islam Osama had been raised under.)

Kuwait war

Then Iraq invaded Kuwait and American and other Western troops flooded into Saudi Kingdom to defend it and then retake Kuwait. The presence of infidel soldiers in the Land of the Two Holy Places Osama took as an enormous affront to Islam. A sign of the corruption and weakness of the al-Saud. So began his steady enstrangement from the al-Saud.

He moved to Sudan, where a local Islamist thinker, Hassan al-Turabi, has been very influential in a series of Islamist governments. In fact, as Wright points out, Turabi and Osama had quite different visions of Islam (Turabi is something of an advocate of women’s rights, for example, citing examples from Muhammad’s life). But they agreed that Islam is the answer to all social and political issues. Osama was prepared to experiment with one of Turabi's ideas, which was to make common cause with Shi'a (pp.173). And Osama invested a lot of money in Sudan, which few folk were.

Osama invested a lot of money, but mostly very unwisely. There are good reasons why Sudan does not attract much investment. He essentially went broke and had his Saudi citizenship revoked because he would not stop public statements denouncing the connections with the US, especially the presence of infidel troops.

Stateless, lacking money, already fingered as a terrorist financier, Osama returned to Afghanistan where an Islamist army of mostly orphan boys, the Taliban, supported by the ISI and the Saudis, had taken over most of the country. Their leader, Muhammad Omar, having literally wrapped himself in the (alleged) cloak of the Prophet, a local object of veneration.

Wright takes us through the machinations between Osama, Zawahiri, Omar and the Saudis. He also takes us through Osama’s increasingly active embrace of terrorism (including an increasing interest in acquiring nuclear weapons), the East African embassy and USS Cole bombings and the at-cross-purposes American responses.

The incoherent—at times simply incompetent—dithering of the Clinton Administration is detailed in a very this-is-what-happened way. The revised intelligence information policy of the second-term Clinton Administration meant even less information was shared between agencies. While its “response by cruise missile” was actively counterproductive: failing to hit anyone crucial, destroying an innocuous factory in Sudan, making Osama much more personally cautious (so harder to hit) and boosting his prestige as “unkillable”. Osama was apparently able to sell an unexploded cruise missile to the Chinese for $US10m: a complete debacle. It doesn’t leave one confident that a putative Gore Administration would have been any more competent in dealing with the Middle East, though there might have been more continuity in effort against bin Laden.

Wright details al-Qaeda as very much a shoestring operation, where major statements and acts of terror produce donations and volunteers. We move back and forth from terrorists to counter-terrorists, each with their own set of problems, both personal and institutional. Wright provides considerable detail on bin Laden’s polygamous family life. John O’Neill had a chaotic private life (he was naturally polygamous too, but his culture did not permit it) and lived beyond his means. He ended up leaving the FBI when his 20 years service was up and taking a much higher paying private security job—as head of security for the World Trade Center. He was killed when the Towers collapsed on 9/11.

Wright concludes with the Afghanistan campaign and bin Laden’s escape from Tora Bora over the border into Pakistan.

What struck me most about the al-Qaeda story was how very specifically Muslim it is. The jihadi impulse is not limited to one organization. Specific conceptions of Islam drive the impulse. Thus the first attack on the World Trade Center was nothing to do with bin Laden, though he attracted a key figure involved in it to him.

Wright makes the point that many jihadis are displaced people, people who in some are alienated from the society they are in, and look to Islam to provide an identity for them. Often, as with Sayyid Qutb, it was the experience of living in the West that defined them as radical Muslim (p.304), that Islam was very much what the West was not. (Qutb’s notion of political sovereignty as belonging only to God, for example.) Wright notes some similarities with the Nazis—a burning desire to get “on top” of history, a belief in pervasive Jewish power (p.306). (There are others: an ideology of conflict, glorification of violence, use of modern means to implement atavistic ends, a veteran mystique, contempt for democracy.)

Wright also makes the point that death itself is what is attractive, that martyrdom is what is being sold:

The lure of an illustrious and meaningful death was especially powerful in cases where the pleasures and rewards of life were crushed by government oppression and economic deprivation (p.106).

Though, as he notes later, it was not poverty as such but frustrated opportunity that was the problem—the recruits tended to be disproportionately better educated (p.301).

This is not a “what is to be done” book. It is a “this is what happened” book. And a very fine and informative one it is too.

Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star

Some books just have irresistible titles and Rich Merritt’s Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star was such a book for me.

It turned out to be an engaging personal story that manages to encapsulate many of the tensions of modern American life, how divergent the roles one person can play. Particularly when raised in a social milieu where being true to one’s nature is not an acceptable role.

Rich Merritt was raised in a deeply religious Southern family. He went to Christian schools from kindergarten to the Bob Jones University (from which he was eventually expelled). The theory of evolutionary psychology that the human capacity for religious belief is a form of group identification certainly gets strong support from Rich Merritt’s experience of Southern Pentecostalism and Baptism, where an unforgiving sense of “them” and “us” is all-pervasive. His deeply religious Grandpa Schrader on his deathbed agonizing over whether he was eternally damned (p.30) came to epitomize the narrow, fearful, judging religion of his upbringing and its costs.

And being same-sex oriented makes one very much not “one of us”. Rich Merritt describes his family and school life very vividly. There is the familiar pattern of feeling wrongly different – his father telling a very young Rich he hoped he was not a sissy when he found him playing with girls (p.28) – and compensating by trying to be “the best little boy in the world”, with sometimes erratic results. However difficult things got with his family—sometimes very difficult—it is clear that there were salving connections of love.
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His decision to join the US Marines was somewhat unexpected, but became a source of pride to members of his family, particularly when he became an officer (he rose to the rank of Captain). Experience at boot camp put the narrow, unforgiving exclusivity of Bob Jones University in a much more critical light. He even heard – for the first time ever – someone (a female African-American lance corporal) defend gays (p.99). After Rich was expelled from Bob Jones U (for cursing, listening to rock music and going to a dance club) the Marines became his new home. He had also become friends with fellow (straight) marine Gary Fullerton, someone whose profoundly supportive friendship clearly provided a major emotional anchor in Rich Merritt’s life. After the loss of his Bob Jones networks, Gary restored his faith in friendship (p.136).

The marines also became the place were he admitted to himself that he was homosexual. Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star provides an excellent insight into the gay networks in the US Armed forces – there are 194,000 people in the Marines, part of the US Armed forces of 1.4m active and 1.5m reserve service personnel. If the same-sex oriented are about 4% of the population (roughly 5% of males, 2% of females) then that means that likely about 60,000 active and the same number again reserve service personnel are same-sex oriented. Of course they form networks: for friendship, relationships, sex – networks that also provide places of safety and support, given the ban on homosexuals being in the US military.

Two years into Rich Merritt’s service “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (or, as it has been called, Hide-and-Lie) became the policy. Nowadays, it is a policy which increasingly lacks popular and service personnel support – even conservative US journals have run pieces calling for the policy’s abolition.

But it still is official US military policy and the contradictions in trying to be a good Marine while passing as heterosexual (to the extent of arranging “stunt babes” as escorts at major Marine social functions) are conveyed vividly. Since all the monotheistic religions have traditionally held that the same-sex oriented should not exist – and certainly have no legitimate social place – there were also no accepted models of how to be same-sex oriented available to Rich Merritt as he was growing up. Like so many same-sex oriented men and women, he had to make it up as he went along.

Stationed in California, the party-club-dance-rave networks were the most obvious model of “how to be” gay. Rich Merritt was increasingly drawn into that. Which led to his brief (eight films) career as a porn star: if one was “breaking out”, one may well break out all the way. There is, in fact, a niche industry of gay porn by serving US service personnel. One which generates scandals every few years (p.229).

Rich Merritt reports that he understood what he was doing was risked his career as a Marine officer. But he was also an adrenaline junkie: something that was to be a continuing, and deep, problem in his life.

Doing porn acquired another layer of risk, as about that time he met Brandon, who became his lover for several years. We follow the emotional highs and lows of his life: military career, gay life, family life – a deeply tension-filled package. He came to appreciate the words of “a wise therapist”: our secrets keep us sick.

Eventually, Rich became the anonymous front marine (“R”) for a New York Times magazine piece (pdf) on the effect of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” on gay service personnel. A risky thing to do but one he felt comfortable with as he came to trust the NYT journalist doing the story.

But not enough to tell her of his porn career: something that caused major problems when The Advocate, a gay magazine, published the extremely juicy news story (pdf) that the lead anonymous marine was also a porn star. (It excited some reader comment (pdf) also.) Which causes major ructions in Rich Merritt’s life.

It also confirmed his decision to resign from the US marines. He graduated from law school, became a highly paid (and highly indebted, due to his party-party life style and student debts) lawyer. His relationship broke up, he had drug problems, family members died or got very sick. It was a time for much angst, emotional roller-coasters and therapy of somewhat erratic quality. The book ends on both a tragic (due to the death of someone close to him) and hopeful note.

When The Advocate broke the story about Merritt’s porn past, some conservative journals had fun at the New York Times’s expense, including mocking what they thought were implausible contradictions in “R’s” story. But the joke was more on them, because people are complex and different and do have unexpected juxtapositions and tensions in their life. So Rich Merritt could be a party-boy gay man who was missing lots of “normal” gay cultural references since he had a highly fundamentalist religious upbringing.

Patterns of bigotry

All bigotries are, in some sense or other, wars against human diversity. Whether diversity in race, sex, religion, belief, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender or whatever. The reality is, humans are varied things. To be a war with the variety of the human is to be at war with the reality of the human. Such wars have costs, both on those who such wars are waged against and those who wage them.

Being heterosexual does not define the human, despite heroic (and horrific) attempts to pretend it does (or ought to). Variety in sexual orientation is likely a straightforward feature of human evolutionary biology. Yet there are few people more isolated, more vulnerable, or more lonely, than a same-sex oriented boy or girl growing up in a deeply religious family and community that rejects the legitimacy of their existence. Hence the higher suicide and attempted suicide rates among them.

A long war has been waged by monotheist religions against the same-sex oriented: a war that propagated and kept alive the notion of God-the-exterminator. In the Christian tradition, that has included adopting and propagating Philo of Alexandria’s reading of Genesis 19 (a reading none of the other Scriptural references to the Sodom and Gomorrah story support) – at Sunday school, Rich’s class was told that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because they let men marry men (p.22).

It has also included putting out publications as the medieval Golden Book, compiled by a beatified Archbishop of Genoa, which claimed that Jesus insisted that all sodomites be killed before He would incarnate. (So, Christmas Day as Massacre Day, celebrating Jesus insisting on mass extermination.) It included brutally suppressing same-sex orientation (and marriage) among conquered Amerindian cultures. And, indeed, in Europe.

At its simplest, it has sold an effortless sense of virtue that people can feel for not doing what most have little or no interest in doing anyway: virtue without effort—an easy sell for the hucksters of faith.

If the legitimately human is defined more narrowly than the set of actual humans, then the resulting gap has to be dealt with: typically by exclusion. Including that ultimate form of exclusion, extermination.

In our own time, there has been the fights not to have the love lives of the same-sex oriented criminalized; to not be social outcasts; to not be barred from various employments; to able to be positively portrayed in books, film and television; to serve their countries; to have the lives they build together protected by the law. A long struggle upwards from the nadir of the default social policy being God-approved (indeed mandated) extermination: extermination to turn aside the wrath of God.

Which is a big story made up of millions of individual stories. Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star is just one of those stories, but a striking and engaging one.

Thoughts Without a Thinker

Some time ago, I was thinking about when was the happiest time in my life, and I realised the happiest time in my life was this time. A lot of things have led to this point, but an important help along the way has been reading (and re-reading) Going to Pieces without Falling Apart by Mark Epstein which I posted about recently.

Thoughts without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective is an earlier book by Epstein. It is at once more Freudian than the later book (not a good point in my eyes) but also more systematically Buddhist. Indeed, the Buddhism notably improves the Freudian content. The book moves through three parts: (1) Buddha’s psychology of the mind, (2) meditation and (3) therapy. The first part deals with Buddhist taxonomy of the mind, the problems of desire, the false notions of self. The second discusses the benefits of meditation for proper understanding. The third explains how Buddhist notions give an end-point to therapy that the psychoanalytical tradition lacks. There are some striking observations about Western mentality and its difficulties.
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Once one achieves a certain level of mindfulness, life becomes very different. (A philosophical blog has a useful post on the difference between mindfulness, metacognition and critical thinking.) No matter how long a road it was to getting there. Looking back, the effect of my own mystical experience in my mid-20s was to give a sense that other ways of feeling were possible. That there was an achievable alternative to how I normally felt, to my damaged self. But it wasn’t even close to a solution in itself. Similarly, the horrible time I had from about 1998 to 2002 had the effect of forcing me to confront and deal with things that, up to then, had merely been an "acceptable" level of psychic poison. Epstein is very good at helping to lose the fear of what one is, so one also loses the fear of what one is not. Thereby becoming comfortable with who one is, rather than barely knowing who one is.

As to the Freudian elements in Thoughts without a Thinker, a friend made the perspicacious observation to me that a parent’s treatment of the child can be a reaction to the child. Thus, a father is likely to be more distant to a gay son (who is different in perhaps unsettling ways) while a mother is likely to be closer to a (gay) son who is more like her than expected. This is a fundamental observation that psychoanalysts managed to miss for decades. Psychoanalysis is not based on careful scientific observation, which is why Freudianism has been dying as our genuine knowledge expands. Though, one of the strengths of Epstein’s book is that he makes it clear Freud was much more open-minded and perspicacious than his later followers (a common difficulty of thinkers and their followers). And, to be fair to Epstein, he very much sees Buddhist pyschology as a way of dealing with gaps in Freudian thinking:

Freud lamented ... that psychoanalysis was unable by itself to produce an ego strong and versatile enough to accomplish his therapeutic goals. By working directly with the metaphorical experience of self, meditation offers a complementary method of ego development, one that fills the gap that Freud was left struggling with (p.155).

Even so, it is noticeable the Freudian elements have definitely retreated as Epstein develops his presentation of psychology with a Buddhist perspective in his various books.

The Origin of Species

Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species is possibly the scientifically and intellectually most important book of the modern era. It was certainly the most important single book published in the C19th.

The theory of evolution was not remotely original to Darwin. Lamarck’s major work had been published in the year Darwin was born (1809) while his grandfather Erasmus Darwin had published on evolutionary theory—including the bases of what later became his grandson’s theory of sexual selection.

The Penguin edition includes a useful introduction by W. J. Burrows, which makes clear how important geology’s opening up the sense of the antiquity of the Earth was to development of Darwin’s theory.
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As Burrows points out, such geology made science increasingly seem a weapon against belief since it undermined the religious view of the world as a recent creation where the ruins of Petra were half as old as time. The notion that science undermined religion was, at least in Christendom, something new. Clergymen-naturalists had looked at nature as a representation of the mind of God, a tradition with a long history in Christianity. C18th scepticism about religion had been based on moral objections and awkwardness about miracles. Geology opened up a time-frame nothing in religion had prepared folk for.

The Origin of Species is such a seminal work, the outlook it was arguing against seems remote. Darwin’s prime targets are the theory of independent creation and the doctrine of the immutability of species: positions that were religiously based but scientifically respectable. Darwin builds his case with layer upon layer of fact. His final chapters—on geographical distribution and classification—are particularly effective. Even now, almost 150 years after the book was published, they are delightful in their shedding of profound light on why the biological world is the way it is. So much of what Darwin wrote has been vindicated by subsequent science

Darwin builds his case methodically. He starts with variation (domestic followed by natural), then the struggle for existence, then the mechanism of natural selection, then patterns of variation, difficulties of the theory, then instinct, hybridism, the imperfection of the geological record, distribution of fossils in geological layers before bringing on the aforementioned discussions of geographical distribution and classification. Darwin concludes with a summary and recapitulation of his theory. A particularly appealing part of the book is Darwin’s description of his myriad, careful scientific observations and experiments.

Darwin’s theory of natural selection was famously based on Malthus’s principle of population. Darwin’s use of Malthus’ principle of population avoided a clear awkwardness in Malthus. There is none of Malthus’s geometric-increase-by-eaters, arithmetic-increase-by-eaten incoherence. All living populations can increase geometrically, it is the limitations of the natural world (sun, weather, moisture, extremes of hot and cold, seasons, etc) which generate the ultimate constraints. Within these constraints, the struggle for existence selects for advantageous variation that are then passed on to their descendants. In his words:

the Struggle for Existence amongst all organic beings throughout the world, which inevitably follows from their high geometrical powers of increase … This is the doctrine of Malthus, applied to the whole of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and, as a consequence, there is frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and will thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form (p.68).

For there is no prudential restraint of marriage in nature (p.117) so

every single organic being around us may be said to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers (p.119).

Darwin was a genuinely revolutionary thinker, and like many revolutionary thinkers, did not entirely grasp the implications of his own views. For example, writing of the movement of seeds by waterbirds,

Nature, like a careful gardener, thus takes her seeds from a bed of a particular nature, and drops them in another well fitted for them (p.378)

does not well convey the selective power of probabilistic processes.

Nor did Darwin grasp the significance of varying breeding strategies. He notes the existence of “slow breeders” but does not consider that a range of breeding strategies may be operating. To write:

of the many individuals of any species which are periodically born, but a small number can survive (p.115)

is putting it way too high. Many species do have lots of offspring and invest no care in their upbringing: of them Darwin’s comment is accurate. Others, however, have far fewer offspring and yet invest in their care: of them it is not. The former strategy typically requires little or nothing in cooperative behaviour. The latter often requires a lot. To regularly write as if the former is the way natural selection operates is to make cooperation far more problematic than it should be. Which was not good for either the scientific or the social implications of Darwinism.

Since Darwin rejects the notion of past catastrophes suddenly wiping out lots of species (Noah’s flood scientised), he has evolution proceeding at a consistent, gradual, but inexorable pace varying over time only with any variance in the rate of mutation. In order to drive this inexorable change, Darwin characterises the struggle for existence as relentlessly intense.

Which was to cause all sorts of problems. Even though Darwin was a very liberal and humane minded man (he detested slavery, for example and was horrified by the attempts to scientifically justify treating blacks as inferior beings), Darwin regularly used language that characterises the struggle for existence as bitter, unforgiving and relentless. Both Nazism and Marxism (especially Leninism) invoked Darwinian struggle to justify the sweeping away of inferior races or classes, as the case may be. And it was not a wild distortion of Darwin’s scientific rhetoric—however far from Darwin’s actual political and social views—to do so.

Darwin-the-careful-naturalist notes cooperation and slow breeding. Darwin-the-Malthusian-theorist makes the former problematic and the latter have no theoretical implications. Something can be both a great breakthrough and disastrously flawed.

As is seen, for example, his theory of sexual selection (only briefly touched upon in Origins [Pp 136ff]). For Darwin, sex is about exchanging semen. But he himself approvingly invokes more than once, the observation that

nature is prodigal in variety, though niggard in innovation (Pp 223,445).

Yet, Darwin deals with sex as if it only has this one purpose. If, however, one leaves more theoretical space for cooperation, then sex—as a way for animals to connect—would more clearly have various functions in nature beyond reproduction, which it clearly does.

But we, of course, have the advantage of that extra 150 years of observations, thinking, analysis and consequences. Origin of Species remains a towering intellectual achievement. We all live in its shadow.

Darwin is not a great writer. There are long sections where he seems to be trying to bury, even bore, the reader under sheer weight of details. But it is worth persevering with to understand, and enjoy, one of the great intellectual breakthroughs of human history.

An Essay on the Principle of Population

The Rev. Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population was one of those runaway intellectual successes that turns its author’s name into an adjective. Alas, as someone observed, classics are like the aristocracy: we learn their titles and pretend acquaintance. It is a book far more invoked than read.

The Penguin edition contains the first edition of the Essay conjoined with A Summary View of the Principle of Population, Malthus’s distillation of his views, plus a particularly useful and intelligent introduction by philosopher Anthony Flew. (I recommend that you read Flew’s introduction, then read the two works by Malthus, and then re-read Flew’s introduction.)

The Essay has three elements to it: Malthus’s statement and explication of his principle of population; critiques of Condorcet and Godwin; and a justification of the works of God to man.

The last has the standard difficulties of that genre, if rather more intelligently expressed than is often the case. The second is striking for reminding us how much the same arguments are continually revisited over the decades.

Malthus is very much an empiricist and a person of the sceptical Enlightenment—things, and particularly people, are as they are: the point is to understand such and deal with that, for otherwise lies disaster. Condorcet and Godwin are very much of the radical Enlightenment—humans are perfectible, so society is perfectible, so radical change can produce unparalleled human felicity. In the light of history—with one major caveat—Malthus clearly has the better of the argument here.
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The major caveat is an error in Malthus’s economics. He does not think trade and manufactures adds to a country’s wealth and particularly not to the betterment of the labourers. The argument being that such work is unhealthy and the production of basic sustenance (particularly food) is what is crucial, so trade and manufactures divert resources from such greater than any benefit they provide.

Clearly, Malthus was wrong. A Malthusian economy as he conceived it is one where the basic economic ratio is the amount of land under cultivation compared to the total population. For most of human history, capital was a minor factor. But hardly always a negligible player: contemplation of the history of Venice, for example, might have led Malthus to reconsider his view on this matter. (He dismisses the Dutch case on the grounds that food is expensive in the Netherlands: which it was. But nor did they have famines.)

The reason why Malthus was wrong—the reason why he did not agree with Adam Smith on this matter but did agree with the Physiocrats, though he thought they were right for the wrong reasons—was because of his reasoning on population, which led him to take food to be a fundamental and pervasive constraint not systematically amenable to human action: the part of his essay that turned his name into an adjective. And also made him one of the founding thinkers of demographics.

To read Malthus’s Essay is to be in the intellectual presence of a genuinely original thinker. His discussion of the connection between high death rates, early marriages and high birth rates is deeply intelligent and perceptive. He is also, as the Summary with its discussion of population statistics makes clear, very much an empirical thinker.

He has had enormous intellectual influence: most profoundly by giving both Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace—quite independently—the mechanism that they applied to evolutionary theory to produce the theory of natural selection. In Charles Darwin’s own words from The Origin of Species:

… the Struggle for Existence amongst all organic beings throughout the world, which inevitably follows from their high geometrical powers of increase … This is the doctrine of Malthus, applied to the whole of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and, as a consequence, there is frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and will thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.

Or Alfred Wallace from My Life:

One day something brought to my recollection Malthus’ Principle of Population, which I had read about twelve years before. I thought of his clear exposition of the ‘positive checks’ to increase … which keep down the population … It then occurred to me that these causes or their equivalents are continually acting in the case of animals also; and, as animals usually breed much more rapidly than does mankind, the destructions every year from these causes must be enormous in order to keep down the numbers of each species, since they evidently do not increases regularly from year to year, as otherwise the world would long ago have become densely crowded with those that breed most quickly … Why do some die and some live? And the answer was clearly, that one the whole, the best fitted live … Then it flashed upon me that this self-acting process would necessarily improve the race, because in every generation the inferior would inevitably be killed off and the superior would remain – that is, the fittest would survive … The more I thought it over the more I became convinced that I had at length found the long-sought-for law of nature that solved the problem of the origin of species.

One of the striking things about various passing comments in Malthus’s Essay, is how much evolutionary theory was “in the air” well before Darwin and Wallace published their original papers: papers whose originality was not the theory of evolution but in identifying a mechanism by which evolution happened.

His theory
Malthus’s reasoning on population was straightforward. Flew provides a nice explication of Malthus’s conceptual framework using Malthus's own words.

Premise (1) :In taking a view of animated nature, we cannot fail to be struck with a prodigious power of increase in plants and animals Indeed …all animals, according to the known laws by which they are produced, must have a capacity of increasing in geometric progression.

Premise (2): … the means of subsistence, under circumstances most favourable to human industry, could not possibly be made to increase faster than in an arithmetic ratio.

From (1) and (2) comes:

Conclusion (3): By that law of nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal power must be kept equal. This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall somewhere; and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind.

This conclusion was somewhat adjusted by Malthus over time. So, in the Summary it becomes:

Conclusion (3.1) it follows necessarily that the average rate of the actual increase of population over the greatest part of the globe, obeying the same laws as the increase of food, must be totally of a different character from the rate at which it would increase if unchecked. The great question, then, which remains to be considered, is the manner in which this constant and necessary check upon population practically operates. (Emphasis in original.)

In his Second Essay, Malthus discusses by what means population is kept within the bounds of subsistence. Despite what later invokers were to claim, Malthus was not advancing an overpopulation thesis. On the contrary, if there is constant and necessary check upon population, it follows that population will never exceed the means of subsistence for any length of time.

In the original Essay, Malthus does not discuss the question of the actually operating means that kept population down. He instead moves on to consider what types of checks exist. These are two: preventive (keep births down) and positive, by which he means ‘active’, (death). This is the exhaustive scheme of Malthus-as-social scientist. But there is also Malthus-as-policy wonk. In the latter form, he has a three-part scheme—virtue, vice and misery. Virtue is sexual restraint (specifically, delaying or avoiding marriage: Malthus takes marriage as being not properly a venue for sexual restraint). Vice is such things as contraception, abortion and homosexuality. Misery is war, pestilence, starvation and other forms of death.

Malthus clearly gives a major role for human volition in his final theory: both good volition (virtue) and bad volition (vice). And, in his discussions about concern for subsistence, he hovers somewhat near coming up with a version of niche theory. But his presumption that married folk will just produce babies roughly (inversely) proportional to the age at which they get married gets in the way. Newtonian mechanics is perhaps somewhat too much in his mind as a model.

To Malthus, in a country suffering land constraint (such as China), lots of babies imply high mortality. An alternative possibility is that high mortality implies lots of babies.

About that volition
Let us suppose that parents don’t generally have babies willy-nilly. Let us suppose they have some idea of how many children they can support. If there is a high infant mortality rate, then you need more babies to reach the designated number of children, since you must expect to lose some children on the way through.

If infant mortality rate drops dramatically, then—after a suitable pause for it to become clear infant mortality rates have dropped—one would expect the fertility rate to drop. This is known as the demographic transition and it is precisely what we do observe.

It is not, however, a Malthusian process where mortality is based on food limitations but one where fertility is a response to conditions.

And if parents have a sense of the costs of a child—if you like, a sense of the “niche” size for a child—and the costs increase—i.e., the “niche size” expands—then one would also expect the fertility rate to drop. Which we also observe: most famously the poor breeding more than the rich. Given the children of the poor have a lower survival rate and cost less than the children of the rich, hardly surprising.

Unless one was a Malthusian, in which case the rich would have more resources and so therefore have more babies (a point William Godwin made against Malthus at the time). Clearly this is also not a Malthusian process.

What both the over-time and across-society forms of the demographic transition are, in fact, is an intensification of the offspring strategy of which homo sapiens are the most extreme form—invest less in number of offspring and more in their care: originally, because our cognitive development takes so long. Now, we add on education time. But that is just further cognitive development: a cultural add-on to the biological process that enables culture.

Flaws
Obviously, Malthus greatly underestimated the capacity of technology to increase food production. His economic theory and his population theory erroneously reinforced each other.

But, as the point about parents making decisions about having babies (or, at least, raising children) indicates, there were more basic problems with Malthus’s theory.

To start with, given food is also made of populations, the notion that populations that are food increase arithmetically while populations that are not food increase geometrically is not coherent, as William Hazlitt pointed out at the time. (This is a difficulty Darwin easily avoided by including sunshine, soil, weather, etc as constraints.)

There are two further, related, problems. The first is a point made by Paul Colinvaux in The Fates of Nations. Human children have always required considerable investment by their parents to raise. If our ancestors could not make reasonably good judgments about how many children to raise, we would have died out. Of course, this is a point from the theory of natural selection that was not available to Malthus or his contemporary critics but has since become available as a result of the use of Malthus’s theory.

There is a certain intellectual irony, not to say paradox, in this.

To say parents make deliberate choices about having children is not to argue against providing contraception. First, more precise control of fertility choices is surely good: especially for poor folk. Particularly as there are some grim ways of not raising too many children at once (abandonment and infanticide). Second, the big thing about the pill is not that it is a contraceptive device, but that it is a female-controlled contraceptive device. The notion that poor folk “just have babies” is condescending nonsense. (I prefer the flattering unifying rationality of economics to the condescending multiplying delusions of other social schemas.)

The second problem was identified at the time by the economist Nassau Senior and the philosopher Archbishop Whately. Whately pointed out that there were two different senses of tendency. There is a difference between tendency in the sense of:

the existence of a cause which, if operating unimpeded, would produce the result

and:

the existence of such a state of things that the result may be expected to take place (emphasis in original).

Parents clearly can produce far too many offspring for resources to support but may well not do so because they judge that resources available are not sufficient to sustain the required investment. In such circumstances, the tendency in the first sense fails to become one in the second.

Now, parents can make judgments that turn out to be wrong. Circumstances may change, perhaps drastically. But, clearly, Malthus’s theory seriously missed the mark, and the failure to distinguish between two different senses of tendency was central to so missing.

That there turned out to be fundamental problems with Malthus’s theory does not detract from it being a major intellectual achievement. We owe both the theory of natural selection and modern demographics to it. He was very much on to something, just not quite what he thought he was on to.

Islamic Imperialism

When folk use the term imperialism nowadays, it is almost taken as read that one means Western imperialism. Yet, if we take Western civilisation to have arisen from the collapse of Classical civilisation, then, from the C7th to the C15th, Western civilisation was more likely to be the victim of imperialism than the perpetrator of it.

Apart from the Reconquista (which was, after all, a re-conquest), the Norman conquest of Sicily (ditto) and the (ultimately failed) Crusader states, for a thousand years—from the C7th to the C17th—Christendom was subject to waves of attacks and conquest by Islamic imperialism (as was every other culture Islam came in contact with): first Arab, then “Moorish” (i.e. Berbers & Arabs) and Turkish imperialism. Much of what we now think of as classically Islamic countries (North Africa, Near East, Turkey, Albania) had been Christian countries for centuries prior to their conquest by Islam: Christianity is centuries older in Egypt and Syria than it is in, say, Sweden. Even the beginnings of Western global imperialism around 1500 were primarily motivated by a wish to “outflank” an Islam that was still aggressively expanding and was not definitively stopped until 180 years later.

Efraim Karsh’s Islamic Imperialism: A History tells the story of Islamic imperialism, bringing out just how drenched in blood the history of Islam has been from the start.

Muhammad himself was a conqueror, who raided, expelled and engaged in mass beheadings of opponents and built warrior ethics (including payment of booty as a religious duty) into his religion. Of his immediate successors, only one (Abu Bakr) died peacefully. Both the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphal dynasties established their rule with great violence and were constantly plagued by revolts.
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Karsh sets out the successive imperial dreams within Islam—those since the fall of the Ottoman Empire being treated in more detail. First came the unification of Arabia. Then the Umayyad imperium based on Arab supremacy: what amounted to a form of Arab apartheid. (Arab pride of race had led to deep—and enduring—anti-black sentiment, which showed up particularly in reactions to the Zanj revolt in C9th.)

Then came the Abbasid version, with a broader view of Muslim identity. It fractured into regional rulerships and suffered subordination to the Seljuq Turks until being swept away in the Mongol invasions of the C13th, invasions that were far more traumatic for Islam than the relatively minor incursions of the Christian Crusades. (Which also had much bigger impact on Christendom—through the techniques brought back—than on Islam.)

With few exceptions (notably the Ottomans), Muslim rule failed to create long-term stability. The pattern was of dynastic rule that might well achieve a golden age of prosperity but would then decay before suddenly disintegrating in an economic and political crisis. (A major reason for the Reconquista was that the Christians were able to create much more resilient polities.)

The Ottoman disaster of the Battle of Vienna was a clear sign that the adaptiveness of the West had overtaken the capacities of Islam. Ottoman rule suffered a slow retreat before the advancing Habsburg and Romanov empires. Eventually, even relatively minor nationalisms were able to throw off Ottoman rule.

By astutely playing the “Great Game”, the Ottomans were able to enlist the Western Powers (particularly Britain) as their saviours against the Russians and a rising Egyptian-based dynasty. The Qajar dynasty in Persia also played Britain and Russia off against each other. One of the virtues of Islamic Imperialism: A History is that Karsh has no truck with the silly fable of poor non-Westerners passively reacting to dominant Western causal agency. Indeed, Karsh has an excellent sense of how regional actors could "play" foreign Powers and the cross-purposes, trade-offs, ad hoc improvisations and shifting priorities which are the stuff of public policy in real life. Including imperial public policy.

Eventually, both the Ottoman and Qajar regimes fatally mis-stepped. The Ottoman empire’s ruling “Young Turk” troika made the completely unforced error of entering WWI on the side of the Central Powers, expecting Germany to win. Which meant that the Ottoman Empire was on the losing side, and so was, after much hard fighting, destroyed by the victorious Entente Powers. The Qajar dynasty also mishandled the “Great Game” (the bribery benefits of playing the British and Russians off against each other being much more attractive than developing Iran) and collapsed.

The Ottoman declaration of war on a British Empire that had protected them for over a century provided an opportunity for new imperial dreams, that of the Hashemite dynasty. Despite the fact that most Arabs within the Empire remained loyal to Ottoman rule to the end, the Hashemites, their ally T. E. Lawrence and enterprising journalism managed to forge a myth of the Arab Revolt as a national liberation movement. But, as Karsh sets out, what has been passed off as “national liberation” movements have been little more than a succession of imperial dreams. Pan-Arabism in particular has been a vehicle for such dreams.

That various Hashemite princes were determined to have their own realms led to the creation of two Hashemite kingdoms (Jordan and Iraq) and the loss of their base in Arabia to the al-Saud. In the 1950s, the high point of Arab monarchism receded as monarchies fell in Egypt, Iraq, Libya and Tunisia. (Typically leading to more repressive regimes.)

Nasser in Egypt seemed to epitomise the new wave of Arab politics. Karsh takes us through the ebbs and flows of Nasser’s manoeuvres and rhetoric, which tended to trip over each other. Indeed, Nasser admired Zionism—until it became convenient to excoriate it.

The imperial dreams of “secular” pan-Arabism fell apart in military, economic and political failure. Which led to the new imperial dreams of the Islamists and the jihadis (most notoriously, that of Osama bin Laden).

Karsh ends with

only when the political elites of the Middle East and Muslim world reconcile themselves to the reality of state nationalism,* forswear pan-Arab and pan-Islamic imperialist dreams, and make Islam a matter of private faith rather than a tool of political ambition will the inhabitants of these regions at last be able to look forward to a better future free of would-be Saladins (p.133).

But Islam-as-private-faith is not the Islam of the Prophet, the first Islamic imperialist.

For imperial dreams are at the heart of Islam and have been for its entire existence. An Islam without imperial dreams would be much easier to live with, but would be a rather different Islam than that which has dominated the Middle East, Northern Africa, Central Asia and beyond for the last 1300 years. As Karsh’s informative book makes clear.

* Which is also code for “accept the existence of Israel”.

Zen at war

Brian Daizen Victoria’s Zen at War is a study of how Zen Buddhism became deeply complicit in Japanese militarism.

Brian Victoria, a Soto Buddhist priest, directly challenges the “touchy-feelie” good image that Buddhism has in the West, especially Zen Buddhism in the US. Zen at War is particularly confronting in what it shows about D. T. Suzuki’s support for Japanese militarism, given his sage-like status in the West. But it is naive, even self-deluding wish-fulfillment, to expect that the history of Buddhism would somehow be immune to the pressures, failings and corruptions that other religions have experienced. Which is not to argue that “all religions are the same”: that is simply not true. Merely that they all exist within human societies and so are subject to the human condition.

Brian Victoria starts with the early Meiji government's withdrawal of support from, indeed active undermining of, Buddhism in favour of Shinto. This created a major crisis for Buddhism in Japan, which had particularly prospered under Tokugawa shogunate. The response of institutional Buddhism (the various sects with their temples and monasteries), much like that of Japanese Christians, was to demonstrate how patriotic and useful Buddhism was. Brian Victoria takes us through the reaction of Buddhism in Japan to this loss of status and how muted responses other than endorsing patriotism and the Emperor system were. There were a few attempts to adopt a social-reformist path, but these were repressed and institutional Buddhism overall rejected such a path.

Instead, the patriotic path led to incorporation of Buddhism into the structures of Japanese militarism. There was some Buddhist resistance to this, but it was limited and also squashed. Instead, Imperial-Way Buddhism (koko Bukkyo), Imperial-State Zen (kokoku Zen), Soldier Zen, and similar forms of overt support, became the dominant face of institutional Buddhism. Brian Victoria has passage after passage of quotes from Buddhist masters and organisations endorsing these. Including from Suzuki.
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Which means there is something else Heidegger, notoriously an apologist for Hitler, and Suzuki had in common:

An American philosopher, William Barrett, wrote that "a German friend of Heidegger told me that one day when he visited Heidegger he found him reading one of Suzuki's books [on Zen Buddhism]: 'If I understand this man correctly,' Heidegger remarked, 'this is what I have been trying to say in all my writings.'"

As far as I can see, Heidegger’s much vaunted philosoophy is just ersatz Buddhism (a view I am not alone in holding: his concept of Dasein in particular is very Zen). Buddhism entered German philosophy through Schopenhauer. Whose The World as Will and Representation Corporal Hitler read in the trenches. So the parallels become quite eerie.

Of course, it all went bad for Zen's endorsement of Japanse militarism, as Japan went down to crushing defeat as a result of choosing—having spent years not finally winning its war against China—to attack the only Great Power not at war, with approaching double its population (133m to 74m in 1941) and an economy about four times its size ($1,148m 1996$ to $214m 1990$ in 1941). But what boots capacity and competence when you have a focused, and thus superior, will? One tempered and perfected by Zen techniques.

Brian Victoria takes the reader through what happened after the war—the belated acceptance of culpability by some (but not all) Buddhist sects and the shifting of Soldier Zen into Corporate Zen.

His penultimate chapter asks the question Was It Buddhism?, examining the long history of Buddhist involvement with rulership. Including how being adopted as an official religion by Ashoka (whose reign, even after his adoption of Buddhism, had very much a dark side) and by the Sui dynasty was not good for Buddhism’s long-term health in either India or China. It was similar in Japan, though not as disastrous (so far) for Buddhism. The provision of state support for Buddhism in return for supporting the state had the common effect of such support—sucking the spiritual life out of the religion. Institutional ties create institutional interests. Protecting these interests impose moral costs.* Including twisting or ignoring inconvenient teachings of the religion’s founder.

In his Epilogue, Brian Victoria points out that all the above remain very much live issues in Buddhism (e.g. in Sri Lanka).

What comes out of Zen at War great clarity is that the reduction of Zen to a technique made it an empty vessel to be put at the service of whatever were the strongest social forces around it. D. T. Suzuki exemplifies this when he wrote:

Zen has no special doctrine or philosophy, no set of concepts or intellectual formulas, except that it tries to release one from the bondage of birth and death, by means of certain intuitive modes of understanding peculiar to itself. It is, therefore, extremely flexible in adapting itself to almost any philosophy and moral doctrine as long as its intuitive teaching is not interfered with (p.107).

Since fear of death is the central thing a soldier typically has to struggle with, a philosophy that focuses the understanding to free oneself from fear of death has obvious utility for a warrior, a point Suzuki made repeatedly.

Zen easily becomes a worship of the will. As does Heidegger’s philosophy. Which, in both cases, led to bad places.

One of the bothersome things in contemporary politics has been to see Victor Davis Hanson, Mark Steyn et al succumb somewhat to worship of the will, to a tendency to write as if it is all about Just Having The Courage To Stay The Distance: on the basis that the person with the Bigger Will Wins.

Without denying that determination matters, this is not a good way to look at things. It is the Anglosphere's enemies who have operated like that. Both Hitler and the Japanese militarists were all about how they were going to be victorious because their Wills were greater. (The Americans in particular were discounted because they were all weak and materialist and decayed by the good life and lack of racial/cultural fibre.) There is a fair bit of such Will-worship among the jihadis as well.

Such leaves out, or seriously undervalues, capacity and competence. You end up with Stalingrad—feeding more and more troops and effort into the wrong fight at the wrong place in the wrong way until your opponent pulls a Zhukov and crunches your weak points. The Allies did not win WWII because their will was greater.

None of the above entails that Zen does not incorporate genuine insights. Indeed, that is precisely the problem. Something with genuine value can become that much more destructive if put to maleficent use. Zen at War is an effective and thought-provoking case study. It is made more so because Brian Victoria understands, and conveys, that troubling ambivalence well.

UPDATE Great interview with the maker of a documentary on Heidegger and Nazism here.

* In Islam, the difference between the Meccan and Medinan suras of the Qur'an expresses this tension and process.

Race and Slavery in the Middle East

Bernard Lewis’s Race and Slavery in the Middle East (originally published in 1990), is a slim volume examining attitudes within Islam on race and slavery.

Lewis carefully distinguishes between Islam as the religion taught by Muhammad, Islam as the religious tradition that grew up from that and Islam as the civilisation based on the religion (p.20). As he is at pains to make clear, the religion taught by Muhammad provided no basis for morally distinguishing people by race. It did provide for slavery (as did Judaism and Christianity), indeed explicitly sanctioned it, but under more lenient conditions than had previously applied. (Or would later apply in the Americas.)

Islamic tradition was somewhat more equivocal, as pre-Islamic notions crept back in—particularly regarding Kafa’a or equality of birth and social status in marriage—and some jurists provided more convenient formulations for slave owners. As Islam spread to non-Arabs, and as Arabs intermarried with subject peoples, issues about Arab, non-Arab and part-Arab became a factor. Generally, however, Islamic tradition remained antipathetic to racial distinctions.
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Islam-as-a-civilisation was another matter. While, as Lewis points out, anti-black sentiment never reached the intensity it did in the US or South Africa, it was a persistent—at times pervasive—element in Muslim culture and attitudes. Despite romanticising claims, particularly made since the C19th, that Islam was free of such—almost invariably motivated by trying to create a stick to beat American attitudes with. (Something Lewis regards as understandable, if unfortunate in its lack of historical realism: his total lack of sympathy for American racism is very clear.)

The reason for the lack of equivalent intensity seems clear enough. At no time were slaves only black—though black slaves did come to be generally used in more menial roles. Nor did blacks become a significant proportion of the non-slave population. That a high proportion of enslaved black males were eunuchs—and many of the rest were used in ways that had high death rates and low birth rates—stopped the development of significant mulatto populations (p.84). That the status of fathers determined the status of children meant that the children of black concubines and wives were generally absorbed into the wider population.

But blacks were an easily distinguishable group (always handy for slaving) and, as Islam spread in Africa, increasingly problematic as sources of slaves. For Muslim law was quite clear—fellow Muslims could not be enslaved. An obvious way to get around the difficulties was to discount the humanity of backs or, if they claim to be Muslims, deny that they are proper Muslims. So a discourse developed denigrating blacks. There was also a counter-discourse, defending them. But, as Lewis points out (Pp32-3, 102), a literature of defence only makes sense if there were persistent denigrations to answer.

As the number of accepted black Muslims grew, the literature of denunciation became less extravagant, but the outlooks lingered. Blackness became associated with slavery and whiteness with freedom and nobility. Even princes who were the sons of grandsons of slave mothers could attract such prejudice (p.89). The Bedouin were particularly intense practitioners of such racial bigotry (p.91).

As, over time, the sources of white slaves dwindled there was increased slaving of Africans to meet demand. At the same time, black slaves took on roles previously reserved for white slaves (p.77).

The growth of abolitionist sentiment in the West filtered through to the Muslim world, particularly the Ottoman Empire. Ironically Arabia—where prejudice in cities against blacks had generally been notably less—was where abolitionist sentiment was most strongly resisted, on religious grounds.

As Lewis takes pains to explain, the pattern of Muslim attitudes on race and slavery were complex and changed over time. Nevertheless, it is not true to claim that Islam was free of racial prejudice. On the contrary, this soon developed—particularly against blacks. To considerable levels of intensity, and long persisted. Lewis handles the complexities clearly and well, managing to cover much ground in this useful slim volume.

The Popes against the Jews

David Kertzer’s The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism is a moving demolition of Catholic apologetics about the Church’s treatment of Jews.

One sometimes sees the claim that the Church “didn’t really” burn any heretics/witches/sodomites, as these were handed over to the civil powers to be executed. There are three things wrong with such apologetics. First, such actions were clearly motivated by Church doctrine. Second, the victims were caught, tried, sentenced and handed over in full knowledge of what would happen. Third, in many areas of medieval Europe—Rome, those parts of the Papal States it was able to assert civl rule over, German Prince-Bishoprics, Palatine-Bishoprics (such as Durham)—the Church was the civil authority.

In the case of the Papal States, the Church remained the civil authority through much of the C19th. So Kertzer starts his history (Part One Keeping Jews in Their Place) looking at the Church’s treatment of the Jews in the Papal States: particularly after the restoration of Papal rule in 1814.

Napoleonic rule, in line with French Enlightenment principles, had freed the Jews from all inequalities in civil law. As soon as Papal rule was re-established, these were re-imposed. Pope after Pope laboured to ensure the Jews were put back in their ghettoes. Forced baptisms of Jewish children continued to be an issue.

Indeed, the Papacy was so reactionary, that Metternich comes across as a liberal, urging reform. The Habsburg monarchy was a private and public supporter of better treatment of Jews, particularly due to the Rothschild influence on Metternich.

The disappearance of a Catholic priest in Damascus in 1840 was blamed on Jews, the Ottoman authorities managing to extract—via torture—the requisite confessions which led to Catholic trumpeting of ritual murder charges. The Austrian authorities acted with rather more humanity.
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Papal government was not popular in the Papal states and was only able to maintain itself via foreign (French and Austrian) troops. The unification of Italy restricted Papal rule to Rome and, after French troops withdrew in 1870, to the Vatican palace. The Italian state—unified against the efforts of the Papacy—was happy to grant Jews civil equality. The Jews were out of their ghettoes, the Pope was captive in his (p.130).

Part Two, The Church and the Rise of Modern Anti-Semitism, looks at the various ways Popes and senior Catholic hierarchs fanned anti-Jewish feeling: through the burgeoning Catholic Press (Kertzer concentrates particularly on the journals and newspapers which operated with prior Vatican vetting), through dissemination of the blood libel, through support for anti-Jewish political activism in France and Austria. (In both countries anti-Semitism developed a stronger popular base than in majority-Protestant Germany.) So the conference of the Christian Democrat movement in France in 1896 had four parts—one on anti-Semitism, one on the struggle against Freemasonry, one on building a social Catholic movement and one on Catholicism and republicanism (pp 180-1). Kertzer successfully demolishes attempts to dissociate the Church from various anti-Semitic activists, showing that it was not their anti-Semitism that was problematic for the Church.

The central claim of Catholic apologetics is that the Catholic Church has never endorsed race thinking. That is, it was anti-Judaic rather than anti-Semitic in any racial sense.

Kertzer points out that the Church could not endorse full biological anti-Semitism, as Jesus and all the Apostles were Jews (p.205). He then lists a dozen key themes of anti-Semitism and proceeds to show that every one was endorsed and promulgated by the Catholic Church, including various Popes.

Which leaves the thirteenth, the claim that Jews were biological inferiors. Which, as he is easily able to show, also had a long history in the Church. In the late C15th, Catholic Castile-Aragon, along with expulsions and forced baptisms, promulgated the estatuos de limpieza de sangre, statutes of blood purity. Which came to be applied to offices within the Church. In 1547, the archbishop of Toledo banned those of Jewish blood from receiving Church assistance. Various monastic and religious orders excluded from membership people of Jewish blood. The Jesuits banned people of Jewish blood back for five generations from being members from 1592, a rule which applied until 1946 (p.207). It was removed in 1946 because, post-Holocaust, the embarrassment of the Nazis and the later Fascists using the example of the Jesuits to justify their own exclusions was just too great.

Perhaps the height of Catholic hypocrisy on the issue was when an Czech archbishop who was born Jewish was asked to resign in 1892 since his Jewish name was causing too much public antipathy (p.208). The call in a Vatican newspaper in 1898 for a healthy anti-Semitism that is non-violent (p.212) sums up the Church’s position.

There were some awkwardnesses. English Catholics, aware of what being a religious minority was like and having good relations with English Jews, made—from the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminister, Lord Russell (the Catholic Chief Justice) and the Duke of Norfolk (the most senior Catholic peer) on down—something of pests of themselves over some of the more outrageous cases. Kertzer’s cites some fairly damming internal Vatican documents to show how much the Vatican was irritated by this English concern and how it read them in standard anti-Semitic terms as showing the nefarious influence and power of the Jews.

While Pope Pius X did issue a statement noting previous Papal statements not supporting claims of ritual murder, the 1911-1913 Ukrainian blood libel case was trumpeted by Catholic organs as proof of ritual murder.

Kertzer concludes in Part Three (On the Eve of the Holocaust) by first looking at the role of the future Pope Pius XI in Poland after WWI. His reports back to the Vatican included statements such as

one of the most evil and strongest influences that is felt here, perhaps the strongest and most evil, is that of the Jews (p.251).

After he became Pope, he told Mussolini that, while most Italian Jews were basically good, the hordes of Jews who livd in Central and Eastern Europe were a threat to healthy Christian society, a lesson he had learned in Poland (p.263).

The final chapter, Antechamber to the Holocaust, examines revealing facts in the Church’s role in the lead up to the Holocaust. Kertzer notes that Pius XI’s response to the anti-Jewish racial laws promulgated by Fascist Italy in 1938 was limited to strong and persistent protests over treating Jews who had converted and married Catholics as Jews. The rest of the anti-Jewish provisions were passed over in silence (p.287): a classic example of the Church’s commitment to freedom being limited to the freedom to be Catholic.

When Mussolini fell, the Vatican applied to new Italian Government to have those provisions abolished. The Vatican rejected pleas to support full civil equality for Jews (p.289). This was 1943.

The Germans marched in and took over Northern Italy. About a thousand Jews from the old Roman ghetto were rounded up. The Vatican Secretary of State made remonstrations to the German Ambassador to have them spared. The German Ambassador made it clear that Hitler supported the seizures. The Vatican Secretary of State made it clear that no public protest from the Vatican would occur. In Kertzer’s words, which end his book.

Two days later, over a thousand of the Jews rounded up in Rome by the Germans were placed on a train bound for Auschwitz. Only a handful would leave there alive (p.291).

Kertzer’s book establishes that no institution was more responsible for the development of modern anti-Semitism in Western and Central Europe than the Catholic Church. Yes, the Tsarist regime and the Orthodox Church were enthusiastically anti-Semitic. Yes, the Lutheran Church—particularly in Germany—had it own shameful record, flowing directly from Luther’s Jew-hatred.

But no other institution matched the Catholic Church for organisational reach, for persistence and for pervasive support, from Popes on down: every single key theme of anti-Semitism—included notions of tainted blood—were actively supported by the Church. It is hard to claim that it was some weird accident that the Nazi Party was led by an Austrian Catholic, that all the major organisers (Himmler, Eichman, Heydrich) were born and raised Catholic (embarrassingly, none were ever excommunicated), that the Nazi Party had its original stronghold in Catholic Bavaria, toned down its anti-Semitism to broaden its appeal to (particularly Protestant) voters and that Catholic Austrians were disproportionately organisers and implementers of the Final Solution.

And the notion that the world is purified by the extermination of the evil and tainted? That is an impeccably Catholic idea too.

Kertzer's book makes it clear that the Catholic Church has much to answer for over its avid promotion of degradation of Jews.