Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class

I thoroughly enjoyed Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class by Judith Brett. Easily the best academic study of non-Labor politics I have read, often genuinely enlightening. (The best non-academic book is Peter Blazey’s biography of Sir Henry Bolte.) There are still traces of the failings of contemporary academic culture, but they are mostly only traces; there is none of the opinion-bigotry-fuelled intellectual incompetence you get in a Michael Pusey or a Stuart Macintyre on these subjects. She has genuinely engaged with her material and has come up with a very thoughtful analysis.

One of the many things I like about the book is that it views religion seriously as belief-systems. She is particularly perceptive on the depth of the views of individuality and society contained in Protestant culture. She clearly regards (I believe correctly) religion as historically a bigger dividing and organising factor in Australian politics than class. This shows up again and again – for example, the overwhelming majority of those who followed William Morris Hughes out of the ALP over conscription were Protestant. She is particularly good at undermining the myth that Catholics were disproportionately poor or working class.
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Brett seems also correct to pick the 1920s as when the Liberal tradition in Australian politics became most narrowly conservative – a result of the effects of WWI and the Bolshevik Revolution on liberal optimism and (a particularly perceptive point) the need to integrate the death of so many young men into a harmonious view of the world. I like her alertness to how rhetorical excess and overstatement works both ways, to how pacification of public space is needed for women to securely play a major role in politics, to the real appeal of a sense of honour in the politics of national debt (which so dominated the 1930s). She conveys very powerfully why Joe Lyons seemed a heroic figure to so many. (It is a sign of the narrowness of Australian academic culture that, 65 years after his death, there is still no serious biography of our 6th-longest serving PM.)

Brett is excellent in analysing Howard’s strengths and limitations (which are mainly the downsides of his strengths and presented as such). She, alas, uses that annoying term ‘neo-liberalism’ but at least makes its usage more plausible and historically situated than is usually the case and soon reverts back to the more sensible term ‘economic liberalism’. (The phrase ‘revival of neo-liberal economics’ [p.162] is a revealing linguistic slip of how unhelpful neo is in this context.) She is particularly perceptive on the dissonance between the language of policy wonks and people’s commonsense view of such matters; a dissonance that had existed somewhat under Keynesianism but became intense with the form of economic liberalism pushed in the 1980s.

Brett’s book does suffer from a lack of critical sense about politics on the left, except in its critiques of non-Labor politics – she notices the separation between actuality and intelligentsia constructions, but doesn’t think through its implications.

One of Brett’s lapses is talking of:

Fraser’s record on ethnic affairs and multiculturalism, on indigenous issues, on women and on the environment is good, particularly when compared with the government of John Howard(p.157)

thereby moving into, as she generally doesn’t, the language of dissent-as-wicked. But she is otherwise mercifully free of the superior-sneering-passing-as-analysis of a Pusey or a Macintyre.

Another lapse is

But the problem is that a right-wing Philip Adams, someone with his capacity to talk intelligently on such a breadth of topics, is not easily imaginable in contemporary Australia (p.207)

a ‘lack of competence’ argument Brett would no doubt treat with complete derision if advanced as a reason not to employ blacks, gays or women. It is a sign of how entrenched and unthought opinion bigotry is in the contemporary Australian intelligentsia that the lack of conservative and other non-left dissident presenters on the ‘national (sic) broadcaster’ is not treated as the scandal it is and that as sensible and usually fair-minded a commentator as Brett could evade the point with such a tawdry trope.

Brett has a good sense of the moral extras to non-left politics; to the politics of liberal individualism, citizenship and nation-building as being more than just self-interest. She has weaker sense of the self-interests within left politics. For example, that the working class is not, even in theory, a power class and that socialist politics is politics on behalf of, not of. (Indeed, by crowding out working-class action such as friendly societies, the paternalist state can actually undermine worker-organisation.) Brett early on refers to this statement by George Reid as a class one, in the workers-versus-middle sense:

The question that separates us is whether development of Australia along lines of private enterprise is the right method of development, or whether industrial development of Australia along lines of state control is proper.

But the workers remain employees in both structures: it is just in the latter their employer also controls the entire state apparatus and the regulator is also the producer, with all the dangers to worker freedom of the first and to quality, prosperity and fairness of the second. The real choice is not between middle class and working class, but the private-sector middle class – the class that makes its money by selling you things, seeking daily consent for its income – and the public-sector middle class – the class that gains its role by or through organised compulsion and whose contemporary power and status is greatest when it can police opinion. (What Mark Latham called the conservative and progressive establishments and I, in a 1994 article, contrasted as private sector bourgeoisie and public sector nomenklatura.) Moreover, visions of social perfection are far more dangerous than mere greed: even if the grand disasters of actually existing socialism were not enough of a warning, the petit examples of the opinion-intolerance and consequent quality-failings displayed in the areas where the public sector middle class wields power – such as contemporary academe and the national (sic) broadcaster – are cautionary.

Brett also continues the talking up of Alfred Deakin and the talking down of George Reid which is normal in Australian academic discourse, despite many of the continuing themes in Liberal politics she picks up being rather more Reidian than Deakinite.

On the other hand, Brett has a good sense of the risk with modern ‘cosmopolitans’ (adopting sociologist Katherine Betts’ helpful formulation) of elevated identification with the ‘global’ resulting in a lack of commitment to the local, the places where people actually live.

The biggest single failing in the book is the complete absence of any sense of the social and policy context of the welfare state. Brett is very aware of how the declining importance of commodities in world trade put the economic elements of Australia’s Deakinite policy structure (trade protection, wage arbitration, state paternalism) under pressure. She has no sense of the pressure an increasing welfare state put on the same. A situation where the proportion of working-age adults dependant on income support has risen from 3% in 1967 to 18% now is a huge shift in social experience and fiscal demands which she nowhere refers to or considers, even though it puts much of what she discusses in a more revealing context – both in the undermining of the professional-service model of the state (not least in undermining the distinctiveness of state action) and in the shift in economic policies as the growing welfare state increased the premium on economic efficiency until governments were forced to respond (hence much of the shift to economic liberalism around the Western world). This is, though, a common contemporary academic failing (and at least she is not as bad as a Pusey, who has little, if any, sense of greater policy context; or a Macintyre, who, though he grasps the wider economic context, blathers on in his Concise History of Australia about a shrinking welfare state). Presumably it is a failing the rise of Latham made harder to sustain – after all, if a Labor leader talks about the problems of rising welfare dependency, it must really be happening.

But, despite these caveats, Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class is an excellent and revealing study which I heartily recommend.

Born that way

Picked up in Smith's Alternative Bookshop Born Gay: The Psychobiology of Sex Orientation which is a highly readable summary of current scientific research on the origins of sexual orientation.

The book takes the lay reader gently through the results of a lot of scientific studies. I particularly enjoyed the debunking of Freudian analysis (pp30ff). The authors also point out that a major limitation on inference from animal behaviour is that sexual monogamy is an unusual mating strategy among species (pp62-3).

Identifying sexual orientation is a complex matter, given there are self-labelling, behaviour, feelings and physiological responses available as identifiers. The evidence based on feelings suggests that about 2-3.5% of men and 0.5-1.5% of women are gay (p.22) while physiological response evidence does not support the existence of male bisexuality (pp 21-22).

Basically, the research shows that (pp 145-6):

sexual orientation is stable (showing much the same level of incidence across cultures) and bimodal (if male bisexuality exists, it is rare);
there is no scientific backing for sexual orientation being influenced by social factors such as upbringing, contagion or seduction;
there is evidence for genetic influence, but it accounts for less than half of sexual variance and seems to be spread across several genes;
the most likely reason for the survival of said genes is selection decisions by the other sex;
prenatal sex hormones are implicated in the origins of sexual orientation;
this is further supported by the clear existence of a fraternal birth order affect (each older brother raises a son's chance of being gay by about a third accounting for about one-in-seven gay men);
the brains of gay men and women seem to be cross-sex shifted in certain respects (i.e. more like those of women and men respectively);
sexual orientation can be predicted early in life from play patterns and toy preference;
the existence of sub-types of homosexuals differentiated by hormones is doubtful.

An amusing result is that gay men seem to tend to have larger penises than straight men—being about 5% longer on average (pp84-85). Gay men are about about a third more likely to be not right-handed, gay women about 90% more likely to be not right-handed, than straights (p.124).

Homosexuality is an uncommon (about one-in-30 men and one-in-70 women) but persistent human variation. It is neither unnatural nor contagious. The real issue is not the existence of human variance, but whether folk can cope with difference—persecution of homosexuals is just a large majority monstrously bullying a small and vulnerable minority. But coping with difference is a problem that extends way beyond sexual variation.

Before European Hegemony

Janet Abu-Lughod’s Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 provides a welcome, highly scholarly, adjustment to views that overstate Europe’s precocity and importance before 1500. However specific its institutional evolution, Europe was a peripheral backwater prior to its export of the Eurasian disease pool to the Americas. She examines each major area of the Eurasian trading network in term, bringing out how much events in one area were affected by changes elsewhere (in particular, how much Europeans were responding to such changes).

I also found Abu-Lughod’s scepticism about grand conceptual schemas and strong preference for considering the complex texture of reality engaging. She sets out a highly informative history of the creation of an interacting Eurasian economy under the period of Mongol domination and how changes among the various participating powers (particularly China) resulted in the interactions falling back to a lower level. She also argues a power vacuum was set up in the Indian Ocean that the Europeans (first the Portugese, then the Dutch and finally the British) were able to fill. In other words, that there was a "Fall of the East" prior to there being a "Rise of the West". She does a nice job of debunking “cultural” and “Confucian-isolationism” explanations for China’s shift, placing the public policy considerations the Ming court was dealing with in a more plausible context.

My first quibble is with the title. This is about the Eurasian system, not a global one, a point the author herself concedes (p.37). It is a “world” system only in terms of the Old World/New World usage and, to be fair, she is responding to Wallerstein’s coinage of the term. The second is she suffers from the modern academic fetish for shudder quotes, though at least she is often prepared to explain in more detail why concepts are problematic, rather than simply engaging in the tedious knowing-virtue wink. The worst bit of the book, as so often is the way, is when she attempts to look forward. The talking down of the stability of the current world-system, and the situation of the US in particular, reads rather poorly for a book published in 1989 with clearly no sense whatsoever of the impending collapse of the Soviet empire.

But the book is highly readable and extremely informative, the personality of the author engaging. An excellent way of coming to grips with how global history works.

Alas, Abu-Lughod does include some fashionably ambiguous nonsense in her introduction about science being “socially constructed” (if she means that science occurs within a social context, obviously true: if she means that whether E=mc2 is true depends on the social context, that is nonsense). This fortunately does not seem to be other than fashionable hand-waving. (Anyone who claims to believe the second claim is other than nonsense is invited to allow me to belt them in the jaw to see whether it is “socially constructed” how many times I have to hit them to break their jaw. Nobody really believes this nonsense, because no-one walks out in front of trucks to see if it is “socially constructed” whether the truck will (a) hit them and (b) kill them.) But this fashionable hand-waving does not detract significantly from the value of the book.

In praise of Osprey books

As someone interested in military history from an early age (in fact military history is how I originally became interested in history) and an avid wargamer for many years, Osprey publishing has been part of my reading patterns for a long time. They provide easily digestible specific discussions with an emphasis on how things worked plus helpful illustrations and photos.

While at a medieval recreation Festival a few years ago, ordered from Mainly Medieval booksellers copies of their books on Bronze Age War Chariots, Viking Longship, Mounted Archers of the Steppe, Carolingian Cavalryman, Rome at War, Byzantium at War, all relevant to what I teach in putting on Ancient and Medieval days.

I was reading Rome at War AD293-696 and noting it was very scholarly, so I checked who the author was. Michael Whitby, Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Warwick University. That would account for it then.

I particularly liked the chronological period chosen. It seems to me that going from the period when Rome is a unified empire incorporating the Mediterranean basin and beyond to the point when first Germanic and then (after Justinian's resurgence) Arab conquests have reduced it to a rump of the Balkans and Asia Minor is exactly the right way to go. Not to deal with the collapse of the Western Empire as if the survival of the Eastern Empire is not revealing, nor treat the Eastern Empire's loss of half its territory and three-quarters of its revenue to the Arab Caliphate as some later unfortunateness, but to deal with the entire process in a unified way.

The series, being British, obviously has a bit of a British Isles focus, but only a mild one. And it does provide very accessible information. I like the use of AD, rather than the let's pretend we're not using a Christian calendar even though we are Common Era wank.

John Haldon's volume on the medieval Eastern Roman empire explains the problem with the 'Byzantium' usage straight up and refers to it in the text for what it was—the medieval Eastern Roman empire—and is a splendid treatment. The longship volume does make it pretty clear that the most likely explanation for the sudden explosion of Norse going a-viking was improvement in shipbuilding technology (particularly sails). The steppe nomad volume notes the common patterns and problems of nomadic pastoralism and that it was a much later developing social form than agrarianism. Not convinced by the chariot volume that chariots were a product of agrarian civilisation—it would be the only significant feature of horse technology that was such a development (and certainly not the view from the Wikipedia article). The Carolingian cavalry volume is somewhat shapeless, but the available information is very limited to begin with.

For readability and information accessibility, the Osprey books are very useful (and clearly, and deservedly, a flourishing enterprise).

What is it to be human?

(I posted this comment over at Reclusive Leftiist, I have slightly cleaned it up here).

Abortion is an intractable issue because it is one of those "what does it mean to be human?" debates.

The war against human sexual diversity is all about "what does it mean to be human?" Catholic (and Orthodox) natural law theory defines people as heterosexual-by-nature so same-sex orientation is a "false form" of the human ("objectively disordered" is the current jargon term). So nothing they want in terms of their orientation counts or has any standing. The evangelicals buy into that through cherry-picking Leviticus and St Paul's use of natural law theory (almost certainly from Philo of Alexandria).

Of course, once you get into the game of "false forms" of the human, extermination is the natural endpoint.

The same groups notoriously define a fetus as human. So a fetus counts as a full human for moral purposes, but a same-sex oriented person does not.

The other link is all about sex. Since the One God is solitary, the One God is not sexual, so sex separates us from the divine EXCEPT in its creative aspect, so the only thing that justifies sex is its ability to create life and bind life-creators.

It is all very coherent, if you do not let things like the issue of forcing women to give birth and systematic cruelty towards your fellow humans bother you.

There is also a lot of effortless virtue involved. Heterosexuals deciding that same-sex activity is evil are not giving anything up. It gives a sense of virtue requiring no effort (apart from completely refusing to give the other person any credence).

Men deciding abortion is wrong are also not giving anything up. The situation with women is obviously, indeed notoriously, more complicated. Such as how motherhood fits into the sense of being a woman. But the thinkers who worked the details of the system out were all men. Typically, celibate, unmarried men.

Real Worlds without quite enough reality

The Real Worlds of Welfare Capitalism by Goodin and others is a serious scholarly attempt to compare the three basic types of Western welfare policy regimes—liberal, social democratic and corporatist. The study centres on data from three compatible longitudinal studies from each of the three types of policy regimes. The US for the liberal regime, the Netherlands for the social democratic and Germany for the corporatist.

The results from the longitudinal data and other indicators is used to compare the regimes in terms of efficiency, poverty, equality, integration, stability and autonomy. The authors' conclusion is that, although all three policy regimes achieve broadly similar outcomes with different strengths and weaknesses, the social democratic regime produces superior outcomes across all sets of criteria.

It is a very solid and impressive piece of work. I was not always convinced by some of the detail, but overall it is clearly an important contribution to the policy debate.
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Other data broadly supports their conclusions. Looking at the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI) data for the top 21 countries, the six social democratic countries (Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Netherlands, Finland and Denmark) score an average of 0.949 on the index, the six liberal countries (Australia, Canada, Ireland, US, UK and New Zealand—the Anglosphere) score an average of 0.944 and the nine corporatist countries (Luxembourg, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, France, Austria, Italy, Germany and Spain) score an average of 0.939. Not differences much worth worrying about.

As number three country on the HDI ranking (out of 177), Australia is hardly under strong pressure to change its policy regime.

Comparing welfare expenditure for the above 21 countries, the social democratic countries average 25% of GDP on welfare, the corporatist countries 24% and the liberal countries 18%. Or, in US$ terms, $7,200, $6,400 and $4,600 per head respectively.

Looking at the rankings under the Human Poverty Index gives a much stronger differentiation than the HDI results. (Though Iceland, Switzerland, Austria and New Zealand are not included.) As lower is better, the social democratic countries do noticeably better (7.9 average) than the corporatist countries (11.1) who do noticeably better than the liberal countries (14.2). Looking at the components of the index, the liberal regimes do badly on inequality, the corporatist on long-term unemployment, the liberals and the corporatists on functional literacy and they all do essentially the same on rate of surviving to age 60.

Which looks like strong support for everyone choosing to go social democratic, as the authors of Real World clearly think. The question arises, however, why different countries chose different policy regimes.

One possibility is that the Nordics are just more moral than the Anglos, so they went social democratic while the Anglos went liberal. Another possibility is that the choices made sense in terms of features of the different countries.

One clear sorting factor is religion. All countries more than 70% Catholic have corporatist regimes, except Ireland (presumably an origin and contagion effect from the UK and then the rest of the Anglosphere). All countries more than 70% Protestant have social democratic regimes. All other countries with Protestant majorities or Protestant pluralities are liberal. One Catholic plurality country is social democratic (Netherlands, but Protestantism has collapsed in the Netherlands which used to be a strongly Protestant country), two (Germany and Switzerland) are corporatist (but West Germany was Catholic-majority before unification) and one (Canada) is liberal (again, presumably an origin and contagion effect from the UK, US and rest of the Anglosphere).

Another sorting factor is cultural diversity. All polycultural countries have liberal regimes, except Belgium (more than 70% Catholic, corporatist and slowly coming apart) and Switzerland (Catholic plurality, corporatist with strong federal system and lots of referenda to manage diversity). No country with an overwhelmingly dominant culture (for practical purposes, monocultural) has a liberal regime, except Ireland (again, presumably an origin and contagion effect from the UK and then the rest of the Anglosphere, though it is possible that the deep and enduring divisions of the Irish Civil War may have been a factor).

The Catholic concern for social stability makes the link between Catholicism and corporatist regimes, with their emphasis on family and social stability, unsurprising.

That Protestant monocultural societies would go social democratic makes perfect sense. Equality is a strong element of Protestantism and the common culture makes a strong state both less threatening and less problems in performing well. Monocultural societies—particularly relative geographically compact ones—are much more likely to have the unimpeded information flows, commonality of problems, preferences and concepts plus the long-term trust to make the system work without disabling waste and inefficiency

That polycultural societies would go liberal also makes sense. An emphasis on personal freedom and more reserved reliance on state action is a sensible way to manage larger degrees of social differences. The area of persistently greatest policy failure in Australia has been the attempt to apply a specific social democratic regime across the largest barriers of cultural difference and diversity—indigenous policy. It is surely no accident that, historically, the major centres of liberal economics have been the Danubian Monarchy, almost the reductio of polycultural societies, with the Austrian school of economics, the C18th and C19th UK-with-Empire and the US (which have both always been polycultural).

That Australia is becoming more culturally diverse, not less, is even less reason to change policy regime. Indeed, I am deeply sceptical that countries such as Norway and Sweden will be able to keep their policy regimes functioning so well if they continue to import large numbers of quite culturally different migrants. The problem not being that they are migrant, but that the social democratic policy regime simply will not work as well in a situation of increased cultural diversity, and therefore decreased information flows, increased differences in preferences and social concepts and decreased social trust.

It is conspicuous that Goodin et al do not deal with the issue of cultural diversity at all. They implicitly treat cultural diversity as if it was the equivalent of hair colour. I suspect what Goodin et al actually show is that public policy is easier in monocultural societies. Quite.

The Soul Beneath the Skin

The first thing one notices about David Nimmon’s The Soul Beneath the Skin: The Unseen Hearts and Habits of Gay Men is that it is written by a very funny and witty man.

Readers with an interest in Queer Theory might want to glance at the theoretic note on page 221 and the use of the word “gay” in these pages. For less academic types, who hear the term gay subject position and think “doggie style”—go pour yourself a drink and we can get started (p.4)

This is a book about the social experiment over the last 50 years—the development of gay (male) communities in the US (though there are references to experiences elsewhere). Nimmon is concerned to show (1) how much is positive in that and (2) what a radical departure in human societies they represent.

Nimmon—who is the central figure in the Manifest Love movement—quotes a wealth of information to show that gay men display a wide range of positive characteristics: features which are wildly under-reported.

Compared to average (and particularly compared to straight men) gay men are more socially tolerant (pp 30ff), much more likely to be volunteers or work in caring/service jobs (pp50ff) and show higher levels of care-giving (pp42ff). They have more (p.117ff), more varied (p.103) and more intense friendships.

Statistically, gay men are nicer than straight men.
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While rates of domestic violence are no greater in gay relationships than straight ones (remarkable in itself, since domestic violence is disproportionately male: there is some evidence that, if you separate out gay relationships by sex, gay male relationships actually have lower rates of domestic violence than straight relationships [p.25]), gay males are wildly less likely to engage in other forms of violence (pp 4ff): this despite the fact that gay males are more likely to have suffered violent abuse when growing up, which is usually a predictor of future violence (p.24).

Gay guys are also twice as likely to be celibate than straight ones (p.81), part of the wealth of information about the open and expressive sexual culture gay men are evolving. So males who identify as gay are also much less likely to engage in unsafe sexual behaviour (p.61). HIV positive ones are particularly likely not to do so (p.65). Gay men actually talk about sex, and do so in a direct and open way.

But gay men also develop much more varied forms of intimacy and personal connection: both the intense and personal and the open and general. Nimmon has a fascinating discussion of the dance party phenomenon (Chapter 8). Which he connects to the wide range of “third sex” social forms in human cultures.

Nimmon quotes Foucault quite a lot, but we won’t hold that against him. Mainly because he concentrates on Foucault on the gay/homosexual experience, where Foucault seems thoughtful and perceptive. Indeed, the text is interspersed with lots of striking quotes. Alas, unlike everything else in the book, they are not sourced.

Not that, at any point, Nimmon thinks it is all sweetness and light. In Chapter 9 in particular, Nimmon examines the downsides of contemporary gay culture (particularly cynicism and bitchiness) and suggests ways things might be improved.

I found Soul Beneath the Skin a fascinating read because of its wealth of information and insight on contemporary gay male culture. That it is a funny and witty read is just a bonus. It is also a very thought-provoking book.

There is a lot more to contemporary gay culture than sex, drugs and dance parties. This is an excellent book to discover that.

Charles Darwin Bicentennial

This year is the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin. His The Origin of Species*, first published 150 years ago, can be reasonably be claimed to be the most important book published in the C19th. A book that forever changed how we looked at the world and ourselves.

Indeed, it is hard to underestimate the impact on Western civilization of the theory of natural selection. Conjoined with the discoveries of geology, it overthrew the traditional religious framing of time—time which the ruins of Petra were no longer "half as old as". It broke down a sense of our profound metaphysical separation from other species.

Modern biology is based on two key facts. The first is that all life on Earth is related, we are all part of the same tree of life.

The second is that species change, across time and space. Under the impact of Darwin, the notion that each species was a separate creation, part of a single act of creation a few millennia ago, collapsed.
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That species evolved from other species was an idea that predated Darwin. His great achievement was natural selection, a mechanism to explain how such a change could happen. A mechanism he got from economist and pioneer of demographic theory Thomas Malthus and his Essay on the Principle of Population.

Charles Darwin himself was a liberal and humane man who abhorred slavery. Unfortunately, some of his scientific rhetoric—itself flowing from a scientifically exaggerated belittling of cooperation of nature and a concomitant belittling of human motives—encouraged ideological monsters. Both Marxism and Nazism drew strength from some of Darwin's rhetoric, however much that would have horrified Darwin himself.

Philosopher Mary Midgely, in her Evolution as a Religion, has critiqued both the misuse of Darwin's ideas and some of the tendencies flowing from Darwinism. As she wrote:

The project of treating the time scale of the Genesis story literally, as a piece of history, is an amazing one, which serious biblical scholars at least as far back as Origen (AD 200) have seen to be unworkable and unnecessary. The reason why people turn to it now seems to be that the only obvious alternative story – evolution – has become linked with a view of human psychology which they rightly think both false and immoral (p.172).

Philosopher David Stove, a great admirer of Charles Darwin, notoriously critiqued aspects of Darwinism in his Darwinian Fairytales. People can find it difficult to separate evolution and natural selection as an ongoing scientific project from Darwinism, the views originally expressed by Darwin. One can accept that Charles Darwin's scientific achievement was very great, as is clearly so, without thinking he was correct in every particular. Respect (which is certainly due) does not have to be unalloyed.

Darwinism's "reading down" of human and animal motives is not supported by the evidence. Nor is his idea that the sole purpose of sex in nature is to conjoin small gametes (sperm) with big gametes (eggs). Joan Roughgarden, Professor of Biology at Stanford University, provides a very accessible survey and discussion of the evidence on such matters in her Evolution's Rainbow. She also provides a very accessible presentation of the key points of modern biology and evolutionary theory in her Evolution and Christian Faith.

This year is also the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species. Darwin's work still provokes heated debate and disagreement far beyond that which any other book published in the C19th does. His great scientific achievements, and flaws, still cast an enormous shadow.

* Hyperlinked titles are to my reviews of the books elsewhere on this blog.

The Subversive Family

Ferdinand Mount’s The Subversive Family: An Alternative History of Love and Marriage takes us on an amusing and informative ride through the long history of the European family.

I particularly liked Mount’s acute sense of shifting social power and its effects. So underlying persistences (such as the popular concept of marriage) interacting with different levels and uses of formal power produce fluctuating effects.

The level and locus of formal power is not necessarily what you might expect – it took centuries of effort by the Church to gain control of marriage as a legal construct, for example. Indeed, to a significant degree, modern marriage law is a return to pre-Christian forms while modern family patterns are far less unprecedented than is often suggested.

Mount’s likening of using Church statements as a source for medieval popular attitudes as the equivalent of inferring Soviet popular attitudes from reading Pravda is very amusing. As is his analysis of the commonality in Christian and Communist attitudes to marriage and family as distractions from Much More Important Things, including their frustration with, eventually triumphant, stubborn popular resistance. Both Church and Leninist State went from opposition to acquiescence to claiming they had always been a supporter of the family.

Mount argues that much current divorce and single parenthood is a sign of an elevated popular concept of marriage, rather than the reverse – a widespread refusal to engage in marriages that would not ‘meet the standard’. The Subversive Family is a highly informative book.

Nothing so dated as a vision of the future

If one was going to pick the worst possible year in the last half-century in which to publish a book on grand strategy, 1991 – the year in which the Soviet Union disappeared from history – is probably it. Nevertheless, I found Grand Strategies in War and Peace edited by Paul Kennedy an informative and agreeable read.

A friend lent it to me and particularly recommended the essay on Roman Empire by Arther Ferrill, which I did find most informative. Like the C5th historian Zosimus and Edward Gibbon (but very few other commentators in the last two centuries), Ferrill argues that Constantine the Great’s abandonment of frontier defence by infantry-centred armies for defense-in-depth relying on cavalry reserves was an ultimately disastrous policy and institutional choice. Given that the infantry-based high-training high-discipline army worked brilliantly for over 5 centuries, while Constantine’s change was followed by the evaporation of the Western Empire 140 years later, it is a claim with a certain plausibility.
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But I enjoyed all the historical studies (three on British grand strategy, others on Spanish grand strategy under Olivares, German, French and Soviet grand strategy), finding them intelligent, thoughtful and informative. The last was by one Condoleeza Rice and managed to read well even given the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of the year the book was published. Though the most memorable observation was Douglas Porch in his essay on French grand strategy pointing out that Versailles was a German strategic victory since Germany’s population and economy was intact and it now had only one powerful state on its borders (France). His argument that the French collapse in 1940 was primarily because Nazi Germany was a more formidable opponent than Wilhelmine Germany, not because 1940 France was all that different from 1914 France, has much plausibility.

A persistent theme was how strategic intention still required tactical success.

What read least well was the final essay by Paul Kennedy on the US’s strategic dilemmas. Not really his fault, since the collapse of the Soviet Union transformed international affairs so completely.

But it did provoke a few reflections. One was how distorting it is to use US economic dominance in the war-devastated world of 1950 as a baseline. It is surely more striking that the US entered the C21st with a greater level of technological dominance, a far greater level of military dominance and a comparable share of world GDP as it entered the C20th. Conversely, EUrope scores comparatively lower on all three: strikingly so in military power.

Another was how the nuclear threat still conditions US policy responses, but now focused on the possible use of nuclear weapons by a “non-state actor”.

The third was how US victory in WWII and the Cold War can be straightforwardly conceived as being that one wins when one’s enemies become democracies. Hence the remarkable sight of the American Republic exporting its Revolution at the point of a gun and a rocket to the land between the rivers and the Hindu Kush: in both cases, as part of a coalition of countries (though a much wider coalition in Afghanistan than Iraq since the former sits better with the traditional norms of inter-state behaviour than the latter: that American policy is the same in both countries rather exposes the “it’s all about oil” nonsense).

But exporting democracy is something that makes lots of folk nervous, particularly by military power. The EU elite doesn’t even think that Europeans should get a full dose of democracy (at least not at the EU level), let alone considering the prevailing views in Russia or (especially) China. India and the Japan, on the other hand, have reasons to find it quite a comfortable idea. A Washington-Tokyo-New Delhi entente versus a Brussels-Moscow-Beijing axis seems a possibility, despite countervailing pressures (the Eastern Europeans, Baltics and Scandinavians like an American guarantee against Russia, the Chinese regime does not approve of EU global governance ideas). Here in Oz, we don’t want to have to make a choice between Washington and Beijing, just as Britain doesn’t want to make a choice between Washington and Brussels. Given that the EU’s global governance ambitions simply aren’t compatible with the consent-of-the-governed principles of the American Revolution, London is going to have to make a choice eventually. And if Beijing manages to continue ride the pressures of modernisation without an implosion (not a forgone conclusion), we will face a choice eventually too. In our case, USA-Japan-India will clearly win. In Britain’s case, it will likely depend on how politically obvious are the profoundly anti-democratic nature of the EU’s global governance aims in causing tensions with the US.

Having reverted to the possessors of intellectual capital’s traditional contempt – going back millennia – for the “vulgar masses” (the proletariat-become-rednecks phenomenon) and for “vulgar commerce” (corporations are evil), much of the Western intelligentsia will be on the side of Brussels-Moscow-Beijing (or, more precisely, agin Washington). But that was the case in the Cold War too, so nothing much new there: the anti-democratic shift among possessors of intellectual capital for status and career reasons (despite much breast-beating to the contrary) just becoming a little more obvious. Indeed, the conceit that there is much cutting edge or new—apart from the cavalcade of shifting mascots and a certain fetishing of language—about this drab and arrogant recycling of the prejudices and politics of Plato is laughable.

But such thoughts take us rather beyond the ambit of what is a surprisingly useful collection.

Europe’s Reformations

James D. Tracey’s Europe's Reformations, 1450-1650: Doctrine, Politics, and Community is a nicely comprehensive look at the European Reformation.

Comprehensive across time, space, doctrine and social context. Tracey has been teaching Reformation history since 1966 and it shows. Not only has he apparently read everything, but he can put it fluently and pithily.

Part I sets out his premises and the framework. Part II looks at the doctrinal issues. Part III the politics. Part IV the social context, including a final chapter providing brief survey of analogous changes in other cultures and civilisations.

Tracey sets out his two key premises in the first paragraph. (1) “The” (Protestant) Reformation was the high point in a series of “reformations” from the C11th to the C18th. (2) Religious motives matter, but so do other motives: hence so the outcome of religious movements can only be explained in their wider social context.
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In discussing pre C16th developments, Tracey identifies two features of continuing importance – lay resentment of clerical privilege and national pride (p.5). Thus, for example, the power of prince-bishops in Germany meant that Germans disproportionately paid for the operation of the Papacy (p.27).

He also sets out (pp13ff) the key doctrinal features of Protestantism: the sole authority of Scripture; salvation or justification by faith alone; the priesthood of all believers; the reform of worship focusing on the sermon rather than ritual; the holy community; the confessional state.

The book has a nice flow to it. So we move from Erasmus’ concern for corruption of scripture and the need for scriptural accuracy and misuse of doctrine for institutional convenience (p.46) to Luther’s breakthrough dissent (pp.47ff). The interaction between Erasmus and Luther allows Tracey to show the dynamics of events: not least of which was the familiar pattern of the compromisers being undermined and discredited by the purists in each camp (pp 90ff).

Tracey explains Calvin’s rather grim doctrine of predestination, which did have the virtue of alleviating fear. God had decided whether you were saved or not, and that was that (p.95). Calvin did not believe in chance—everything that happened was God’s will.

The Catholic Council of Trent (1545-1563 with interruptions) stated firmly that humans were free to accept or reject God’s grace and that tradition was a source of revelation equal to scripture, making the Catholic/Protestant distinction particularly clear (p.101). It also meant that the Papacy became the leader of Catholic reform, which greatly improved its standing in the Catholic world (p.102).

The notion of heresy as “treason against God”—(re)introduced into secular law in Latin Christendom from the C13th—received a new lease of life, particularly as the Spanish Inquisition turned its attention from converted Jews. Catholic Europe produced about 3,000 Protestant martyrs from 1520 to 1600 (p.107).

Toleration of religious minorities rested not on the idea of toleration (that developed later) but out of the trauma of religious war (pp 166-7). The Netherlands was the first European pluralist society because it recognised one religion formally and others informally (p.178). The position post-Restoration England eventually came to (p.209).

Tracey takes us through the politics of the various Reformations (and Counter-Reformations) well, teasing out the general and particular. The Lutheran Reformation in Scandinavia partly rested on Kings looking to Church lands for financial gain (pp 170). I was particularly appreciative of Tracey’s coverage of Reformation and Counter-Reformation in the Austrian Habsburg lands (pp 178ff), a subject that often gets glossed over. He makes it clear how uncertain the religious outcome there was.

For social patterns, Tracey begins by examining late medieval society and its various social and religious tensions. He then takes us through the patterns—both general and particular—that led to various outcomes. Social context matters, but careful attention to local circumstances is needed to see what was going on.

In his last chapter, Tracey looks briefly at the Neo-Confucian recovery of Confucian scriptures, the C18th Wahhabiya purification of Muslim worship in Arabia, the holy community of Hasidic Judaism in the C18th, and Iconoclast purification of worship in the C7th and C8th Eastern Roman Empire. His point is to show that the Protestant Reformation has some common features with other reform movements, history being made up of both the particular and the general—particularly since human beings have common yearnings and state building has recurrent features (p.300).

Tracey’s study is an excellent general history of the Reformation.

Changing Ones

Will Roscoe’s Changing Ones: Third and Fourth Genders in Native North America is a very helpful analysis of genders in Amerindian* societies. These societies frequently operated on notions of sex and gender which contradicted Christian/European assumptions about there only being two genders.

In Christian/European/Western conceptions of gender, your biological sex determines your gender. That is, your gender is a “natural” expression of your physical form. So, that there are only two sexes (ignoring the tiny minority of intersex folk) means that there are only two genders. Sex and gender are the “same” thing. (Even though conceptions of the qualities or traits of each gender change over time.)

Which is not how Amerindian (or, as Roscoe points out when he extends his analysis) many other societies thought about the matter. To them, your gender was determined by your physical form and your psyche. So there were three (or four) genders: male-in-form-and-psyche, male-in-form-and-female-in-psyche, female-in-form-and-psyche and (sometimes) female-in-form-and-male-in-psyche. (Not all societies seemed to have acknowledged the last group, and some who did seem to have put them in a single physical-form-different-from-psyche gender along with the male-in-form-female-in-psyche.)

When it came to social roles, typically your emotional gender was more important than your physical form. Including who you had sex with (and who you might marry). But, as Roscoe is at pains to point out, it was about much more than sex.
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In Part I, Roscoe takes us through Amerindian gender diversity. In Part II, he provides a more general assessment of its implications.

Roscoe first introduces us to Amerindian gender diversity, mainly through European reports of the same. Roscoe notes that there were plenty of same-sex marriages. He approvingly quotes a Crow elder from 1982 saying

We don’t waste people the way white society does. Everyone has their gift p.4.

Roscoe's first aim being to document Amerindian gender diversity: which, he notes, anthropology showed little interest in until the 1980s (p.21).

He also introduces a continuing theme, which is European failure to see Amerindian gender diversity in its own terms but, instead, refracting it through received theories. Ranging from Christian denunciations of “sodomy” to the condescending reductionism of psychoanalytic theory. The former included such vilenesses as Balboa in 1513 throwing 40 men dressed as women to the dogs, a massacre a C17th Spanish historian called

A fine action of an honourable and Catholic Spaniard (p.4).

Chapter Two is a look at the life and times of Osch-Tisch, a Crow bote (third gender male) warrior who died in 1929, aged 75. Chapter Three does the same with Hastiin Klah, a Navajo nadleehi (third gender male) noted for his artistic and his shamanistic knowledge and achievements, who died in 1937, aged 70.

Chapter Four examines alternative identities and genders native women, particularly through particular individuals (and how Europeans reported them, as distinct from how Amerindian sources remembered them). Chapter Five looks at gay Amerindians today, including the loss of traditional notions of gender diversity—and the roles such folk played—and the absorption and adaptation of contemporary gay and lesbian identities from wider American society. The loss of such traditional notions and roles Roscoe does not ascribe merely to Christian influence within Amerindian society, but also a wide range of actions and pressures by

countless government officials, school teachers, missionaries and local whites (p.101).

Then it is on to Part II, trying to put all this in a wider context. He starts by noting the huge difficulties Europeans had in simply describing what they were seeing (pp120ff). Particularly whether to see it primarily in terms of gender difference or sexuality and using terms such as hermaphrodite, homosexual, transvestite, transsexual.

Eventually, apparently starting in 1978, anthropologists decided those who have become labelled generically as berdache (a Persian word originally) were a third gender (p.123). Roscoe takes us through this developing understanding—including his own suggestion of gender diversity as a form of occupational specialisation—arguing for a multi-dimensional understanding that incorporates gender, sexuality, social role, productive specialisation and religious functions (p.135). He summarises the minimum conditions for multiple genders as being division of labour by gender categories, a belief system where gender was fluid or otherwise not determined by physical sex and historical circumstances that allowed such roles to be constructed and practised (p.136).

Roscoe then examines third and fourth genders in Yuman culture and history in terms of this analysis. Which leads into an examination of how much such traditional roles and concepts of gender diversity have survived in Amerindian cultures. Roscoe is very keen to consider transmissions of concepts and ideas between cultures. Including how European usages changed over time, from a sodomite

rhetoric of abomination (p.179)

to the use of a more neutral hermaphrodite.

He notes historian Rudi Bleys's work finds a tendency for European commentary on gender diversity in a wide range of non-European societies to shift from abomination of sodomites to noting their femininity and seeing same-sex activity as the province of a distinctive minority (p.182). Roscoe also argues that how what we now call homosexuals in European society had a self-understanding that could be construed as being that of a third gender (p.185). And that contact with gender-diverse cultures influenced how Europeans talked about, and thought about, human sexual variety, including in their own societies.

In Chapter Nine Roscoe powerfully critiques attempts to see the role of the berdache in Amerindian society as one of subordination, showing how the sources simply do not sustain such a view. He also notes how, up until the Valladolid debates in 1550, denunciations of sodomy were part of the justification of Spanish conquest (Pp195ff).

In his final chapter, Roscoe notes how widespread conceptions of third (and fourth) genders have been in human societies, including the ancient Middle East. How very common it was for such to perform shamanistic, priestly or other religious roles. And how challenging such is to Western conceptions of only two genders, the (solitary) naturalness of heterosexuality and the allegedly transgressive/deformed nature of divergence from that. As Roscoe says, that were not merely differences that were tolerated

they were differences that served (p.212).

The book also includes a comprehensive index of Amerindian tribes with terms used and roles played by members of third (and fourth) genders.

I found it a fascinating and very informative book. I particularly admired Roscoe’s care with sources. It does help make one see how bizarrely reductionist Christian/European/Western understandings of sex and gender have been (and still are).

* Roscoe uses the term American Indian. I prefer the single word Amerindian that, to my ear—being an Australian living in Australia—is less jarring in its false allusions to Indians. That Roscoe clearly has a great deal of experience with contemporary (American Indians) gives him considerable authority on the issue. The phrase still just jars on me.

For Lust of Knowing

For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies is a splendid, elegant, erudite work of history of scholarship which has the particular value of demonstrating what meretricious crap Edward Said’s Orientalism is.

Irwin starts by taking us through a brief survey of the depiction of Persians in Classical Greek plays and texts—and Said’s depiction of the depiction of Persians in Classical Greek plays and texts. He has witty fun showing how little the former has to do with the latter. The chapter title—The Clash of Ancient Civilisations—strikes just the right note.

Then he moves on to the medieval period, and the beginning of Christian commentary on Islam (An Ancient Heresy or a New Paganism). The great question about Muhammad for early medieval Christian writers was: was he a pagan or a heretic, there really being no other category to put him in (the Jews being somewhat sui generis). A debate carried on in vast ignorance. (An early C14th Church Council decision to found chairs in Arabic studies seems to have been a complete dead letter.) Later medieval writers seemed to sidestep this issue somewhat, with some writers (such as Ramon Llull) stressing how close to Christians Muslims were. But, for centuries, interest in matters Muslim carried with it the suspicion of showing one to be crypto-Muslim yourself.

Irwin moves on to writings on Middle Eastern and Asian cultures by Renaissance writers, then Reformation and Counter-Reformation writers (The Holiness of Oriental Studies) and to Enlightenment writers (Enlightenment of a Sort).

The picture begins of build up of a sputtering stream of scholarship, full of great characters, great cranks and frequent financial hardship. One in which German scholars increasingly came to dominate.
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So we move on to the C19th (Oriental Studies in the Age of Steam and Cant) enlivened throughout by witty asides (e.g. the sad lack of acknowledgment of Frankenstein’s monster’s interest in cultural studies).

Many Orientalists, falling in love with the peoples and cultures they studied, were anti-imperialists. (Including, the misrepresented—though undoubtedly racist—crank Gobineau.) Noting that Gobineau was an anti-imperialist, admirer of the Jews (for what he took to be their racial exclusiveness) and believed the human race had well and truly peaked, Irwin also makes some very sensible comments (Pp169ff) on the pervasiveness (including existing in many non-Western cultures) and variety of (“small r”) racism. For example, some thought racial mixing produced hybrid vigour, others degeneracy. Views of the “ranking” of races also varied greatly.

There is simply no straightforward relationship between imperialism and Orientialism. Russia, whose Empire was proportionately most Muslim, did promote Orientalist (specifically Muslim) studies for that reason. Britain, which had by far the largest Asiatic empire (and ruled over the most Muslims), did not. Instead, Classics were the stuff of imperial education. An Orientalist interlude in the rule of India inspired by figures such as Warren Hastings being brought to a halt by 1830 by a coalition of Evangelicals and Utilitarians of whom Macaulay was the most eloquent spokesman. Thereafter Classics reigned supreme. It was those most convinced of the superiority of Western culture and Christianity who opposed Orientalism. The real centre of European Orientalism from the C18th onwards was Germany which, prior to 1878, had no overseas possessions whatsoever (and those it acquired were in Africa and the Pacific).

The most disparagingly imperialist form of Orientalism was, naturally, Soviet Orientalism, product of a radically atheist regime which was the Culmination of History, so radically superior to other cultures. The advent of the most savage of all imperialist regimes—the Nazis—essentially destroyed German Orientalism. British Orientalism flourished as its empire retreated.

Irwin takes us through the complex and conflicted history during the later period of European imperialism (A House Divided Against Itself) and then to its post WWII flourishing (The All Too Brief Heyday of Orientalism) before moving on to Said (An Enquiry into the Nature of a Certain Twentieth-Century Polemic).

Irwin concludes with a discussion of various hostile Muslim and Arab commentaries on Orientialism (Enemies of Orientalism). Many of the questions that interest Orientialists—when were the Hadiths compiled? When was the Qu’ran written down?—are inherently confronting to devout Muslims, even without bitter legacies from colonialism. Irwin notes how critics of Western imperialism rarely troubled themselves over (the far more oppressive) Soviet overlordship in Central Asia. But the colonialism you and yours have directly experienced has somewhat more weight than what some other group, even if they are fellow Muslims, experience.

While Irwin clearly has great sympathy for Muslims generally, and Arabs in particular, including Palestinians (he is clearly no fan of Zionism), scholarship comes first with him. He is happy to defend Bernard Lewis’s scholarship, (noting wickedly Said’s unacknowledged debts to Lewis) or Elie Kedourie's. Nor is he in favour of consoling platitudes:

The refusal of many Orientalists to take Islam at its own valuation as a revelation from the Divine has caused offence to many Muslims. The sheer degree of hatred with which Western culture in general and Orientalism in particular have been regarded in some Muslim circles is not widely understood (p.310).

He notes that:

Another dismal consequence of polemics like Orientalism is that some university departments of Arabic or Middle Eastern history appear to have an unavowed policy of excluding Jews from serious consideration as candidates for jobs in those departments (p.276).

Progressivist tenderness for sensibilities is often somewhat one-sided.

Irwin is fundamentally appalled by the rapturous reception of Said’s dreadful book, particularly after so many errors in it were so quickly exposed:

it is a scandal and damming comment on the quality of intellectual life in Britain in recent decades that Said’s arguments about Orientalism could ever have been taken seriously. Obviously I find it impossible to believe that the book was written in good faith (p.309).

Given that errors Irwin points out include some so egregious that consulting, for example, a Penguin™ edition of various Greek plays and other texts Said cites reveals them, this does not seem to overstate the case. Irwin cannot really explain why Said has such an influence—simply citing aspects he feels folk liked—mainly because he seeks reasons based on Orientalism itself when we are dealing with much wider issues of academic sociology.

But it would be hard to beat his damning concluding summary of Said’s Orientalism:

On the whole, though, the good qualities of Orientalism are those of a good novel. It is exciting, it is packed with lots of sinister villains, as well as an outnumbered band of goodies, and the picture that it presents of the world is richly imagined, but essentially fictional (p.309).

So Irwin captures (even if he knows it not) the central appeal of Said’s Orientalism, as with so much contemporary “scholarship” of similar ilk. It turns the world into a heroic narrative, adherence to said narrative making one a “band of goodies” hero. By supporting various texts peddling such narratives—Michael Pusey’s brilliantly successful pandering to academic prejudice via his very mediocre piece of scholarship, Economic Rationalism in Canberra is a local case in point—folk fit in within their own milieu while preening over what grand and powerful evils they oppose. Such safe, effortless “heroism” is clearly irresistible to many.

As Irwin notes, Said regularly treats narratives he disagrees with about events as being much more morally pernicious than the events themselves. Which, of course, makes those who contest such narratives that much more morally important—indeed heroic. Who wouldn’t want to play under such rules?

Someone who thinks genuine scholarship is not an exercise in moral preening. Which Irwin does not, and demonstrates it is not by wit and example in this splendid book.

European Miracle: side thoughts

One of the things I very much enjoyed about reading Eric Jones’ The European Miracle, which I reviewed in my previous post, is the thoughts that were provoked while reading it.

States building nations: one can argue that, in Europe, states built nations at least as much as nations acquired states. Nation-states also rest on the demotic idea that characteristics of ordinary folk (language, ethnicity) matter in their own right, not just in terms of convenience of rule.

Christianity’s institutional influence: It seems likely that Christianity, in particular its institutional manifestation in a powerful, trans-polity Church (which has no equivalent in other civilisations) increased the institutional competitiveness. One could also mount an argument that it encouraged a higher level of requirement of moral duty among rulers (it would only have to be marginally higher to, across centuries, have a significant long-run effect).
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By contrast, the key problem of East Asia in particular, and of Asian civilisations in general, was simple:

State and subject were disconnected and the economy was unable to transform the state. (p.253)

Marxism’s baleful influence: clearly, this was utterly disastrous social milieu into which to import the idea that the state should run everything, though one can see how the idea that the state should actually provide services and, at least in theory, care about its people would seem revolutionary and apposite. Conversely, liberal ideas of a limited, service-providing accountable state constrained by other social interests with enforceable rights might as well as been from Mars – or perhaps Venus.

Competitve globalisation: In the modern world, with globalisation, suddenly all states are in the position of competitive pressure which European states used to be in. Hence the shift towards market-friendly policies. Though contemporary European states are leading the charge to reduce/eliminate those same competitive pressure through the global governance agenda. Hopefully, the US will continue to be curmudgeonous about the whole, very bad, idea.

Fluctuations in the representative principle: Jones’s analysis of ruler conciliation of interests accords with the way the representative principle has waxed and waned in Western civilisation since medieval times. The representative principle waxed during the later Middle Ages, as kings balanced against nobles and clergy the burghers whose activities gave them the tax base which allowed them to turn suzerainty (shared jurisdiction and legitimate organised force) into sovereignty (sole jurisdiction and legitimate organised force).

With some exceptions, notably British Isles and the Netherlands, the representative principle then waned again as the continuity of funded monarchical sovereigns overbore the transience of representatives who no longer, even in theory, had independent access to military power. After the American and French Revolutions established the notion of popular sovereignty, and the American Civil War established that representative government could handle the test of great military effort, the representative principle then waxed to its current unparalleled heights.

It now appears to be in decline again. The notion of judicial activism elevates the judicial principle higher, and the representative principle lower. The growth of internationalisation (the increasing tendency for political decisions to be made by international bodies) depresses the representative principle further both directly and through whittling away at national sovereignty – the vehicle for citizen consent. Internationalisation reduces competitive pressures between states while the tendency for the Western intelligentsia to adopt common positions reduces competitive pressures between ideas. Within a framework of coercive decision-making, the less important the representative principle is, the easy de-legitimisation of alternative ideas becomes. Once again, the operation of the representative principle does not buttress the position of the intelligentsia, the operation of non-representative conduits for ideas, particularly coupled with de-legitimisation of alternatives, does.

Property matters: It used to be a commonplace of European thought that property was a key bulwark against tyranny and of a free society. On the other side of the socialist disaster, we can see again that that is so. And it is appalling to contemplate how many lives, how much misery, how much destruction, was caused as a result of the fading of this understanding. Ideas have consequences. How was this understanding lost? It wasn’t through deeper knowledge of other societies: if anything, grasp of the differences faded. It wasn’t through deeper understanding of the history of Western societies – ditto. It seems to have been a destructive sentimentalisation of the prospects for state and revolutionary action tied to a fading in serious, clear-eyed concern for consequences. A fading that continues.

With globalisation (encouraging competition between states) and internationalisation (reducing or eliminating it), much of the ‘progressive’ intelligentsia are backing entirely the wrong horse. What a surprise. Then again, if you are operating on a presumption that the traditions of the West, the most successful of human civilisations, are wrong – i.e. you define virtue against success – you are going to end up backing a lot of failure. If you adopt positions that lead you discount the lessons of history, ditto. The increasing tendency among the Western intelligentsia to adopt outlooks that buttress their own status and social position has frustrated understanding. Which raises the question of why should folk be taxed to pay for that?

The European Miracle

Quotes from The European Miracle by Eric Jones:

Economies are politically embedded, and this is decisive for the way they perform. (P.xxix)
Resources are a function of the available technology, and have no economic meaning until a technology has been invented to employ them. (P.xxxii)
There is an old gibe that economics is about choices, while sociology (and anthropology too on this showing) is about how people do not have choices to make. (P.14)
Where a pattern of behaviour is maintained over a long span, the methodological preference of the economist is certainly to look for evidence that the short-run payoffs are stable. (P.14)

Jones discusses the historiography of very long term economic growth at some length. I had not realised that there are scholars who seriously propose that there is nothing distinctive about European economic performance prior to the ‘great disruption’ of the industrial revolution (which, as Jones says, raises the question of how did that happen there in the first place). Since European imperialism (itself highly distinctive) was well underway prior to 1750, this ‘essentially the same until 1750/1820’ position seems a very odd one to take. Moreover, Jean Gimpel in The Medieval Machine makes it quite clear that even Medieval Europe was very technologically distinctive.

I really like Jones’ point that you cannot really work out what, if anything, is distinctive about one civilisation unless you compare it to others. Who knows England, that only England know? A social science application of using a ‘control’ inspired by the methodology of physical science.
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I enjoyed his dismissal of the thesis of an unchanging ‘Asian mode of production’ a la Wittfogel, Marx & Engels. He makes the point that steppe imperialism (the Ottoman, Mughal and Manchu empires, what McNeill calls the ‘gunpowder empires’) had very distinctive forms that changed the dynamics of the societies they were imposed on.

I was struck by the evidence that the Germanic and Celtic peoples had established social structures based on nuclear families in the second millennium BC (i.e. 4,000 years ago) (Pp 11-12), having long been sceptical of the ‘nuclear family is recent and artificial’ line.

The evidence that external European trade was only about 7 per cent of European continental product prior to 1800 doesn’t exactly help the ‘Europe-rich-because-exploited-periphery’ argument (Pp xxxiv-xxxv). Such arguments have always fallen down on a series of hurdles (why is Switzerland – no colonies ever – richer than Portgual – longest history of colonialism?; most European/developed world trade is, and always has been, with the rest of Europe/the developed world; how did they get to be in a position to undertake such exploitation in the first place?, etc.).

Jones cites a nice observation that

the six most likely centres of pristine state development (Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, Mexico and Peru) all featured circumscribed zones of production which presented ‘special difficulties to villages that might have sought to escape from the growing concentration of power in the hands of overly aggressive redistributive war chiefs’. (P.10)

Europe was marked from a relatively early stage with a more equal distribution of wealth with the European poor being notably less poor than elsewhere (P.5).

Jone cites another nice observation that Europe west of a line from St Petersburg to Trieste

was distinguished from non-European civilisations by a high age at marriage and a high proportion of people who never married at all,

late marriages allowing a spell for saving and being part of a long-term European preference at the margin for goods over children, a difference Jones suggests was at least partly a result of different disaster-management requirements (Pp 15ff). The point he makes about European disasters tending to destroy labour rather than capital (P. xxxiv) seems to militate against that, though it would foster (however slowly) capital accumulation, perhaps making the choice at the margin of goods over children an easier one.

Later and fewer marriages would also imply a higher status for women (relatively speaking) in Europe than non-Europe. To what extent the abilities of half the population is fostered being not an insignificant factor in long-run social outcomes.

The European Miracle is a great book. Particularly like the way Eric Jones takes medieval Europe seriously and how he is willing to consider technology, politics, culture, family formation, the lot.
More quotes from The European Miracle:

Yet the past in reality was not a mill-pond occasionally ruffled by breeze. It was made up of a ceaseless succession of adjustments to disturbances, big and little. (P.23)
Europe was a mutant civilisation in its uninterrupted amassing of knowledge about technology (P.45)
... industrialisation … was not in any case a thunderstorm that suddenly arrived overhead but a growth deeply rooted in the past. (P.225)
The dismal record of the rest of the premodern world shows that purposive government, regular technological change, and a population response reined back from swamping any gains in income were far from inescapable attributes of human society. (P.234)

Jones’ key point is that differences that are marginal at any one moment can, if they persist, have huge long-term effects. For example, in ecological terms, Asians were r-strategists,

maximising numbers as an adaptation to frequent mortality peaks, so that some might hope to survive catastrophes

while Europeans were K-strategists, living in a more stable environment, controlling fertility more (p.20) so that

numbers were kept below the maximum and incomes above the minimum … Underlying the European response pattern was an adjustment to a more favourable risk profile … the options were simply a little broader. (p.21).

Thus Europeans continued to invest marginally more in capital goods (both physical and human) generation after generation, with all sorts of consequences for standard of living, status of people, status of women, power relationships, individualism, etc.

It was good to see Jones give full credit for the sheer adaptiveness/inventiveness of the medieval period (particularly pp 58-59). As he says, the inventions that ‘kicked off’ the industrial revolution distract too much attention from a traditionally inventive/highly adaptive economy. Organisational inventiveness was often the key (p.65).

But this adaptiveness and inventiveness existed in a profoundly different institutional environment, which technology both grew out of and reinforced. Thus, while the difference in literacy rates in the C18th between Europe and the Ottoman empire was 50% to 5%, the difference in publication rates was a factor of 10,000 (p.67). (This imbalance has persisted, as recent UN reports make clear.) In a similar vein, China published in 1980 its first new forensic medicine textbook since 1247 (p.227).

The key institutional difference seems to have been the European state system, which was competitive enough to force rulers to attempt to attract (or at least not lose) skills and capital, stable enough so that institutional learning could take place yet embedded in a region of sufficient cultural continuity that access to economies of scale was not too badly affected by political fragmentation (Pp 104ff). The other regions of Eurasia veered between Imperial unity – which created complacent, exploitative regimes which had no reason to conciliate their subjects – and unstable disorder.

Why Europe never unified after Rome seems to have been a largely function of geography (although Jones does not make this point, Rome achieved what it did because its military technology was, and remained for centuries, much superior to anyone else’s in Europe. No one else ever achieved a sufficient level of persistent superiority to overcome the geographical difficulties). Europe is a “peninsula of peninsulas” (p.90) with substantial mountain ranges, many rivers and a large off shore archipelago (the British Isles). So a scattering of agricultural ‘core areas’, none of which was naturally dominant, separated by natural boundaries, impeded attempts to politically unify while the navigable coasts and rivers fostered trade, movement of ideas, capital and skills. England in particular benefited from wave after wave of emigres bringing skills, knowledge, capital. As soon as someone developed a good idea, it spread fairly quickly: both because it could (geographically, culturally and institutionally) and because rulers could not afford to fall behind in a competitive environment.

Which certainly was competitive – c.1000 polities in the C14th, 500 at the beginning of the C16th, 25 by 1900 (p.106).

Interestingly, the only other area in Eurasia (or the world) geographically like Europe is Japan. Which is also the only area that generated similar institutions. Disappointingly, Jones notes the Japanese exception (pp 157-8) but does not explore it. Yet it is not hard to see why this institutional similarity might be so. While Japan was a single kingdom, it did not centralise like the other Asian states did. The geography permitted political unity but discouraged ‘deep’ unity – even under the Tokugawa Shogunate, the central authorities had to work with independently powerful (and armed) local notables, which provided much more basis for interest group politics, deals and balances than in the rest of Asia.

Japan and Europe had another similarity–both avoided rule by steppe nomads, unlike the Islamic world, India and China (p.229). Japan because the Mongol invasions failed (largely due to the ‘divine wind’, or kamikaze, which sank the Mongol fleets), Europe because the Mongol incursion was temporary and pulled back by succession disputes.

Jones makes the observation that nation-states are a recent, European invention (p.127).

The European Miracle brings home how different the state as evolved in Europe, and the European experience of the state, was. And how historically naïve it is to think of state action as having any natural tendency to being benign. We in the West think of the state as a service provider, but that was not how the state functioned in non-European societies. As Jones says of the Manchu regime in China, but equally applies to the Mughals in India or the Ottomans in the Mediterranean, Balkans and Middle East,

The empire was an Asian revenue pump concealed by a mask of solidarity and any notion of an implicit social contract in which services of material consequences were supplied by the emperor in return for his share of the national product is spurious. (p.206).
The ratio of military to court to civil expenditure by the Chinese state was 25:7:1, so only 0.03 to 0.06% of GNP was available for infrastructure spending. (pp 208-9).
For the populace, the bargain was a poor one. The Chinese paid 24 per cent of G.N.P. to two percent of their number in return for defence and the co-ordination of irrigation and flood control. No other important services were provided, no civil policing for example. Villagers kept their own watch. (p.209)

Those running European states were, presumably, equally self-interested, but they lived in a competitive environment. They found it expedient to offer services (such as the administration of justice) and to reduce arbitrary actions (such as confiscating property) in order to conciliate interest groups who could either go elsewhere or whose extra efforts were needed to ‘keep up with the Plantagents/Valois/Habsburgs/Bourbons/Hanoverians ...’ As Jones says of the European ancien regime, it matters not what the motives of those running the state were.

The results were out of all proportion to the motives. (p.237)

Another difference Jones explores was that, although in Europe, India, China and Islam, it was customary to grant land temporarily in return for military service (the practice of Karl-lo-Magne, aka Charlemagne, and the Otto’s of the early German Reich), only in Europe did this turn into hereditable tenure and genuine ownership (p.xxx). The difference in incentives for elite land management, and thus long-term investment patterns, between being granted temporary taxing rights over a group of villages (Asia) and actual hereditable ownership (Europe) is obvious. One is tempted to cite the persistence of Roman legal forms as a reason, except the evolution into hereditable rights also occurred outside the areas of the former Roman Empire and the other place where such a pattern developed was – guess where – Japan.

Though Jones does not discuss it much, only Europe developed the representative principle. Clearly this is no accident, it was a result of wider processes in the development of the European state.

Reading Jones, I was brought up short at how Eurocentric my understanding was of death-tolls in wars. I thought of the 20 million dead (mostly combatants) of WWI as something new. I was vaguely aware that the Taiping rebellion of mid C19th China resulted in 25 million dead (mostly civilians). The shock was that the Mongol conquest of China in the early C13th resulted in a loss of one-third of the Chinese population (about 35 million dead, again mostly civilians). But the Mongols were the ‘pyramids of skulls’ people who regarded clearing peasants out of grazing land as a form of pest control. Jones discusses how Europe has a long history of attempting to control the violence of wars, something Asia conspicuously lacked (p. 235). Again, this accords with the different incentive structures and their effects.

There are also amusing tidbits, such as the name ‘America’ may have come from Richard Ameryk, collector of customs at Bristol, who gave explorer Cabot his pension, rather than the latter Amerigo Vespucci (p.72).

Overall, The European Miracle is a classic work of economic history, which greatly deepened my knowledge of European, and non-European, civilisations.

The Code of the Warrior

The Code of the Warrior: Exploring Warrior Values Past and Present is by Shannon French, who teaches ethics at Annapolis Naval Academy. She asks why warriors needs a code (short answer – to distinguish warriors from murderers), examines various historical warrior codes (Heroic Age Greece, Rome, Vikings, Plains Amerindians, Shaolin monks, Samurai), includes a chapter by Felicia Ackerman on Malory and concludes with a chapter asking whether terrorists are warriors (no, since their notion of violence is explicitly and purposely unbounded – they are political murderers). The importance of purpose and context for the development of warrior codes is brought out.

The book is workmanlike and enjoyable. The use of fiction and literature (The Illiad, Norse sagas, Morte D’Arthur) is very reasonable, given the concern with conceptions of the warrior. Much of the discussion is penetrating, clearly showing the benefit of years of wrestling with, and teaching, the material—for example, that vengeance is a way of stating the worth and importance of the wronged. Or that—as I know from personal experience—outrage is a moment of great moral danger. I particularly enjoyed her references to responses of her Naval and Marine students to the issues.

Some of it read a little sadly after the Abu Ghraib revelations (but, it wasn’t her Naval and Marine students doing such things). But I appreciated and enjoyed the book.

Evolution and Christian Faith

Joan Roughgarden is Professor of Biology at Stanford University, a transgender woman and a practising Christian (specifically, Episcopalian). Which puts her right at the intersection of the American "culture wars".

Her Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist is a short, clearly written book which explores the relationship between evolutionary biology and Christian faith. Apart from being a practicing Christian, she is obviously not interested in playing the game that being rational/scientific/whatever “requires” one to give up your Christian faith. In terms of being widely persuasive, that is a losing proposition.
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Chapter One frames the problem, discussing US polling favouring treating evolution and intelligent design as equally valid things to teach school children. Including a poll of doctors (which rather deflates the “it is because they are stupid” line).

Chapter Two sets out the first fact of evolutionary biology: that all life on Earth is related. One of the virtues of the book is Roughgarden’s very clear presentation of the key features of evolutionary biology. She finds no contradiction between this “single tree of life” and Scripture.

Chapter Three sets out the second fact of evolutionary biology: that species change. On these two facts hang all of evolutionary biology: one family tree unites all of life, and species change across space and time (p.24). These are the two key facts Roughgarden believes need to be part of any Science curriculum. She also finds no contradiction between species change and Scripture, parsing the use of ‘kind’ in Genesis 1:11-12 in a minimalist way.

Chapter Four discusses her approach to Scriptural interpretation, which is to give the facts precedence. That is, to side with the evidence over rule-bound literalism. This she holds to be the approach of Jesus, particularly in Matthew 15:10-16 and Matthew 15:17-20. Besides, if God found His Creation to be good, so is being truthful about how it is. There is nothing here that would bother St Augustine, for example.

Chapter Five discusses how species change, the point where we move from established biological facts to biological theory. Roughgarden uses the phrase natural breeding rather than natural selection because of the distracting uses selection has acquired. The key point is what breeds. Indeed, it is not merely having offspring that counts in evolutionary terms, it is having offspring who themselves also breed.

Chapter Six discusses random mutation, the generator of the differences evolution works on. While random mutation provides the raw material, it is breeding which provides direction in evolution (p.46). The Parable of the Sower provides a Biblical illustration of the mechanism.

Chapter Seven discusses the direction of evolution and the differing views of the role of God in Creation. There is lots of evidence that random mutation/genetic variation + natural breeding leads to living things better equipped to survive.

Chapter Eight discusses debate within the Roman Catholic Church on evolution. Chapter Nine is a To-Do-List for theorists, looking at current limits of evolutionary theory. As per her earlier Evolution’s Rainbow, the need to grapple more with social and cooperative behaviour is central to her discussion. Indeed, the discussion (Pp 71ff) of individuality and individualism in biology is rather better here than in Evolution’s Rainbow. There is also a fun discussion of favourite examples of evolution in action. Her discussion of the need for a richer sense of motivations is not too dissimilar from some of the points David Stove made, but she does it much more tactfully as a practising scientist. (Her speciality is, apparently, lizards.)

Chapter Ten is on Intelligent Design (ID) and why it is not science. She notes that, in theory, ID (start an agnostic and scientific data leads you to an intelligent designer—i.e. God) can be distinguished from Creationism (start a believer in the complete truth of Scripture, including Genesis, and science supposedly confirms your belief). In practice the two have become hopelessly bound together (p.62). ID is not science since its central claim of “irreducible complexity” is a claim without any evidence (apart from assertion), nor any parameters on which to structure getting evidence. She has fun with the notion of “irreducibly complex” bits popping into existence before moving on to a discussion of miracles.

She concludes with a credo about the need to teach what science is:

Science is not just an accumulation of facts, it is how to discover facts and how to explain them. We must teach that science depends on stating testable hypotheses, then actually doing the test, and then standing aside while the tests are confirmed or refuted by other, independent, parties. That process produces facts and explanations, not opinions. Assertions that are not testable, or never will be tested, or will be tested only by one group with a vested interest cannot be considered good science (Pp 100-1).

While she is firmly of the “science produces facts and explanations” view, I can see that some of her language here could be seized on by “it is just because the establishment is against us” types, but it is clear enough what she means.

Roughgarden believes ID should be in science curricula as an example of what is not science. She also favours:

teaching intelligent design in a religious studies curriculum as an example of junk religion (p.101).

Chapter Eleven is on gender and sexuality, both in evolutionary theory and in St Paul. She favours a “reading down” interpretation of St Paul (particularly those bits of Romans): an approach whose attraction I understand but which I do not think works. St Paul is fairly clearly invoking the marriage of classical natural and Judaic Scripture which was pioneered by Philo of Alexandria, both in his discussion of the Levitical laws and in his discussion of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Hence St Paul’s use of unnatural (para physin), a non-Judaic concept that appears nowhere else in Scripture (except in his letters) and St Paul's condemnation of female-to-female sex, which occurs nowhere else in Scripture other than in Romans.

Chapter Twelve, Future Directions, is a plea for more understanding from all sides of the debate, including:

reforming the narratives of selfishness that underwrite social Darwinism, developing nuanced moral positions about genetic engineering and cloning, and improving our care for the global dimensions of God’s creation (p.126).

Dawkins’ enthusiastic adoption of the language of selfishness comes in for a kicking. (Philosopher Mary Midgely would thoroughly agree.) But Roughgarden is equally critical of religious perspectives that invoke a wrathful and hateful God. She puts forward a fairly mild statement about global stewardship and concludes with Christ’s summary of His teachings in Matthew 22:37-40.

Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist is a short book, designed to be read relatively quickly. It succeeds admirably as an accessible primer for anyone interested in the interaction between evolutionary biology and Christian belief.