Racist schmasist

When, a friend and I were visiting a friend in Wellington (New Zealand) a few years ago, we got into a discussion with some of the latter’s housemates about Hamas’ recent election victory. I mentioned that one of the more sensible public statements on it had been made by President Bush. To which one housemate responded that Bush’s “racism” was more circumspect.

The man who appointed a black man followed by a black woman as the public face of American foreign policy and who thought Arabs are up for democracy (and appointed an Afghan-American as point-man in first Afghanistan and then Iraq) and is apparently obviously “racist”, he’s just clever about it. Indeed, so clever that President Bush acted precisely as someone who is not racist would.

Sad. So young and the flatmate’s mind had already turned to mush.

Not that he is doing much other than following contemporary academic and progressivist fashion, which is to label all sorts of things which are clearly not racism as “racism”: such as, for example, criticism of Muslims. Islam is a religion and a civilisation. Muslims are not a race: indeed, they are folk of all races. A general comment about Muslims, no matter how ignorant or bigoted it is, is not racism, just as a similar comment about Christians would not be.

What is racism?
Racism—in the sense of identifying continent-wide races (white, black, yellow, etc) and postulating a hierarchy between them—fully developed in the West in the C19th, though the term was not coined until the 1930s. Full-blown racism sought to explain European dominance. When medievals, for example, talked of “race” they normally meant Czech, Germans, etc: ethnicity based on language groups. The notion of the different descendant groups from the “sons of Noah” had no moral implications: indeed, faced with the existence of previously unknown peoples in other continents, the Papacy ruled that all peoples were equally human on very medieval reasoning.

But there were clear precursors to C19th racism in the Arab-Islamic world, in reconquista Spain and in New World colonialism. In each case, the move has the same purpose: to justify blatantly unequal treatment (the ownership of slaves and the subordination and/or dispossession of out-groups) in violation of otherwise egalitarian norms (Islamic, Christian, liberal). In the case of slavery, it also rationalised the lower enforcement costs in having slaves of a different skin colour.
Read More...
Tribalism—identifying strongly with your own group—is a much older phenomenon than racism. Racism obviously feeds on our propensity for group identification, but not all group identification is racist. Indeed, in the absence of universalist norms, there is no reason to develop racism—the notion of inherently debased orders of humanity based on skin colour—as differential treatment of outsiders is taken for granted. Racism is a historically specific phenomenon in a way tribalism and xenophobia are not. Genuine racism is a relief from—in its extreme form a revolt against—the burden of moral universalism. It also requires some sense of visibly different populations. Which is why, for example, Arab/Berber Islam pioneered anti-black tropes. And why American racism was so virulent—both the norms of Christianity and of the American Revolution had to be subverted. (Something the Rev. Martin Luther King was well aware of and eloquent about.)

Things that are not racism
Then there is the wonderful concept of implicit racism. In the words of Prof. John Hobson

implicit racism locates ‘difference’ through cultural, institutional and environmental criteria than genetic properties. (p.220).

Which, of course, makes it so implicit it is not racism. The special noxiousness of racism is precisely that it picks on a characteristic that is unchanging. It not only says a group of people are deeply flawed in their humanity, it denies them any redeeming agency at all regarding crucial aspect or aspects of life.

Why misuse the term in this way? In Hobson et al’s case it is clear enough—it turns any claim of Western superiority into a thoughtcrime. The more widely one defines racism the narrower the limits of acceptable debate, with the definers of racism setting those limits.

But it also buttresses a wider sort of status claim. There is a joke in the US that being accused of racism is what happens when an (American) liberal is losing an argument. Afro-American conservative Thomas Sowell noted years ago the shifting use of racism:

If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago and a racist today.

Consider the reaction to then PM Howard’s statement that many Australians find the burqa confronting. I live in the Footscray area, and its vibrant diversity of folk is one of the things I particularly like about it. One sees plenty of Muslim women in headscarves. But I have found the burqa a tad confronting—both because I don’t see very many and because of the assumptions about the role of women that lie behind it. But, apparently, feminism and its concerns don’t apply to Muslim women and Howard was a bigot, or playing on bigotry, for implying that they do (and that most Australians might think that too).

As Sowell's bon mot suggests, the game is to define things only the cognescenti would call 'racist' as racist in order to establish one is of the cognescenti. But it does more than that: one defines things as racist to justify discounting the opinions of one’s (moral and intellectual) inferiors. Thus the preferences of most Australians on migration policy don’t count because they are racist (no matter how much evidence there may be to the contrary on that). Any policy that expresses their preferences, no matter how popularly supported, is similarly illegitimate because it is racist.

Historically, there are typical beliefs of a group that defines its identity through possession of intellectual capital: the masses are vulgar, commerce grubby and the soldiering/policing professions thuggish. Which is modern progressivist politics in a nutshell. A set of prejudices that were old when Plato was a boy are laughingly redefined as “new” and “cutting edge” by various linguistic tricks based on 1066 and All That’s Irish-question principle (whenever the English worked out the answer to the Irish Question, the Irish changed the Question).

An example of such "Irishing" is when Pauline Hanson uttered a much milder version of what was “cutting edge” progressivist politics in 1900 when the ALP was getting underway and The Bulletin was the mouthpiece of intellectual opinion, she was treated as an utterly vile heretic. For, in the meantime, the proletariat had become rednecks and defining oneself against the surrounding populace had become the basis of knowledge class/progressivist politics: a pattern that has a clear medieval precursor.

There is also a striking ignorance of the interaction between racial prejudice and capitalism. In both the American South and South Africa it was precisely because capitalism could not be trusted to grade folk by race that the state intervened to do so. The actions of merchants and patterns of commerce are deeply subversive of hierarchies, except the unstable and contestable hierarchies of wealth and fame: which is why so many traditionalists, and anyone who wants a static social order, hate commerce and thus the commercial order known as "capitalism".

It is the nature of capitalism (as a system where the factors of production are exchangeable in markets) that it produces capital. So workers become richer (since overall wages are determined by the capital/labour ratio) and capital becomes more widely dispersed (which is why Marx was so spectacularly wrong in his predictions about capitalism). It is also in the nature of capitalism that what is cares about is profit, with the effects of not caring about various status-markers: for reasons Voltaire identified almost three centuries ago.

Yet, at a CERC seminar I attended on clashing nationalisms, it was taken as read by both the presenter and his academic audience that capitalism and racial prejudice went hand-in-hand. When, in private conversation, I commented to the nice young presenter that it would make sense, in terms of its constituency base's preference for commercial honesty, that the Lega Nord would have been ostentatiously anti-corruption, he looked at me as if I was from another planet. The notion that honesty in public officials helps commerce was clearly one of those does not compute ideas for the poor boy. Yet Venice, the Dutch Republic and England were noted for the comparative honesty of their public officials precisely because they were such commercial polities.

In the words of Jagdish Bhagwati (pdf):

familiarity breeds contempt but contempt does not breed familiarity.

As is sadly typical of much of humanities academe, they were not going to let their contempt for capitalism encourage them to become genuinely informed about it. Capitalism is evil, so naturally it is also naturally racist and naturally corrupt. (In fact, actually existing socialism was and is far more pervasively corrupt precisely because it creates such huge and pervasive value in official discretion: corruption being the market for official discretions.)

But ease of application is central to the appeal of status-through-attitudes. It requires no sacrifice of time, money or any annoying humility: particularly not the humility in the face of evidence, as it does not even require truth. Merely have the right attitudes, and you are a member of the moral elite. (Anyone who thinks much of contemporary academe would not prefer to be flattered than informed hasn’t been paying attention.) Used in such a way, the cry of "racist!", like racism itself, becomes a relief from the burdens of moral universalism, extending from words to who gets jobs, access to media, grants, etc.

Indeed, a pervasive intellectual dishonesty sets in. I have seen the pattern too often. Not matter how careful and specific the original formulation, dissenting arguments are simplified and misrepresented because dissent cannot be allowed to be reasonable, let alone correct, because it undermines the status-use of what is being dissented from.

One ends up with a humanities academy large sections of which do not serve truth, still less the society around it, with its “intellectual capital” being profoundly debased for self-serving purposes. In Camille Paglia’s words:

the humanities have destroyed themselves over the past 30 years…Through an obsession with European jargon and a shallow politicization of discourse, the humanities have imploded.

Such a humanities academy thereby becomes increasingly a bad investment for the society that is currently taxed to pay for it. (Even without considering rising prices or bloating in the pay and number of administrators.) This is not a stable situation. Either the society will begin to seriously notice, and stop paying (either through loss of students or budget cuts or both: which may lead to improved behaviour) or, as is much less likely, a widening pattern of cognitive failure will lead to the social order’s stagnation, even eventual collapse. (Which the Islamists would only be too happy to be the fortunate heirs of.)

Racism is a real evil. One of the sins of so over-using the cry of “racist!” as a device for shutting down dissent is precisely that it belittles a genuine evil. It also poisons public debate and intellectual discourse. Enough already.

The Qur’an: a Biography

Bruce Lawrence’s The Qur’an: a Biography provides a short but very informative guide to the nature of the Qur’an and how it has been seen throughout its 1400 year history. It is part of a series on books that shook the world. Lawrence is a scholar of Islam who has previously written on fundamentalism

The Introduction covers what the Qur’an says about itself and Muslim debates over the status of the Qur’an—is it a perfect reflection of the Word of God and thus eternally true of itself (univocal) or is there mediation through the human so it is subject to interpretation in particular contexts (plurivocal)? That the Qur’an was originally a series of spoken texts is made very clear—the first word in Muhammad’s first vision was Recite! and it is only properly The Book of Signs when spoken aloud.

The first two chapters are on Muhammad himself, providing a short biography. After that, each chapter is a case study. So, there is a chapter on his youngest wife, A’ishah, who lived to a considerable age (she was probably nine when they married, 14 when he died and lived to be 65) and was an important figure in the oral transmission of Muhammad’s teachings—only three of the Companions match or exceed the number of traditions of the Prophet (2,000) which were transmitted through her. A chapter on the Dome of the Rock—whose verses are the oldest written texts of the Qur’an still in existence written 60 years after the death of the Prophet—completes the first part of the book, on the Arab Core.

The rest of the book takes us through how the Qur’an has been interpreted down the centuries. A chapter on a Shi’a Iman, a chapter on a Sunni historian, the first non-Arab discussed, make up the Early Commentaries. The next part, on Later Interpretations, covers Robert of Ketton, who translated the Qur’an into Latin in the C12th—Lawrence thinks he did a very creditable job—and is the only non-Muslim to get a chapter; then a visionary interpreter of divine names and renowned Sufi; and then a translator of the Qu’ran in Persian and founder of the so-called whirling dervishes, a Sufi order.
Read More...
So Lawrence is taking us through the spreading impact of the Qu’ran. Not merely into other cultures (particularly Persian) but also in the ways in which it is used and what it inspires. The next part is Asian Echoes, starting with the Taj Mahal, a Persian building that happens to be in India and which has more Qur’anic verses on its walls than any other Muslim tomb. (It is also the most dramatic expression ever of romantic love in any human construction.) Then a chapter on a C19th Indian politician and educator who sought to reconcile Islam and modern science. And a chapter on a Muslim poet in British India whose poetry was inspired by Qur’anic verses and made the first speech in favour of the creation of what became Pakistan.

The final part, Global Accents, uses three contemporary case studies. The first is the most prominent American Black Muslim, the son of the founder of The Nation of Islam. W. D. Muhammad preaches a much more inclusive form of Islam than his father, much closer to mainstream Islam. Lawrence inserts most of a speech in which W D Muhammad says, among other things,

The Constitution of America is influenced by Quranic teachings. Even the capitalist concept of business is influenced by Quranic teachings (p.165).

This is, as they say, a stretch. Particularly the first sentence. Indeed, the first Constitution to explicitly deny its government the right to establish a religion is—how to put this politely?—not obviously Islamic in its inspiration. But W. D. Muhammad's comments are most definitely in line with the longstanding Muslim tradition of appropriating other people’s traditions where convenient. After all, Muhammad and the Qur’an appropriate in its entirety the Jewish prophetic tradition (and adds on Jesus, which certainly increases the coverage). To the extent that Abraham’s intended sacrifice of his son to God is said to have taken place near Mecca, with Abraham and his son building the first Kaaba shrine.* Sheik Hilali’s claim that Australia was originally discovered by Muslims is of a piece. It is a bit like the way the Soviet Union had a habit of pretending Soviet or Russian scientists had discovered rather more than they did. If you are carriers of the Final Revelation, then it is much more comforting to think that fellow carriers did as much as possible. while it is rather confronting if Unbelievers go around high achieving.

The next case study is the most famous current advocate of jihad—Lawrence has edited a collection of his speeches and writings. Lawrence explains and critiques Osama’s interpretative strategy with Qu’ranic verses, though Lawrence’s own qualification of jihad with defensive in the chapter is too defensive. After all, anyone who wants to claim that Islam sanctions aggressive war for the faith need look no further than the career of the Prophet himself, not to mention the conquests of his Companions. The tradition of the ghazi goes right back to the start of Islam, the only major religion founded by a conqueror. Islam never developed a warrior code such as the Zoroasterian jawanmardi, the Christian chivalry or the Buddhist bushido to reconcile the role of the warrior with the precepts of religion, since warrior precepts were incorporated from the beginning.

Lawrence concludes that Osama’s doctrine of uncompromising violence is merely a recipe for endless anarchy. Lawrence's claim that

Osama bin Laden is mislabelled as an Islamic fundamentalist. He is more the descendant of Rasputin and the Russian anarchists of the early twentieth century than he is of Muhammad and Muslim warriors of the early seventh century. His Qur’an is not a signpost but a grave marker

(p.183) is a gross slander on Rasputin, who was anti-war. By Russian anarchists, Lawrence appears to mean the Nihilists. Again, he may be being a bit harsh. What Lawrence seems to be groping towards is some notion that Osama and his ilk are influence by the Jacobin tradition of total politics. There may be something to that—particularly in influence on Sayyid Qutb—though the entirely Arabian tradition of Wahhabism/Salafism (which is older that any Jacobin tradition) is surely also important. It is arguable that Osama’s conception of what the Qur’an enjoins is more absolutist than early Muslim practice. But Lawrence seems to be trying to absolve Islam of any responsibility for Osama’s embrace of terror. (9/11 may have been a bit of an embarrassment, given a book Lawrence published in 1998, though the apparent central point about the diversity of Islam is surely correct.)

The final chapter looks at the use of the Qur’an as an instrument of healing, which continues to the present. The Epilogue notes the Qur’an's own references to its levels of meaning, the continuing debates over the status of Muhammad and the meanings of the Qur’an, its use and abuse.

While Lawrence is clearly very sympathetic to his subject, he is also a clear and enlightening writer. The book provides an excellent insight into the status, nature and role of the Qur’an in Islam and Islamic history.

*Christianity appropriated Jewish prophetic traditions too, but it was actually founded by Jews and its Old Testament simply incorporates Jewish Scriptures. It does not rather imaginatively rework them, as the Qur’an does.

Patients with plans

Psychotherapist Alan Rapport has a website with some useful articles about psychotherapy. (All of which are pdf files.)

His articles outline an approach to psychotherapy that makes sense and deals effectively with the issues raised by Masson in his Against Therapy by making the patient’s (conscious or unconscious) plan in seeking psychotherapy the central focus. In Rappoport’s words:

In assisting patients to carry out their plans, the sole function of the therapist is to help them conclude that neither their own nor others’ welfare is served by their maintaining their pathogenic adaptations; that is, that is safe for the patient to relinquish them, and it is safe (and typically beneficial) for others that they do so.

Rappoport is clearly very sensitive to the risks to patients involved in therapy. As he writes in The Patient’s Search for Safety:

Therapy is a risky business for patients, since they are exposing themselves to the possibility that they will be retraumatized in ways which were particularly harmful for them. They are as careful as they can be to maximize the likelihood they will benefit from the treatment, and to minimize the dangers of being harmed by it.

Rappoport is using and extending the Control-Mastery model of therapy which he summarises nicely in a short paper. He elsewhere summarises it as:

Control-Mastery theory holds that the causes of psychopathology are pathogenic beliefs, invalid and dysfunctional concepts of oneself and others acquired during our formative years which interfere with healthy interpersonal functioning.

Rappoport carefully sets out the overlaps with other therapeutic approaches and provides an insightful explanation of how patients can gain benefits from therapists pursuing a wide-range of therapeutic approaches:

A great deal of the therapist’s behavior is not significant to the patient in regard to the testing process. The issues which frighten or reassure the patient are quite specific, and behavior which does not relate to them is irrelevant. This is the reason that therapists of many different theoretical orientations and a wide variety of personal styles may be of help to the same patient. For example, if a patient is concerned about whether she is valued by the therapist, the therapist’s neatness or religious affiliation is unlikely to affect the patient’s sense of safety in this area. If a person is concerned about whether the therapist is competitive, the therapist’s school of thought or degree of interest in the arts will not be of great significance. As long as the patient’s needs are met, the therapist has great latitude to be relaxed and natural and, in fact, should be so, thus providing a convincing demonstration of nondefensiveness.

I am impressed by the clarity of exposition and philosophical insight in his papers. Rappoport’s notion of pathogenic adaptation (a term he prefers to pathogenic belief on the grounds that they are not fully accepted as true by the patient but are rather adaptations under pressure) is a much more concise explanation and characterisation of psychic pain and disfunction than I have read previously.

I originally came across his work because a friend showed me this piece on co-narcissism (adapting to narcissistic parents), a copy of which had been given to her by someone who works as a professional therapist.

Rapport does use the concept of self-esteem which I distrust as a therapeutic goal, strongly preferring self-respect. (That is, judgment based on a morally grounded assessment of oneself, not merely feeling good about oneself.) But he clearly means a damaged (and damaging) sense of self, and that is very much the issue. The piece on co-narcissism is impressive in the calm, knowing way it discusses both the damage the narcissist does and the way the narcissist is also damaged.

So, lots of useful and thought-provoking stuff.

The Crusades: a short history

Jonathon Riley-Smith’s The Crusades: A Short History is a comprehensive history of the Crusading movement from Pope Urban II (successful) preaching in 1095 to Napoleon’s capture of Malta from the Knights of St John in 1798. The prose is matter-of-fact, the information content very high. Riley-Smith argues that it was the notion of a political Christ, a Christ who commanded that certain political arrangements be achieved, which was central the Crusading ideal. The decline of that notion meant a decline in the crusader ideal.

I particularly appreciated the way Riley-Smith outlines the sheer spread, in time and space, of the crusader ideal. Especially the way he reads C16th attitudes in terms of where history was coming from, rather than the 20-20 hindsight of where it was headed. I was, however, glad I had recently read Amin Maalouf’s history of the Crusades from Arab chroniclers, as The Crusades suffers a definite lack of Muslim perspective—their only role in the narrative is as a foil for the Crusaders.

Riley-Smith goes for the one damn thing after another theory of political events (particularly for the Fourth Crusade’s sacking of Constantinople), which I certainly prefer to the deep-and-dark conspiracy or the really-clever-folk approaches.
Read More...
Was struck that, in his discussion of the Albigensian Crusade, the infamous quote, allegedly uttered by the Papal Legate when Beziers was taken,

"Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet."
(Kill them all. God will know His own)

was not mentioned. The Catholic Encyclopedia denies that the words were uttered (but they would, wouldn’t they?). Voltaire fails to mention it in his essay on the Albigensian Crusade, which is striking, given it would have been very much grist to his mill. (His claim that the Inquisition was a completely new thing is false, as the Orthodox Church in the Eastern Roman Empire had persecuted heresy, if not to the same extent and without the specific institution.)

I particularly dislike the tendency in modern academic analysis to draw some big line between how Europeans treat non-Europeans compared to how they treat each other, so as to establish a racism! analytic. It is a nonsense distinction, as there is no barbarity that Europeans inflicted on non-Europeans that they did not also inflict on other Europeans. Riley-Smith integrates Crusades against other Christians into his history well. Yet again, the sheer fury of the Papacy against Frederick II and his descendants is startling in its persistence and bitterness. The more I read of it, the more there seems to be some dimension missing in the histories.

In terms of my longstanding interests, I was struck by how few knights were needed to support viable (small) states in Outremer and the Latin Empire. Even though historical evolution certainly never stopped, European society from about 900 to about 1500 is knightly society. That is its strikingly specific and pervasively important social form. Right up to the time of Bayard, the “last knight”. The only real analogue being the samurai of Japan and the earlier Iranian azadan nobility, also known as dehgans. The mamluks of Egypt may have had even more intense training and Ottoman sipahis of Turkey equivalent intensity of training. They like the jagadirs of India and the bannermen of Q’ing China, were allocated income from peasants to support themselves. But such jagir, iqta or timar allocations were various forms of revocable tax farming. They were not inheritable property rights in land, or in peasant labour, but temporary and revocable property rights in the tax extracted from the peasants on the land. Such warrior groups did not produce the sense of identity both socially and across time (e.g. lineage) of the knights and the samurai. A contemporary Arab commentator, Usamah ibn Munqidh noted the high status of the knights:

all pre-eminence belongs to the horseman. They are in truth the only men who count. Theirs it is to give counsel; theirs to render justice.

Hence the lack of genuine equivalent of chivalry and bushido among the other mounted warrior groups other than the pre-Islamic Iranians. Or of the heraldry of Latin Christendom and of Japan. There was some take up of the idea of heraldry by Muslim warriors as a result of their interaction with the Franj, but it died out because it lacked the required social matrix to support it.

Their social arrangements also did not encourage anywhere near the same attention to the productivity of the land, or provision of public goods to peasants (such as court services, including delineation of property rights: also a feature of samurai Japan). It is hardly surprising that the states of Outremer showed more structural persistence and treated their (largely Muslim) peasants better than neighbouring Muslim states. In the horrified words of Ibn Jubayr:

Upon leaving Tibin (near Tyre), we passed through an unbroken skein of farms and villages whose lands were efficiently cultivated. The inhabitants were all Muslims, but they live in comfort with the Franj—may God preserve us from temptation! Their dwellings belong to them and all their property is unmolested. All the regions controlled by the Franj in Syria are subject to this same system: the landed domains, villages, and farms have remained in the hands of the Muslims. Now, doubt invests the heart of a great number of these men when they compare their lots to that of their brothers living in Muslim territory. Indeed, the latter suffer from the injustice of their coreligionists, whereas the Franj act with equity.

(So, Ibn Jubayr concludes, they have to be smashed; the more things change …)

The way the states of Outremer and the Latin Empire were set up (come to that, the way William the Bastard set up his new kingdom) very much show that the model “in people’s heads” was some idea of vassalage and land-for-service. Naturally, the areas where the system “just growed” had rather more complex arrangements (not least because of Roman law survivals, such as allods). Similarly, which realm service was owed to for a particular fief was not up for grabs (except in the sense that territory always is). But, even given the normal messiness of reality, the underlying ideas are clear enough in what folk did.

But it is precisely because Riley-Smith has such a high factual comment, that one can be struck by such things. It is a very informative history.

ADDENDA Re-reading my review, I realise I did noy mention a particularly worthy aspect of Riley-Smith's book, his treatment of the persistence of the crusading impulse into the C16th. Henry the Navigator and Isabella of Castile were both crusaders and saw their exploration efforts as attempts to outflank Islam. Efforts which were, of course, stunningly successful. We should read the beginning of the "Age of Exploration" not backwards from its effects but forwards from its motivating impulses. (Always an issue in history. of course.)

The Secret History of 9/11

The documentary The Secret History of 9/11 details the manifold decision (and particularly bureaucratic) failures that led up to 9/11. George W. Bush’s infamous seven minutes of doing nothing in front of the Florida classroom actually makes him one of the quicker reacting decision-makers. (And he did go on to deliver a remarkable speech to Congress.)

The Clinton Administration had previously dithered and scrupled. The federal bureaucracies did not communicate well (or sometimes at all). The new Bush Administration wasn’t really interested (and was new). There was a persistent pattern of inertia. Notably, after the attack happened, regarding Iraq, which had been the Defence Dept Middle East focus for 10 years under three Administrations.

The screw-ups on the day itself can be summarised as peacetime. It was the sluggish reaction of peace-time bureaucracies. The doco makes much of crucial 10-15 minute delays, but they are what happen when folk have peace-time presumptions. Particularly given the continental US has not suffered a serious attack from foreign forces since 1812.

Oh, and the 9/11 conspiracy theories are really, really stupid. But we knew that. (Not to mention involving amazing and pervasive levels of contempt for others.) The documentary makes the post-occupation planning and other failures in Iraq, and the Katrina screw-ups, all make more sense simply from being a not-very-competent Administration. The old analytical principle of given a choice between a conspiracy and a screw-up, pick the screw-up works again.

Property is always with us

Some pictures from 1984 North Korea. One the great lies of Leninism was that it abolished private property in the means of production: it just turned the state and all it controlled into the property of the ruling group. In North Korea, the Kim dynasty effectively owns the people too.

No system abolishes property rights, they merely re-assign them or otherwise define them more or less precisely. Moreover, in terms of analysis of behaviour, it is economic property rights (who controls use of an attribute) that matters, rather than legal property rights (who is said to own the attribute).

If you do not think that is an important distinction, try and explain theft and black markets without it. Or slaves buying their freedom. Or property rights existing in hunter-gatherer societies.

So “government” does not have property rights, they adhere in the officials making the decisions (and, if you doubt that, try and write a cheque against “your” money held by government). Hence Leninism turns things into the property of the ruling elite, and Stalinism into the property of the autocrat.
Read More...
The various revolutions in transport technology since the second half of the C19th have led to reconceptions of urban property rights. Rail, trams and cars had encouraged the growth of residential-only neighbourhoods. From 1910s, buses and trucks made industry, commerce and apartments more unpredictably mobile, which led to the creation of zoning (pdf) to protect the amenity of the residential neighbourhood, upheld in a key 1926 US Supreme Court decision. The growth of freeways in the 1950s and 1960s led to another wave of zoning. (Restrictions on property rights can actually increase the value of particular attributes).

There is a key distinction here. Zoning to protect the amenity of existing residential neighbourhoods is one thing, zoning to control the creation of new residential neighbourhoods quite another. If one takes the attribute suitable for housing and shares it between the landowner and officials, it is not hard to see that land-for-housing will be underprovided (i.e. supplied less than there is demand for). Particularly as increasing housing land scarcity drives up the value of housing land, leading to more revenue for officials to use (through rates, land taxes, stamp duty, etc), more value for the houses of existing homeowners (who vote and like their house values to rise) and more political donations (from developers who need political access to get development approvals). So one has both increased transaction costs (which will mean less such transactions) and given decision-power to folk who do not get the full benefit of use of individual land blocks but who get lots of benefits from restricting land use.

Welcome to the real world of regulation.

If one restricts entry to a market, particularly a basic market like land, it is not the rich and privileged who suffer. Consider one of the nastier cases of cultural imperialism in Oz, the Equal Pay Case of 1965-66 which imposed on the indigenous workers in the pastoral industry a mode of employment—permanent full-time work—that indigenous Australians had had no role in developing and which did not reflect their work habits or levels of productivity. (Those who are very big on endorsing cultural difference are likely to be outraged at the suggestion here that culture made a difference.) After this sudden, imposed, immediate assimilation, indigenous employment in the pastoral industry collapsed, massively increasing welfare dependence with consequences that still affect (pdf) outback indigenous communities.

Similarly, restricting access to land screws over renters and people trying to enter the home-owning market: basically, the poorer folk in society.

But, never mind the consequences, feel the good intentions.

One does see a certain amount of commentary—generally based on David Ricardo’s analysis of rents and Henry George’s analysis of land taxes—that land is some special case, usually based on some lazy notion of land being “fixed”. Land has alternative uses whose value can shift depending on rules and technology. For example, the development of canning and refrigerated transport depressed the value of farming land in Britain because meat could now be supplied to British tables from North America, Argentina and Australasia. Whatever the sense in taxing the unimproved value of land a la Henry George, there is no sense in treating property rights in land as some analytical or moral special case.

Since 1973 (pdf), the cost of building a house in Oz’s major cities has gone up at or less than the rate of inflation (that is seven-to-eightfold depending on the city: the CPI went up 8.4 fold from 1973 to 2003). That is because house building is a highly competitive and efficient industry.

From 1973 to 2003, the price of housing land in Melbourne went up 16fold, in Perth 18fold, in Brisbane 19fold, in Sydney 51fold and in Adelaide 70fold.

Pick which of the two components is most controlled by government. But remember, those metro planners are from the government and they’re here to help you.

We can see how much land-for-housing is not a special case from looking at licensing of taxi cabs. There, regulatory control over the number of taxis has exactly the same effect in raising the price of taxi plates that regulatory control of land use has on house prices. Indeed, a taxi plate in Melbourne has about the same value as a median house. A similar effect can be seen in New York. In the words of one recent article:

New York City's medallion system, established in 1937 during the Great Depression in response to a ballooning number of unregulated taxis, artificially capped the number of cabs on the road, to what is now about 13,000. … The May 2009 price for an individual medallion, those held by owner-operators, was $568,000. The cost of a corporate medallion was $744,000.

Restrict access to a basic resource like land, and one creates a more unfair, unequal and conflict-ridden society.

A point that has very wide applicability. Consider the work of Hernando de Soto (whose work is hated by the usual suspects, who wilfully miss his point, though it is possible the doesn’t quite understand the full implications himself: or maybe he does). The burden of his work is that the greater the level of official discretion, the higher the transaction costs, the poorer the society. Consider the difference between Latin America and North America. Latin American cities are typically a century or more older than North American cities as European foundings, but Latin America is a lot poorer.

Pause for joke:

American: why do you Mexicans hate us gringoes so much?
Mexican: because you stole half our country. And, what’s more, you stole the half with all the paved roads.

North America got British institutions, which have low official discretions and low transaction costs (including well-defined and protected general property rights). Latin American got Iberian institutions, which have high official discretions, high transaction costs (where it can take 300 days adjusted by bribes to get the needed official approvals to start a business: the same process in Miami might take a day) and poorly defined and protected property rights (unless you are currently well-connected politically).

So North America got the paved roads.

And it is a continuing problem across the developing world—for example, problems in the Indian Dept of Motor Vehicles. That’s without considering the disaster that is the interaction between foreign aid and African government.

Pause for joke:

An African Minister for Infrastructure visits an Asian colleague. Who lives in a magnificent riverside mansion.
“How can you afford this magnificent house on your salary?” the African Minister asks.
The Asian minister takes him to the front window and points to the large bridge across the river.
“See that bridge? Half of it mine,” says the Asian Minister.
A couple of years later, the Asian Minister for Infrastructure visits his African colleague. Who lives in a magnificent new riverside palace. It is huge.
“How can you afford this magnificent resident on your salary?” asks the Asian Minister asks.
The African minister takes him to the front window and points across the river.
“See that bridge?” he asks
The Asian Minister looks along the river, completely puzzled.
“I don’t see any bridge” he says.
“Yes,” says the African Minister, “all of it mine”.

(Which is the difference between Africa and Asia. In Asia, you actually get the bridge.)

Making the regulator also a producer is a recipe for bad outcomes. Thus command economies had much worse environments than market economies because production and regulation were controlled by the same decision-makers. So regulators had much less interest in controlling the wasting of the public domain in air and water by producers (i.e. controlling the attribute “tends to cause pollution”) because the folk making the final decisions for each were the same folk.

The problems were made worse by the decision-makers being answerable to no one else, but the conflict of interest involved in being both regulator and producer is clear enough. Thus that Ministers of Education are both the largest providers of schooling services and the regulators of the same is the biggest single source of failure in school policy (corrupting both the public and private school sectors, the point folk often don’t get). Though it is remarkable the number of folk who would agree that Collingwood taking over the AFL or Manly the ARL is patently silly yet for whom government schooling is entirely unproblematic. (The Ministers-are-magical theory of education—because being voted into office solves all such problems: just like with metropolitan planning.)

Often the denial of property rights is just a cover for their exertion (real or attempted). Thus public broadcasters such as the ABC are really owned by their staff who gain wider support by ensuring that it has a loyal audience precisely because it does not reflect the range of views of the national community who notionally own it (via their agent the government) and who certainly pay for it.

Similarly, one sees the attempt to appropriate public debate by defining acceptable and unacceptable opinion (the rednecks have no speech rights theory of public debate). An attempt to own the terminology, in Yoram Barzel's terms. In particular, racism is used as a term of differentiation and disenfranchisement. For 30 years, it was used to deny the wider voting public here in Oz any say over migration policy via bipartisanship. More recently, we will decide who comes here has been the slogan of re-enfranchising the public (so is, of course, branded as racism by those who have lost control over migration policy).

Well-defined property rights mean richer societies. They also mean less violence. Hunter-gatherer societies have much higher rates of violence than agrarian societies, because ownership of farms (and the reduced mobility associated with farming life) increases what is potentially at risk for perpetrators of violence. Agrarian societies have much higher rates of violence than industrial societies partly because the web of property extends even further, but also because wealthier societies have more effective enforcement. (Though the seven century decline in rates of violence in England has reversed since around 1950, probably at least in part because of the reduction in consequences due to public housing and related trends).

The hunter-gatherer to agrarian shift is mainly about fixed property as such. A farm fixes a person in place and means that he or she has to get along with folk on a repeated basis. There is more at stake for them and more invested in continuing relationships. There are also other reasons for the dramatic long-term decline in levels of violence and cruelty, as Stephen Pinker discusses.

More generally, on the basis of patterns in existing societies, I would argue that societies tend to be less violent where property rights are better defined. (How one can get statistical data suitable for regressions etc on the latter is a bit difficult to see.) But it is obviously true that (1) property rights are more secure and better defined in developed democracies compared to developing countries and (2) developed democracies have much lower crime rates than developing countries. Bangalore is a classic case of violence from poorly defined and adjudicated property rights.

Organized crime exists on the difference between legal and economic property rights. If the state refuses to enforce ownership (by declaring it illegal) does not bother (as in Latin American slums) or does so sufficiently incompetently (due lack of clarity or poor adjudication of rights as in the Bangalore case) then the way is open for private enforcement of property rights. Hence the violence associated with black markets—markets where economic property rights exist without legal support.

It is also obviously true that property rights are not even close to the sole determinative factor in rates of violence—since crime rates vary from decade to decade and from country to country without any notable change in property rights as such. Such differences are about changes in the balance of benefits and costs, with how well property rights are defined being a major background factor in that.

The reason being that better defined property rights (1) mean less resources are "up for grabs" (the good fences make good neighbours point) and (2) the likely negative consequences of violence increase for the perpetrator.

Property rights can be reassigned, they can be more or less clearly delineated, they can be more or less secure. What they can’t be is completely abolished. Property will always be with us. It is just a matter of who whom?

Draft essay

I have drafted an essay entitled "the inevitability of property" looking at the application of the thinking of Harold Demsetz and Yoram Barzel to, in particular, the boundary between private and public action. I will be sending around for comment. If you want to be on the comment list, please email me (m w a r b y [at] m i r a [dot] n e t).

Medieval wisdom

Paul Romer’s idea of charter cities (at outlined in his TED talk here) has a certain wry amusement value for any medievalist, since “charter cities” is simply a variation on how medieval rulers created cities as economic hubs. The notion was, quite straightforwardly, to create the situation where economic activity could take place that would not occur in the rural areas that were otherwise the norm. This was particularly so in medieval England, with its boroughs operating under royal charters run by corporations. The self-governing city, generating its own laws and institutions was very much a feature of medieval Europe, particularly northern Italy. Venice was, in some ways, the Hong Kong of its time: the stand-out institutional success. (I find attempts to dismiss the success of Hong Kong as some one-off freak quite ahistorical.)

Gen. Petraeus in his “Surge” in Iraq pulled US troops out of the “firebases” and put them into the local communities. The idea was security was security for people in the area: it was something you could not create and maintain unless you had ongoing connections to those people. So that they told you stuff, you knew what was going on and you provided the security services they actually needed and wanted. This was simply a version of what Commonwealth forces had done in Borneo, with their patrols living and working in the local villages and the Brits had done in Oman. The use and expansion of pre-existing connections was also part of the Commonwealth success in the Malayan Emergency.

These are versions of the medieval approach to establishing law-and-order: local lord/knight with a range of connections to the local populace and a long-term incentive for law and order (since dead or de-propertied peasants were not very productive). We know this worked better than other arrangements, since Arab chronicler Ibn Jubayr commented on how much better off Muslim peasants were under “Franj” rule than Muslim rule (the latter being based on warriors with revocable tax-rights rather than the inheritable land ownership of Western knights). The trick was long-term incentives. It is that lack of long-term perspectives that Paul Collier notes as a central problem in the regular failure of post-conflict reconstruction: the need, in his words, to move from the politics of plunder to the politics of hope.

The representative principle (electing folk to represent you) is a medieval idea: from Alfonso IX of Leon and Castile, Simon de Montfort, and Edward I. But it was built on existing structures—bishops and lords were already, and continued to be, members of the deliberative assemblies. So the assemblies worked because they reflected how the societies actually worked.

Clearly, they evolved over time but they started in a place that worked for those societies at that time. A model that has been sadly overlooked for Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which could have so done with a “Council of Sheiks” as an “upper house”, so that governance is connected to how things operate on the ground, not some merely theoretical notion of how things ought to be. As Paul Collier points out in his TED talk on the “bottom billion” the empirical evidence is that electoral competition is bad for poor governance resource-economies but checks and balances on power are good. A “Council of Sheiks” provides the potential for checks and balances connected to how things actually are on the ground.

The medieval period is the basis of Western civilisation: the most successful civilisation in human history. It is a period of major successes and achievements from a very bleak beginning. There are many lessons and benefits to be taken from it. Particularly for societies still locked into “tribal” (i.e. kinship and network lineages) patterns since they have rarely, if ever, experienced rulership as other than some version of predatory autocracy. Centuries of disparaging of medieval experiences, of talking as if it was just the “dark time” between the Classical period and modern revival, misses a lot of potentially useful ideas.

ADDENDA: Folk sometimes make a very big deal about the Taliban having a secure area to operate from in Pakistan's North-West Territories. But, during the Dark Ages, the Norse raiders going a-viking had secure areas to raid from. The solution was to build up local defenses, forcing them to operate in bigger groups that could be brought to battle and destroyed, such as at Ethadun, Clontarf and Stamford Bridge.

Or co-opt them as the new defenders. As was done in Iraq with the Sons of Iraq.

The Crusades Through Arab Eyes

Amin Maalouf’s The Crusades Through Arab Eyes starts off with an Arab description of the barbarism and savagery of the high point of the Franj invasions (as the Muslims called the Crusades), the capture, sack and slaughter of Jerusalem. Precisely because it is from the Arab/Muslim perspective, it is a striking reminder of how savage the Western crusaders could be.

Then comes the first false note

The sack of Jerusalem, starting point of the millennial hostility between Islam and the West … (p.iv).

The book concludes on the same note (p.266):

And there can be no doubt that the schism between these two worlds dates from the Crusades …

This is complete crap. After all, how did Palestine get to be Muslim in the first place? Indeed, how did Palestine, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Turkey, Albania, Bosnia, Spain—all previously Christian lands—get to be Muslim? By conquest of Arab (or later Turkish) armies in the name of Islam. Less than thirty years before the sack of Jerusalem, the main field army of the Eastern Roman Empire had been crushed at Manzikert and Turkish warriors under the banner of Islam had occupied most of Anatolia, all the way to the Aegean Sea, setting up the Sultanate of Rum (Rome) to make clear their occupation of (yet more) Roman lands.

The border between Christendom and Islam had wavered back and forth after the initial Islamic surge which had reached as far as major raids into France, one of which was famously defeated at Tours by the grandfather of Charlemagne. Sicily had recently been recovered. The border in Spain fluctuated back and forth.

It used to be said that the attitude of the Soviet leadership was

what is ours is ours and what is yours is negotiable.

Muslims perfected that outlook 13 centuries earlier. After all, the high point of Islamic territorial expansion was not even close to being reached in 1099. Maalouf records the horror of a noted Islamic traveller (Ibn Jubayr), visting Palestine a century after the Franj occupation had begun, that Muslims would ever stoop to remaining where unbelief ruled (Pp iii-iv).

Yet the rest of the work is a very informative and engaging rendition of the Crusaders from Arab perspectives. Maalouf tells the Crusades in the Levant as an exciting story, filling out the reports of Arab and other Muslim chroniclers via Western scholarship on the Crusades. He conveys particularly well the homicidal religious bigotry of the various waves of Franj crusaders (a homicidal religious bigotry which later became a point of frustration and despair for the resident Franj of the Crusader states). It makes understandable the second part of the concluding sentence of the book I quoted above

…deeply felt by the Arabs, even today, as an act of rape.

Though one wonders about a culture inclined to angst over things that happened 950 years ago, done by folk whose descendants were expelled over 700 years ago—the phrase get a life! comes to mind.
Read More...
But, of course, as the epilogue of the book makes clear (p.265), the image of the Crusades is now also about Israel, also seen as a crusading state—one division of the Palestine Liberation Army is named after Saladin’s great victory over the Crusaders, another after the Mamluk’s great victory over the Mongols. But Israel-as-crusader-state is an analogy that misleads as much as it informs.

I was also struck by how congruent the pictures conveyed of events and, even more, particular characters could be by Christian and Muslim chroniclers. So a Muslim chronicler (Ibn al-Athir) describes the 1204 sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade as one of the most reprehensible acts of history. While the renditions of history’s most famous Kurd, Salāh al-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb (Saladin), and everyone’s favourite Franj villain, Reynald de Chatillon, from Arab chroniclers seem very similar to that one gets from Christian chroniclers.

It is perhaps typical of the man that aspects of Frederick II’s character which Muslims who met or wrote about him clearly found engaging were precisely what worried a lot of Christian chroniclers about Stupor Mundi.

Maalouf is far from shy in pointing out Muslim failures and problems. Hence Malouff writes (p.218)

Saladin had the same immediate successor as all the great Muslim leaders of his time: civil war.

He makes the point even more explicitly in his epilogue. Having (quite reasonably) dwelt on the homicidal untrustworthiness, the ignorance, the lack of culture of the Franj invaders in the body of the text, Maalouf also makes the point that the Franj immediately set up state institutions in their Crusader states that clearly worked better than the political arrangement of the Muslims (p.262):

Nothing of the sort existed in the Muslim states. Every monarchy was threatened by the death of its monarch, and every transmission of power provoked civil war … Let us note that in the Arab world the question is still on the agenda, in scarcely altered terms, in the latter part of the twentieth century.

Nor were observers at the time unaware of the contrast. Ibn Jubayr may have been horrified by Muslims accepting rule by infidels, but he also wrote (p.263):

Upon leaving Tibin (near Tyre), we passed through an unbroken skein of farms and villages whose lands were efficiently cultivated. The inhabitants were all Muslims, but they live in comfort with the Franj—may God preserve us from temptation! Their dwellings belong to them and all their property is unmolested. All the regions controlled by the Franj in Syria are subject to this same system: the landed domains, villages, and farms have remained in the hands of the Muslims. Now, doubt invests the heart of a great number of these men when they compare their lots to that of their brothers living in Muslim territory. Indeed, the latter suffer from the injustice of their coreligionists, whereas the Franj act with equity.

As Maalouf notes,

In the Arab East, the judicial procedures were more rational, but the arbitrary power of the prince was unbounded. The development of merchant towns, like the evolution of ideas, could only be retarded as a result.

Of course, the contrast Ibn Jubayr drew between Franj and Muslim states in C12th applies even more emphatically between Israel and Arab states in the C21st. Similarly, reading about the Assassins, or batanis

those who adhere to a faith other that that which they profess in public (p.102)

as Maalouf calls them, using a contemporary usage, one is powerfully reminded of al-Qaeda.

While Maalouf notes the twin threat of the Franj and the Mongols clearly leads to a hardening of Muslim attitudes and a turning inwards, he also notes that Arab civilisation was already dwelling on past glories before the Crusaders arrived and that, while Arabs retained religious authority, political power in the Arab world was already held overwhelming by non Arabs (mainly Turks). Bernard Lewis once cruelly observed to a Jordanian friend:

Excuse me, but you've got your history wrong. The Turks got rid of the Crusaders. The British got rid of the Turks. The Jews got rid of the British. I wonder who is coming here next.

Maalouf further notes that the West found the Crusaders a greatly enlivening and learning experience, taking back all sorts of ideas and techniques that enriched its civilisation. By contrast, the Arab world saw the Franj as appalling barbarian invaders from which nothing was to be learned. Even Ibn Jubayr saw the benefits of Franj rule as a threat to Islam, rather something to learn from (an attitude that is still very common).

I can certainly recommend Maalouf’s highly readable book as enriching one’s understanding of the Crusades in the Levant and, sadly, contemporary Middle Eastern politics.

China Transformed

R. Bin Wong’s China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience is the first of the major three recent “California School” studies, and much the best. (The others are Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the making of the modern world economy – reviewed here – and Hobson’s The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation.)

Bin Wong’s central point is that Chinese history had its own dynamics, and one distorts one’s understanding of those dynamics if you import models of politics and state-building applicable in Europe to China. As he says, it is much more useful to understanding if one also looks at Europe through Chinese perspectives rather than only the other way around.

Bin Wong is particularly good at elucidating the patterns of Chinese history and the history of the Chinese state. He differentiates between the rulership structures of medieval and post-medieval European history and those of Chinese history very effectively. Nevertheless, reading Bin Wong’s discussion of the development of imperial Chinese rule (an effectively a one-rulership civilisation) I was struck by the parallels with imperial Roman rule (Europe’s only experience of one-rulership civilisation). For example, the Roman bread-and-circuses dole was an even more elaborate welfare arrangement than Imperial Chinese granaries. The Roman state kept population registers much like the Chinese state did. It showed the same reluctance to raise taxes. Prior to its Christianisation, it had a remarkably similar religious policy. If the history of the Mediterranean basin had been repeated attempts to recreate and improve the Roman Empire of the Antonines, then the resultant state would have probably looked very similar to the late Imperial Chinese state, with Stoicism perhaps playing the role of Confucianism.
Read More...
This thought-experiment points to a major analytical difference. I am more sceptical of cultural explanations because of, for example, parallel evolutions of knightly Latin Christendom and samurai Japan, than Bin Wong is.

Bin Wong does pick up on the far greater institutional variety of Europe compared to China and the importance of jurisdictional competition in driving state-formation in Europe. I rather liked his description of the Chinese social order as ‘fractal’ (looking much the same at each level) with much less sharp differentiations between state and society than Europe developed. The Imperial Chinese state, in its various dynastic iterations, was basically concerned with one problem – how do you run an agrarian empire. As Bin Wong makes clear, they got to be very good at it. European rulers, by contrast, had to deal with a much wider range of challenges and, as a result, Europe developed much more flexible social arrangements. That Chinese Imperial rule had less need to mobilise consent and negotiate with organised domestic interest groups also put limits on ability to respond to unexpected challenges. While it is perhaps a bit of an exaggeration to say that Qing China showed all the institutional variety of a petri dish, it is true that, unlike Japan, Qing China had to both attempt to industrialise AND create from scratch appropriate institutional arrangements to mobilise social resources in new ways.

Another parallel I noticed with Roman history, is that the problems the Qing state had from the 1840s onwards with the Western capitalist Powers were very similar to the difficulties the Eastern Romans had with the Italian merchant city-states. In both cases, the society the bureaucratised autocracy ruled were central elements of trading systems whose citizens were not themselves major conveyors of trade. In both cases, a series of decisions and omissions led to them being at a perennial disadvantage in dealing with the aggressive, commercially expansive, foreigners whose commercial interests very much had the ear of rulers (in Venice’s case, the merchants were the rulers).

European states operated on higher levels of both coercion and consent than China. But higher levels of provision of public goods requires higher levels of coercion: public goods being based on the state’s capacity to compel contribution and punish transgression.

It seemed to me Bin Wong could have more fruitfully drawn a compare-and-contrast with the similar experiences, yet strikingly different trajectories, of China and Japan from the mid C19th. In the 1840s, China is humiliated in the Opium Wars. In 1854, Japan is forced to open by Commodore Perry and similar humiliations follow. From 1851-1868, China is ravaged by internal revolts (the Taiping and Nian rebellions) with some Muslim rebellions persisting until 1877. Up to 1877 Japan suffers internal revolts (particularly the Boshin War) ending only with the suppression of Saigo Takamori’s rebellion (fictionalised in The Last Samurai) in 1877. Yet, by 1895 Japan is a modern power able to defeat China in the Sino-Japanese War, a take-off even more blatant with Japan’s defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War, where China was simply territory to fight over.

All the Japanese had to do was industrialise: they already had the institutions appropriate to mobilise social resources, merely adding a Western “gloss” on them. The problem with Qing China, as Bin Wong manages to make clear (though a contrast with Japan would have made it much more effectively), is that, although the Qing government rose to the fiscal challenge much better than I realised, it could not manage the institutional challenge anywhere near as well.

Bin Wong also conspicuously fails to grapple with the demographic costs of the Chinese Revolution (or, indeed, of events in Chinese history generally). Death tolls in the millions or tens of millions pass without comment or reference, which is not only a moral but an analytical failing since such experiences underpin the power of appeals to order that Chinese rulers regularly use. Though Bin Wong does make clear that, in the context of Chinese history, Mao was much less of an innovator than Western observers, using Western frames of reference, grasped. (Mao’s famous comment that he hadn’t changed China, just a few places around Beijing, may have been more perspicacious than folk realised.)

I was sad to see a passing mention (p.286) to the widespread myth in academe that the welfare state is being dismantled, the common confusing of adjustment with retreat. I am also sceptical about the notion of a 'theory' of revolution. One gets regime collapses (which come in all forms) which then lead to a wide variety of outcomes (regime replacment, regime transformation, state replacement ...) that trying to pick out enough specificity and commonality to get a coherent 'theory' of revolution seems a doubtful exercise to me.

Still, an extremely informative book I greatly enjoyed. I heartily recommend it if you want to better understand the patterns of Chinese history.

How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization

Thomas Woods’s How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization is the good news (and only the good news) about the Catholic contribution to Western civilisation.

Which is enormous, as Woods has no problem demonstrating. The Catholic Church dominated the intellectual activity of Latin Christendom from Late Antiquity to the Reformation. It maintained huge scholarly, scientific, educational and charitable efforts during and after that time. It was a remarkable, trans-jurisdictional institution with no real equivalent in any other civilisation. Of course it was central to the construction of Western civilisation. Indeed, I would argue strongly that the squabbling alliance between (usually Germanic) warlord and Catholic Church is precisely how Western civilisation was born, after the collapse of Classical civilisation.

And Woods does very useful service lucidly detailing the extent of the contribution as there has been—as he quite rightly points out—a fairly longstanding pattern of disparaging the Catholic contribution. A pattern that was originally Protestant-inspired, more recently secular.
Read More...
He starts with a notorious hard case—Gallileo. As he points out, Gallileo is the case everyone “knows” of an obscurantist Church blocking the path of science. In fact, the Gallileo case stands out because it is the only significant case of the Church taking action against a prominent scientist. Gallileo was an obstinate curmudgeon who got into trouble by going beyond the evidence people had at the time, despite many friendly warnings (from the Pope down), and wandering into theologian territory. If he had pushed the heliocentric theory as a hypothesis, he would have been completely safe. Instead, he argued that it was obviously true (even though he could not answer various objections, such as why we observe no parallax motion by the stars) and that Scripture would just have to be reinterpreted to fit. (Which was not so much bad theology—it was quite in line with various authorities from St Augustine on—as premature.) So he got smacked.

A single case which is more than balanced, as Woods can easily show, by the enormous contributions to science, not merely by Catholics but by Catholic churchmen. The Jesuits, for example, included many avid, successful and pioneering astronomers.

Woods further argues, using the work of Jaki and others, that Christianity (and particularly Catholicism) was far more science-positive than the base ideas of any other civilisation. That many Churchmen, starting in the medieval period, developed many of the key ideas upon which Western science was built. That the Catholic notion of a rational, ordered Universe is basic to the scientific conception of the universe (and not a feature of the world-view of other civilisations). A case Woods puts lucidly and informatively.

But the sheer range of the Catholic contribution is striking. Monks preserving works from the past; the church creating the university; encouraging art and architecture (the medieval Cathedrals really are an amazing achievement); creating international law; laying the basis of economics (he has particular fun pointing out that Catholics developed and maintained a subjective theory of value while Protestants wandered down the cul-de-sac of the labour theory of value with all its errors); the development of charity (a very Christian idea); the influence of canon law; the development of Western morality.

And there is much of fascinating and revealing detail. Woods is surely quite right to point, for example, to the Christian impetus behind the abolition of gladiatorial combat. As he is correct to suggest Catholicism rose above the arid anti-emotionalism of Stoicism (p.172). (Except, of course, with sex: the influence of the Stoic antipathy to emotion and anything deemed to undermine rationality is particularly obvious in St Augustine on sex.) Catholic theology was much more open to the rights of non-Christians than folk generally realise.

Woods persistently writes with a strong positive gloss for Catholicism. Thus, early Christianity is Catholic. Even the 1277 Condemnations get a positive gloss—they encouraged innovative thinking (p.91). Apart from a passing reference to its number of victims being greatly exaggerated, we hear nothing of the Inquisition, or the burning of heretics. Historians of the common law might be surprised by his claim that canon law is the basis of all Western law (p.201). His positive gloss extends to the flight of fancy that Henry VIII’s suppression of the monastery aborted a nascent industrial revolution due to stopping monastic experiments in iron smelting (pp36ff).

Woods might have profitably asked why the case of Gallileo had such resonance. Which is surely because there was an Inquisition; the Church did burn heretics, and their books; there was an Index of Forbidden Books. It is easy to acquit the Church of the charge of being hostile to science. On the contrary, Catholicism was, fairly inarguably, the stand-out science-friendly religion. (In a way Orthodoxy clearly wasn’t while Creationism is a Protestant disease.) But it is equally easy to show the Church was hostile to intellectual freedom. Where the freedom to be Catholic is not at issue, the Catholic Church has frequently been an enemy to liberty. Indeed, there is clear evidence that priestly control over printing drove scientific publishing from Catholic to Protestant Europe: it was not theology but priestly power which made Protestant Europe more of a haven for scientific and other intellectual enquiry.

But the freedom to be Catholic does incorporate a lot of freedoms. Marrying the (opposite sex) person of your choice, for example. Woods makes some very sound points about the ways in which Catholic theology, particularly its opposition to infanticide and its morality of family life, were liberating for women—compared to what had previously been the case.

To understand what makes a civilisation distinctive, one has to have a good knowledge of other civilisations. (It is reassuring that he quotes Needham on Chinese science.)

To understand what something, even as pervasive as the Catholic Church, contributed to Western civilisation, you have to have a good knowledge of other participants and thus potential contributors. The latter in particular is where Woods falls down. It is unfortunate that, for example, he has a rather simple view of Machiavelli, writing as if The Prince simply represents his views and that he was not also the author of the Discourses.

More excessively, Woods claims that Western civilisation was essentially created by the Catholic Church. Did Germanic warlords have nothing to do with it?

It also makes one wonder how come we can recognise familiar patterns in the Persian Wars, five centuries before Christ? Did the activities of all those secular rulers make no contribution? How about Western civilisation’s persistent nature as one of competing jurisdictions? A geography of peninsulas and mountains: hard to unify, easy for trade and ideas to move around? Being a temperate zone farming civilisation? The striking similarities between samurai Japan and knightly Europe? The fact that he makes no real attempt to explore the different outcomes between Catholicism and Orthodoxy is particularly revealing, as their theological differences are relatively minor.

Then there is the retreat of Catholicism. Where does the Reformation come from? Did it have no influence? Where does the Enlightenment come from? Does it have no influence? Or is it all bad? Downhill all the way?

Which is what Woods is forced to argue—that the diminution of the role of the Catholic Church within Western civilisation has been a process of decline, the burden of his last chapter. He cites the usual suspects—art, literature, sexual licence. Even if one accepts that there has been cultural decline in those areas, the notion that it would have all been OK if the Catholic Church had retained its status is surely risible. The growth of knowledge has been so vast and so (in historical terms) rapid, some disorientation was surely inevitable. The growth of technology in some ways even more so—what does painting do once you have photography, films, cameras, etc is simply not a question with an obvious answer.

And there are a vast number of indicators outside those realms that surely suggest that it is not a story of decline at all. It is notable, for example, that anti-slavery agitation gets no mention, despite being profoundly Christian-inspired. Unsurprising, it being terribly Protestant and all. To take another obvious example, Western civilisation did not stop burning people alive because it became more Christian and Catholic, but because it became less so. Do we really want to say Catholic morality is the last word on the status of women? And so on.

It is particularly awkward that the achievements of science that Woods is so impressed with have been accelerating as the role of the Church has declined. As has Western civilisation's general intellectual dominance over other civilisations. Woods wants to argue that part of the Catholic Church’s basic contribution was to increase the ambit for non-religious thought and action and then give that thought and action a strictly subordinate role. Spot the little contradiction there.

But even one-sided books can be useful correctives. There is genuinely a pattern of disparaging, or being simply ignorant of, Catholic contributions to Western civilisation. How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization is an easy-to-read compendium of such contributions. As long as you remember that it is only the good news.

Conformity and dissent

A fanatic is a person who cannot change their mind and will not change the subject.
(Winston Churchill, attr.)

… they cannot change it, because they have no other subject. That is the nature of their crippled epistemology, without which they would not be fanatics.
Russell Hardin, elaborating (pdf).

Had a prolonged Aha! experience some time ago. Firstly, from a splendid book (Why Societies Need Dissent by Cass Sunstein) and secondly from a concept used in the book but taken from an article (The Crippled Epistemology of Extremism [pdf]).

Inklings of what Sunstein covers I had already worked out for myself in general terms, but he provides a much more precise vocabulary and backing from a slew of empirical studies I had no idea existed.

Hardin’s concept of crippled epistemology is used by Sunstein to good effect. What Hardin is concerned to provide is an explanation of fanaticism, Sunstein with the mechanisms (and dangers) of conformity.

On fanaticism
Hardin sees fanaticism as generally a group phenomenon. He starts with a theory of the acquisition of knowledge. One’s belief in the truth of X can depend on the rewards of counting X as true. Acquiring some knowledge can have considerable costs. Much of our knowledge is ‘happenstance’ or ‘byproduct’ knowledge that comes to us essentially free. Some knowledge is a ‘consumption good’ – its acquisition is pleasurable. We tend to rely greatly on others for knowledge.

Suppose you are always a big loser from normal politics. Loyalty (which is self-denying), voice (which has already failed) or exit are your options. If you choose exit, you may find a like-minded group. Over time, those with weaker commitment will tend to leave such a group, intensifying identification with particular beliefs and practices within the group. If the group becomes more isolated, both paranoid cognition (supposing the worst of those you are not in communication with) and sinister attribution (exaggerating the degree to which they are the target of attention) are likely to grow. Both these aid group loyalty while damaging the knowledge-acquisition of members. A crippled epistemology can then greatly aid group cohesion.
Read More...
Prosperity and democracy undermine extremism – by increasing the stake people have in the current situation, de-legitimising coercive politics and increasing the range of information available (particularly about alternative perspectives). Illiberal politics are required to sustain the crippled epistemology of extremism.

Suppressing knowledge is the route to power, strangely even the power of an idea, albeit a crippled and crippling one.

Sunstein summarises Hardin’s characterisation of fanatics as being people relying on a small subset of information mainly derived from fellow extremists.

Hardin’s account would be improved with the addition of some economics of communication and the power of commitment to a particular identity.

If you are committed to a particular view of yourself, there are large costs involved in acquiring knowledge that undermines that view. Refusal to pay those costs is understandable, but damages your knowledge acquisition. A group of like-minded people will tend to reinforce each other in such judgements. Sticking with the like-minded is inherently congenial, it being much less costly to communicate with each other on such matters than with outsiders (communication meaning two-way exchange; monologues and diatribes have no such costs, except in so far as they cut one off from information).

So, the group provides mutual authority and recognition while aiding and abetting the shared epistemological crippling.

Clearly, this is a model that applies rather more broadly than simple fanaticism

Group costs and individual benefits
Sunstein is interested in the remarkable human tendency to conform. Unchecked by dissent, conformity can have major negative consequences. Some empirical results he cites include:

highly contentious corporate boards tend to work better than consensual ones
investor clubs which are not socially-bonded work better

(in both these cases, conformity lowers earnings)

the "Bay of Pigs" disaster, a classic case of bright people being consensual in stupidity
Judges vote differently depending on who else in on a judicial panel with them
Conforming juries head towards extreme results.

Conformity – going along with what others apparently know – provides a good rule-of-thumb in the absence of personal knowledge or expertise but can deny public important information – so conformity carries group risks. In personal terms, it’s the other way around – conformity is a form of free-riding, dissent carries personal risks. Hence the problem – society benefits from behaviour which carries significant personal risks. Dissent is not always good (Hitler was a dissenter), but societies and institutions work better if dissent can operate.

Studies shows that overt self-confidence and firmness is highly persuasive and that unanimity is very powerfully persuasive. (One dissenting voice can have a very strong effect simply by breaking unanimity.) Also, out-group membership decreases information flows. Dissent counts a lot less, or information generally, if it comes from someone identified as an out-group member. (So, a differing propensity to identify members of one group – e.g. the left – than another – e.g. the right or ‘conservatives’ – does actually matter.)

(All this being the case, it is particularly damaging for professions or milieus allegedly involved in the pursuit or dissemination of knowledge to de-legitimise alternate points of view, regularly use group denigration or punish divergent views as showing some moral aberration or lack of personal worth.)

In explaining the behaviour patterns revealed by research and observed more generally, Sunstein uses two causal tendencies. First, we rely on others for information. Second, we want to have a good reputation.

Apart from conformity, Sunstein is particularly interested in group cascades – increasing waves of common belief or behaviour – and group polarisation – intensification of belief or attitudes via mutual reinforcement. He is ecumenical in his examples – one of the things I like about the book is the way he moves back and forth from ‘left’ to ‘right’ for his examples.

The various behavioural studies he cites produce some notable results. Such as the tendency towards collective conservatism – groups will remain committed to certain judgements or decisions even when members turn over. Or that many people will assent to propositions opposite to that which they apparently believe if confronted with a series of opinions that support the reversed view.

Persons of high social status or high confidence in their own views are less likely to conform. People who are frightened or confronted with a difficult judgment are more likely to conform. If there are financial rewards for getting it right, conformity decreases for easy judgments, increases for difficult ones (which is important for market behaviour). Conforming also tends to increase confidence in the conforming judgment. The number of public supporters for dominant opinion tends to increase conformity, though a single ‘voice of sanity’ has considerable power to reduce errors. Publicly-voiced and privately-held opinion can move in different directions (often to the majority in the former, to the minority in the latter, if the minority opinions are confidently put and not isolated voices). In ambiguous situations, expert opinion is much more likely to be followed if not openly questioned. It is also surprisingly easy to induce false confessions.

Sunstein discusses patterns of legal compliance and non-compliance, including a few striking examples – such as the 1988 US Toxic Release Act which led to a 45% decline in toxic releases from 1988 to 1995 by the simple expedient of requiring companies to publish their type & level of toxic releases.

Informed people can stop cascades. Cascades are less likely if people are rewarded for correct group decision. When conformity is rewarded, cascades and mistakes are more likely. Cascades can be informational (following what other people believe to be true) or reputational (following what other people believe to be right). Reputational rewards for conformity greatly increase the likelihood of cascades and errors.

(Aside: which means, of course, a milieu which deems some opinions as a sign of virtue, and others as a sign of wickedness, is highly likely to be conformist, produce cascades and be in error.)

If conformity is rewarded, early dissenters are particularly likely to be penalised, having a chilling effect on dissent in the future. Conformity and cascades reduce the procedural cost of decision-making but increase the risk of error.

Dissenters can be disclosers (people releasing into the public arena privately held information) or contrarians (a mixed blessing). It is not dissent per se but useful dissent which is of value. Senseless, hysterical, paranoid, hateful or dehumanising comment is not legitimised by being dissent. Freedom of speech is the best corrective to erroneous conformity and cascades.

Unlike many cascades, group polarisation operates through deliberation. But one can have polarisation entrepreneurs who mobilise people through polarisation (history is full of them; Milosevic in Serbia and Osama are classic contemporary examples).

Where groups are like-minded, they tend to polarise towards a more extreme manifestation of their like-mindedness. Like-minded people have a natural tendency to dwell on shared or common information. That sets up resonances, which increase confidence in common positions, encourage a shift towards more intensity (of belief and of content). The polarisation effect is magnified if both informational and reputational cascades are set up. It is further intensified if rhetorical advantage lies towards increased extremism (as it tends to, due to its greater ‘purity’).

Antecedent extremism and a sense of common group membership both increase the tendency to group polarisation. The easier group exit is, the more likely polarisation is as moderates will tend to leave. Opposed sub-groups tend to discourage polarisation.

Group information diversity strongly tends to aid better decisions, value diversity is more mixed as it can get in the way of group decision-making. (Which only matters if the group has a high need for common decision-making.)

Which is all very interesting, but why was I so impressed? Because it gives a basis for understanding issues I have been worrying at for some years.

I don’t like the term political correctness much. It runs together two different phenomena – evangelical niceness and opinion-bigotry – and, as a term, is a little too obviously a weapon in the culture wars. I coined the term moral vanity to try and pin down a certain type of behaviour and Club Virtue to identify an opinion hegemony. But neither comes with a useful heuristic, even though Club Virtue came from thinking of the economics of clubs, given the clear attempts to exclude moral legitimacy from dissenting opinion while mutually endorsing and displaying shared status as being of the virtuous. (A club is a public good – one which provides shared benefits – from which people can be excluded.)

Add in Hardin’s notion of a crippled epistemology – which, for example, clearly bedevils many academics, such as those discussed by Haynes and Klehr in In Denial and I have frequently observed among academic commenting on ‘economic rationalism’, ‘globalisation’ and ‘neo-liberalism’ – and the dynamics of conformity as outlined by Sunstein, and it all becomes much clearer.