Origins of the European Economy: a decline and rise

Michael McCormick’s Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce AD300-900 is like reading a rolling, scholarly detective story. McCormick marshals a wide range of evidence to give a picture of the decline and then the upward turn of trade in the period. I was particularly taken by the systematic examination of references to travellers in texts of the period. Though the use of ice-core data to provide evidence on levels of (mostly declining) metal production was notable as well.

What the book doesn’t do is provide a full picture of the European economy in the period. The study is very specifically about trade and communications.

It is clear that trade (and population) began to decline under the Roman empire from the third century onwards, well before the major barbarian incursions. The decline started in the western provinces, particularly the Atlantic littoral. (At first, the eastern economy improved, but then decline hit it as well.) The decline continued until about 750AD. A revival then sets in, but one flowing from western merchants. Indeed, the North Sea arc seems to show increasing trade from about 650AD. But the Carolingian revival is a revival from a low base. Trade never entirely disappeared, but was at a notably low level. (On the shipwreck-count evidence assembled by Hopkins, trade in the Western Mediterranean in the period 400-650AD was about 20% of the level it was in the 200BC-200AD period.)

There seems to be effectively a four-way interaction: the pagan/Christian North Sea arc, continental Latin Christendom, the Eastern Romans and Arab Islamic empire. Islam was, on balance, a stimulus to trade rather than, as Pirenne hypothesised, a barrier to it. The study brings out quite clearly the importance of the European slave trade – slaves were probably Europe’s main export: the Church regularly denounced the sale of Christians to infidels and the redemption of such Christians was a standard noble act. Low population meant that labour was in demand: labour-as-property that is.

The decline in trade and population is much more noted than explained. McCormick clearly regards the analysis as a work in progress. But it is striking the way it is very much post-Roman factors that lead the revival. The Northern Arc, Venice (which did not exist in the Roman era), Islam. Continental Europe revives when the Arnulfings (or, as the historians call them in honour of the greatest scion, the Carolingians) supplant the last of the Roman-successor Merovingian monarchs. The Eastern Romans sat athwart trade routes, and benefited from the upsurge, but conspicuously failed to participate outside their own boundaries. (Indeed, they were later to become dependant on Italian merchant cities for their seaborne trade.) McCormick certainly implies the Roman state itself may have been a significant factor in the economic decline, but does not assemble evidence to enable him to assert that confidently.

Origins of the European Economy is an engaging and informative study.

Protocols of Zion

Protocols of Zion is a documentary by very (US) liberal filmmaker Mark Levin. Mark Levin's specific politics are not mine, but his broadly humanist viewpoint is. While not a great film, it is both an informative and a depressing one.

9/11 has proved to be a great boost to the drear, vile forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, with claims being made that no Jews were killed in the attack on the Two Towers.

That anti-Zionism has become a staple of Western progessivism has provided ample cover for Jew-hatred to be given a new lease of life in the West, and for its virulence in the Arab and Muslim world to be overlooked or excused—since serious examination of the latter might imply that Israel has legitimate concerns and indeed, a legitimate reason to exist: the Jewish state being the only state in the world that apparently loses legitimacy the longer it exists and that increases its reputation for aggression the more it evacuates territories. The documentary has some particularly choice Jew-hatred excerpts from Arab TV and notes that Hamas's manifesto explicitly endorses the Protocols.

Watching the documentary reminded me of how much I have come to despise conspiracy theories. I have heard so many over the years, and they're all crap: conspiracy theories being much easier and cheaper to produce than actual effective conspiracies.

Among the Believers

V. S. Naipaul’s Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey is one of his famous travelogues. Originally published in 1981—but reissued after he won the Nobel Prize for literature—it chronicles his journey to Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia and then back to Iran in the period after the Iranian Revolution. So journeys in countries that are Muslim but not Arab.

Naipaul spends almost as much time conveying the conversations he has as describing what he sees. This is understanding through witnesses. Experiencing countries in the words of people who live there.

The casual Jew-hatred common in contemporary Islam comes across quite strongly. Even more remarkable given that Naipaul was travelling in countries with few, if any, Jews. A sad feature of globalisation—hateful images of The Jew resonate in places without any actual Jews.

Reading the book 25 years after it was published, it is a bit startling to realise who the Muslim Malay youth leader Anwar Ibrahim, or the rising Muslim activist Abdur Rahman Wahid are.

Naipaul is wrestling with what Islam means to people. A man between cultures himself—ethnically Indian, Caribbean (Trinidad) by birth, British by culture—Naipaul is very alert to the problems and ambiguities of identity. Naipaul’s own comments and analysis is more a matter of passing comments: one does not get long analytical passages.

In Iran, Islam means looking to an Arabian source of righteousness, not the Iranian past. But that is true of all the converted realms:

It turns out now that the Arabs were the most successful imperialists of all time: since to be conquered by them (and then to be like them) is still, in the minds of the faithful, to be saved (p.164).

In Pakistan, the state withers but the faith endures: the faith that is the endlessly sought, but never achieved, solution to the failures of the state. In Malaysia, Islam means trying to overcome the lassitude of the Malay village and a solace to the replacement of the timeworn patterns of village life by a strange and disorienting modernity. In Indonesia, Islam is both the latest layer over a Hindu and Buddhist past and a force attempting to sever all connection to that past, depending whether one is taking a Javanist or a purifying approach to Islam. In both Malaysia and Indonesia, it is Islam and the village that is Naipaul’s main focus.

Not a man of faith himself, Naipaul nevertheless has a Western perspective that is ultimately derived from Christianity. Christ’s message was that salvation was personal, a matter of personal choice. The Kingdom of Heaven was not of this world. The West is a civilisation in which the Reformation and the Enlightenment have also occurred. So religion is not, except in a very limited sense, a source of social solutions, of public policy.

Islam is a much more political faith, in the full sense. Muhammad preached about achieving a righteous society and became a ruler. So Islam can be seen as a source of political solutions. This perplexes Naipaul. He sees the notion of Islam as a solution to political problems, to social problems, as belief without a centre: a fabric of hopes, even delusions, without sustaining substance. Islam is seen as the source of social order, but the problems of social order now extend beyond what Islam covers. Muhammad was the conduit of the Word of God. But the conduit of God died, so how are issues to be settled? A problem that divided Islam from its earliest years—the division in Islam between Sunni and Shi’a is over the proper successor to the conduit.

Naipaul sees the Shia obsession with the death of Ali and his sons as an endless and empty recycling of emotions over a receding and unchangeable past. But, he notes, the Sunnis equally see a few decades in Arabia in the C7th as some perfection that must be endlessly aimed at recapturing. So the West changes and develops, but Islam ages (p.295). The belief that Islam is the basis for social order and the capstone of God’s Revelation is a great burden.

This late twentieth-century Islam appeared to raise political issues. But it had the flaw of its origins – the flaw that ran right through Islamic history: to the political issues it raised it offered no political or practical solution. It offered only faith. It offered only the Prophet, who would settle everything – but who had ceased to exist. This political Islam was rage, anarchy. (Pp 411-2)

(This nine years before Bernard Lewis published his famous essay.) And it is rage that Naipaul encounters again and again: not a personal rage directed at him, but a rage at things not being how they ought. But fervent hopes without resolution are a great source of rage. (Jew-hatred is part of that rage—Israel as cosmic insult.)

The Teheran hostage crisis (which still poisons US-Iranian relations) brings Naipaul back to Iran, where his journey began. He is struck how the belief in a past best-time by Islamic revolutionaries and his communist Iranian guide (who believes that the Soviet Union from 1917-1953 was a pinnacle of human achievement) are, in a sense, interchangeable revolutions. Both backward-looking rages over injustice.

Naipaul is a master of English narrative, so the reader gets carried along by delightfully clear and simple language. Naipaul is also free of modern cant. He is direct and unapologetic in what he sees, asks and reports. Among the Believers is a book that is of a time and place, but will not date. And which still informs.

The Roots of Modernity: the global path to now

If am asked what folk should read to understand global history, part of my answer would be anything by Angus Maddison.

Growth and Interaction in the World Economy: The Roots of Modernity is a recent lecture by Maddison summarising his work on long-run economic development. In it he defends the proposition—against critics such as Pomeranz and Frank—that European economic ascendancy begins building in the C11th, rather than being a transitory C19th phenomenon ultimately based on the exploitation-of-the-Americas “windfall”. He also denies that either Europe or Asia was caught in a “Malthusian trap”—that is, not all economic growth prior to the Industrial Revolution was consumed by population increase.

Maddison has been a pioneer of trying to measure historical economic activity. Even if only rough estimates are possible, to identify the relative scale of phenomena is a very useful exercise for historical understanding.

The brief monograph is divided into four parts—how and why did the West get rich, the European transformation of the Americas, the interaction with Asia, the development of Africa. While acknowledging the huge economic take-off after 1820, he is at pains to demonstrate a broad range of slow, but steady, improvement going back centuries. For example, he provides some detail on how the scientific revolution of the C17th led to all sorts of practical improvements (such as better navigation). This was certainly a change from the previous pattern, where science (such as it was) was mostly a serious of ad hoc attempts to explain what technology could do.

It is also striking how slow technological transfusion could be. China had printing presses in the C9th, Europe from 1453, Mexico 1539, Peru 1584, North American colonies from the beginning of the C17th, Brazil in 1808 and the first African printing press was in Cairo in 1822 (or about a 1000 years after China)(p.79). Invention is less important than the extent, or otherwise, of take-up of technology. The interaction between techniques and institutions is very much at the centre of his analysis.

Maddison breaks up the last two centuries into four time periods, which I would label as follows: 1820-1913 Liberal ascendancy, 1913-1950 Collectivism and War, 1950-1973 Welfarism and Peace, 1973- Liberal resurgence. The 1913-1950 was the worst of the four periods for global economic growth, the 1950-1973 the best.

I do not agree with everything Maddison has to say. Maddison repeats a much stated claim Asians had little interest in European products (p.55). What, millions of them, for centuries? The effect of silver flows was surely much more important. Maddison himself notes that one-third of the silver mined in the Americas went to finance Asian imports (p.36). Which means the remaining two-thirds stayed in Europe, making European good silver-expensive when silver was the principal medium of exchange in Asian trade.

I also don’t think Maddison has entirely thought through the implications of silver flow for the nature of Iberian government. He mentions the role of the Crown being aided by war against the Moors. But such militancy hardly explains why Iberia (a pioneer of representative assemblies) decayed into corrupt, stagnant authoritarianism (a decay Maddison describes very effectively)—it is not as if the English Crown was not a militant one (ask the Welsh, Scottish, Irish and French).

I suspect he also somewhat overstates the negative effect of Muslim conquest on Mediterranean trade (p.71).

But the book is clearly written and full of striking information. For example, that the introduction of camels in the C8th is what permitted significant cross-Sahara trade (p.71) or that the ecological benefit of the Americas to Eurasia (maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes, manioc, tomatoes, cocoa, beans, pineapples, tobacco) was at least equalled by the flow of new animals and plants in the other direction (cattle, pigs, chicken, sheep, goats, wheat, rice, sugar cane, coffee, vegetables, fruits, horse and mules) in the “Columbian exchange” (p.2). Not to mention, of course, a very one-sided transfer of diseases (which Maddison discusses in some detail). Growth and Interaction in the World Economy: The Roots of Modernity is a very accessible brief tour of global economic history.

Men, Homosexuality and the Gods

Ronald Long’s Men, Homosexuality and the Gods: An exploration into the Religious Significance of Male Homosexuality in World Perspective is in large part a book about arguments in the contemporary US, particularly religious arguments, over homosexuality.

Hence the berdache of Amerindian tradition (Holy Effeminancy: The Native American Berdache As Living War Charm), Leviticus (Holy Homophobia in the Hebrew Scriptures), Paul and St Augustine (Early Christianity: A Revolution Aborted? ) and Buddhism (The Variegated Lotus: Homosexual Sex and Historical Buddhism) each get a chapter while the final chapter is entitled Struggles on The American Front.

But it is not only a book about that. The first chapter (Straight Thinking on Some Not-So-Straightforward Matters) sets out key terms (he prefers top and bottom rather than penetrator and penetrated as being a more socially grounded distinction) and concepts, particularly about how to think about religion and how to think about (male) homosexuality. The second (Holy Homosexuality: Of Men and Semen) looks at the Sambi of Papua New Guinea (who believed ingesting semen turned boys into men) and Taoism. The third (Holy Homoeroticism: Splendid Men and Splendour Divine) looks at Plato and Athens and Platonism in Sufism. Then it is on the Amerindians and so on.

Long notes that gay liberation and gay scholarship have moved together: the wearing away of the stigma of homosexuality has encouraged scholarly enquiry while scholarly enquiry has undermined the stigma of homosexuality. Looking to the past for gay heroes, and then for cultures which did not stigmatise homosexuality as C20th America did, led to some very alien sexual institutions: such as the “(teenage) boy wives” of Azande and Nzema, the compulsory fellatio of the Sambi; or cultures where penetration of lower status males was a way of affirming one’s masculinity, such as Ancient Rome. Or religions that tolerated, honoured, even mandated homosexuality.

It is to this variety—the various ways religious traditions of the world have taken up the question of homosexual relations among men—that this book is an introduction … We are all inclined to presume the world is as it is for us unless we are shown otherwise. (p.5).

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Long illustrates the power of assumptions, and the religious basis of assumptions about homosexuality, through an anecdote of a friend who came out to his father and got the immediate response:

But that’s the kind of guy other guys beat up

and, despite lacked any other sign of religiosity—the son could only remember his father using the word "God" in his presence once—saying

but it’s a sin! (p.7).

Long discusses the Sambi, the attitudes that come across in Plato’s writings (including the notion that homosexual romance strengthens democracy while its proscription, such as among the Persians, strengthens autocracy) and the Sufi notion of shahid bazi: the notion that gazing on beauty, including a beautiful young man, is a path to the appreciation of the divine.

He then moves on to the Amerindians, where he seeks to puncture romantic notions of the berdache as honoured manifestations of human sexual variation. Long argues instead that they were feminized, unmanned, men whose feminisation was both a lessening and a manifestation of mystical power. A basic thesis of the book is that:

males are born but men are made (p.49)

and that attitudes to (male) homosexuality need to be understood in terms of particular society’s conceptions of masculinity. So, Long argues, the berdache grew out of sexual penetration as the unmanning of defeated enemy warriors. A berdache was thus both a “safe” sexual release for young warriors and a manifestation of their victorious nature: hence a living war charm; Long reminds us that:

people can be tolerated, and society can provide a significant value for them without admiring them (p.55).

Ironically, I think Long may be projecting Western attitudes more than he realises.

Long’s discussion of Leviticus takes us through the concept of people’s bodies being owned by their family (pp78ff)—so the sin of Onan was not masturbation but coitus interruptus to avoid impregnating his dead brother’s wife, any resulting child being more his brother’s than his own (p.73)—the use of sexual proscriptions to separate Israelites from foreigners (as he notes, the imputation that homosexuality is foreign is a hardy perennial in human affairs; and, given only cities were likely to have significant concentrations of homosexuals, seen as an urban corruption [p.75]); that raping of defeated enemy soldiers was also a hardy perennial; that slaves were often expected to be at the sexual whim of their masters (supported by highly suggestive Egyptian wall paintings [p.76]) and very different cultic sexual practices (p.77) to create the basis for the Levitical proscriptions. He regards, however, the horror of sexual penetration as a sign of crushing defeat as the real emotional basis behind them (p.84).

He includes an aside on Muslim attitudes, arguing that a Muslim man who penetrates non-Muslim men was much more acceptable than anything which implied sexual submission by an Arab/Muslim male. The submission that is required of Islam also meant domination and subduing of others (p.77).

In his chapter on early Christianity, Long argues St Paul simply did not continue the logic of the rejection of the other aspects of the Holiness Code to matters (homo)sexual, mainly because he was under no pressure to do so (p.93). (I would agree about Paul being inconsistent about not rejecting all the Holiness Code proscriptions—in a way that there is no evidence that Jesus would have supported—but I would also argue that there were pressures on Paul to make exactly the move he did. While I understand the attraction of reading Paul’s use of malakoi and arsenokoitai as denunciations of exploitative sex, I am not convinced.) Long notes that part of the success of Christianity may have been that it shielded (women in particular) from the pressure to marry (p.94): a revolution in family matters.

Long also gives an extensive rendition of St Augustine’s view on matters sexual (pp 95ff), particularly his fear of passion and pleasure as overthrowing the rational control which the basis of virtue (a very Stoic idea) and diverting us from attention to God. So procreation is the only possible justification for sexual activity.

Moving on to Buddhism allows Long to explore a tradition which has a similarly problematic attitude to desire as St Augustine but goes in a quite different direction:

If, for a Western thinker such as Augustine, self-control is the height of rationality, in Tibetan Buddhism, it is the open receptivity that is the essence of reason (p.114).

It is also a quite different tradition about what constitutes a religion and religious concerns. Though, again, Long notes how Buddhism still manages to reflect cultural presuppositions about masculinity:

If, at is seems, there is no reason in Buddhism why homosexual sex should be treated any differently than heterosexual sex, it is nevertheless the case that in actual practice Buddhism presumes the cultural bias that assumes that sex is something a man has with a noman, a woman or a lesser or younger man (p.114).

The last chapter draws the threads together to bring an historical understanding on the “culture wars” debates over homosexuality. Long quotes with approval Richard Mohr’s comment that the military has the purpose of defending a society, but militaries are also often used to define the country, citizenship and personhood. Long also makes the perspicacious comment that Clinton’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy serves to mask that gays have been officially included in the American military (p.118).

Long discusses various lines of gay thinking on the issues (correctly tagging Andrew Sullivan as a classical liberal) before getting stuck into the Bowers v Hardwick decision, teasing out its underlying religious presumptions and its overturning by Lawrence v Texas. He quotes Richard Mohr’s telling comment that:

unenforced sodomy laws are the chief systematic way that society as a whole tells gays they are scum (p.129).

Long holds that unnaturalness arguments against homosexuality are not arguments at all, but just educated name-calling (p.90). This is an amusing thought, but excessively hard on natural law theory. His point that calling homosexuals objectively disordered is just another way of calling them sick has rather more force (p.135). He is not convinced that it is possible to live without gender norms, not least because boys will always have the need to emotionally separate themselves from their mother and so need some direction to aspire to (p.142).

Long sees the modern homosexual movement as something unique in history: a repudiation of the notion that a “real man” is one who penetrates social underlings (p.142). Long sees WWII as the beginning of the modern homophile movement, with the 1970s as being when gay men took within themselves a concept of homosexual masculinity: of muscles as queer (in the parlance, they became their own trade).

Long draws together his argument that underlying very different religious traditions and social contexts is a notion of masculinity requiring a particular sort of sexuality, one which involves subordination of one’s sexual partners:

Full adult masculinity has been thought regularly to be sexually enacted in the penetration of social inferiors, and the penetration thus signified, if it does not cause, subordination (p.145).

He argues that homosexual liberation is, in fact, liberating for all men because it provides a much more open concept of masculinity. That sexuality no longer be conflated with defence, that men be free to make love as well as war.

I find myself intrigued and often in agreement with Long. I agree (to put it more directly and generally than Long does) that the shift from the notion that sex is properly between unequals to that it is properly between equals or near equals is a major social change—it is a nice historical resonance that the word homosexual was first coined in the same year as John Stuart Mill published The Subjection of Women. Which suggests that homosexual liberation is part of broader social shifts. (The concern over paedophilia—it becoming the ultimate transgression—strikes me as being part of the same shift.)

So I am not comfortable with situating quite so much in constructions of masculinity. They are clearly important, but again seem to me to be part of broader issues of attitudes to sex, of how its various roles are conceived. Which is to say, I am struck by concepts of masculinity as effect as well as cause, of changes and variations. Long himself is very concerned to chart variations in understanding of masculinity, but that raises questions of why such variations in the first place: still, a very stimulating and informative work.

Depressions on the mind

Revisiting the Great Depression is a hardy perennial of economic history that has added force in recent times due to the recent global financial crisis (GFC) and Great Recession. One of the central myths is "FDR and the New Deal saved the US". A consoling heroic narrative, especially as the modern US Democratic Party was essentially re-created (and turned into the default majority Party of US politics) during the Roosevelt Administration.

This is a mythic story that only has strong plausibility if one does not compare the US experience with other developed economies. The US was, for example, the only major capitalist economy to have two economic downturns during the 1930s. Moreover, the Australian economy began its economic turnaround before Roosevelt took office and recovered much more strongly (and consistently) than did the US economy. To put it another way,Australian public policy was more successful than American public policy. (These details and much more were provided in Prof. Sinclair Davidson's very informative address comparing the Great Depression with the Great Recession to the Adam Smith Club Wednesday night.)

Yet the New Deal has mythic status and the Premier's Plan does not (except as a horror story in ALP history: the Premier's Plan does not even rate a Wikipedia entry). This is for lots of reasons, not least of which was FDR's very charismatic personal style, the sense of (dare one say) audacity and hope he generated, his utilisation of the new medium of radio, the gloss of victory in the Second World War and that the New Deal incorporates the notion of government-as-saviour which is such a powerful force in modern politics. What are the public policy facts against all that?

Including that one John Maynard Keynes supported the Premier's Plan and wrote letters to and about FDR's Administration criticising its contradictory policies.

But one should never underestimate the power of a simple narrative. "FDR and the New Deal saved America" is a simple narrative. "There is not enough spending, so government has to do the replacement spending" is a simple narrative. That Oz is the only developed country where fiscal stimulus has "worked" in the current crisis could be evidence that the Rudd Government was just very, very clever (or very, very lucky). Or 25+ failures to one success could mean that they were all cases of expensive "pissing into the wind": it is just that we were better placed than other folk, so our pissing seemed to work. (Too bad about the looming public debt.)

Meanwhile, in the US, unemployment continues to rise in dramatic contradiction of the Administration's projections.

On a lighter note, let's all enjoy this little exchange before the Australian Senate Economic Committee (pdf):

Senator CAMERON—What about some of the infrastructure projects that form part of the package?
Prof. Davidson—Name them.
Senator CAMERON—The Ipswich Motorway.
Prof. Davidson—The government’s job is to build roads anyway. I would have thought that is a state government responsibility.
Senator CAMERON—Are you seriously putting to this inquiry that the federal government should play no role in investing in the nation’s road infrastructure?
Prof. Davidson—I am putting it to you that if you wanted to build roads that you would give the money to the states and allow the state governments to make decisions as to what roads they wish to build.
Senator CAMERON—That is an interesting point of view!
Prof. Davidson—We have a constitution that actually has states that make decisions about these things. You do represent the states, don’t you?
Senator CAMERON—I am here to ask the questions, not you.
Prof. Davidson—Actually, I am a taxpayer. I will ask questions too.
Senator CAMERON—You will not ask me any questions. I will be asking the questions, thanks very much.

Red Millionaire

A fascinating insight into the origins of modern political action is provided by The Red Millionaire: A political biography of Willi Munzenberg, Moscow’s secret propaganda tsar in the West by Sean McMeekin. It brings the politics of the period (1910 - 1940) thoroughly to life, though McMeekin is not as good at examining the effectiveness and reach of Munzenberg’s propaganda activities. (Stephen Koch’s Double Lives is better at that.) Munzenberg was a member of the ‘Zimmerwald Left’ – the pre-1917 circle around Lenin. Unlike the rest, he remained in the West, being a devoted (if self-serving) supporter of Moscow until eventually falling fatally foul (as almost everyone did) of Stalin’s resentment of all those whose connections to Lenin did not go through him.

The post-1917 sections of the book display, yet again, what an evil bastard Lenin was. No amount of death was too much if it achieved his purposes. Mind you, his approach to politics was the same as Marx’s was – smash what you don’t control. It is just that Lenin had a state to exercise that power, rather than fringe revolutionary organisations. Lenin was much more Marx’s heir than many are prepared to accept.

It is one of the great divisions in politics – those who think the process (in the sense of how you do things) is morally central because it must encompass a range of divergent purposes (e.g. democracy) and those who think the purpose is morally central and so process is subordinated to it (e.g. Leninism). The EU goes for the latter model (the European Project, global governance; neither of which are people deemed entitled to say ‘no’ to), the US (at least for its own citizens) for the former. Munzenberg was a purpose man, and his propaganda exulted purpose. McMeekin is particularly good on delineating how Stalin’s ‘social fascist’ line against the Social Democrats did so much to help bring the Nazis to power. It is also a great reminder how abuse of the term ‘fascist’ has been a staple of left politics since the fascists first appeared. And that the democratic left has often been the most effective enemy of the Leninist-cum-Stalinist left – the SPD was much better at exposing Munzenberg and putting him under pressure prior to 1933 than the Nazis, just as Orwell exposed Stalinism far better than anyone else. But, then, the Nazis and the Stalinists had features in common – not least the shared purpose of destroying Weimar Germany.

Still, the only important difference between Leninism and Stalinism was that Stalin applied to fellow Bolsheviks the same modes of politics Lenin applied to everyone else. Part of how the Soviet Union followed the Ibn Khaldun model of predatory rule. First, a group bound by common feeling seizes power (Lenin), then the ruler separate himself from the original group to entrench his own power (Stalin), the system slowly decays as group solidarity fades and corruption erodes social resilience and regime power (Khruschev to Chernenko) until it finally collapses (Gorbachev).

The legacy of Willi Munzenberg’s political activism is not in the now-defunct Soviet Union that he so effectively served, and whose service likely eventually killed him, but in the use of congenial framings, regardless of their truth content, to push political agendas. To some extent, we still live in the shadow of the Red Millionaire.

Freakonomics

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything was on my books-to-read for a consultancy I was doing, and I moved it up the list thanks to an online recommendation.

It is a collection of striking questions with clever use of data to answer them. The most infamous piece of analysis is that the surge in abortions as a result of Roe v Wade is a major factor in the dramatic drop in the US crime rate 20-odd years later – the argument being that those children most likely to become criminals were those most likely to be aborted by abortion becoming cheaply available to low-income women (pp137ff). When I originally read of the analysis, I was highly sceptical, but an impressive case is put, not least because factors are adduced to explain both the dramatic rise in the US crime rate in the 1960s and additional factors for the drop in the 1990s: more police do deter crime and incarceration does reduce crime. (I like the quote [p.123] from a political scientist that:

apparently, it takes a Ph.D. in criminology to doubt that keeping dangerous criminals incarcerated cuts crime).

Capital punishment had almost no effect (pp123-124), because the US simply does not fry/hang/needle enough folk to have a significant effect (even on the optimistic statistical estimate that each execution stops about 7 murders).

Needless to say, this is an analysis with something to offend all sides of politics. (A very critical take on the abortion-cut-crime argument is here. James Q. Wilson declares the case unproven here.)

Another striking result is that election results cannot be explained by how much candidates spend. Analysis of almost a 1000 Congressional races where the same candidates were against each other in successive elections found that:

a winning candidate can cut his spending in half and lose only 1 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, a losing candidate who doubles his spending can expect to shift the vote in his favour by only that same 1 percent (pp11-12).

Then there is the data on how it is not what parents do with their children, it is what they are, which has most effect on their children's student test scores (pp166ff). Keeping the family intact (or not) has no measurable effect, having lots of books around does, reading to them doesn't, nor does the amount of television they watch. High parental socio-economic status is a positive, moving to a better neighbourhood has no measurable effects, a child's mother being 30 or over when she had her first child is a positive, mother staying at home between birth and kindergarten has no measurable effect, child having low birth weight is a negative, speaking English at home is a positive, going to museums regularly has no measurable effect, being regularly spanked has no measurable effect, parents being involved in the PTA is a positive, being adopted has a negative effect compared to what their parent's characteristics would otherwise suggest (this seems to be genetic – high-status parents adopt children low-status mothers give up: on the other hand, adopted children do noticeably better in college-attendance, career and income and avoiding teen marraige than similar children not adopted [p.176]).

Having a backyard pool is about a 100 times more dangerous for one's young children then having a gun in the house (pp149-50). And lots about cheating (and how most people don't).

My favourite section was on the analysis of a crack gang (Black Gangster Disciple Nation, pp94ff). The gang was essentially a franchise arrangement with steeply increasing incomes (an Indian-born researcher, Sudhir Venkatesh spent years studying the gang and managed to get hold of the books put together by the local leader, J.T., a college graduate with a business major). That is, the gang worked basically like McDonalds with the addition of illegality and violence. The "soldiers" lived a home with Mom on very low incomes, but had a chance (if they survived and progressed upwards, about 1-in-4 were killed) of getting very high incomes. When a gang war was on, the soldiers were paid more; such wars being generally started by the soldiers, since violence was their route to status (it disrupted business as far as JT was concerned).

Full of fascinating stuff – and highly readable too!

A Manual of Hadith

Picked up in Readings (or it might have been Borders) some time ago A Manual of Hadith by Maulana Muhammad Ali, originally published in Lahore in 1941 (the Empire is treated as matter-of-fact background reality) and reprinted in 2001. The manual is somewhat abbreviated because of wartime paper shortages.

Muhammad Ali was a member of the (Lahore) Ahmadiyya: the more Muslim mainstream part of the Ahmadiyya movement. Mainstream enough to provide a good feel for the hadith.

The manual is written in clear English, very accessibly arranged. Each chapter starts with relevant citations from the Qur’an, as a summary of the various hadith in the chapter. As per tradition, each hadith states who was the original witness. The hadith are presented in both English and Arabic. (Arabic is the sacred language of Islam, the language of Revelation: only the Arabic version is authoritative.) The hadith are footnoted to provide further elaboration of context.

The manual is to help folk be good Muslims. The breadth that covers is indicated by the list of chapters: How Divine Revelation came to the Holy Prophet, Iman and Islam, Knowledge, Purfication, The Mosque, Adhan and Iqamah, Jama’ah (congregation), The Iman, Institution of Prayer, Prayer-Service, Friday Service, Id service, Supererogatory Prayers, Miscellaneous Prayers, Burial Service, Charity and Zakat, Fasting, Pilgrimage, Jihad, Marriage, Divorce, Buying and Selling, Cultivation of Land, Matters relating to Service, Debts and Mortgage, Gifts, Wills and Inheritance, Foods and Drinks, Toilet [meaning apparel, etc], Ethics (Adab), The State.
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Islam is not merely a religion of rules, it is a religion of law. The key difference between Christianity and Islam concerning law is who makes it. In Christianity, there is no doubt that people make law. Even canon law is the Church seeking to turn into rules the principles it infers from Scripture and natural reason. There is no pretence that they are other than man-made things. “God’s law” is rhetoric or a reference to Scripture or natural reason—a source from which law is derived, not law itself.

In Islam, God makes law. Shar’ia is God’s law. It makes sense to talk of Islamic jurisprudence in a way it simply doesn’t for “Christian jurisprudence”. It thus makes sense to talk about God being sovereign in a quite direct He-makes-the-law-the-judges-enforce way that does not work for Christianity. Judges are not religious officials in Christianity. They are in Islam.

Life being complex, it has never entirely worked that way. Rulers in Islam have always had reasons to issue extra rules and regulations. In Christendom, the medieval Church had jurisdiction over large areas of life. Religious doctrine underpinned much law even beyond and after that (and still does, as the fight over same-sex relationships indicates). But Church judges were not sanctioned by anything in the New Testament—which propounds a religion of moral rather than social order—whatever the later pretensions of the Church: there is no religious problem with secular judges. Islamic judges are quite directly sanctioned by the actions of the Prophet (a ruler and conqueror) in appointing judges who were to use the Qu’ran as their first point of reference, and the traditions of the Muslim community as their second.

Islam as religion-of-social order has some striking manifestations. Ali points out that Islam turns prayer into institution (p.99). It is a public act rendered in a standard way.

Islam’s appropriation of Jewish and Christian prophetic tradition is extensive. Ali notes Islam accepts the concept of the Anti-Christ (p.125 fn27) but it applies to those who teach the doctrine of Sonship and Atonement (i.e. Christianity):

there is note [sic] the least doubt that the tribulation of the Dajjal means the tribulation of the Christian and materialistic civilisation we are faced with in these days, and the name Anti-Christ given to it is due to the fact that it is opposed to the true teaching of Christ, who never taught the doctrines of Sonship and Atonement.

In a slightly oddly presented hadith (it reads as if he saying something after his own death, which is clearly not meant), the Prophet is quoted as saying:

I have been commanded to continue fighting against people until they say there is no god but Allah; whoever says this will have his property and his life safe unless there is a due against him and his reckoning is with Allah (pp 177-8).

Since this hadith is about the Prophet’s second successor Umar and his first successor Abu Bakr, it is clearly an endorsement of the extraordinary religious conquests of the early Caliphs. But there is no geographical limit to the injunction, which has Qur’anic endorsement (Sura 8:39

And fight them on until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah altogether and everywhere; but if they cease, verily Allah doth see all that they do).

Sura 8:39 being one of the verses from the Qur’an quoted at the beginning of the chapter Jihad. Ali differentiates (p.203) between jihad as missionary activity (an obligation for all Muslims) and as a physical activity (which only applies in certain circumstances). Ali claims the latter is strictly defensive, but Sura 8:39, the activities of the Prophet and his Companions and successors and more than one hadith is against him on that point, as is the normal Islamic division of the globe. Ali accepts the proper goal of Islam is to be ascendant over the entire globe. This division into missionary and warfighting jihad is somewhat different from the division into inner and outer jihad which has been prominently pushed in recent times.

A disappointment for fans of 13th Warrior such as myself (yes, I know the armour’s crap), there is a hadith of the Prophet banning every drink that intoxicates in specific response to a drink of fermented honey (p.292): alas for one the funnier scenes in the movie.*

Ali argues that the selection of the early Caliphs were clearly democratic in nature (p.334). Well yes, in a rather ad hoc way. But the position rapidly became hereditary: with the Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid and Ottoman caliphates. But one can see the “if we could just get back to C7th purity” theme operating which is such a hardy perennial in Islam.

Reading A Manual for Hadith really brings home the extent to which Islam is a whole-of-life religion. A deeply political religion: Islamism makes far more sense as a political philosophy than any “Christianism” does**: indeed, Islamists can quite reasonably claim that they are just being Islamic. In its detail, Islam is far more like Judaism (which the Prophet had far more contact with) than Christianity. Moreover, the Jewish tribes Muhammad had contact included territorial entities. The way Islam divides the globe is another manifestation of its nature as a territorial religion.

Judaism made the transition from a religion of social order to a religion of community order embedded in a wider social order it did not control or direct and had no pretensions to do. But that transition occurred as a result of major disasters (the Babylonian Captivity and the Diaspora). The Ismailis have done so within Islam, but they are also a permanent minority. That is the move Western Muslims are expected to make: the separation of the logic of belief from the logic of believers. (Though the usual suspects complain if Western political leaders say that in so many words.)

The difficulty is: any Western Muslim can look the world of Islam, a civilisation defined by religion, including a league of Islamic States (a league of Christian states seems bizarre and archaic) to feel, not a member of a permanent minority, but of the vanguard of a (rightfully expanding) religiously-defined civilisation. With the more inane fantasies of multiculturalism encouraging Islam as primary identity while being tone-deaf to any issue of reassuring the resident, non-Muslim citizenry (hardly surprising, since they are habitually cast as the locus of problems multiculturalism seeks to fix).

The dynamics of Islam are not the same as those of Christianity or Judaism. Islam has the universalism of the former and the rules-for-the-whole-of-life nature of the latter to be very much a thing in itself. Interesting times.

* Regarding movies, the central role of the angel Gabriel in the Revelation to Muhammad must make the Prophecy movies particularly problematic, though you can just see Christopher Walken’s Gabriel saying to his fellow rebel angels

and do you know what I told that desert monkey boy next?.

** The narrow agenda of conservative political Christians—basically no abortion and enforcement of sexual taboos—highlights this.

Picking the wrong model

In the late C19th Australians had a higher average income than Americans. As country rich in natural resources with a small population and effective institutions, with no legacy of slavery or Civil War, Australians were well placed.

Australia suffered badly from the 1890s Depression, particularly Victoria. But the newly federated Commonwealth of Australia was still the highest average income country in the world. In the early part of the C20th, Australia faced the policy choice of following the model of protectionist Victoria (which had had a very bad 1890s Depression) or free trade New South Wales (which had done much better). For various reasons, including the use of tariffs to fund the new Commonwealth Government, the connection between protection and wage arbitration and that Melbourne was the national capital until 1927, the public policy model of protectionist Victoria was followed, not that of free trade New South Wales.

The wave of economic reforms from 1983 onwards were a delayed acknowledgment that the adoption of the Victorian public policy model had been a mistake. That Victoria in the early 1990s managed to repeat many of the policy failures of the 1890s just unscored the point. The prolonged economic expansion after the 1992-93 “recession that we had to have” and that Australia now handles economic shocks (the 1997 Asian Crisis, the current Great Recession) better than comparable countries (a major turnaround from its previous history) further reinforce the point.

This history came to mind after reading a recent piece on the travails of California.
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California is seriously dysfunctional: on balance, more dysfunctional than Victoria was in 1900, even though Victoria was deeply indebted, had created no net new male jobs in almost 10 years and lost population to Western Australia due to the Kalgoorlie and other gold fields:

California's percentage of adults without at least a high-school education is the second-highest in the nation (and the fact that 72% of those without diplomas are immigrants only fuels the state's growing problem of social stratification). The Commonwealth Fund has ranked the quality of California's health care lowest of the 50 states. The state has the highest rate of criminal recidivism in the country. It has six of the ten worst cities in the country in air pollution. Los Angeles and San Francisco have some of the most congested roads in the nation, which costs the state's employers billions in lost productivity each year. The state is seriously discussing mandatory water rationing, and has in recent years experienced severe disruptions of its electricity supply. Unemployment is over 11%, and a recent survey of corporate CEOs ranked California the worst state in the country in which to do business. It is losing native-born ­citizens faster than any other state.

Between a fairly disastrous system of referendum initiative (not a problem in itself, Switzerland manages to run such a structure just fine) and deeply uncompetitive politics:

Because California's political districts are thoroughly uncompetitive (in 2004, 153 state or federal legislative seats were up for election, and none changed parties), members of the legislature tend to come from the parties' ideological poles.

California has a very dysfunctional political system.

Note, California’s problems are not from a lack of government spending. Rather the opposite:

state government spending has nearly doubled in just the past decade, while the state's population has increased by about 10%. …
… the Golden State has 12% of the nation's population, but 30% of the country's welfare recipients …

Union power has made both its education and prison systems deeply dysfunctional—hence the US’s second-lowest rate of school completion and highest rate of criminal recidivism. Its bloated regulatory structure is rife with corruption and costs driving businesses elsewhere. As one business blogger writes:

In California, where such behavior is rampant (and where the state unemployment agency has established penalties for employers who even think about asking the state to investigate one of his ex-employees for fraud) I pay over 7% of wages in unemployment taxes, vs. less than 1% in states without such fraudulent behavior.

(Comparison by relevant States is here.)

People may have heard of NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard). California has pioneered BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anytime Near Anyone), such as with dams or new power stations. As the author of Who Killed California? writes:

In 2006, the Golden State passed the Global Warming Solutions Act, essentially a statewide ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. Under this regime, California will have to lower its greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. With the state expected to add 15 million net new residents in that 30-year period, California is unlikely to meet its reduction targets without massive economic regression. Estimates of the plan's eventual costs to California families have been as high as $3,800 a year. Yet California's politicians continue to insist that the Solutions Act will be an economic boon, sparking a revolution in "green jobs." Such is the fate of Californians: to live in a state where environmentalism is a religion and economics a superstition.

Except, of course, locally-born Californians (and associated businesses) are fleeing California at higher rates than any other State is suffering. They can, for example, go to Texas which has overtaken California in the number of Fortune 500 corporate headquarters, created more jobs last year than the rest of the US put together and where houses are only about three times median household incomes (pdf) having avoided any housing bubble. (So, if you move your corporate HQ to Texas, your secretaries can afford to buy houses and the children and spouses of your staff can get jobs.)

In his conclusion, the writer draws explicit attention to how much of President Obama’s domestic policy program represents repeating what has already failed in California:

There is little in President Obama's legislative agenda that hasn't already been tried in California. Need a model of runaway spending with no regard for growing debt? Look to California, whose bonds currently hover just above junk status. Want to insist on restrictive carbon-emission controls? Note the example of California's 2006 greenhouse-gas law, which is expected to reduce the state's economic output by 10% and destroy 1.1 million jobs. Want to put the government in charge of health care? Look at California's repeated legislative pushes for a single-payer system of health-insurance coverage, each of which ended in failure.

Surely a country cannot repeat nationally a public policy model that has already failed in one of its States? Sure it can: Australia did in the early part of the C20th.

The Carolingian Economy

I have done some reading on the Pirenne thesis, because I am particularly interested in the transition from late Antiquity to medieval Europe. This led me to simultaneously read Pirenne’s original (posthumous) work, the Hodges and Whitehouse re-examination in the light of archaeological evidence, Michael McCormick’s Origins of the European Economy and Roger Collins' Early Medieval Europe 300-1000, having recently finished Keith Hopkins' 1980 article "Taxes and Trade in the Roman Empire 200BC-400AD" and Adriaan Verhulst’s The Carolingian Economy. The Hopkins article includes a very revealing graph of ancient shipwrecks in the Mediterranean, which clearly indicates what much other evidence supports – Roman economic decline preceded the major barbarian incursions: a pattern repeated later in the Eastern Empire prior to the Arab invasions.

Found Verhulst’s book informative but a tad frustrating. He follows the modern analytical divide between ‘economic’ activity and ‘political/military’ activity. Which is not to say he ignores state action, far from it, but he does not tie in the central activity of the state/rulership – the organisation of coercive power – with economic activity. I constantly felt that I was reading the historiographical equivalent of Hamlet without the Prince. He is very concerned to show that there was trade in the Carolingian economy and that it managed, under Charlemagne and his son Louis the Pious (at least prior to the outbreak of war between Louis and his sons), a period of notable economic expansion.

It is clear from reading Verhulst that most production was local. It would perhaps be too strong to say trade was merely an economic effervesce in a predominantly locally self-sufficient economy but it is still clear enough that the dominant sources of wealth were land-to-which-labour-was-applied and violence (whether overtly protective – controlling those who worked the land – or overtly predatory – stealing from those who worked the land). The (by modern standards) premature death of Mancur Olson looks more and more like an intellectual tragedy, since his attempt to incorporate force within mainstream economic analysis seems to have not yet acquired any strong proponent(s). Particularly in pre-Industrial Revolution societies, rulership was essentially a process of coercion and so that has to be central to effective analysis. Still, an informative work.

The Origins of Satan

Elaine Pagels is the premier contemporary populariser of current Biblical scholarship. Her The Origins of Satan is a reworking of (or stringing together of) various scholarly articles in a book about the development of the notion of Satan.

As with Pagels' others books that I have read, it is informative and accessible. Pagels traces the development of the notion of Satan in Jewish and Christian thought from the generic agent of God (e.g. Balaam and the ass) then specific agent of God (in the book of Job) of the Old Testament to the enemy of God of the Essenes and early Jesus movement, to the inspirer and leader of the demonic forces personified by the pagan gods and pagan order and heretic Christians of the Christian movement.

On the way through, one learns much about scholarly interpretations of the Gospels and of the development of the Jesus movement into Christianity. Pagels argues that the notion of Satan as the enemy of God, and as the motivator and leader of opposing humans, filled developing theological needs in explaining and theological dignifying problematic relations of first the Essenes, then the Jesus movement, with other Jews and then the Christian movement with pagans and other Christians. A pattern that develops through various Gospels to early theological writings (particularly by Origen, against the pagan order, and Irenaeus, against dissident Christians). Basically, it was a way of explaining why folk did not do or think the right things while elevating the status of the (beleaguered) folk who did. Such beleaguered folk being the ritual purists within the Jewish community (Essenes), the Jesus movement within the Jewish community then, particularly as it became increasingly a Gentile movement, the Christian movement within the pagan-Roman world.

On the way through the use of Satan to provide (in Karen Armstrong's terms) a sustaining mythos (particularly about the role and importance of Jesus and being a follower thereof) established the modus of (literally) demonising human opponents that has become so much a habit among Christians and Muslims and various secularisations of apocalyptic and eschatological visions (notably Marxism and its derivatives [p.182]—there are plenty of modern secularists who believe salvation comes from believing the right things and damnation from believing the wrong ones). In, as Pagels ends with, contradiction of Jesus's position that reconciliation was divine.

The book is a little disjointed because of its origins as a series of scholarly articles. Nevertheless, a good and revealing read.

The Gates of Power

The Gates of Power: Monks, Courtiers and Warriors in Premodern Japan by Mikael S Adolphson is a narrative history of political demonstrations by Buddhist monks in Japan up until the C14th. A little too much of a narrative history—I would have liked some more in-depth discussion of the institutional arrangements.

Nevertheless, it is a very informative rendition of disputes within the Japanese political elite from the C9th to the C14th. That is, the period when the warrior class was steadily increasing its role in Japanese society. Adolphson argues that Japan had a tripartite arrangement of power (courtiers, monasteries, warriors) where power shifted only gradually to the warriors.

For anyone interested in medieval European history, medieval Japan is a fascinating compare-and-contrast, because a completely different cultural milieu produced great institutional similarities.
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Japan did not suffer the same prolonged assault that Latin Christendom did from the C7th to the C11th centuries, where the Norse, the Avars-then-Magyars and the Saracens raided and plundered from the North, the East and the South respectively. Nor did it suffer the collapse in literacy and trade that occurred in Western Europe during and after the evaporation of the Western Roman Empire. What Japan had in common with Latin Christendom was a temperate climate, a geography that facilitated movement in ideas and skills but impeded full political unification and a lack of external conquest (which thereby permitted continuous institutional evolution: in effect, what game-theory might call "long term games").

Latin Christendom turned to the arrangement of protection-by-knights-in-return-for-labour-by-peasants comparatively thoroughly and speedily. Warrior rule in Japan took much longer to evolve. In Latin Christendom, whatever remained of the old Senatorial aristocracy (and any Germanic imitators) was completely replaced by (or transmuted into) a warrior aristocracy by the C9th. The Japanese civil aristocracy lost ground much more slowly to the warrior class, still having some governmental role at least up to the consolidation of the Tokugawa bakufu.

Which is not to say there were not persistent institutional differences. Japan never evolved any equivalent of the Hospitallers, Templars or Teutonic knights, still less of the Spanish crusading orders. Its “warrior monks” were much more like the monastic thugs who made Alexandrian politics so dramatic under the Eastern Roman Empire. Buddhism and Shinto got along much better than Christianity did with Judaism or pagan beliefs.

While local-samurai-protecting-local-peasants-in-return-for-labour arrangements did grow up in Japan, particularly in the Kanto plain, what Crusader historians would call “money-fiefs” were much more common in Japan (most likely because administrative skills never became as scarce as they did in Latin Christendom) and eventually became the dominant form of samurai remuneration.

Yet the similarities remain striking. Historians of Japan talk about the “privatisation” of government, whereby estates stopped being the recoverable gift of the tenno (the imperial administration) and became increasingly private property. This is a process recognisable from early medieval history in Latin Christendom. Similar processes occurred in Islam and India, but regular waves of conquest by pastoralist conquerors meant that arrangements kept “returning” to revocable local tax-rights.

In terms of long-term economic development, private property is more efficient. It is obviously also preferable for the property holders. In terms of central control, revocable tax-rights are preferable. Such “privatisation” into local property rights is a sign of loss of control over its agents by the central authorities, a persistent problem in agrarian rule and a major factor for the collapse of states. Europe and Japan were protected by their geography from the conquests which tended to follow such decay in central power.

But they were also “tough” societies. Latin Christendom dealt with the assaults of the C7th to C11th rather more successfully than the Western Romans dealt with the equivalents from the C3rd to the C5th, and from a lower (though expanding rather than shrinking) population base. Latin Christendom was much more successful at expanding—territorially, demographically and technologically. The knights came to rule over more of Europe than the Romans ever did.

One of the trends Adolphson mentions is rising peasant power in Japanese society. Competing power hierarchies give peasants leverage. This is a process one can see in both Japan and Latin Christendom. Both societies evolved comparatively strong property rights, independent family households with women marrying later. Merchants similarly benefited, with both societies evolving sophisticated mercantile arrangements.

Japan did not, however, evolve any equivalent of the boroughs of Latin Christendom. It, like other civilisations, lacked the tradition of deliberative assemblies one sees in Classical civilisation and Germanic societies. It entirely lacked Latin Christendom’s invention of representative assemblies.

(The largely independent domains of the Tokugawa daimyo remind me of the Counts of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Barrayar, except the Shogun took great efforts to ensure the daimyo were never all in the same place at the same time.)

Different religious traditions resulted in very different attitudes to suicide. But bushido and chivalry obviously performed similar functions—trying to integrate a warrior elite within the wider society via the dominant religious tradition. The desired trade-off being a warrior elite other folk could live with via a framework of warrior legitimacy. (Adolphson’s discussion of Zen being used as a tool by the new Ashikaga bakufu, both to buttress expanded warrior rule and to tame the esoteric Buddhist sects, has a certain congruence with Brian Daizen Victoria’s analysis in Zen at War of Imperial Zen and Corporate Zen from the Meiji Restoration onwards.)

I enjoyed the tales of competition and intrigue that Adolphson tells. While thematically concentrating on the history of monastic protest, Gates of Power gave me much more insight into the operation of the various Buddhist monasteries and sects—particularly as vehicles for providing religious support for legitimate authority, more easily fulfilled by esoteric forms of Buddhism—the diffuse and competitive nature of power in Japanese society after the founding of the bakufu, the rise of the Ashikaga family, the often dominant role of retired Emperors (the role of Emperor itself was largely ceremonial and ritual so, by retiring, an Emperor rid himself of such time-consuming duties while exercising paternal authority over the notional head of state). I was also amused by the discussion early on in the book of how commentators have often seen religious or monastic power as inherently illegitimate, this tending to get in the way of careful analysis. The Gates of Power is a useful and informative read.

Function and form: of marriage, sex and Sodom

One of the striking things about many of the opponents of same-sex marriage is their lack of a sense of history. To them, marriage has been essentially the same down the ages, as one can see in the comments here. A slightly more sophisticated form of the same lack of a sense of the rich and varied history of human marriage is shown in columnist Charles Krauthammer’s statement:

… until this generation, gay marriage had been sanctioned by no society that we know of, anywhere at any time in history

which is either smug ignorance of much anthropological data or else arch narrowing of terms. Even supporters of same-sex marriage such as Steven Schmidt can make statements such as:

The institution of marriage is the foundation of society and alterations to its definitions shouldn't be lightly undertaken. It has always been defined as the legal union of a man and a woman, and it's understandable that many Americans are apprehensive about making a definitional change to so profoundly an important institution.

while standing in a land whose preceding cultures included ones that had same-sex marriages. (Of course, the Papacy had shown itself ready to take rigorous steps to ensure such social forms did not emerge where it had any say.)

Beyond simple historical ignorance, there is a deeper question. Is marriage a thing with a single nature, or a collection of phenomena in the human world? We are in deep philosophical waters here. People who say that same-sex marriages cannot be “real” marriages are saying that marriage is something with a specific content regardless of what particular human societies have or have not called ‘marriage’.

This is not a very scientific way of proceeding—it is certainly not one that anthropologists would adhere to. But it is a very powerful idea, that there is some definitive form of a thing. In the case of marriage, the Catholic Church adheres to that position on natural law and scriptural exegesis grounds. It is a common problem with natural law theory that it defines things in terms of what people are used to and passes that off as some general categorisation—thereby universalising the parochial. A theme which, in Christian thought, starts with St Paul on hair:

Does not the very nature of things teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him, but that if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For long hair is given to her as a covering.

The above-cited comments are following in a long tradition.

That there is a definitive (as distinct from proper or preferred) form of marriage across space and time is not a view that is required by Christian or other religious belief. Christopher Brooke, in his The Medieval Idea of Marriage engages with what is meant by Christian marriage without pretending that thereby defines all marriage. His approach has no quarrel with anthropologists identifying various forms of same-sex marriages in actual human societies.

Yet it is clearly not the business of the modern state to enforce Christian marriage as the only standard, but some general standard of marriage that will cover believers and non-believers of all varieties. Hence, to the pre-existing philosophical claims of classical natural law theory, is added the political attractiveness of claiming that marriage has some inherent nature.

It is clear that marriage has always been an evolving institution: even the Catholic Church’s conception of marriage has evolved somewhat, driven in no small part by popular wants and resistances. All sorts of things have affected the evolution of marriage: such as the old-age pension—as that supplanted children-as-pension-plan—or the increasing economic independence, and self-control of fertility, of women.

What do we mean by saying what marriage is? Does it make any sense at all to try and find a single concept of marriage? Or is ‘marriage’ a quite general category into which a whole lot of different forms and instances fit, more or less well?
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The general anthropological approach follows the latter. We have a general notion of what marriage is, then we look at the range of things in human societies that seem to be reasonably contained within that general notion (which may well evolve as we come across more cases). So we find polygamous marriage, polyandrous marriage, same-sex marriage, temporary marriage with a range of nuances and varieties within those broad categories. Connected to a range of quite divergent views and assumptions about sex, gender, parenting, kinship, property, etc. The notion of some definition of marriage that excludes what various societies have done seems just some form of arrogance. A case of our particular model of the world trumping how the world actually is. Universalising the parochial not as a bug or poor usage but as a basic feature.

The evidentiary approach insists that any model we use has to connect to the world to work as a model of the world (leaving aside the inherent limitations in being a model). So any such exclusion from the category of being marriages is just wilful arrogance.

Any model, however, only has to provide a congenial framing to appeal. It can be very appealing to say “I just know what marriage really is, and I do not care what other people may or may not have done”.

Of course, the issue for public policy is what marriage should mean legally in a particular society. But to have a normative concept parade itself as a defining concept is to imply there is no proper choice. Public policy should just conform to how marriage “really” is. There is no (other) proper choice in the matter.

Which is precisely the classical natural law way of proceeding. Define deemed proper purpose and forms that create the basis for judgement, these taken to be innate to how things are (hence I will use the term ‘purpose[i]’). A formulation that both defines what it is and defines what it ought to be. To conform to something—such as marriage—deemed proper purpose(i) and form is moral, to go against such is immoral. But if some actually existing marriages do not conform to such deemed proper purpose(i) and form, how do we determine what constitute said proper purpose(i) and form? Clearly, it is not done by empirical observation, for the concept of marriage is not defined by inference from the range of marriages-as-they-occur-in-the-world. An approach that is not merely anti-empiricist, it is anti-empirical.

Nor is the concept derived from what people want. To define according to proper purpose(i) and form is to trump human desires. Consent is not enough: it has to be consent in accordance with the proper purpose(i), within the proper forms. Just as a Marxist does not care (except to grade various levels of oppression) whether workers have consented to work in a capitalist firm—since a capitalist firm is “inherently exploitive”—so an adherent of classical natural law theory does not care that two people of the same sex have consented to live together as life partners, since same-sexual activity is not according to proper purpose(i) and form so such consent does not count, it has no positive moral weight.

Of course, any system is going to put bounds on consent. But to make purpose(i) and form the central source of legitimacy is to put strong bounds on consent. Indeed, on the significance given to human purposes. Hence St John Chrysostom, the “patron saint of preachers”, held (on natural law grounds deriving from Philo of Alexandria, also the likely source of St Paul’s use, notably in Romans, of the very un-Judaic notion of things being para physin, against nature) that engaging in same-sex activity was worse than being a murderer while the greatest proponent of classical natural law thinking, St Thomas Aquinas held same-sex activity to be worse than rape.

This elevation of category over consent continues. Professor Henry Jaffa holds, on natural law grounds, that homosexuality is wrong in the same way that slavery is wrong for it puts people in the wrong category:

Slavery is against nature, because it treats human beings like subhuman chattel. Sodomy is against nature, since it treats men as if they were women.

Actually, slavery is wrong because it is a pervasive and monstrous violation of human autonomy. But, then, anathematising same-sex activity is also a violation of human autonomy. Of course, under Prof. Jaffra’s argument heterosexual anal or anal intercourse would be just fine, which is not the classical natural law position. Elsewhere, Prof. Jaffa has said:

I challenge anybody who wants to defend homosexuality to say if they condemn slavery and genocide. Assuming they do condemn slavery and genocide (unless they are some kind of a Hitler) I think we would say that all would agree today that slavery and genocide are wrong.
However, as far as I can tell, the only ground on which they can be condemned is on the basis of nature.

Which is a pretty impoverished notion of both moral argument and respect for human autonomy.

Both Marxism and classical natural law theory, when in power, ended up deciding it was just fine to kill people if they did not conform to designated proper purposes(i) and forms. The former “purifies” society because there should only be one class, the latter because there should be only one sexuality: both are at war with the diversity of the human.

Which is another way to have a model trump reality. For why do we have ethics, courtesy, law, economies, rules and structures of any sort? We do because we are purposive beings. We act in the world according to choices driven by our purposes. These acts, choices and purposes interact: they require cooperation and restraint. Hence rules of morality, courtesy, law, social structures, economic structures, institutions: all the vast array of human norms. Forms of things are taken, moulded, structured according to those acted upon purposes. It is why the matter of preferred states of affairs arises in the first place. Human purposes are the point, the forms are what are acted upon or through in pursuit of human purposes. To elevate physical forms as morally primary must be to belittle human purposes and thus people. When Jesus said ( Matthew 15: 16-20)

"Are you still so dull?" Jesus asked them. "Don't you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body? But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and these make a man 'unclean.' For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what make a man 'unclean'; but eating with unwashed hands does not make him 'unclean.' "

He was showing rather more understanding what is morally central than many of His alleged followers have since. But elevating physical form—thus belittling human purposes and (specific) people—elevates the role of priests (it was, after priestly obsession with form that Jesus was preaching against: see also Mark 7:1-23), or their secular equivalents, as “gatekeepers of righteousness”.

It also sells effortless virtue: how hard is it for someone whose income does not come from business ownership (such as, for example, some tenured academic) to decide that capitalists are evil exploiters, or for a heterosexual to decide homosexuality is wrong? Effortless virtue based on contempt for others is not exactly the message of the Gospels.

The problem is not having concern for categories and the nature of things. All our perception is pervaded by putting things in categories (“this is a stone, tree, person, cat, …”) tagged with our direct and indirect experience of the nature of things: a process that is neither random nor manifests the perfection of necessity but as much a part of our perceiving as any “sense impression”. Such recognition is not only part of perception: it is central to the point of it. So much of learning is about developing such recognition. Any recognisable physical object has tagged knowledge associated with it as much as any recognisable piece of writing: different recognitions having different levels and types of tagged knowledge. Indeed, writing works by extending this normal part of perception: that we can grasp words as referring to things is simply an extension of the normal information associations of our perception. Though such extension may affect our perception of the physical world, just as Zen thinkers would argue.

An example of the importance of the information associations of perception is when looking at something out of focus. It is a blur of shapes. Once it comes into focus, not only do we have more information, we tag what we see with the associated information. The difference between looking at someone we know and someone we do not shows up the importance of associated information. As does looking at something, putting in one conceptual “box” with associated information, and the realising it is something else—such as thinking something on the ground ahead is a dead insect and finding, when we get closer, it is just some fluff and thread.

In reality, we are all, in a weak sense, Aristotelians. We all work with (or even shape) things according to their expected capacities. Just as social existence (let alone social analysis) is impossible without expected regularities in human nature, we equally could not act in the world without expected regularities within physical nature: both sets of regularities not being fortunate happenstances but based on inbuilt propensities and capacities. Our understanding of these is built up by experience, observation and thinking thereupon. Starting with how babies learn about the world around them. In the words of an email from early childhood educator, they:

… apply limited Action Schemes to everything they come across, which is part of learning about the world. The earliest action schemes are things like grab and suck. Babies are born knowing how to do this—or at least they can do it within hours of being born. Later there is grasp & shake, which is why we give babies rattles. There's also banging, dumping (around 9 months) and turning things over to see the other side. As babies develop they get to combine these basic action schemes into more complicated patterns. So younger babies are kind of looking at the world of objects as: is this something I bang, something I shake or something I ignore? Babies & toddlers put everything in their mouths too, just like animals do. Touch it, to feel its texture, grasp and shake and turn it over, taste it. Watch a gorilla do the same thing to an unknown item the next time you're at the zoo.

In other words, they explore the nature of things to build up a conceptual order that allows them to deal with what is otherwise a sensory cacophony. It is by assigning instances to classes, examples to categories, tokens to types—or whatever terminology we wish to use—that we extend our ability to act from this build-up of experienced associations.

It is a mistake to see this process as definitive, complete, certain or in any other way perfect. But it is also a mistake to note its incompleteness, uncertainty, fallibility, etc and to thus conclude that there is no understanding or knowing involved—that it is, in some sense, a perfect failure. Nor to fail to note its reflexive nature—that it is not separate from the world but of and in the world, with all the feedback effects that entails.

Reason and right
There are two problems with the innate-purposes model. First, in not grounding norms as coming from us being purposive beings. Rocks do not have norms. Living things do, and they do depending on the complexity of their purposivefulness—the range of purposes, the awareness of such purposes, the level of interaction (particularly possible reflexive interaction) of such purposes. This purposiveness distinguishes living things from non-living things: the level of such purposiveness the sentient from non-sentient. This is not to say that morality is just about what people want and feel. Merely that wanting, feeling and the capacity to deliberately choose one action over others in some considered way is what morality exists to deal with. Indeed, it allows morality to exist. Morality is not grounded in the nature of reality, it is grounded in our nature as sentient beings.

And also in the reality of conflict. If human purposes never conflicted the questions of how should I live? and how shall we get along? would never arise. In having purposes, we face conflicts between our purposes and between what we want and what we can do. Hence the issues of instrumental rationality (how do I act to achieve X?) and substantive rationality (how do I manage my different purposes?). In dealing with other people we face conflicts with our purposes towards them and between their purposes and ours. Hence morality and the vast array of human norms.

(As an aside, this fits in nicely with the conception of Paradise as the beatific vision, since conflict within and between purposes no longer arise. It also fits in with the notion of Satan essentially casting himself out of Heaven by, in his pride, bringing conflict to where it could not be.)

Rationality is about dealing with our own purposiveness. Given the demands of having sense of identity, of self; the reality of psychic pleasure and pain, the endless struggle to think well of ourselves; and that neither our time nor our capacity for cognition is infinite—hence the utility of habits, routines and using the apparent knowledge of others—a lot of what gets characterised as “irrationality” is rational management of purposiveness given limited cognitive resources. It is a trap to define ‘rationality’ as implying perfect reasoning (or as “agrees with me”).

Morality is about dealing with the interactions of the purposive using our sense of ourselves as moral beings within a moral community. Given that morality has functions, that consequences matter, that rules have both economising and signalling value, that morality requires our adherence, that it arises out of human purposes and purposiveness, that it has to create a moral order to work, with requisite authority, all the philosophically respectable theories of morality are onto something important about morality (which is how they get to be philosophically respectable in the first place).

Though divine command theories of morality, not so much: even if they do speak to the requiring authority point. Leaving aside objections such as John Stuart Mill’s, divine command theories of morality also suffer the problem that it is basic to any command that it is communicated, otherwise it is not a command. So such approaches only make sense within some particular tradition of revelation. But, as morality exists much more broadly across space and time than any specific tradition of revelation, clearly morality is not grounded in divine command since people to whom no such command has ever been communicated to still act morally, still act within a sense of moral order. This even without the problem of the uncheckability of such revelation or that there are moral issues that get dealt with without any specific command even within such traditions (which takes us back to Mill’s point about the good requiring a meaning beyond God commanding it).

All of which raises the question of whether theories of morality, such as utilitarianism or various forms of natural law theory, determine what is moral or do they provide various ways of structuring the pre-existing function of morality?: the better the “functional” fit, the better the moral theory. The former seems to imply that one has to know a specific theory to be “truly” moral (which seems highly implausible), the latter, which seems to be more like how things work, raises questions about the nature of moral authority.

The weight of nature
One sign of environmentalism being a religion is that it gives great metaphysical weight, such as to profoundly constrain human purposes, to nature. It thus greatly reduces the more weight given to human purposes in exactly the same way (if more broadly) that giving great weight to an aspect of nature—the procreative function of sex—devalues human purposes and thus people. (I think we can take it that burning people alive for getting married, throwing them to the dogs to be eaten alive because of how they dress and who they have sex with or denying them as much of the equal protection of the laws as can be managed, all manifest devaluings of people.)

That morality is grounded in human purposiveness is why morality, and norms in general, occur across religious and non-religious traditions. Indeed, why, given the persistence of regularities in human nature, there is a high degree of overlap in moral norms. The main contributions of religion are to add extra motivation, to provide a sense of belonging and to provide a role for priests and clerics as both moral exhorters and “gatekeepers of righteousness”. Which includes putting particular emphasis on those things that separate the community of the righteous from heathen “Others”. The observation of C.S.Lewis:

those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences

applies particularly to priests and clerics. Who so often find it useful to characterise the different as wicked. The same-sex attracted have generally been—before modern communications and mass urbanisation allowed the same-sex attracted to achieve social “critical mass”—very easy targets, since there are few people more vulnerable and easily isolated than a same-sex attracted youth growing up in a family and religious milieu that anathematises same-sex activity and attraction. Indeed, as the same-sex attracted have become harder targets, and as the impulse to make them targets has faded (an interactive process), so their social position has improved. (There are lags in this process: so there is evidence that public policy in the US, for example, is more hostile than public opinion [pdf].)

The second problem with the innate-purposes approach is having the model—the concept—trump reality. To not understand that concepts are models, what models are and what roles they play.

We live in a world of things that we put into categories. Some categories are pretty inescapable. Others are not: the world is full of continua. When we make distinctions, we draw boundaries in those continua. Boundaries that are often fuzzier than we are generally willing to admit. Colours are an obvious case, but so are things such as language, species, gender, institutions. Boundaries that are often more arbitrary than we realise—different languages make and elevate very different distinctions. Any concept is an abstraction from reality: that process of abstraction is also a process of simplification and is a process easily prone to error. The more abstract our thinking, the easier for it to go wrong. And our abstract thinking can easily go very wrong.

Which is why it is highly desirable to have strong checks on our abstract thinking—concern for evidence; concern for people’s experiences and concerns; concern for careful reasoning. That so much of the world can apparently be expressed mathematically has been a huge boon for our more abstract understanding of the world, since mathematics makes it so much easier to have rigour in our thinking. (Though mathematical models themselves can be a trap.) The manifold failures of actually existing socialism have been a very clear display of the failures of Marxism: a highly abstract and allegedly rigorous approach to understanding human society that is an excellent example of how our abstract thinking can go very wrong.

We may also reasonably feel that that classical natural law theory led to burning people alive, or throwing them to the dogs to be eaten alive, on the basis of who they had sex with is a pretty clear manifestation of serious failure as a moral standard. Just as are the highly adverse effects of parents failing to accept the sexuality of their same-sex attracted children. Also from a system that was highly abstract and allegedly rigorous approach to understanding human society. The consequences of basing judgement on a model of how people are supposed to be, rather than how they actually are, are not pretty. The oppressive tyranny of the utopian urge comes precisely from its war against people-as-they are in the name of people-as-they-are-supposed-to-be. It does not matter whether it is in the name of the “single legitimate” sexuality, religion, race or class: they are all murderous and tyrannical wars against the diversity of the human.

Any system that ends up selling effortless virtue based on contempt for others is not a good look. But how can any system of moral evaluation that is ultimately not grounded in human purposes end up anywhere else? Christ really did have an excellent point.

Marxism gets there by Marx’s labour theory of value (for as labour is the only source of value, workers are the only legitimate class), a theory of value which is most certainly not grounded in human purposes, even though it purports to be. Classical natural law theory gets there by use of Aristotle’s theory of causation, using it to hold that procreation is the only legitimate function of sex, thus making heterosexuality the only legitimate (active) sexuality. (Celibacy is permitted: indeed required outside of marriage.)

Cause and intention
Aristotle’s theory was based on there being four causes—the material cause (the underlying stuff something is made out of), the formal cause (the form, structure or pattern that it exhibits), the efficient cause (what brings a thing into being: technically, what actualises a potentiality in a thing) and the final cause (the end, goal or purpose of a thing). Post-medieval philosophy abandoned formal and final causes.

In this case, it is final cause that counts. For it is final cause that sets up a criteria for judgement about whether something is being used according to its deemed proper purpose(i) (and so within the forms which support that purpose[i]). So the Catholic Church declares all conscious sex, other than that where the ejaculation occurs into an unimpeded vagina, as unclean (that is, immoral). For only sex that conforms to the form of sex according to its procreative purpose(i) is moral. Hence, only sex within marriage (the social form for raising children, given that sex is limited to that procreative in form) is permitted and no other form of sex to the point of ejaculation is—even between husband and wife.

Edward Feser, in his admirably clear The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism, states the notion of there being a definitive form of marriage (due to it having a final cause) with his usual clarity:

For the metaphysics underlying natural law theory entails that marriage is, not by human definition, but as an objective metaphysical fact determined by its final cause, inherently procreative, and thus inherently heterosexual (p.149).

So all those cultures which have encompassed same-sex marriages are just metaphysically deluded.

Moreover, the notion that any human institution has a single function, a single purpose, is generally dubious: to have it as a metaphysical necessity is nonsense. The same point applies to sex in general (particularly as sex is pleasurable, so can provide catharsis and express connection). Or any biological feature, since without the ability of something to evolve into something else there cannot be evolution. For, in the natural world, the purposes of living things drives use which drives form (hence a fin can evolve into a foot, a foot can evolve into a hand). [Biologist Ian Tattersall explains how the process of adaption of something into something else now has its own term:

what has in recent years increasingly been termed "exaptation." This is a useful name for characteristics that arise in one context before being exploited in another, or for the process by which such novelties are adopted in populations. The classic example of exaptation becoming adaptation is birds' feathers. These structures are essential nowadays to bird flight, but for millions of years before flight came along they were apparently used simply as insulators (and maybe for nothing much at all before that). For a long time, then, feathers were highly useful adaptations for maintaining body temperatures. As adjuncts to flight, on the other hand, they were simply exaptations until, much later, they began to assume an adaptive role in this new function, too. There are many other similar examples...]

Giving final cause defining moral weight as purpose(i), so setting proper use due to form, puts things precisely the wrong way round.

But even without the problems of requiring purposive singularity or reversing the process of how natural selection works, there is a difference between role

the role of this billiard ball in this causal sequence was to knock that other billiard ball into the side pocket as a result of being hit by a cue

function

billiard balls have the function of being part of a game of billiards

and purpose

his purpose in hitting this billiard ball with his cue was to knock that other billiard ball into the side pocket.

An asteroid striking the moon has a key role in the causal sequence that created a crater. A kidney has the function of processing and distilling liquid waste in the body. A kidney transplant has the purpose of replacing a failed kidney. One is an individual event, one is something embedded in a functioning (indeed, highly coherent) structure and one is a matter of conscious intent. Each higher level entails the ones below it: the reverse is not true. They may, in some sense, all be manifestations of intentionality in the sense of being directed to something: they are very far from being manifestations of the same sort of intentionality. Hence rocks do not have morality or moral dilemmas while humans do. For we are purposive in a way that rocks, for example, or bacteria, are not and bacteria are purposive in a way rocks are not.

The purpose in the kidney transplant comes from the mind of the participants, as does the purpose of the billiard player. Such purposiveness is not innate to the structure of things but arises out of human purposiveness.

Being consciously purposive creates the questions of how we should we live and how shall we get along. But these are not the same question—Robinson Crusoe confronts the first question but not the second—and treating them as the same question does not have a happy history for it gives controlling power to those who get to define “the good”. Which, of course, makes it very attractive to those who think they and theirs will get to do that defining.

To move between these very different forms of directedness without taking sufficient note of the very large differences between them is a form of a classic way for our reasoning to go wrong: shifting between concepts without noting it. Malthus engaged in a particularly clear example by failing to distinguish between two different notions of tendency. As did Darwin in his use of “struggle for existence”. Roland Barthes does a version in his seminal (and I do not mean that in a good way) Death of an Author essay. Indeed, as David Stove pointed out, entire philosophical traditions can be built on it. The purposiveness of the kidney transplant is not remotely the same as the function of the kidney or the role of the asteroid and does not have the same grounding.

Classical natural law theory imprisons human purposes within the deemed reproductive function of sexual organs, even though sex in nature clearly has much wider functions than just reproduction. For the function of sex in nature is, in classical natural law theory, not inferred from how sex is used in the natural world. Nor are the range of purposes animals have in engaging in sex taken seriously: again, an anti-empirical approach.

Such imprisoning human purposes within deemed biological function is profoundly belittling of human purposiveness, as we have seen: hence its deeply, indeed murderously, oppressive nature. The greater is imprisoned within the lesser, thereby both enjoining and requiring either changing (“reparative” therapy), constraining (imprisoning, flogging, etc) or eliminating (hanging, burning alive, throwing to the dogs to be eaten alive, etc) those who do not fit.

The classical natural law theory has a too simple a concept of order, of how things have natures. It imposes single (or at least absolutely trumping) concepts of innate function, with too strong a notion of intentionality, which do not evolve, on a much more mixed, indeed fluid, reality. The model ends up trumpingg reality. Hence it cutting out of the “properly human” those who are attracted to members of their own sex or cutting out of “marriage” historically existing same-sex marriages. Just as it produces too simple concepts of sex, of money, of how labour is organised, what hair is for, and so on. If things have trumping functions, trumping purposes(i), then whatever trumping function you can identify has to be the “right” one. Universalising the parochial is inherent—dare one say, natural—to classical natural law thinking. Which, of course, can be very useful as a mechanism for boosting the familiar and anathematising the different: a very useful feature for gatekeepers of righteousness. A feature that goes right back to Philo of Alexandria.

A nice example of universalising the parochial is provided by Edward Feser in The Last Superstition in his citing of disgust at homosexuality. While disgust is a universal human emotion (and may, indeed, be a distinctively human emotion), what excites disgust varies enormously among and within human cultures. Notions of disgust are particularly malleable to religious teachings—as we can see in the reaction of many Muslims to dogs. A devout Orthodox Jew, Muslim or Jain, or vegetarian, may well be repulsed by turning a pig leg into ham to be eaten: even those of us who love ham may find some of the processes involved somewhat repellent. Such malleability is particularly true of sex—human cultures have varied in their view of same-sex acts from homicidal anathematisation to making them compulsory. Indeed, the widespread adoration in the late Classical period of Emperor Hadrian’s deified lover Antinous (of whom we have more surviving statues than perhaps any other classical figure) bespeaks of how cultural presumptions change. As does the use (such as by Plato in the Symposium) of lovers and tyrannicides Harmodius and Aristogeiton—icons of Athenian democracy: the first non-divine figures to be recognised by the Athenian polis with civic statues—as emblematic of how love between men was a support of a free society (a rhetorical commonplace for centuries).

So why should the disgust of some people in some times and places at same-sex acts count, but Muslim disgust at dogs or disgust by some politically correct left-winger at Edward Feser’s conservative Catholic views not? Obviously, it is not disgust but the criteria which makes some disgust significant and others not which is the authority here.

Feser also provides a tiresomely “clever, clever” argument about homosexuals being free to marry:

… the answer is that they can marry. But of course, what that means, as a matter of conceptual necessity, is that they can marry someone of the opposite sex. What they can’t do is marry each other … (due to the objective metaphysical facts of marriage, p.149)

All in the name of the One True Sexuality.

Well, suppose we have a theory of the One True Religion. Everyone is free to worship God in public service but since, as a matter of conceptual necessity, the only true service is Anglican (Americans would say Episcopalian) what Catholics are not free to do is to worship publicly in a Catholic service. We can immediately that this treats the wishes of Catholics with belittling contempt. In exactly the same way Feser’s argument about marriage does the same-sex attracted. (In my example, I am, of course, describing the situation in the England of Elizabeth I and the United Kingdom of Great Britain after the Glorious Revolution of 1688.) Feser replies that he has a theory: but so did the Anglican and Presbyterian establishments. Bigotry always has a theory. One, moreover, which taps into the “true” nature of the universe and the human condition, so is not bigotry. One way bigotry appeals is by providing a sense of being an insightful “knower” of the wicked and corrupting nature of the objects of bigotry. In the case of Georgian England, the righteous disgust of good Protestants at any movement towards any easing of the restrictions on the nefarious Catholics infamously led to the Gordon riots of 1778. But we have already established that some popular disgust counts and others do not.

The cause that doesn’t
Feser’s theory is Aristotelian metaphysics, where everything has a final cause. But that does not, of itself, set up any criteria for judgement precisely because it is a universal feature. John Locke tried to ground our moral status in us being God’s property: but, if God has property, then everything is God’s property. So, that gives us no special status. Similarly, if everything has a final cause then that provides no criteria for judgement.

Just as, if one cherry picks particular bits of Leviticus (such as Leviticus 18:22 & 20:13) but not others (in repeated defiance of Leviticus 18:4-5, 26; 19:19, 37; 20:22 which require all the laws set out be followed) then one’s authority is not Leviticus but whatever criteria one is using to pick and choose so, if one grants some final causes status but not others, one’s authority is not them having a final cause but whatever criteria one is using to elevate some final causes over others.

Consider a pig leg. Its final cause is to convey a pig around. But, unless we are vegetarians (or have religious objections to pig-meat), we have no objection to turning the pig leg into roast pork, or into ham. The original final cause which brought the pig leg into existence matters not, we choose to engage in a causal sequence which has a different final cause—to consume the pork or ham with : nutritional benefit and sensual enjoyment completely frustrating its original function. (Wild boar can be even better: fish, venison and kangaroo fine things.) The rights or wrongs of that, or any other action, do not depend on some particular final cause in the sequence of final causes any particular bit of matter goes through.

It is purposiveness that matters, not purposes(i). A vegetarian would argue that a pig has a sentient existence that trumps our wish to eat pig meat. Non-vegetarians would disagree. But it is the status of the pig as a sentient, and thus purposive, being that is the key issue. Is it enough like us in sentience to make eating it wrong or not? A practising Jew or Muslim may say that God has barred the eating of pig, but that is grounded in God’s explicit Revealed decision: purposiveness of the highest order in their religions.

Since the is’s of nature entails no oughts, people take the moral “lessons” from nature that they bring to it. For is us, our purposiveness, that is the source of values, so people take from nature the values they bring to it. Hence Nazis took from nature their obsessions with violence, purity, territory; environmentalists take their revulsion against capitalism and industrialisation; classical natural law theorists take from nature monotheism’s obsessions about sex. (One notes that the naturalness of nudity gets it no cred from the God-fearing.) Animist traditions, arising out of living embedded in nature, tended to have a much broader view of the function of sex because that is what they could observe thereby avoiding being in the position of deciding that some sex acts tell them about the nature and functions of sex and other sex acts do not. (And so to deciding that some marriages tell us about the nature and functions of marriage but other marriages do not, that some humans manifest how people are supposed to be and some do not.)

In the case of the original source argument about same-sex activity being “unnatural”—The Athenian in Plato’s The Laws—lacking recourse to the Judaic laws, it was grounded in false claims about there being no same-sex activity in nature:

If we were to follow in nature's steps … declaring that it is right to refrain from indulging in the same kind of intercourse with men and boys as with women, and adducing as evidence thereof the nature of wild beasts, and pointing out how male does not touch male for this purpose, since it is unnatural

and:

… for making a natural use of reproductive intercourse—on the one hand, by abstaining from the male … on the other hand, by abstaining from every female field in which you would not desire the seed to spring up. This law, when it has become permanent and prevails … is the cause of countless blessings. For, in the first place, it follows the dictates of nature, …

Later natural law theorists then characterised such activity observed in nature as unnatural flaws in the animals concerned: a case of cutting away their original props, leaving them standing in mid-air, metaphysically speaking. Hence their recurring tendency to universalise the parochial, as in Feser’s characterisation of marriage or St Paul on hair, or St Gerald of Aurillac on work, or medieval Scholastics on money or … .

We do not exist for marriage, marriage exists for us: indeed, it exists from us. It is a social form grounded in, and created by, human purposes: not in some innate form that trumps human purposes. Hence, since we vary and our conceptions vary, marriage can and does come in all sorts of forms, forms that change over time. It is probably no accident that Aristotelianism collapsed in European philosophy just as Europe was being confronted with a huge range of new societies, lands, species and natural phenomena: the collapse of what historian Alfred Crosby calls the venerable model took Scholastic Aristotelianism, with its tendency to universalise the parochial, to judge the world rather than infer from it, with it. It is hard to maintain a strong sense of there being a definitive natural order when one is confronted with a riot of human and other diversity undreamt of in your philosophy.

In The Last Superstition Edward Feser argues that the historical philosophical arguments for abandoning Aristotelianism are poor. He looks to animus against religion as a motivator. Given many of said rejecting philosophers were believers in God, the simple inadequacy of classical natural law theory in the face of the riot of new knowledge seems a more plausible explanation.

As is anti-clericalism: more specifically, opposition to priestly power and its consequences. The opposition of priests in general, and the Catholic Church in particular, to intellectual freedom is longstanding and well attested. Descartes, for example, apparently stopped working on his cosmology after Galileo ran into a spot of bother with the Church. But, with the invention of printing and the Reformation (in part a consequence of the spread of printing), there was a further effect. Scientific printing in particular was essentially forced into Protestant lands because of the way Catholic priests (as “gatekeepers of righteousness”) exercised their power to license what was printed. This despite the fact that Catholic theology—with its notion that the world, as the direction creation of God, has primacy over Scripture, as a creation of the body of believers (however divinely inspired)—was more science-friendly than Protestant theology, with its notion of the primacy of Scripture. (Hence contemporary creationism is much more of a Protestant, than a Catholic, phenomena.) Indeed, Protestant printers would use the Catholic Church’s Index of Forbidden Books as a mark of what to print, because such works had both the lure of the forbidden and allow book buyers to celebrate their “Protestant liberty” in defiance of “Papist despotism”. (The more things change …) Since such priestly power was indelibly connected to medieval Scholasticism, Aristotelianism was further tarred by repressive association.

The diversity of the human
Whether to grant the same-sex attracted equality before the law is a public policy choice. But it is genuine choice, grounded in human purposes. There is not some definitive form of marriage built into the structure of the universe that leads us to only one proper choice about what form of marriage is permissible.

That opponents of same-sex marriage are not willing to venture any predictions about what will happen in the US States that legalise same-sex marriage is itself an indication of how not grounded in human purposes, and in human nature as it is, the opposition to such equality before the law is.

The question is whether the same-sex attracted are a legitimate manifestation of the human or not and so whether their relationships are to have equal protection of the law. The supporters say they are legitimate manifestations of the human, with all that implies:

The increasing presence of "openly gay" people in social life and in the media has changed our habits. And over the last 30 years or so, instead of thinking about the private activity of gay sex, many Americans and Europeans started thinking about the public category of gay people.

Hence attitudes to same-sex marriage being so much a division between generations. To the extent that the public animus towards same-sex attracted appears to be seriously hurting the standing of Christianity among young Americans.

A vivid and personal instance of this shift in perspective was provided by a National Party MP:

I have killed a man. In fact, I have killed men. Not through what I have done, but through my own pathetic and stupid prejudice. Not long ago I went to the funeral of a young gay friend of mine who had died of a rare wasting illness. He ultimately died of a broken heart – he died because he was sorry to be gay. He was a country bloke who didn't want to be gay, but he just was.
He didn't want the prejudice that he would inevitably face. I guess he wanted the textbook life that we generally romanticise about and call “normal'”, but it just wasn't him. At the cemetery I saw two of his friends, both male, holding hands as they lowered the casket, bawling their eyes out at the loss of their beloved friend. Through their tears my eyes were finally opened. Their love and respect was what mattered. Who cares what people do as long as they love each other?
I felt like a complete moron. In all these years of thinking that being gay was odd or unusual, in actual fact I was perpetuating prejudice that was killing young men – and which still kills young men.
I killed my friend through my failure to accept difference, and through the lack of understanding from other country blokes, just like me, who made him hate being gay. It is not overt prejudice or open vilification. It's the more dangerous, subtle, constant things we do that must have gnawed away at his soul. It was people such as me who give gay people a funny look, who make gay men ashamed in country Australia.
And I haven't just killed him, I have killed many. Killed them at the end of a rope in the back shed or at the barrel of their father's gun or next to an empty bottle of grog. It's a tough realisation to come to. I have been brought up and remain a strong Catholic, believing in strong “family values'' and that heterosexual relationships were what God was all about. But only a week after the funeral I went to a wedding where the priest read the Gospel where He says “of all of my commandments the most important one is to love thy neighbour''. Unless they cut out a bit on the end that said “unless they are gay,'' I reckon God didn't care much about who you love, so why do we?
Thomas, if you can hear me, forgive me for now I understand.

In other words, they stopped being flawed departures from what should be and became just people.

Apart from the utterly unnecessary human misery they create, the “mild” manifestations of bigotry matter because they keep alive the notion of a category of people whose existence is problematical, as a “problem” requiring “solution”. A final solution even: ideas have consequences.

The opponents say the same-sex attracted are not legitimate manifestations of the human:

Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.

and it is perfectly obvious where the idea that there exist people who are not legitimate forms of the human:

In that night our Blessed Lady and Mother of God was delivered of our Blessed Saviour upon the hay that lay in the rack. At which nativity our Lord shewed many marvels. … And it happed this night that all the sodomites that did sin against nature were dead and extinct; for God hated so much this sin, that he might not suffer that nature human, which he had taken, were delivered to so great shame. Whereof Saint Austin saith that, it lacked but little that God would not become man for that sin

leads. (Not only did it take decades to acknowledge that homosexuals were victims of the Holocaust, when the camps were conquered, they were often transferred from the death camps to ordinary prisons, since same-sex activity remained a criminal offence: that is, they remained not a legitimate manifestation of the human.) A homicidal and exterminationist view being involved right from the beginning of the welding of the natural law tradition to Scriptural revelation precisely because it has purpose(i) and form not only trump human purposes but setting the definition of what it is to be (acceptably) human.

It is simply mad to think that men having sex with each other, engaging in the “wrong form” of sex, is more morally offensive than rape or murder: as The Golden Legend avers. All the homosexual orgasms in the history of the world do not morally outweigh one person being burnt alive for having sex with another. Indeed, they do not outweigh the mental torture inflicted on one adolescent for having the “wrong” aspirations to love and be loved, for being induced to think that they are somehow outside the natural order and hateful to God.

For it is nonsense to say “against the sin, not the sinner”. If someone said “love you, but I hate the fact that you are black”, we would see it for the bigoted statement it is. Our erotic nature is a fundamental part of us, not some optional extra. Just as pretending that encouraging people to be thoroughly alienated from their own erotic nature “has their best interests at heart” is a specious and contemptible rationalisation of deeper animus at their being so dreadfully different.

For if the same-sex attracted are not legitimate manifestations of the human, what has been done to them in the name of such thinking does not count. If they are not are not legitimate manifestations of the human, what has been done to them in the name of such thinking does not tell us anything about the logic of such thought. It is a normal pattern of bigotry to either ignore the brutality and other harm that results from it or to blame such on the objects of bigotry: the problem is never the way bigotry frames matters but always with the objects of bigotry. (The self-righteous certainty of political correctness regularly operates in this way.) The whole point of bigotry is to deny the objects of bigotry the status of “real people”, with the consideration that would entail.

So the brutality arising out of the anathematising of same-sex attraction and activity is either ignored, belittled or any harm involved is the fault of the same-sex active themselves. Or attention is simply shifted to how “threatened” the huge heterosexual majority is by the small same-sex attracted minority’s “corrupting power”, just as Jew-hatred built up the Jews in the same way. For if the small minority does not have great corrupting power, then it is just a large majority monstrously bullying a small and vulnerable minority—which is central to why we see the same patterns in anti-gay activism as was manifested in anti-Jewish activism.

A corrupting anathema
The anathematisation of same-sex attraction is profoundly corrupting of moral sensibility. The elevating of forms and alleged purposes(i) over human purposes and purposiveness is profoundly belittling of what it is to be human. Not merely in the casting out of categories of people from the “properly human” but in not granting that purposiveness as the real root of all norms and so not treating what it is to be human with sufficient seriousness. Such elevation of designated forms and purposes(i) over human purposes, even over what it is to be human—indeed, to define what “counts” as properly human—must be oppressive.

For it was precisely Philo’s re-interpretation of Genesis 19 according to natural law principles which shifted the story from a warning to all not to treat the weak and vulnerable badly (so a story grounded in human purposiveness, which is how Christ used the story, following in the tradition of Ezekiel, and Zephaniah) to divine horror at same-sex activity (so a story grounded in form and function) and one which, moreover, was morally quarantined off as the anathematisation of an easily isolated, and thus vulnerable, minority: such that even tolerating such people became an offence against God. The notion of virtuous extermination was thereby embedded in Western civilisation. It is hard to over-estimate the evil consequences in re-casting the premier Scriptural example of the Wrath of God from a warning not to treat others badly to an anathematisation of the different: indeed, as an injunction to oppress and kill the different.

What is it to be human?
So, the debate over same-sex marriage is, in large part, a debate over what it is to be human. People vary, marriages vary: equality before the law is a way to cope, via simple decency, with the variety of the human rather than prosecuting an unending war against it.

It is, of course, deeply insulting, even infuriating, to be in the position to have to argue that, really, one is a fully legitimate manifestation of the human. But it is the position that Jew, blacks, women—all those who have had to struggle to achieve equal protection of the law—have had to go through.

In The Last Superstition, one has a grown man, and a philosopher, comparing homosexuality to alcoholism, autism, etc (p.134). No one who has suffered the destructiveness of the sufferer and those around them of alcoholism (or, for that matter, the travails of raising an autistic child) can possibly compare it to erotic attraction to one’s own sex without a seriously impaired sense of what actual pathology is, and is not. Particularly given same-sex attracted men are, as it happens, disproportionately likely to be volunteers, in the caring/service jobs or carers; tend to have more varied and intense friendships than heterosexual men; are less likely to engage in violence and more likely to be actively creative. But, then, Jews (if anything, even more wildly disproportionately intellectually creative) were equally dismissed as inherently pathological.

Again and again, those to be denied equal protection of the law are pathologised and belittled or are cast as somehow alien. Just as “decent conservatives” in the C19th American South did not want to see blacks as their moral equals, or conservative Catholics in C19th France, Austria or German would be outraged at the thought that Jews could be legitimately French, German or Austrian, so now many conservatives see homosexuality as somehow alien to the proper order of things. Of all the attempts to do cast out people in one’s own society as somehow alien, none is more nonsensical than seeing the same-sex attracted as such, as Bruce Bawer expresses so vividly:

Western civilization, far from being threatened by homosexuality, is to a staggeringly disproportionate degree the creation of gay men and women.
"Do you want to protect your children from gay influence?" I imagine [Allan Bloom] writing. "Very well. Destroy the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, silence Messiah and Swan Lake, and burn Moby Dick and The Portrait of a Lady. Gay culture is all around you — and it belongs to everybody."

But the effortless virtue of feeling superior to Leonardo Da Vinci, Handel, Tchaikovsky, Henry James, Alan Turing (for whose ill-treatment British PM Gordon Brown recently apologized) and all the other non-heterosexual creators of Western civilisation because, unlike them, you are not “queer”, must be a heady thing. It is also, of course, an utterly contemptible thing.

But, then, there is something profoundly pathetic about members of a huge majority trying to build up members of small minority as some great moral threat when, of course, it is the small minority who are the vulnerable ones. Leaving aside what happens in Muslim countries, in places like Jamaica or Nigeria even seeking to worship together can be actively dangerous. But freedom for the people-who-should-not-exist to worship, or to have same-sex marriage ceremonies, is not the sort of religious freedom that anti-gay activists concern themselves with when they bleat about religious freedom.

The madness, the pathology, is not in homosexuality. The madness is thinking it matters. That the same-sex attracted are anything more, or less, than just folks. Anything more, or less, than just a manifestation of the variety of the human.

The position of the Catholic Church is, as it has always been, that homosexuals, people with an “unnatural”, a “disordered”, attraction to their own sex, should not exist as they are. Once you have a category of people who should not exist, then clearly society, and decency, is served by making sure they do not exist or, if you cannot manage that, restrict that they exist as much as possible. Hence the Catholic Church’s position has been to be as exterminatory towards the same-sex attracted as it can get away within the existing historical circumstances. If they could be publicly killed them for acting on that attraction, that was done. If they were so outside the ambit of the Gospels that God could be portrayed as a Virtuous Exterminator, purifying the globe of their polluting presence before the Incarnation could even happen, that was done. If they could be denied any public space for manifesting that attraction, that was done. If they could be denied any legal rights or standing from manifesting that attraction, that has been done. For people who should not exist have no claim on the rest of humanity, the rest of society. Error has no rights, even to exist. (Something that the politically correct, in their ardent wish to police public discourse, tend to believe quite strongly.) But freedom means nothing if it does not mean the right to be wrong (with the normal caveats about being limited by the freedom of others), for otherwise we are under the power of whoever gets to define “the wrong”.

And the notion that there are people who should not exist comes to Christianity via the marriage of natural law theory with the Holiness Code using a reinterpretation of Genesis 19 to make that marriage work. In particular, the notion that functions are defined by innate purposes which thereby preclude any other purposes or uses from having any claim. The natural law approach of concepts that judge the world, not merely in a moral but in an ontological sense, has a natural exterminatory logic to it. Hence reinterpreting Genesis 19 to make God the Virtuous Exterminator of the people who should not exist, a logic expressed so fully in The Golden Legend. But that history of brutality and violence is only a moral problem if its victims and their experiences have moral weight. If they are people who should not exist, it is all mere action in defence of “decency”.

To accept equality before the law, one has to reject the notion that there are people-by-category who should not exist, or who are otherwise not fully legitimate manifestations of the human. Hence the power of philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah’s above-cited point about “accepting the public category of gay people”, which includes accepting their full humanity. Hence also the bitter resistance by the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church, Orthodox Jews, Muslims and Evangelical Christians to granting them that full, public humanity: so many of whose adherents are clearly happy to engage in whatever level of contempt for others—and its concomitant sense of effortless virtue—that is required to maintain their sense of the authority of scripture, the authority of their church and of sex as something that—unless done in the right form—separates us from the divine. (Not a burden that animist or polytheist conceptions of the divine, which are often highly sexualised, generally labour under.) Hence monotheism’s strikingly insistent anathematising of same-sex attraction, regardless of whether the particular strain of monotheism adheres to natural law theory or not.

Which puts in perspective the transformative nature of the Gospel message, for the point of the rejection of the Old Law, of the Holiness Code, was that the Gospel message changed it all into a message of moral universalism, so not playing restrictive, priestly games with good forms and bad forms. But it is classical natural law theory which led Christianity to keep that one bit of the Holiness Code going, that one case of keeping form trumping human purposes (in violation of Matthew 15: 16-20 and Mark 7:1-20), to interpret Genesis 19 in an exterminatory way which justifies further extermination of the people who should not exist. A reinterpretation which also finds its way into the Qur’an’s presentation of the story of Lot.

Defining ‘marriage’ so as to exclude actual marriages is both characteristic of how classical natural law theory precedes and a manifestation of a very grim legacy. For just as it holds that some sex acts tells us about the proper nature of sex and others do not, some marriages tells us about the proper nature of marriage and others do not, it ends up with some humans tells us about the proper nature of the human and others do not and so—as with being the “wrong class” in Marxism, the “wrong race” in Nazism—those with the “wrong sexuality” are “surplus to requirements” and to positive consideration. With all the petty, and not so petty, cruelties that generates.

We should not need to ask what they consequences of such thinking are: they have long since become obvious. Though one case can stand for so many. In 1741, Jan Jansz, aged 17, was convicted in Amsterdam of sodomy. As a result of the authorities performing their duty in accordance with traditional Christian doctrine, he spent the rest of his life—fifty-seven years—in solitary confinement in his cell. Decades of torment in the cause of their consciences, just as C. S. Lewis identifies.

The question is why people refuse to face what such thinking means, despite the mountains of evidence? Because of the blindness of habit, the comfort of the familiar and the endless appeal of effortless virtue. It would be some grim comfort to think the tormenting of all the Jan Jansz’s were and are all just pointless barbarity. But such acts are worse, for they are purposeful and self-elevating barbarity, reducing one’s fellows to stick figure puppets in the self-serving passion play of our comfortingly righteous, effortless virtue. Let’s not go there any more, nor adhere to the false theories that take us there.