Fireside this week!
For this week’s musing, I want to consider the role the historian has in making judgements about the past, particularly – but not exclusively – about historical figures and their legacies. In particular, I very often encounter the notion that historians aren’t supposed to make any sort of value judgements about the past or that we are only supposed to judge past actors by the values of their own societies. Both claims are, at best, a fairly substantial misunderstanding of how the discipline of history functions and what its aims are. On the one hand, historians ought to seek truth about the past, but on the other hand we also ought to interpret the facts we find with an eye towards present-tense use and understanding. Doing the latter requires rendering a variety of value judgements; the historian does not pretend perfect objectivity (such a thing being, we contend, impossible) but is instead intended to indicate at the outset what the basis of those judgements are.
That is not, by the by, some sort of new thing in historical inquiry. There is a tendency in some quarters to assume that historians assigning judgements to things in the past is some sort of new thing (often implicitly or explicitly ‘leftist’ in some way), but historians of decades past did this too. The only difference is that those historians generally didn’t acknowledge the values they were applying. But it is, for instance, not an accident that Johann Gustav Droysen (d. 1884) and William W. Tarn (d. 1957), both upper-class men writing in hegemonic, imperial monarchies (Prussia and Great Britain, respectively) thought Alexander’s hegemonic, imperial monarchy was fantastic. They were ‘pro-‘ regimes which enforced – to borrow Tarn’s phrasing of Alexander’s accomplishments and mentality – “the unity of mankind” by killing lots of mostly brown people. They just didn’t feel the need to register those values in any way because those were the hegemonic values of the society they lived in; they assumed their readers too accepted the fundamental justice of creating the “brotherhood of man” (also a Tarn phrasing) through armed violence.1 And indeed what people mean when they complain that now historians are ‘imposing’ their values on history is really, ‘in the past I agreed with the values historians imposed on history, but now I do not.’ This isn’t a plea for objectivity, but for special consideration. What has changed with more modern historians is that we try to be honest about how we make our value judgements and that we are doing so (or at least we’re supposed to try – some historians do not succeed and others do not try).
Nor was that new to the modern era. Recall that Polybius (writing in the second century BC) presents part of the purpose of history being that, “men have no more ready corrective of conduct than knowledge of the past” (Polyb. 1.1.1); such a corrective, of course, can be of little use without make value judgements about those past events. “So-and-so did X” has no value as a corrective of conduct without the added assessment, “and that had positive/negative effects” or “was productive/counter-productive to certain aims.” Herodotus and Thucydides, the first historians, have no problem assessing certain actions and certain figures as wise or foolish, pious or impious, brave or cowardly and so on.
And indeed, historians today tend to view claims of ‘objectivity’ very skeptically. On the one hand, as a discipline we value the ability to view historical events dispassionately and follow the evidence where it leads. On the other hand, the history of history (historiography) and other fields as well suggests that ‘true’ objectivity is impossible. Even when advocates of more quantitative fields claim true objectivity and ‘value-free’ analysis, to most historians it seems what they’ve done is hide their value systems, not remove them. What is studied and how it is studied still derive from non-objective systems of value; the values are still there, merely the frame of consideration has been adjusted to hide them. Such claims of ‘value-free’ analysis in the past have all too often served efforts to cloak values (often quite contested ones) in the mantle of ‘objective science.’ This is not a retreat into crass relativism; some things are true and other things are not,2 but even the choice of what truths we pursue (to the necessary exclusion of others, given limited time and resources) is an expression of value. Historians – not universally, mind you, but generally – have tended to figure that it is better simply to be transparent about how we are judging something, rather than to claim falsely that we offer no judgement at all.
That said, one of the things historians are trained to do is to inhabit systems of value or knowledge different from our own. You’ve seen me do this, for instance, in explaining how the world looks from inside religious systems which I do not believe or discussing the values of medieval military aristocrats which I do not hold. The entire Sparta series relied in part on repeatedly accepting value frameworks to which I disagreed in order to show that even by those standards Sparta fell short. Doing that does require the ability to view a subject – even an odious one – dispassionately, to consciously use a different system of values or set of assumptions than the ones you operate with in every day life. That same skill is useful when trying to judge a given outcome, event or person, allowing the historian to inhabit different value systems and offer an analytical judgement for each.
One such application, of course, is to judge a given event or character by the standards of their own society. I made a point, for instance, in the recent Twitter debate on the legacy of L. Cornelius Sulla, to point out – more than once – that even by Roman standards, Sulla was regarded quite negatively. Indeed, even Roman optimates like Cicero treated Sulla as, at best, an embarrassment, while Plutarch’s sketch of Sulla’s dissolute and luxury-corrupted character is quite severe. The Gracchi, Caesar, Cicero and Cato the Younger all had their partisans and defenders in the decades after their deaths; defenders of Sulla (or late career Marius!) are rare indeed.
That said, this standard is limited in a lot of ways. In practice, in my experience, most demands to only judge figures that engaged in conquest, slavery or racism ‘by the standards of their time’ come from individuals who, when one pulls out a nickel and scratches the surface just a little, turn out to be pro-conquest, pro-slavery or pro-racism. The ‘figures should only be judged by the practices of their day’ pose turns out to be a weak disguise for the more serious and also usually more reprehensible position that those practices were good. It is not always the case, but it is very frequently so.
But most people, when asking a historian about a figure do not want to know what Gaius Q. Publicus thought of something, but what they should think of it. After all, Thucydides offers his “possession for all time” but rather “an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to understanding the future” or as Polybius advances it, “a ready corrective of conduct.” To simply assemble historian details without any intention of them ever being useful to anyone is just, after all, antiquarianism, a pursuit every bit as shallow as crass presentism.3 They are asking if a given thing is something to be admired and emulated, or a cautionary tale to be avoided and that requires a bit more of the historian.
One such more useful standard for individuals is asking, “did this person succeed at what they were trying to do?” For instance, Octavian largely succeeded in his core aims (reestablish the Roman state around his sole rule) whereas Sulla largely failed in his (restore the Roman state to its traditional function in a durable way). That approach is valuable because what people often what to know is if a person or a system was effective, which really boils down to asking if it achieved its aims. That is not the same, mind you, as asking if it conformed to the broader values of its society. Sometimes individuals succeed at their core aims to the general irritation of their broader society; Peisistratos was a great success at making himself tyrant, but the Athenians don’t seem to have been truly thrilled about it, for instance.
At the same time people are often not asking, “did this thing do what it intended” but rather “was that outcome good?” Would it have been good for me?” That second question is, of course obviously implicated when some blockhead suggests that what we really need is a Caesar or a Sulla or a Franco to solve all of our problems (a repeat occurrence lately); the historian has not raised modern judgement here, rather the initial question has by proposing that society needs someone of the type of some historical figure.4 That requires the historian to step outside of the values of the past or the intents of historical figures. One such measure you’ll see me use quite to assess those questions is the impact to individual well-being for the average or typical member of a society. That can be, I think, a lot more illuminating than simply asking how a given society or person stacked up against the values of their day. After all, by the values of many Greek elites, Sparta was at least notionally fantastic, but we can be quite sure Sparta was a pretty terrible place to be for most people who lived there (but whose condition fell beneath the notice of the Greek elites who write to us). So when the question is, “was Sparta a society to be admired, to be emulated by us?” assessing it in terms of its treatment of a typical member of the society is a lot more useful.
At the same time, because of the very nature of the questions being asked, it can be important to also assess societies, social structures and indeed individuals against current standards as well. This is not some sort of historical crime, though it is important to lay out the facts as impartially as possible first and then set out a judgement second with transparency on the standards by which the judgement is being laid. If you ask, “was so-and-so a good person?” the answer is clearly going to depend mostly on how you define ‘good person.’ But for the reader asking, “should I admire this society or person?” it is perfectly fine for the historian to say, “well, if you value X, Y and Z, then yes/no.” Likewise it is perfectly reasonable for a historian to say, “if we, as a society, profess our value of X, then we ought to reassess our assumption that person Y is admirable.” For instance, if we think conquest is bad, well it’s quite hard to justify admiration of Alexander the Great on any other basis – which is precisely why the tenor of scholarly reception on Alexander (and perhaps, at some decades delay, public reception) – has shifted, if incompletely.5
Judgements like that tend to be complex, especially applied to societies, because most societies have at least some traits we might view positively and some we might view negatively (which is not to say they have them to the same degree; it is fine to judge some societies as worse ways to organize people, so long as we are transparent about the values we use). But they are also useful and indeed to a substantial degree necessary for us to make about the past, if we are going to use it as a guide to the future. And so historians have to make them, albeit in a transparent way where our goal is to explain our reasons to the public and indeed convince the public that they can and should share our reasons. That’s what historians do.
On to the recommendations:
Over at the Texas National Security Review (which goes by TNSR in security policy circles), assistant professor of national security affairs for the U.S. Navy War College and my old graduate school colleague Joseph Stieb has an article on “Why Did the United States Invade Iraq? The Debate at 20 Years.” Attentive readers may remember that Stieb also wrote a book on this very topic. Stieb’s article is, I think, well worth reading because its purpose is not to argue for a specific position but rather to outline the main scholarly positions. The reason I think that is valuable to read is that, to be blunt, most people hold to some version of uninformed folk history on this topic, either favorable or unfavorable to the Bush administration and most of those folk histories have nothing to do with the actual evidence of why the administration was doing what it was doing.6 Stieb lays out the positions as they exist now from the people who have bothered to read the evidence and develop informed opinions, dividing them between the ‘security school’ which argues that the administration believed itself (rightly or wrongly) to be moving to counter a real threat to long-term US security and the ‘hegemony school’ which argues that the administration intended instead a substantial extension of American influence and hegemony in the region in the absence of a compelling security threat. He then details how these different schools views on that basic question filter out into how they understand subsidiary questions about the war; the whole thing is well worth a read. TNSR is great for putting the sort of scholarship one generally finds behind the formidable paywalls of academic journals out in an open forum.
Speaking of which, also worth a read a TNSR is Henrik Larsen’s article, “Thinking About Post-War Ukraine.” Since the start of the war, commentators in the West have rightly urged policy makers to begin now to think carefully about the post-war settlement and in particular the necessary reconstruction of Ukraine. Larsen tackles this question and in particular the problem posed by Ukrainian corruption (particularly ‘grand corruption’) and the opportunities posed by reconstruction and Ukraine’s clear aim to join the EU. Larsen suggests a structure for tying reconstruction aid to anti-corruption reforms, but regardless of what one things about the specific recommendations, the opening history of Ukraine’s anti-corruption efforts since 2014 is valuable, especially since many people’s understanding of Ukraine’s situation here remains mired in the past, even as Ukraine has made steps forward (albeit sometimes slow, halting and halfway steps) on this issue.
On a far flashier note, UNC’s Prof. Wayne Lee continues his efforts to reconstruct version of the Chinese firelance, one of the earliest uses of gunpowder weaponry, with video of another test-firing, this time of a three-barreled version. If you’ve seen previous videos of his efforts (I’ve highlighted them here and on Twitter), this experiment is clearly more successful, with the use of small copper-caps to keep the burning powder from self-ejecting out of the barrel too quickly, allowing for a longer burn time. Also, it’s just really cool to watch!
Finally, for a bit of the ancient Mediterranean, the latest Pasts Imperfect features quite a few interesting things, including Gregory S. Aldrete discussing his latest book in collaboration with Graham Sumner (one of the premier artistic-reconstruction artists of the day) contrasting how Rome is visually depicted in film against how it might have actually looked. Also noted in the round-up and not to be missed is the spectacular recent find of an incredibly well-preserved 3,000-year old bronze sword from Nördlingen, in Bavaria and an exciting note that the Index of Medieval Art is going freely accessible to the public at the beginning of next month.
And for this week’s book recommendation, I’m going to recommend a book I frankly though I had done earlier, Dexter Hoyos’ The Carthaginians (2010). Carthage is one of those ancient states that shows up mostly in history classes in a secondary role as Rome’s chief antagonist before being defeated and then destroyed, but as you may well guess any state that managed to go three rounds with Rome is a lot more interesting than that. Digging into Carthage’s history, however, is difficult for the non-specialist because the Carthaginians largely don’t write to us, forcing us to rely on scattered mentions and discussions in Greek and Latin sources (commenting from outside Punic culture) and the very limited epigraphic evidence from Carthage itself.
In The Carthaginians, Hoyos, one of the most substantial modern scholars of Carthage, pulls that disparate evidence together to provide the reader a sound introduction to the Carthaginian state, working through what we can know of Carthage’s foundation, political, social and religious structures, and its history down to 146 (with a brief epilogue touching on the memory of Carthage in the sources).
That is a lot to ask of a relatively slim volume (the core text is just 223 pages), but Hoyos manages the task, delivering in readable, lay-accessible prose a wide-ranging description of what we know of Carthage. Uncertainty and lacunae in the evidence assail from all sides and Hoyos is generally quite open about that kind of uncertainty, noting when, for instance the precise roles or powers of an office are simply unclear to us given the limited evidence. He also opens with a detailed discussion of all of our key sources, placing them chronologically as well as assessing their reliability, another very helpful task for readers who may be unfamiliar with them and may not understand why, for instance, Polybius is mostly trustworthy and Polyaenus is mostly not. Hoyos’ work remains, I think, the best introduction to Carthage for someone looking to begin trying to understand this important polity, dominant in the western Mediterranean for centuries before coming into cataclysmic conflict with Rome.
- As an aside, Ernest Badian utterly skewered beyond recovery this view of Tarn’s – both that Alexander achieved some sort of ‘unity of mankind’ or that he ever desired to do so, in a famous article, “Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind” Historia 7.4 (1958): 425-444. Droysen and Tarn both were projecting modern European justifications for imperialism backwards onto a historical conqueror who does not seem to have shared them. Badian’s work was part of the sea-change in Alexander scholarship towards a focus on Alexander’s failings and victims, which remains a prevalent strand through which modern scholars tend to understand him, though of course the causes and consequences of Alexander’s tremendous military success also remain a major focus.
- Though ‘knowing true things is better than knowing untrue things’ is still a value-laden expression. The scientific method is not ‘value-free!’ It is simply a value set we agree with.
- These are, indeed, the twin pitfalls between which historians are supposed to walk. Unsurprisingly, folks on social media bothered by what historians say about the past are very prepared to complain about presentism, but are apparently blissfully unaware that their own preference for ‘value-free’ antiquarianism is an equal failing.
- And yet for some reason no one is out there saying, “What society really needs is Norman Borlaug.” It is always some terrible dictator with a body-count rather than some innovator who saved millions of lives. I wonder why that is; I’d happily take another dozen innovators like Borlaug, but I see no great use for another Sulla.
- And if you are reading this thinking, “but I thought Alexander was supposed to be a wise king, or have thought about philosophy, or have imagined a better way of rule, or to have valued intellectual pursuits” or any one of a number of achievements or ideas that were not based around conquest, what you’ve encountered is an odd modern version of the Alexander Romance, a sort of fairy-tale history where ‘Alexander’ is a character created to express certain ideals, quite independently of the historical Alexander who appears in our sources. The Alexander who appears in our sources wasn’t a complete boor – he could be polite and charming (especially early in his campaigns) and seems to have liked at least some literature – but he wasn’t a deep thinker or a fellow with particularly elevated ideas. He seems to have liked war, especially winning (not that he had much experience of losing), drinking and glory; it is fitting that his favorite literary work was the Iliad and he evidently also was fond of Xenophon’s Anabasis. His efforts at things beyond that sphere – be that religious, cultural or administrative – do not betray deep thoughts, any particular aptitude or great enthusiasm. This is, after all a man who solved the Gordian knot by hitting it with a sword. That’s how he solved all of this problems, and when he hit a problem he could not solve by hitting it with a sword, he hit it with a sword anyway and then promptly drunk himself to death.
- For what it is worth, I think – as do most people – that the Iraq War was a mistake. But I also think that evidence is important and find the folk histories of what people think Bush thought he was doing very frustrating. Presidential administrations produce a lot of records and then people in those administrations produce a lot of evidence and testimony, which means that ‘what did they think they were doing and why’ are actually very knowable things. If your theory of the war is that there was some hidden motive, you also need a theory as to why two successive Democratic administrations, both hostile to the war and to the Bush administration didn’t release the records which would prove that hidden motive. In fact, we have enough records and evidence and statements for the thriving industry of competing interpretations Stieb discusses here (as well as his own book on the role that the percieved failure of containment during the 1990s plays). In any case, for the half dozen of you already racing to put your own folk histories of the Iraq War in the comments, please instead address them to Joe.
What gets me about this discourse is that, the rest of the time, history languishes under the same narrative as the rest of the humanities, that it’s just a bunch of useless navel-gazing with no relevance to modern life. But bring it into a relevant modern discussion, and the cries of “Presentism!” start. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
Indeed!
Concerning footnote 6, I have to wonder at what point the availability of data becomes a liability rather than an asset. Produce enough documents, testimony, and other sorts of information and you start to drown out relevant facts for whatever your line of inquiry is with a vast sea of irrelevance. Add in the inevitable slant that every source has, and it seems to this amateur that you can create a setup where there’s too much information to actually yield useful results.
This is an intelligence problem too. For historians, it can take decades of sorting through the documents, synthesising them and then integrating the syntheses. The historiography of the run up to World War I has only achieved a rough consensus after 50 years of work, and the decade when the Soviet archives were opened transformed many views on World War II operations. For now, Iraq relies more on memoirs and public statements – roughly where World War I was in the 30s. The emails (if they survive) will give us a better view in about 30 years.
Sounds like AI could help expediate the process somewhat, using it to try and sort through massive bulks of data.
But depending on how the AI is programmed, that could lead to massive confirmation bias.
I’ll go a step farther than Mike and say that any intelligence-processing AI (or at least ones designed under paradigms we can currently understand) would fall victim to every bias of the system which provided it with data in the first place—both in the sense that bias in the training data (and its analysis) would be faithfully replicated, and in the sense that there would be bias in gathering subsequent data which the algorithm would not have the context to resolve (because that data was not gathered). And that’s assuming ideal outcomes.
There are circumstances where producing conclusions faster is worth ones that are a bit subpar, but I suspect most intelligence agencies would benefit more from methods which let them generate better conclusions. Until we can make a real-life Brainiac, I don’t think AI is the answer.
Hard disagree, I think this misunderstands what the specific problems and limits of an AI like GPT-4 are.
If you gave GPT-4 a bunch of historical documents and told it “give me a summary of all the information pertaining so-and-so”, then sure, the results wouldn’t just be biased, they would be complete nonsense. But that’s the wrong way to use it.
The powerful thing about something like GPT-4 is that it understands it natural language, like, really, scaringly well. So if you write a script that loads individual each document, sends it into context-sized chunks to the GPT-4 API, and asks it to return just a Yes/No answer to the question “does this extract mention the topic X or anything inherent to it?”, then you’re guaranteed to get a better tagging of each document than if you just, say, looked for keywords. You don’t ask the AI for any value judgements, just very simple things like if a topic or something that could have to do with it is mentioned. That’s likely a lot more trustworthy.
ChatGPT might be mildly more trustworthy than a keyword search, but it’s far from 100%. For example, I asked it if it had any idea why the Village People’s two leading songs were about the YMCA and the Navy. I think we all know the answer, but ChatGPT didn’t. It suggested that those were both places where people gather with a common purpose.
More generally, Chat GPT is good, though not perfect, at analyzing canonical poems, but very poor at pop music lyrics. I think that’s because it can crib from the reams of criticism written about the former, whereas the latter often relies on contemporary cultural codes which everyone understands but no one writes down.
So I wouldn’t count on ChatGPT to understand, say, “coded” messages in Churchill’s correspondence or Richard Nixon’s speeches.
You’re again misunderstanding how you should use it. ChatGPT is not a repository of knowledge; that’s why I mentioned using the (paid) API instead. What you want is the raw ability to parse text in natural language it possesses. Basically closer to pasting a chunk of text, asking it if the info is in *that* chunk, repeat. It has a context window of 8000 tokens (roughly, words) and a price per call so if anything the biggest problem in doing it at scale is the cost, unless you can use your own locally hosted open source LLM instead.
FWIW I think the most immediate aspect GPT-4 and the likes are going to have on historical research is when it comes to translations. It can already do decently good Old English or early Joseon Korean, for example, and it wasn’t even specifically trained for that.
I’ve been reading a fair bit about the Spanish Civil War recently and I’m happy you called out Franco as one of the bad dictators. I remember seeing the “We need a Protestant Franco in this country” tweet, thinking of how Spain is a country filled with mass graves, and going “We don’t. We REALLY don’t.”
You speak as if Franco arose in isolation in a perfectly good state. The question with any form of government is what is the practical alternative.
Of course you’d go to bat for Franco. Yeah, I’m sure the dictator who had women raped by dogs was better than the alternative.
Got Franco confused with Pinochet. Embarrassing!
Still, not a great move to defend Franco in any capacity. Like, just tell us how you really feel and that you like Franco cause he saved Spain from communism or whatever.
Given the track record of communism in other countries, it is, at the very least, not immediately obvious that Franco was worse than the likely alternatives.
GJ: The problme wiht that argument is that there’s basically no reason to believe Spain would fall to communism in 1936. In fact the communists were fairly mariginalized *until the Civil War* (and even then they played the role of importnat supporting legitimist supporters, not the leading group)
Heck, even *during* the civil war repulican forces were strong enough to launch a coup and purge the communists without too much trouble.
The problem with that argument is that nothing in the original comment required that the other figures be Communist.
Particularly as the same authoritarian forces are on the move again in Spain.
Whatever was in Spain pre-Franco, Garcia-Lorca was able to have his poetry and plays performed. After Franco, well, he was cold-bloodedly executed in an unpleasant manner.
GJ: The problme wiht that argument is that there’s basically no reason to believe Spain would fall to communism in 1936. In fact the communists were fairly mariginalized *until the Civil War* (and even then they played the role of importnat supporting legitimist supporters, not the leading group)
Apart from the attempted revolution in 1934, the assassination of political rivals, and the murder of priests. Granted the ideological make-up of the various sides in the Spanish Civil War is hard to follow, so maybe the violence was all committed in the name of non-communist far-left ideologies. Still, in practical terms, I’m not sure the difference would be all that great.
Particularly as the same authoritarian forces are on the move again in Spain.
Whatever was in Spain pre-Franco, Garcia-Lorca was able to have his poetry and plays performed. After Franco, well, he was cold-bloodedly executed in an unpleasant manner.
Estimates for the number of people killed by the Spanish left during the Civil War range from 38,000 to upwards of 100,000, and that’s not counting the people killed in the failed revolution of 1934 or the other political violence before the war actually broke out.
In fairness, it should be pointed that estimates for the number of people killed by the nationalist side are generally higher, sometimes twice as much so. But let’s not pretend that Republican Spain was some kind of peaceful liberal democracy, because it very much wasn’t.
I really feel that you should lie down until you stop imputing your wish fulfillment fantasies to other people.
Granted the ideological make-up of the various sides in the Spanish Civil War is hard to follow, so maybe the violence was all committed in the name of non-communist far-left ideologies
I think that’s right. Anarchists, for the most part, who had a dim view (and the dim view was mutual) of the communists, although they were on the same side in some sense.
In any case, as you acknowledge yourself, Franco’s side had even more executions and bloodshed (more like 3x higher then 2x higher, i believe), so whichever side you choose there’s going to be plenty of bloodshed. Whether you prefer Franco’s social order, or a hypothetical Communist Spain, or some sort of liberal-capitalist ideal (which was probably not in the cards anyway) is going to come down to your values and preferences. I don’t have much attraction to the kind of society Franco and his supporters wanted to build, so that’s why I oppose them, but I can see why a Catholic ultraconservative would weigh things differently.
As our host observed about ancient battles, so is it in fights between absolutist rivals: the losers have the most casualties. Trotsky is not better than Stalin because he killed fewer — he broke with Stalin over Stalin’s insufficient desire to kill, he merely lost the power to rack up his numbers.
@Arilou: Errr…what? The people who got purged were the anarchists and such. The Stalinists didn’t get the boot until the end of the war.
60 guilders: POUM (a minor leftist party) got purged during the “May Days” of 1937, this is what Orwell was writing about. CNT-FAI the major anarchist trade union/organization along with parts of the PSOE and (mostly) the army then purged the communists in 1939 in an attempt to negotiate a peace deal. (which Franco refused, since he had at that point basically won)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_coup_of_March_1939 (wiki)
Imputing an atrocity to him does not change a thing, especially since the alternatives also committed atrocities.
The “alternatives” committed atrocities on a much smaller scale, and also they wouldn’t have been the alternative at all if Franco and his buddies hadn’t launched a coup that led to a civil war. Stalinism was barely a thing in Spain until the war forced the Spanish Republic to rely on the USSR when all other potential allies (except for Mexico) had turned their backs on the legitimate government
The alternatives lost, which limited their ability. Also they had revolted before, at the notion that the party that had won the majority of votes should be represented AT ALL in the government, so they were clearly a menace without the coup.
The “alternatives” committed atrocities on a much smaller scale, and also they wouldn’t have been the alternative at all if Franco and his buddies hadn’t launched a coup that led to a civil war. Stalinism was barely a thing in Spain until the war forced the Spanish Republic to rely on the USSR when all other potential allies (except for Mexico) had turned their backs on the legitimate government
Leftists in Spain had launched an attempted coup in 1934, two years before the start of the Civil War.
To the people saying we need another Franco, the alternative is what we have now
Let’s be clear, these are people who prefer the mass graves over no mass graves
Your confident assumption that this country can not have mass graves without a Franco figure is ill-founded.
There were people calling for all kinds of totalitarian acts against those who refused the COVID-19 vaccine, too, including concentration camps and refusal of all medical treatment. If you say they were too few to be taken seriously, the burden of proof is on you to show the Franco figure ones are sufficiently more numerous to be taken seriously.
The burden of proof is on you to show that taking stronger action to promote vaccination would have resulted in mass graves. That seems highly counterintuitive. At face value, we would expect the anti-vaccination movement to have dramatically increased the number of deaths due to COVID.
On the contrary, when people feel free to scream in public that anyone who disagrees with them should be sent to a concentration camp, the intuitive reaction is that camps, followed by mass graves, are a grave peril.
Naively, one would expect that if it were realistic to imagine a developed nation taking those who refuse to be vaccinated against an epidemic, putting them in internment camps, and then burying them in mass graves…
One would expect that of the dozens of developed countries that historically did face the COVID-19 pandemic, many of which have quite stringent public health laws and considerably higher support for anti-pandemic precautions than we saw in the US…
…Surely at least one of those nations would have actually done that. Or at least produced documentable plans for doing so, in the sense of seriously considering it as a policy.
But this is not what we observe. In practice, we observe governments having all, without exception, having taken comparatively pedestrian measures to enforce vaccine mandates. No concentration camps. No mass graves. Some bad things happened to people who refused to be vaccinated, especially in professions where mass contact with the public and compliance with medical safety protocols are held to be high priorities. But no concentration camps over COVID vaccines. No mass graves over COVID vaccines. Anywhere, even in the countries where anti-vaccination movements were weak.
The experiment was run dozens of times in parallel around the world. The results were a nothingburger. It turns out that letting government try very hard to get everyone vaccinated against an epidemic doesn’t result in genocidal winnowing of the population.
By that logic, since the Nazis did not put the Jews in concentration camps and mass graves as soon as they came to power, the Jews were safe.
Oh yes I’m sure the camps are coming any day now, that big horrible left-liberal government is coming for your rights any second.
Aaaaaany second. Surely. It’s not like rightists have spent decades fearmongering about this paranoid delusion of theirs that’s never happened. No it’s right around the corner I’m sure.
Except, of course, that it has repeatedly come for their rights. Not always successfully, but the rage shown when they fail is also a bad sign.
There hasn’t been a serious call for “concentration camps” from anyone. As for medical treatment – the way the US healthcare system works, if you can’t pay for yourself, you are left to die. That’s already way more heartless than anything going on in “socialist” Europe. The logic of “if you willingly didn’t vaccinate, fair, your choice, but if this results then in you needing expensive medical care you’ll be placed after the others who instead mitigated their risk” isn’t authoritarian, it’s extremely libertarian instead. It leaves both the choices and the consequences to the individual. The collectivist answer would be “you all get healthcare, but since you do, you have a duty to society to vaccinate”.
That said, either way, in the end it was the “doing too little” side that got most people killed in hindsight (and still essentially won).
I think I prefer my lying eyes over you.
Do you have any actual example of people calling for concentration camps for the unvaccinated that isn’t just “weirdos on Twitter”?
And granted, weirdos on Twitter are in a way sadly a force in the world, but if we go there, we can produce some very notable weirdos for the other side of the debate too – and it’s not like underestimating COVID, fearmongering about the vaccine, or straight up peddling bogus cures are victimless mistakes. All of these things can and in fact have caused deaths.
“Weirdos on Twitter” is in fact the best barometer I’ve found for telling what the Left will demand next, bar what the Left loudly denies it will demand next.
“The Left”
What, do you think people are hiveminds?
There is no “the Left.” Get 5 leftists in a room together and you have at least 8 contradictory opinions.
The idea that you can somehow divine an “agenda” for “the left” out of twitter comments is farcical, and completely out of touch with reality
You should get out more. Then you will able to see the smallness of the differences you tout.
I don’t particularly object to supporting the Franco regime- in fact I think it’s interesting when people challenge the American/liberal-capitalist status quo, from either the right or the left, and I’m happy to argue with them. I can’t take seriously anyone who embraces the anti-vaccine cause, though. Or anyone who thinks that “totalitarian” events happened in 2020.
And I say that as someone with very little liking for the current US regime (or for any US regime historically). Love it or hate it, “totalitarian” isn’t a very useful descriptor for it.
There has been nothing resembling a coherent push for “camps for the unvaccinated” by anyone. In fact the more extreme to the left you looked the less preoccupied with COVID people tended to be, or at most they only brought up the differences in outcome based on race or class. Just because you look at it from the outside and make a big soup out of it doesn’t mean you actually understand the dynamics (note that this happens to leftists looking to the right too, they similarly often group everyone together and get a rather contradictory and confusing picture). If someone gave absolute power to the craziest of the craziest leftist extremists right now I’d expect many baffling and tyrannical things from them, but “putting unvaccinated people in camps” would not be one of them.
Honestly, the camp that pushed to ignore COVID as much as possible, even past reason for something that has out of the blue become one of the biggest infectious causes of death and disability in the western world, has won. After a brief attempt at protecting public health all policy has slid into “you know what guys it’s everyone for himself, can’t be bothered”. I don’t know what kind of world you must see in which “camps for the unvaccinated” isn’t the furthest, most absurd extreme imaginable. You might as well worry about the government genociding everyone whose surname begins with the letter P.
And why on earth is it anyone’s duty to look at the “extreme left”?
You’re the one claiming literal concentration camps for the unvaccinated are the next point on the let’s agenda, obviously that seems a pretty extreme measure so you’d expect it to be supported more in the extreme wing of the left, and I am saying that’s actually not the case at all.
That people were calling for concentration camps for the unvaccinated is an absolute fact.
That many of them were not on the “extreme left” is also an absolute fact.
To argue that it should not be so in theory is not even an argument.
Someone occasionally shouting “those idiots who don’t vaccinate should be imprisoned!” in frustration does not make a policy. Do we have to take at face value every single thing right wingers say too? Because oh boy. My point is that in practice there never was anywhere anything resembling a consistent push for something as ludicrous as concentration camps for the unvaccinated; there certainly isn’t one now, as all things surrounding COVID have lost interest and steam (including unfortunately also the sane proposals).
Worst that I could have imagined passing is the vaccine being mandatory, which would probably mean incurring in a fine or such if you don’t do it. There are mandatory vaccines in some western countries (in Italy there are multiple ones for example) and this has never caused any society yet to collapse into authoritarianism or concentration camps.
When was there a consistent push in any 20th century state that used concentration camps?
Incidentally leftists do take the rightwingers at face value, given the complaints about random comments about needing a Franco, RIGHT HERE, so you are knowingly invoking a false equivalence.
> Incidentally leftists do take the rightwingers at face value
Point me to the part where I said that they’re always correct to do that, or that leftists don’t sometimes make the same mistake.
If all you can do is read a dissenting opinion, binning me in a bunch with lots of other people, and assigning me other opinions that you think HAVE to correlate with it, you’re not discussing properly. I’m not doing it with you – I even agree with some of your other points here, which makes me probably one of those who are taking you most in good faith (though I also am sure we do stand on different positions politically in general). But about this specific point, sorry, you’re just letting ideology and wanting to dunk on the other side blind you to reality, same thing you accuse leftists (sometimes rightly) of doing.
Complaining about being lumped together with other people when you yourself lumped people together only undermines your positions entirely.
Franco arose after the other rebel leaders had convenient accidents (airplane or being captured, depending) after they tried and fail to launch a coup against the democratically elected government.
Democracy is not a magical charm that legitimates a government that illegally arrests and murders opposition politicians.
No but apparently clerical fascism is a magical charm that absolves a government of any crimes in the judgement of Mary because she would rather have them that any other type of person in power.
Apparently you think arguing against what you wish I had said is actually a valid argument.
If you are mourning Calvo Sotelo here, let me note that Calvo Sotelo was leader of a pro-authoritarian, anti-suffrage faction. He had earlier in 1936 run on a campaign platform that included the plank:
“We must try at all costs to make these elections the last ones.”
He was also an active participant in the planning of the 1936 coup attempt, though the coup did not take place until a few days after he himself was killed.
And yes, he was killed extralegally by the Spanish police- the Assault Guards being a police organization founded by the Second Spanish Republic in 1932.
But if Calvo Sotelo was an “opposition politician” with a legitimate right to make organizations, have his voice heard in the highest political circles, and rightfully have impunity from violence while so doing, one might argue that Lenin was too, for very similar reasons. And Calvo Sotelo himself would, by all appearances, have rejected that premise.
Your argument that if people are bad enough it’s all right to murder them is the very argument that leads to mass graves.
Right, I’ve heard the same argument about Lenin and Stalin. And technically it is true, the question with any form of government is what the practical alternative was. But since this is true about any form of government, just asking this question isn’t saying very much.
On the contrary, it means it’s vital all the time.
What I wrote might have been badly phrased in an attempt to be snarky, I should probably have avoided that. What I mean is: Yes, finding an answer to the question is vital all the time, but the way your comment asked the question doesn’t seem productive for finding an answer.
If you meant to imply that you think Franco was preferable to the alternatives, I think you should explain why you think so instead of just leaving the question hanging.
If you wanted to say that you didn’t know if Franco or his opponents were the preferable alternative, you could probably have made it clearer that you are asking others to weigh in on this question.
No, I meant to say that it is wrong to speak of Franco as if he rose in isolation in a perfectly good state.
Funny enough, that’s what I said.
“Spain wasn’t a perfect place on July 16, 1936, the day before the coup that Franco helped launch” doesn’t seem very relevant to the question of whether “we need another Franco” is actually true. A lot of countries have been imperfect places at a lot of times, because of a lot of problems with a lot of solutions. The question isn’t “was Spain perfect on 7/16/1936” and it would be absurd to pretend that anyone involved in the discussion of Franco’s legacy is asserting that it was.
However, the claim “but Spain wasn’t perfect on 7/16/1936,” while useless for most purposes even if proven, is very useful for one purpose. Namely, creating a veil of obscurantism to protect Franco’s reputation. If one has already decided that one supports Franco (postmortem), then saying “well, Spain wasn’t perfect on 7/16/1936” is an effective way to at least temporarily protect that support from criticism.
Any real error of judgment made by Franco can then be shrugged off. The Spanish generals (including Sanjurjo, Mola, and so on) were acting in an imperfect situation, therefore their decision to take command of tens of thousands of soldiers and overthrow the government was urgently necessary, and the fact that it plunged Spain into a bloody civil war was just… the way of things.
Even downright criminal acts committed by Franco without any justification that would pass casual inspection can be shrugged off. Since Spain c. 7/16/1936 was imperfect, any crimes committed by past, present, or future alternatives to Franco’s dictatorship can be presented as proof that Franco did the right thing! And if those crimes are not sufficient, then one can go on to make up entirely speculative, hypothetical crimes, attributing them to “what would have happened if not for the Spanish generals’ coup!”
None of this is very helpful, if we are trying to analyze Franco’s legacy accurately.
——————
All in all, “Spain was imperfect on 7/16/1936” serves mainly to distract attention from a series of much more relevant questions:
1) What were Franco’s aims, not just in his own words, but in more pragmatic terms?
2) Were those aims at least nominally good for the Spanish people at large, as opposed to being self-serving or torturous?
3) Was Franco successful in achieving those aims? If so, did this objectively make things better for Spain, or did it come at some price that future generations might wish had not been paid?
4) Do we, today, in any particular place, face a situation that would make it good for us, collectively all of us and not just some single interest group, to have some similar person pursue similar aims by similar means?
Diminishing the situation to “it wasn’t perfect” shows bad faith.
Very briefly:
1. Restore and protect public order, the power of the Church, private property and capitalism.
2. Yes (although I don’t care much myself about the power of the Church).
3a. Yes.
3b. Compared to the likely alternatives, probably yes, as in I would have preferred living in Spain for most of the past 75 years to, say, Romania.
4. “Any particular place”? In the United States, definitely not. In North Korea, Franco would be a decided improvement, despite the lefty academics who have thought otherwise.
“1. Restore and protect public order, the power of the Church, private property and capitalism”
I think this is more or less right, although some of Franco’s more ideological supporters were less enthused with capitalism than he was instead. What you think of Franco is ultimately going to come down to how important you think political Catholicism, the power of the church, traditional economic and social hierarchies, capitalism, etc. are.
I would argue though why you think “Romania” is the best comparison for Spain, instead of, say, Yugoslavia?
Both a republican and an anarchist (part of) Spain seem like morally superior alternatives (from a democratic/human rights perspective) which significant amounts of people fought for.
Why?
We already saw the Republic refuse to let the party that won the majority of votes have any part in the government, whereas from the democratic point of view they should have run it.
As for human rights, the anarchists made it clear they thought they did not exist by their gleefilled perpetration of atrocities, which also demonstrated they would, unlike Franco, try to remake human nature, which is how the real atrocities are perpetrated.
The Spanish political turmoil around 1936 election is something that would deserve its own book, but in general, the parliamentarian systems don’t need to accept the largest party to the government. The majority of the parliament is required for a government to work, and if parties representing the majority can form a coalition that shuts out the party with the plurality, that is quite all right. It is definitely not a justification for a coup.
Then it’s not a democracy and can not invoke “democratic” as a defense.
MAJORITY.
Not plurality. MAJORITY.
By definition, that party had the right to rule, or there was no democracy.
Engaging in an odd bit of historical revisionism if you’re trying to claim that any of Spain’s many, many right-wing parties won anything close to a majority of the votes in 1936, or indeed that the National Bloc won a majority either given that it both didn’t and didn’t win a greater share than the Popular Front (by a hair, but still).
Notice how WJ interpolates “1936” into what I said in order to debunk what I didn’t say.
That is perfectly normal? Governments rule by negative mandate: They don’t need a majority behind them only that a majority will not vote them down. Both largest party not being part of government (which happens all the time, such as in Sweden right now) and minority governments are perfectly normal. If you want to be a part of government you either find someone to team up with, or you get 50%+, that’s normal. In order to get their right-wing government CEDA had to abstain from taking any seats in it as a sop to the centre: They didn’t have to do this, they could have brought down the government. (assuming that wouldn’t lead to a shift in loyalties of course)
And it’s also perfectly undemocratic. You do not get, therefore, to plead “Democracy!”
By that standard, no parliamentary governments are democracies? I’m inclined to think that if anything parliamentary systems are more representative than the United States’ first-past-the-post, winner take all system. The frequent necessity of minority party coalitions means that parties representing as little as 5 or 10% of the electorate become pivital swing votes and therefore get heard more. Imagine if the Libertarian Party of the USA was in a position to decide whether the Republicans or the Democrats held a voting majority in Congress!
Except that by definition, when one party won the majority, even if all the other parties joined, they still form a minority and therefore are undemocratic.
Also, it should be mentioned that the *very same guy* who planned and launched the 1936 civil war had *already* tried and failed to launch a coup in 1932: And that the right-wing govrnment then pardoned him, allowing him to make another go. (he then died in a plane crash due to his own incompetence, which is kinda funny)
“And it’s also perfectly undemocratic. You do not get, therefore, to plead “Democracy!””
No it isn’t? CEDA could have brought down the Lerroux government if they wanted to. But they chose not to, instead being passive partners in the Lerroux government. This again, isn’t unusual, nor is it undemocratic. Remember CEDA did not have a majority, or even close (no one had their own majority) even as part of the rightist bloc.
They had exactly the amount of power thier votes amounted to: About 30%.
Shifting the goalposts, since I spoke of the Republic, not of a particular government.
“Lots of politicians do this” does not make this democratic; it means lots of politicians sell out their voters.
“Except that by definition, when one party won the majority, even if all the other parties joined, they still form a minority and therefore are undemocratic.”
*No party won a majority*
The right-wing bloc (itself a coalition of CEDA, the Carlists, the Falange, etc. got 160 seats out of 473. The centrists getting around 75, the socialists around 60, the radical republicans around 100, and the rest being divided among the various nationalist and minor parties.
Which election are you talking about?
“Which election are you talking about?”
1933. That’s the only election you *could* be talking about, since 1931 and 1936 were both won by the left, And before then Spain was a dictatorship and afterwards there was the Civil War.
Mary, I’m noticing a trend with you where you make vague statements, then when people try to infer what you mean, you accuse them of strawmanning you, but do nothing to clarify what your actual position is. Case in point, your insistence that “the Republic refuse to let the party that won the majority of votes have any part in the government”. Can you please state clearly which election and which government you’re referring to there?
Coalition governments are not undemocratic; if anything I’d say they’re MORE democratic than American style bipolarism.
In a two party system you have two choices vying for the whole voting population, which produces the Hotelling’s law problem: the parties converge very close to each other within the Overton window, and almost everyone is unhappy with them but still votes with the one they dislike less.
In a multiple party system you have a better representation of different views. Then if the majority party has 40% but two minority ones can form a coalition with 55%, the coalition rules. And then has to deal with its internal dynamics in somehow making both sides of the deal happy with the result. Compromise! Discussion! That’s what we call politics, yeah. And that compromise reflects a possible compromise between the voters those parties represent, and of course next election they’ll be punished for it if the voters didn’t like it. This actually offers more choice and less polarisation; its weak point isn’t being undemocratic, it’s being less stable than a two party system. Coalitions often come apart and governments fall and then new elections are needed.
When you speak of “both sides” you mean the politicians, not the voters. That’s the antonym of democracy.
If the system is half decent, the politicians are supposed to represent the voters, which isn’t ideal but we can’t exactly fit 50 million people or more in a single Parliament (and direct democracy via e.g. online voting might work but surely would have other risks, problems, ways of being tampered with etc). In fact I think in a proportional, multi-party system you have better odds as a voter to find a party that approximates your ideas well enough, instead of having to constantly settle for the slightly lesser evil.
I agree that a republican government would have been superior to Franco, but it seems very unlikely that a country as poor and backward as 1930s Spain, in the intellectual climate of the time, could have maintained a republican government. (I mean, Germany and Italy couldn’t, after all.) There has never been an anarchist government established, which makes it both implausible that one could have been established in Spain and impossible to evaluate how it might have been for the Spanish people.
Italy never had a republican government back then, it was a kingdom.
Fascists versus communists is truly a no win scenario.
“Trotsky is not better than Stalin because he killed fewer — he broke with Stalin over Stalin’s insufficient desire to kill, he merely lost the power to rack up his numbers.”
I’m not sure if you’re addressing me- the nesting here is kind of confusing. But, I *don’t* think that Trotsky was better than Stalin, necessarily. I think that Bukharin, or Rykov, or Tomsky absolutely were / would have been, though.
The problem of spain in 1936 and many other countries who are not fully democratic and developped is that instead of having a normal right and a normal left, there is a party of order and a revolutionnary side.
The party of order is generally militaristic and corrupt, but it keep safety and make things run normally (or at least try). The revolutionnary side is often very ideological/religious (often marxist or islamist), but it promise change and offer a bright vision for the futur (but fail to deliver). Take syria for example; there is Assad, but in front of him was radical muslims who wanted to execute minorities and instal a theocracy. Same thing in egypt with the muslim brotherhood vs the army. That’s why all those proxy wars and regime backing of the cold war and beyond are so morally grey. In latin america we backed the party of order against revolutionnary threat. In afghanistan we initially backed the taliban and others against a soviet party of order before invading and doing the opposite. In the afghan case as in Cuba, the party of order was so incompetent, so corrupt and thuggish that the revolutionnary party won.
So yeah Franco and other nationalist leaders are not good guys, but it’s not clear what was the alternative here. The saving grace of the Franco regime is that it became more benign as time went by and he left the management of the economy to more expert peoples and the country developped. Also the regime was good at making things work (“the trains are runing on time”). As the country was richer and at peace for long enough, there was less impulse for a revolution and everybody was more willing to get along.
I feel like there’s a difference between saying “We need a revolutionary leader who is willing to make the ruling class face consequences for its actions” and “We need a new Francisco Franco Bahamonde”.
It’s kinda like the difference between saying “I have concerns about how Israeli military interests influence US foreign policy” and saying “I have concerns about how Jews are controlling US foreign policy”; the latter might be a poetic way to refer to the former, but when you phrase it like that, I have no reason to think that you’re not just expressing a slightly veiled fascist sympathies.
At the very least, pick a revolutionary leader who wasn’t a literal fascist?
First, the “parties of order” in such situations tend to cause a lot of disorder themselves. They are not parties of “order itself,” they are parties of “enforcing the order that they desire.” If there is a possibility of society changing in ways that they do not desire, then disorder becomes entirely acceptable to them. Paramilitary violence, terrorist bombings, purges of proscribed individuals, and so become perfectly acceptable, as long as they can hope to use these things to prevent undesired social change.
A fascist “party of order’s” idea of “order” is that the fascists can put up a poster anywhere they want, but that if I put up an anti-fascist poster beside it, a bunch of goons break into my house and beat me to within an inch of my life. That El Supremo can live as he pleases and wield the machinery of the state for personal benefit, but that factory workers going on strike for higher pay and better working conditions is a profound threat to the stability of the state and must be put down with guns.
To dignify such a thing with “the party of order” as a name is to grossly misrepresent that thing.
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Second, claims such as “the trains run on time” have an infamous history. Mussolini, now notoriously, did not make the trains run on time. He simply lied, said that he had done so, and none dared to contradict him, because saying in fascist Italy “the Fascists cannot make the trains run on time” was a good way to get your head broken by fascists.
Was Franco that different in this respect?
Parties or ordres don’t always succeed at making things run well (somme do). I don’t think we n’est à new Franco right now or that a party of ordre is better than a functionning democracy of a développed country. Just that having a party of ordre is better than getting overrun by a far left or islamic révolution, which is the alternative in many countries that don’t have a fully functionning modern democracy.
Well, actually… Spanish GDP per capita growth per the Maddison database was a hair higher in the post-Franco epoch (1980-2008) than in the Franco epoch (1935-1980), 3.1%/year vs. 2.9%; both epochs are chosen in the standard economics way, i.e. peak-to-peak. And Spain had a lot more room to converge in the Franco epoch – in isolation its growth rate should have fallen as it got closer to French, Italian, and Northern European incomes.
Likewise, Chilean growth under Pinochet was pretty mediocre – it’s post-Pinochet that it’s posted the Americas’ fastest per capita income growth.
Fascist leaders do not actually promote growth or economic development; getting rid of them does. Same way Poland’s fast growth since 1990 is not the vindication of communism but the vindication of anti-communism.
The comparison isn’t Franco vs. post-Franco, but Franco vs. the revolutionary alternative.
That’s an unknowable. What we can know is that post-Franco Spain changed socially in all the ways his regime tried to prevent, rather rapidly.
It’s not knowable with certainty, but we can form a reasonable guess based on how similar regimes have performed economically.
Comparing an era of global peace and prosperity to an era of global depression and war may not be exactly apples to apples.
Well then we can compare Franco’s regime with other countries in the same period.
I suspect the best control would be Italy, it was also devastated by a war (albeit WWII instead of a Civil War) but ended up with a democratic government afterwards.
According to the estimates of GDP PPP per capita of the Maddison project: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-2020?tab=chart&yScale=log&time=1920..2000&country=ESP~FRA~ITA
Spain and Italy had in 1929 (just before the Great Depression) GDPs per capita of respectively $4,173 and $4,889, in 1975 the year of Franco’s death they were respectively $12,621 and $17,123 a much greater gap.
In fact Francoist Spain had only surpassed its GDP per capita from 1929 in 1954; apparently, Franco’s first years were his worst.
I don’t say that a party of ordre is better than a fully functionning democracy, I just say that the latter Franco reign was mode like a normal right wing government and that developpment and prolonged peace mean peoples where less willing to kill each others, parving the way for a functionning democracy.
I think I should clarify that the dynamic of party of ordre vs revolutionnary side is a political disfunction. Sometime it lead to a peaceful end if the country is well d’un and there is peace like it happened on South Korea or Spain, but that’s the best case scénario. In latin America the revolutionnary side dire after the cold war and the région transitionned to mostly democracy, but less rich. In Afghanistan, Libya and Venezuela the revolutionnary side won. On other places like Egypt or other middle eastern country the party of order is in Power but is just extremely corrupt aux the trains don’t d’un on time at all and there is no developpment comparable toi the late Franco reign.
I don’t think “party of order” vs. “party of revolution” is a really useful way to think about societies. Revolutionary parties, once they have long enough establish themselves, become the new party of order in their own right. As you concede with your reference to the communist regime in Afghanistan (the proximate cause for the Soviet intervention there was actually to remove a radical, far-left leader and install a more moderate, “orderly” communist regime).
In Cuba today, the ruling communist party right now is the party of order.
“Becoming more benign with time” is also a pretty common pattern, you see that with communist and Islamic states too. Once a regime has been around for a while, it no longer needs to assert its legitimacy through repression, it has the kind of legitimacy that comes from inertia.
If the revolutionaries in Spain had won, they would have conducted repression of their own, but gradually would have become more permissive / lax with time, and would have become a new party of order in their own right.
This brings up the question, are there any “good dictators” we might name instead, or is the concept of dictatorship that is the inherent problem? (I am firmly on he latter side, just to make myself clear). Or is our society really so split along the political divide that many people think “a dictator of our side” would be good but “a dictator from the other side” bad? It seems to me that dictators can emerge either as an alternative to anarchy or protection against “the other side”. I think this strongly underscores Bret’s point that history definitely needs to be examined with the guidance of our values. (By the way, “values” is a broader concept than “moral values”. “Pragmatic” and “effective” are values, just not moral ones.)
Yes, there are many good dictators. In fact, there’s one quality without which no dictator can be truly good.
In practice “dictator” is almost always used as a term of opprobrium. A good dictator isn’t called such; he’s called a president, or prime minister, or whatever his official title is.
OK but that is not historical analysis nor serious discussion. I was not speaking facetiously. If we are discussing dictators we must have a definition of the term and it should not be “good food is what the speaker likes to eat”. On this basis, you might as well say there are no dictators at all, only strong leaders from the opposite side of the political spectrum.
You’ll find neither from that one.
I don’t know African or Asian history well enough to dwell on that, but in Europe, Portugal’s Salazar is usually brought up as the least objectionable one of the 1930’s right-wing dictators. He was a narrow-minded Catholic authoritarian, but personally frugal and lead morally unobjectionable life. He merely imprisoned his adversaries, not killing them, and at a relatively modest scale, and kept Portugal out of WWII. Of course, he also lead Portugal in some horrendous colonial violence, so it was not all sunshine.
If you then go to democratically elected strongmen, Ireland’s Eamon de Valera was close to being a dictator, but gave up power when beaten in 1948 and 1954 general elections, though he won the elections in 1951 and 1957. He lead Ireland in a period of conservative stagnation and limited economic growth, but also stabilised political life so that peaceful transitions of power became the norm.
Urho Kekkonen of my own Finland is a similar figure: he was elected several times in accordance with the Finnish constitution, and Finland did have free elections during his 25 year tenure (1956-81), but his overall personal influence was only barely consistent with the constitution. (Though he never violated the constitution formally, there were some very close shaves. Especially the case of 1974 where his term was extended by 4 years by a 5/6 supermajority of the parliament passing a temporary constitutional amendment.) During his time, Finland changed from an agrarian economy to a post-industrial service economy, social mores were considerably liberalised, economical growth was faster than most other European countries, and there was no overt censorship nor any political prisoners. The downside was that the Finnish political life was dominated by the need to accept Kekkonen as the guarantor of good Fenno-Soviet relations.
I don’t think it’s that weird that one would consider “a dictator of our side” at least *less bad* than one from the other (all else being equal, at least one would selfishly note they have better chances of surviving the former!). A dictator really is usually just an absolute monarch draped in the forms and nomenclature of a republic. The big difference is that monarchs were generally just a random lottery – some came up half decent, some dangerously incompetent, some criminally insane – while dictators are usually the end point of a process which selects for the most power-hungry, cynical and ruthless of all demagogues, as any who don’t fit the bill usually get eliminated by more power-hungry, more cynical, and more ruthless demagogues in their quest for ultimate power.
So while I suppose in a very ideal sense one could imagine a dictator that is not a violent maniac and has some genuine integrity and good goals in charge, and see such a ruler as a potentially lesser evil in a trade-off between liberty and some other goal (e.g., would it be worth it having an environmental-inspired dictatorship if it meant saving the world from catastrophic climate change?), it turns out that in practice, the only people who actually *succeed* in becoming dictators are almost invariably the worst bastards humanity has to offer, so it’s kind of a moot thought experiment.
The “good dictator – bad dictator” question came from my replying to Alex Wallace’s post way above, saying he was happy for Franco being called out as a bad dictator. And while I agree that it’s understandable we’d think a dictator from “our side” less bad than from the opposite side, the difference between “less bad therefore acceptable” and “acceptable as in, good” is what fuels a lot of the above discussion (i. e. do the other bad alternatives make Franco acceptable in comparison, how bad the alternatives must be to make Franco acceptable, was he so horrid as a dictator that it can’t be even remotely acceptable?). Also,while I think this is frequently how people approach the elections in a bipartisan democracy (even if I don’t like the current leader of my party, I won’t vote on the opposite because at least I agree with my party’s principles if not all their practice) it doesn’t work precisely because dictators aim at total power and will not allow people the freedom to criticize, to choose what they support and what they don’t . If I want to keep my integrity I will have to oppose some of the actions of the “dictator of my side” and then I will also be seen as enemy of the regime. It happened so during the Communist regime in Hungary, for example before 1956. The uprising caught up the whole nation because many, many people of the left side, even moderate Communists were disillusioned by the practices of the regime and oppressed for their opinions. Imre Nagy was a Communist himself. There is also a third problem: if there is a dictator, people who see him as “on our side” will easily be blinded to his faults and his becoming more and more oppressive, more and more tyrannical especially as these regimes use propaganda of fear of an enemy (the other extreme). And so far as I know from history, they will invariably become more and more tyrannical because in the normal way, they would lose their absolute power sooner or later.
Agnes Nogradi, or anyone, would you call Gamel Abdel Nasser a ‘good dictator’? IDK enough about him to say. My working definition of a good government is one which has for its’ primary goal the defense, wellbeing and prosperity of its’ citizens and for its’ secondary goal the maintenance of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of its polity.
Nasser had pros and cons, but there are absolutely good dictators out there, as well as good leaders of one party states, and good monarchs, and even some good democratic leaders. The form of government is a tool, that might or might not succeed in producing good leaders. The more important question isn’t “how a regime wins and maintains power”, it’s “what the regime chooses to do with that power”. I don’t understand the tendency so many Americans seem to have, to view democracy as a primary good in its own right.
Honestly, most of my favorite leaders historically have *not* been liberal democrats. Joseph Broz Tito, just to take one pretty well known example.
I think the vast majority of people, historically and today, would prefer a dictator from their side to a democrat from the other side.
I think there is some good value in considering people by the standards of their time because of how our moral heuristics actually work – which is IMO what drives people to feel like sometimes harsh judgements by our standards just don’t make sense nor are very helpful.
When judging a person, we tend to account for their actions to assess their overall character. Now, suppose I read some writings of George Washington, and he sounds like a pretty reasonable and clear-headed guy. But, here comes the kicker, turns out he owed slaves. Well, by the standards of our current society, owning slaves is an extremely abnormal and immoral thing, and anyone who does it has to be some kind of sociopathic wretch, the sort of person who is willing to go out of their way to break social norms just to their egotistical advantage, and is thus probably not to be trusted on anything they sat. If I think of a modern slave owner, I build myself an image of a *kind of person* that is not very much like George Washington was at all.
Now, of course, even by the standards of the late 18th century, the US and their slavery were already an aberration. But regardless, Washington was born into that system; his still owning slaves (despite in principle disliking the institution) amounts to him essentially still taking part of the system. But this, while we can consider it hypocritical and cowardly (the way it is hypocritical and cowardly today to be fully aware of how certain products are made with slave labour and yet still purchase those products because they make your immediate social life easier – cue the “and yet you still participate in society!” dude popping out of a well), didn’t require him being a particularly sociopathic individual, with all the baggage that carries. A born today George Washington wouldn’t own slaves for sure.
Applying modern standards leads to finding ourselves, as we go back and back into the past, forced to label the almost entire populations of certain eras as irredeemable monsters, which obviously isn’t particularly helpful nor particularly believable; we’re more interested in relating, and thus establishing parallels and analogies, finding constants, not just lording it out over the past (well, some people DO enjoy doing that, either morally or technologically, but it doesn’t feel very academically fruitful to me). I think the constant in this case is that many people fall within the mold that society offers them, and then some break that mold in more or less limited ways to either push for broader change (which we can consider good or bad) or out of pursuit of selfish benefits (usually bad). A normal office worker or a normal peasant don’t break the mold at all. A crime lord or a tyrant like Peisistratos break the mold for their own benefit, and society tends to regard such individuals as the worst. Saints, hermits, artists, philosophers can sometime break the mold quite a lot, and this often makes them exceptional to our eyes, but they can break it so much that they just don’t integrate well enough in society to affect change (though there’s exceptions, and in general they can inspire it). Washington & co broke the mold in terms of revolting and creating a political system that their original society at the time considered doomed, but lacked the capacity, courage, vision, or simply actual power to also revolutionise how that society worked inside (and in some cases, didn’t even have the personal commitment to make sacrifices for the sake of a principled stand). I think this is the strongest case for the “values of the time” approach: it allows us to classify people not as good/bad, but as radicals/rebels/conformists/sociopaths, which are human types that seem to be a lot more constant throughout history.
To be fair though, the assessment of (eg) Washington as “sociopathic wretch” because he owned slaves is limited to a small minority of, well, obnoxious idiots. The mainstream, I would say, does recognize nuance and complexity – as also helpfully pointed out by our host in the last paragraph on value judgements. It is possible to assess someone like Washington as a “good person” (a very reductive assessment, I agree – but just for the sake of argument), even in light of modern values, while recognizing that him owning slaves was a bad thing (and also assessing *how* bad in the contemporary framework it was).
In cases like this, the actual problem IMO is that the reasonable people are way too hesitant to call the idiocy out.
An Argument i often made with people who considered the founding fathers and/or the US Constitution infallible/sacrosanct etc.
I don’t know that it is possible to assess Washington as a “good person”. He explicitly ordered ethnic cleansing. He also made a lot of his money selling land he didn’t actually own.
You see, the American education system is not great at teaching nuance.
Yes, that reminds of my Constitutional Law class, in which one student expressed bafflement about the Dred Scott case, because Taney (the author of the opinion) has been appointed by Andrew Jackson, and Jackson was on the good side (being for the common man and whatnot). The idea that notable historical figures (from Jefferson to Jackson to Lee to Roosevelt) might be morally ambiguous had apparently not been part of his education.
The terrible explanation for this is that they simply didn’t regard African-Americans as fully human, or at least not human in the same sense as a white person. Taney said as much in his decision. This was pre-Darwin but they regarded African-Americans like what we would now call Neandertals or Denisovans.
Washington and the other Founding Fathers are heavily mythologised by Americans. They are all 100% perfect and could never have done anything wrong.
This is less true than it used to be. It’s mostly conservatives these days who revere the Founding Fathers.
In great part, I think, a backlash against a certain growing fashion for castigating them as monsters whose creation is irredeemably flawed. Historiography is never divorced from contemporary ideologies or politics (or even other disciplines- look at the 19th century academic fights over Beowulf against the background of the Schleswig-Holstein war!)
It is possible to respect without idolizing and while accepting flaws and mistakes. As opposed to throwing the baby out with the bathwater and assuming an attitude of self righteous virtue.
In the 19th century yes, today no. In fact the fashionable attitude is quite the opposite, which is just as bad.
Slavery is an existential evil but one that has existed everywhere on the planet and wasn’t even questioned, much less condemned, until about two hundred years ago. For that matter war and conquest were considered positive goods, for the conquerors, pretty much everywhere and by everyone. Alexander was doing what a ‘good’ king was supposed to do in his day, expand his territory and capture lots of loot and slaves. He was just far more successful at it than his immediate predecessors.
Your argument would be more effective if your example was that monster, Thomas Jefferson, rather than George Washington. An effective argument for that is David Waldstreicker’s The Odyssey of Phllis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through Slavery and Independence (2023). Both men had a great deal of interest in denigrating this young woman so many admired, but none more than Thomas Jefferson. He even denigrated the classical poets who came down through to the Enlightenment such as Horace, who had also been a slave, quite likely of African origins, and was free due to his genius, the word that was much used in various ways in those times. Wheatley consciously modeled her own trajectory on those of revered classic authors such as Horace. TJ did his best then, to tear down Horace, etc.
The arguments about slavery and history, for instance, that are raging in Wheatley’s time, still are, as we see here. So this book is even more relevant to today’s entry.
I’ve always found Jefferson to be the most interesting of the Founding Fathers precisely because of his obvious moral failings: Some of the others you can argue they were just blind, or didn’t think about their society much, but Jefferson was intelligent and clear-sighted enough to realize the flaws of his society… and then balk at the consequences of that realization. The kind of moral cowardice is all to common, and I suspect if we really think about it we’ve all done similar things.
I think it was Terence who was an enslaved person of (presumably North) African descent, not Horace. Jefferson does mention Terence in the Notes on Virginia.
In my personal opinion Phyllis Wheatley’s poetry is fairly awful, but no more so than white male poets of the era.
Where did you get the idea Horace was African? He seems to have been descended from Italians enslaved after the social wars, or so Wikipedia says.
He even denigrated the classical poets who came down through to the Enlightenment such as Horace, who had also been a slave, quite likely of African origins, and was free due to his genius, the word that was much used in various ways in those times. Wheatley consciously modeled her own trajectory on those of revered classic authors such as Horace. TJ did his best then, to tear down Horace, etc.
I think you’re getting him confused with Terence, who had indeed been a slave, and was of African origin (from modern-day Tunisia, to be more precise).
Horace, OTOH, was (as far as we know) entirely Italian. He had never been a slave, either — his father had been, but was freed before Horace’s birth.
Well you can grade these things on a curve. A good standard of judgment was “was this guy trying to make things better or worse?”
For Washington my impression (based on limited knowledge of the period on my part) is he wasn’t really trying to make things better (get rid of slavery) and he wasn’t really trying to make things worse (expand or entrench slavery). So he was just a guy, not particularly good or evil.
People who are fine with benefitting from deep injustices of the societies they are born into but who aren’t especially sociopathic are a dime a dozen.
I mean, that only concerns his attitude about *slavery* specifically. I feel like that misses one or two events of historical consequence that Washington may have had an active role in, and pushed in a direction that we could consider positive. I don’t think anyone who led a rebellion against a more powerful army for the sake of establishing a more egalitarian and representative rule with his neck on the line gets to be accused of *complete* moral cowardice. But there are only so many such bets you can make in one lifetime and win.
Actually Washington opposed slavery and had a plan for freeing his slaves and replacing them with white tenant farmers that he was unable to carry out due to being president. Simply freeing his slaves was complicated by the fact that about half his enslaved workforce wasn’t owned by him but by the Parker Custis estate and he had no right to free them. He was unable to resolve the problem of freeing some but not all the slaves working for him. In his will he Freed those slaves he could, which was more than Jefferson did.
“by the standards of the late 18th century, the US and their slavery were already an aberration”
I don’t think that’s quite right. Every New World society of the time had slavery, to my knowledge, as did most of Asia and Africa. Only in Europe had slavery ceased to exist, and even there, many, perhaps most, people were not free by modern standards.
Slavery in most Old World societies at the time was a footnote – more like slavery in the North, or slavery in the Iberia of 1500, than like the pervasive slavery of the South or of Ancient Greece and Rome. In other words: there were slaves, but not all that many, and production was done by free peasants more than by slaves. Ownership of slaves was a status symbol (as it was in the Lisbon of 1500, which was 10% black slaves), and manumission rates were high. There were some exceptions for slave raider societies, like Barbary Coast and the Crimean Tatars, but by the late 18th century they were a hulk. At the time, the institution of slavery in the Americas was globally unique in how pervasive and how brutal it was and how there was little hope of manumission due to the racialization of slavery.
The Crimean Tarters supplied the Ottoman Empire with slaves, for galley rowing and in house labor, if not for industrial production, is that not so? So, in that part of Asia (and the Balkans) the institution would not have merely a footnote.
So far as I know, your point is correct with regards to China, India and southeast Asia.
It is so! But in the overall economy, it was not such a big institution. Of notes:
1. The peak of Ottoman slavery was earlier than what we’re talking about – more 16th than 18th century.
2. Galleys were generally rowed by unfree labor in that era, unlike in Ancient Greece and Rome – France was sentencing people to the oar under Louis XIV (who, speaking of historicism, I feel has correctly been revised down in historians’ judgment in the last few decades; we’re talking about a guy who ethnically cleansed his country’s most productive ethno-religious group). But at any rate galleys were in decline in that era, which is after all called the Age of Sail, not the Age of the Oar.
3. Mass slave production was not really a thing – this was an agrarian economy and the land was worked by tenant farmers, not slaves as in the American South, Brazil, or the Caribbean. Wikipedia tells me Istanbul was 20% slaves, so more than 1500 Lisbon, but this would have been a lot lower in rural Turkey (as it was in rural Portugal).
4. There was a lot more upward mobility for slaves in the Ottoman Empire than in the Americas, for example with the janissaries; this mirrors the Turks’ own origin as elite slave-soldiers for the Caliphates.
(I will add that the “slavery was demographically insignificant” line is also true of the British Empire of the early 18th century, which means that explanations of the Industrial Revolution that center the role of slavery are just wrong. No, the 50,000 slaves in Barbados in the early 1700s are not what drove the invention of the Newcomen engine.)
Ottoman slavery was absolutely not merely a footnote, but it’s importance is radically different: Namely that it provided a large chunk of the ruling, administrative and military classes.
(those were, of course not the only, or even the majority of slaves in the Ottoman Empire, but the other slaves were basically (in most cases) luxury goods rather than productive investments: Something you spent money *on* to make your life easier, rather than expecting to make money *of*)
Which does not mean it was not an absolute engine of atrocity: It was, but it consumed a whole lot less people tahn the american plantation system.
(in terms of Absolute number of slaves, the largest slave society at the time was of course neither the Ottoman Empire nor the United States but Qing China, it’s just that the millions of slaves in Qing China only made up a fraction of the population)
On the subject of whether slavery was central to the Industrial Revolution, I think the debate doesn’t center so much on demographics (“what percentage of this nation, including all its colonies and its homeland, consisted of slaves”).
I think it’s more about the theory that practicing slavery and using up millions of slaves in the New World generated surpluses of gold, silver, and luxury trade goods that made it easier for Old World countries to finance industrialization.
I’m not saying that the theory is true, but I can easily imagine a situation in which a nation is very rich and very able to start industrializing because of slavery. Even if there are only a few thousand slaves in the nation today… So long as there are a million skeletons where past slaves were worked to death on the mines and plantations.
Again, not saying this theory is correct, but we should at least know what it is before rejecting it.
The argument is somewhat correct (there’s fierce debate about the actual impact of slavery visavi industrialization, but those that argue that it did have an impact are mostly talking about the capital generated by (especially) sugar plantations, and that was then reinvested into other stuff)
Yes, and the counterpoint is that slave plantations in the Caribbean whose total population is maybe 2% of that of Britain are not going to generate enough profit to matter for industrialization. They can make several individuals fabulously wealthy, but the bulk of investable wealth in Britain had to come from the much more numerous Britons themselves. Slaves just don’t generate that much surplus per capita.
(This argument stops working when we’re talking about the colonization of India, but that’s generations later and by then Britain is already well on its way to industrializing.)
As Pomeranz pointed out, pre-industrial economies were limited by the fact that land can be used for fuel, food or industry (timber, cotton, hemp, dye-stuffs etc), but each takes from from the other. Hence the Malthusian trap. West Indian sugar (a huge source of calories) and US cotton allowed escape from this constraint – millions of ‘ghost acres’, as he puts it. This freed labour in Britain, and also allowed the British state to heavily subsidise innovation.
To use Bret’s terminology re different views of Sparta: Pomeranz’s view of development is not colorable. Too many things he says are either wrong or just nuts; we can discuss Robert Allen’s view of development if you’d like, but that’s completely different. It’s not actually serious to assert that the surplus created by the exploitation of 2% of the population drives industrialization. Nor is it serious to talk about land constraints in that era – Britain was massively increasing the productivity of its own land through enclosures and better crop rotation (it only became the massive food importer we know it as today in the 19th century).
US cotton issue is different, and also completely wrong, because the timing is wrong. By the time mass cultivation of cotton by slaves was a thing, in the late 18th century, Britain was well into its industrialization. Napoleon, don’t forget, was trying to impose the Continental System precisely because already in the early 1800s, Britain was living off of manufactured exports to Europe. The point of escape from the Malthusian trap was in the late 17th century – it just took a while for it to be visible with how slow growth was until the middle of the 19th century.
I think the argument for slavery driving industrialization is somewhat weak, but It’s not *quite* that weak: The argument isn’t that the capital generated was a particularly large part of overal british surplus, but rather that the profit marigins were very high, allowing them to be reinvested into other things (like new agricultural practices or stema engines) at a higher rate. These investments then in turn generated more profit that could be reinvested, etc. In a way that traditional british agriculture (whose profit marigins were much lower) didn’t.
@Arilou Funnily enough, I’ve heard the exact opposite argument made; that slavery slows industrialization because the high profit margins for slaves means that investors get a better return (at least in the short term) from just buying more slaves, rather than investing in industrialization.
I think Pomeranz has a point, particularly if we look at other societies that nearly reached industrialisation. The drivers look different if one looks more at the material/technical issues than at money. The West Indies and India (where Britain imposed a very exploitative regime) were huge sources of profit, but competition for these profits were drivers of technical innovation, and the opportunities opened by the state to capture lucrative trades pushed things further. There were feedback loops between fuel, London demand, shipping, North Sea coal, steam power, Indian textiles, the slave trade (Indian cloth for West African slaves), Lancashire water-power, capture of re-exports, sugar and more.
Britain’s wealth in the 18th century was less from industrial exports (these took of in the 19th) than in re-exports. Captured by the Navigation Acts.
Well, that is shifting the goal posts a little, from “the US was unique” to “the Americas were unique.”
Yeah? I can try digging up for you a series of lectures from maybe 10 years ago at Yale about the history of American slavery that begins with this point: there are societies with slavery (like the Ottoman Empire or Qing China) and slave societies, and the US was the latter, alongside the Caribbean, Brazil, and Ancient Greece and Rome. I believe Spanish America was, by 1800, more like the Northern US than the Southern US in the centrality of slavery there, but I don’t know enough about the history of abolition there beyond that Bolívar and others personally opposed slavery.
When I talked about slavery in the US as “an aberration” I guess I was thinking mostly culturally – so yes, I was more preoccupied with Christian Europe (with whom the colonists shared pretty much 99% of their culture) rather than, say, the Ottomans. These institutions were very different anyway, for example if I don’t remember wrong pretty much everyone in government in the Ottoman Empire was technically a slave of the Sultan, which includes even very high and powerful functionaries. That is functionally more similar to “absolute monarch who has power of life and death over his subjects” than chattel slavery. Anyway my point was that even with the argument “surely George Washington had enough culture and had read enough enlightenment philosophy to know slavery was wrong!”, in practice the material, economic and social incentives of the society he was actually immersed in were obviously more important, as they always are for all of us. Very few people would completely jeopardize their own position (say, for a modern equivalent, give away 50% or so of their household or inheritance) for the sake of a purely ideological and moral principle. Some will, but they’re the ones with an incredibly firm moral core. Which obviously Washington wasn’t, but that’s a far cry from being a monster.
This is a really great comment (as are your other ones in this thread), thank you.
“By the standards of the late 18th century” is “by the standards of western Europe – of Britain, France and Holland and a few others”. Those who defended slavery did not point to the Turks or the Chinese, which were not felt to be moral exemplars, but to Rome and Greece and the biblical narratives. What societies outside this culture did was irrelevant.
Make that a small part of northwestern europe. Much of eastern and central europe had systems of involuntary servitude such as Russian serfdom.
Serfdom was not at all like chattel slavery. Serfs were bound to the land; the rule in European (and Ottoman) serfdom was that landlords couldn’t move the serfs around, and if they sold the land, whoever bought the land would also get the serfs. This means that the American regime of family separation didn’t exist. I also believe that the American and Ancient Greco-Roman regimes of beatings didn’t exist in European serfdom, but that I’m less sure of. Finally, because Russian serfdom was not racialized, serfs could and did routinely escape – some of the frontier communities in Ukraine comprised a large population of escaped serfs.
The beating (and other abuse) certainly existed – serf revolt was a constant of East European life. Russian serfs could also be re-located – the Tsars routinely sent thousands off to work in Ural industries.
The beating (and other abuse) certainly existed – serf revolt was a constant of East European life. Russian serfs could also be re-located – the Tsars routinely sent thousands off to work in Ural industries.
Russian serfs could, but I believe Russia was unusual in that respect. In most countries, serfs were indeed tied to the land.
The novel “Dead Souls” by Nikolai Gogol revolves around a fraudulent scheme based on ownership of serfs who have since died but are still on the property registers as of the most recent census.
Not quite; the monstrously exploitive slave-based sugar plantations in the Caribbean were if anything worse.
One of the responses in this thread mentioned the difference between slaves who were essentially luxury goods who were a net loss to their owners (i.e. personal servants) versus slaves who were economically a plus. I presume that the latter were mostly engaged in agriculture. Which leads me to a question regarding “American Exceptionalism” with regards to slavery: Is there any useful distinction between systems where slaves primarily raised food, and those engaged in producing a lucrative cash crop? Of course grain is going to be a cash crop to some degree, but I’m wondering if slavery was “different” where the slaves’ labor was more readily convertible into cold hard money. For a non-agricultural example, I’m given to understand that it’s traditionally held that slaves used for mining were treated far more harshly.
I expect the real difference is more in specialisation of the work and surplus-per-slave. If you’re near subsistence levels with low productivity, you can’t afford to spare much before the slave becomes uneconomical, and therefore will treat them worse. I think this is relevant for any crop that you’re growing to sell; crops are rarely themselves a sign of prestige, even luxury ones (you just BUY the stuff, you don’t grow it in house).
The West Indies and the US South were closely connected, although WI was much harsher (sugar is a harder regime than cotton or tobacco).
Slavery is interesting from an economic perspective. Some slaves – the black Georgian page-boy, the Circassian slave–concubine, the Roman aristo’s Greek tutor – are Veblen goods, where the return expected is in status affirmation. The higher the cost the better.
Household slavery and much peasant agricultural slavery is just cheap labour paid up front (with a side-order of dominance feels). They tend to be absorbed into the general population unless renewed.
Gang-slavery, as per Roman large estates, ancient mining, the West Indies, briefly southern Iraq, southern Portugal, Sicily, the US South and a few others needs some particular conditions – a return valuable enough in pure money terms that continuing low productivity can be ignored, a large wealthy market easily reached (Lisbon, Rome, Baghdad, Europe), a source of cheap slaves, a reliable means of controlling the slaves …Absent these it collapses. The US South is unusual in that the slave population had enough personal room that the population grew naturally (unlike WI or Rome or Iraq). I’m inclined to attribute this to the very strict colour divide, heavily policed.
Interestingly, Mary Renault seems to have made a more progressive case for the “unity of mankind” view of Alexander, of which her depiction of Alexander’s romance with Bagoas would have been a good example (Tarn on the other hand sought to dismiss the historicity of Bagoas, mostly for homophobic reasons).
Also quite odd that the negative view of Alexander is seen as something new, considering many ancient accounts also view him as deeply flawed, though they tend to view it through the lens of him ‘degenerating’ into ‘oriental tyranny’.
And as for Alexander’s fondness of the Anabasis, this is somewhat in doubt as it is likely that Arrian played up this for his own purpose of writing an “Anabasis of Alexander”.
Rulers we call ‘the Great’ are usually accorded the title because they were successful at war. Which was, for most of recorded history, regarded (by rulers and their circles) as a noble activity. Alexander wholeheartedly endorsed this ethos, and was very good at war. It is still a common mindset, so we can at least know where he – and his admirers – are coming from.
I suspect lines like “Is it not passing brave to be a king, and ride in triumph through Persepolis?” will have a more ironic tone in a few decades.
“Rulers we call ‘the Great’ are usually accorded the title because they were successful at war.”
To be honest I’m not quite sure of that. Is there any readily accessible statistic on that? I was under an impression that it’s it’s not really true, and that while ‘the Greats’ were usually good at war, it was mostly because it was an extension of them being really good at stabilizing and expanding the power of their states. However, to be sure of that I’d have to spend a bit too much time on research than I’d like at the moment.
Biggest case of one “Great” whom I think isn’t renowned specifically for war is Sejong the Great, of the Joseon dynasty, Korea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sejong_the_Great
Biggest war the Wiki page describes is an expedition to root out Japanese pirates that made less than 500 victims in total. But the guy had a big role in promoting science, arts and literacy. Most incredibly, he PERSONALLY INVENTED the currently used Korean alphabet, specifically as an alternative to Chinese hanzi, for the explicit purpose of making it easier for the lower classes who had less time to study to learn to read and write. Nobility was so salty, they banned using the alphabet after his death.
Another “Great” I’m fairly happy with having that title is Alfred the Great, King of the West Saxons. Admittedly famous for war, but it was mostly defensive ones; he had to defend his kingdom from attacks of the Vikings and successfully did so.
Sejong and Alfred, nice.
Some other Greats: Frederik, Peter, Catherine. Charlemagne if we accept a French version (-magne) My European history has gone out of focus, so I can’t say how much fighting the first three did, or if wars were why they got the Great; I have a vague impression it was more for various “enlightened despot” reforms of their countries.
Some other Greats: Frederik, Peter, Catherine. Charlemagne if we accept a French version (-magne) My European history has gone out of focus, so I can’t say how much fighting the first three did, or if wars were why they got the Great; I have a vague impression it was more for various “enlightened despot” reforms of their countries.
Not sure if the wars specifically were why they were called “the Great”, but all three fought major (as well as plenty of minor) wars — the War of the Austrian Succession for Frederick (which he started with an unprovoked invasion of Silesia), the Great Northern War for Peter, and the Russian conquest of the Ukraine for Catherine.
Alfred the Great also drew up the legal code and put it more in order, and facilitated literature of his era, both encouraging the translation of works from Latin and doing translations himself. (He lamented how men had not done it when they saw the loss of Latin, but it does occur to him that the loss was so bad and so rapid they might not have believed it possible.)
Also Gregory the Great: not a military figure.
Same for Leo the Great. In addition to Leo and Gregory, Pope Nicholas I is also sometimes called the Great, although is fame in modern times even among Catholics is far less.
Popes called “the Great” are a special case because by tradition, the Pope doesn’t lead armies. Nearly any other person of kingly rank would.
Theodosius the Great led armies, but I think he got his title more for supporting the Catholic Church over the Arians than for his military exploits (as a commander he seems to have been competent but not exceptional).
*Not sure if the wars specifically were why they were called “the Great”, but all three fought major (as well as plenty of minor) wars — the War of the Austrian Succession for Frederick (which he started with an unprovoked invasion of Silesia), the Great Northern War for Peter, and the Russian conquest of the Ukraine for Catherine.*
I know it’s random but the simultaneous mention of Alexander, Frederick and Catherine inevitably leads me to think of this…
I also think of Henri IV/III of France and Navarre. He was Henri le Grand because he pragmatically *ended* the French Wars of Religion (for a while, anyway) and also because he generally improved living standards.
In contrast, in Korea, Sejong the Great is considered great because he came out with the Korean Alphabet
I am going to make another nudge for Dr. Devereaux to read Will Cuppy’s “The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody.” He has a chapter on Alexander and disparagingly notes the same two quotes the good doctor did.
He is known as Alexander the Great because he killed more people of more different kinds than any other man of his time.
(Besides it fits what often seems to me like Dr. Devereaux’s methodology, i.e. “Find some pop-history concept that cptbutton likes and gently explain why it is nonsense.”)
I’ve seen progressively-inclined people make the similar case that Genghis Khan was a great man because his empire was cosmopolitan and multiethnic. Once in a popular history book I found in a bookstore and once by some moron on Twitter (who was also arguing that the British Empire was good actually, for the same reason). For anyone who disbelieves that, i can probably devote some time to tracking the book down, but you’ll just have to take my word on the Twitter idiot, i guess.
There are people out there who despise nationalism ( = “separate states for separate ethno-national groups”) so much that they rush to embrace imperialism (Mongol, British, whatever) as the polar opposite.
I have to admit, “Genghis Khan as woke icon discourse” was not on my 2020s bingo card.
We live in some pretty strange times.
“I only eat my tofu well-macerated under the saddle of the horse I ride all day.”
There have been European Christians dating back to Marco Polo who praised the Mongols for smashing the hold that Muslims had on the East.
That’s right, I think. A bunch of the Mongol elite themselves were Christians, and they had some Christian states ally with them, so I can definitely see why some Christians would see them as saviours. When the Mongols invaded the Levant the mother and favorite wife of the ruling khan were Christians (albeit an “unorthodox” variety) as was the general leading the invasion.
I don’t think that’s the same reason they’re being celebrated by people on twitter though.
Some Mongol commanders were Christians–Nestorian, I presume–under Genghis or his successors? I had read somewhere that the generation of Genghis’ age had their own polytheistic religion.
The original generation were indeed mostly polytheist, although over the next couple of generations the Mongols mostly converted to various other religions (chiefly Islam, with some Nestorian Christians and a few Buddhists).
The original generation were indeed mostly polytheist, although over the next couple of generations the Mongols mostly converted to various other religions (chiefly Islam, with some Nestorian Christians and a few Buddhists).
The Mongol heartland itself became fully Buddhist, but I think that was later, in the 16th century. One branch of the Mongols drifted west in the 17th century and settled in European Russia (the Kalmyks), they’re the only Buddhist national group in Europe today.
Apparently some Mongol and Turkic nationalists are trying to revive Mongol shamanism / Tengrism today.
I understand that Genghis (and his successors?) transplanted artisans to Mongolia while they were building piles of aristo heads. I have wondered if it was the descendants of those transplants who embraced Buddhism.
The Mongols went to Buddhism from contact with Tibet.
Napoleon consciously envisioned himself another Alexander, and modeled himself on what he thought Alexander was. This was part of his impetus for the debacle of the Egyptian campaign, in so many ways, foreshadowing the debacle of the Moscow campaign, and even in-between, the Peninsular War debacle. OTOH, Napoleon did bring a corps of his ‘savants’ — engineers, chemists, translators, writers, artists, mechanists, mathematicians, who did accomplish remarkable works that did contribute to history and to the future, both.
I think it’s interesting to note why and how modern people would criticise Alexander, compared to how his contemporaries, and people through the ages, criticised Alexander.
As you point out, your average Roman intellectual would likely consider Alexander’s principal failure consisting of him adopting oriental ideas about kingship, which made him unpopular among his Macedonian and Greek troops and generals. But that historian would still consider Alexander’s far-ranging conquests admirable, and maybe even write about his eventual failure with a certain melancholy (something I’ve noticed from time to time when reading accounts of Alexander’s forced abandonment of his eastward march, and eventually of his death)
While even current historian are likely to comment on Alexander’s fascination with Persian culture as eventually creating a rift with his countrymen, they are also more likely to conclude that being a warring conqueror, who had caused the deaths of thousands of people just to expand his empire, is not an admirable trait *at all*. This fact changes heavily how Alexander’s life and influence are discussed, IMHO.
Huh, had come around the term firelance a couple times before, but just now bothered to find out what they were. It’s kinda lame that ultimately the fire part was just using the gunpowder for shock value, but I guess ‘lame but effective’ is part and parcel for history.
Now then, regarding the Bush admin schools, is there no ‘corruption’ third opinion (given how the Iraq war AND later occupation basically only bred resentment among islamists and gave them the social capital needed for them to become real threats?-meaning it feels like it failed in both security and hegemony aspects), or is accusing still living people of major crimes too much of a potential safety risk for historians to debate it?
I believe the consensus of those who know their stuff is pretty solidly against the popular idea of it being about getting Iraq’s oil. That being said there was a lot of terrible decision-making (probably some crimes since what presidency doesn’t have some?) and one of my professors liked talking about it as a nice illustration of the negative effects of groupthink (lets just say he wasn’t a fan of Cheney’s way of ‘consensus building’).
The article is rather bloodless, but then IR is very much a theoretical discipline, not really inclined to get down to the messy details and bicker and argue about who killed who.
If you read the linked article, you’ll discover that your proposed option fits easily within the “hegemony” school of thought on why the invasion happened. Only some of the hegemonist narratives require thinking that the people in Iraq would be happy about the invasion. (IMO, the “hegemony” view is a little more heterodox than the “security” one while nonetheless having fewer gaps in their arguments.)
I’ve always somewhat fallen in the “They wanted it done” school. Iraq had been a reoccuring “problem” for years, and the Bush administration saw an opportunity to “solve” that problem: The arguments for security, or even hegemony were basically post-hoc justifications for “We need to stop having to deal with this every few years”.
So they did something that meant the US – and the region – is dealing with it two decades later. Whatever the motive, there really is no excuse for the deep ignorance and stupidity.
It’s not as if the Mideastern countries we didn’t invade are unproblematic. I agree with the claim that invading Iraq was not worth the lives it cost, but I’m very skeptical of the claim that the geopolitical or even regional situation would be better generally if we hadn’t invaded. How would anyone know that?
We can’t know for certain, but given that the US’s invasion led directly to the collapse of Iraq, hundreds of thousands killed in partisan violence, ISIS, etc, I think it’s absurd to imply that we’re not implicated. Countries we didn’t invade may be problematic, but they mostly haven’t collapsed into civil war with hundreds of thousands dead. And we can look at specific follies of the US occupation, like dismissing the armed forces without securing the weapons.
It would almost certainly be a lot better for a lot of Iraqis and Syrians.
@ey81
>I’m very skeptical of the claim
> that the geopolitical or even
> regional situation would be better
>generally if we hadn’t invaded.
It might or might not be better, but it would be far easier for the US to declare the situation not our problem, which is the criterion Arilou was talking about.
“declare the [Iraq] situation not our problem”
That doesn’t seem to be something the US does very often. It would have been easy to declare Libya not our problem (Qaddafi was neither invading his neighbors nor exporting terrorism) but the Obama administration made it our problem, dropped lots of bombs, and pretty much created a failed state. That’s just the way America is.
“It would have been easy to declare Libya not our problem (Qaddafi was neither invading his neighbors nor exporting terrorism) but the Obama administration made it our problem, dropped lots of bombs, and pretty much created a failed state. That’s just the way America is.”
Come on, can you honestly argue that Bush or Trump (or Mitt Romney) would have done any better? I don’t see why Obama deserves particular blame here- this is a chronic disease of the American political/cultural establishment.
More precisely, our European allies decided to make it their problem, then came begging to us for help when they discovered they didn’t have enough ammunition.
The fact that the Iraq War failed utterly to improve American security or hegemony doesn’t necessarily mean those things weren’t the objective. It could just as easily mean that the Iraq War was a mistake, which in the year 2023 is a pretty uncontroversial position.
I think about this sort of thing a lot when talking about Julius Caesar, whose Gallic Wars absolutely constitute a genocide under the 1948 convention. Of course, the Roman Republic didn’t ratify any sort of convention; but there’s modern states that haven’t ratified it, and we can still judge them for violating it. And it’s telling that many of Caesar’s Roman contemporaries were themselves appalled at the amount of violence that he and others liked him unleashed
This pair of ideas
One such more useful standard for individuals is asking, “did this person succeed at what they were trying to do?”
and
At the same time people are often not asking, “did this thing do what it intended” but rather “was that outcome good?”
put me in mind of what I think were Goethe’s suggested maxims for analyzing poetry (which I’ve heard suggested as useful things to think about for art in general):
1. What was the poet trying to do?
2. How well did they succeed in doing that?
3. Was it actually worth doing?
That seems like an excellent metric for evaluating almost everything.
In a third year English Lit class on medieval literature, I commented that their view of time was quite different to ours, because they felt that the Romans were from the recent past, and the Anglo Saxons were from the distant past. The lecturer tore strips off me – “how dare you!”.
Oddly, I was the only one in the room who had studied Medieval History…
I actually DO care what people in the past thought about things!
>because they felt that the Romans were from the recent past, and the Anglo Saxons were from the distant past.
What do you mean by that?
I think for once, the premise is a bit weak.
Most historical writers we think of tended to be homogeneous in their being a cultural elite, with a shared legacy whose main influence is Greco-Roman, so they tended to gravitate to a degree towards a shared outlook, which very candidly included systemic bias such as ‘the heathen and/or the foreigner are worse than us’; as a result there was a greater insulation and each culture developed their own standards a bit more independently based on their needs, as you’ve shown in your military aristocracy values series.
So the question is not whether we now assign judgements where we didn’t before, rather that we’re now operating under a more relativist outlook that forces each writer to ‘declare’ for a system and of course, suffer additional burdens that come with that; Graysen, Tarn and the reactionaries have in common they need not reaffirm or reassess largely accepted moral positions, so their analysis relies less on said outlook being proved as true and more about gathering facts and interpretations fitting under that system. On the other side, instead, there’s a tension between wanting to challenge the moral status quo and a desire to have that same status quo’s same broad, seemingly universal approval rate so one can focus on facts and interpretations.
And as a result, where before we often hardly needed to discuss the moral character of a person or society and the reasons underlying, because we already had most arguments roughly built-in, revisionists should embrace the fact that not having that protection lets them take a clearly different position from the days of old and that part of why they get so much criticism is a positive side-effect and proof they are being disruptive to some degree; but the more energy spent reaffirming that everybody tends to have some level of moral judgement, the less energy there is to further one’s school of historiography’s positions by providing useful analysis.
You can accept that you get criticism as a positive side-effect of healthy changes in society… And still be well justified in counter-criticizing the critics on the grounds that you think they’re wrong.
Reading Pasts Imperfect, I was very sad to learn that the Archeology of Disability was an exhibit being held at one museum. Does anyone have good recommendations on books or the like on that topic?
You want to look into the work of Dr. Debby Sneed. I’m not sure if she has a book out, but she certainly has several articles on this topic.
Oh wow, she was on the first episode of Peopling the Past! Totally didn’t recognize the name
There are two factors confusing Dr. Devereaux’s reply to the claim that economists strive for objectivity.
First, in economics, one can make claims about the consequences of certain actions (i.e. “positive statements”) without judging the morality of those consequences. For example, printing too much money causes inflation. This remark makes no claim about whether inflation is good or bad (that would be a “normative statement”).
Second, while economists definitely have ideas about morality, part of good economic analysis and advice is being able to substitute other people’s desires for one’s own. Typically, one starts by assuming the importance of people’s happiness, well-being, safety, etc. (concepts lumped together under the term of “utility”). Generally, one adds the idea that it is a good thing to increase a person’s utility if it is possible to do so without decreasing a person’s utility. After that, one leaves it to the people affected by an economic policy to decide what makes them happy.
So, for example, one could ask whether people should have another holiday in May. An economist answering this question might say that doing so will decrease the amount of goods and services that people produce and consume while providing every employed person with more leisure (a positive statement). He or she could add that this change will make people who prefer an extra day of leisure to the value of a day’s production better off, but those who want more goods and services worse off. At this point, the economist could leave it to others to make the decision, or could make a normative proposal based on some set of values (e.g. “I value the Protestant Work Ethic, so there should be no holiday”, or “I value majoritarian democracy, and most people say they prefer a holiday to a day’s pay, so I do too.”)
“After that, one leaves it to the people affected by an economic policy to decide what makes them happy.”
the problem with this is that “what makes people happy” isn’t some sort of fixed reality- people decide what makes them happy in response to a lot of forces (cultural, political, economic, interpersonal) and is malleable to a certain degree.
This is an argument for markets and lassez-faire economics. We don’t and can never know exactly what people want, so we might as well leave them free to make their own choices. Indeed, under certain unrealistic assumptions, this approach will lead to a situation in which no-one can be made any better off.
In the real world, collective, coercive action is required to prevent life from becoming poor, nasty, brutish and short. Hence people create institutions to improve human welfare, which necessarily requires some conception of what will make people happy.
I don’t think you’re arguing with me? I entirely agree that states and other institutions are inescapably going to need to start with some conception of what makes people happy, and put that into place with collective, coercive action. I don’t think “leave it to people to decide what makes them happy” is sufficient, and part of that is because, like I said, people’s conception of what makes them happy is shaped by outside forces.
I’m not arguing with you. I’m saying that the proposition that people have uncertain, changeable tastes is an argument for free markets. We cannot know what makes people happy, but, if prices can be changed freely, we can know what they are willing to pay for. This prices will encourage production, satisfying human desires. Changing tastes will be reflected by changing prices, which will lead to changes in production and better allocation of time and resources.
This system often works very well, but there are numerous situations in which it breaks down.
Well, we do have to have laws against murder and the like.
Other than that, why on earth should some people get the right to try to push other people around like chess figures? Especially given their horrible history in actually shaping them. Communists’ attempt to shape its subjects produced the opposite of what it claimed to want.
Why do you think that’s inescapable? The only way this makes sense to me is if you define “collective, coercive action” so broadly as to cover basically every possible action by government, including things like “leaving it to the market”.
Leaving things to the market can be very coercive indeed. It’s just that we define who does and doesn’t get coerced by reference to a specific set of rules about ownership and control of material things.
If the landlord chooses to raise the rents on an apartment building, and wind up evicting several tenants who protest that they are unable to pay the new rent while also covering utilities, food, transportation, and child care, then there is definitely coercion involved in the eviction process.
Without the possibility of the evictions, and thus the possibility of coercion, the rents in the apartment building cannot be “left up to the market.” Because the rent increase is meaningless if the landlord lacks the ability to compel people to pay it.
It would require a very strange framework for what ‘coercion’ means if we were to imagine that, say, forcing the landlord not to raise the rent is ‘coercion’ but evicting tenants for not paying the increased rent is not.
And if hearing this makes you uncomfortable, or leads you to think that I must be promoting dangerous radicalism, let me ask: Why is it that a candid description of what ‘coercion’ means, in line with the dictionary definition of the term, so easily and obviously leads to politically radical suggestions?
You are defining coercion so widely that any time anyone does something in his own interest, or possibly for his own necessity, it is coercive if people don’t like it. That is entirely too broad.
” it is coercive if people don’t like it.”
No, he’s defining coercion as the use of force.
If tenants refuse to leave despite not paying rent, they will be eventually forcefully removed by the police. That’s coercion.
Really wonder why you feel a need to deny that, Mary.
So if I move into your house one day, coercion enters into it when you call the police to get me to leave?
“So if I move into your house one day, coercion enters into it when you call the police to get me to leave?”
Of course it is, what else would it be? It’s justifiable coercion, if one accepts private property, but it’s definitely coercion. (Or specifically, invoking the police to coerce the squatter to leave.) This is just the dictionary definition of ‘coerce’!
Then the term “coerce” is utterly useless in political discussion
We don’t usually define coercion to include just doing any old thing with your own person or belongings. In the example cited it would be coercive if you landlord could compel someone to rent from him at his price. Likewise if a renter can pick a price and force a landlord to offer her house at that price. But if the landlord and renter just disagree on a price and so don’t make a trade? No coercion.
“Other than that, why on earth should some people get the right to try to push other people around like chess figures? ”
Because maybe the state has both a better informed and a fairer and less self-interested view about what might be good for society than you do?
And maybe it doesn’t.
In fact, it certainly doesn’t have a better informed view, because it has only a tiny fraction of the information available to the citizens, each of whom has only a little but that which is relevant to his situation.
And whenever anyone claims to be more fair and less self-interested than other people, the burden of proof is on this paragon. Especially when he then claims the right to coerce people, as you have applauded in Cuba.
@hector st. clare: based on history, there really isn’t a lot of evidence for the state being more benevolent or enlightened than its citizenry.
“In the real world, collective, coercive action is required to prevent life from becoming poor, nasty, brutish and short. Hence people create institutions to improve human welfare, which necessarily requires some conception of what will make people happy.”
Why, yes, we do need laws against murder and fraud and all the other crimes.
To assert past that is past the evidence we’ve got
We need institutions to deal with externalities (e.g. pollution), provide non-excludable goods (e.g. defence, policing) and ensure the enforcement of private agreements (e.g. contracts).
I think that society is made better off by the provision of certain services by governments (such as healthcare, education, and sanitation). I think we need rules to prevent markets from breaking down (such as laws against monopolies). I also believe in redistribution to an extent (the marginal utility of money is higher for poorer people). People can disagree, but this isn’t a matter of economics.
We also need to price negative externalities that aren’t easily priced on the market itself. We need air pollution laws because you can’t just make people pay for competing air providers. Besides, I think an oft underestimated aspect of this is that making decisions as part of a market is a cognitive burden, that invisible hand optimisation doesn’t come out of the cosmic vacuum. And if you accumulate too many cognitive burdens on people who e.g. already have lots on their plate that in itself becomes a source of unhappiness. We can’t physically spend all our day making the most informed decisions possible about everything, like efficient markets would require us to. Especially when it comes to vital things like school or healthcare, having a safety net actually frees up mental resources, not just financial ones.
So you’re doing us a favor by tyranny?
No, you do not get to plead that you need to decide for us because otherwise our pretty little heads will be burdened.
Calling air pollution laws “tyranny” is utterly deranged.
Calling depriving us of freedom a good thing, because it’s removing our cognitive burden, “air pollution laws” is utterly deranged.
“You pay a bit more tax but if you ever are sick you get free healthcare” is not tyranny either, it’s a simple trade off. I wouldn’t even care as much for it if private insurance systems were as efficient, but they patently aren’t; they’re byzantine and expensive because they operate under an incentive to maximise profit and thus minimise claims. They’re adversarial, which is the very last fucking thing you need if you’re seriously ill and looking for healthcare.
So, sure, I think it’s a worthy trade-off. If you think this is tyranny, why not say the same of firefighters, or the police? Why are *those* ok to fund with taxes?
Who on earth is offered that deal? The deal is invariably “We will forcibly take your money, and if you get sick, we may deign to give you some health care, on our own schedule (as in, often so late that it’s futile), but then again, we may not, and we may even tell you you cost too much and should volunteer to die.”
Moot point. Telling us that our making decisions is too much of a burden and you will take upon yourself to decide for us is the ESSENCE of tyranny
Universal health care is no more tyrannical than police, Mary, and rather less so than US police. It also works rather better than US health care, where private insurers take your money and decide whether or not you’ll get health care.
Since that was not what I called tyrannical, moot point.
Anyway, by any realistic standard, the US healthcare system is the best. You have to measure by things such as “survival time after cancer diagnosis” and not things that are heavily influenced by non-medical factors such as “life expectancy” and certainly not by things such as “is socialized.”
‘Who on earth is offered that deal? The deal is invariably “We will forcibly take your money, and if you get sick, we may deign to give you some health care, on our own schedule (as in, often so late that it’s futile), but then again, we may not, and we may even tell you you cost too much and should volunteer to die.”’
Is that supposed to be an argument defending the present US health care system? The USA government spends even more on health care then single payer countries; and that to provide only for certain groups like old people and veterans…
According to the world bank the domestic general government health expenditure (measured as a percentage of GDP) of the United States surpassed that of Canada in 2006 and the United Kingdom in 2014.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.GHED.GD.ZS?end=2020&locations=US-GB-CA&start=2000&view=chart&year=2020
Also, ‘Anyway, by any realistic standard, the US healthcare system is the best.’? Maybe by realistic standards excluding such things as coverage, cost-effectiveness, and non-oversizedness of bureaucracy…
I notice that the “realistic standards” you offer do not address *results*
> but then again, we may not, and we may even tell you you cost too much and should volunteer to die
So exactly the same as US health insurance companies, except those cost even more and have an even stronger interest to find ways to shaft you?
Nope. The most the insurance company can do is tell you they won’t pay. The government can and has posted armed guards to prevent a child getting a *second opinion*
>I notice that the “realistic standards” you offer do not address *results*
Well, the USA has a higher child-mortality rate than Eastern European countries like Poland, Hungary, and Greece; so the things I had mentioned do seem to influence the results.
Or do you claim that ‘non-medical factors’ have such an enormous influence that they alone are sufficient to explain the USA having an higher child-mortality rate than is to be expected of a country with a third of its nominal GDP per capita?
https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$model$markers$bubble$encoding$y$data$concept=child_mortality_0_5_year_olds_dying_per_1000_born&source=sg&space@=country&=time;;&scale$domain:null&zoomed@=1.5&=100;&type:null;;&x$data$concept=ny_gdp_pcap_kd&source=wdi&space@=country&=time;;&scale$domain:null&zoomed@=300&=100000;;;&frame$value=2020;;;;;&chart-type=bubbles&url=v1
The highest correlation with infant mortality in the US is illegitimacy. Turns out that single mothers drink, do drugs, and smoke during pregnancy. That’s what kills their babies, not medical care. So, yes, “non-medical factors” have the enormous influence you claim they don’t.
> The government can and has posted armed guards to prevent a child getting a *second opinion*
In what deranged dystopian totalitarian hellscape has this happened, precisely? Because I’ve now lived in two countries with public healthcare (Italy and the UK) and not only sometimes you’re able to get a second opinion from the public healthcare system, but if you’re really bothered by it for some reason, or want to speed things up if waiting lists are long, you can also STILL go off and pay out of your own pocket for a private consultant. No armed guards in sight. And then the public doctors will take into account prescription and diagnoses from private ones, of course. That’s what a sane country does. If China or the USSR have gone crazy about it, well, China and the USSR have gone crazy about A LOT of things.
The UK. It was all over the news.
I’m not arguing with you. I’m saying that the proposition that people have uncertain, changeable tastes is an argument for free markets
To an extent, yes, and I think markets are going to have to play *some* role in any well-functioning society for the foreseeable future, capitalist or non-capitalist. But, it’s also an argument for various interventions by the state (starting with the educational system) to try to steer our tastes, values, and preferences into directions that are conducive to the common good.
We know that preferences are changeable to some extent- if they weren’t, the advertising industry wouldn’t exist- so if private interests can try to influence people’s values and preferences, so too can and should the government.
Even with the most sophisticated marketing, advertisers can’t sell a failure- witness the Edsel. And they can’t make people act against their best self-interests, because they aren’t a government with armed force at their disposal. At best, governments can focus on the broad and long-term self-interest over short sighted and parochial interests; but even then we get debacles like Vietnam or Iraq in the name of “for the greatest good”. At worst, we get totalitarianism like Stalin’s or Mao’s purges. Because governments as corporate entities do have their own selfish and irrational instincts towards self-perpetuation; as do the individuals seeking to retain control of the helm of the ship of state. Basically the proposition that the government (or anyone else) should mold what people want is a reversal of democracy, and sets up a technocratic government as the master of the “masses” rather than government as the servant of the People.
Now I’m picturing Anakin Skywalker saying “then they should be made to”.
On what evidence do you assert that the government is capable of steering our tastes, values, and preferences into directions that are conducive to the common good?
Trying doesn’t cut it. Lots of governments have tried. This has often increased the dishonesty of the students because the government has set it up so that survival depends on cheating.
So since external forces could change how you are to be happy, we should ignore your views on socialism? We could use your malleability to make you happy with another arrangement.
Can you flesh this out a little more? Because I’m not sure what you’re getting at. I don’t think human preferences are completely malleable, just that they’re partially malleable. I also think some conditions of life are objectively better than others, regardless of what people might feel about them. And I think the state should use its power to try and push people to prefer ways of life that are objectively better for society and conducive to human flourishing. I don’t think that someone who makes their income through rents, investments, or inheritance, on the one hand, or someone who collects a basic income check and spends their time playing video games, on the other hand, is really an example of human flourishing, even if they might both be perfectly happy.
Of course you’re welcome to try to repress me, if you can find enough political support to do so. I wouldn’t at all be surprised to find myself repressed someday, either by conservatives for my economic views or by progressives for my views on cultural issues. It would even give me a little satisfaction if that happened, since it would confirm me in my opinion that liberal democracy isn’t going to last in the long term, and shouldn’t be taken too seriously.
Do I think you “should” do that, in a moral sense? Well, no, because I think your values are, well, fundamentally wrong & mistaken. It has nothing to do with the morality of coercion or political repression in general- it’s about the ends for which coercion is employed.
What do you think might take the place of liberal democracy?
You think they are malleable enough that you do not have to listen to people when you impose what you like on them. That’s how gulags are filled: with the people who refuse to mold themselves to what you want.
“What do you think might take the place of liberal democracy?”
In my ideal state?
Rule by a party with a leading role, that cracks down on individual politicians who try to become to powerful (to avoid the problems that come with personalist rule), and that has *some* advisory role for markets as well as for public opinion, but that doesn’t allow either one to have the guiding hand in society.
Sounds like the old dream of the rule of the Philosopher Kings, or maybe Confucianism as applied to the government of Imperial China: the belief that the perfect system is one where enlightened rulers exercise power in the name of the greater good. But who guards the guardians? Whereas democracy as currently practiced is predicated on the presumption that few people are wise and none of them perfectly good, especially not when entrusted with power. Despite its resemblance to a drunken stagger on the edge of a precipice, our current system has the virtue of more accurately reflecting human nature than utopianism.
“That’s how gulags are filled: with the people who refuse to mold themselves to what you want.”
you do know that the gulag system was shut down in the later part of the 1950s, following Stalin’s death, right? I.e. that communist states self-corrected in that regard? Or are you using “gulags” as a sort of metonymy for authoritarianism in general?
It was dramatically reduced after the end of reliance on convict labor for development. But as said in Wikipedia’s article on The Gulag Archipelago:
“Solzhenitsyn was also aware that although many practices had been stopped, the basic structure of the system had survived and it could be revived and expanded by future leaders. While Khrushchev, the Communist Party, and the Soviet Union’s supporters in the West viewed the Gulag as a deviation of Stalin, Solzhenitsyn and many among the opposition tended to view it as a systemic fault of Soviet political culture, and an inevitable outcome of the Bolshevik political project”
Your point?
It was just fine because it didn’t last the length of the Soviet Union?
We all know that you consider the deaths so many eggs for the glorious omelet, but we don’t. And we notice — no omelet.
Can you explain why you think that’s a problem?
He’s a Socialist who in the last week has clearly and overtly expressed approval of Cuba’s repression.
If he let people get what they wanted, he wouldn’t get what he wants. So he tells himself that what they want isn’t important.
This is true but outside the scope of economics IMO. It’s still useful to go backwards and ask “what makes people happy”, but it’s a separate question.
“or example, printing too much money causes inflation. ”
Well, it’s more complicated than that, and depends on a whole lot of other things. (to take a theoretical example, if all the money is printed but then immediately set fire too, that won’t cause much inflation)
This is a silly example, but the point is that the statement is already making a bunch of unspoken assumptions.
Sure, but that has nothing to do with the morality of printing money. One could say: “If we put tariffs on goods from Lilliput, the the amount of goods we purchase from Lilliput will increase.” This is a positive statement, and it is false.
I could have written: “In a situation of initially stable prices and holding all other factors equal, an increase in the money supply will lead to a rise in prices over time.” Bit wordy, though.
It is a positive statement, whether or not it is *true* or not is going to depend on a whole lot of other factors. And the point is precisely that these kinds of statements can (if you’re not careful) disguise these unspoken assumptions.
For instance the tariffs might not affect net prices at all because Lilliput is selling them for cheaper for other reasons, etc. “If all other things remain equal” is a pretty big assumption.
Only an economist (don’t be offended; I’m very fond of them) would consider the phrase “too much” to be a value-free statement!
How would you express the point? You could replace “too much” with “enough” or “sufficient” and my meaning would not change, but the opposite values could be inferred. “A certain amount of money” would be inelegant, and would perhaps imply a false precision.
One could imagine the analogous exchange:
“If you do too many push-ups, you will lose weight.”
“I want to lose weight.”
“Carry on, then.”
Well you’ve fallen into the trap right there, again, “too many push-ups” is a values-based statement. You’re presupposing that the person you’re addressing wants to maintain their present weight and are subsequently corrected. Do you in fact know what a “value” is?
I am using the words “too many” to mean “sufficient for a result to occur.” I am not assigning a value to that result.
In my initial statement, I could have written: “In a situation of initially stable prices, and holding all other factors constant, an increase in the money supply will lead to a rise in prices over time”, saying in twenty-eight words what I said in six. I would avoid the potential for misinterpretation, but at the cost of sounding like Sir Humphrey Appleby.
@WJ
Like practitioners in every academic field, economists expect each other to be clear and unambiguous. In economics, clarity generally takes the form of a mathematical model. For example, the relationship between money and inflation is expressed by the equation MV = PY, where M is the money supply, V is the velocity of money (the rate at which it circulates), Y is the quantity of goods and services produced, and P is the price of those goods and services. The equation is clear, concise, and is not a (moral) values-based statement.
For precision, economists would also list the assumptions behind the relationship (V does not change, Y is determined only by labor supply, capital stock and technology, and changes in the money supply do not affect output over the long term). They would justify these assumptions by reference to real-world data (see, for example, Chart 1 of McCandless and Weber’s “Some Monetary Facts” in “Quarterly Review”, Summer 1995).
I am writing replies to a blog post for a general audience, avoiding mathematics or overly-technical language. I assume that my readers are extending intellectual charity, and are interested in trying to understand what I mean to say. I will attempt to extend the same courtesy to you.
MV=PY
Well, M cannot be determined with any precision (see the Thatcher monetary experiment, or the arguments about how far to go down the M0/M1/M2/M3 chain);
V is a best guess.
P is composed of labour supply (we have a reasonable number), capital (we don’t agree on what it is or how measured – see Cambridge capital controversy) and technology (not measurable).
P – we know the prices of of goods/services bought and sold. We attribute prices to the other. larger part of the economy.
Would you build a bridge if engineering calculations were this precise?
@Peter T
“In the context of bridge engineering, redundancy is considered a characteristic of good design.” Chapter 9: Redundancy, Steel Bridge Design Handbook, National Steel Bridge Alliance (2022).
Are economic theories perfect? Of course not. Is an understanding of economic theory helpful when formulating policy? Yes.
@James T
Your response deserves a more detailed reply than the flippant one I posted earlier:
M: As described in Table 1 of “Some Monetary Facts” (the article to which I referred earlier), the relationship between growth in money supply and price levels holds rather well for M0, M1, and M2.
V: We are looking at how changes in money supply affect changes in price levels. As a result, we don’t even need to guess V, we just need to know that it does not change in response to increases in the money supply. Why would it?
Y: The Cambridge capital controversy would be relevant if we were interested in capital as an input. However, this is the quantity theory of money, not the Solow-Swan model. So long as the actual amount of goods and services produced does not change in response to increases in the money supply, the actual value of Y is irrelevant. There are indeed situations where Y might change in response to a change in P (e.g. workers notice a rise in wages before they notice a rise in the general price level; introducing more money into an economy facilitates division of labour…). However, in the long run, increasing the amount of money in a mature economy should not increase the total production.
P: We are interested in the prices of goods bought and sold. That is our dependent variable.
The trap here is not specifying what you mean by “too much”.
Incidentally, not everyone will lose weight if they do a lot of push-ups, regardless of whether it is “too many”. If at least as much volume of muscle is created as fat is lost, the exerciser would, instead, gain weight. (For me personally, this is extremely true and I have discovered it repeatedly, but I also very much do not need to lose weight. I might want to be stronger, however.)
If one wants to be pedantic and second guess intentions or hidden assumptions behind every choice of words, communication (especially in a relatively informal context like this one) becomes impossible and bogged in procedure.
In this context, “too much” clearly refers to an equilibrium value at which the money supply keeps pace with growth. More than that and you get inflation; less and you get deflation. I have my problems with economics (including how desperately simplistic some models are, and yet they get used for no better reason than “more complex ones would be too hard to do calculations with”), but come on. No economist will tell you that inflation in every form is always undesirable anyway, so even if their models CAN be value laden, this is not one of those cases.
Well, “printing money tends to cause inflation” is a very natural formulation that most people would understand isn’t an mathematical function and doesn’t let a value judgement slip in.
But more substantively, the real value judgement hiding is in your “everything else held equal” clause in another response. One of those things held equal is what economists call “value” and I’ll call “wealth” here to avoid overloading a single word.
Wealth is measured by the amount of stuff that change hands for money, plus a fudge factor. For example, if a barrister works pro-bono on a socially important case, their labour is booked under this “stuff” that will count towards total wealth. But a housewife’s pro-bono donating of their labour to domestic chores – something that could be readily quantified, since we know the approximate hourly cost of domestic chore labour – isn’t.
Perhaps I’m speaking for our host here, but I think you’d really struggle to explain to a historian why that isn’t a value judgement. It might be one that is necessary to make predictions by economists relevant to policy makers, but that doesn’t free it of its value-judgement-ness.
“Everything else held equal”, or “ceteris paribus” if you prefer Latin, just means that a change is being made without other changes being made at the same time. It is like saying “Everything else held equal, if I let go of an iron bar, it will fall to the floor.” Yes, if you turn on a strong, properly aligned electromagnet as I let go, the bar will move upward, but that’s not the effect we’re interested in.
I feel like I cannot win here. I picture the following exchange:
“Printing money tends to cause inflation.”
“Ah, so you’re saying that, if the Federal Reserve prints an extra dollar bill, the price of a haircut will go up? I don’t believe that.”
“Well, no. I mean printing *too much* money causes inflation.”
“So you mean inflation is a bad thing? That governments should not print money if it causes inflation.”
“Okay. I meant to say ‘If *enough* money is printed, then there will be inflation.”
“Then if prices are stable, the government isn’t printing enough money. Inflation is a good thing?”
“Well, how about ‘In increase in the money supply will lead to an increase in aggregate price levels.’?”
“All right, but what if there is pre-existing deflation. In this case, the extra money will just lead to less deflation than would otherwise have occurred.”
“Fine. In a situation of stable prices, an increase in the money supply will lead to an increase in aggregate price levels.”
“What if a strange mania for burning banknotes occurs at the same time as the increase in the money supply, exactly cancelling it out?”
“In a situation of initially stable prices, in which all other variables are held equal, an increase in the money supply will lead to an increase in aggregate price levels.”
“Oh, Eric, you use too many words. These are real issues, affecting real people. You should write clearly and concisely.”
To be pedantic, neither of these are wealth. Wealth is a stock measure and you are describing flows.
And while we value wealth using money terms, “the amount of stuff that change hands for money” isn’t the definition. A house that has been owned by the same people for fifty years is still part of wealth.
You appear to be thinking of GDP instead of wealth. Except that as far as I know, a lawyer working pro-bono isn’t included in GDP.
Anyway the reason GDP’s production boundary is as it is is because the main funder of the statistics is the government, who is interested in questions like taxation and inflation. It’s not practical to tax unpaid housework and that has little impact on monetary flows.
Volunteer work, whether it be my pro bono work as a lawyer or my volunteering at the church book table, is generally not counted as part of GDP, which only includes goods or services exchanged for money. (There is an exception for owner-occupied housing, which is valued as if the owners were renting it to themselves.) Similarly, the domestic work done by housewives is not part of GDP, whereas the domestic done by paid housekeepers is. One could try to value all the unpaid work done in a society, but the measurement uncertainties would make the value of the result very questionable.
Actually GDP is all the goods and services produced over a given period of time, valued at market prices or as closely as possible. The exception is household services for own use and the exception to that exception is owner-occupied housing.
So a subsistence farmer contributes to GDP. Their crops are valued at market prices. When they build a home, that contributes to GDP. When a company writes software for internal use, that contributes to GDP.
Note that GDP isn’t a measure of welfare or well-being, but of production and income. Unpaid charity work is valued at zero because it doesn’t directly generate an income for anyone, even if it generates psychological benefits.
There’s a number of reasons why that definition is the way it is, such as user needs (& willingness to pay).
Only in economics will you find people who can so brazenly bemoan such things as “being clear about what you mean” and “using unambiguous language”.
If the outcome were decided by the addition of individual preferences, this might be a reasonable way to proceed. They are not – there are multiple social feedback loops, collective frameworks that bound and shape decisions and, of course, pervasive hierarchies that allocate different weights to persons and groups. Who gets what is inescapably a matter of values.
I’d have said that the reason that economists tend to operate by adding up individual preferences is because of problems like “pervasive hierarchies that allocate different weights to persons and groups”. If there was just one hierarchy that allocated weights we could use that, but of course there’s numerous hierarchies. For example, a Protestant might weight the interests of Protestants above those of Catholics, and vice-versa. Or, for a more local level, I weight my kids above my neighbours’ kids, and vice-versa.
And there can be extensive disagreement about what group someone is a part of. E.g. whether or not someone is Christian. Or is a citizen of a given country. There’s generally much less disagreement about whether someone is an individual, maybe the odd case of conjoined twins where one brain isn’t fully formed?
Therefore adding up individual preferences wins out by default. It’s something we can agree on, even if we’d all prefer that our own favourite hierarchy and our own definition of groups was applied.
Remember the center of economic thinking is in Europe and in the USA (with numerous important contributions from outside of course). These are not culturally homogeneous societies, there’s no consensus on values.
Out of interest, how do you think economists should address the numerous hierarchies that allocate different weights to persons and groups, if you reject individualism?
As a crass generalisation, economists sum up individual preferences because that is mathematically tractable, and gives the appearance of being value-neutral. The first is openly admitted, but means a retreat from reality; the second is sustainable only if some large fictions are inserted. The discipline has some interesting things to say, but maps on to practice only very loosely.
How should they address it? Take up the study of sociology.
In other words, you don’t know of a better solution but you’re not going to admit it.
“gives the appearance of being value neutral”
As opposed to weighing them with the TRUE worths of each individual person, which are determined I assume by their scores in Santa Claus’ nice and naughty list, or some metaphysical equivalent?
Like, what is one *supposed* to do?
I majored in International Relations as well as history. If find IR’s tries at explanation interesting, but more or less useless in practical application – there is no holding things equal and every policy issue has a concrete, complex situation. So there is no solution other than knowing as much about the details as possible. It’s a pragmatic rather than a theoretical exercise. Formal economics is similar, in that it tries to generate a body of theory, but the actual practitioners often ignore the theories (even when they are trained economists) – or apply them and come to grief. So a dose of sociology – how do these people operate? – would be a useful corrective.
Even decided which questions to study is a value judgement. Economists could study how to best maximise the number of paperclips in the world, but they judge this question to not be worthwhile of studying.
Yes, economists are humans, and how they choose to spend their time is based on their own values. By analogy, how nuclear physicists decided what to study in the 1940s was also a value judgement, with immense moral implications. Their discoveries (such as the possibility of uncontrolled nuclear reactions) are not values-based, however.
Economists have a mature sense of this because they have a closer relationship with policy, but the principle can be applied to science more generally. Science doesn’t actually tell us we should do X about COVID or Y about climate change; it just gives us estimates about the likely consequences of such policies. Or, as Sabine Hossenfelder quipped, “Science does not say you shouldn’t pee on high voltage lines, it says urine is an excellent conductor.”
Would that economics could be genuinely described as a science and make such confident assertions as physics/chemistry can about urine and electricity.
Nonetheless this is facile and a cop-out even by scientists I feel. If I announce my intention to piss on the high voltage lines and you remind me that urine is an excellent conductor, there is a fairly obvious line of thinking which is “you want me to reconsider my plans by bringing this to my attention.” Likewise if you choose to inform me of this when I’ve made no such announcement, it’s probably to warn me because you think I’ll be less likely to do it if I’m informed about the danger.
We can, surely, make bloodless assertions of banal fact like “the sky is blue” but ignoring the context of how and when this information gets presented, and the motives people have for presenting it, is to ignore half of everything being said. All in the name of chasing some sort of imagined prestige from being a “real” science either out of embarrassment at the idea that maybe the field isn’t composed entirely of enlightened scholars dispensing raw knowledge but of ordinary humans. Or less charitably to deliberately pretend objectivity while smuggling subjective values under the radar.
> If I announce my intention to piss on the high voltage lines and you remind me that urine is an excellent conductor, there is a fairly obvious line of thinking which is “you want me to reconsider my plans by bringing this to my attention.”
I think you’re working really hard to miss the point here. Obviously people know the predictable consequences of peeing on live wires and don’t need to be told, unless maybe they’re small children.
The point is that science can only tell us what the predictable consequences are; it can’t make decisions for us. If you’re a suicidal masochist, for instance, maybe you should pee on the high voltage line after all. Our understanding of the world around us can only help us achieve our goals, it doesn’t select those goals for us.
I feel like you’re also trying very hard to miss the point. The notion of pissing on the high voltage line is just a slightly humorous example of this idea that the sciences are objective and free of bias. In the sense that the purpose of any field of study is “to accurately describe facts” then yes, that’s true.
But the point, really, is that while this may be true of a particular science (and economists can dream that their field is close to the hard sciences if it pleases them), the actual scientists are only human. Humans have biases, values, limited time and energy to devote to both study and communication and are supremely not objective beings. The facts that they choose to study, choose to present to the world, choose to question or to not question and how they then frame, contextualise and put forth that information are all subjective and human things that impute their values and agendas.
As I said and I’m not sure you read: We can, surely, make bloodless assertions of banal fact like “the sky is blue” but ignoring the context of how and when this information gets presented, and the motives people have for presenting it, is to ignore half of everything being said.
It behoves the economists in particular to remember that they are humans with human thoughts and not Olympian gods dispensing pure unadulterated fact that can never be questioned, precisely because for such a soft science they have had an outsized impact on state policy that impacts the lives of billions.
> As I said and I’m not sure you read: We can, surely, make bloodless assertions of banal fact like “the sky is blue” but ignoring the context of how and when this information gets presented, and the motives people have for presenting it, is to ignore half of everything being said.
So your point is that scientists and economists are often biased and tendentious, if not outright disingenuous, when it comes to dispensing policy advice? Sure, I agree with you. My point is that *they shouldn’t be that way*. What’s the point of contention?
@WJ
Can you provide some real-world examples of economists who act like “Olympian gods dispensing pure unadulterated fact that can never be questioned”? Someone who says something like “The ‘American Economic Review’ should never publish anything that refutes my theory, no matter what empirical data can be provided against it.” Or perhaps “No policymaker anywhere should ever deviate from the rule I have set down.”
I’ve read a fair number of economic papers, and the structure tends to be more along the lines of: “Assuming policymakers wish to achieve an outcome, our study suggests that adopting a certain policy would be more effective at achieving it than the current approach. We base this claim on the following data…” Policymakers are free to say “That outcome is not our goal” or that the change in question is undesirable because it would negatively affect some other goal. Peer reviewers and readers of the article will make all sorts of critiques. These could include “you have insufficient data”, “your data is not representative”, “correlation is not causation–what you call the cause is actually the effect”, “a third factor is responsible for both purported cause and effect” or even the classic “there is a problem with your math.”
I think the sense in which scientists are motivated by “values” is that most practicing scientists believe things like “natural ecosystems and biodiversity should be preserved to the extent that’s possible”.
I can’t prove to you that that particular value is correct, but I also think it’s less arbitrary and has more intuitive appeal to most people than a value judgment like, say, “James, not William, is the legitimate King of England.” In that sense, what they’re doing is somewhere in between a value neutral and a value laden enterprise.
@Hector_St_Clair
Scientists are human beings with values, and that overlaps with their profession. Part of being a good scientist is being able to separate scientific conclusions from one’s values. This may sound callous, but in the end it actually furthers those values.
I’ll provide an example. The hypotheticals I introduce are obviously based on a real person, but they are only meant for illustration and make no claims about her actual background or motivations.
Imagine a woman values wildlife and nature, which leads her to become a marine biologist. She also values birds, and she notices that the number of birds in natural habitats is decreasing. As a bird-lover, she may not like this conclusion, but it is important that she can dispassionately recognize this fact and provide strong evidence for it. Only then can she do something about it.
Then imagine that, based on her scientific inquiries, she finds that one reason for bird population decline is that DDT bio-accumulates in aquatic ecosystems. When birds eat fish, the DDT gets into their body and causes their eggs to become too thin. This is an objective hypothesis. It may be true or false, but it has nothing to do with whether one values birds. It is important that the scientist not be swayed by her love of birds when deciding whether the null hypothesis that DDT doesn’t affect birds can be rejected. After all, it does not help birds to take action based on a faulty hypothesis.
Once the connection between DDT and bird numbers is established, the woman can take action to discourage the use of DDT (possibly by writing a book about the issue). Her scientific research will inform her arguments and policy proposals, but her actions are ultimately those of a concerned citizen and bird-lover.
I think “people usually don’t want to die by electrocution” is as reliable a fact of psychology as they come. Put together, it makes informing one of that little physics tidbit just sensible. It seems to me a less value laden choice (informs the individual of all the facts you can guess they would like to know, let them make their own decisions) than any of the alternatives (either violently wrestle them away from the power lines or sit back with a bag of popcorn and a Darwin Award ready).
The remark about Carthage reminded me that it was the subject of the most recent “Fall of Civilizations” podcast, which I thought was quite informative.
If someone with more knowledge of the subject than me agreed or disagrees, I would be eager to hear it.
In general I like the podcast, certain narrative conversations aside.
>One such measure you’ll see me use quite to assess those questions is the impact to individual well-being for the average or typical member of a society. That can be, I think, a lot more illuminating than simply asking how a given society or person stacked up against the values of their day.
“Individual well-being” is a deeply subjective metric. I’ve often seen it used here in purely material terms, but there’s a lot that could fit into it depending on the values of the interlocutor.
It depends on the circumstances how subjective that metric is, I’d say. Material concerns like having enough food can be assumed to always play a crucial role in individual well-being – when we’re dealing with famines, ending them can reasonably be assumed to have a large positive impact on individual well-being.
You’re certainly correct about famines, but I think a question like “which is better: having a stable job with a low risk of being fired, or having a greater variety of choices at the grocery store” is more subjective, and is going to depend more on your values.
Subjective yes, but you will find a broad consensus at to the kinds of things that constitute well-being, and I think it is fair to speak from that consensus position by default and clarify when necessary.
Bret, American dictionaries prefer to write judgment without the letter “e” for “judge.” There are quite a few opportunities for correction in today’s Fireside text.
Part of the reason why you don’t see more calls for more guys like Norman Borlaug as opposed to various dictators is just that a lot of people don’t know about guys like Norman Borlaug. Improvements in crop yields are, quite frankly, boring to read about, whereas blood-‘n’-guts all over the place purges are exciting. Also, political leaders tend to get more play than scientists, as a general rule. Put these two things together, and you get a populace that is much more familiar with notable dictators than scientists. (Also, in Borlaug’s case, I think a lot of people are a little peeved that he averted their predictions of worldwide famine and starvation, so he kind of gets pushed aside in favor of people like Rachel Carson.)
Also, “We need more people like Norman Borlaug” isn’t contrarian. “We need an American Sulla” is, and thus gets readers.
I think you can stir up a lot of controversy by saying we need more Norman Borlaugs, but maybe I run into more degrowth environmentalists than most people.
Haha yes. You must move in different circles than I do. I know people object to genetically-modified organisms, and to chemical fertilizers. I haven’t encountered much opposition to hybrid cultivars like dwarf wheat.
I was thinking more generally about finding technological solutions to our problems in lieu of reducing the human population and/or reducing our material standard of living. Although I have run into a few criticizing Borlaug himself.
“We need to start using electricity LESS efficiently” is fairly contrarian, and there’s someone saying that while lined up to do at least as much for hydrocarbons as Borlaug did for carbohydrates: https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/06/26/the-terraformer-mark-one/
I had a dark chuckle at Said’s quote in the article about Iraq claiming that an orientalist “Arabs are savages who must be held in line” mindset led to the Iraq War. I sure heard that a lot during the war, but always as an explanation for why the war effort was doomed and that a brutal tyrant like Saddam was the only thing capable of holding Iraq together. I suppose it’s rather embarrassing to be on the same side politically as the position you’re spent your life attacking.
It also seems completely false, at least as I recall the war — the more important pro-war mindset was “Arabs are just like Americans, if we bring them democracy and capitalism they’ll seize the opportunity with both hands!”
It strikes me that a lot of this depends on the notion that objective correct morals exists but that our understanding of them is imperfect and changes with time. I think this is a reasonable viewpoint, but we must be careful when using it to make judgments of people. Consider an analogy, was Ptolemy an idiot because he replied on epicycles to model the Universe? No, that’s what he had to work with at the time. He was wrong, not stupid. Similarity we can judge action taken by people as morally wrong, but also see when in the context of the time it would not have made the person unusual. That person is probably best thought of as operating with a relatively poor moral framework instead of as a historical monster. None of this is to say that there aren’t any weren’t monsters out there, but if you paper over everyone with the harshest judgment you can, then I think you lose more understanding than you gain.
Sorry, this was meant to be a top level comment not a reply to GJ.
I don’t think there exist objective morals; there exist, however, convergent and objectively optimal strategies to pursue the goal of “we want to live prosperous, happy, secure lives”, which while technically relative is also in practice a widely shared goal (and I don’t feel particularly bad about saying that anyone whose goal is misery instead can fuck off). So a lot of that moral progress really is more like sociological progress as we figured out better and better strategies to achieve that goal, and at the same time, it corresponded to technology providing more abundance, which loosened constraints. Scarcity lets obvious “better you than me” scenarios proliferate.
So yeah, in many ways it’s kind of like Ptolemaic astronomy. If someone for example genuinely believed that women were the intellectual inferior of men it’s not particularly surprising they’d think it dangerous to let them into government. This kind of belief is of course easily reinforced by personal bias, and less and less defensible as evidence against it accumulates, but anyone born, say, in Roman times would have learned it as a matter of course accepted by everyone. Going beyond it would require being a genuine innovator and having some ability to see beyond the context of the time (such as the inevitable self fulfilling prophecy of women being less educated and thus looking generally less capable) as well as some good counterexamples. That’s not just being morally good, that’s also being out of the box thinkers and having some decent luck.
“I don’t think there exist objective morals; there exist, however, convergent and objectively optimal strategies to pursue the goal of “we want to live prosperous, happy, secure lives”
(…)
So a lot of that moral progress really is more like sociological progress as we figured out better and better strategies to achieve that goal”
I think there is a huge moral question at the basis of this: Who is part of the above mentioned “we”? I and my family? I and my social group? I and my nation/compatriots? Every human being on Planet Earth? And also, what is the acceptable price to pay for the happy, prosperous, secure lives? (e. g. questions of environment protection). Even if ‘we’ want to improve ‘everyone’s’ lot, there isn’t any way to bring everyone up to the same level of prosperity, and then – do some people need to give up some of their prosperity/comfort in order to improve others’ level of prosperity/comfort?
Yeah, those are the “better you than me” scenarios I mentioned. Whenever there’s scarcity, partition of resources becomes a more pressing problem. In abundance, the issue relaxes. Not that it necessarily disappears entirely, and of course there’s always cases in which someone simply genuinely hates someone else (and not merely loves themselves more), but my point was that most of what we can call a sort of pseudo-linear progression of morality in history has just been “we work out better ways to be prosperous”, “we expand the amount of people we consider worthy of being prosperous” or “we learn to make more stuff so we can afford sharing the prosperity”. Expanding the sphere of concern also often comes hand in hand with science, as tearing down sharp boundaries makes it harder and harder to justify holding differences as fundamental.
The question that immediately springs to mind when I hear statements like “judge them by the values of their time” is “whose values?”. Like, we hear “judge such-and-such slaveholder by the values of their time” and we’re supposed to infer that this means the values of the slaveholder and not, for example, the slaves.
I think it speaks to the degree that people are conditioned by being raised in a hierarchical society to view things from the perspective of the dominant perspective. It’s no different than that person on twitter the other day who was rambling about how men used to lead legions into battle, and utterly failing to consider the reality that most men in Roman times were peasant farmers or slaves. You have to actively train yourself to think in egalitarian, anti-hierarchical ways. I would encourage this, on the grounds that it both permits a clearer perspective on the people of the past and, one hopes, encourages a more empathetic view of people today.
Like, we hear “judge such-and-such slaveholder by the values of their time” and we’re supposed to infer that this means the values of the slaveholder and not, for example, the slaves.
There are enough examples of ex-slaves owning slaves of their own to suggest that plenty of slaves didn’t actually oppose slavery itself, even if they personally didn’t want to be on the receiving end.
Of course as we all know, a person’s values will never change as their circumstances do and indeed are always perfectly consistent and well thought out. Those slaves would never dream of saying slavery was bad, why they might own slaves someday!
Nevertheless, the assumption is that their values did not change unless you have evidence to the contrary. Most people, caught on the downside of a society-wide practice, think it’s their bad luck, not an intrinsic evil.
Of course as we all know, a person’s values will never change as their circumstances do and indeed are always perfectly consistent and well thought out. Those slaves would never dream of saying slavery was bad, why they might own slaves someday!
“We’re supposed to infer that this means the values of the slaveholder and not, for example, the slaves” presupposes that the slaves have a different view on the matter to their masters. But there’s no direct evidence for what slaves actually thought on the matter, and the indirect evidence (how [former] slaves acted when they were in a position to buy, or not buy, slaves of their own) doesn’t generally give us any sign of widespread abolitionist sentiment, at least not until abolitionism started becoming mainstream in society at large.
One notes that after the slaves on the Amistad mutinied and ended up back in Africa, one of them became a slave trader.
The assumption that slaves opposed slavery as an institution is ill-founded. Many slaves who became free went on to own slaves.
If one of the Amistad returnees became a slave trader, that proves nothing about the beliefs and attitudes of the others. It merely shows that one enterprising person had an eye for the main chance.
The assumption that slaves did not oppose the institution is equally ill-founded for similar reasons. Some who became free became abolitionists and underground railroad conductors. I like the locution “became free”, as if by some Act of God, rather than risking their lives running away.
The point isn’t that slaves didn’t oppose slavery: Many did. But also many did not particularly. This seems to be true throughout history; Most people don’t want to be slaves (though ask Köprulu Mehmet Pasha and he’d probably say it worked out pretty well), but that says nothing about what they thought of slavery itself.
“I don’t want to be a slave” and “No one should be a slave” are very different statements after all.
Most people don’t want to be slaves (though ask Köprulu Mehmet Pasha and he’d probably say it worked out pretty well), but that says nothing about what they thought of slavery itself.
I feel like we really miss out on a lot if we insist on using the same term to cover the status of Black slaves in the US South, on the one hand, and Koprulu Mehmet Pasha’s situation on the other. Neither of them was “free”, but they weren’t really the same kind of situation.
I think that Arilou’s point here is somewhat prudent. We need not go to oriental locations, but we can take 18th century England as our example: the narrator of Daniel Defoe’s “Captain Singleton” is an English boy of gentle birth who gets abducted by a beggar and sold to gypsies, then later acts as a pirate and slave-trader. The story is somewhat fanciful, but it was believable enough to have the contemporary readers willingly suspend their disbelief. It was considered quite believable that somebody might informally sell a parentless child of the lowest classes.
In Captain Singleton’s world, slavery is something that happens to people as a misfortune, and being an enslaver is a way of being fortunate. The character doesn’t grow into actually criticizing the social system that makes it possible to exploit other human beings that way, nor does Defoe show any sign of overcoming the limitations of his narrator.
I’ve sometimes wondered about a scenario in which a Southern slave owner circa 1800 or so found himself seized by Barbary pirates and sold into slavery, only being rescued or escaping years later. Would this teach him any empathy for his slaves at all? Or would he dismiss his experience as a mere aberration, a temporary reversal of the natural order of things?
I’ve sometimes wondered about a scenario in which a Southern slave owner circa 1800 or so found himself seized by Barbary pirates and sold into slavery, only being rescued or escaping years later. Would this teach him any empathy for his slaves at all? Or would he dismiss his experience as a mere aberration, a temporary reversal of the natural order of things?
As mentioned above, lots of former slaves happily owned slaves of their own, so probably the latter.
You mean the accurate locution? You do know that many slaves were freed by their masters?
Also, a counterexample does indeed only need to be one case.
‘Many slaves were freed by their masters’. Not in much of the US slave states – it was explicitly forbidden by law in some states, and deliberately made very difficult in most. It also did not occur much in that other great centre of chattel slavery – the West Indies.
And a single counter-example say very little about a general social situation.
The discussion was of slaves in general. Even if the US universally prohibited it — which you admit it didn’t — the other slaves are important.
I have a strong dislike of verbal trickery. One could say that opposition to slavery was not universal among the enslaved themselves, as witness the Amistad returnee who himself became a dealer in human cattle. That would be quite unexceptional. There will always be those who look for a profit any way they can.
Well, you can forgive yourself for having indulged in verbal trickery, then.
“many slaves were freed by their masters.” (Owners would be a better and more accurate word.) How many and in which states? Besides those who were offered freedom for fighting on the British side in the Revolutionary War? BTW, what was the social status not to mention earning ability of those who were freed, if indeed there were any at all? And, no, I am not going to “do my own research”; I did not introduce the topic. Until I see some believable documentation and figures, I will regard the assertion as unproven. The only instance I know of was Washington’s eventual freeing of a long time friend and companion. There was a former slave who wrote a biography of Madison, but I think he had bought his own freedom.
If you regard the emancipation of slaves as “unproven” you are so appalling ignorant of the most basic facts about slavery as to have nothing to say about it.
And you lie. I spoke merely of people who had been slaves. YOU claimed that they were all runaways. So, yes, you introduced the topic. And in such a manner that a single emancipated slave would rebut you. (As for what state: Rome, for instance. Athens. And many other states, that is centralized political organizations.)
I never claimed anything like all formerly enslaved persons were runaways–that is, successful runaways. You used the term ‘slaves’ inclusively. The example of the Amistad returnees has nothing at all to do with slavery in the ancient world. I am afraid that particular piece of spaghetti didn’t stick.
The obligatory Chesterton quote, below, does not convince that you are a principled conservative rather than merely a snob.
I like the locution “became free”, as if by some Act of God, rather than risking their lives running away.
vs.
I never claimed anything like all formerly enslaved persons were runaways–that is, successful runaways
Both you.
Based on accounts of escaping slavery, there was an element of luck even in the best planned escape. Lucky that you weren’t recognised on the train maybe. Or that a stranger gave you shelter.
It’s like saying that a soldier survived WWII.
The point is more that being anti-slavery is an ideological vision, which is not the automatic product of your material interest being in not being a slave *yourself*.
This isn’t IMO particularly surprising and we see its analogue all the time now too. We even had someone coin the expression “temporarily inconvenienced billionaire” to refer to how seemingly inexplicable it seems to see working class people being so preoccupied with defending a system that often gives them the bad end of the deal; not just the system as a whole (you can argue there’s good reason to think capitalism IS better even for the working classes in practice than violent revolution), but even details of it (like progressive taxation brackets or lack of public healthcare in the US) that really wouldn’t change the big picture.
Marxism even has a term for this, “false consciousness” – a concept I personally dislike since it reeks of unfalsifiability to me. But the point stands that no, people very obviously DO NOT always necessarily generalise “this thing should not happen to me” to “this thing should not happen to anyone”, even if the thing is blatantly striking people nearly at random regardless of their merits. They have various more or less thought out reasons to believe that the world is ordered that way and it may not or should not be changed; they still want good things for themselves, of course, but don’t necessarily think this means good things should be guaranteed to everybody. That’s just a philosophical generalisation you get if you think the world ought it to us to be just and consistent, and if it isn’t, then we should make it so.
Yaaaah. How many of the enslaved when given the opportunity fought for the Union here in the US, and how many fought for the CSA, hmmmmmmmm.
In a culture where anti-slavery sentiment was generally common, and growing, and for their own freedom. (The number of slaves who objected to their slavery on personal grounds vastly exceeded philosophical objections.)
Exactly right. Nobody wants to be a slave but that isn’t at all the same as objecting to the institution. The understanding that slavery is intrinsically evil is quite a recent development historically speaking.
Most of them probably didn’t oppose cholera, malaria, polio, or droughts and hurricanes “as an institution” either, since the option of doing so to meaningful effect wasn’t available yet. Add up everybody’s preferences on having it happen to them personally, or their in-group, and I suspect there’d be a solid enough consensus, possibly even predating the invention of language.
Slavery is not the same as cholera, malaria, polio, or droughts/hurricanes. It is a man-made institution, and therefore the option of opposing its existence to meaningful effect has always existed.
A solid consensus in favor of not having bad things happen to me, but I don’t care about others, that did nothing and so is moot.
The problem of people identifying with the powerful is probably downstream of the fact that their words and deeds are the ones that we hear about. We can infer the opinion of the guy who became a slave trader, but we are less likely to know what the others thought about slavery. You’re right that we can’t infer that all slaves would have been against the institution as a whole–but we can’t infer from some self-selecting examples that they mostly WEREN’T, either.
To narrow the question to the United States, there were enough participants in the Underground Railroad that it conveyed around a hundred thousand slaves in 40 years.
That only confirms that the slaves themselves wanted to be free. It was the freeborn participants whom you can know opposed slavery. (It’s likely the escaping slaves did, too, but then, in a society where the sentiment was cross-class.)
A lot of former slaves were involved in the Railroad. This was important because they had local area knowledge at the extraction end.
In a society where opposition to slavery as an institution was well recorded.
There’s an important point that “The values of the times” aren’t really ever set in stone even in fairly small groups: People have different opinions and ideas, based on their own experiences.
John Brown; Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglas, Karl Marx, Guiseppe Garibaldi, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Sojourner Truth, Empress Cixi, Mark Twain, Oscar II, Napoleon III…. These were *all* people of their times (the same times!) yet they all held very different opinions about all sorts of things.
+1000.
The fact the Texas National Security Review exists is like another version of “Hi, I’m from Texas! What country are you from?” 🙂
Will comment more another day when I have more time, so just a quick thought: I remember an argument by C.S. Lewis that we should engage with history because any era may have moral blindspots and learning about the values of people in the past may help us notice our own blindspots. (The example he uses was that in his time people considered “selflessness” the highest virtue, but previous eras would have said the highest value was “love”. Which makes one question if “selflessness” alone is really that laudable – and indeed, Lewis is critical about selflessness as a virtue in other works, perhaps because of this encounter with values of the past.)
So I suppose it may be worthwhile to not only judge the historical figure, but also – metaphorically – allow the historical figure to judge you.
As Chesterton sagely observed, readers should occasionally consider the limitations of their own era rather than of the figure they are judging.
Adding an example where looking at values of the past made me reevaluate my own values: Learning (among other things through this blog) that many people in the Roman Empire liked the Roman Empire and basically no one wanted to see it fall made me question if principled anti-imperialism is really the way to go. Now I am more open to judge empires on a case by case basis against the available alternatives. So when the pro-US-hegemony post Bret has been hinting at comes around, I will approach it with a much more open mind than if I hadn’t looked at the values of people two millennia ago.
I think it might also have helped that the Roman Empire was around for a very, very long time. If conquest was fresh there’s still open wounds from the fighting and integration is probably still poor. But after a while, those wounds heal, integration improves, and benefits may begin outnumbering the downsides if the empire in question isn’t just using its conquered lands to extract resources unidirectionally (which wouldn’t last long anyway as it’s not sustainable). Cue the “what did the Romans ever do for us?” scene from Life of Brian.
So I suppose it may be worthwhile to not only judge the historical figure, but also – metaphorically – allow the historical figure to judge you.
+1000 to this.
I don’t read history so that I can confirm that 21st century America is the greatest civilization in the history of the world, I read history for quite the opposite reason. Learning about how societies were different in the past gives us reason to hope that they might be better in the future, and that there’s nothing “natural” or automatically “correct” about the way we live now.
And of course, from a “Why study/fund the humanities?” perspective, the case is much easier to make if you begin from the premise that previous generations have something to teach us than if you begin from the premise that we’re so much smarter and more moral than they were.
And indeed what people mean when they complain that now historians are ‘imposing’ their values on history is really, ‘in the past I agreed with the values historians imposed on history, but now I do not.’ This isn’t a plea for objectivity, but for special consideration.
I don’t think that’s the right explanation. To illustrate, let me start by quoting a little dialogue:
The Emperor summons before him Bodhidharma and asks: “Master, I have been tolerant of innumerable gays, lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, transgender people, and Jews. How many Virtue Points have I earned for my meritorious deeds?”
Bodhidharma answers: “None at all”.
The Emperor, somewhat put out, demands to know why.
Bodhidharma asks: “Well, what do you think of gay people?”
The Emperor answers: “What do you think I am, some kind of homophobic bigot? Of course I have nothing against gay people!”
And Bodhidharma answers: “Thus do you gain no merit by tolerating them!” https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
It seems to me that when people complain about historians imposing their values on history, they’re complaining — justifiably or not — that the historians in question are acting like the Emperor in the dialogue, trying to get virtue points for being against imperialism (or whatever) when being against it carries no cost and requires no moral effort of them whatsoever. We all come from a society where imperialism is frowned upon, and none of us has had or is ever likely to have an opportunity to launch a war of conquest; the fact that we’re against imperialism doesn’t make us more virtuous than Alexander, any more than the fact that we believe in evolution and gravity makes us more intelligent. The reason why people don’t complain so much about Droyson and Tarn is that, since they support Alexander, they’re obviously not trying to portray themselves as more virtuous than him, and so are free from suspicion of trying to win cheap virtue points.
“the fact that we’re against imperialism doesn’t make us more virtuous than Alexander”
It does do that actually. Imperialism is bad. While none of us is ever going to stand in the same sandals as Alexander and have the power to make the decisions he did, our evaluation of those decisions does matter.
“any more than the fact that we believe in evolution and gravity makes us more intelligent”
Intelligent is maybe not the word I’d use, but certainly better educated and more aware of how life came to be and how the universe “ticks” so to speak.
We stand on the shoulders of giants, as Newton would tell us. We’re not necessarily better at thinking than the people of the ancient world because we’re all still working with the version 1.0 human brain, but we do have a substantially better knowledge base to work from and that makes us in a literal sense possessed of more intelligence than them.
As to the Slate Star Codex article… well frankly it betrays something that was always sort of evident about its author which is that he was (remains I suppose) a total fucking weirdo. At once presupposing that the Emperor doesn’t have any particular problem with the uh…. “gays, lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, transgender people, and Jews”, but that also that he’s desperate for the approval of the Bodhidharma and to accumulate “virtue points” for it.
It is, at best, being wilfully ignorant in order to nit-pick about the exact definition of “tolerance” in order to score Epic Internet Debate Points and at worst could be said to indicate that the writer seems to think the “default” position is to not tolerate “gays, lesbians, bisexuals, asexuals, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, transgender people, and Jews” and only to do so when Virtue Points are on the line. Both of which speak rather more to the character of the writer than the people he’s criticising.
Preening about one’s virtue compared to past time is an excellent way to blind yourself to the identical evil in modern times with superficial differences. People who think they are antislavery because they oppose a statue while facilitating human trafficking over the southern border.
We’ll get right on the line to the Anti-Confederate Monument Human Traffickers Association and tell them you’ve got issues with their rank hypocrisy Mary. Thanks for keeping us abreast of your good-faith and reasonable views.
And WJ provides us with an example!
The point the SSC post is trying to make is clear to me: “tolerance” means that you are somehow able to coexist with those you do NOT like. They don’t have to be LGBT or black people just because that’s been a mainstream thing. You maybe dislike other kinds of people, but surely you dislike *someone*. The point is that you can’t go into all out war against everyone you dislike, all the time (this reminds me of Brett’s own Twitter thread sometime ago about the Wars of Religion, which are exactly what happens when everyone instead does that). You have to be able to find a way to coexist, within reason and just allowances for self defense. But ideally if everyone is trying to deescalate, society can keep moving along instead of degenerating into total bloody conflict. Now that holds of course for the homophobes or racists (which are assumed to *be* such – we can’t always eradicate every bad idea from every person’s mind, the important thing is that they don’t act them out!), but it holds also for other categories. If society tears itself out over small political disagreements the outcome doesn’t look particularly better than a race war.
Right, so it’s nitpicking about the definition of “tolerance” and handwringing over how people who aren’t homophobic tend to not like homophobes very much. Cry me a damn river, won’t somebody think of the bigots etc.
You’re evidently not a very tolerant person.
I can tolerate many things, but I do not sympathize with all of them.
I can tolerate the existence of someone who has a deep-seated irrational loathing at the sight of funny colored skin, without feeling at all sympathetic to the mighty internal struggles they go through every day to suppress their ‘natural’ desire to harass, assail, traduce, and make miserable all people who have that skin color.
Not being allowed to oppress others is not a condition of being oppressed oneself.
Now all we have to do is decide which actions are oppressive.
Given that we have people who call it “genocide” when they aren’t allowed to control other people’s speech, that’s not going to be quite so easy as you imply
‘ people who call it “genocide” when they aren’t allowed to control other people’s speech,’
That’s a pretty strong claim, Mary. Which people, where and when? What your sources?
Not according to the author of the Slate Star Codex piece no. I’ve very little time or desire to put up with racists, homophobes, fascists, anti-semites etc. and I’m not generally going to extend the benefit of the doubt to them or take their thoughts very seriously.
If this somehow makes me a worse person than somebody who does, well, subtract ten Virtue Points from my grand score and move me a few places down the board I guess. Seriously I can’t get past how fucking stupid it is to think about ethics like that.
No, it’s not, it’s trying to give you perspective, and to point out what the actual difficulties in running a society are.
To wit: you have certain things you believe are Right, and there are other people who don’t believe them and you consider Wrong. This does not make you special: everyone is like this. That you and I have very reasonable arguments for why those things are Right and those other are Wrong doesn’t make us special either.
Now, a society has to somehow find ways to mediate between all of these different viewpoints. Acknowledging this doesn’t mean falling in some kind of nihilistic moral relativism in which good and bad things are the same. I still have very solid reasons to believe what I believe! But that doesn’t magically mean that people who believe otherwise disappear. And because I also AM a relativist, in the sense that I don’t think any hard rule of nature enforces moral principles and there is no objective feedback to rely on to bolster and vindicate my specific position the way it might be if, say, we were arguing about whether the Earth is flat or a sphere, that means the conflict over values is entirely social. I don’t get to dismiss others who disagree with me because in a conflict between social constructs, people are both the soldiers and the battlefield.
At this point we’re not left with many options. One very extreme one is violent suppression or even physical elimination of those who hold specifically Wrong ideas. This is obviously morally problematic in itself, and requires a significant amount of strength to back it. Still, we do it as a society – there are aberrant behaviours that we’re willing to punish violently with incarceration or in some cases even death. It works because most people agree on that. Any issue in which you have something like a 60/40 split is one that can’t be settled with violence that isn’t gruesome and self-destructive like a full blown civil war, and would likely end up being worse than the moral wrongs it’s trying to right.
Therefore, the remaining options all involve dialogue, compromise, and the good old frustrating and boring but sometimes effective dance of regular politics. And in the meanwhile, as you try to keep conditions that enable this sort of action rather than degenerating into the aforementioned violence, tolerance. Which yes, as SSC points out, is actually tested only when you actually, really, truly dislike the people you’re trying to tolerate.
It strikes me as you write this that the people the author is hand-wringing for tolerance of, the bigots, are the first to resort to violence in order to enforce their vision of a “pure” society. You speak of needing “perspective” and “the challenges of actually running a society” but from where I sit, the biggest challenge is that when you give these people an inch they launch a giant campaign to legislate the undesirables out of existence, commit acts of abject cruelty and oppression and laugh about it, and generally go out of their way to be intolerant. At their worst they drop the pretence and just herd people into camps and slaughter them.
The paradox of tolerance is an old and, frankly, solved conundrum: it’s actually a very good idea to be intolerant of people whose goal is the elimination of others based on their immutable characteristics. It is a good idea to exclude them and make them feel unwelcome to express their ideas in public spaces, it is a good idea to not permit them to wield political power, it is a very good idea to forsake chasing “virtue points” by patting oneself on the back for being so nice to the Nazis and instead tell them to fuck off.
However, we need a very high standard of evidence for claiming that people have the goal of “the elimination of others based on their immutable characteristics.”
People routinely call people “Nazis” on literally no grounds because they wish to ostracize them. It is in fact the people who use the term who are unfit to wield power.
People routinely call people “socialists” on literally no grounds because they wish to ostracize them. It is in fact the people who use the term who are unfit to wield power.
Really? When was there a slogan going around calling for people to punch socialists?
I don’t know how you get to say that Scott Alexander is “hand wringing” for tolerance of bigots when *in the same exact post* just a few paragraphs later he brings up how he struggles to think of any people he knows in real life that might disapprove of gay marriage, and how even in other rationalist spaces like LW even the relatively few right-wingers are libertarians rather than standard issue GOP types as an example of the kind of political bubbles we end up living in.
Yes, obviously right wingers are prone to this too. Yes, many of them are also thirsty for civil war and violent repression. This is, in fact, a problem! The point is just that it’s not a problem that is best understood in terms of “oh, those darned evil right wingers, they always want nothing more than violence”, or rather, ok, you can do that, now what? What’s the solution you gather from there?
You can’t discuss seriously about problems – analyse how we got there, which incentives produced a situation, what are the possible solutions or prevention measures to avoid this problem repeating – without some degree of detachment and an attempt at taking an outside perspective. The problem is that in political debates many people (like you are doing right now) simply never allow for that. Every statement that isn’t outright condemnation of the opponent may be a show of weakness, an endorsement, a dog whistle; there never is a space safe or appropriate enough to rise at the meta level and finally be able to say “ok, but seriously, HOW did this mess arise? What is in our actual power to do to fix it?”. All you’re ever allowed to do is scream about how evil the others are as if that fixed anything, when it patently doesn’t – it only is reinforced because it galvanizes your side more.
This doesn’t mean that I suddenly agree with Republicans and want them to have their way. I’m not even from the US honestly. But I think that writing off ANY hope of a peaceful solution to problem (which doesn’t mean letting the others have their way: there are degrees of firmness between “be a pushover” and “kill your enemies”) is lazy and immoral given what a non peaceful one looks like. This includes the Republicans chomping at the bit for civil war, of course; but ANYONE chomping at the bit for civil war is responsible for bringing it a bit closer. If it truly gets to that point, fight it; until then, there’s yet hope.
I wonder – what brutal social context formed such a radical opinion of yours that a stable, tolerant, civil society such as most of the Western world today is a hair’s breadth away from being democratically subverted by authoritarians into committing genocidal mania? Considering the prevalence of the LGBT community and their pushing for trans rights; considering the public outcry and the massive wave of protest following a single publicized case of police brutality leading to a death of a black person; considering the widespread diplomatic support for a country that is fighting a war of existence against a fascist invader – it seems to me that ideals of liberalism are stronger now than ever. The one recent significant counterexample that I can think of – the US Capitol Insurrection of 2021 – I think our host was quite quick to condemn as wrong and anti-democratic, and it mostly went the way of the Charlottesville march as an object of mockery and widespread condemnation.
I sincerely disagree. I think Karl Popper himself would disagree, as he wrote:
The intolerance in question has been, frankly, unnecessary, and almost always seemed counterproductive. I do not see our current societies as being ones where one would be unable to counter intolerance by rational argument, trying to appeal to public opinion (after all, that’s what this very post is trying to do here).
Feel free. Just realize that, without further argument, you most likely won’t convince anyone else to follow in your principle of premature close-minded anti-intellectualism. I, for one, do not feel threatened by these ideas enough to stick my head in the sand and hide in fear from them.
Also, even though you dislike Scott Alexander, I’m still tempted to quote him. So, here it is:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/
People routinely call people “socialists” on literally no grounds because they wish to ostracize them. It is in fact the people who use the term who are unfit to wield power.
Socialists face far less ostracism than fascists in literally every western country.
To add to what Roadent said: I feel like the “these are settled matters, everyone who still disagrees is not even worth entertaining and must just be shut up” is a woefully out of touch mindset with how these dynamics actually work.
No matter is ever a “settled matter” because people, surprisingly, die all the time, and new people are born, and so new minds need to be continuously reshaped. Sure, you may be surrounded by obviously jaded, dead-set-in-their-ways extremely ideologically polarized adults in whatever online bubble you spend your time in (guilty as charged myself) but there’s ALWAYS a fresh reserve of new people still looking for ideas to grasp onto, there’s always one of xkcd’s proverbial “lucky 10,000” every single day for every single idea of note.
And each of them will eventually stumble upon each and every one of the moral debates you care about and if you never take pain to even put up a serious rational defence of it they’ll only see one side making things that sound like well-reasoned arguments and another side making angry sounds and absent any other knowledge their basic social heuristics will kick in and suggest that probably the ones that sound thoughtful are actually right and the others are just bullies with no good points.
And it’s a problem if the one that sound like they have well-thought arguments (regardless of whether they actually are; fact checking evidence is hard and long while first impressions are quick!) is the racists, the homophobes, and the authoritarians.
The death of reason has been frankly greatly exaggerated. We got a few psychology studies (so mostly poorly replicable low stakes tests performed on two dozen undergrads) about how people have some built-in biases and tend to rationalize them and suddenly we’ve got a whole political movement deciding that appealing to reason is pointless and possibly a little reactionary, and that true progressives purely shriek emotional snippets and whatever earns you most likes on Twitter. This, I suspect, is not how a steady and solid push to build up a base for your ideas actually works, and I’m afraid it’s hurting society far more than the propaganda of bigots of various sorts (which has always existed, but somehow until we stopped actually tearing it down systematically had been kept in check far better). Granted, social media dynamics also changing the way information is spread probably play a role too, but that THIS was the tactics that were deployed in this new environment and the genuine beliefs that were adopted to justify them is frankly disheartening.
It does do that actually.
No, it makes us lucky to be born in a society with more accurate moral views. You don’t get virtue points for resisting a temptation that doesn’t exist.
Intelligent is maybe not the word I’d use, but certainly better educated and more aware of how life came to be and how the universe “ticks” so to speak.
Knowing more =/= more intelligent.
Higgsbosoff has already rebutted your strange misreading of the SSC article, so I won’t repeat it.
You don’t get virtue points for resisting a temptation that doesn’t exist.
Yes. It always amuses me when people whose moral values are in complete lockstep with the society around them act like this makes them morally superior to people in the past whose moral values were in complete lockstep with the society around them.
Everybody likes to think that they’d be on the side of the civil rights marchers, when in fact most people only oppose segregation because society tells them that’s the correct belief to have. If they’d grown up in a segregationist society, they’d be in favour of segregation, for the exact same reason as they’re actually against it.
Many people ARE in favor of segregation. They just call it “safe spaces.”
Wait, what? Most Americans were on the side of the civil rights marchers while those marches were happening. MLK had positive net approval in 1964-5. Vice-President Nixon had a plan to work with Senate leaders to break the filibuster to pass civil rights legislation, until Lyndon Johnson sniped him in order to claim credit for his own civil rights bill to burnish his credentials for 1960. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 got an aye vote from practically every politician not representing the White South. Just about every civil rights law and every civil rights ruling from that era enacted the popular will over a white supremacist vetocracy that the majority of Americans did not like.
What’s true is that the post-1965 turn of the movement was less popular. But also racially conservative Americans don’t pretend that they liked the 1966-onward phase of the movement – they openly say that they’re against how black people started demanding welfare payments rather than individual rights like voting.
> Most Americans were on the side of the civil rights marchers while those marches were happening. MLK had positive net approval in 1964-5.
I think that mostly makes it a case of social progress outstripping the pace at which the legislative one can keep up. It used to be that people DID support segregation, but by 1964, the balance had shifted; the law simply hadn’t caught up yet because it always has quite a bit of inertia, being dominated by cumbersome processes and politicians being mostly out of touch old guys.
You’re doing the same incredibly weird thing the SSC article is doing and making claims about “virtue points” as though morality were some sort of game in which the goal is to beat the high score which I find so entirely stupid I’m baffled by it. I really don’t know how to respond other than with incredulity, you can’t seriously believe people only have morals for the sake of keeping score right?
Regardless of that, I am familiar with the concept of moral luck so I’m aware that it’s basically by chance of birth that I’m a better person with better values than Alexander the Great. But that still makes me very much a better person, even if it’s not necessarily by dint of my own effort.
>Knowing more =/= more intelligent.
Oh do please cease being such a pedant.
People who preen about their being better for reasons that they did not contribute to at all do indeed have morals only for the sake of keeping score.
You’re doing the same incredibly weird thing the SSC article is doing and making claims about “virtue points” as though morality were some sort of game in which the goal is to beat the high score which I find so entirely stupid I’m baffled by it. I really don’t know how to respond other than with incredulity, you can’t seriously believe people only have morals for the sake of keeping score right?
No, “virtue points” just means how virtuous you are. It’s got nothing to do with keeping score, whatever that’s supposed to mean.
Regardless of that, I am familiar with the concept of moral luck so I’m aware that it’s basically by chance of birth that I’m a better person with better values than Alexander the Great. But that still makes me very much a better person, even if it’s not necessarily by dint of my own effort.
Virtue isn’t a matter of having the right beliefs, but rather of being habituated to doing good. Most of us aren’t habituated to not starting wars of conquest, because we aren’t in a position where “Should we start a war of conquest?” even comes up as a question; it’s a virtue that simply doesn’t apply to our lives.
Of course, you could say that not starting wars of conquest is merely a specific application of a broader virtue — peaceableness, say, or moderation — but based on your comments so far, I don’t think it’s a virtue you possess.
Oh do please cease being such a pedant.
Sloppy use of terminology leads to sloppy thinking, as someone who is in a literal sense possessed of more intelligence than Alexander the Great ought to know.
No, it doesn’t make you a better person. What would make you a better person than old Alex would be if you were given the same opportunities that he had and refused the temptation.
For thousands of years all over the world imperialism was considered a Good Thing – for the imperialists!
I don’t really think “everyone” today dislikes imperialism. You get plenty of conservatives over at places like the National Review who thinks British colonialism in Africa and Spanish colonialism in the New World was good actually (I can furnish you links to Helen Andrews’ articles arguing exactly those things). But I’ve also seen liberals say nice things about, say, the Austro-Hungarian Empire because they see it as an alternative to nationalism. Lots of people dislike imperialism in theory but like it in practice because they dislike the likely alternatives even more.
(*I* very very much despise imperialism, but that’s just me).
I don’t think I ever said that literally everyone today dislikes imperialism, but I do think that being anti-imperialism is the mainstream position, and in academia in particular it’s pretty much universal. In other words, I don’t think it takes any moral or intellectual effort to be against imperialism in the modern west.
Genuine question: What do you think makes imperialism worse than the alternatives? When I think about the bad things empires did (like settler colonialism with genocide, wars of aggression, economic exploitation), other polities seem just as likely to do them as empires.
I’d say the definition of “imperialism” *requires* that you enact wars of aggression. You don’t have an empire if you don’t perpetually invade someone else to grow your territories. Empires aren’t the only polities that can do those things, but they do by definition subsist on them (at least the conquering part; the genocide in theory is not a requirement, but in practice having a national/ethnic elite rule over other conquered ones and extract resources from them often results in something along those lines due to the sheer disparity in power).
Nah, you don’t have to. At least not in the most faciel sense of “war of aggression”. Lots of imperial conquests were at least theoretically justified as some kind of self-defence after all (and after they attack you you can move in and set up a new administration, that is of course only natural)
Eh, by that logic, Putin is “just defending himself” from NATO encirclement, totally normal thing to do, not aggression at all, sir.
Empires that grow really big don’t have the time or inclination to make up good casus belli for their wars of conquest other than at most “I’d like a lot of buffer territories around my core”. Even the US ended up making shit up to justify invading Iraq, and that’s a very “soft” form of empire they got going (not direct conquest, more like trying to spread certain ideological tenets that they think will make other countries into their natural allies and thus pull them into their sphere of influence).
I’m not saying empires are necessarily the worst thing that can happen to the world. If we want to define what the US have “an empire” (which is sort of accurate by function and role in the world, historically), then it definitely seems better than an alternative of a lot of small and angry nation states each purely protecting their own little backyard. And empires can clearly vary over a broad range of sustainability and brutality. But I think you can’t have empires without some kind of expansionism, and that usually means a fair dose of warring, often as the aggressor, though that may be thinly veiled by some excuse.
Because I value my ethnic, cultural and national identity, and I don’t want my group to be either 1) absorbed into a bigger group and lose its distinct identity, or 2) be ruled over by another group for its own self interested benefit, or 3) something even worse. I assume most other people feel the same way about their groups as well.
And as noted below, wars of aggression are pretty much baked into the concept of an empire.
At some point, I’m going to need to write a 10,000+ word takedown of rationalism and Scott Alexander personally, for its middlebrow terribleness.
But for now, let me just point out that the motivating example in the in-group/out-group post, about Nazi anti-Semitism, is completely false. In fact, in the Holocaust’s history, a really important aspect is that the Nazis realized that even the average Einsatzgruppe member would not readily kill an assimilated German Jew the way he would obey orders to shoot an unassimilated, weird-seeming Lithuanian or Ukrainian or Belarusian Jew. The antiseptic aspects of the Holocaust, like the gas chambers (unlike the Holocaust by bullets east of the Curzon Line), were designed specifically with that in mind.
Earlier, the mass dehumanization campaigns of the Nazis against the Jews had to likewise keep in mind the similarities within Germany. The “I’m not anti-Semitic, I have Jewish friends” line was so pervasive in Germany that Goebbels himself had to step in and exhort the Germans to stop having the one good Jew they know and understand that even said Jewish friend was part of the international Judeo-Bolshevist conspiracy. In contrast, in that same era, even rather liberal Germans readily hated the Poles and Polish Jews, precisely because they were more different. The line about how the Nazis demagogued against the Jews because of the similarity is just historically wrong.
Rationalists overlook it because as a group, they are extremely incurious about the humanities and non-economics social sciences and so end up both historically ignorant and only talking to other historically ignorant people. Please stop citing Scott Alexander on anything except how to be a white supremacist cult leader (with my thanks to ACOUP commenter Topher Brennan for pointing that out), especially in a history blog.
If the essay is more on this line, you might as well skip it. It will be dreadfully unconvincing.
I wrote and then deleted a sentence in the comment saying “Mary Catelli here would be less fascist than the median rationalist who openly expresses object-level political opinions.” You don’t have to write apologia for Franco, you know.
Stupid lies don’t help your plausibility.
Must be thinking of that other fascist apologist named Mary Catelli who posts here.
None of that is relevant to anything anyone’s said in this discussion.
You could perhaps begin with definitions. Apparently, a “rationalist’ is no longer merely a person who believes in clear thought and reasoning from facts and evidence? The word now denotes a certain what?, online community, ideology (or sub-ideology)?
Who is Scot Alexander and why must I know about him?
Scott Alexander is the author of Slate Star Codex/Astral Codex Ten, the blog that GJ linked to and that I was replying to. He and the AI-is-existential-threat writer Eliezer Yudkowsky are the leaders of a community and movement that is called rationalism. If you don’t know much about this movement, you’ve missed little. This isn’t really about clear thought or reasoning from facts; it’s just a name, in the same way that Objectivism is not about any kind of objectivity but just denotes the followers of Ayn Rand.
Thank you.
That’s never what it meant. Except in the heads of Yudkowsky and his weirdo spinoffs. (rationalism is a speciifc philosophy but that’s a different kettle o’fish)
Given that Yudkowsky and Siskind (pen name Scot Alexander) are the subjects of the discussion and indeed probably the most prominent people calling themselves “rationalists” today, one can safely say that the philosophy department definition of “rationalism” that would encompass the likes of Spinoza is a bit archaic by now.
“Scott Alexander’s historical analysis of Nazi antisemitism is too simplistic” is a long way from this being somehow apology or “white supremacist cult leader” thinking. The thing he calls the narcissism of small differences doesn’t seem that outlandish to me: at most we’re talking a matter of degree. Polish Jews were still closer geographically and culturally to Germans than the Japanese. The whole point is that there are differences small but noticeable enough to raise that sort of feeling of being threatened, and differences that are so large they become hard to conceptualise and go into a different mental bin. Some degree of closeness IS required for intolerance to develop, people don’t generally go randomly hating other people half a world away they don’t give a shit about. They focus on those they think may be affecting their lives directly (even when their rationalisations for why they would be are woefully unfounded and fantastical).
So like, the reason people are saying that Siskind is a white supremacist is A) That he has supported eugenics and B) That we have emails where he basically says that he is “hiding his power level” and trying to smuggle in fascist beliefs by proxy. It’s not something he says in particular here, but when the known racist starts misunderstanding how racism worse he kinda doesen’t get the benefit of the doubt he’d get if he was someone else.
Isn’t Scott Alexander Jewish?
Are you saying that Nazi Germans hated the Japanese more than they hated German Jews? Because Scott Alexander wrote that:
If you’re going to argue that Scott Alexander is “completely false”, then you may as well start by picking apart the actual comparisons he wrote about, rather than some barely relevant digression that, when attacked, essentially fulfills the role of a strawman argument.
If this is Scott’s argument, it’s so abstracted from the actual situation as to be mere hand-waving. Nazi ideology was born in an anti-Semitic environment, nurtured anti-Semitism, and that in turn was built on many centuries where Christianity was the defining element of identity. The culture broadly didn’t know enough about the Japanese to hate them.
Scott brings up specifically what Freud called “the narcissism of small differences”. He makes many points throughout the post, one of which is that often the “outgroup” isn’t more “out” the further you go, but instead is someone pretty close. This is actually pretty relevant to people who for example may consider themselves “tolerant” for being worried about poor people in Africa but then act like an ass to their local homeless people because hey, they stink. And that’s not tolerance.
But more in general, if you take the pain of reading the whole post, Scott is actually aiming his post at *his own community* and doing some critical self-reflection. He brings up how the Red and Blue tribe (typical Republicans and Democrats) who are at each other’s throat and how there’s people who prize themselves on looking at this from a somewhat outside, removed perspective and can feel superior for it but then again it’s just that those people are members of a *third* tribe, somewhat ideologically more aligned with Democrats but not entirely overlapping in worldview and philosophy, and really, they’re still only shitting on the other tribes like everyone else. It’s a reflection about how hard it is to escape this mechanism (and how you probably can’t really do it in full), but also at least seeing the mechanism is a first step. And he ends up advocating for tolerance *towards the Blue Tribe*, namely, basically suggesting to his fellow tribe members to be more willing to look past disagreements on language or methods and ally with the ones that at least stand for human rights, freedom and progress. So honestly I don’t see how people are accusing this post of being the rants of a fascist; it’s anything but.
@higgsbosoff: it’s being treated as “the rantings of a fascist” by people who see themselves in the post, don’t like it, and don’t want to admit that they, too, have the potential to do evil within them.
Dude, you can’t just drop accusations that someone is “a white supremacist cult leader” without evidence (well, you can, but I’m not going to take you very seriously if you do).
There is a faction who are convinced that Alexander was poisoned by Aristotle, no less–never mind that no ancient source places Aristotle anywhere near Babylon–as part of some nebulous oligarchical plot. I would like to see Mr. Devereaux discuss Alexander’s death and what can be reasonably surmised about it. (Aristotle may be said to have had a perfectly understandable if not praiseworthy motive of revenge for the judicial murder of his nephew. One can easily imagine the philosopher’s sister on his case, “You created this monster, brother, you do something about him.)
You could write a very entertaining farce having all of Alexander’s friends and enemies out to do him ill, only for natural causes to swoop in at the last minute – or some/all of the independent conspirators succeeding!
Peter Green, Alexander of Macedon, is an excellent biography.
I’ve got a question about Dexter Hoyos’s writings:
I got interested in the book you recommended, “The Carthaginians”, and searched for it on the website of the online store where I usually buy my ebooks. There, I discovered that Dexter Hoyos has also written another book with the title “Carthage: A Biography”.
Err, to me, this sounds suspiciously as if Hoyos wrote the same book *twice*. Is that the case? And either way, which one of those two books would you recommend more? They’re both priced at a range so that I can, at most, afford one of them.
According to what I have managed to find, “Carthage: A Biography” is about the history of the city while “The Carthaginians” is about the history of the civilization.
The TNSR piece doesn’t really seem to address another possibility, namely that the war was prosecuted mainly for domestic political purposes. I may be misremembering some Karl Rove quotes that seem to suggest that they thought that making Bush a “wartime president” would guarantee his reelection in 2004, and for various reasons Afghanistan wouldn’t work for that result.
Hmm, I see a little bit of a glancing mention, maybe, at the end of the piece, but it’s not much, if it even is anything at all.
The article doesn’t try to lay out every conceivable position, just the two biggest camps in the scholarship.
Post to subscribe.
This probably is one of those folk histories, but the version I remember hearing the most at the time was that the “Neoconservatives” of the Republican party were fixated on the concept of the United States as a “hyperpower”. Not merely a supreme hegemon, but so powerful that it could define global political reality- the USA could simply make true whatever it wanted to be true. To the adherents of this view, Iraq was to be simply the first of many countries that the USA was going to “clean up”: overthrow dictators, and install democratic (and more importantly Western-friendly) governments.
I’d actually say that “democratic” was more important to the Neoconservatives than “Western friendly”. For all their crimes, the neocons were idealists who genuinely thought they were doing their victims a favor.
I think for most of them they simple axiomatically thought these were the same thing.
The coalition, during the occupation, implemented large-scale privatization of the economy with absolutely no popular mandate whatsoever. It took massive street protests, strikes, and yes, violent insurgency to get the US and its allies to concede to holding elections in the first place.
The US foreign policy ‘blob’ has a conception of US power which is affronted by defiance on the part of lesser nations (the Soviet Union and now China were/are at least peer competitors). Latin American states proclaiming equal sovereign rights, France or Iran demanding to be treated as equals and so on. A difference of opinion coupled with a seemly deference is acceptable; comparable power can be bargained with, but opposition from states that should be properly subordinate cannot be tolerated. Iraq fell into this category.
In defense of “folk history” of the Iraq war, I think both the ‘security school’ and ‘hegemony school’ are underestimating the role of emotional drivers in the choice to go to war in Iraq. Bush and his circle were not acting out of pure rationality or haughty ideologies and ignoring irrational biases seems to me frankly a little weak. The “folk history” that revenge motivated Bush seems at the very least simplistic but it tries to account for emotional drivers of the decision. Certainly it seems to me a purely rational reaction wouldn’t end up with an “Axis of Evil” composed of 3 countries with zero connection to 9/11 (two of them bitter enemies). Perhaps it is seen as to speculative to talk of these emotional push factors but ignoring them seems ridiculous.
At the very least, it seems to me there were a lot of non-rational factors in the entire reaction, from Saudi Arabia getting little (public) scrutiny despite being the source of most of the attackers, to Pakistan’s role in supporting the Taliban going mostly unexamined… If historians are examining this without seeing the contradictions in it all, it’s hard for me to take it seriously.
I tend to lean more into the emotional aspects, but I do note that the “Axis of Evil” while making no sense in the way it was presented, makes sense from both hegemonist and security schools: IE: “These are security threads/obstacles to american hegemony that needs to be delat with”.
I guess the question I want to ask, from the ‘security’ perspective, is “why are you ignoring Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, who both recognized the Taliban, whose citizens took part in 9/11, and who have been linked to other state terror? Particularly Pakistan, which has continuously hosted terrorist groups that attack their rival India, but also Saudi Arabia which is a major source of funds?”
To say Iraq, Iran, and North Korea are the biggest security threats after 9/11 requires a level of unbalance and bias that truly is mindblowing. There is a lot of motivated reasoning involved. To leave these questions unasked just boggles my mind. The entire idea that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea constitute any sort of existential threat to the US then or now is bordering on absurd – Iran can be seen as a threat to US interests in the middle east, but hardly a threat to US security (and conversely, Saudi Arabia could be seen as a threat to US security despite being nominally aligned with US interests).
This could be an argument for the ‘hegemony’ camp, but only in the most machiavellian realist perspective, as the biggest threat to the ideological hegemony – the democracy and freedom thing – was clearly a rising Islamic fundamentalist movement that, once again, had its base of support in SA and Pakistan.
This is not to say I think the US should have gone to war with Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, there are a number of reasons why that would be absurd, but it seems to me a lot of the thinking is held over from the past, like Iran because they kicked out the Shah and US companies, North Korea because they do their thing (I mean, they are a threat but in a very unique manner), and Iraq because of the past conflicts like the Gulf War. Certainly at the least 9/11 should have changed the relationship to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan more materially than it did, merely looking at the public evidence.
That said, it’s not like US law enforcement agencies have been purged of right wing extremists even after 1/6, so… Perhaps what historians can do is limited to looking at what people think they are doing whether it has any basis in fact or not. Remember the Maine!
I should note that, I think it’s pretty obvious, the neoconservatives were *wrong* in thier analysis, but I also think it is important that their analysis makes *internal sense*
Pakistan, for instance, was largely seen (much too naively) as in the US camp; As a result of the Cold War, US security interests had trained pakistani military, etc. Pakistan was, somewhat obstinate and difficult to control but still largely considered to be in the US sphere of influence. Similar thing with Saudi Arabia. The sense was that they had some extent influence, although not control over these actors, while Iran, Iraq and North Korea were outside of the scope of US influence other than the most brute force ones.
Similarily, US security interests is a fair bit broader than merely US territorial integrity or targets on US soil (and this is where the security and hegemonic schools kinda bleed over into each other, to some excent I question how useful they are)
What strikes me about your response, which I think is very on point, is that the thinking is very “state” level and thinks of the world and security from a perspective of nations and (pseudo imperial) superpower “spheres of influence”, which I very much think the Bush team as a whole believed in. There was a sort of grasping at straws when it came to reality of ideological and small group terrorist threats. The US toppled the Taliban (temporarily) but failed utterly to challenge their ideology. On terrorism, I think there is limited success – certainly nothing like the original WTC attacks, much less 9/11, has occurred since. This I think is more of a law enforcement thing (terrorism in many ways being more like criminal activity than war).
With both Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, the relationship to the acts is more complicated. Officially neither state had anything to do with it, of course.
Picking out old enemies because “we gotta go to war with someone!” seems to be more of what happened than actually focusing on the specific threats that lead to 9/11. The perception of Iraq specifically as a threat can’t be justified on either security or hegemony terms except as those have a logic unrelated to 9/11 and terrorism; effectively making Iraq a sort of war of opportunity.
> Saudi Arabia getting little (public) scrutiny despite being the source of most of the attackers
I see this argument being made a lot, but it never made much sense to me. One of the goals of Al-Qaeda was to overthrow the Saudi regime, specifically because of that regime’s close ties to the US. Pointing out that many Al-Qaeda were Saudi nationals sort of misses the point, in the same sense as pointing out that many of the IRA were UK nationals. Likewise, an American disengagement with the Saudis would have accomplished rather than foiled the political goals of AQ.
I checked out the full book from Stieb on the decision-making going into the Iraq War. Fascinating stuff, and I came out of it with a much more negative opinion of George H.W. Bush’s handling of the situation. He basically boxed himself in by going hard on a sanctions regime with a blanket refusal to remove them unless Saddam left power (or was toppled), and when it became clear he wasn’t going anywhere couldn’t back out of it. He listened to Colin Powell on avoiding an open-ended military conflict, but not an open-ended sanctions regime*.
We got the worst of both worlds out of it – a sanctions regime that didn’t remove Saddam from power but which immiserated the population of Iraq, a regime that other countries rightfully balked at continuing and which gave Saddam no incentive to be cooperative with the WMD inspections.
* The US in general seems to be incredibly hard-put to ever end a sanctions regime. I have no idea why – maybe we should put time limits on them, so Congress and the President have to repeatedly renew them.
Why would it make my argument *more* effective? Jefferson if anything is a case of someone that you can argue was probably kinda bad as a person by the standards of his time too. If I think of Washington I see someone who wasn’t particularly flashy, wasn’t the most educated or the smartest of his peers, but was solid, reliable, charismatic, and overall fairly modest, able to keep his wits even when put in a position of great power. Jefferson by comparison comes off a lot more arrogant, his vision for America an ideological pipe dream with little practicality and his slave owning situation a lot more problematic (what with the slave mistress and all that). Washington IMO worked better for the example exactly because I genuinely would say that all in all he’d be someone I would consider a good person, on the net, and I can fairly well square that with his slave owning given the context. But I don’t think Jefferson was a good person. Even accounting for the context, I think Jefferson was likely someone I would still have hated and considered a boor and a selfish prick.
You seem to have answered the question yourself.
Washington was conflicted; he understood that in his era, which was the enlightenment era, which was now followed by the era of Revolution, which he himself was a great figure in initiating, slavery was considered to be a regressive, not progressive, i.e. thread in Enlightenment thought. He wanted desperately not to go down in history as a slaver or a supporter of slavery. Thus, he ensured his will freed the slaves he personally owned.
Though so many still look at Washington as a simple mind in contrast with TJ’s great mind, TJ’s short-sightedness about past, present and future becomes more clear in each succeeding era. Washington was a far more savvy political operator than TJ from the gitgo. He was also, to a degree, unselfish, in ways that TJ couldn’t possibly fathom. Moreover, Washington was loyal and TJ from youth displayed an unerring trajectory of backstabbing, just starting with his attempt to rape his best friend’s wife. Phillis Wheatley came to Washington’s attention during one of the depths of his war time sloughs of despond, and it was when she was still attempting to chart her path between Patriots and Tories, like so many other Americans then, not knowing how this would turn out. She had written some, in retrospect, very ill-advised poems in praise of Britain and of a British naval officer — the two of them conducted a public semi-flirtation via poetry published in papers in Boston. The two of them never met in life though.
TJ wasn’t in the least conflicted about slavery. He knew it was a bad thing, but nevertheless it was a good thing for him, and he wasn’t about to make any move to mitigate slavery at all, not in his own time or the future. He didn’t even free the children he had by his slave, Sally Hemings, not even in his will.
Alas … for the era, that the cotton gin arrived right after the war, when the movement for abolition in the independent colonies was at its height.
Wikipedia:
“Jefferson eventually (primarily posthumously, through his will) freed all of Sally’s surviving children,[41] Beverly, Harriet, Madison, and Eston, as they came of age. “
Wiki, as you know is not always correct. And this is not correct.
Jefferson did eventually free his children with Sally Hemmings (though it was complicated by his financial situation and constant debt) some in his will, and some he simply freed by the expedient of sending them out of state with some money.
My point is that saying “why didn’t you use Jefferson?” as an example misunderstands my point.
I used Washington because I think he’s still redeemable, even with the slave owning. I didn’t use Jefferson because I’m happy with judging HIM a shitty person. A clever, very talented shitty person, but shitty nevertheless. Washington is a better example for my point of someone for whom the judgement changes drastically if you do or don’t contextualise specific details like “he owned slaves”.
Bret, now that I’ve had an opportunity to finish, here are the remaining proofreading concerns fro your consideration:
emulated, or a cautionary tale to be avoided and that > [move comma to follow “avoided”]
see me use quite to assess > [word missing? “quite often” perhaps?]
a read a TNSR > at TNSR
regardless of what one things about > thinks
book I frankly though I had > thought
The problem I have (well, one of them) with contemporary historiography is that evaluative standards for past figures tend to shift in order to support historians’ (uniformly left-liberal) ideological agendas. So imperialist conquest by Alexander or 19th-century Europeans may be criticized, but conquests by Mohammad and his Muslim successors rarely are.
He’s not a historian, but recall how Obama criticized the Crusades but not the Ottoman sack of Constantinople, though the moral superiority of the latter is hard for me to discern. Most historians have the same biased set of judgments.
In your culture, people say “crusader” to mean “fighter for a just cause.” The actual crusades involved the Rhineland Massacres, and then the genocide of the Siege of Jerusalem, in a military culture where internal sieges usually ended in ransom payments and general respect for the other side’s valor and not mass killing in the style of the Third Punic War. It’s actually a good example of where understanding the values of the contemporary society is useful: when the Romans massacred an entire city, that was their way of doing war; but medieval Europeans did not do that when they were fighting other Christians, only when they went to the Middle East to stir shit, and on the way there they deliberately detoured through Europe’s largest Jewish communities in order to do some light genocide on the way.
Notably, nobody in non-Christian cultures uses “crusader” with the American connotation. In Israel, the expression “crusader for justice” makes about as much sense as the expression “terrorist for justice.” That’s the difference with the Ottomans: nobody in the US and Europe says “janissary for justice” with a straight face. A person who spoke positively of a Muslim leader or movement that was so identified with either anti-Semitism or general genocide would be treated as an extremist and a pariah; most leftists loathe The Young Turks precisely for both the name and Cenk Uygur’s past Armenian Genocide denial.
In your culture, people say “crusader” to mean “fighter for a just cause.”
Yes, but the actual crusades are also a stock example of Bad Things People Did In The Middle Ages.
and then the genocide of the Siege of Jerusalem, in a military culture where internal sieges usually ended in ransom payments and general respect for the other side’s valor and not mass killing in the style of the Third Punic War. It’s actually a good example of where understanding the values of the contemporary society is useful: when the Romans massacred an entire city, that was their way of doing war; but medieval Europeans did not do that when they were fighting other Christians, only when they went to the Middle East to stir shit,
Sieges generally only ended in ransom payments when the city or fortress in question surrendered on terms. When a city was taken by storm, sacking it was SOP. The sack of Jerusalem *may* have been unusually violent, but then again it may not have been; we don’t have any reliable figures for the number of people killed, making it difficult to compare.
and on the way there they deliberately detoured through Europe’s largest Jewish communities in order to do some light genocide on the way.
A subset of the crusaders did, and were opposed by the local Catholic bishops, a detail which seems to have slipped your mind.
Medieval sieges ended relatively mercifully even when fortresses were taken by force when the inhabitants were Christians in good standing; the Early Modern Era was more brutal (e.g. Magdeburg), but that’s not what we’re talking about.
And I’m aware of the opposition of the local clergy to the Rhineland Massacres; you do not need to explain Jewish history to me. In Speyer, they even managed to forestall it. They also were not the crusaders. If the crusaders were like Nazis and terrorists, then the local clergy is analogous to Christians who resisted (like Oskar Schindler or Archbishop Damaskinos Papanderou) and to any number of people today who fight against terrorism in their own communities.
Medieval sieges ended relatively mercifully even when fortresses were taken by force when the inhabitants were Christians in good standing; the Early Modern Era was more brutal (e.g. Magdeburg), but that’s not what we’re talking about.
No, even during the medieval period, sacking cities was common, and often brutal. For example, the sack of Berwick by Edward I’s forces lasted for several days, and the king only put a stop to it when he saw a man hacking a baby out of a pregnant woman’s stomach.
And I’m aware of the opposition of the local clergy to the Rhineland Massacres; you do not need to explain Jewish history to me. In Speyer, they even managed to forestall it. They also were not the crusaders. If the crusaders were like Nazis and terrorists, then the local clergy is analogous to Christians who resisted (like Oskar Schindler or Archbishop Damaskinos Papanderou) and to any number of people today who fight against terrorism in their own communities.
The crusades were prompted, directed, and sponsored by the Church, so I don’t think you can separate the two so easily. If anything, it’s more like, say, the Boer War, where the British army put a load of people in concentration camps until the civilian government intervened to stop them.
You’re still dancing around the fact that the faction of Christianity that committed the Rhineland Massacres – the crusaders, under the leadership of Godfrey – is the one that in modern Western culture is viewed as synonymous with justice.
By analogy, take left politics. There are elements there that committed mass murder, i.e. communism. There are elements that didn’t, and that opposed the mass murder from the start, i.e. social democracy (the first US newspaper to break the story of the Holodomor was the Forward). But nobody that I know uses the expression “communist for justice” unironically and then falls back on the positive things done by mid-20c social democracy, because people are aware of the atrocities and care about the victims to at least some extent (even if weapons deliveries to Ukraine are far too slow).
And re sacks: there are examples one way and examples the other way. In the Wars of the Roses, the cities were not sacked, which is one of the things that bothers me about the portrayal in A Song of Ice and Fire – to the average commoner it just didn’t matter which lord won until the transition from the CK3 to the EU4 era, whereas in thoroughly CK3 Westeros, it does. I think it’s Lindybeige who gave examples of medieval sieges on video where the respect for the valor of the defenders was such that they were spared. And then all of these rules went away when those attacks were not Christians in good standing: the Albigensian Crusade, the Siege of Jerusalem, some early Portuguese explorer atrocities…
You’re still dancing around the fact that the faction of Christianity that committed the Rhineland Massacres – the crusaders, under the leadership of Godfrey – is the one that in modern Western culture is viewed as synonymous with justice.
As I said above, the Crusades are used as a stock example of bad things people did in the middle ages and/or bad things people did because of religion. So the premise that the crusaders are “viewed as synonymous with justice” is false.
And re sacks: there are examples one way and examples the other way. In the Wars of the Roses, the cities were not sacked, which is one of the things that bothers me about the portrayal in A Song of Ice and Fire – to the average commoner it just didn’t matter which lord won until the transition from the CK3 to the EU4 era, whereas in thoroughly CK3 Westeros, it does. I think it’s Lindybeige who gave examples of medieval sieges on video where the respect for the valor of the defenders was such that they were spared. And then all of these rules went away when those attacks were not Christians in good standing: the Albigensian Crusade, the Siege of Jerusalem, some early Portuguese explorer atrocities…
To show that the sack of Jerusalem was exceptional, you’d need to show that captures of Christian cities *normally* didn’t involve sacking, not just vaguely gesture to some unnamed and uncounted examples.
Heck, the Normans perpetrated a three-day sack of Rome in 1084, you don’t get much more Christian in good standing that the literal city of the Pope.
The expression “crusader for justice” is not ironic, is what you’re missing. Hell, Bush wanted to name the invasion of Afghanistan a crusade until it was pointed out to him that in the Islamic world the connotation of the term was more negative.
And stop imposing bullshit burdens of proof on other people, same thing you did in the other thread re Franco. The crusaders committed genocide. They did so willfully; Godfrey deliberately took a route through the Rhineland. That’s the context, and not some bullshit innocent-even-if-proven-guilty standard.
The expression “crusader for justice” is not ironic, is what you’re missing. Hell, Bush wanted to name the invasion of Afghanistan a crusade until it was pointed out to him that in the Islamic world the connotation of the term was more negative.
Yes, the term “crusader” is generally used positively. The crusades themselves, however, are generally viewed in a negative light, as ey81 said above.
And stop imposing bullshit burdens of proof on other people, same thing you did in the other thread re Franco. The crusaders committed genocide. They did so willfully; Godfrey deliberately took a route through the Rhineland. That’s the context, and not some bullshit innocent-even-if-proven-guilty standard.
Godfrey didn’t actually take part in any massacres (albeit he did take money from the Rhineland Jewish communities to leave them in peace), so not the best example to choose.
Yup. West Bad. Everybody else good.
It’s more – how about we look at our own past in the same way we look at others. Also, now there are a lot of accessible histories written by the ‘others’, where some version of us are the bad guys. A history of the US written by a Navaho or a Cherokee is going to be different. Does that make it less valid (so long as it is soundly based)?
It’s more – how about we look at our own past in the same way we look at others.
But that’s precisely the point — we *don’t* look at our own past in the same way we look at others’. We’re happy to acknowledge any good that non-western empires did, and we accept their conquests as legitimate, but refuse to do so for western-empires.
Who is the ‘we’ here? The internet makes a lot of opinions available – that does not make the loudest the most held.
“We” here is “the people in society with the most cultural and political influence, including in the media, academia, politics, the civil service, and NGOs”.
Well ‘west bad’ is not a frequently-argued view on Fox News – the single most-watched broadcaster in the US. Nor does it get much air on Sinclair Radio. Nor is it proclaimed by a large and influential political party – one busy banning books that suggest there might be a case along these lines in Florida. Last I looked the Conservatives ruled in the UK, and did not endorse this view. Perhaps it’s what you notice?
Exactly right. It is fashionable to condemn the west, those evil white men, while ignoring or excusing the very same behavior in non westerners.
Well ‘west bad’ is not a frequently-argued view on Fox News – the single most-watched broadcaster in the US. Nor does it get much air on Sinclair Radio. Nor is it proclaimed by a large and influential political party – one busy banning books that suggest there might be a case along these lines in Florida. Last I looked the Conservatives ruled in the UK, and did not endorse this view. Perhaps it’s what you notice?
Note that I said the most influence, not the highest viewing figures. Fox News might be the single-most watched broadcaster in the US, but because most of the important people think it’s full of racists and fascists, its influence is smaller than its viewership figures would suggest.
As for Ron Desantis, he’s so famous (notorious) precisely because he’s an outlier. Most right-wing politicians make some vague noises about pushing back against wokeness but do absolutely nothing, which is why we still get headlines like this: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/revealed-government-funded-black-employment-charity-suggests-white-people-are-a-plague/ar-AA1d8JPR
The point is more that neither camp has a particularly consistent view of the landscape. One is “well, we may have made a few mistakes, but look at those horrible uncivilized barbarians, obviously they had it coming, and they’re probably actually kind of savage still today”. The other is “we should repent and denounce our own horrible mistakes in hurting our beautiful neighbours whom as outsider we have no standing to judge in any way”.
Neither is anything resembling a serious historical judgement. Both are motivated reasoning entirely centred on one’s present political aims, and while I think that at least the more selfless aim of trying to make the world more equal is more admirable, renouncing any right to judge other cultures in any way, as if they were so alien that it is impossible for us to relate to them, is hardly a good way to go about it. Aztecs weren’t unfathomable beings whose motivations we can’t possibly grasp. They were people, ruled by the same impulses we’re familiar with, including greed, selfishness, bigotry, fanaticism. If you think the religious nut who disowns his child for being gay today is bad I assure you you probably would find the Aztec priest who believes the gods demand human sacrifices truly despicable.
Especially when Aztec human sacrifice is thought to have not been purely a religious practice but part of a larger religious-political “system”. Whereby the ritual slaughter of tributes and captives was in part a dominance display by the Aztec imperial state.
No. A far higher bar is set for the West. Note how often non western slavery is defended as being in some elusive way ‘better’. And non-western imperialism and genocides being ignored.
The only slavery I see routinely suggested as ‘better’ is Roman slavery, which hey, is also “Western” by most definitions.
I think non-Western imperialism and genocides suffer more from simple ignorance than anything else; US history classes focus on European, American, and a very sketchy “world” history.
There’s also, y’know, proximity; the Western stuff is far more recent, or even ongoing, with the victims living among us. The victims of the Aztecs are rather less relevant to the modern world.
I think non-Western imperialism and genocides suffer more from simple ignorance than anything else; US history classes focus on European, American, and a very sketchy “world” history.
Firstly, if western history classes highlight bad things the west did whilst ignoring bad things everybody else did, this seems like a point in favour of the “A far higher bar is set for the West” argument, rather than a point against.
Secondly, I’ve observed the same double standards even amongst people who are definitely aware of non-western imperialism, slave trading, etc., so it’s not just a matter of simple ignorance.
There’s also, y’know, proximity; the Western stuff is far more recent, or even ongoing, with the victims living among us. The victims of the Aztecs are rather less relevant to the modern world.
People are quite happy to criticise the Crusades, or the Spanish conquest of the New World, or even ancient figures like Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. And on the other hand, plenty of non-western states or non-state organisations are committing atrocities as we speak, but receive a fraction of the condemnation as (e.g.) white slave-traders who’ve been dead for three hundred years.
“Firstly, if western history classes highlight bad things the west did whilst ignoring bad things everybody else did, this seems like a point in favour of the “A far higher bar is set for the West” argument, rather than a point against”
No, because those classes also highlight good things about the west while ignoring bad things elsewhere, because they mostly ignore elsewhere, period.
Bret:
This might seem like a double-post or something, but I’d like to ask a favor. Since I usually provide these proofreading points in response to your posts, I wonder if you could take the time to tell me about your choice to use the spelling more preferred by Brits: judgement? Or is there some accepted style guide that suggests this spelling is preferred for your writings as a historian?
I find myself disagreeing with your framing. When I see people judging others by modern standards, it is almost always to justify crimes committed against them.
Things like: “The Aztecs committed human sacrifice, so the Spanish were justified in committing genocide.”
Or: “Islamic society was barbarous and degenerate, so the Crusades were justified.”
Whenever I see people judging others in the past by modern standards, it is almost always white people judging people of color and using that as justification for past crimes.
But the ground you are standing on here is slippery too – if you forgo the opportunity of judgement, how can you say those past crimes were crimes? A lot of European imperialism overseas was without question terrible but also often par for the course in how empires often operated. Early modern imperial powers – not just European ones – tend to be pretty ruthless. It suddenly becomes a struggle to condemn anything, including the European imperial crimes you decry.
I’m basing this on r/AskHistorians rather than on books, so caveat emptor, but, re the Aztecs: it’s actually important context for modern historiography. The army that defeated the Triple Alliance was majority indigenous by headcount, and the brutality of the Triple Alliance is useful context for explaining why, shortly after strange people arrived from beyond the sea, Tlaxcala and others allied with them.
Also, re the Crusades, the apologia farther upthread is consistently what I hear when I complain, here and on Twitter and in rationalist forums. The “Muslims were brutal too” line is rare; it’s weaponized against condemnation of American slavery (again, see comments upthread), but not really against Jewish complaints about the Rhineland Massacres or the Siege of Jerusalem. I speculate that people who engage in such apologia are genuinely trad rather than revisionist, so they’d have read traditional accounts of the Crusades that speak favorably of Saladin.
If you judge the Spaniards by modern standards, why can’t you judge the Aztecs by them?
If you don’t have any problem judging that there were crimes against the Aztecs, why is it wrong to judge crimes by the Aztecs?
The problem is that the Spanish took the same crimes they’d committed against the Aztecs’ victims and went right on merrily committing them against the same people who’d been victims of the Aztecs.
Judge the Spanish not for what happened to Tenochtitlan, but for what happened to Tlaxcala. It wasn’t great.
Except for the mass human sacrifices.
The Spanish conquerors ended up killing a lot more people than the Aztec human sacrifices did.
The Spanish conquerors ended up killing a lot more people than the Aztec human sacrifices did.
Weren’t the vast majority of those deaths due to disease, which would probably have happened anyway even if the Spaniards had kept to entirely peaceful and non-imperialistic trade?
The Mound Builders suffered as badly as the Aztecs, despite thoroughly defeating the Spanish, or never even meeting them.
I’d like to see the study you base that opinion on, Mindstalk.
“Weren’t the vast majority of those deaths due to disease,”
Yes, but that still leaves room for lots of deaths due to conquest and slavery. Such as, further south, shoveling slaves into deadly silver mines.
“I’d like to see the study you base that opinion on, Mindstalk.”
I don’t have one, but neither do you have a study to think otherwise on, I bet.
And there are only so many people you can kill ritually on top of a pyramid. Deaths due to warfare, slavery, and food confiscation have no such limit.
“Weren’t the vast majority of those deaths due to disease, which would probably have happened anyway even if the Spaniards had kept to entirely peaceful and non-imperialistic trade?”
Yes, and no. The vast majority was due to diseases, but disease is a social/economic as much as a bacteriological problem: The movement of spanish armies spread the disease, the wars, conscriptions, and general destruction both made the diseases worse (starving people are more susceptible to diseases) and prevent recovery.
(and this went far beyond the zone of actual spanish control: Refugees from the spanish would be driven awya into other people’s lands, in turng causing wars, displacement, etc, and carrying the diseases with them)
Yes, and no. The vast majority was due to diseases, but disease is a social/economic as much as a bacteriological problem: The movement of spanish armies spread the disease, the wars, conscriptions, and general destruction both made the diseases worse (starving people are more susceptible to diseases) and prevent recovery.
Most of North America was depopulated by disease before Europeans started settling/conquering there. E.g., the Mississippian civilisation completely collapsed between the De Soto expedition and the next European explorers to reach there.
(and this went far beyond the zone of actual spanish control: Refugees from the spanish would be driven awya into other people’s lands, in turng causing wars, displacement, etc, and carrying the diseases with them)
The geographical extent of the disease spread is too great to be plausibly explained by this alone.
“Weren’t the vast majority of those deaths due to disease,”
the problem isn’t just the disease, it’s the disease followed by colonization.
In a counterfactual where the epidemics had hit Native American populations but white colonization *hadn’t* happened, the Native American populations would have collapsed but then gradually recovered over the course of the next few centuries, and by now Native Americans would still be in control of their own societies (though maybe still with a reduced population).
The original claim was that the Spanish killed loads of people, not that they prevented population rebound by settling in land which could otherwise have gone to natives.
I’m not going to try to guess proportions but I’ve seen a fair bit of judging of past white people. American slaveowners, English slave traders, Columbus in the Americas… The show Xena portrayed Julius Caesar as a murderous asshole rather than some noble statesman. Our host has noted the same of Alexander “the Great”, and one Youtube history-video make likewise snarked about “Alexander the not so Great”, “Alexander the kind of shitty really”.
Agreed: If Colin is really encountering lots of people justifying atrocities by Westerners against other peoples, he isn’t reading much contemporary academic writing. Maybe some alt-right blogs?
The one thing Caesar wasn’t was murderous. Maybe he wouldn’t have been assassinated if he’d eliminated a few enemies. He seems to have been reacting against the terror of Sulla and Marius’ proscriptions which he’d experienced at a susceptible age.
Caesar may not have been murderous toward rival Roman politicians, but “Xena” wasn’t concerned with that, it was taking the POV of the peoples he conquered and shipped en masse into slavery.
Oh, yes, exactly like everybody else of his time.
The Aztecs committed human sacrifice on an unprecedented genocidal level to terrorize their subject tribes. Which explains why said tribes sided with Cortez. It’s not justifying the Spanish conquest to say the Aztec empire was one of histories nastier polities.
Except they really didn’t. At least not to those levels. The degree of human sacrifices practiced by the Aztecs was heavily distorted. Both by the conquistadors, and the Aztecs themselves. Archeological evidence suggests that they didn’t practice it at a scale that far removed from their neighbors, and it certainly wasn’t “genocidal”. Most of the city states that aligned against them likely did so for reasons of opportunism and advancement, which was fairly common in the region at the time.
Literal towers of skulls say you’re wrong. See what I mean about non western stats getting the benefit of the doubt?
Really? I usually see people excusing non-western imperialism, slavery, human sacrifice, and so forth as ‘not so bad’ as western ditto.
I wonder if part of the problem is that many people aren’t good at arguing about values and instead treat them like axioms. To take an example from the this post:
In many cases, this will then be the end of the discussion. If the person has bad values, it is assumed that there is really no point in arguing with them. But we are only anti-conquest, anti-slavery, and anti-racism because people in the past managed to persuasively argue that conquest, slavery, and racism are bad. Perhaps this is also something we could learn from history: How to argue for our values.
By the way, I think if we dig a little beneath the surface level in the values of the past, we will often notice that they aren’t as different as they may seem at first glance. There will often be points of agreement as well as there are points of divergence. Take slavery in the Roman world for example. Abolitionism was unknown with very, very few exceptions (Gregory of Nyssa). But Ancient Romans mostly didn’t think that slavery was good. They thought that slavery was detrimental for the slave but beneficial for the owner. They also thought that freeing a slave was a kind act and that kindness was morally praiseworthy. So for them freeing a slave (if they would be materially secure) was a morally good act, just an optional one. We consider it a morally mandatory act. Still a significant difference, but the difference between “do this good thing if you want to” and “you should do this good thing” is less than “this thing is good” and “this thing is bad”.
True enough. I wonder if in a way all of this doesn’t go with the surplus a society has available. An equivalent statement today could be for example “we should make sure everyone has a house, food and healthcare guaranteed no matter what; to keep their life at the whims of nature is unreasonably and unjustifiably cruel”. And the thing is, in theory we WOULD have the resources to do that, but still many people would oppose it under the notion that we can’t afford it. The problem being also, would a society that does that be able to *keep* having that many resources? Would it be possible to do that without so much coercion that it then degenerates in different, worse forms of oppression? What few examples of actual communism we have from recent history aren’t encouraging. That principle would be a lot more natural if we had a society that’s *so* productive that it can afford to do that and still somehow accumulate capital at the top with a roughly Pareto distribution, which we don’t yet. Then the denizens of that society may look back at our times and consider how absolutely savage they were, when obviously we COULD have lifted everyone from abject poverty, and just didn’t do so on purpose because too many individuals were more preoccupied with keeping their lifestyle well above that.
My public library system does not have the recommended book by Hoyos, but does have his history of the Punic wars. Is that worth reading? So far, what I know of those wars comes from the highly anti-Roman Republic writers at CAH, and the equally biased Richard Miles, whose principal source seems to have been a grotesque hybrid historian he calls Timaeus/Diodorus. According to Miles, the earlier of the conjoined twins, Timaeus, lived for about 50 years at Athens and became imbued with anti-Persian sentiment which led him to be unfair to Carthaginians. What the monotheistic land based Persian empire had to do with polytheistic Carthaginian thalassocracy I do not know. It does seem to me that the Persian Empire receives far better press from Anglo-American historians than is merited.
Prior to Alexander’s expedition, the Persians had been meddling in Greek affairs since the end of the Persian Wars. Some historians have suggested that Sparta could never have defeated Athens without Persian gold. Alexander, and Phillip before him, may have thought that a punitive expedition was the only way to put a stop to Persian influence in Hellas. It is interesting to note that the incursion into India was inspiration for the Indian conqueror, Chandragupta.
Achamenid religion is a complicated subject but it’s probably wrong to call it monotheistic, or even monolatrous: That’s more a develeopment that happens in Sassanid times.
It is far easier to tell people about what happened in the past than to convince people (especially people who do not share one’s own ideological background) what they should think about it. And while historians have a special claim to knowledge about history, one which non-historians have reason to respect, I do not think we have any similar claims regarding ethics or morality.
There’s certainly a place for historians regarding ideologically motivated revision and atrocity denialism and what have you, mind. But something more complex, like “was this empire good or bad”, also depends an awful lot on the world views that people have going in, and that’s something far harder and not always possible to change. (and even when trying to change those, there’s something to be said for subtlety, in terms of not getting tuned out.)
True – but when a historian comes along and documents that eg this bit of imperialism was really bad for all these brown people, or Victorian lower class women had a rough time, or that Jefferson was a sex abuser who opposed even emancipation once his income came from selling slave children,, then the people who learned only the nice bits in high school get very upset and start on about objectivity.
I can read the sagas with admiration for the characters and some of the values the Scandinavians held (stoic courage, laconic humour, loyalty), and admire their literature. This does not mean denying that they were violent, murderous and immensely destructive. A history that writes out the bad bits is itself subjective.
“That is not, by the by, some sort of new thing in historical inquiry. There is a tendency in some quarters to assume that historians assigning judgements to things in the past is some sort of new thing (often implicitly or explicitly ‘leftist’ in some way), but historians of decades past did this too. The only difference is that those historians generally didn’t acknowledge the values they were applying.
(…)
And indeed what people mean when they complain that now historians are ‘imposing’ their values on history is really, ‘in the past I agreed with the values historians imposed on history, but now I do not.’ This isn’t a plea for objectivity, but for special consideration. What has changed with more modern historians is that we try to be honest about how we make our value judgements and that we are doing so (or at least we’re supposed to try – some historians do not succeed and others do not try).”
I think it is a matter of intellectual honesty and objectivity rather than being leftist or rightist – or at least, it should be. I grew up in a Communist regime where judgment of history as taught in schools was similarly coloured by the Communist ideology (e. g. “revolutionary” was a synonym for good and all bloody uprisings against any current regime were seen as great steps to bring humanity forward but the 1956 Hungarian revolt against Communism was termed “counter-revolution” because it clearly didn’t fit the narrative). So I have experienced that it can happen on both sides.
Nobody needs a Sulla or a Caesar, that cure is far worse than the disease. On the other hand Sulla and Caesar didn’t create the disease they both sought to cure. Roman Republican government had been spiralling out of control in an orgy of political violence since the deaths of the Gracchi. The Republic had to change, you can’t govern an empire with the same apparatus you governed a city state, but attempts at innovation, not by any means always wise and rational were met with fierce resistance by traditionalists. And both Populares and Optimates broke any rules and norms that got in their way and resorted to violence. Sulla tried to ‘restore’ the Republic by strengthening the Senate and the oligarchy that controlled it. He failed signally. But at least he had had a plan grounded in a political philosophy however purblind and elitist. Caesar seems to have been improvising on the fly and basically assumed he had to stay in control of everything forever or the whole structure would crumble. He wasn’t entirely wrong. Fortunately Caesar left behind an heir who did manage to cobble together a system that managed to function for the better part of five hundred years, after a fashion, and lay a groundwork undergirding our modern world.
The Republic was ultimately based politically and militarily on the middle class of yeoman farmers who were Roman citizens. What destroyed that foundation was mobilizations for increasingly lengthy and distant military campaigns that hurt small farmers while the rich could establish latifundia and farm them with the slaves the conquests so conveniently provided. Essentially, by a boiling frog process Rome got out of the republic of free citizens mode and entered the conquering empire mode. The Republic had lost its core, and really no one could have saved it short of placing heavy taxes on imported slaves and using the revenue to give poor citizens land, which the nobility would never have gone for.
Read this post on the Straight Dope Message Board for an excellent summation of what led Tiberius Gracchus to take the steps he did:
https://boards.straightdope.com/t/ancient-rome-militia-to-legion/254576/3
And the rise of a permanent urban underclass surviving on the grain dole was very destabilizing.
It may come up in a post, but according to our blog author this isn’t accurate in parts, though was the standard story for a long time.
The story according to various tweets and podcasts ad such is more like:
-Rome wins lots of wars, becomes more safe.
-People who would have died in fighting in earlier periods now survive. Because there’s only so much land available to said people, they end up in tough situations like being a poor city person. Thus the appearance of “Rome is full of landless poor people”
-Rules for restricted terms, keeping one person from amassing too much power, etc. are sloppily followed sometimes.
-Too many traitionalist types who resist reforms, plus others like expanded citizenship that led to the social war.
-Put this together and ambitious generals take advantage of weakened rules, plus support from these opposing factions, to amass power and cause a lot of destruction.
-Augusts seems to have fixed this in his reverse constitutional monarchy (In theory is a republic but in practice a king controls everything.) by having so much power in himself that independent generals had more trouble cropping up, though this problem would still exist as we know from all the years of several emperors. Land reform and other related reforms I cannot say how they were handled, though citizenship expansion became somewhat regular, and soldiers got payments to help set themselves up after service.
One suggestion on his twitter was that a more accomidating senate could have taken over land redistribution itself, satisfying a reform goal while not allowing specific politicians to have too much power. I could see some commentary on this subject when the “how to Res Publica” series publishes.
Correct me if I’m mistaken but I thought the consolidation of Italian farm land into increasingly large latifundias under fewer owners was well-documented. This was made possible in large part by those successful campaigns that brought in lots of slaves for sale. I’d never heard that an absolute surplus of free Roman citizens was the cause of landlessness.
Bret, would you care to chime in on this? I’m genuinely curious.
I mean…why not both?
Hi, I’m Bret, imitating the previous commenter for fun….O.k., it’s same other guy responding. Here’s where our blog writer mentions these things:
Link to podcast It’s mentioned towards the end.
Link to Tweet Big thread that mentions this as part of a larger collection.
For an unrelated question posed to people with better historical source searching abilities than my own: the 18th century Polish encyclopaedia Nowe Atemy is said to include this comment on dragons: “Defeating the dragon is hard, but you have to try.” Would anyone be able to find the original sentence (in I assume Polish or Latin) and what page it appears on? The full text is available online but my seachers for “smok” have been fruitless for anything that looks like it could be this specific phrase.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowe_Ateny
“Draco Helveticus bipea et alatus”
Oops, that caption is not the quotation.
Got it! It’s the caption to an illustration of a man with a sword attacking a dragon, see p. 487 of this .pdf http://biblioteka.kijowski.pl/chmielowski%20benedykt/ateny.pdf:
SMOKA POKONAĆ TRUDNO, ALE STARAĆ SIĘ TRZEBA
I thought there are a few other problems with it:
It is terribly USA-centric, while ignoring how the political demands for the UK to tag along may have also fed into the decision making (especially around the inspectors).
It appears to expose a gap in US thinking, which is unmentioned: Saddam had an incentive to maintain ambiguity about possessing WMDs as deterrent against his neighbours. I recall seeing this point made in UK papers at the time (though my memory could be faulty!)
The third thing that, to me, was conspicuous by it’s absence was any mention of the PEOPLE involved. Specifically, it struck me that there is no mention of the personal aspect of Bush Snr having “unfinished business”. Again, this was something that I recall the UK press picking up on at the time. No, it would never have been official policy, but can we discount it as an influence?
Antiquarianism does at least avoid many downsides of studying history.
It would have been better for the tranquility of mankind if Putin did not care about the history of either Ukraine or Russia, but if he could not avoid reading about it, he should have best regarded it as a mere curiosity – with the territorial extent and military exploits of Russia in past ages being of no importance whatsoever for his own behaviour. The learning of lessons from the past, especially when done by emulation of its heroes, is perilous since one is prone to adopt views that are terribly out-of-date (like strange assumptions about the workings of international diplomacy in the present) or to seek and find confirmation of one’s preconceptions (like the greater glory of one’s ancestors).
Dinosaurs do not need to be relevant for our time to be interesting; why history?
Good point. But in so much as I am made by my past, our collective identities (as tribes, nations, cults or whatever) are made by their pasts. The tale they tell shapes the future – and hence is contested. Or, as on French guy put it, “getting history wrong is one of the privileges of being a nation”
Dinosaurs ARE relevant to our time. We are in a mass extinction (and have been for around 12,000 years), and only by studying the mass extinctions of the past can we figure out the best path forward out of this one. The present is the key to the past and the past is the key to the future.
The lesson of the dinosaurs wrt mass extinction is “don’t get hit by an asteroid”. Which some people are in fact addressing.
While I accept that the impact theory is true, the actual events were FAR more complex. The object that hit us did regional damage, but didn’t directly kill a lot of organisms, for example–what caused the issues was that the dust clouds blocked solar radiation, cutting the bottom out of the food web. This has direct implications for certain proposed methods for dealing with climate change.
There’s also the question of what survived and why. Dinosaurs did not go extinct; it’s only the non-avian ones that did (not technically a “real” biological group if you know your cladistics, but paleontology deals with that a lot). There are a lot of surprise winners and losers when you look closer. Ammonites should have survived if anything did–prolific, ubiquitous, rapidly-radiating, a fairly textbook weedy species. On the other hand, coral reefs should not–only three did that we’re aware of, and the reasons why remain a mystery.
In addition, there’s not just one mass extinction. There are….well, a few, the exact number is hard to pin down (depends on how you count the Ediacaran/Cambrian, for example). What trends do we see? And why do we see those trends? THAT could become extremely important, because by identifying the mechanisms that swing things one way or the other (for example, does the recovery phase start within the extinction phase or after?) we can figure out how to push things in the correct direction (the “recovery starts during the extinction” direction).
There are also questions about what kinds of ecosystems can be stable. There’s an African formation, for example, that has just an absurd amount of predators in it. Like, thermodynamically unreasonable. And it has almost no herbivores, which makes it very different from Rancho La Brea. Why? And more importantly, is this something we can use? Humans are predators, after all, and finding ecologically sustainable farming methods is important for the long-term stability of the ecosystem.
Lastly (not “finally”, I’ve just ranted long enough), paleontology in general is going to be critical in exploring alien life. Biology is incredibly useful, but it leads you astray because it can only look at living organisms and current conditions (even DNA studies are limited, because any lineage that didn’t survive is invisible to such analysis). Paleontology is not so constrained. We can look at organisms that lived under VERY different conditions, and have discovered things that are so weird that all we can really say is that it was alive. Paleontology also has to routinely address the question “Is this animal, vegetable, or mineral?” in ways that biology does not. As we explore other planets, that’s going to be a more and more interesting question (it already is an important one, for formations on Mars that are identical to stromatolite fossils on Earth, so this isn’t hypothetical, it’s an active area of research). Dinosaurs are weird enough that they can contribute to this. For example, we have nothing even remotely like T. rex in our Cenozoic ecologies. Why? And what does that tell us about how other ecosystems might work?
Africa may be deficient in numbers of predator species, which assertion I find surprising–how many different kinds of antelope are there in Africa?–but the tropical vegetation supports huge herds, or used to do so. The “absurd amounts” of predators do not seem to have reduced herd numbers.
The formation I referred to was Cretaceous in age, not modern. It has too many predators, and almost no herbivores (the first hadrosaur find from that formation was a bit of a shock). I know very little about modern African ecology; most of my work has been Quaternary stuff in the Desert Southwest of the USA.
I can say that every modern ecosystem is, as evidenced by predator tooth wear, deficient in predators, at least compared to Cenozoic normal conditions. It’s another flaw in using just biology to understand how the biosphere works: All of biology has been conducted within a mass extinction, which is by definition an abnormal condition. This renders attempts to resolve the mass extinction by returning to some previous baseline futile. Every baseline we have is merely a different point within an era of instability. It’s akin to watching a house fall down after the removal of load-bearing walls, and thinking that if you could just put everything where it was a few seconds ago everything would be fine. But because these processes are extremely slow by human standards, without studying the deep past we’d never notice this.
I read somewhere that the huge volcano which created the Deccan Plateau was also more or less coincident with the asteroid that hit Yucatan, and that volcano spewed out massive amounts of ash during its’ period of activity.
More or less; that long ago geologists struggle to date anything to less than a million-year window. The idea that the asteroid impact caused the Deccan eruptions is unprovable but intriguing. P.S. they think they may have found a site that preserves the devastation that occurred on the actual day of the impact: https://www.washington.edu/news/2019/03/29/north-dakota-site-shows-wreckage-from-same-object-that-killed-the-dinosaurs/
The Deccan Traps are pointed to by a subset of geologists, but frankly it’s not a serious theory. We KNOW the Earth got smacked by a very large rock. We know where. We know when (at least as much as we can). The idea that “No no, it was actually the volcanism” is silly. The volcanic activity certainly didn’t help things, but…it was the rock.
Further, the idea that basalt trap volcanism is sufficient to cause mass extinctions doesn’t withstand inspection. If you look at the episodes of basalt trap volcanism in the past, you see that there is no correlation between such volcanism and mass extinctions. Bigger basalt trap events occurred without causing mass extinctions. I’ve never read any paper explaining how that could happen. It’s not impossible, mind you–biology is complex, and larger pushes don’t always lead to larger outcomes–but no one’s presented a realistic mechanism for THIS volcanism to produce a mass die-off while larger events didn’t.
Part of the issue is sociological. The Alvarez team (who originally proposed the impact theory) was attacking one of the foundational pillars of geological thought at the time–Uniformitarianism. Turns out, people who spend their lives finding evidence to support some idea, and who absolutely believe it to be true, and who have vested interests in its truth, don’t react well to being proven wrong. There were a number of reactionary hypotheses tossed around, and the Deccan Trap idea is one of the main ones (mostly due to Keller and her team being loud). But anyone who looks at the data objectively, rather than cherry-picking with the intent of proving an a-priori conclusion (something I got to watch Keller get called out on at a conference once) concludes that, it was the rock.
I don’t think most geologists think the impact could have caused the Deccan Traps. I’ve spoken to a few about it, and there are issues with the timing and the wave propagation, which gets really complicated inside the Earth. That said, I’ve always wondered how much of that is a knee-jerk reaction against the trap advocates. I don’t know; wave propagation through the mantle is not my thing. I prefer dead critters.
To be fair, no, the object that hit us probably produced a spray of suborbital debris whose subsequent fall shortly heated the atmosphere past flashpoint temperature. Almost everything that wasn’t burrowed underground literally caught fire and burned alive minutes afterwards; the dust winter merely finished the job. It was a truly apocalyptic event.
Your posts do not explain why studying dinosaurs is in any way cost-effective to prevent future mass extinctions. Assuming the extinction of the dinosaurs was a complex event does not help your case, since it should make us less confident about the certainty of our insights into Mesozoic ecology. As you know, many paleontologists with complex theories about dinosaur extinction were hostile to the (STEM lord!) Alvarez hypothesis when it was first proposed[1].
1: https://www.nytimes.com/1985/10/29/science/dinosaur-experts-resist-meteor-extinction-idea.html
> ”The arrogance of those people is simply unbelievable,” he said. ”They know next to nothing about how real animals evolve, live and become extinct. But despite their ignorance, the geochemists feel that all you have to do is crank up some fancy machine and you’ve revolutionized science. The real reasons for the dinosaur extinctions have to do with temperature and sea-level changes, the spread of diseases by migration and other complex events. But the catastrophe people don’t seem to think such things matter. In effect, they’re saying this: ‘We high-tech people have all the answers, and you paleontologists are just primitive rock hounds.’ ”
“Your posts do not explain why studying dinosaurs is in any way cost-effective to prevent future mass extinctions.”
Explain to me how you’re going to study mass extinctions without studying mass extinctions.
Literally the only options for figuring out how to handle the current mass extinction are “Study the events of the past” or “Screw around and find out”. There is no third choice. Since most of us would consider the death of 7-8 billion people a bad thing (the human species won’t go extinct–see Peter Ward on that topic–but the body count would be huge), this leaves only one acceptable option. When there’s only one way to do things, it by definition is the cost-effective way.
(No, simulations DO NOT work here. We DO NOT know enough to build adequate simulations, as evidenced by repeated failures to engineer biotic systems that are stable even on human lifespan timescales. You can’t simulate what you don’t understand.)
Citing people opposed to Alvarez as evidence of anything in modern paleontology is on par with Creationists citing errors back in Darwin’s time as proof that evolution is false. The field has moved on. A significant number of paleontologists today were in diapers at the time of your quote (1985). Most of us are Neocatastraphists; citing the opinions of Uniformitarianists is akin to criticizing modern Spain by citing Roman Imperial law and ignoring the fact that Spain isn’t Rome. Further, you’re ignoring that many paleontologists were on the side of Alvarez. Again, see Peter Ward, who was one of them–specifically, read the first chapter in “Under A Green Sky”, where he discusses his experience as a Neocatastraphist at that time. Your citation is mere cherry-picking, a gross distortion of the debate at the time (to be fair, it’s probably not your fault; most folks involved attempted to distort it one way or the other, and it takes a LOT of effort to build a clear picture).
As an aside, I particularly like the “They died of disease” idea. It flagrantly ignores the closing of the Isthmus of Panama, the settlement of North America by Europeans [note that while disease wiped out a lot of natives of the North American continent, Europeans survived], and a bunch of other events in the past. It’s one of those things that indicates that they were flailing for anything to salvage their world view, which is itself an admission of defeat.
I think a third option is “work out mechanistic models from first principles”. Past extinctions have similarities but none is quite like the present one, so inevitably we have to feel the gap by using more basic knowledge about e.g. climatology, fluid dynamics and thermodynamics to work out climate models, and so on.
We seem to be talking past each other.
Your first response argued that the current mass extinction can help to justify the study of dinosaurs due to their own mass extinction at the K-T boundary. I was thus not referring to other mass extinctions or existential risks in general.
But when allocating funds to tackle the current mass extinction, why should studying life in the Mesozoic be anything other than a very low priority? The expected value of this endeavour is low; much less trendy fields would produce more insight; at the very least one should be more concerned with mammals and their response to climate change than an almost-entirely extinct group of animals that lived in an ecology alien to ours.
On such utilitarian grounds, studying dinosaurs appears to be a waste of resources. This does of course not imply that palaeontology should be curtailed by a central planner. But it might encourage an intellectually honest examination of the reasons given for pouring resources into it.
I think a lot of the impetus behind “We have to judge them by the standards of their time” is not so much about actually liking XYZ things the figure got up to but about liking ABC things they did and thinking XYZ weren’t that important, either in absolute terms or as a part of a narrative about the figure.
E.g. I think most people who say “You have to judge him by the standards of his time” re Churchill and India don’t believe that being racist toward Indians is per se good (those who do, ime, will often just say so) but rather that it’s not a big deal period or that “Well, it’s not great but the important thing is his contribution to the war.” Very often this is an unexamined position (in reality they also know what the man liked to eat for breakfast! Not at all narrowly tailored) but I think that’s the real driver. In essence it’s an effort to avoid revaluating an existing opinion.
Alexander has been very successful, that you like or not. I fail to see why should we condemn his conquring as he conquered a group of very xenophobic warring cities that founded colonies to rob native people of their land and a bigger empire that killed a lot of people for a very long time to keep expanding. Hardly poor and innocent victims.
Even if he conquered them today at 9:00, that would not make him bad, maybe it would not make him “The Great”, but surely won’t make him “The Bad”.
Sounds sort of like accounts of the various “rub outs” of Chicago and New York City mobsters by their rivals during the 1920s and 1930s. One can truthfully say both that the winners were by an absolute standard cruel and despotic, and that they were usually no worse than the people they overthrew.
Or maybe they’re just urging a balanced approach rather that an orgy of self righteousness.
> Though ‘knowing true things is better than knowing untrue things’ is still a value-laden expression. The scientific method is not ‘value-free!’ It is simply a value set we agree with.
The scientific method may have embedded values, but ‘knowing true things is better than knowing false things’ does not. In the writing about the possibility of general AI, there is a notion of “convergent instrumental goal”. AGI, being structured much more unlike humans than any animal, cannot be assumed to share any values whatsoever with us; far more than merely humans from another culture, which can already be a pretty sharp difference, this will be a massive difference. It may principally value something we’d consider insane like maximizing the number of small twisty pieces of red-anodized metal. But we can still reason about what things it *will* still care about.
These are the convergent instrumental goals, also called ‘Omohundro goals’ because Steve Omohundro did most of the formalization of the topic. The primary list is:
– Goal-content integrity: minds value continuing to hold their values, because otherwise their values might not be achieved as well as possible.
– Resource acquisition: whether this is as specific as microchips and crude oil or as general as atoms and energy, whatever resources are needed to take action allow actions which forward the mind’s values
– Cognitive enhancement: smarter minds can more effectively achieve their values
– Self-preservation: You can’t achieve your values if you don’t exist
“Know true things rather than false things” does not appear in this list because it’s sufficiently basic that it is a requirement for several of the things which *do* appear in the list. You can’t maintain your goals if you don’t know what they are. You can’t acquire resources if you don’t know what things are and are not those, or don’t know how much you have. But you can also consider it to be part of cognitive enhancement: ultimately, the result of cognitive enhancement is, simply, a better means of discerning which plans work and which do not, and that’s a process of evaluating beliefs about plans – which naturally include beliefs about the state of the world, beliefs about strategy, beliefs about logic itself – for whether they are true or false.
(Ultimately, this rests on only one ‘value’: the principle of induction. If you accept ‘things which have happened before are, ceteris paribus, more likely to happen again’, then you get most of logic and reasoning falling out of it, ultimately including this kind of convergent instrumental goal.)
I cannot say I agree with… well, almost the whole section above the recommendations, really.
About your comment about how the scientific method is not “value-free”, I think that is somewhat like saying that problem solving (which is more or less what the scientific method is; find unexplained phenomena, explain it in a disprovable manner) is not “value-free”. If you think it is so, please say so and spare both of us the rest of the conversation.
Presentism implies one’s ideals are more valid than whatever historical figure being judged. This is quite the strenuous claim, given our ideals as a society change all the time. As you yourself said in Helm’s Deep Part VII, “an American general who slaughtered a goat in front of his army before battle would not reassure his men; a Greek general who failed to do so might well panic them.” Insisting on using one’s own standards to criticize historical figures is no more valid than the American general (or us for that matter) calling the Greek general a superstitious fool for thinking that killing the goat will make him win.
We cannot guarantee whatever values (and therefore value judgments) we have will persist any more than J. L. Motley writing in the 19th century could guarantee a future society of devout Protestants. This is a problem because because history is written for posterity and our value judgments a. can be wrong and b. are worthless in a society that does not share our values. Motley’s judgments when writing on the Eighty Years’ War are much less valuable today than in the 19th century because, unlike him, we are not devout Protestants and do not have a horse in the race, and thus do not share his intense partisanship against Philip II. Likewise, John Lynch considered that criticism of Philip II for being a Catholic despot was unrealistic because it “implies he was wrong not to be a Protestant and a democrat” (Spain Under the Habsburgs: Empire and Absolutism pg. 171). If we make value judgments using our own values and use it to inform our historical analysis, there is not so much a risk that we will write analyses that become unrealistic and worthless, but that it will inevitably happen.
The logical step, then, is to strip out our own values as far as possible from the judgment, because those do not change; Philip II’s aims cannot change because he died in 1598, and 16th century Spain remains 16th century Spain. Geoffrey Parker, for instance, while conceding that Charles V was not a very good person by modern standards, does so after a long epilogue discussing how much he succeeded by his own metrics and concludes “the Emperor’s contemporaries were surely correct to deem him an extraordinary man who did extraordinary things” (Emperor: A New Life of Charles V, pg. 533). These approaches you have acknowledged, but promptly dismissed as not useful. I do not see why; as John Lynch suggested, to approach with our own values is unrealistic.
Mr. Guthmann is correct in the regard that economics produces “value-free judgment” because, as he said, what they give is a solution to a problem, given assumptions about human behaviour. What underlies your comment (economics being based on the value judgment that rising production is good) is that most people tend to ask economists how to make more money. However, economics need not be about the economy and you can use it for other objectives, which is more or less what the entire field of law and economics is about. What objective you intend the law to further (and to use economics to optimize) is, again, not the economist’s problem.
You are ascribing to morals what more probably ought to be ascribed to philosophy of politics and to metaphysics. If you disagree with the Protestant vs. Catholic, it’s because you do not think their metaphysical assumptions are right; with despot vs. democrat, because you think better government is issued by a different one.
Meanwhile, you have read half a paragraph of a 5 paragraph comment, and understood nothing from it. Well done.
Read Lynch’s comment again (or read the book, because it’s a good book), and tell me where it says “therefore I advocate a third religious position”.
Are you claiming you lied about the book, then?
And I’ve said that I support a third position… where, exactly?
In your comment.
And even if you didn’t support a third position, how would that make it a question of values and not metaphysics?