Synthesis

Synthesis:

It was the animals all along.

An anthropologist named Pat Shipman believes she’s found the answer: Animals make us human. She means this not in a metaphorical way — that animals teach us about loyalty or nurturing or the fragility of life or anything like that — but that the unique ability to observe and control the behavior of other animals is what allowed one particular set of Pleistocene era primates to evolve into modern man....

[T]his also placed early humans in an odd spot on the food chain: large predators who were nonetheless wary of the truly big predators. This gave them a strong incentive to study and master the behavioral patterns of everything above and below them on the food chain.

That added up to a lot of information, however, about a lot of different animals, all with their various distinctive behaviors and traits. To organize that growing store of knowledge, and to preserve it and pass it along to others, Shipman argues, those early humans created complex languages and intricate cave paintings.

Art in particular was animal-centered. It’s significant, Shipman points out, that the vast majority of the images on the walls of caves like Lascaux, Chauvet, and Hohle Fels are animals.

It's a majestic thesis, one that is worthy of a great scholar and that should be fascinating to see defended in coming years.

It also happens to conform, by the way, to something Hegel said... about magic.

Philosophers don't often write about magic, because mostly few of them believe in it. I do, of course; but it's unusual. This comes not from Hegel's writings, but from the Zusatz -- the student notes of his lectures -- on paragraph 405 of his Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

For an understanding of this stage in the soul's development it will not be superfluous to explain in more detail the notion of magic. Absolute magic would be the magic of mind as such.... Among adults, a superior mind exercises a magical power over weaker minds; thus, for example, Lear over Kent, who felt himself irresistibly drawn to the unhappy monarch.... A similar answer, too, was given by a queen of France who, when accused of practicing sorcery on her husband, replied that she had used no other magical power than that which Nature bestows on the stronger mind to dominate the weaker....

[A]lso over animals man exercises a magical power which dispenses with any kind of mediation at all, for these cannot endure the gaze of man.

Of man! One might say that this is one of those occasions where "humanity" cannot be introduced as a substitute. A Man or a Lady can work this magic: but not just any human. Some of us walk among them with our heads held up; and others fear them, having forgotten what it ever was to be Man. Man, in this formulation, is of the kinship of Hector: Tamer of Horses.

Having just trimmed the feet of a thousand pound Tennessee Walker tonight, one who wasn't keen on the operation, I have to say that there is something to Hegel's concept. So much lies in the gaze you give the animal before the operation; and if someone can hold the horse's head, and keep the gaze, all is easy that might otherwise be impossible.

Horses are a miracle anyway: that they have a void in their teeth right where we might put a bit; that they, unlike dogs (or Tolkien's wargs) have a spinal structure that is fit to bear the weight of a rider. The magic isn't ours alone; but part of what we do with them is magic. Anyone who says otherwise has either never tried it, or never looked it in the eye.

Paintings of Petra

The Paintings of Petra:

Obscured by smoke damage, the paintings of ancient Petra have been carefully revealed. Petra is chiefly famous for its stone work, which account for the name: Pliny the Elder gave us the Greek name for it, and as we all know, petra or petros means "rock" in Greece.

Lascaux

Lascaux

Yesterday's screen-shot on my search engine, Bing, was of the 17,000-year-old cave paintings at Lascaux in southern France. (Bing has stunning screen-shots almost every day, by the way.) I went on a hunt for information about the caves, and found this link to an excellent virtual tour (click "visite de la grotte"), then got distracted before I'd checked many of the other links. When I tried again this morning, a lot of new articles came up about some old "Life" photographs of the painting that recently re-surfaced, which I suppose was what inspired the folks at Bing to feature Lascaux yesterday.

These renderings of a horse and a bull have been among my favorites for years. I always wondered: was the artist a natural? What did his tribesmen think of his skill? Was everyone brought up to try his hand at this beautiful work?

This fanciful site about "Atlantean Man" in pre-Columbian North America suggests that I am a descendant of the Cro Magnons who made these paintings:

Comprehensive studies of blood types also show that Mayans, Incas and Auracanians are all virtually 100% group O, with 5-20% of the population being rhesus negative. This was the blood type of the original Europeans and stems from Cro-Magnon man (Kurlansky, 2001). The races that possess this blood type are races of the Americas, the Canary Islands, the Berbers, the Basques, and Gaelic Kelts.

Like both my parents and (necessarily) both my sisters, and like about 7% of the population, I have O-negative blood. I am in fact a hotbed of recessive traits, including straight blonde hair, absence of a widow's peak, blue eyes, lack of dimples, and thin lips. (On the other hand, my chin is not cleft, I can roll my tongue, I am not color blind, my earlobes are of the "detached" shape, and I am not susceptible to poison ivy.)

Get ready for a roller-coaster ride if you do a search of "Cro Magnon" plus "O-negative blood type." The Net is stuffed to the rafters with eccentric theories about the mystical meanings of bloodtypes. There's a special diet, for instance, keyed to what your bloodtype tells you about whether you are essentially more paleolithic or agrarian.

The author of this strange O-Negsite believes that Rh-negative blood is an "angelic trait, passed to us by the Watchers." She lists some fascinating traits we O-neg types have in common. "Low blood pressure," check. "Love of space or science," OK, I'll go with that. "ESP," "unexplained scars on body," "sense of not belonging to the human race," "extra rib or vertebra," and "capability to disrupt electrical appliances" -- hmmm. I believe I've mentioned my alienation issues, and I did have a watch repairman claim once that my wrist was exerting an electromagnetic influence that accounted for his failure to fix the problem. I can't swear I don't have any extra ribs or vertebrae, but I'm pretty sure I lack inexplicable scars. Unless they're being hidden from me.

Chasing down links from this and similar sites reveals related theories, such as that the Basque people were Starchild-like invaders who started the whole O-negative Cro Magnon thing, including not only cave paintings but standing stones like Stonehenge. Or that Quetzalcoatl was an early Viking survivor whose energetic procreation explains why native Central Americans also have an unusually high incidence of O-negative blood. There's also something about "Reptilians" that I can't quite get a handle on, though it shows up often.

Gotta go. A large monolith has appeared outside, and has sent a message to my reptilian O-negative blood that is urging me to go make some cave paintings.

Immigration in Germany

Immigration in Germany:

There is a significant debate that is being stifled in Germany, argues this piece from Der Spiegel:

Sarrazin has been forced out of the Bundesbank. The SPD wants to kick him out of the party, too....

But what all these technicians of exclusion fail to see is that you cannot cast away the very thing that Sarrazin embodies: the anger of people who are sick and tired -- after putting a long and arduous process of Enlightenment behind them -- of being confronted with pre-Enlightenment elements that are returning to the center of our society. They are sick of being cursed or laughed at when they offer assistance with integration. And they are tired about reading about Islamist associations that have one degree of separation from terrorism, of honor killings, of death threats against cartoonists and filmmakers. They are horrified that "you Christian" has now become an insult on some school playgrounds. And they are angry that Western leaders are now being forced to fight for a woman in an Islamic country because she has been accused of adultery and is being threatened with stoning.

We can probably separate out the parts of this that are about 'the Enlightenment' from the parts that are not. There is a similar anti-immigrant sense in the United States, where the immigrants are from a post-Enlightenment culture -- indeed, Mexico ran the gamut of the Enlightenment all the way to socialism.

(For of course socialism and Communism are the last children of the Enlightenment -- the fruit of exposing all institutions to thorough and constant revision according to the reason of thinking men, men of letters. The French Revolution and Mao's revolution were alike in exposing every institution to withering revision, and in claiming that they were doing so in the light of reason. Karl Marx was quite a man of letters, and for many years the words 'intellectual' and 'socialist' were almost synonyms. Not for no reason! Marx's ideas are compelling and deeply considered. They also happened to be wrong; but it is telling that it was not until Joseph Schumpeter that there was a good explanation for just why and how he was wrong. Reason can lead, but it can also mislead.)

But I digress. The point is that a lot of anti-immigration sentiment is not about the Enlightenment; it is about preservation of culture. The Enlightenment looks like the division from Germany, but find a place overwhelmed by another post-Enlightenment culture, and we see that it is not the real division. Now it looks like language; but find a place where people of the same language are immigrating in massive numbers (say, Indians moving into England) and now...

There is nothing dishonorable about wanting to protect a culture with the institutions of government. Indeed, to a large degree, that is what a nation state was ever designed to do. Far from an abuse, it was the purpose of governments of this type to provide a space for a people of a certain character to live according to the laws that seemed right to them.

That, critics argue, has an ugly history. Well, so it does, if by ugly you mean a tremendous amount of war and bloodletting. Cosmopolitanism has an ugly history, as the socialist and communist period demonstrates. The defense of a religious character has an ugly history; so does the defense of scientific atheism. The Enlightenment has worked great good here; great harm there. So has the Church; so has any church. So has democracy; so have monarchies.

Aristotle argued in the Politics that there were three legitimate forms of government: Royalty, Aristocracy, and Constitutional Government. Each of the three can be perverted, and the perversions are named: Tyranny, Oligarchy, Democracy. Each of these three destroys the state by using the power of the government not for the common good, but for the good of the dominant faction. This means injustice in the short term, and eventual revolt.

What, though, is the common good in Germany? Is it that which is good for Germany -- i.e., maintaining its wealth and internal stability? Is it that which is good for Germans -- i.e., maintaining their cultural institutions and relative prosperity? Is it that which is good for everyone in Germany, without regard to the poverty in Turkey and elsewhere that is leading to these waves of immigrations? Is it what is good for humanity, though that means leveling the prosperity of Germans to funnel wealth to places like Greece and Turkey? What if those places waste it, as Greece has done so thoroughly? Now you are sliding into the perversion of Democracy, in Aristotle's terms: a destructive government dominated by transfers of wealth to the indigent. Where, though, was the place where you were working for the "common good," and not using the government in favor of one particular part -- for ethnic Germans, say, making them and their institutions a privileged class?

"Well, why shouldn't Germans be privileged in Germany?" Ah, but that was the idea with the ugly history.

Ultimately it is humanity that has an ugly history. It has also a terrible future. I am no prophet, but I have every sorrowful faith in that.

Welshmen Never Yield

Welshmen Never Yield

The Brits are outnumbered, and the Zulus are outgunned. They both depend on music for morale.

Freedom

Freedom

From "The Barrister" at Maggie's Farm:

Politicians of all stripes hate free markets, because free markets aren't political. Free markets are just the expression of the free choices of free people. In daily life, free markets are more of an expression of a free people than is voting.

The free market is like having an election all over the country countless times every single day. Our business on the formal election days is to make sure no one takes away our power of election the rest of the time.

9/11/10

September 11th, 2010:

As every year, I will repost my poem Enid & Geraint. It must be among the oldest poems about 9/11, for I wrote it on that day, in the afternoon, when I could no longer watch the television replays of the falling towers. I shut off the machine, and went out into the forest, down to the creek that ran through the woods. I crossed it halfway onto an island, and sat among the stones and wrote this.

Enid & Geraint

Once strong, from solid
Camelot he came
Glory with him, Geraint,
Whose sword tamed the wild.
Fabled the fortune he won,
Fame, and a wife.

The beasts he battled
With horn and lance;
Stood farms where fens lay.
When bandits returned
To old beast-holds
Geraint gave them the same.

And then long peace,
Purchased by the manful blade.
Light delights filled it,
Tournaments softened, tempered
By ladies; in peace lingers
the dream of safety.

They dreamed together. Darkness
Gathered on the old wood,
Wild things troubled the edges,
Then crept closer.
The whispers of weakness
Are echoed with evil.

At last even Enid
Whose eyes are as dusk
Looked on her Lord
And weighed him wanting.
Her gaze gored him:
He dressed in red-rust mail.

And put her on palfrey
To ride before or beside
And they went to the wilds,
Which were no longer
So far. Ill-used,
His sword hung beside.

By the long wood, where
Once he laid pastures,
The knight halted, horsed,
Gazing on the grim trees.
He opened his helm
Beholding a bandit realm.

Enid cried at the charge
Of a criminal clad in mail!
The Lord turned his horse,
Set his untended shield:
There lacked time, there
Lacked thought for more.

Villanous lance licked the
Ancient shield. It split,
Broke, that badge of the knight!
The spearhead searched
Old, rust-red mail.
Geraint awoke.

Master and black mount
Rediscovered their rich love,
And armor, though old
Though red with thick rust,
Broke the felon blade.
The spear to-brast, shattered.

And now Enid sees
In Geraint's cold eyes
What shivers her to the spine.
And now his hand
Draws the ill-used sword:
Ill-used, but well-forged.

And the shock from the spear-break
Rang from bandit-towers
Rattled the wood, and the world!
Men dwelt there in wonder.
Who had heard that tone?
They did not remember that sound.

His best spear broken
On old, rusted mail,
The felon sought his forest.
Enid's dusk eyes sense
The strength of old steel:
Geraint grips his reins.

And he winds his old horn,
And he spurs his proud horse,
And the wood to his wrath trembles.
And every bird
From the wild forest flies,
But the Ravens.

Pat Buchanan Serious

Pat Buchanan: Are We Serious?

Once in a while, Mr. Buchanan makes a good point. Half of one, at least:

Jones, who sells t-shirts saying "Islam is of the Devil," may be an Islamophobe, but he is also a serious man, willing to live with the consequences of his deeds, even if he causes U.S. war casualties.

The questions raised by his deliberate provocation are not so much about him, then, as they are about us.

Are we a serious nation? Is Obama up to being a war president?

Constantly, we hear praise of Lincoln, Wilson and FDR as war leaders.

Yet President Lincoln arrested thousands of citizens and locked them up as security risks, while denying them habeas corpus. He shut newspapers and sent troops to block Maryland's elections, fearing Confederate sympathizers would win and take Maryland out of the Union.

President Wilson shut down antiwar newspapers, prosecuted editors, and put Socialist presidential candidate and war opponent Eugene Debs in prison, leaving him to rot until Warren Harding released him and invited the dangerous man over to the White House for dinner.

California Gov. Earl Warren and FDR collaborated to put 110,000 Japanese, 75,000 of them U.S. citizens, into detention camps for the duration of the war and ordered the Department of Justice to prosecute antiwar conservatives.

During Korea, Harry Truman seized the steel mills when a threatened strike potentially imperiled production of war munitions. Richard Nixon went to court to block publication of the Pentagon papers until the Supreme Court decided publication could go forward.

This is not written to defend those war measures or those wars. It is to say that if a president takes a nation to war, and commits men to their deaths, as Obama did in doubling the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, he should be prepared to do what is within his power to protect those troops.

The other half of the argument has to do with whether this country, as opposed to those previous Americas, is willing to endure the President's use of such power. I think GEN Petraeus was right to speak as he did, but many seem to have considered it a stretch for a military officer even to mention that this idiot was likely to get troops killed so he could have his little show. The Drudge Report made a point of reminding us that the US military was in the Bible-burning business, but going out of its way to protect Korans from the same fate.

There's no doubt that the Muslim world reacts more harshly to desecration of its religious symbols than the Christian world; but that, as Buchanan says, is a problem with us, not with them.

My Memory of 9-11

I took the above notes while in my office at 71st Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenues, on September 11, 2001. We had managed to get through to the Internet for a few minutes, or -- and -- I was also on the phone with my Mother on Long Island, who was giving me info. At the time of writing the note, only one tower was down.

I remember I was in class at Hunter College earlier that morning (studying Urban Affairs, no less), and there was a commotion in the hall.  We had a speaker due to our class that was running really late so the door was open. Another professor walked in and said "Two planes flew into the World Trade Center." 

Two planes... I knew it was no accident. And an image popped in my mind that I still cannot explain: of both towers toppling over. Not crumbling, as they did, but toppling over, and I knew what a victory that would be to maniacs in the Middle East. Actually, I'm not sure I consciously thought "Middle East" but I did picture it and its people cheering -- not a sight so unusual with regard to something bad happening to the U.S.. These thoughts all took place in less than ten or fifteen seconds and they were mostly visual, not even fully formed sentences in my mind.

You could see smoke rising up (we were on the 17th floor looking south, straight down Lexington Avenue) between the buildings in the horizon (not the actual Trade Center but some buildings). A bunch of us left Hunter and headed to where we needed to go. I got to the street, turned the corner at 68th Street and 3rd Avenue, walking north to 71st, and heard a woman who I imagined had gotten her mother on the phone and said, in a shaky voice, "have you heard from Eileen?" I'll never forget her voice. I think she was asking about her sister. We literally were walking past one another. Eddie Bauer was on that corner. It's not there now but I remember it.

Frosty Sends

Frosty Sends:

A protest song:



They're stretching a little to describe the conflict as one about 'country boys' and 'politicians' (to say nothing of this ongoing attempt to paint MLK as a sort-of member of the Tea Party, which I can't imagine he would have supported); but given the Lexington & Concord imagery, the stretch isn't quite as far as it might seem initially. By stretching, I mean the obvious point that the Founders were generally well-educated men of the middle class: not just highly educated lawyers, but men like Washington, who was a surveyor as well as the owner of a tobacco plantation; or Paul Revere, who was a silversmith from Boston. These are not exactly 'country boys.'

On the other hand, the militia who arrived to do battle may be described in that way with less stretching. The warning here is a warning properly to those members of the Republican party who are looking at the Tea Party movement with the sense that they'll somehow be able to control and profit from it. The Founders had mostly thought they would be able to keep things calm as well -- until Lexington and Concord.

Thomas Paine in Philadelphia had previously thought of the argument between the colonies and the Home Country as "a kind of law-suit", but after news of the battle reached him [he knew otherwise]....

George Washington received the news at Mount Vernon and wrote to a friend, "the once-happy and peaceful plains of America are either to be drenched in blood or inhabited by slaves. Sad alternative! But can a virtuous man hesitate in his choice?"

No indeed: virtue compels, once that point has been reached. How many virtuous men, though, will you find among the politicians of the Republican Party?

Saving God

Saving God?

A UK magazine called Standpoint reviews two religious books that adopt naturalism as a means of defending -- rather than attacking -- religious faith. The reviewer is not impressed.

This theistic framework is not the only possible framework for spirituality: both the writers under discussion flirt intermittently with the Buddhist notion of anatta — the idea that the self is an illusion and that there is nothing beyond a constant flow of impermanent conditions that arise and pass away. But it is no easy task to graft such ideas on to the ethical rootstock of Western spirituality. For one thing, it is far from clear how a worldview based on detachment and oceanic merging into the impersonal void could support anything like a morality of unconditional requirements that calls us to orient our lives towards the Good.

We need, as Comte-Sponville rightly concedes, fidelity to the tradition that shaped us. But part of that tradition condemns intellectual pride and calls us to humility. A little humility may be enough to allow us to make the short step from fidelity to faith. We need the humility to accept that we cannot create our own values, or pick and choose the rootstock from which our fragile moral sensibilities have sprung.

I'm not sure that I accept the reviewer's premise that naturally-oriented arguments are non-theistic. I've been reading Avicenna, as you know. A Muslim, and Persian, Avicenna is one of the most impressive thinkers I've ever encountered: his reputation is, if anything, understated. I had gotten the impression from books that mentioned him that he was mostly important to philosophy (as opposed to medicine) for having transmitted Aristotle, and some works of Plato, to the West. In fact, his philosophy synthesizes both Aristotle and Plato, and then adds unique elements that are originally present in neither -- but which are demanding and deeply considered. It's not for no reason that he was widely read by Medieval thinkers, or that much of his thought was incorporated by philosophers like St. Thomas Aquinas.

Consider his proof for the existence of God. You can read the original in his Metaphysics, but it's pretty dense stuff: the commentary I've linked to may be easier if you aren't philosophers yourselves. I'll further gloss the commentary below.

Avicenna leaves the conceptual realm for a single empirical datum: "There is no doubt that something exists."

This is the same thing that St. Augustine and, later, Descartes came away with as an undoubtable truth. Descartes' formula is the most famous today, but he was the last of the three.

Avicenna proceeds: "Everything that exists is either necessary [by reason of itself] or possible [by reason of itself and necessary by reason of another]."

If something exists, that is, it must at least be possible for it to exist. If it weren't possible, it couldn't exist! That much is easy to understand.

Why "necessary," though? The argument hinges on the idea of where one 'gets' existence. Whether we're talking about a natural thing or an artifact of human creation, how can something come to exist? A horse can be bred by two other horses; a house can be built by a man. Gases in space can collect together and form a planet. But in all cases, the new thing that comes to exist is obtaining existence from something that already exists.

Therefore, if any single thing exists, it is necessary that something else existed to give it existence (if that first thing doesn't, itself, exist by necessity). Nothing can give existence if it does not exist itself. The parent horses had to exist if there is a foal; the men had to exist if there is a house; the gases in space had to exist if there is a planet. Those things, since they exist, had to have something that existed prior to them... etc.

Avicenna notes that you could go back through an infinite regress if you don't anchor this somewhere (this problem was first recognized by Agrippa the Skeptic). Avicenna doesn't rely on that argument, though: he points out that it's enough to recognize the necessity in the first step. If we know that something exists, we already can make a necessary claim: either (a) it was necessary in itself, or (b) it is necessary that something else made it exist.

If we rely on the infinite regress, we could potentially stop here: if something exists, then either it is necessary in itself, or it necessarily has a prior existent. At least one thing, then, necessarily has to exist in order for anything to exist: we just have to find out which one is 'necessary in itself' and we can stop.

That isn't Avicenna's method, though. The next part of his proof hinges on the question of what holds things in existence, which he believes helps us establish the nature of what kind of thing could be 'necessary in itself.' We can go through that if you're interested. It's an interesting use of neoplatonic emanation to insist on the unity and one-ness of the necessary existent (which St. Thomas Aquinas has to answer, since he wants to hold that the 'necessary existent' is not one thing, but three-in-one).

For now, though, I'd just like to note that there remain arguments for God that arise from naturalism, and which aren't adequately demonstrated false by either logic or science. They are very difficult and dense arguments, which are much harder to grapple with than most modern readers have patience for doing. As a result, they tend to be airily dismissed by moderns who haven't taken the trouble to fully understand the argument in the first place. That's a choice, but not a necessity.

Some Small Matters

Small Matters:

According to this study, the current Congress and administration are slightly on the spendy side. Under their, ah, 'leadership,' we find that:

...the federal debt held by the public increased by $2.5260 trillion, which is more than the cumulative total of the national debt held by the public that was amassed by all U.S. presidents from George Washington through Ronald Reagan.

That's no problem, right? After all, look at all the good it's done. Why, unemployment is down... maybe.

New unemployment claims supposedly dropped to 451,000 last week, hooray! But eight states (including California and Virginia) didn’t actually report jobless numbers last week because of the Labor Day holiday (ha), so the U.S. government just made up the numbers from those states, and those numbers are lower, hooray!

Well, of course they are. If the numbers were higher, that would be "unexpected."

Memo for the Record

Memorandum For The Record:

BillT sends.

Cat Heaven

Cat Heaven

Texan99 heaven, too, if it comes to that. This is what my home would look like if my husband didn't play the heavy and keep me sane. It costs up to $6,000/month to run the 30-acre Caboodle Ranch. I'm not sure if his location is secret or what keeps the population of 500 from exploding to zillions of cats dumped from everywhere. The guy who runs this place has built all kinds of little treehouses and cottages and churches and City Halls for the cats to play in. A complete fruitcake: my kind of guy. I'd take this over a cocktail party any day.

Garbage

Exactly What Is A "Food Historian"?

Apparently the adjective is intended to negate, rather than modify, the noun.

Food historian Caroline Yeldham agreed, saying that highlighting modern eating patterns and contrasting them to medieval diets would make people think about what they ate.

"The medieval diet was very fresh food. There were very few preserves so everything was made fresh and it was low in fat and low in salt and sugar."

If by "preserves" you mean that they didn't can things, yes; if you mean they mostly ate "fresh" food, no, that has no bearing on reality. There were times of the year when they mostly ate fresh food! But the need to store against the long hungry seasons meant that a tremendous amount of what they ate was preserved, even if it wasn't "preserved."

There are several ways besides canning to preserve food. Pickling is one; drying and smoking are two more. Meats in particular were often dried and cured, and kept at length; this is one reason that Medieval feasts often included boiled rather than roasted meats. Dried meat improves by boiling it, as the boiling reconstitutes it to some degree.

There are two main facts about medieval diets that reduced obesity v. modern life:

1) They ate less food.

2) They worked harder.

Consider the hardest-working modern American or Briton -- say, a road worker who labors all summer on the highway. He (almost certainly a he) is working long hours in terrible heat, yes; but he is also sitting down in powered equipment instead of digging ditches by hand, or harnessing and un-harnessing draft horses. He is taking a union-regulated lunch break, and going to a fast food joint where he can eat refined white bread and "fresh!" meat, and cheese, as much as he likes. The cost of the food is a pittance compared to his salary, when compared to what food cost in the Middle Ages.

I yield place to none in my respect for the Middle Ages as a source of inspiration, but this is just foolish. It's like telling kids that they should eat their asparagus because there are starving children in Ethiopia. Well, perhaps there are; but the children are so spoiled that they'd simply think that was a good reason to ship the asparagus off, rather than realizing that they should appreciate what they've got. They've never had otherwise; and even the childish imagination has limits.

Krugman What?

1938:

An argument by analogy can sometimes be helpful... but only if the analogy fits.

The story of 1937, of F.D.R.’s disastrous decision to heed those who said that it was time to slash the deficit, is well known. What’s less well known is the extent to which the public drew the wrong conclusions from the recession that followed: far from calling for a resumption of New Deal programs, voters lost faith in fiscal expansion.

Consider Gallup polling from March 1938. Asked whether government spending should be increased to fight the slump, 63 percent of those polled said no. Asked whether it would be better to increase spending or to cut business taxes, only 15 percent favored spending; 63 percent favored tax cuts. And the 1938 election was a disaster for the Democrats, who lost 70 seats in the House and seven in the Senate.

Then came the war.

From an economic point of view World War II was, above all, a burst of deficit-financed government spending, on a scale that would never have been approved otherwise. Over the course of the war the federal government borrowed an amount equal to roughly twice the value of G.D.P. in 1940 — the equivalent of roughly $30 trillion today.

Had anyone proposed spending even a fraction that much before the war, people would have said the same things they’re saying today.

Oh, right. Only one small point of disanalogy: the war also destroyed nearly all of our competition in the production of industrial goods, while leaving us with customers absolutely starved for replacements. Paying off all that debt therefore wasn't a problem: we had assured income in the form of people buying from us what they needed to put their country back together.

Now, if the proposed stimulus will reduce all our competitors to ashes, leave our industrial base intact, and also require them to buy stuff from us to rebuild? Then I'll be convinced that the analogy holds.

Tolkien on Film

Tolkien on Film:

The famous writer, in 1968, via the BBC. Hat tip to Mr. Lars Walker, whose fine blog pointed me to it.

Beijing Opera

Good Advice from China:

“Watch out for that sword,” the rehearsal director shouted.

“I don’t want anybody’s head getting cut off because you don’t know what you’re doing.”

The article is about the Beijing Opera, which is in some trouble as China turns away from its history and embraces the West. Western observers tend to think the opposite is happening -- that China is embracing a kind of resurgent Confucianism and seeking to regain its ancient imperial dominion. What seems to me to be the case is that they've embraced capitalism, and are seeking mostly greater control over their export corridors (as well as easier channels for exports).

The Beijing Opera is worth some study, if you're not familiar with it. If you like Hong Kong cinema, the roots are in the Beijing Opera. If you were scratching your head in the 1990s at Xena, Warrior Princess -- it's because you were having your first encounter with the offshoots of the Beijing Opera.

It has the advantage peculiar to Chinese society of not needing spoken language to convey its meaning. Chinese writing is intelligible to every Chinese speaker, but spoken dialects may be so wildly different as to seem nonsense. The symbols carry meaning. Chinese writing may do this:

For instance, by modifying 刀 dāo, a pictogram for "knife", by marking the blade, an ideogram 刃 rèn for "blade" is obtained.

In day to day life, much bargaining is done by hand signals. Even though almost every purchase requires haggling, I could easily do business in spite of my limited grasp of the language. Ten hand signals indicate numbers; and their use is expected, because of the dialect issue.

The Beijing Opera carries this symbolism through elaborate postures designed to carry the meaning of the act. The Japanese, as the Japanese will, absorbed and refined this idea to its highest degree. Their version of this kind of opera is called Noh, which influenced the more famous later form Kabuki. You see elements of the elaborate-postures-as-signals in Spaghetti Westerns -- which were notably influenced by Japanese cinema -- and even in American film. Note how the constant movement of the snow emphasizes the pauses in the actors' movements, and therefore draws your attention to their poses and what they are signalling.



So it's an interesting topic, this opera in Beijing.

UPDATE: For a Spaghetti Western use of this concept, look no further than the closing scenes of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.

Color Without Pigment

Color Without Pigment

Pigments absorb light in most wavelengths and reflect back in just a few, which our eyes detect as "color." But that's not the only way for things to appear colored to us. Rainbows result from clear raindrops, for instance, and from the mysterious habit of light to bend when it passes through the barrier between one clear medium and another, together with the even more curious fact that light of longer wavelengths (like red) bends more than that of shorter wavelengths (like violet). Suspended water droplets act like a prism: sunlight bends coming into each drop, then some of it bounces off the back of the drop, and bends again coming back out. The red bends more than the violet, the yellow in-between, giving us the effect of a spray of colors stretched across the sky: ROYGBIV.

Why is the rainbow is only a pale reflection of the sun, instead of a glare like a glimpse of the sun in a polished mirror? For the same reason we catch only a ghostly, pale reflection in a window at night: when light passes through a thin clear layer, most of it goes out the other side, and only a little is reflected back. The reflected amount varies between zero and sixteen percent and achieves a maximum that depends on the thickness of the layer: specifically, what light wavelength it is a multiple of. Any particular thickness of layer will favor a particular associated color. A layer with a constantly varying thickness, like a sheen of oil on top of water, will shows swirls of color. We call this effect "iridescence," from Iris, the goddess of rainbows, the messenger of the gods. (The plural of "iris" is "irides"; this root also explains the spelling and is the only way I can remember not to give it a double "r" as in "irradiation.") We see iridescence in soap bubbles, oil slicks, and some kinds of crystals.

Many living creatures also have learned the iridescence trick, though strangely it's more common in reptiles, fish, birds, and insects than in mammals. An exception is the golden mole, a varmint that predates the entire dinosaur era and has several archaic properties such as a cloaca (a combined port for liquid and solid elimination). Its fur has a golden sheen that is said to be a function of iridescence. It "swims" through loose sand like a Dune sandworm, which I find charming, but it is iridescence I started out to discuss here, so I'll try to get back on topic.

The Blue Morpho butterfly has iridescent wings, as do the scarab beetle and many birds, including the peacock and the hummingbird. Insects' effects usually result from thin, clear scales, while birds employ tiny periodic nanostructures in their feathers' hairlike "barbules."

Cuttlefish (below left) use a combination of pigment and iridescence to exhibit color, which they can change instantly, like a TV screen.

And of course, there are the beautiful nacres, formed from thin clear layers of shell.

Cassandra

For Cassandra:

Here below find a video that combines my interest in feats of horsemanship with her interest in wiener dogs.



(H/t: The Whited Sepulchre.)

Ringgold Games

Ringgold Games:

I spent the weekend at the Ringgold Celtic Festival and Highland Games. The weather was beautiful, and many old friends were there. There's not much to say about it that would interest the readers, but that is why I've been so quiet.

Watermelon Gems

Watermelon Gems

I've never been that enthusiastic about diamonds; I like a lot of vulgar color. So here's a semi-precious stone I can really get behind. Tourmaline is a silicate crystal that exhibits all kinds of colors depending on the traces of minerals that slip in. Not only does this result in an entertaining array of colors, it yields mind-boggling chemical formulae, like this for elbaite, a variety of tourmaline associated with the island of Elba: Na(Li_1.5,Al_1.5)Al₆Si₆O₁₈(BO₃)₃(OH)_4.

The site Grim directed us to the other day, TYWKIWDBI (which they pronounce "TeaWikiWidBee"), has a beautiful picture of tourmaline today. I won't reproduce it here, because you should go over and check out the site, but here is a fine picture from Wikipedia, showing the reddish/greenish stripes that give "watermelon" tourmaline its name:

Some more pictures from Glendale Community College:

Tourmaline crystals are prismatic and columnar crystals that are usually triangular in cross-section. The style of termination at the ends of crystals is asymmetrical, so that a typical columnar crystal resembles a pencil, long and skinny with one flat end and one pointy end. This asymmetry is called hemimorphism, and can result either from changes in crystallization conditions during the growth, or, as in the case of tourmaline, from alternating patterns inherent in the complicated crystal structure. Hemimorphic crystals tend to display an unusual level of both pyroelectricity and piezoelectricity, meaning that if you heat or squeeze the crystal, the lattice does not expand or contract. Instead, ions are displaced, which generates electrical potentials on the crystal faces. This effect occurs in a lot of crystals, some of which will generate a visible spark when crushed, but for some reason it is accentuated in asymmetrical crystals.

If this kind of thing suits you, you might enjoy the Mineral of the Month Club, which explains all kinds of wonderful things in addition to selling you striking specimens by mail. I'm quite taken with August 2010's vesuvianite:

MOTMC memberships are available in various levels at surprisingly affordable prices, for those of you with birthday issues looming. My birthday happens to be in November.

Troops Turn Down "Stop Loss" Bonuses?

Troops Turn Down "Stop Loss" Bonuses?

The Washington Post reports that military servicemen required to remain on duty beyond their original discharge date during the last nine years are declining to submit the required paperwork to collect the bonuses that Congress voted for them last year. They are eligible for $500 for a month, for an average of several thousand dollars apiece. About 90,000 active servicemen and veterans (two-thirds of those eligible) have not turned in the applications, which are due on October 21.

Why? An Army personnel officer thinks the servicemen may question whether the bonuses are legitimate and not some kind of gimmick. Too good to be true? Offensive to their culture? Officials are struggling to figure it out, with about $324 million in soon-to-expire benefits at stake.

H/t Daily Beast.

Hungry to Vote

Hungry to Vote

Be afraid, incumbent progressives. People are about to pop with the need to get to the ballot box and express dissatisfaction. Last January, CBSnews.com ran a "report card" poll on the President's performance in half a dozen areas. I don't know what the initial response looked like, as I didn't notice the poll at the time. In the meantime, however, it seems to have gone viral on Twitter. The comment thread, which CBS never shut down, is up to an astounding 39,000 entries and going strong. Also interesting is that the results of the poll now show a a solid "F" grade.

The comments are harsh, too, despite the occasional forlorn appearance of an Obama supporter who tries to rally his friends to participate in the poll, wondering "Is this for real?"

November is going to be interesting.

"Put him in Camp Bucca"

It occurs to me that if you can make a comedy prank show out of planting fake IED's in celebrities' cars, then for all intents and purposes, the war has been won.

But I have to agree with Allahpundit that this rates a "99 out of 100 on the inappropriateness scale".

(via Hot Air)

They Walk Among Us

They Walk Among Us

I like to write movie reviews on Netflix, and to create "Lists" there. (They call them "Top Ten" lists, but there's nothing to prevent the list from being only five long, or extending far beyond ten.) Today I'm creating a list of movies with a theme that always entertains me, which is people who look like humans but whom the other characters gradually realize aren't from around here. I suppose this kind of thing appeals to people with alienation issues. I love it when characters make all kinds of excuses for an alien's alienness, but then finally to admit that the explanation for all these eccentricities is truly extraterrestrial, or supernatural, or sometimes a case of time travel. I also love a storyline that explores what it must be like for the alien.

Here's my list so far:

• The Man Who Fell to Earth
• Time After Time
• The Terminator
• Starman
• Kate & Leopold
• Unbreakable
• Highlander
• Splash
• Cat People
• Hancock

By coincidence, Netflex has decided today to shut down most of its reviewer-community functions, including all lists. Too bad. I liked being able to find a reviewer I trusted and then browse his reviews and order some of the movies he liked, many of which I would never have heard of earlier. Apparently Netflix is moving more into streaming videos, which would be great if we could get a fast internet connection here, but we're stuck with horrible HughesNet service until the cable gets laid out into the boonies near us.

Reason and Evolution

Reason and Evolution:

I doubt that this gentleman and I see eye-to-eye on everything, but I also believe in the power of evolutionary theory to explain many human behaviors:

Behavioral economists are inspired by psychology, not by evolutionary theory, and not even psychology writ large, but a particular sub-discipline called cognitive heuristics and biases, which shows how often people depart from the expectations of rational choice theory. The result is a long list of “anomalies” and “paradoxes” but no positive account of our psychological mechanisms as a product of genetic and cultural evolution. I wish that I could report otherwise, but it is necessary to take the Evolution Challenge for the field of behavioral economics, no less than for neoclassical economics....

What goes for economics also goes for every other body of knowledge about our species.

Philosophy as a discipline also needs to do more to account for the lessons of evolutionary science. Modern philosophy is dominated by the influence of Kant and Hegel, for whom the rational nature of humankind was the really important thing. In this they felt believed they were drawing upon and improving the legacy of the ancients, who had argued that thought was the faculty by which we regulate all our other faculties (Plato), or even that thinking was the essential nature of humanity (Aristotle).

The accounts of human nature arising from this rationality-centered picture tend to be wrong exactly where evolutionary theory says they should be wrong. It also tends to lead to a misreading of the ancients, who were closer to questions of survival, life, and death -- and therefore to evolution as a process. If you read Plato's Republic as a defense of reason, for example, you're missing the fear of destruction that arose from the Spartan conquest of Athens, the civil war, the tyranny. For that matter, if you read Aristotle as endorsing rationality as the dominant fact of human life, you've misunderstood what he meant by "reason." Reason, for the ancients, is a faculty that is supposed to be able to aim at both truth and beauty.

I doubt you can get to truth with reason alone; but I'm sure you can't get to beauty! Even the most friendly reading -- beauty as some sort of compliance to rules of symmetry or mathematical formulae -- still doesn't really get you there. Nor does it explain virtues like courage, magnanimity, friendship, or love.

Letting humans be a kind of evolved animal as well as a thinking being allows their animal nature to be as important in your philosophy as it proves to be in reality. The question becomes not: can reason control animality? Rather, the question is: what is the right balance between reason and animality for the best kind of life?

OK, and Along Those Same Lines

OK, and Along Those Same Lines

Tracey Ullman puts the same song to excellent use in this skit, a favorite of mine:

Lions and Birds:

We've talked about this before, but it's worth looking at again given that Mark Steyn has written about it lately. Listen to this song, by a group called "the evening birds" -- and they sound like them. You'll recognize the tune at some point.



At 1:10 in this next version, the lady piper hits what a bluegrass artist would call the "breakdown" of the interesting part of the song.



And here's Mark Steyn's story of how this song became the famous one you know.

The Viking Gateway

The Viking Gateway:

From TYWKIWDBI ("Things You Wouldn't Know If We Didn't Blog Intermittently") comes this:

[I]n northern Germany, not far from the North Sea-Baltic Canal... one can marvel at a giant, 30-kilometer (19-mile) wall which runs through the entire state of Schleswig-Holstein. The massive construction, called the Danevirke -- "work of the Danes" -- is considered the largest earthwork in northern Europe...

The researchers have discovered the only gate leading through the Danevirke, a five-meter (16 feet) wide portal. According to old writings, "horsemen and carts" used to stream through the gate, called "Wiglesdor." Next to it was a customs station and an inn that included a bordello...

People say that prostitution is the oldest profession, but I suspect this last sentence has the order the right way around.

How Did You Learn to Read?

How Did You Learn to Read?

Having no children in school (or anywhere else), I've had no dog in the fight over techniques for teaching literacy for a long time. Every now and then, though, I stumble on a debate over phonics, whole language, sub-lexical reading, holism, or graphophonemics that makes me wonder what in the world everyone is talking about.

I don't remember learning to read. I have no idea how I was taught, except that I think it must have included some attention to skillsets that now glare at each other over the barricade separating Phonics Land from Whole Languagea. I'm sure I can remember connecting letters to sounds, but I'm equally sure that no one drilled me in meaningless word-calling exercises before exposing me to stories, if only because I'd recall the physical violence that would have been required to keep me at the task. The earliest two things I can remember about learning to read are the shocking realization that it was possible to read silently to oneself -- who would have thought of such a thing! -- and the glow of pleased recognition when a neighbor explained that the ridiculous sequence of letters "i-n-g" meant the interesting sound I knew from words like "king" and "ring." Could it be that, back in the 1950s, I was being treated to what the New York Public School system calls its newly adopted system, "Balanced Literacy"?

When I turn to articles about literacy pedagogy, I begin to doubt my longstanding ability to read and comprehend:

*A reader uses three cuing systems:

1. the graphic (printed visual array);
2. the syntactic (conventions and consistencies of the language’s structure);
3. and the semantic (meaning or comprehension, including background information and personal previous experiences). [graphic organizers, Language Experience Approach (L.E.A.) and Directed Reading-Thinking Activity (DRTA), writing books and stories]

I don't know what any of that looks like when a teacher or a kid does it. I think people just read stories to me that I was interested in, pointed out the words, and probably explained the sounds of the letters, and at some point it sank in. Maybe that's what they call Directed Reading-Thinking Activity plus embedded phonics these days. Perhaps my family was all holistic and trendy! Maybe they began every lesson by activating my "prior knowledge (schema) through discussion" and continued this throughout the lesson to help me make connections to other books as well as my own experiences. There may have been attention to explicit skill instruction and the use of authentic texts, including culturally diverse literature in various modalities.

Or maybe the people who write about education have just become unusually insane in recent decades.

How did you guys learn to read? What about your kids?

Lives Well Lived

Lives Well Lived

What do people regret from their deathbeds? A palliative care nurse reports that her dying patients felt that they'd sold their dreams too cheap and wished they hadn't given in so thoroughly to the expectations of others. Breadwinners on treadmills regretted missing so much of their children's and partners' lives, only to be able to buy more things none of them really needed. Stoics and shallow peacemakers were sorry they'd lacked the courage to express their feelings. Many regretted not keeping in better touch with old friends. Others concluded that a fear of change had left them mired in old miserable habits when they could have chosen happiness for themselves.

I took this all as a rather sweet cautionary tale about drawing from the deepest wells within ourselves and not spending our lives caught up in frantic but not very meaningful scurrying: Mary vs. Martha. The comments on Assistant Village Idiot's site made me realize that others might see a much more unattractive "lotus-eaters" kind of message. Our friend Retriever, for instance, read the nurse's account as a kind of "watered down Joseph Campbell follow your bliss" screed, and doubted whether most people ever really regretted "doing the right thing, or meeting their responsibilities." Not being much of a "follow your bliss" type myself, I went back to read the original post to see if it still struck me the same way.

It did. I still see it the way AVI does. He quotes Screwtape on the human souls he was teaching his nephew to tempt:

...so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here [Hell], "I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked."

The difference must lie in my assumption that the work the dying patients regretted was neither their true duty nor their heart's desire but a lot of vain fuss. It's one thing to do hard, unpleasant work that really needs to be done, either for its own sake or to provide for your loved ones. It's another to get caught up in a rat-race that separates you from everything that should be most important. This is something that C.S. Lewis wrote about a lot: the idea that neither hedonism nor self-negation for its own sake was the ideal. Screwtape's advice continues:

As a preliminary to detaching him from the Enemy [God], you wanted to detach him from himself, . . . . Of course I know that the Enemy also wants to detach men from themselves, but in a different way. Remember always, that He really likes the little vermin, and sets an absurd value on the distinctness of every one of them. When He talks of their losing their selves, He only means abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever. Hence, while He is delighted to see them sacrificing even their innocent wills to His, He hates to see them drifting away from their own nature for any other reason. And we should always encourage them to do so. The deepest likings and impulses of any man are the raw material, the starting-point, with which the Enemy has furnished him. To get him away from those is therefore always a point gained; even in things indifferent it is always desirable substitute the standards of the World, or convention, or fashion, for a human's own real likings and dislikings. I myself would carry this very far. I would make it a rule to eradicate from my patient any strong personal taste which is not actually a sin, even if it is something quite trivial such as a fondness for county cricket or collecting stamps or drinking cocoa. Such things, I grant you, have nothing of virtue them; but there is a sort of innocence and humility and self-forgetfulness about them which I distrust. The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring twopence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. You should always try to make the patient abandon the people or food or books he really likes in favour of the "best" people, the "right" food, the "important" books. I have known a human defended from strong temptations to social ambition by a still stronger taste for tripe and onions.

So there are different ways of looking at giving in to the expectations of others. A lot depends on what they expect.

Moving on to other Remedies

Other Remedies:

Having closed the last inquiry, then, let us examine other ways in which we might be able to repair -- or if need be, restore -- the proper function of the government. This essay looks at the structure of the original American government, and asks why that particular model was chosen. There was a problem at that moment in history that people were thinking about: the difficulty of defending a Republic that was extended over a large territory. Such a Republic would be necessary, because smaller republics would not be able to muster the resources to defend themselves in that era. But there were problems with the model:

Governments at a distance from the people they rule tend to be invisible; and when human beings are invisible, they tend rightly to suppose that they can get away with a lot. Moreover, large polities tend to face emergencies more often than small polities, and emergencies require from rulers vigor, alacrity, and resoluteness of the sort most easily provided by a man who can act alone. The challenge facing the American Framers was to devise a constitutional structure capable of producing a government fit for meeting emergencies but unlikely to become, as James Madison once delicately put it, “self-directed.”

To meet this challenge, they turned to the second and third parts of Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws – where he sketched out two different ways in which a republic can overcome this limitation on its magnitude. It was, he realized, necessary that it do so because – at least in modern times – no small republic could hope to marshal the resources necessary for its self-defense when attacked by monarchies of intermediate size or despotisms immense in size.

The first expedient suggested by Montesquieu was federalism. By means of federalism, a group of republics could project power in the manner of a monarchy while remaining small enough to be genuinely self-governing.

Montesquieu’s second expedient was the separation of powers. By distinguishing along functional lines between the executive power, the legislative power, and the judicial power and by distributing these three powers to different bodies in such a fashion as to render them separate and quasi-autonomous, the English had managed to transform a monarchy into a republic capable of sustaining itself on an extended territory. For emergencies, they had an executive capable of vigor, alacrity, and resoluteness. To prevent that executive from becoming a tyrant, they had a House of Commons responsible to the electorate and capable of calling the executive’s servants to account. To avoid populist excesses, they had a House of Lords capable of checking the House of Commons; and to protect the liberty of the citizens, they had judges who could not easily be removed from office and juries selected from among the peers of those accused.

The Americans combined both expedients. To begin with, they instituted a federation, building on the remnants of the old colonial system and on the structure that existed under the Articles of Confederation. At the center, they established a government of limited powers – capable of defending the nation, of guaranteeing to every state a republican government, of regulating commerce between the states, and of responding to emergencies. To the states and local governments, where the territory was comparatively small, they left all other legitimate powers. To make the federal government in some measure independent of the states, they provided for direct popular election of the House of Representatives; and to enable the states to protect their own prerogatives from federal encroachment, they had the state legislatures elect the federal senate.

At both the state and federal level, the American founders instituted a separation of powers, giving to the executive, the legislators, and the judiciary the means by which to defend their own prerogatives and the motives for doing so – and, by dividing and separating the powers, the Founders sought to make the government and its operations visible to the citizens. Each branch served the general public as a watchdog with regard to the others.

The measures undertaken by the Obama administration and by its supporters in Congress that gave rise to and sustained the Tea-Party Movement all have this in common. They constitute an assault – evident to anyone who cares to look – on our inherited political order. They transgress on the two great principles constitutive of that order. They are inconsistent with federalism and the separation of powers...

Federalism has another great advantage, which was important to the Founders: it allows for the diversity of opinion that was very important to making the early Republic as stable as it was. There was not a great deal of social trust between the early states, and the factions in those days were just as hostile to each other as our factions are becoming today. The Federalist structure intended to protect the states' rights to substantially different internal social contracts, so that the descendants of the Puritans in the north and the descendants of the Cavaliers in the South could each have their own laws and ways.

That part of the idea remains important today: a major part of the friction we have in the United States comes from the use of the Federal government to impose one-size-fits-all solutions on the whole of the nation. The more urban blue states have some basic assumptions about law and justice that are incompatible with what the more rural red states believe, and vice versa. Some of those issues have to be Federal issues (e.g., does the Constitution authorize programs like Social Security?). Many, though, could be handled in a Federalist manner without causing injustice to anyone -- after all, if they really did not like the interpretation of the state of California (say), they could move to New York or to New Mexico.

Such a model gives us more liberty, as we are free to have several different modes -- at least as many as fifty, as there are that many states. Individuals can then choose from among the many interpretations what they prefer for themselves and their families. Furthermore, they can then live at peace with their neighbors who feel differently, instead of constantly being in friction with each other over the attempt to finalize a 'one-size-fits-all' solution that their faction prefers.

Thoughts, on the essay or on these matters that it raises?

Limits Continued

Limits: Some Concluding Remarks

Eric says that he doesn't like the talk of limiting the franchise; he's not the first to say so.

We started with a similar exploratory thought experiment, in Plato: and it was far more tyrannical than anything as mild as 'perhaps the franchise should be earned in some fashion.' The dialogues are still very useful even though no one would ever want to live in such a republic. The good of them is in getting you to teach yourself how to think about the questions of politics. We certainly want a state that is well managed, which executes its functions wisely, and which is able to defend itself (because living in wars, losing wars, or being subject to anarchy is miserable). We certainly don't want a state that goes so far as Plato's in controlling our lives. The one we have now seems to be both overly coercive (as Eric notes) and destabilizing due to ruinous spending programs and internal factional friction.

Now, if the effect of limiting the franchise were to increase government power and decrease citizen ability to restrain the government, then it would be a bad idea. I agree with that prospect, and if I were certain that would be the effect, I'd agree with Eric's remarks entirely.

The counterargument: It's possible that by concentrating the power of the vote among those who have an interest in maintaining the small-r republican character of the nation, you could increase rather than decrease the effect of the vote in restraining government coercion. Hamilton was interested in limits in principle because he thought that was the best way to preserve the newly free character of the nation. His idea was that the government would otherwise naturally fall into the hands of the rich and powerful, who could sway the poor. In this, he was drawing on lessons from England, and fairly old traditions.

Now, that said, this exploration -- as interesting and profitable as it's been to look back at the source of the franchise, to note that the arguments for expanding it were based on virtue, and otherwise to examine how we got to where we are -- hasn't really brought forth useful results. Elise said that her chief objection was that she couldn't think of a way to limit the franchise that would ensure that all and only the right people got to vote. So far, I haven't been able to think of one either.

All I came up with as good examples of qualities that would demonstrate virtue were honorable military service, and faithful parenthood. That's inadequate: I can think of lots of people I know who don't fall in either category, but who are certainly not folks who should be disqualified from voting. And I can't think of any quality or union of qualities that would be a good proxy for virtue: neither education, nor income level (Hamilton notwithstanding, I don't think either wealth or payment of taxes is a good model), nor much of anything else that comes to mind is really useful in this regard.

I doubt that limiting the franchise is the answer. The lesson of the Norman expansion of the franchise is that it's worked better than the systems that did not expand it. I don't think there are good moral reasons to believe that the franchise should be universal and unearned, but I also can't think of a good model for earning it that allows all and only (or mostly) the right people to have access.

Finally, it really does have to be virtue that we have a good way of measuring, and not what Elise calls pragmatics. This is because, as we've discussed, conservatives and liberals seem to have different blind spots in things like threat perception. We need both sets of insights; a state that was ruled by either set alone would be missing a crucial part of the picture. It's important to remember that we need each other, so that someone can see the things I can't see, or that you can't see.

Unless there are solid suggestions that seem to answer that question, I propose to conclude the examination.

Yay Juliette

Yay, Juliette!

Baldilocks gets a cartoon. Nobody's ever made a cartoon about me; but, on reflection, that's probably just as well.

Crusaders

Crusaders:

Since 9/11, there have been a number of books and articles re-fighting the legacy of the Crusades. In particular, the slaughter in Jerusalem at the end of the First Crusade usually is taken to be evidence of the wickedness of the whole project. Dad29 links to a piece today that points out a fact that doesn't normally make the cut:

Violence against, and persecution of Jews was never encouraged, tolerated, or condoned by the Papacy. Christianity did not need a thousand years to “clean up its act” with regard to Jews; in response to the atrocities carried out by soldiers in the crusading armies, Pope Calixtus II issued the bull “Sicut Judaeis” in 1120, which declares, among other things that:

[The Jews] ought to suffer no prejudice. We, out of the meekness of Christian piety, and in keeping in the footprints or Our predecessors of happy memory, the Roman Pontiffs Calixtus, Eugene, Alexander, Clement, admit their petition, and We grant them the buckler of Our protection.

In other words, when Christians carried out acts of violence against Jews, they were doing so in disobedience to their religion, and their spiritual leaders. This was also the case during the unfortunate sack of Constantinople in 1203, in which Christian turned upon Christian during the Fourth Crusade.

What is often also forgotten is that there had been some Christian pushback against the Islamic nations before 1095. One reason that the Normans won at Hastings in 1066 is that the Anglo-Saxon army had been in the north fighting Harald Hardrada, the Viking king, only days before; they'd finished a brutal battle at Stamford Bridge, and then had to force march to intercept the invading Normans.

That same Harald Hardrada had fought in Sicily with the Byzantines, as part of the Varangian Guard. This is told of in the Heimskringla. These campaigns were in the 1040s.

The reconquest of Spain began in 1085 with the fall of Toledo to Alfonso VI of Leon and Castille. We were looking at a scene from El Cid just the other day, as you'll recall.

So by 1095, when Pope Urban preached the Crusade, it was not out of desperation and fear of imminent destruction. It was in part out of a sense that the tide had been turning, and that the once-unstoppable forces of Islam had begun to be rolled back. The atrocities committed against Christians in the Holy Land didn't seem impossible to correct, with Toledo in recent memory and with an ally in the East.

That said, the First Crusade was a miracle. The ally in the East proved treacherous, and a student of the war will be stunned that they carried it off at all. They did so only by the smallest margin, capturing Jerusalem with an Islamic army advancing upon them. I met one of the descendants of the man who led that army, while I was in Iraq; in those days, his tribe (of whom he was one of three brothers who were the paramount sheikhs) had run a kingdom in the north of what is now Iraq. He was very proud of that fact, and he knew that I would know just which army he meant when relating the story -- as indeed I did.

So, you see: the past is with us. It is not, as Requiem for a Nun put it, even past.

The Lifecycle of Gov't programs

The Lifecycle of a Government Program:

Once upon a time, when the city of Atlanta was growing by leaps and bounds, the Georgia Department of Transportation decided that they needed a new major highway that would let traffic into and out of the city on a direct north-south line. They had an interstate (I-75) that did so on a northwest/southeast line; and they had one that went southwest to northeast (I-85). But they wanted another one just to go north to south.

The Federal government said, "Nope." They agreed to pay for a regular highway, US 19, but not another interstate.

So Georgia took the money for US 19, linked it up with some of its own money, and linked it up with the existing Georgia 400 highway. This allowed traffic to flow in from the north directly to the center of Atlanta, where it met up with I-75 and I-85 in the middle of town.

To pay for the construction, they set up a toll booth. This was something of an innovation in Georgia, but not to worry! It was to be temporary, just until the construction costs were paid off by the state.

That's been oh, around fifteen years ago. Tens of thousands of cars a day go through that gate, paying tolls both in and out of the city. The original costs were long paid off, but did the toll go away?

Two guesses.