ndrosen | Entries tagged with history

I get apples, some other fruits and vegetables, and cider from a certain vendor at the farmers’ market, paying with a credit card (after some cash was stolen, their boss announced a policy of preferring payment by credit card). They tell me how much the charge is, and I sometimes comment on the number, if it’s interesting mathematically, or the date of some historical event, or my father’s year of birth plus four hundred, or whatever. Sunday morning, my purchases came to $16.42, and I told the seventeen year old girl who took my card that 1642 was the year that the English Civil War began.

Another person working there asked if that involved King Charles the somethingith and Parliament. I said yes, Charles the First and Parliament went to war against each other, beginning the Civil War, also known as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, because England, Scotland, and Ireland all participated. The English Parliament made alliance with the Covenanting Scottish Presbyterians, Oliver Cromwell came to power in England, and invaded Ireland, acting with great brutality, and so forth.

So I contributed to a young lady’s education, as well as getting some Goldrush apples, and a bunch of basil, together with cucumbers and garlic.

Thirty-five or thirty-six years ago, a one-off sf convention, Hostigos, was held in my home town of State College, Pennsylvania, where I was at that time a graduate student. It was the first con I ever attended, and I got to meet Hal Clement, Jerry Pournelle, Roland Green, and others. Among the swag which I acquired was an issue of SFWA Bulletin with an article by the great Poul Anderson. Anderson had been influenced by the historical theories of a scholar named John K. Horde, and had, I believe, adjusted the timeline of his Technic future history to fit Horde’s ideas.

In that article, Anderson summarized Horde’s theories (Horde seems never to have published a work setting them forth in full, although the keeper of the Poul Anderson Appreciation blog once included a link to an article by Horde). Briefly, a society begins in free growth, but then makes a bad decision at some point, which begins to poison it. This does not lead to immediate catastrophe, and the society’s brightest achievements may come while its roots are decaying and future disasters begin to loom. It remains possible for the bad decision to be revisited, and the path to catastrophic failure to be rejected, but as time goes by, this becomes increasingly difficult. Horde had a specific length of time, I think 125 years or something like that, from choosing the wrong path to catastrophe.

Anderson wrote, emphasizing that this was his opinion and not necessarily anyone else’s, that the United States had gone wrong in 1913, which was when we got the Federal Reserve Board (to blame for inflation), the income tax, eroding liberty and privacy, and the direct election of Senators, eroding the concept of a federal republic. This, he wrote, meant that we had until possibly 2038 to fix things, but that reversing course would become harder and harder.

I do not insist that Horde was right, or that Anderson was, but current circumstances do seem to fit the hypothesis disturbingly well. We face huge deficits and looming financial catastrophe, which neither major party is serious about addressing. The president-elect is grossly unfit for public office, and the Democrats do not offer good policy alternatives. Both Biden and Trump have sought, and in Trump’s case, very much seek, to govern by fiat rather than by persuading Congress to pass legislation; this is the path to Caesarism.

I would add that the Sixteenth Amendment, giving us the income tax, marginalized Georgism, which had been very much a part of the political conversation. Many Georgists had supported the income tax, on the grounds that income taxes on the rich largely fell on income from land rents, so the income tax was far preferable to tariffs as a source of federal revenue. However, the income tax ended up taxing the rich and the middle class on income from wages and capital, and land value taxation largely vanished from mainstream discourse.

I would also add that whether or not the direct election of senators was to blame, the power of party machines was eroded, making it possible for go-it-alone political entrepreneurs like Trump to get elected. Democratic and Republican Party machines may not have been staffed by angels, but they did mostly manage to impose some discipline on politicians, and assure that someone like Henry Ford (infinitely better as an automotive engineer than as a political thinker) could not become President, despite a substantial segment of the public wanting him.

So we may have a dozen or so years to get the United States on a very different track, against immense obstacles. Some Americans may prefer to immigrate, but the prospects of freedom throughout the world may be poor if the United States collapses, or becomes a cynical authoritarian power. Agitate, or flee, or try to find some local community which can escape the worst consequences of national crisis, and live half there, half inside one’s own head, trying to pass on one’s ideas and an analysis of what went wrong. I have taken an oath to support and defend the United States Constitution, and will do what I can, while it remains possible. “The giants and the trolls win. Let us die on the right side, with Father Odin.”

As I have mentioned in previous years, I celebrate the Monday federal holiday in October as Bartolome de las Casas Day, honoring a man who spoke out against Christopher Columbus’s enslavement and brutal abuse of the Indios, and who struggled to get fair treatment for them, inspired by his Catholic faith and belief in universal human dignity. In a sense, de las Casas was one of history’s losers, but (something which a certain politician of today wouldn’t understand), it can be better to struggle for the right, and lose, than to participate in grave wrongdoing.

On a lighter note, I plan to bake chocolate chip cookies, having made the dough yesterday. Whatever miseries and cruelties ensued from Columbus’s voyages, people today, all over the world, can enjoy foods like New World chocolate, Old World wheat, cinnamon, and nutmeg, and Old World soy beans and rice (used to make miso, an ingredient in the cookies). Let us hope that we can also learn to get along with each other, and behave decently, as Bartolome de las Casas would have wanted.

I’m about fifty minutes late, but January 21 was the centenary of V.I. Lenin’s death, as reported by Ilya Somin on the Volokh Conspiracy blog. I remember reading a biography of Lenin as a teenager in high school; I used it as a source for a paper I wrote in high school about whether history depended on great men and chance contingencies, or only on broader forces and trends. I came down in favor of the former. The biography was by Robert Conquest, if I recall correctly, and he was assuredly no admirer of Soviet Communism or of Lenin, nor is Ilya Somin.

At a time when many young people are favorably inclined to socialism, we should remember what it was really like, especially in extreme form, and pass the information to those who never knew.

I mentioned celebrating Bartolome de las Casas Day instead of Columbus Day; Ilya Somin has an article on the Volokh Conspiracy about Christopher Columbus’s cruelties and misdeeds, in which he quotes from a column by Jeff Jacoby. I remember reading Jacoby’s columns in the Boston Globe, back when I lived in the Boston area (1996-1998).

There is an interesting article in Reason about General Smedley Butler, whom I had heard of before, without knowing very much about him. The article is by Thaddeus Russell, author of A Renegade’s History of the United States, who has a non-standard take on things.

Our club president was looking for a speaker for this week’s Toastmasters meeting, so I signed up, and proceeded to speak on “The Growth of Private Estates and Private Armies in Heian Japan,” reusing the title and some the content from a paper I wrote as a seventeen year old college sophomore taking a Japanese history course.

This seemed to go over well. I spoke while sitting in front of a computer, communicating with people by a Zoom-equivalent. The evaluator praised me for, among other things, my use of hand gestures, which I had not been aware of making.

As to the substance of talk, I began by quoting Gibbon that, had there not been a single barbarian in Europe, the West Roman Empire could not have survived, or would have survived without honor. Heian-kyo provides confirmation of a sort, as it never fell to external barbarians. Decadence, the appropriation of public land as private estates (which became not only tax-exempt but immune from all entry by imperial officials), and the development of relationships of vassalage between fighting man and lord led to Japan creating its own internal barbarians.

Some celebrate Columbus Day, and some celebrate Indigenous People’s Day, but I mark the second Monday in October as Bartolome de las Casas Day. Christopher Columbus was a bold explorer, it is not to be denied, and he could not have foreseen the effect which Old World diseases would have on the native population of the Americas, but he left an ugly record of enslaving, mutilating, and slaughtering the people of the islands he discovered. This is not only a matter of applying today’s standards to a man five centuries dead; his brutal conduct, although not unique to himself, drew condemnation from other Spaniards of his time.

One of these was Bartolome de las Casas, who gave up his own position as an encomendero (one to whom land and serfs were entrusted) to speak out for the natives in the light of his Christian faith and a universal conception of human dignity. I believe that he is more to be honored than Columbus.

I had thought of Carrie Nation, the famous saloon smasher, as a stern, humorless person, insofar as I thought of her at all. It seems, though, that she wasn’t like that at all, and according to an article in Slate, she sheltered battered women long before women’s shelters were a regular thing. I still don’t think that Prohibition was a good idea - people who wanted to drink got their booze from Al Capone instead of from a tolerably ethical distiller or saloonkeeper, but one can understand Mrs. Nation’s actions under the circumstances, and she seems to have been decent, caring, and also exceptionally courageous.

As a bonus, the psychological blather that has been written about her adds to my skepticism about Freud and similar blatherskites.

I was four and a half years old when my mother put me in front of the television set and told me that they were sending men to the Moon. Decades later, I had the pleasure of being in the same room as Buzz Aldrin (I was seated in the back of the auditorium; he spoke from a podium at the front). I marked the fifty-second anniversary of the Moon landing by leaving a message for my sister; she called back, and put the telephone on speaker so my niece could hear as well.

I reminisced about seeing the launch, and quoted, “The Eagle has landed; tell your children when/Time won’t drive us down to dust again.”

And I hope that time won’t drive us down to dust again. I am glad to hear of Jeffrey Bezos taking a brief trip into space, and of Richard Branson’s and Elon Musk’s projects. Elizabeth Warren and others aren’t happy with billionaires doing what they think should be done, if at all, by NASA, while private businesses are heavily taxed to pay for whatever Senators and other politicians think worthy. My view is otherwise; I say that SpaceX and others have made launches cheaper than NASA ever managed, and I hope to see them accomplish much more.

The big-spending, high taxing opponents of free enterprise in space remind me of villains from a Poul Anderson novel, or maybe from Michael Flynn’s Firestar series. Let us leave them in the dust!

Ilya Somin has called for some day, with May first a good candidate, to be declared Victims of Communism Day, which might serve as a useful reminder of what what horrors ensued from an ideology that attracted some idealists genuinely seeking to build a better world.

To endorse the proposal is not to endorse the fascists and grifters on what passes for the Right in America today.

I am old enough to remember Watergate. In particular, I remember the local newspaper urging its readers to pay attention to history in the making, and my own parents telling me much the same.

Richard Nixon had his faults, but it must be said for him that he did not praise and incite neo-Nazis and related scum until they stormed the Capitol. Dishonest Donald has now failed that test of minimal civic virtue and respect for his country’s Constitution and institutions. Even though the grifter in chief did not directly incite this attempt to assault the seat of government, prevent Congress from carrying out its functions, and intimidate or hang Congressmen, he cannot escape responsibility; his encouragement of thuggery, false claims of massive ballot fraud, and refusal to concede an election which he had clearly lost led to the attempted coup the world saw today.

I fear future problems: Even with Trump himself out of office and quite possibly in prison, it is likely that millions of Americans will continue living in a delusional belief system, treating the scoundrel as a hero and a victim of a Deep State conspiracy, and that some of them will commit acts of terrorism and sedition. They may not be enough to govern — the Republican Party may be left shrunken and disgraced — but they will make trouble, and likely be numerous enough to prevent an anti-Trumpist reformed GOP from winning without their support. Who, then, will prevent the Democrats from implementing their policies, to which, as a classical liberal, I have considerable objection?

In some sense, Trump may not be capable of being other than what he is; his habits are too deeply set, and his intelligence too low. But what will history say of the Cruzes and Hawleys, who are intelligent and mentally functional enough to be culpable?

P.J. O’Rourke has an article in the December issue of Commentary about President John F. Kennedy, based on a book by Harvard history professor Fredrik Logevall, JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956. The book, as I understand it, takes a favorable view of JFK, for whose sometimes appalling behavior the author makes excuses; O’Rourke takes a dim view of the man and the whole Kennedy myth, titling his article “Shamalot.” JFK was a philanderer, as we already knew, and seems to have had a full share of human nastiness in other ways; he did have charm, which is not a real substitute for solider virtues. O’Rourke makes a distinction: JFK had charm while alive, but only had charisma posthumously.

I must say that I have long had a rather dim view of the Kennedys and their hangers-on and flatterers; I think it absurd and disgraceful to our republic that being related to an imperfect president who was assassinated while in office has been seen a qualification for public office.

Did you, when you first heard of the Homestead Act as a child, learn that it was a wonderful opportunity for poor people to become independent farmers and settle the wide-open West? Things weren’t that simple, of course, and one of my Georgist friends has provided a link to an article about the national myth and the reality. The author, Matthew Downhour, may make a Georgist presentation in the near future; his article quotes Henry George.

Several decades ago, I read Julian Jaynes’s bizarre and fascinating book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which, to summarize briefly, argues that until about 3000 years ago, people were not conscious, and heard the voices of their gods telling them what to do, the gods’ voices coming from one area of the human brain, with the hearing mind — not truly conscious — in the other hemisphere. Aside from various other objections, Jaynes’s 1970s level of understanding of neuroanatomy turned out to be, shall we say, oversimplified.

I remember saying to someone else who had read the book that I thought that Jaynes was onto something, but I did not believe that the change was as drastic as he hypothesized.

Someone in my network linked to an article by Scott Alexander with an updated and refined version of the idea. I highly recommend the article, which I won’t try to summarize at any great length. Briefly, Mr. Alexander thinks that people thousands of years ago were conscious, and did not have bicameral minds in Jaynes’s terms, but that they did hear the voices of their gods, like small children with imaginary friends (also noted by Jaynes, as I recall). What silenced the gods was that people developed a theory of mind, and came to think of themselves and others as having minds, so that when they heard their own thoughts, they heard them as their own thoughts, not as voices of their gods.

It is at least an interesting attempt, and one more believable than full bicameralism, to apply psychology to account for some ancient behavior and writings.

Last week (I meant to post a link to it last Thursday before my surgery Friday, but didn’t get around to it), Reason had an article on Woodrow Wilson’s libertarian lackeys, people who theoretically favored freedom, but were involved in enforcing censorship and suppression of dissent, either because they honestly thought they were preventing worse, or because they were seduced by the thrill of being in positions of power, and close to the President. On the other hand, Louis F. Post behaved honorably, doing his best to damp down the Red Scare, and prevent the deportation of people against whom there was no evidence of wrongdoing.

Some of these libertarian lackeys were Georgists, and the author, Jesse Walker, gives a fair introduction to Georgism in the early twentieth century, and how Georgists differed from some other Progressives.