Little Venice, London

Easy walking distance from the hotel (near Paddington Station) and even more interesting than this picture

Guess what, again

From an illustration to a Foreign Policy article on "strong horses," what must be a buzkashi match.

News from Iran

Sitting in a London hotel I read The Fear Factor: a piece in the Independent on a profoundly divided society.

I'm off!

If things work out and the volcano don't rise, I'll be flying today to the UK for another Cornish walking holiday. Wish us safe travel and good weather, and no inconvenient vulcanism.

In the meantime I have left a few posts timed for various points in the next two weeks. I've chosen material that should have a sufficient shelf-life.

For those who might be curious, I plan on being at the Kalamazoo Congress around noon on the Thursday.

Image: Standing stones, in other words, stones that haven't fallen down yet.

Destruction of sites associated with early Islam

Brad DeLong suggests we have a look at this Wikipedia article, which gives a hint of the many divisions among Muslims, even on what would seem to be really important issues. It also says something about the unusual position of Saudi Arabia and its official Wahhabi form of Islam.

Breaking news for once -- Canadian government (can be held) in contempt of Parliament

Update: Title changed to reflect the somewhat ambiguous ruling of Speaker Milliken.

As per the ruling of the Speaker of the Canadian House of Commons, who gives the Government (the PM, his cabinet, and the Conservative caucus) and Parliament (the other parties in the Commons) two weeks to solve their conflict. And then? Doesn't exactly say!

Rough(?) quote from Milliken via the Globe and Mail.

It is the view of the Chair that accepting an unconditional authority of the executive to censor the information provided to Parliament would in fact jeopardize the very separation of powers that is purported to lie at the heart of our parliamentary system and the independence of its constituent parts. Furthermore, it risks diminishing the inherent privileges of the House and its Members, which have been earned and must be safeguarded.

Back to the Good Parliament...

Another update: Globe and Mail account, April 28.

Ship report: Quebecois

Ships have been moving on the river for quite a while, but I'm seldom in the right place to see them, and sometimes I can't read their names. A few days ago, however, I caught this one -- Quebecois.

Unleashed upon a waiting world -- Carnivalesque!

Bloggers with a particular interest in ancient, medieval or early modern history occasionally get together at the grand carnival called Carnivalesque. A carnival is one of those "Internet traditions" you sometimes hear about. Some hapless volunteer is dragooned into looking over recent contributions by her or his peers, and choosing the ones to recommend to everybody else. Carnivalesque comes out roughly monthly, and alternates between ancient/medieval material and early modern mostly European. Today Gill Polack, who claims to come from someplace more remote than Bonfield, Ontario -- a mythical antipodes? -- has put together a compilation of the earlier eras. Go read!

The comparative present

Thanks to Brad DeLong, from whom many good things come, I have just been alerted to the existence of the publication called Business Insider, which seems to have a real predilection for charts and lists illustrating current trends. This kind of thing can be either very useful or very deceptive, but I love it, even if a given example doesn't hold up very well under strict examination. Comparative material has a lot of potential to make people think, if they don't take the first analysis they see as the final word.

Business Insider first two lists of can which I found interesting. Some readers may remember that I am skeptical about alarmism in connection with demographic crises, especially crises of shrinking population. Business Insider offers us a list of 10 countries heading for a demographic crisis, and what is interesting here is that includes both countries with too much and too little population growth, and some detailed discussion of each. I haven't had the time to read it properly myself, but at least I think it will be worth reading.

The second list discusses 10 countries that have significant oil reserves and can be expected to pump away in the "distant future," long after places like Saudi Arabia have run dry. Of course it is hard to say what the world will be like then anyway, but the list does alert me to a couple of things. One, Iran has a lot of oil, and so will continue to be a "trouble spot" no matter what the ideology of the people in charge. Two, Canada is on that list, which I find quite alarming but not entirely surprising. I would rather not be a "trouble spot."

Applying a classic political idea to a current controversy

Every so often on the Internet, someone uses a well-known historical incident or classic argument well enough to shed light on what was interesting about the original situation or controversy, better perhaps (perhaps!?) than the usual textbook explanation. Or a blog post will open up a subject worthy of wider thought (again).

Thus in a frankly partisan but hardly outrageous piece at Slate, Ron Rosenbaum says: Don't ignore the Tea Party's toxic take on history.
Here's an excerpt:

Most people with a basic grounding in history find Tea Party ignorance something to laugh about, certainly not something to take seriously. But I would argue that history demonstrates that historical ignorance is dangerous and that it can have tragic consequences, however laughable it may initially seem. And thus the media, liberals, and others are misguided in laughing it off. And educated conservatives are irresponsible in staying silent in the face of these distortions.

The muddled Tea Party version of history is more than wrong and fraudulent. It's offensive. Calling Obama a tyrant, a communist, or a fascist is deeply offensive to all the real victims of tyranny, the real victims of communism and fascism. The tens of millions murdered. It trivializes such suffering inexcusably for the T.P.ers to claim that they are suffering from similar oppression because they might have their taxes raised or be subject to demonic "federal regulation."

Rosenbaum goes on to discuss the "stab in the back" myth that helped bring Hitler to power. Some people will cry foul. What I thought about, however, was not about whether Rosenbaum got it exactly right, factually or rhetorically, but about how inadequate history education generally is. You would think, given the emphasis on American history in the USA, that the Tea Party types would have a reasonable understanding of that history. But all too many seem to be modern Know-Nothings (part of American history that deserves more attention).

But maybe it's not a matter of education, as it is a matter of historical opportunism. Grab for the doctrine of Nullification (look it up) if it suits your needs, psychic or tactical, and forget about consistency.

Brad DeLong, an economist who clearly believes economics is or can be a philosophical pursuit, often reflects on what history has to say on a given issue, recently applied a classic thinker's arguments to whether the United States should pay historical reparations to the descendants of slavery. I think that this is a wholly impractical idea, and I've never been all that impressed with the 18th century liberal/conservative (he's called both) Edmund Burke. His positions on the issues of the day were all too often perfectly calculated to defend the interests of himself or his patrons. But he occasionally had a striking insight, as in his prediction of the rise of Napoleon.

Brad makes interesting use of a famous Burkean notion, that society is a contract across the generations, not just among the living. Definitely some problems with that, the devil being in the details. But this post shows the idea deserves to be taken seriously.

I reject the quitclaim deed [Henry Louis Gates -- see the original post] offers: just because there were people with skin of another color on another continent who aided and conspired with my ancestors in their crimes does not mean that I am quits of all obligations as I sit here still enjoying the fruits of their crimes.

This is the reason that when--back in 2003--Andrew Sullivan called me a:

classic example of the arrogant liberal. He supports affirmative action and believes that individuals in 2003 bear a direct responsibility for those people who enacted slavery and made life a living hell for many black Americans in decades and centuries past...

I rejected Sullivan's critique. He was simply wrong. I was not and am not an arrogant liberal on these issues. Instead, the arguments that convince me (and that lead me to reject the quitclaim that Henry Louis Gates offers) are not liberal but conservative ones--Burkean ones, to be exact:

A liberal sees society as a result of a social contract implicitly made between all of us alive today: we agree to live by rules and laws that we then have a chance to rethink, remake, and reform. It's important that this social contract be fair to us. From this perspective, the questions "Why should recent Korean immigrants bear any responsibility for repairing the damage left by the marks of slavery and Jim Crow?" and "Why should African-Americans find their own capabilities and potential accomplishments still limited by the marks of slavery and Jim Crow?" are both very good ones. (Somehow Andrew Sullivan only asks the first, and never thinks to ask the second. But thinking about why would take us far afield.)

I begin from a different point, from the observations that we Americans alive today are all the recipients of an extraordinary and unmerited gift, an inheritance of institutions, principles, and organizations that is without peer anywhere on the world today and that is of inestimable value. We aren't independent liberal individuals making a social contract in the rational light of Enlightenment Reason. Instead, we are heirs who have received an enormous inheritance from our predecessors. As Burke wrote, we:

claim and assert our liberties as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity--as an estate specially belonging to the people.

It's not a contract, or if it is a contract it is not one just between those alive today. Again, as Burke puts it, if you are to think of a social contract you have to recognize that it is not:

a partnership agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico, or tobacco, or some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary interest, and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties.... It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.

But estates that are inherited come not only with assets, they also come encumbered with debts. If we are to be Americans--if we are to take up the wonderul unmerited gift, accept the marvelous entailed inheritance that is offered to us--we must take up not just the benefits and advantages, but also the debts that America owes from its past actions as well. To do otherwise--to ignore the debts while grabbing the goodies with both hands--is to show that we are not the true heirs of Benjamin Franklin and company. And chief among the debts that America owes from its past actions is the obligation to erase the marks left by slavery and Jim Crow....On many issues I am an arrogant liberal. But not this one. On this issue, I'm an arrogant conservative.

Worth reading and thinking about.

Dead Kennedys’ Plastic Surgery Disasters and Christian-Muslim relations in Early Medieval Spain

If you are one of those people who comes here looking for insights into obscure medieval topics, I am afraid I've got nothing for you today -- except, of course, something from Jonathan Jarrett, who is trying to interpret a ninth-century theological treatise written in Muslim -ruled Cordoba, Spain.

And if you want to know what the Dead Kennedys have to do with this, you'll have to read not just the post but the footnotes.

Image: the martyrs of Córdoba at the Last Judgment.

Madison Square Park, New York, c. 1900

From the blog Ephemeral New York. Check it out for images and stories.

Painting "After the Rain" by Paul Cornoyer. Click to see a much larger version.

Coffee shops: Iran's aboveground underground

Trying to find some psychic elbowroom in Tehran's 'Islands Of Forgetfulness:'

While making an espresso Mehrdad [the shop owner] continues: “The present culture of drinking coffee came from university students wanting to stay up for exams, although drinking Turkish coffee was not uncommon in households, especially if it was followed by fortune telling.”

I hear a giggling sound from the table behind me and as I turn I realize that one of the girls has an upside-down cup in her hand, one of the rituals of reading the coffee grounds....

“The majority of customers are lovers, be it a girlfriend-boyfriend couple, a mistress or a lover, fiances, newly married couples, or just interested parties needing a place to sit, look at each other and talk over a coffee," Mehrdad says.

Music Sharing

A young man with a strange hairdo (strange that is to the norms of Iranian society) then came to sit at our table.

His name was Bahador and without hesitation he starts to promote his music. “We've produced this CD ourselves. It's a rock album that has got some air time in San Jose. It would mean a lot to us if you purchase it and support our underground production,” he says.

As I was paying for the original but illegal CD (not bootlegged but illegal because this kind of music is prohibited by the government) Mehrdad whispers, “This is the second group of coffee-shop customers: artists, musicians, writers, and intellectuals.”

“There are no ways and no places for musicians whose work is not approved by the government to promote their music," Mehrdad says as Bahador left our table.

The (American) Middle East Peace Religion

This Foreign Policy article by Aaron David Miller is about official American priorities, policies and assumptions. These are important things to know about, but not to be mistaken for an overall analysis. Still, some readers may find this useful. I liked it for illustrating how perspective changes over time, since I can remember every event mentioned here.

An excerpt:

On October 18, 1991, against long odds and in front of an incredulous press corps, U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III and Soviet Foreign Minister Boris Pankin announced that Arabs and Israelis were being invited to attend a peace conference in Madrid.

Standing in the back of the hall at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem that day, I marveled at what America had accomplished. In 18 months, roughly the time it took Henry Kissinger to negotiate three Arab-Israeli disengagement agreements and Jimmy Carter to broker an Egypt-Israel peace treaty, the United States had fought a short, successful war -- the best kind -- and pushed Iraq's Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. And America was now well-positioned to bring Arabs and Israelis across the diplomatic finish line.

Or so I thought.

Baker, who lowballed everything, was characteristically cautious. "Boys," he told a few of us aides in his suite after the news conference, "if you want to get off the train, now might be a good time because it could all be downhill from here." But I wasn't listening. America had used its power to make war, and now, perhaps, it could use that power to make peace. I'd become a believer.

I'm not anymore.

Venus, Mercury and Luna

Several nights over Portsmouth, England, from Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Student blog competition at Nipissing University

Nipissing University sponsored a student blog competition this past term, and the winners have just been announced. If you want to see life at NU from other perspectives, go here for links to the top three.

That volcano's name

Jeff Sypeck illustrates the rather large distance between Old English (and its cognates in Old Norse) and English now.

Sabbatical score so far -- update 2

I have not updated my sabbatical score since early November. That's about the time a lot of things went out the window. Nevertheless, I have got a lot done since November. You can add this to the earlier list.

• I have -- some time ago actually -- finished a first draft of my translation and commentary on Charny's Questions on War. (Don't be too impressed, it's a short study.) Right now the draft is out with an informed reader who I have asked to find the holes in my presentation.
• I have just finished the paper I will be presenting at Kalamazoo's International Congress on Medieval Studies. It concerns the Chronicle of the Good Duke. The paper may not be really done -- ask me in a few days -- but I could stand up and deliver it now with a good conscience and without dread, if I had to.
• I've also translated a good third of the Chronicle -- about 110 pages in the printed edition.

Despite the distractions and tragedies, I have got quite a bit done. I put it down to motivation. And my realization of how few people get this kind of work situation. It would be a sin to waste it. And I haven't.

Image: Someone else's messy pile of books.

Medieval soldiers' profiles

Once upon a time the scholarly site The Soldier in Later Medieval England had a feature called Medieval Soldier of the Month. It's now called Soldier Profiles. Highly recommended, especially to students who take my 2010 fourth-year seminar on chivalry and medieval men-at-arms.

More volcano pictures

From the Big Picture.

Guess what this is?

Thanks to the photographer; to Brad DeLong; and to Sean Garrison, who always knew we should fear volcanoes.

Source criticism and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon

Just part of a fun, continuing feature: Common Errors (in ancient history).

Tips for amateur scholars

Do you have some serious intellectual interests but not much scholarly training? Do you live in the United States or Canada? Medieval History Geek has a few tips that may help you get at the good stuff...

Volcano photos via TalkingPointsMemo

More here.

Pattern welding

For all you Viking sword fans, Darrell Markewitz at Hammered Out Bits explains the mythology and the reality of the pattern-welded blade. Lots more down-to-earth metalworking lore where that came from!

Image: 205 layers of twisted and hammered iron. DM sez: "Expect to see some images of the finished knife in about a week."

Reflections on an Icelandic volcano

Since I am scheduled to go to Britain at the end of the month, I am watching the Icelandic volcano and the disruption of air travel with more than a little interest.

I have gathered from news reports that this is not a Krakatoa; it's just special geological circumstances and the location of the eruption that endanger extremely busy air routes. Would anyone care if this was happening on South Georgia Island? Besides the 2,000 who live there?

This incident, like the big icestorm that hit Quebec and eastern Ontario about a decade ago, underlines how we (OK, I) expect that complex structures we depend on will just routinely keep working, when there are all sorts of unlikely but perfectly possible catastrophes out there lurking. My favorite one, besides all the climate catastrophes, is a major solar flare that fries every satellite in orbit.

Sweet dreams!

Imperial profits/imperial losses

Keep this story (from McClatchy referred by Juan Cole) in mind when you are thinking about the dynamics of imperialism. It means different things to different people:

For several years, Afghan police recruits under the tutelage of private U.S. government contractors couldn't understand why their marksmanship never improved.

The answer became clear earlier this year. Italian contractors also helping to train Afghan volunteers showed them that the sights on their AK-47s and M-16s had never been adjusted.

"We're paying somebody to teach these people to shoot these weapons, and nobody ever bothered to check their sights?" Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri said, after relating that story at a hearing Thursday.

To McCaskill, who chaired the hearing of the Senate Contracting Oversight panel, it illustrated why the U.S. has spent more than $6 billion on private contractors, but the police-training program remains rife with problems.

"It is an unbelievable, incompetent story of contracts," she said. "For eight years we have been supposed training the police in Afghanistan. We've flushed $6 billion."

Later in the same story:

"Just about everything that could go wrong here has gone wrong," Defense Department Inspector General Gordon Heddell told the subcommittee.

Moreover, the job of an Afghan police officer is exceedingly dangerous. The death rate has risen from about two dozen per month in recent years to about 125 each month, Heddell said.

So what do you think is going to happen?

Libertarianism and feudalism

If you haven't had enough of theories and critiques of libertarianism, have fun with this.

If you are a medievalist, there is some danger your head will explode. On the other hand, that danger may be only marginally greater than it is for anyone else.

Animals as witnesses in medieval English courts

Over at the medieval studies blog In the Middle, Karl Steel has a great post on the legal standing of animals in English courts. I will just quote one of his citations and send you off to see his learned commentary:

If a ship is broken and no living soul escapes from it [de qua nullus vivus evaserit] [,] that may properly be called wreck, especially if the owner has drowned, because the true owner, coming from afar, may prove by certain proofs and signs that the things are his, as where a dog is found alive and it can be established that he is its master; it will be presumed that he is also the owner of the things, and so [also] if certain marks have been placed on the wares and goods.

Here's Karl!

Image: a medieval dog by his presence helping to cure internal injuries.

Total human population

There's a blog out there called Barking Up the Wrong Tree, and someone (Brad DeLong, probably) cited it for a chart showing How Many People Have Ever Lived on Earth?

Here it is:

Year	Population	Births per 1,000	Births Between Benchmarks
50,000 B.C.	2	-	-
8000 B.C.	5,000,000	80	1,137,789,769
1 A.D.	300,000,000	80	46,025,332,354
1200	450,000,000	60	26,591,343,000
1650	500,000,000	60	12,782,002,453
1750	795,000,000	50	3,171,931,513
1850	1,265,000,000	40	4,046,240,009
1900	1,656,000,000	40	2,900,237,856
1950	2,516,000,000	31-38	3,390,198,215
1995	5,760,000,000	31	5,427,305,000
2002	6,215,000,000	23	983,987,500

Number who have ever been born	106,456,367,669
World population in mid-2002	6,215,000,000
Percent of those ever born who are living in 2002	5.8

Source: Population Reference Bureau estimates.

And here's a link to the original source.

Thanks to all involved.

Image: Zanzibar, in memory of John Brunner.

American political debates and (world) history

I often have trouble restraining myself from commenting on US politics in this blog. The USA is a big, important country and no matter what definition of "world history" you adhere to, just ignoring it would wildly distort my commentary. On the other hand, we have so much American news available that it's easy to look at everything from a US point of view.

Sometimes, however, internal historical-political debates in the USA are really important for outsiders to have some acquaintance with, simply because some positions adopted by Americans are a little hard to believe. And American readers of this blog may find it interesting to consider why outsiders might feel that way.

So much for prologue. Today's example comes from the debate over health insurance reform in the USA (I consider that a more accurate term than "health care reform.")
Opponents of HIR have made all sorts of dire claims for the evil consequences of the Obama program, to the point that some of them are harking back to the policies of nullification and secession that defenders of slavery championed, in the name of liberty, in the early 19th century. Some justify their hostility by appealing not so much to "conservative" principles (since many American "conservatives" have proved to be pro-big government) but to "libertarianism."

Self-proclaimed libertarians tend to be cranky individualists, so it's hard to say how much common ground any group of libertarians have. So maybe some of you readers will find it interesting to look at a debate that has spilled out over some forums in the last little bit.

It started at Reason.com with David Boaz writing an article on the theme "There's no such thing as a golden age of lost liberty," which the editors of Reason paired with a critique by Jacob Hornberger which included this passage:

Let’s consider, say, the year 1880. Here was a society in which people were free to keep everything they earned, because there was no income tax. They were also free to decide what to do with their own money—spend it, save it, invest it, donate it, or whatever. People were generally free to engage in occupations and professions without a license or permit. There were few federal economic regulations and regulatory agencies. No Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, bailouts, or so-called stimulus plans. No IRS. No Departments of Education, Energy, Agriculture, Commerce, and Labor. No EPA and OSHA. No Federal Reserve. No drug laws. Few systems of public schooling. No immigration controls. No federal minimum-wage laws or price controls. A monetary system based on gold and silver coins rather than paper money. No slavery. No CIA. No FBI. No torture or cruel or unusual punishments. No renditions. No overseas military empire. No military-industrial complex.

As a libertarian, as far as I’m concerned, that’s a society that is pretty darned golden.

And that really got people going. There were a number of responses, notably at Crooked Timber in this post and its many comments. I think the critics have the better arguments, but whatever you think you may find the debate itself instructive.

Let's go back to the moment to nullification and secession. Some state governors in the USA have found this an appropriate moment to celebrate or even revive Confederate History Month, while of course doing their best to disengage their proud heritage from slavery and Jim Crow. Of all the responses, this one byTa-Nehisi Coates, "The Ghost of Bobby Lee," may be one of the best possible. It's very thoughtful and no one passage can catch its high quality and complexity, but here's one I put on Facebook because I felt it had something to say about how the living use all kinds of history:

What undergirds all of this alleged honoring of the Confederacy, is a kind of ancestor-worship that isn't. The Lost Cause is necromancy--it summons the dead and enslaves them to the need of their vainglorious, self-styled descendants. Its greatest crime is how it denies, even in death, the humanity of the very people it claims to venerate. This isn't about "honoring" the past--it's about an inability to cope with the present.

Image: Politics in the American golden age (it actually is called The Gilded Age): "Bosses of the Senate" by Joseph Keppler, 1889. Click for a larger, more legible image.

Update: a punchy cartoon comment on Confederate History Month.

Natalie Zemon Davis will be at Nipissing University in September

Mark your calendars: the exact date is September 24.

Davis is one of the most eminent historians in Canada, or even North America as a whole today. She is famous for taking difficult sources and putting flesh on them dry bones. Perhaps her most well-known project was interpreting the story of a 16th-century French imposter, Martin Guerre -- a project that produced a book on the case itself, an article on her methodology, and
a movie recreating the story. Like many another historian teaching early modern Europe, I have sometimes used the Martin Guerre material in class. Others, I am sure, have used more recent books -- because Davis is someone interested and skilled at communicating with people who aren't scholars as well as those who are.

It's quite an honor to have Davis accept the History Department's invitation to speak. Take advantage of this opportunity to hear her if you can. More details as available.

Oh, yes, when we are talking about eminence and reaching a broader public, there is this recent honor to make the point.

Orion nebula as it appears in the infrared

From Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Two telling reports from Inside Iraq

Inside Iraq is a blog written by Iraqi employees of the fine American news service, McClatchy.

Here are two recent and telling posts:

Seven Years after ....Occupation or Liberation??

Raid and Search

I am reminded

I have lived in Ontario's Near North for almost 20 years, but you only have to be away from it for a little while to forget how different it is from the places where most people live.

My stay in SW Ontario has been in a merely medium-sized city, in a pretty quiet neighborhood, and the windows of my office overlook a very fine garden.

But a flying visit to the Near North reminded me that at home it is QUIET and the nights are DARK and from my front door the sightlines are LONG. Not to mention being able to see the Milky Way.

Image: someone's photo illustrating Neil Young's "Helpless." Note the trees, rocks, and water.

The future of the past of anthropology

Or was it the other way around?

Yesterday I crossed the Detroit River to see Stephen Christomalis talk about issues in anthropology raised by his recent book, Numerical Notation: A Comparative History. The talk was mainly before colleagues and students of his department At Wayne State University, but they did him proud with a decent catered lunch and a comfortable room to listen in. People were very interested in what Steve had to say, and no wonder. His specific research (I suppose we should say "old" research, now that it's been published) on the invention, life, and abandonment of number systems, is pretty darned cool, and some of it was incorporated in the talk. But he also talked about bigger issues, such as the fact that his numerical notation research has led him to reject usefulness of both a particularist view of anthropological reality (everything is unique), and its polar opposite, universalist approaches. Chrisomalis likes the theory that works 99% of the time. Why not all the time? There is some interesting interaction lurking behind that situation. Then there is his championship of historical anthropology. He made the point that almost all theoretical work in anthropology is based on data from merely the last 100 years. What about cultures that died out before ethnographic investigation was devised? It only stands to reason that things that are not present now or in the recent past may well have existed 10,000 years ago. And an understanding of 10,000 years ago may be vitally important to understanding "human nature."

Well, someone who used to write "Muhlberger's Early History" is not going to argue with that!

Image: Stephen talking.

NGC 602 near the Smaller Magellanic Cloud

From Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Oligarchy, democracy, and conciliar government

Jonathan Jarrett read this earlier post, suggesting that he go to Phil Paine's site and read these posts, and did so. He left a comment here and Phil responded here as well. I thought this conversation good enough to promote all the comments. And here they are:

Jonathan Jarrett said:

I love both those posts, and I'd tell Phil so himself there but I see no room for comments. I do wonder whether, although I agree with his criticism of those historians who tend to see what they know should be in the evidence rather than what might be, Phil isn't guilty himself to an extent of seeing democracy wherever he looks. A social structure such as that he describes in the so-called 'super-towns' seems to me to be as readable as oligarchy as democracy, although I would admit that a community of 3-400 clan heads in an assembly would look quite a lot like an Athenian assembly... It's still really interesting though.

Another possible angle of the historians' perspective: a while back I saw something online, which indeed you may have linked here, about Inner Central Asia, Bukhara and that general (massive) neck of the woods, being a cradle of learning and urban civilisation for many centuries, something which was partly wiped out by the warfare of the Mongol Empire. That, too, reflected on the fact that few people nowadays can easily entertain the idea that there were huge cities there in what to us is the Middle Ages, largely because the area's subsequent history has been so much as the battleground for troops and troops of steppe warriors (I risk betraying much ignorance here). I wonder if the difficulty here isn't the apparent discontinuity with the present-day locations of power rather than the spectres of Athens and Ur. Though, contrariwise, Ur is hardly in a major power zone now. I just find it particularly hard to think my way into that Inner-Asia-high picture of the world, even though I grasp it intellectually, because it's so far off my mental world map of today, and I wonder if that is all educational or if some of it is modern political (or indeed growing up in the Cold War when anything in that area was beyond study).

Thinking in type here, sorry. The Cold War training might be the strongest idea there.

Phil Paine said...

My focus was not on whether the Tripolye towns were "democratic" or not, but on the assumption that they could not be called cities because they had no palaces or temples. It is the Russian archaeologists who excavated them that came to the conclusion that they were governed by some sort of assembly. This is jumping the gun. They are guessing entirely on the basis of the configuration of buildings. Similar building patterns in many cultures around the world are characterized by consiliar management of various kinds. It is not conclusive evidence that they were run by a council. Hence my remark "a consular system, if that was indeed how they were governed".

My point is that Anthony accepts this consiliar interpretation, and because he sees the sites as not showing evidence of aristocracy, he automatically degrades them from "city" status, despite their clear urban nature. The facile equation of urbanization with aristocratic or priestly rule is what I am challenging.

This is part of a long-established notion that conciliar institutions are "primitive" and automatically disappear in a fixed series of "evolutionary" stages of "progress" (presumably toward the sophisticated acme of Napoleon or Stalin). This is the notion that I've always objected to.

Consiliar institutions are widespread in every era and location of the world, usually co-existent and intertwined with aristocratic institutions --- not as exclusive alternative. The balance is constantly shifting between them (the history of Athens or the Iroquois Confederacy show this well), with occasionally one eclipsing the other. Sometimes they can cooperated (as in Novgorod), and at other times they conflict. Historians raised to equate civilization with aristocracy have been systematically blind to evidence of conciliar institutions.

Central Asian cities are a special interest of mine. The Central Asian cities are a perfect example of another sin I complained about, the "accident of sequence". As long as the Soviet Empire existed, and Central Asia remained a modern backwater, global historians showed little interest in the Central Asian cities, despite the fact that they were huge, prosperous and politically powerful for many centuries. Cities as big as anything in Europe, in their day, were routinely discussed as if they were minuscule oases on a caravan route. The paleodemographer Tertius Chandler,asserts that Merv (in Turkmenistan) was briefly the world's largest city in the 12th century. Yet this huge chunk of the Earth is known only vaguely to many people who consider themselves well-read in world history. A great philosopher such as Ibn Sina, for instance, has usually been discussed as if he lived in an abstract Islamic dimension, and not as somebody from Bokhara. But nobody would discourse on Peter Abelard without ever mentioning that he was French.

The Chinese government jams my e-mail, and attempted to take down my site, so I can't leave a comment function open (that's how they jam it), and I can no longer post an e-mail address online. Steve, however, can provide you with an alternative e-mail address if you contact him.

Phil Paine said...

A second thought (sorry, I tend to walk away from a comment and then think of something else to say while out for a bike ride). When one talks about "science" in the Middle Ages or the Ancient world, one doesn't have to constantly fend off objections that it wasn't like what they do now at CERN or CalTech. The differences and similarities between modern scientific practice and the activities of Archimedes and Roger Bacon that underly them are understood. It is still meaningful to talk about Archimedes as a scientist.

But when one brings up the practice of conciliar, or proto-democratic institutions, in ancient times, there is always a flurry of objections of the sort that this and that isn't "true" democracy. But that isn't the issue for someone making the points that I am making. I am concerned with accurately evaluating the historical role of conciliar governance (sometimes called "collective" or "egalitarian" governance, though these terms carry baggage I prefer to avoid). Conciliar governance often involves proto-democratic and sometimes unequivocably democratic procedures. These forms of decision-making by committee, consensus or voting compete with the powerful notion of aristocratic or autocratic rule. This is not a competition that has ever been fully resolved: right now, here in Canada, the Prime Minister is refusing to devulge documents on Canada's military activities in Afghanistan, even though Parliament, which is supposed to be supreme in these matters, has demanded it. A very ancient struggle is going on, one that is well known to students of constitutional history.

The evolutionary scheme absorbed by many historians, on purely theoretical grounds, dismisses conciliar institutions as primitive and irrelevant to civilization. It is this evolutionary scheme that I strenuously object to.

Athens has always been a thorn in the side of that scheme, because it doesn't fit into it at all. So the solution, for many, has been to wall off Athens, or all the Greek city states, into a separate category and to fend off any suggestion that it might not be unique. If Greek democracy is always portrayed as uniquely exceptional, some weird event outside of "normal" cultural patterns, then the a priori scheme of democracy being a negligible "primitive" stage of history can be preserved. If, however, processes similar to those that took place in Athens turn up elsewhere, in different times, places and cultures, then the whole castle of cards trembles and, I hope, can be made to fall.

The issue of Oligarchy is quite relevant to this. All settled communities are vulnerable to aristocratic rule, for the same reasons that all restaurants in big cities are vulnerable to mafia shakedowns. Anyone who has the military skills to kill peasants and burn crops, control trade routes, or extract protection payments is a formidable threat to conciliar self-rule. The majority of human communities have been saddled with some sort of aristocracy. Nevertheless, other forms of decision-making have survived, and occasionally have consolidated enough to keep aristocrats at bay. These are the building blocks of today's existing (and hopefully tomorrow's emerging) democratic polities.

Yes, most of the polities that I describe as "proto-democratic" or "conciliar" were, at best, oligarchies. Athens was best describable as an oligarchy most of the time. Even when the democratic component was on the ascendant, the aristocrats didn't go away... they spent all their time scheming to overthrow or subvert it. Even "modern" democracies face this problem. Anyone familiar with the history of the United States knows that for generations, states like Alabama and Mississippi may have been like Vermont and Wisconsin on paper, but in reality were crude oligarchies enlivened by lynch mobs. Yet that doesn't invalidate the United States as an object for the study of democracy, or eliminate the concept from its history.

Jonathan Jarrett said...

Wow, thankyou for the exhaustive reply, and sorry about the inadvertent straw-man. I shall keep the phrase `accident of sequence' by for the many parallels out there.

You just never know how things are going to go

When I was a kid growing up in Ohio, I was a big fan of American history. (I know you are astonished by this.) I loved mastering the basic facts of history, what are often inaccurately called trivia. Knowing all the states, all the capitals, all the presidents, I loved it. Knowing the obscure facts, of course, was more satisfying than knowing the easy ones. So Millard Fillmore, with the oddball name, was perhaps one of the most satisfying figures to know something about -- just that he existed was pretty good.

I was in the United States recently, and brought back some change. And it is with a peculiar feeling indeed that I report to you that a Millard Fillmore dollar coin sits on my desk right now.

Another treat from Phil Paine

It's only appropriate that my first substantial post in the renamed blog should be about Phil Paine. I have known Phil about as long as I've known anybody and we've always shared a great enthusiasm for a rather expansive view of history. We have bounced many an idea off the other, and occasionally collaborated.

While I was struggling with the migration of this blog from an FTP publishing format to the current one, Phil was reading my more recent posts, putting them together in his mind with his own reading, and coming up with a couple of essays that cover a lot of territory, but in the most interesting way. It all starts with the person whose portrait heads this post, Dorothea Thorpe...