Should history be more scientific?

Me, I've always been a "history is one of the humanities" type, except maybe when I was in junior high school, dreaming of Hari Seldon. But this report from Newsbiscuit may compel me to change my mind. The experimental design is pretty impressive:

St George decanonised after 20 million red cross flags show no measurable effect

In the largest experiment of its kind for four years, the power of St George or his flag to have the slightest influence on worldly events, let alone bring about a miracle, has been proven beyond doubt not to exist. Following a similar outcome in 2006, when the authorities allowed a ‘double or quits’ repeat of the 2002 experiment, the so-called ‘best of five’ experiment has been accepted as conclusive proof.

St George will now be de-canonised in a short ceremony led by the Pope’s envoy Cardinal Capello. The ceremony will take place in a secret location to avoid the possibility of revenge attacks on the Cardinal by members of Opus Dei, furious at how his teaching methods have exposed the inefficacy of flagellation as a technique.

Official observer Professor Richard Dawkins said every conceivable effect on people and objects had been considered for the experiment, which took place in South Africa and involved 90 minute tests involving experimenters kicking a special sphere, called a ‘ball’, around while 20 million St George flags were displayed and prayed to in England,’ said Prof Dawkins.

‘One idea was that the flags could act through the mythical fifth ‘incredibly weak force’ postulated by some physicists. The only possible evidence was some inexplicable movements of the ball in some of the early games, which almost had me believing that God not only existed but was American, but no measurable movement was achieved by England’s technicians.’

There's more where that came from...

Image: The Union flag. Its true meaning revealed?

A night sky near Marjah in Helmand Province, Afghanistan

From the Big Picture.

Nipissing University historian goes to the US Supreme Court

...again! (At least his arguments did.)

Back in 2008, Nathan Kozuskanich, Nipissing University's Early American historian, was cited in supporting material submitted to the United States Supreme Court in regards to a case called "Heller" involving the Second Amendment to the Constitution, the one about bearing arms. Nathan's contribution was specifically to analyze 18th century American sources to see what "bearing arms" meant at the time the amendment was written and passed. His arguments did not win the day for the people who used them, but being noticed at all in that crowded forum is nothing to be sneezed at. Mountains of learned tracts have been written about the Second Amendment; his stood out anyway.

In the past week a second case concerning the interpretation of the Second Amendment, "McDonald," came up to the Supreme Court, and this time, Nathan's name and his crucial article on "bearing arms" were mentioned in the dissent of Justice Breyer ! I am linking to the Google docs version. I found it impossible to search for Nathan's last name or anything else when I followed the link to Google docs, so I will say that when I read the judgment, the citation was on page 3 of Breyer's dissent, page 182 of the file. Justice Breyer's dissent indeed incorporates recognizable logic from Nathan's original article.

We are all proud here to have a colleague playing in the big leagues on important issues.

Image: The Right to Bare Arms, the album.

Best summary of the results of the Iraq war so far

One of the McClatchy bloggers -- an Iraqi reporter for the best American wire service -- looks for celebrations of Sovereignty Day (formal end of the Coalition occupation) , can't find them, and realizes why:

Then I called the Baghdad Municipality office – They must know if an event is to take place in Baghdad, but, no, there was nothing.

"Last year we were informed weeks in advance in order to make preparations – It's 2.30 already and until this moment we have received nothing. I doubt very much that there will be any celebration tomorrow".

Still not convinced that the incumbent government is not taking advantage of this anniversary to boost its standing in the talks to form a government (that are not making any progress), I called our source within the interior ministry – Maybe he had an idea.

"Sovereignty Day?? What sovereignty?? And who is to hold the celebration?? The government? What government??" [The elections some months back have still not produced a ruling coalition in parliament; there is only an interim government and negotiating parliamentary factions. -- SM]

I put down the phone.

Indeed – What sovereignty? And what government?

This occupation opened the door for powerful winds – and they entered and are blowing, still.

Iraq has become a plain on which international and regional forces are struggling for supremacy. A tug of war between the Shiites in Iran and the Wahabis in Saudi – between the Kurds, whether in Iraq, Turkey or Iran, and the Arabs – between forces that want to keep the country together and forces that want to rip it apart.

And in the midst of all this – I think the government has actually forgotten Sovereignty Day.

It is as if Sovereignty Day does not exist.

There you have it.

Image: Iraqi sandstorm.

Coming up in a hard school, 1247

An entry in Matthew Paris's English History shows that even king's brothers might have to earn respect from other knights the hard way:

Of a tournament held at Newbury.

On Ash-Wednesday, a grand tournament was held at Newbury amongst the knights of England, to try their knightly prowess and strength; and as the king was favourable to it, it began and ended well. At this tournament, William de Valence, the king's uterine brother, a novice, conducted himself with great daring, in order to acquire a famous name in chivalry; but being of tender age, and not able to sustain the force of the hardy and marshalled knights, he was thrown to the ground, whereby he suffered considerable losses, and was well batoned, in order that he might receive his apprentisage in knighthood.

Image: A Matthew Paris illustration.

Update: A reader asks, in comments, what "well batoned" meant. To me it means that the tourneyers were using batons instead of sharp weapons. In other words, they beat the snot out of him, but not in a way that would leave permanent damage.

Update 2: Will McLean on "well batoned."

Update 3: After looking at available Latin dictionaries, classical and medieval, I think baculatus, the word Matthew Paris uses, is best translated by the phrase Will cites, "thoroughly beaten." I can't find any citations of a word in bac- that means a sword or sharp weapon.

History of language: higher education can be fun

Stephen Chrisomalis is a fun and spirited guy, as I can attest from personal contact. Read this account of in-class research on the history of the word "chairperson" and see if you don't agree that it sounds like practically the Platonic ideal of an undergraduate course-meeting:

Last week I was running a very similar lecture to the one I always, on language and gender, where we talk about whether there are innate sex differences in language usage (not really), whether there are gender differences (yes, albeit highly context-dependent), blah blah blah. We talk about the myth that women talk more than men and get into some of the issues relating to social power. But that’s it. Even though it’s a topic a lot of students are interested in, I hadn’t ever come out of that session feeling as if we had learned anything in particular, or done anything out of the ordinary.

And then we found chairperson. It had ended up on the list of topics I was preparing on the subject, and when I showed the list to my class, they honed in on it right away. We actually started by investigating ‘chairman’, ‘chairwoman’, and ‘chair’, as well – all three are attested in the OED from the 17th century. ‘Chair’ as a title held by a person was surprisingly early (not just ‘he held the chair’ but ‘he was the chair’) at 1658. This alone, based on two minutes’ search of the OED, was worthwhile as a lesson to the students, because chair, too, has been the subject of some ideologically-charged metalanguage. I had thought that I might show them how we could examine the frequency of the various terms on a decade-by-decade basis. But chairperson, sitting there with its date of 1971, was far too tempting a target.

And so off we went on our lexical excursion. I didn’t expect much, maybe to find a few from the 60s, then move on with my demonstration of other techniques. The usual Googlery didn’t produce much of interest – not least because of the wacky metadata in Google Books and Google News Archive, producing thousands upon thousands of misdated records and more than one feisty embuggerance. (Oh, and PS, Google, when I search for chairperson do not show me results for chairman automatically.) I cursed once or twice at the Great God of Search, against my normal classroom practice (uhh … you can stop laughing now.) But Proquest, oh, sweet Proquest, how you came through for me. So instead of 1971, we have the following four early attestations:

1899 Washington Post Jul 15, pg. 6 “Indignant Womanhood”

“Madame Chairperson,” exclaimed the delegate, earnestly, “I feel the force of all that has been said concerning the necessity for us, the women of the nation, to nominate a clean candidate!”

Read the rest here.

Matthew Paris: obsessed?

A while back I noted that Matthew Paris, the 13th century English chronicler, seemed to be hung up on the words oppressions, extortions, and papal legate. And having now quickly gone through volume 2 of the 19th century edition of his English History, I now suggest that what he was really obsessed about was the subject of money. When he talks about tyranny, when he talks about corruption, when he talks about vice, he almost always follows that up with a story about money. Or occasionally, income from land. Or illegitimate taxation. Or some other kind of property.

Sometimes he'd just break into a whole riff about money, as here, where he was talking about King Louis's need for more cash in the middle of his expensive crusade:

There was now sent to him as much money in talents, sterling coin, and approved money of Cologne (not the base money of the Parisians, or of Tours), as eleven waggons, to each of which were four strong horses, could be loaded with, together with some beasts of burden by which it was carried to the sea-coast, where it was received on board some Genoese ships, to be transported to the needy king, with also no small quantity of provisions. Each waggon carried two large iron-hooped casks, prepared for the purpose, filled with the aforesaid money, all of which had been extorted from the property of the Church during a period of three years. And what end was gained by it the following narrative will fully show.

You can almost see Matthew rubbing his hands together like Uncle Scrooge about to jump into his swimming pool full of cash. Or maybe Matthew saw himself driving the wagon, cracking the whip over sweating oxen, and cackling maniacally. If these visions seem a little extreme to you, look at the Chronicle yourself. We all have our dreams, and I am sure that Matthew's were about solid, high-quality coinage, and lots of it.

Image: an English penny of Matthew's time.

The Toronto morality play

Players:

• the Black Bloc, whoever they are; motives, radicalize the rubes, have some fun at Toronto's expense.
• the current federal government with an assist from Ontario's cabinet; motive, to make Stephen Harper look tough and as an upholder of order against chaos, unlike all those wimps who keep talking about civil liberties. (Ontario government motives: ??)
  
• the Ontario and Toronto police; motives, to acquire new security toys and a mandate to use them. See "wimps who keep talking about civil liberties," above.
• ordinary protestors who didn't see the trap and their own roles in the play.
• ordinary Torontonians and other Ontarians, including especially those ordinary resident of the university area who are being dragged in entirely for being in the wrong place; they thought they weren't in the play at all, but they are paying for the tickets, the theater, and the cleanup.
• the rest of Canada gets to pay, too.

Cost of the morality play: $1,000,000,000 up front plus damages, serious injuries to the political and civic culture of Canada and its largest city, usually a pretty civilized place.

Update:

The abbey of St. Albans before the Reformation

From a site devoted to Matthew Paris's home -- one of the bigger monasteries in England.

Dean Bavington's Managed Annihilation is out!

Details here and here.

Boy, do I feel dumb! Afghan railways

I like to think of myself as smart and well-informed, more interested in world history and comparative history than other people, and sensitive to the little details that change the big picture.

I guess I have to revise that self-image. I just found out today, thanks to Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post, that Afghanistan has never built a railway of any particular length, that it is not connected to the greater network of Asian railways.

Here is my excuse: back in the 1920s, Afghanistan had a modernizing King named Amanulla. After reading Before Taliban about two years ago, I was aware that he built or at least started to build, a railway from Kabul. I know that he came to a bad end and was replaced by a more standoffish government, in typical Afghan style, but it never occurred to me that this was pretty much the end of railway building in Afghanistan! The Soviet military had big plans and actually laid some track, but the anti-Soviet resistance took care to see that it didn't get very far. In more peaceful times, the Kabul government has usually been opposed to the extension of foreign lines into Afghanistan, since those plans were almost always sponsored by the government of British India or the government of Russia.

I really should have known, since I've seen lots of pictures of the Khyber Pass. If you have seen them too, you'll notice that there's nary a track, and no place to hide one, either. Furthermore, that I was teaching first-year world history, I found that it was difficult to talk about and illustrate 19th-century developments without lots of pictures of locomotives. It was the prestigious symbol of modernization and development in those times -- and into the 20th-century, too. I should've been sensitive to the fact that there are no such pictures of Afghanistan, and what pictures of Afghanistan there are have no locomotives.

The lack of rail transport in Afghanistan is not just a symbol of the country's rejection of the outside world, it is one of the major concrete policies that Afghan governments have usedto guarantee of outsiders will not, in somebody's words,plunge a knife into the vitals of the country. (Of course they have had to deal with large-scale air transport for long time now, and there are highways, but that doesn't take away from the original point. See what Eugene Robinson has to say about the prospects of mining in Afghanistan.) I am sure that not everyone feels that way about the outside world, but enough do.

If you're interested in the railways of Afghanistan, such as they are, see this excellent article on the web and its various links.

Image: somebody else's railway.

Juan Cole on the prospects of American success in Afghanistan

Lessons of Petraeus’ Iraq for Petraeus’ Afghanistan is a detailed and sensible discussion. It is particularly useful for its summary of the Iraq war and the current situation there.

Image: Iraqis protesting the lack of electricity in the sweltering summer.

Imperial rule, then and now

Juan Cole, the Middle East scholar and political commentator, wrote in his blog today an article entitled "McChrystal Drama is Sideshow; Can Obama define a realistic Goal?" If you have been paying attention to Afghanistan policy, you can write a summary of the post from the title.

More interesting, in a way, and more appropriate for this blog, is a long comment by someone called hquain, which I will reproduce here:

Here’s a follow-up question: what would a “realistic set of goals” consist of? We can enumerate the possibilities easily enough ourselves… should any at all come to any mind.

I’d suggest that Afghanistan represents the typical situation in which global ‘goals’ are generated post hoc to cover for a complex dynamical process that is dominated by a multitude of contending forces and incentives, themselves often quite local in scope if not in impact.

The military — one of the actors now and no mere tool — has set up shop in Pentagonistan, a wealthy country all of its own that overlies the Afghan wretchedness, where new hardware and software is beta-tested in an endless live-fire exercise, where the officer corps gets its promotion-worthy combat cred, where McChrystal Pasha and his like inflate their theories of dominion and control, cushioned by inexhaustible billions. They don’t need goals; they have plentiful incentives to stay the course from week to week, month to month, year to year.

Other networks of advantage, real and imagined, can surely be discerned in the worlds inhabited by each of the parties to the situation, starting with simple inertia (change itself being costly) and branching out in many directions, at many scales.

The question, then, is what the use would be of declaring a set of goals, even ‘realistic’ ones, should they exist. Perhaps they could serve temporarily as a force in the local calculus, pushing us to get out sooner rather than later; but we shouldn’t think of the situation as one controlled by long-term goals, so that all we have to do is pick the right ones to control it.

Hquain here talks about American foreign policy, and American occupation of Afghanistan, in the politics of this particular war in the way I might talk about a distant empire of the past. Say, perhaps, the ancient Persian empire that Alexander conquered and swallowed. The writer reminds us of a number of things here, that wars and imperialism are complicated phenomena,
and that anything really important is not accomplished by large groups motivated by monomaniacal collective goals, but by individuals and relatively small groups motivated by their own particular interests, whether mystical and apocalyptic or more down-to-earth, like worries about where the next meal is coming from. The reference to Pentagonistan not only reminds us that there is not a single American policy or set of interests in the Middle East, but many. It specifically reminds me of something I read years ago and incorporated into many lectures. Namely, that the Spanish army of Flanders, which in the 16th century was put together to crush the Dutch revolt and was also aimed at one point at the conquest of England (think Armada 1588), had more troops and a larger "national debt" than just about any polity in Europe at the time.

This makes me wonder how CENTCOM, the American Middle Eastern command based in Tampa Florida, compares in size to the other national capitals of the world. Where would it be rated by number of personnel employed? CENTCOM surely is more important, better armed and better financed than any central American country (not including Mexico, which should be counted as North American).

When world events of the present are happening to people like you and your neighbors, it is difficult to take a detached view. If people talk consistently like America or Canada or other countries are individuals with single, rationally calculated wills, we start thinking that there is a single Canada or America or Honduras.

Once we break free from that illusion, however, we may realize that there is a Pentagonistan, one hardly restricted to the boundaries of Afghanistan, whose relationship to the United States of America and its government cannot be understood simply by looking at the Constitution of the United States or the organization table showing the formal relationship of the various generals, admirals, joint chiefs, presidents, cabinets, and members of Congress.

That was quite a thought-provoking comment, hquain and not a single egregious insult in it. Go forth, reader, and do likewise.

Image: what is the name of this country? Where are its boundaries?

Speaking of early history...

...I have recently been introduced to Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog: The outlandish, the anomalous and the curious from the last five thousand years.

It looks like it will be fun. If you're curious look at the latest post, World’s last Latin speakers in Africa?

Here is an excerpt:

Beachcombing guesses that the latest Latin speakers were those on the outskirts of the collapsing Empire, where there was the need to keep Latin ‘proper’, while these often bilingual invariably barbarian communities grasped onto their fading Roman identity as the world went soggy around them. As such the bilingual inscriptions of sixth- and seventh-century Wales (Irish-Latin) are interesting because the Latin there seems to show characteristics of a spoken language. And this at a date when the Romance languages were becoming increasingly unlatin-like.

For Beachcombing though an even more exciting reference appears in the work of Muhammad Al Idrisi in the mid twelfth century. Al Idrisi, an Andalusan Arab writer, wrote in A Diversion for the Man Longing to Travel to Far-Off Places – a work best known for carrying the earliest reference to Italian pasta – that the inhabitants of Gafsa in what is today Tunisia ‘are Berberised and the majority speak African Latin’. Could these have been the last Latin speakers in the world? It is a nice story, but Al Idrisi then gives the name of the town spring as tarmīd (a word still used today) that does not sound particularly Ciceronian…

Carnivalesque returns, and brings us Antioch

Carnivalesque, the carnival of early history blogs, is back -- over at Cranky Professor. And the first of its links takes us to Zenobia: Empress of the East, whose author Judith Weingarten, a fan of all things associated with the Eastern Empire, left in May to travel to Hatay (or Antakya), the city that now arises from the spot where the ancient Antioch once stood. To let us abandoned readers share in some of the fun she looks at an interesting Turkish initiative to reconstruct the old city. It is some challenge, because the current incarnation of the settlement is entirely modern -- if you stretch the idea of modern just a little bit. Certainly there is nothing there to suggest a city that once thought of itself as Rome's rival.

Apparently that has not stopped the Turkish scholar, Dr Kayhan Kaplan of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Mustafa Kemal University in Hatay, who at this site has posted reconstruction of what the old city may have looked like, from four different angles. It looks like the site is entirely in Turkish, but you don't have to read Turkish to enjoy this.

As Judith Weingarten points out, there are limits to this kind of reconstruction, but it gives people something to argue about, and progress is possible:

Needless to say, archaeologists and historians are going to argue about his recreations for a good many years. In fact, Antiochepedia has already thrown down the gauntlet on nine points of topography (e.g., were the river branches narrower? should the island's southern tip be more pointed? that kind of stuff). For the rest of us, it is simply stunning and gives us a real "feel" of ancient Antioch.

I agree entirely with Antiochepedia: "In the good old days, Dr Kaplan might have been cheered along the Colonnaded Street for this job!"

There is more good stuff at Zenobia, and at Cranky Professor for that matter.

Image: Antioch as depicted on the Peutinger map, a medieval copy of a Roman original.

Discouraging reflections on Canada's war in Afghanistan

When I was a teenager I lived in the United States. Over in Vietnam, there was a war going on and Americans were fighting in it. For much of the time, however, it was hard to believe that there was a war going on.

Now it is equally hard to believe that Canada is at war in Afghanistan, most of the time. I keep thinking that it is somebody else's war. But we have bought into it, and Canadians are fighting and killing and being killed. I keep running into appealing young Canadians who are anxious to do their duty, or have already done it, and fortunately come back in one piece. I find it very hard to say anything much to them, except express good wishes, because I have a feeling that this war, like all previous invasions of Afghanistan over the past two centuries, is going to end badly for the invaders. And let's face it, we are invaders.

Though some people may find this a frivolous remark, I take my pessimism from my reading of George McDonald Fraser's Flashman, the first of a long and well-written satirical series about a fictional British soldier of the 19th century, on the surface a great hero of the Empire, in actuality a cunning cowardly opportunist who never did the right thing except for a bad reason. The novel Flashman is set in the first British-Afghan war, 1839-42. In it, Britain intervened in Afghanistan for reasons that seem sufficient at the time, sets up a friendly government in Kabul, only to see that government lose support and be replaced by much more hostile one, which first expels the British Army holding Kabul and then slaughters it down to the last man as it retreats to British India. In the novel young Harry Flashman survives; in real life it was somebody else and he was the only survivor.

I read this novel about 1970, and so it had a fair amount of influence. At least I knew something about the first Afghan war and how it went off the rails, even before the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979, and its occupation went off the rails. It has simply been for a long time a piece of my historical understanding then invaded Afghanistan is a bad idea, and setting up a friendly government there through occupation is unlikely to work. The Russian experience in Afghanistan and the American experience in Vietnam and the French experience in both Vietnam and Algeria are all in my skull, and though I think the Taliban are despicable, I have wondered from most of the past decade why anyone would think things would go differently this time.

The answer seems to be that policymakers in the Imperial capital live in dream world of personal or collective ambition where getting out a message of confidence and this time it will work out is far more important than the facts on the ground in the actual theater of operations. Next to nobody in Washington with real authority knows any Afghan language, or seems to see Afghanistan itself as anything but a stepping-stone to some greater goal. Canadian government circles have adopted the goal of supporting the United States and NATO while afflicted with a similar ignorance.

I am not passing myself off as some kind of expert on the affairs of Afghanistan. But I can say that every realistic and detailed discussion of the country I have read in recent years supports my pessimistic view that one day NATO and the United States will just have to leave Afghanistan, and Canada's Afghan war will be over. The resulting disorder in Afghanistan will probably be terrible-- it's terrible now -- but what Stephen Harper or Bob Rae think about things there will have absolutely no effect on how things work out.

If you feel like following this up, I suggest you recent discussions of the Afghan situation. One of them is by a well-known British-Pakistani leftist writer, Tariq Ali. He's been around a long time and knows something about how the world works. If a lefty critic who thought that the Vietnam War was a terrible mistake is too much for you, even though he was broadly right, why not go to one of the few nonpartisan American sources, the McClatchy news service, and read one of their recent articles entitled, very directly: Experts: U.S. has no long-term political strategy for Afghanistan.

After nine years. No long-term strategy. You tell me how it is going to work out.

Update: For more along this line, Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek says this (my emphasis):

As Barack Obama goes through one of his most difficult periods as president, you might wonder what it would have been like if the other guy had won. We will never know, of course, but in one area, John McCain provides us with some clues. He would have tried to overthrow the government of Iran. In a speech on June 10, later published as a cover essay in The New Republic, McCain urged that we "unleash America's full moral power" to topple the Tehran regime. The speech highlights one of the crucial failings of McCain's world view, one in which rhetoric replaces analysis, and fantasy substitutes for foreign policy.

Well said, except it's not just McCain's world view, and those failings include a distorted image of America's role in world affairs.

Image: Canadians in Kandahar

A Torontonian explains why he is supporting Cote d'Ivoire in the World Cup

"My ex-girlfriend lived there for a few months."

Neither Canada nor Trinidad (his personal heritage choice) is in it, you see.

Thanks to CBC Radio news for that one..

A recent look at Kyrgyzstan

I have been getting a fair number of hits on my existing posts on Kyrgyzstan, presumably from people looking for up-to-date news and commentary on the crisis there. I have to admit that I have been paying no attention to this situation at all. However, the people at The Big Picture have been, and so their site now features a photo essay of events from the past week or so.

Image: Ethnic Uzbeks fleeing the country.

Medieval Blue

I won't steal Jeff's find, just direct you to it.

Say no more, say no more

What to do?

What do I do when I find an extensive, insufficiently credited passage of my Overview of Late Antiquity, available freely on the web since 1996, has been incorporated verbatim into someone else's printed book?

A kind review from Phil Paine

Phil has written a short review of my book Deeds of Arms. I reprint it here largely because it contains one beautiful passage I wish I'd written, and which I will want to refer to in the future:

(Steven Muhlberger) Deeds of Arms ― Formal Combats in the Late Fourteenth Century

Steve has outdone himself with this parvum opus. It's an exemplary work of focused history, with everything there in the right quantities and proportions. Medieval western Europe was a military society in which tournaments --- group or single combat done by rules and for the display of prowess --- had a profound significance, affecting far more than their immediate participants. Success in deeds of arms could bring more mere celebrity. In a society where aristocracy justified itself itself primarily by courage in battle, it was the key to upward mobility and power. Learning how this kind of combat nullo interveniente odio (without rancor) was done and celebrated gives us insight into how medieval society worked. The Middle Ages, especially its upper reaches of power, smelled of blood, sweat, dung and horses. This book is a fine antidote to those that retrofit the era with a kind of abstract geopolitical aura, something like an EU Barosso Comission report delivered by board members unaccountably wearing hose and plate armor. Those who have only a passing interest in chivalry or deeds of arms will find this book refreshingly compact, clear and informative. Those with a deeper interest will not find it wanting in depth of scholarship and understanding.

Fellini's Roma (1972)

I haven't seen a lot of Fellini movies, and I certainly missed this one when it first came out. It may be just as well -- I don't know if I would have appreciated it back then. A couple of nights ago, on the other hand, I found it mesmerizing, something I had to watch and enjoyed watching just as a fascinating object. Such movies had more appeal to me than when I was younger.

One does not have to be a genius to see that there must be a large amount of autobiographical reflection in this movie. There are scenes that might be from Fellini's childhood, More from the wartime era, and quite a few from 1972 or thereabouts. There is no plot, just a certain number of realistic but satirical scenes and others that are more fantastic.

One scene I could not find on the web somebody described to me long ago. I was glad to finally see it. The camera follows an official through the perpetually under-construction Roman subway system, during which he complains about how hard it is to make any progress when there are so many archaeological finds in the way, some of which are so significant that the tunnels have to be rerouted. Then the workers detect a great hollow space along the current route. They break through into the space and find it is a Roman villa whose walls are covered with brilliantly preserved paintings of Roman men and women. And then... and then... as workers and officials and out-of-town visitors all watch, the outdoor air corrodes the paintings, and they suddenly and completely disappear.

Then there is this indescribable scene::



This movie also had a lot of shots of the richest and cleanest and most spectacularly dressed hippies I have ever seen, hanging around the fountains of Rome (and in one scene being beaten up by cops while older rich people watch). Were they for real?

This appeals to my World History "bump"

... to use some out-of-date ("historical") slang! (Think phrenology.)

The other day I stumbled across an anthropological blog called Savage Minds, which included this story by Rex (Alex Golub) that combines globalization, ecological policy and business, democracy and possibly indigenous rights. I will include an excerpt here, but the whole post is worth reading and it's not really very long. It concerns developments in Papua New Guinea, mostly famous in the outside world for being the home of headhunters, at least once upon a time. Now it is an obscure but very interesting case of postcolonial development.

The government of Papua New Guinea recently amended the country’s Environment Act to make it illegal to appeal permitting decisions made by the minister. The immediate reason for this change is clear — the national government relies on large, internationally-financed resource developments to fund it budget. The Ramu NiCo mine in Madang province, majority-owned and operated by a Chinese firm [urk! --SM], is planning to dispose of tailings by dumping them into the sea — a move that many, many people in Madang oppose. When anti-mining groups got an injunction against the mine, the government responded by making it illegal to oppose their decision to let the mine go ahead.

...The big picture is that Papua New Guinea is torn — between politicians in Moresby who are want to use mining revenue to enrich and develop the nation, and grassroots Papua New Guineans who don’t see why they should suffer so others can gain the benefits of mining revenue. When Papua New Guinea became independent in 1975, the country inherited the benevolent paternalism and technocratic confidence of its colonizers — the first generation of educated Papua New Guineans were going to lead the country forward and help develop the grassroots in the name of national progress. Now the worm has turned and Papua New Guinea’s leadership seems to see Papua New Guineans as ungrateful and stubborn — after a peaceful protest organized by Transparency International outside parliament, the prime minister called those who participated “satanic and mentally insane”.

...Papua New Guinea is torn between two different idioms to express this conflict between grassroots and the political elite. Within the country, the language used is that of the nation: ironically, the nation-making project of the independence period was so successful that many Papua New Guineans now see themselves as uniting against the state in the name of national unity. Externally, however, the language used to describe these conflicts is that of indigeneity. Coverage of recent events by a UN-sponsored website, for instance, describe the problem as one in which “indigenous people lose out on land rights”.

What I do not say in the article — since it is all scholarly and everything — is how incredibly disappointed I am in the government of Papua New Guinea. Democracy is not fun or easy, and the paralysis induced by lawsuits can be a huge pain, but the solution to these problems is not and can never be removing people’s rights to participate in the processes that will affect their lives. This is particularly true in the case of Ramu, where environmental concerns are justified and deeply felt, not simply cynically used as tactics in a political process. Transparency, accountability, and participation are all incredibly stupid and ridiculously ineffective ways to run a government — but we chose them because democracies put people’s rights ahead of convenience or practicality.

Additionally, I am very uncomfortable with labelling this as a conflict featuring ‘indigenous’ people — despite the fact that I know appealing to international forces using the idiom of indigeneity is often yields useful leverage in political contests like the one at Ramu. But in fact Papua New Guineans are indigenous only in the (often oppressive) eco-authentic sense: they are brown, they have ‘exotic’ languages and cultures, and they live in a place full of endangered species of animals. They are not, however, ‘indigenous’ in the much more important political-emancipatory sense: there is (and was) no real settler colonialism in Papua New Guinea, no large scale expropriation of land, and not even an ethnic majority to oppress minority groups. Despite how easy it is for outsiders to shoe horn Papua New Guinea into popular and easy paradigms of indigenous struggle, such a construal of Papua New Guinea’s story does not do the country justice.

Eco-authentic definitions of indigeneity perpetuate stereotypes of Papua New Guinea as savage backward by giving them a positive moral valuation. They obscure from sight the large number of educated Papua New Guineans, and they stigmatize Papua New Guineans’ decisions to take part in urban, cash-based economies as an abandonment of precious indigenous heritage.

Most importantly, however, these idioms tempt Papua New Guineans to give up on their country and its government. With corruption in the civil servant rampant and elections in Papua New Guinea too-often a mere shadow of genuine democracy (there is video footage of political henchmen unapologetically — and literally — stuffing ballot boxes), it is easy these days for Papua New Guineans to opt out, to declare the government an illegitimate opponent of the grassroots rather than to hold it to account as the voice of the people. Perhaps they do not need the ‘indigenous alternative’s’ help in abandoning any conception of state legitimacy. But I think Papua New Guinea loses something important when it gives up on its dreams of independence and self-government. Even though it may require people to dig deep, I would urge Papua New Guineans not to give up on the light at the end of the tunnel, and to insist that they are citizens, not indigenes, of Papua New Guinea.

Image: Madang market.

Reflections on Iran, one year after

A year after the stolen election and the rise of the Green movement in Iran, Foreign Policy has a collection of articles by Iranian-American journalists: Misreading Tehran: Leading Iranian-American writers revisit a year of dreams and discouragement.

A clip from Teodora, imperatrice di Bisanzio (1954)

The legends of the Empress Theodora were pretty extreme back in the 6th century, back when she was alive. But you can always count on a modern filmmaker to add more:


Here's another short piece:



The actor playing Theodora was Wilma Aris; I don't know who played Justinian, but he looked the part.

Thanks to Paul Halsall for the tip.

The great battle continues in Egypt

Ever since Muslim armies took control of Egypt, the relationship between Muslim governors and Christians has been a source of controversy. As Aljazeera English points out in this video report, the practical answer to such problems -- pretty typical of most empires at most times -- that the conquered people should be allowed to maintain their own customs under their own (religious) leaders, this answer can be a problem itself.

Note: the church architecture, Christian art, and ecclesiastical costume. I've never seen them so clearly...

A nod to China

I generally don't say much about China, since I don't teach China save occasionally in World History. Shame on me.

I felt I could not overlook this Daily Kos diary about the reaction to a wave of suicides in Foxconn's very, very large electronics factory in Shenzhen (see image showing a Foxconn produced motherboard from a couple of years back). The diary cites this New York Times article, which I excerpt:

The Foxconn Technology Group, a giant contract electronics manufacturer that experienced a series of worker suicides, said it would raise salaries by at least 30 percent, more than previously indicated.

...

“It’s been a while since we increased wages, hence the decision,” Mr. Ding said on Wednesday. The company supplies Apple, Hewlett-Packard and other large technology companies.

At least 10 people have died this year at Hon Hai’s manufacturing complex in Shenzhen, and the police are treating the deaths as suicides.

Foxconn’s chairman has rejected accusations from labor rights groups that the firm is a sweatshop and last week opened the Shenzhen plant to the media.

According to the DK diary, there has been a wave of strikes in China. See the diary for more information.

Huge export-oriented factories controlled by the communist elite of China have been a key factor in the world economy for quite some time now. If these strikes are being met by concessions, this could have a big impact on us all. It does make me wonder what is behind them.

It's hard being an oligarch, out on the street.

Martian war machines

At this link you will find a very scary piece of video, sent to me by my Czech friend, Filip Marek. Someone has mangled it, and the beginning is missing, but it appears to be a legitimate Channel 4 documentary out of Britain. And what is documented in this is pretty scary: the use of remote-controlled drone aircraft, whose controllers are enlisted personnel with basic computer skills based in Arizona, to attack people in the eastern hemisphere, whose countries the United States is not at war with. I have heard about this before, but this presentation is very hard hitting.

Let's just think about one point raised in the video, by implication: wouldn't any counterattacks against the Arizona base be considered by the US government to be terrorism? And in fact wouldn't terrorism be one of the few possible responses to robot attacks from the air? And then we are presented with the information that the recent Times Square bomber was inspired by a desire to get revenge for such airborne attacks...

In the end it may simply be a lack of fuel that may save us from a really terrifying kind of war.

This brings back to me one of the more terrifying visions of the future I have ever had. In the movie Apocalypse Now there is an amazing scene where the US helicopters fly into battle -- a battle that involves shooting people on the ground who may or may not be the enemy -- playing the Ride of the Valkeries on a really good sound system.


I realized then that the Martian war machines were no longer H. G. Wells' vision from a fantastic feature, but a reality. Mine wasn't really a vision of the future, of course, despite my words above. It was a vision of the past.

Now I've got another one to match.

The difficulties of adapting a religious tradition

Over at Informed Comment, Juan Cole has an interesting take on the recent proposal by a few Saudi clerics that "breast-milk feeding should be used as a way of establishing kinship between men and women, which would then allow the two to be in each others’ presence when the woman is alone and unveiled," which would be helpful, for instance, if a man and a woman worked in the same office.

I took this as sheer nuttiness from one of the most rigid (and atypical) religious establishments in the Muslim world, but Cole says no:

The things driving this legal advice or fatwa are first of all that Saudis mostly practice the Wahhabi form of Islam and people in the Arabian Peninsula generally tend to be more strict about the notion of gender segregation. Segregating women from unrelated males and having them veil when they go out of the house is not in the Qur’an ...

Most Muslim women in history never veiled or were secluded. Pastoral nomads were a significant proportion of most Middle Eastern societies, and their women rode camels and horses outside during migrations to where the pasturage popped up. And peasant women worked the fields and could not be secluded or mostly afford to veil. Only in the past two centuries has veiling and sometimes seclusion been adopted in some Muslim countries as a sign of upward mobility (since these were aristocratic customs they are ways of putting on airs if you bet better off some year).

Since the Saudi religious authorities are so worried about secluding women, they are inevitably also worried about the ways in which contemporary societies and economies increasingly make such practices (which were only practical in the past for the very rich anyway) impossible.

Thus the appeal to “milk kinship.” Now, milk kinship is in fact a social institution in premodern Muslim societies, but it was not typically appealed to with regard to loosening gender segregation (which anyway was not so common in the medieval period). Where upper-class families had a nanny she might breastfeed the aristocratic baby at the same time that she breastfed her own infant, and that practice was considered to make the children a kind of sibling. Then the aristocratic could never take the daughter of his nanny to wife, and he might give special promotions or patronage to his ‘milk brother,’ the nanny’s son. These customs existed everywhere from Iran to Senegal, though they affected a small sliver of Muslim society.

...

If you weren’t religious or weren’t Wahhabi, you could just suggest that strictures on women and men mixing socially are hidebound and more customary than Islamic, and just change the practice. Hundreds of millions of modern Muslims practice gender mixing (Saudi Arabia, which Westerners often misunderstand as having a normative Islam, is viewed by most Muslims as an outlier). In fact, the spread of the headscarf in places like Egypt is probably not a sign so much of increased female conservatism but an attempt to make it all right for women to enter the public sphere in much greater numbers (also women wearing headscarfs are a little bit less likely to be pinched and harassed by men in public). But such an argument would not work in Saudi Arabia, where the authorities are zealous about Wahhabi tradition.

...

So the Saudi clerics are tinkering with the tradition, since in the past it concerned a wetnurse and children under 5, not adult women and adult men. And when that change is made, it becomes weird. But it isn’t a sign of conservatism (it departs from the traditional custom into new territory). It is a sign of modernism. It is an attempt to create a wider circle of men with whom women can legitimately interact in public.

It occurs to me that this effort at modernism may be worth thinking about when arguments about the use of the hijab, the niqab, or the burka come up, as it has in Canada recently.

Any of my grad students out there?

I will be teaching a seminar in Nipissing University's Masters program in history this year. I believe that it is called HIST 5216, Topics in European History, but what it really will be is a seminar nicknamed "Medieval Historians." I do not expect that any of my students who come into this course knowing a lot about medieval historians or even the Middle Ages.

If by any chance, any of students in the fall come across this post, and has a little time on the hands, let me suggest you go here to read something I wrote back in the 90s that will help you with at least the first third of the course. It is The Overview of Late Antiquity, a brief summary of what I learned about the earliest Middle Ages, also called Late Antiquity, during the time I was a graduate student and a young professor digesting a tremendous amount of material thrown at me during my education. It is specifically aimed at an audience that needs some basic concepts and terms spelled out for it. Even though we all have to start at a pretty basic level in any subject, there are too many good short guides in any field. This was my attempt to write one.okay

If anyone else wants to read it, you're surely welcome.

What profs should expect from graduate students, and vice versa

Dame Eleanor Hull is the pseudonym of an American professor of medieval literature. She also writes a blog about academic experience. This month she's been thinking about what she can expect from her graduate students, whom she sees as a mixed bag in regards to talent and preparation. Comparing their performance in her classes to her own performance in an ivy league program has made her wonder about her own expectations. She's asked for comment.

Well, this upcoming fall I will teach my first graduate seminar ever, since the university has only had a masters program in history for the last two years, one of which I was on sabbatical. In the past I have had a few undergraduate seminars and everything worked right and students were both talented and enthusiastic, but graduate seminars ought to be a little different, shouldn't they? So I am interested in hearing from graduate students, former graduate students, former graduate student who now teach graduate students, and anyone else who has an opinion who is bold enough to express it. What do you expect from your professors? What drives you crazy, or drove you crazy in the past, about how your professors ran their graduate seminars?

One of the things that you might consider commenting on is the matter of what is polite and effective communication between an older professor who is an expert in the field and students who are usually quite young and keenly feel their own inadequacies -- or sometimes not. Lady Eleanor Hull brought up this point in one of her posts:

When I was a student, my cohort and I were good at reading subtexts. Many of my students are not. And yet, if I'm very direct about certain kinds of instruction, this can be read as bossy, bitchy, rude. I suppose a lot has to do with tone of voice and body language. And I think being direct is usually better than indirect direction. But sometimes I would prefer to put a page of translations and explanations in the syllabus, something like this:

If I say, “Of course you know,” or “Let me remind you,” I mean I expect you don’t know, but you should, and I am going to fill in some information so we can all pretend you knew this all along. Listen carefully, so you can keep up your end of the pretense.

If I say, “You might want to look at [Source],” this means “Go to the library and look up [Source].” Similarly, “You really should look at [Source]” indicates that I'm surprised you haven't done this already and you had better find [Source] ASAP.

Dame Eleanor has got both agreement and strong disagreements on this point.

That's an interesting issue, but far from the only thing we could talk about. One point I should make clear is that the students I am teaching are not aiming to be specialists medieval history. My class is considered a "breadth requirement" (under the rubric European history) for students who are interested either in 20th century history or Canadian history. Some students Perhaps will have taken medieval history and be interested in it, but it'll just be a matter of luck. Clearly my presentation will have to be calculated to make them feel that it's a good idea to know more than just your own little corner of chosen history. And I'm afraid I won't be able to convince them just by saying that sentence in the first class meeting. It's pretty certain that they will think at times that they are suffering the torments of the damned, but I hope in the end some will think it was all worthwhile.

I am very interested in what you might have to say on these matters.

Image: It was supposed to be a seminar but it got oversubscribed and turned into a lecture course.

A fascinating article on the current bullfighting controversy in Spain

In the Guardian.

Medieval Fantasy as Performance: the Society for Creative Anachronism and the Current Middle Ages, by Michael A. Cramer

Michael Cramer is a theater scholar, an active dramatist, and a longtime member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. I know him reasonably well and am not shy about promoting my friends when they publish, but I can honestly say that this is a very interesting book that will appeal to a number of different audiences: thoughtful members of the SCA, people interested in postmodernism and medievalism on the theoretical level, and those who find dramatic theory useful in analyzing what people do in daily life.

One of the best features of this book is that Kramer is willing to be honest about his own feelings about the organization he has belonged to for so many years. If some aspect strikes him as worthwhile, he doesn't hold back from saying so either implicitly or explicitly. If some incident or feature strikes him as problematic, that comes through, too. He is neither bashful nor chauvinistic. I can guess that he feels that if some readers are going to dismiss the SCA or his study as too weird for words, well, then, they should read another book. This straightforward approach to the material makes it a lot more lively than a lot of cultural/anthropological studies.

As an informed reader with a great deal of SCA experience myself, I got some good laughs from his accurate observation. It didn't hurt that I know or have heard of most of the people he interviewed, quoted, or told good stories about. For somebody like me, this book could almost be entitled Famous Eccentrics of the SCA. For readers coming to this book for scholarly treatment, Cramer's deft use of anecdotes is actually a strength, because they are well-chosen and well discussed. They're not just there for freak-show value. Cramer is far from condescending to his subjects; if a famous eccentric in the book it's for a good reason.

I am not sure how this book will be received by theorists of performance or postmodernism, but I've always thought that the SCA was an interesting cultural phenomenon, and I think this may be the best, or at least most sophisticated, treatment of that phenomenon.

Image: the cool cover. There are lots of cool pictures on the inside, too.

Selective scripturalism

Both Brad DeLong and the blog Making Light directed me to this post at Slacktivist, which makes a specific political point, but is worth thinking about in a more general sense, too.

A few times a week I get an e-mail or a drive-by comment from someone very upset that I'm defending or advocating for a position they regard as contrary to the Bible. This happens often. Regularly. Constantly.

Yet as often as it happens, none of my accusers has ever been angry that I seem to be "glibly dismissive" of the clear biblical teaching of Luke 3:11. No one has ever suggested on the basis of this Bible verse that I am a fraudulent sham and an enemy of the true faith. Nor have they ever suggested that my failure to heed and revere it's clear instruction constitutes an attack against the sacred "authority of the scriptures."

And that's odd, because I would seem to be vulnerable on this point.

"Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none," the Bible says in Luke 3:11. And I have a lot more than just two coats. I have a closet full of coats, jackets, suits, shirts, dress pants, jeans, sweaters and nearly a dozen different pairs of shoes. My wardrobe would seem to be a sinful extravagance that's biblically indefensible.*

And it's worse than that. I'm also actively trying to lure others into this lifestyle of selfish superfluity. I have over the years recommended or urged the readers of this blog to acquire all sorts of things beyond what they need ...

Now it's true that the person speaking in Luke 3:11 is John the Baptist -- an ascetic who wore a hair-shirt and lived on locusts and wild honey. In general, John the Baptist's teachings on diet and dress aren't regarded as authoritative.

But it's not just bug-eating John who gives us this teaching. Variations of his statement can be found throughout the entire Bible, in the law and the prophets, the Gospels and the epistles. This is a unified, unambiguous, relentlessly repeated commandment not just of John but of Moses, Isaiah, Amos, Jeremiah, Jesus, Paul, Peter ... of everybody, really.

We're not talking about just a handful of scattered verses -- not just a few obscure texts plucked from the lists of Leviticus and one or two Pauline tangents. This is a major, dominant theme of the entire Bible: Whoever has more than they need must give to whoever has less than they need.

And yet as I said, despite regularly receiving angry condemnations for the ways in which I supposedly deny "the authority of the scriptures," I have never even once been challenged on the matter of my personal superfluity or my advertising and enticement urging others to acquire.

None of my interlocutors has ever accused me of flippantly disregarding Luke 3, or Matthew 6, or Amos, or 2 Corinthians 8 -- even though my lifestyle is clearly and wholly incompatible with what those texts have to say. I have never received a single question from these Guardians of Biblical Truth as to how I manage to reconcile my lifestyle with the vast multitude of scripture passages condemning it as sin. My supposedly conservative inquisitors have never challenged me on this point or accused me of promoting a "liberal" approach to the Bible that hand-waves away the clear mandates taught in the more than 2,000 verses dealing with wealth, possessions and the poor.

Instead, they're mainly just upset about the Gay Thing.

That's odd. Because the Bible doesn't actually have a whole lot to say about homosexuality. The sum total of all it says on that subject is just a tiny fraction of what the Bible has to say about sex in general and even all that put together is, at most, a minor sub-theme.

Think of it this way: Picture a seesaw. Take all of the passages you can find in the Bible that might possibly be construed as condemning homosexuality and gently place them on one seat of the seesaw. Now take all of the passages and parables and sermons and stories in the Bible that deal with wealth, possessions and the poor and drop them onto the other seat.

That seesaw just became a catapult, launching that little collection of verses on homosexuality high into the air....

Let me address my accusers directly. Be warned: If you come to me as a Guardian of Biblical Authority, demanding to know why I do not join you in biblically condemning homosexuals, I will before answering you look at your shoes.

Are they practical and well-worn? Are they your only pair?

They had better be. Because unless your shoes provide evidence of the reckless generosity unambiguously commanded throughout that same Bible you insist must be used to condemn our GLBT neighbors, then I'm not sure you really understand -- or much care about -- the "authority of the scriptures." Unless you exhibit a personal poverty commensurate with the chastity you insist from others, then I don't believe that you believe what you're saying.

Show me an American willing to abstain from luxury and indulgence and that person earns my attention. Show me a straight person expecting to be commended for abstaining from gay sex and that person earns only my pity. (That's not an achievement, that's a tautology.)

The Bible is not a Rulebook for Other People. If you're going to insist on treating it as a rulebook, then you're going to have to pay attention to the rules that apply to you as well as to the rules that apply to others. I'd suggest starting with this rule: Don't treat the Bible as a rulebook.

The comments on this post are worth a good look, too.

One more argument for a subtle approach to the analysis of religion in life and history!

Image: difficult to interpret, for me at least.

Françoise Noël wins a prize!

Dr. Françoise Noel, longtime member of the History Department at Nipissing University, has recently been awarded the Ontario Historical Society's Fred Landon Award, for the best book on regional history in the past three years. the book is Family and Community Life in Northeastern Ontario, The Interwar Years, a study which is both solid in the scholarly sense and entertaining, especially for those interested in the grassroots history of our area. Family and Community Life is Dr. Noel's fourth book, which makes her a very productive scholar indeed.

This announcement gives me an excuse to reproduce the cover of the book, a wonderful work by a local artist.

Medieval Afghanistan?

Matthew Gabriele is a thoughtful history professor who occasionally posts some of those thoughts over at Modern Medieval. This week he's got something good to say on the abuse of comparative history:

Is Afghanistan medieval? No.

Yet, people keep asking this question.

Yesterday (June 2, 2010), it was Prof. Thomas Barfield of Boston University, writing at ForeignPolicy.com. Barfield points out, quite rightly perhaps, that comparisons between the European Middle Ages and contemporary Afghanistan come fast and quick, most recently by the current UK Defense Minister, Liam Fox. Indeed, when looked at quickly, the religious and political situations seem quite analogous -- a decentralized power structure with several loci that have recourse to legitimately use violence, the permeation of religion into the discourse of everyday life, etc. Makes you wish that someone would study the intersection of religion and culture, doesn't it?

Anyway, after drawing the outlines for his comparison, Barfield concludes his essay by suggesting that any Western diplomats charged with helping modern Afghanistan should learn their medieval history, because "at least in medieval Europe, the centralized state emerged victorious."

This is what's called "neomedievalism" in foreign policy circles, and if you don't know about this, go read you some Bruce Holsinger. Basically, the idea is that all states follow the same basic evolutionary model that roughly maps onto the (Western) European experience -- anarchy, increasing centralization during the Middle Ages, finally emerging as strong, coherent nations in the 19th century or thereabouts. There are some problems with that.

Leaving aside the fact that my description of Afghanistan above (taken from Barfield's essay) could easily describe today's United States (think about it), and the fact that I would NEVER discourage people from studying the European Middle Ages, there are some other problems here. Let me count off a few, and I'm tired right now so I won't take too much time. I'll even bullet-point them:

1. The European Middle Ages are not a repository for all that people today consider "backwards" and/ or "barbaric." It is not a synonym for "religous" (let alone "Islamic") either. The people who lived during that age were more cultured and intelligent than you think they were, and they were more violent and narrow-minded than you can imagine. Just. Stop. Generalizing.
2. Relatedly again, there's something really patronizing about thinking that the European example has all the answers. We're not all on the same timeline. Historical context matters for the very simple reason that each situation is different.
3. Relatedly again, the narrative of European political centralization that Barfield's relying on is very old. It goes back to Charles Homer Haskins, who attended the Peace Conference at Versailles in 1919 as an advisor to Pres. Wilson, and then to Haskins' student, Joseph Strayer, who worked for the CIA and wrote the famous On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State. There's been a lot of work done since then on how this model is problematic. It's almost like me looking at Prof. Barfield's Afghani tribes and using French Structuralism to explain their behaviors. Wait a minute...

That's what Barfield's doing. It's all deep structure, isn't it? The idea here is that certain fundamental, almost transcendental, structures dominate human existence and govern individuals' actions. If you understand those structures -- best evidenced, of course, in the European example -- then you can shape them to your liking. But there's a problem with that. As Barfield himself says, "[My] medieval analogy is not an exact one, of course. Afghanistan's Sunni Islam never had an institutionalized clerical hierarchy, monasteries, or religious figures with the power of a pope." So, except for the fact that the lived religious experience of the 2 wildly different times and places are wildly different, they're the same, right? Do I have to answer that last question?

Look, Afghanistan is a mess. But it's a mess because we THINK it to be a mess -- because we don't like the way the state functions. It looks "primitive" to us and that bothers us (and, to a degree, threatens our American interests and security, were the Taliban to regain power). But it is what it is. I do know, however, that turning Karzai into Louis IX or Henry II isn't really going to solve anything and could very well make things worse.

I am not sure I can go along with Prof. Gabriele all the way. I certainly agree that Afghanistan is not medieval, but although I understand why he said "Just. Stop. Generalizing." (and perhaps beat his head against the wall for good measure), I don't think that was the right response. My top two reasons I don't think Afghanistan is medieval are:

1. The area we now call Afghanistan existed during the Middle Ages, and back then it was not much like it is now, or like France or England at that time. Studying Afghanistan's actual historical development, from home of empires (instead of football of empires) to the decentralized home of Pashtunwali, might just be more relevant than trying to visualize Afghanistan as a rather slow off-the-mark Europe.
2. These pictures. How does categorizing Afghanistan as much like medieval Europe account for the fact than an independent Afghanistan, not yet occupied by foreign forces, looked like this just four decades ago? Remember that some of the people in those pictures are still alive, in Kabul, or Peshawar, or Columbia, Maryland, or Toronto. In what way have their lives been like that of medieval Europeans? Be precise.

In some ways, we don't generalize enough in history. Generalization is all too often avoided by the prudent scholars and left to daring souls who, as a friend of mine once said, "extrapolate from the last two points on the graph." Or plunk down a handy "Western" analogy on a distant culture because it is more convenient than learning the details of its own specificity.

I wouldn't say "just.stop.generalizing." Rather, "check your generalizations carefully, and don't insist your analogy is a magic key to everything." It's not always Munich in 1938, nor Paris in 1793. The dead, as Modern Medieval says on its masthead, still have something to say, but they won't do the hard work of understanding for you.

Image: Not the Loire Valley, or the Welsh border.

Full of awe

Speaking of total system failure...

Dan Froomkin:

Despite more than three weeks of accumulating scientific evidence that gargantuan plumes of oil lurk beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico -- presenting an imminent threat to sea life and a possibly decades-long threat to the nation's coastlines -- NOAA Director Jane Lubchenco on Wednesday refused to contradict BP CEO Tony Hayward's statement over the weekend that "the oil is on the surface" and "there aren't any plumes."

Scientists on NOAA and academic research vessels have been reporting since the week of May 10 that they have spotted -- and sampled -- oil suspended in the water column. And the Huffington Post has learned that lab results from a previously secret NOAA research mission have been analyzed; its results just haven't been made public.

But to Lubchenco, the Obama appointee running the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, all the accumulated evidence is just "circumstantial."

And what others call oil, she calls "anomalies."

It's all in the mind, y'know.

Total system failure?

Michael Bérubé:

Hockey is the only source of good news in the entire world. ...

Really, I was going to try to write something this week about how the financial collapse of 2008 and the Gulf disaster of 2010 are such enormous, systemic failures—so clearly the result of deeply dysfunctional institutions in which both the primary players and the “regulators” were rotten to the core—that they should have provoked sweeping, wholesale reviews and radical changes in business as usual. We’ve known for some time that there will be no radical changes in business as usual on the financial front. I’m guessing that we’re not going to see any radical changes in the oil industry or in American energy policy either. I could be wrong—it’s just a wild guess. But for almost two years now I’ve been haunted by one sentence from a blog comment by Roger Gathman—“I figure we are in the Soviet endgame zone—say, USSR, 1985, with trivia pursuing corruption as one institution after another fails.” Perhaps President McCain is our very own neo-Konstantin Chernenko, and in 2012 President Issa can be our neo-Boris Yeltsin. We already have our neo-Chernobyl, thanks.

As for U.S. policy with regard to Israel, of course it is possible to hope that the attack on the Gaza flotilla will be the tipping point that finally provokes a sweeping, wholesale review and a radical change in business as usual. Last I looked, Turkey was a NATO ally, after all. You’d think that would count for something. But for some reason I’m not giving in to that hope. And I’m not writing that post about total system failures, either.