Edinburgh Companion to the History of Democracy

This reference book, in which I  have an article on "Ancient India," should  be out today.  I won't be  expecting you to be bringing me your copies for autographs -- it's priced at L125/$200!

Halloween thought

It's tough this year to be teaching about the Apocalypse -- in connection with the Crusades, and Muslim and Christian doctrines of the Last Judgment -- when you know that at the moment the word "apocalypse" is practically inseparable from the word "zombie."

This too shall pass.

Don't blame the Arab Spring

From that radical organization, RAND:

The current unrest in Syria, and elsewhere in the Middle East, is mistakenly being blamed on the Arab Spring. Even before the recent violence, many observers were quick to declare that spring had rapidly turned to winter in the Arab world. Here at home, and just before the presidential debate on foreign policy tonight, a Pew Research Center poll showed that Americans are increasingly skeptical that the Arab Spring will lead to lasting change. The survey, released last week, found that 57% of Americans (up from 43% in April 2011) do not believe that the uprisings will improve the lives of people in those countries.

 But the roots of the unrest are not in the desire to cast off authoritarian regimes that took expression in Arab Spring protests. The roots came before the uprisings, and progress will take longer than we wish.

 Weak and corrupt government institutions, underdeveloped civil society, a lack of means and habits of peaceful expression, repressed resentments, and the absence of free news media are all legacies of the previous regimes, and still characterize those countries where governments remain authoritarian.

 Blame the autocrats, not the Arab Spring.

 What's the implication for U.S. foreign policy of hand-wringing over whether the Arab Spring was a good thing after all? That the U.S. should have worked to suppress the uprisings? Opposing the possibility of democracy — in the face of overwhelming popular support — would have further eroded U.S. influence in the region. The Arab Spring has discredited the idea that the secular authoritarian regimes were fundamentally stable; the turbulent dynamics we now see in play were their creations.

 Disparagement of the Arab Spring has been accompanied by criticism in some quarters of the Obama administration's support for it and in others of the administration's failure to ensure greater progress toward democracy. Some have suggested that unrest in the region is a consequence of U.S. support for political change.

These critics wrongly suggest the U.S. has much more leverage to create democracies than is realistic. Even where U.S. leverage was not compromised by a history of propping up or tolerating dictators, our country's ability to affect the course of post-authoritarian transitions was generally at the margins. Internal forces drive political transitions, not outside ones.

Read the whole thing.

Pessimism day, 2: the USA

If you want real hardcore pessimism, try the League of Ordinary Gentlemen:

The Towering Legacy of George W. Bush

by Jason Kuznicki on October 23, 2012

Conventional wisdom errs when it says that George W. Bush was incompetent. He was a president of overwhelming influence, the most effective chief executive since FDR. We live in the world that W. created, for good or — mostly — for ill.
Weirdly, Powerline’s John Hinderaker, of the first and I believe only Time magazine Blog of the Year sort of… well… he was completely, absolutely, right:

It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.

Four years out of office, W. still can’t get anyone to notice. Electing Barack Obama was supposed to be a repudiation of his predecessor’s policies, and in many ways I wish it had been, but the truth is that it’s been nothing of the sort. W’s policy innovations have been so popular among the governing class that there have been few serious challenges to them from any corner at all. When these policies, all of them less than twelve years old, are challenged,the challenger is typically presumed to be a crank.

...

Why exactly is W. still viewed as an incompetent? And why, if his policies are so much in demand, is he still personally so unpopular? The man appears to have delivered exactly what the American electorate wanted, and he’s made it stick, and it’s what the American electorate apparently still wants, and they only disagree about whether it’ll be blue bunting, not red. (Could one of these colors ever mean something different from what it did just a few years before? Of course it could. Just take a look at W., who made it happen back in the day.)

One would never infer Bush’s accomplishments from his reputation. A poll conducted this month found that America’s favorite recent presidents were Ronald Reagan (38%) and Bill Clinton (34%), and that’s maybe unsurprising. But despite two terms of good economic times — and being at war — George W. Bush garnered a meager 1%. The same poll showed him tied Obama, at 28%, as the people’s choice for our worst recent president.
So what gives? And where’s the monumental architecture? I’ve got two answers. And honestly, I sort of hate both of them...

The second reason is that while many of us apparently like W.’s policies — they still poll pretty well — we Americans generally aren’t so comfortable with the sheer fact that we like them. We don’t like what that fact says about us: America used to be a much freer nation, and by that we mean: Most of us at one time knew better. We were more self-confident. At ease. Unsurveilled. A bit more able to trust. We’d defeated the Soviets, defeated the budget deficit, invented the Internet (and let’s not quibble just now about who exactly did it, or how, or with what aims in mind), and we were well on track to get our entitlement systems in order and make them solvent again.

Then something terrible happened, and we were told that it all had to go away. Confidence and freedom were dismissed as ignorance and naivete, or worse, as evidence that you were on the other side.

People thought that way for a while because they were — we all were — genuinely scared. There’s nothing wrong, in moderation, with being genuinely scared of things that are, let’s face it, genuinely frightening. Nowadays the emotion just doesn’t fit so well anymore, and yet the policies are in place now, and they’ll be very hard to change. Vested interests are seeing to them, caring for them, making sure we remain afraid, just afraid enough that we won’t bother fighting too hard. The various aspects of the Bush legacy are here to stay, and all that’s left is quibbling about the details.

Imagining that we might be better — that we might do without the constant, free-form authorization of war against any and all; that we might not need Gitmo; that unreviewable targeted killing of American citizens anywhere in the world is an abomination; wow, that we might even be able to balance the budget — all are extremist views now. Not to be taken seriously.

Pessimism day, 1: The Arab Middle East

At Arabist.net, a link to and an evaluation  of  a melodramatic piece on  the outcome of the "Arab Spring:"

✚ This Is Not a Revolution by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley | The New York Review of Books
Another almost melodramatically lucid-pessimistic view of the Arab uprisings and their consequences by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley. Much of the phenomena they describe is accurate, but what they object to is history in motion, which they see as more of loop. This is too depressed-romantic a view. There are terrible debts to be paid for the way power was organized in the Arab world over the last 60 years, they will be paid in blood. Let's get on with paying them, and not cry over spilt milk. But the idea that a restoration of the Ottoman model (in terms of a MB caliphate, not Turkish domination) is happening I find dubious.
I liked this bit:

The Islamists propose a bargain. In exchange for economic aid and political support, they will not threaten what they believe are core Western interests: regional stability, Israel, the fight against terror, energy flow. No danger to Western security. No commercial war. The showdown with the Jewish state can wait. The focus will be on the slow, steady shaping of Islamic societies. The US and Europe may voice concern, even indignation at such a domestic makeover. But they’ll get over it. Just as they got over the austere fundamentalism of Saudi Arabia. Bartering—as in, we’ll take care of your needs, let us take care of ours—Islamists feel, will do the trick. Looking at history, who can blame them?
Mubarak was toppled in part because he was viewed as excessively subservient to the West, yet the Islamists who succeed him might offer the West a sweeter because more sustainable deal. They think they can get away with what he could not. Stripped of his nationalist mantle, Mubarak had little to fall back on; he was a naked autocrat. The Muslim Brothers by comparison have a much broader program—moral, social, cultural. Islamists feel they can still follow their convictions, even if they are not faithfully anti-Western. They can moderate, dilute, defer.

Intervention in Syria? Read this

http://www.joshualandis.com/blog/?p=15984

A book on runes

Boydell and Brewer sent me a notice about this recent book on the Scandinavian runes. Here is what the author, Michael P. Barnes, has to say about it. 

For those of you too busy to click through, Prof. Barnes basically says that there's almost nothing in print about runes except mystical interpretations. Barnes, on the other hand, taught runology from 1971 to 2006 at University College London, treating them as a practical means of communication. If you've always had a desire to read and use runes, this might well be the book for you.

The rest of the Boydell and Brewer newsletter is here.

Virtuous knights

"Knights were meant to be virtuous..." So said said one of my students in the fourth-year chivalry seminar. He was commenting on a question I asked the class to answer. How did crusading affect the way warriors were viewed?

So far we have not really been talking about what most people call "Knights". I think that before 1100, we have to be careful to say that we are seeing soldiers/men who provide military service (milites) or horsemen (chevaliers) or henchmen (knechts/knights) or military dependents (vassals). But the knights who represent the idea of chivalry to us, the knights of the medieval romances, or Walter Scott, I don't think they've come down the pike yet. Did great lords identify themselves as knights? In most regions, very rarely.

These armed horsemen were not expected as far as I can tell to be exemplars of individual virtue. Their virtue was a simple evaluation of whether they were rapacious and murderous, or not. And with the preaching of the crusade, whether they were fighting in a good cause against outsiders, or beating up on their Christian brothers at home. The armed horsemen were evaluated as part of a group that might be contributing to the public good or running wild breaking the peace.

As we move into the 12th century, however, we will see the poets devoting a lot of energy to the virtues and vices of individual knights, fictional ones by and large, but distinct individuals nonetheless.

Comments, anyone?

Image: from a website promoting virtue.

Three types of comments I put on undergraduate essays

One way that I grade undergraduate essays is to read through them and mark them up with comments,, question marks, and grammatical corrections (and circles around misspelled words). Then I go through the papers again and read my comments. 

 One level of comment is the simple indication that I don't get what you're talking about, or an indication that your spelling, word choice, or grammatical mistakesl are all I can see. If a paper has a lot of these, it can't possibly be an effective argument for any point of view. 

Another level of comment is a question, how do you know this? It means I think you need to explain further in the text or cite some source, or use a direct quote to justify the statement you just made. You might be right, but you haven't established it yet. 

The best kind of comment from my point of view is me arguing, in a cramped little marginal note, with the statement you just made. You have said something that I have to respond to. Congratulations! Now the fun begins. 

Oh, yes. Sometimes I do write "good" or even "good!" This is certainly good for you, but not as much fun for me as the argument.

Image of  an alternative procedure thanks to Dr. Spaulding:

Some interesting medieval scholarship on the web, Crusaders take note

The always interesting  Jonathan Jarrett reminded me of some interesting material that has been posted to the web which might be of interest to people who like the Franks and the Frankish nobility or who are fascinated  by the motivations of the people who went on the First Crusade.


I was particularly interested in the second post, which is the next best thing to a scholarly article, because I have been reading student papers about the motives of crusaders. Jonathan Jarrett, takes the position that you just can't dismiss the fact that, expensive as the crusading expedition was likely to be, some of the pilgrims thought they might possibly become rich. Jonathan Riley – Smith, a leading contemporary interpreter of the First Crusade is well-known for his opposition to the idea that any sensible person could have gone to Jerusalem expecting riches. In my lectures on the First Crusade, I make the point that Frankish warriors/early Knights were in the habit of taking big risks, notably to their own bodies, in hopes of gains of various sorts, monetary and reputational. It is nice to see this point of view systematically developed in any sensible form. If any of my students are still interested in this problem, our library has a more detailed article by John France in the collection of articles by Thomas Madden. This collection is called, rather obscurely, The Crusades. Just so it won't be confused, no doubt, with any other collection of articles on the Crusades.

Land of milk and butter

Some years ago a student slipped up on a final exam and attributed Henry IV's famous quip on religion and politics to Elizabeth I, making the queen say "England is worth a Mass." (Henry said "Paris.")

Today a student paper documented another slip:  "The land of milk and butter."

Just a slip, since the student got it right elsewhere, but still, it's ... delicious.

Voting matters?

An excerpt from a Salon article by Jonathan Bernstein posted here as a note to myself.   You can read it too.

Your vote doesn't matter.

...Because if you’re really doing coalition work – if you’re really doing politics – you’re not thinking in terms of “who should I vote for?” Instead, you’re asking who we are voting for, and by election time you’ve already negotiating not only whom “we” are supporting, but, more important, who we are. And part of the pain of it is that, yes, it sometimes means supporting someone you don’t like, or someone who advances politics you don’t like.

It’s not just that you may have to cut deals that involve sacrificing what you think of as your principles. It’s that real coalition work – real politics – involves taking other people, their beliefs and cultures and values and preferences and passions, seriously. It involves trying to see the world as they see it. And that may expose you to their pain, and even the possibility that you (or at least folks in groups you identify with) caused some of that pain. It may involve finding out that people within some group you’ve always thought you identified with are actually radically different from yourself, and don’t even consider you one of them. It involves allowing for the possibility that you won’t come out of politics the same way you went into it. That takes more than a little courage.

The rewards, however, are potentially enormous, ...

http://www.salon.com/2012/10/06/your_vote_doesnt_matter/singleton/