A few days ago I finished reading The China Story by Freda Utley. Just last night I finished Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson. I began the first over a month ago, and the latter when I began my previous post. Part of the difference was that I was reading Utley’s book in pdf form on my computer, and was constantly tempted to look at other stuff on the internet. Another reason is that it’s much more boring. She was personally involved in some of the events discussed, but I did not care to read a chapter focusing on Owen Lattimore. Another blemish in my eyes is that like those she criticizes, she is an idealist with a distaste for self-interested cynical realism. She displayed that in other writings sympathetic to the Palestianians (not unlike several of her comrades of the old right) as well as the defeated Germans after the second world war (this would be sufficient proof of anti-semitism to a modern neo-conservative). Although she had opposed war with Germany (though ironically may bear some responsibility for it, as Japan blamed her for our boycott of them during the Sino-Japanese war) and sought a negotiated peace, in this book she tries to use the ill-repute of the old isolationists to analogize those who were later sympathetic to the Soviet Union and/or Chinese communists. I found that distasteful.
It is enjoyable to read just how wrong so many of the great and good were in their perceptions of the communists, but in hindsight we can see that Utley was wrong about much as well. China did indeed split from the Soviet Union to a degree even greater than Tito. The collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in absolutely no diminishing of the political power of the communist party in China. The most interesting part of the book to me was a question Utley posed but never quite answered: why was our policy in Europe (such as toward Greece and Turkey) so different from the one the same people advanced at the same time in East Asia? Her answer is that Americans were more familiar with Europe and viewed its defects as understandable aberrations given the circumstances, but were more likely to look down on backward, corrupt Chinese government. My hypothesis is that they didn’t really care all that much about China, much as with Africa today. Freda cared, and so did her fellow journalists (some of whom, like her, had some affiliation with the communist party) that stayed in China while the Japanese advanced. Many of them were willing to overlook the dark side of the Chinese communists, just as Freda acknowledged Chiang Kai-Shek’s earlier partnership with the communists as well as the Soviet Union and the defects of his own government but stumped for him anyway (the possible difference in reactions may be due to the fact that while in Russia Utley’s husband was killed on suspicion of Trotskyism). One final note I’d like to make is that most histories I’ve read attribute the result of the civil war to the incohesive nature of the Kuomingtang, which was really a collection of warlords prone to break apart, which isn’t really discussed in the book.
The discussion of the next book goes on for a while with lots of summary and a critique of Mencius Moldbug, so I will put it below the fold.
I finished Demonic Males much quicker than I expected to, because I was planning on leaving enough for later, but whenever I planned on reading one more chapter it ended up being two or three. It’s not a dry science text and even has some good narrative sections. The subtitle says “apes”, but it’s mostly about chimpanzees and how they relate to human nature and history. That is because we are more similar to chimpanzees than any other species. The chimpanzees have a “party-gang” social structure, where males jockey (even to the point of two tearing of the fingers and testicles of a third) for the alpha position, resulting in favorable access to food and females. When the party reaches above a certain size it splits apart so that theere will not be too much competition over food in the area. Males form gangs and engage in raids (not merely in defense or retaliation) on neighboring territory where if they find a lone male or infertile female or a male-female pair they will beat their victim (even if it was a former friend or relative) to the point of crippling (later resulting in death) and in the last case drag the female back to their troop. These raids resemble the very common method of war among primitive peoples engaged in low-intensity agriculture and to a lesser extent hunter-gatherers. Within a troop a chimpanzee male can induce a female to become its consort by waiting until no one is around to defend it and then repeatedly battering it until it follows. Although in some related species the size ratio of males over females is similar or even larger, chimpanzees along with humans stand out for that behavior. Gorillas form large troops where a dominant silverback male protects a harem of females without needing to do violence against them or fight other adult males to the point of death. However, a bachelor gorilla may induce a female to leave her troop and join him by penetrating its defenses and killing her infants. Most female gorillas experience infanticide of one of their children at some point in their lives and perversely this makes the killer more attractive to her, as he has demonstrated that her current protector is not up to the task (lions behave similarly). Orangutans are solitary animals and a large (or flanged) male mates by making loud calls, whereupon a female will come to him and mate. As far as that goes, it seems their relationships are less morally revolting than those among gorillas and chimps. However, rape is rampant among chimpanzees. There is another variant of male which is adult but has the body of a youth, about the size of a female. Because it is not large enough to protect a female by driving away other males, they do not wish to mate with it and avoid it. However, its small size also enables it to chase females and climb trees easily so that it may rape them. Because baboons are solitary, raping is a viable strategy for these males. An alternate theory presented is that the rape is not directly advantageous but is rather a form of sexual coercion (like battery for chimps and infanticide for gorillas) that induces females to be more passive toward that male should she encounter it again, but until some evidence shows that the latter actually occurs, I would say Occam’s Razor suggests that rape is about sex in that instance rather than power.
The exception to this pattern, and discussed in the third to last chapter of the book, are bonobos. Wrangham states that there really is another evidence to be confident that they are the “hippie ape” they have been portrayed as, just as Margaret Mead’s Samoans were not. The theory for how they turned out that way is that a drought and absence of mountains in their home long ago exterminated the local gorillas. This freed up a lot of soft herbs that gorillas had been eating for chimps (or a similar sort of proto-chimp from around the time our ancestors branched off by leaving trees and eating roots in a different area) to add as significant feature of their diet rather than focusing on fruits. This in turn enabled significantly larger and more stable parties. As species ranging from honeypot ants to chimpanzees are reluctant to attack with intent to kill without an overwhelming advantage in numbers (making this book not quite the antidote to Randall Collins someone made it out to be), this makes raids less likely among bonobos. Females that spend that much time with each other also bond through what may simply and politely referred to as hoka-hoka (which also enables friendly relations among different parties that encounter one another), and will support one another in the infrequent event of a male acting like an uppity chimp. Females do not have to worry as much about falling behind a few males in search of food while carrying an infant and thereby becoming vulnerable because as mentioned their party size is much larger and like gorillas they have plenty of herbs to munch on. Males do not display the same pattern of jealousy toward females because they appear to be unaware of when females are especially fertile. In that sense they are like the South American muriqui monkey, whose males only engage in sperm competition rather than attempting to prevent any mating. The result is that males and females are co-dominant, with status hierarchies (though associated with much less violence, usually blustering and without premeditated murder) among both sexes that intermingle to the extent that a high-status female may assist a favored male (such as a close relative) in attaining an alpha position. On a final strange note, chimpanzees love to hunt colubus monkeys and eat them, but while bonobos eat meat (such as infant antelopes, as do chimps) and are fully capable of catching colobus monkeys, they show no inclination to eat them, even after accidentally killing them through play (UPDATE: Turns out to be wrong). The authors hypothesized a reduced bloodlust and a link between war and hunting.
On a short digression, it should be noted that there are some species that are actually matriarchal. In such cases it is the females that stay in a particular territory and defend it whereas males are more likely to join other parties to avoid incest (under patriarchy it is the reverse). In some species of monkeys such as rhesus macqaues or savanna baboons females form phalanxes and fight each other for territory, though it is non-lethal and the objective is simply to induce the other group to go away. Spotted hyenas are an odd reversal of the usual pattern in that they are among the few species (such as humans, chimps, lions and wolves) where adults deliberately kill other adults, in this case generally both females. The authors emphasize that this exception serves further to illustrate the rule, as these females are significantly masculinized by androgen, with the result that their clitoris (through which they give birth and is thus prone to tear) comes to resemble a penis. The hypothesized reason for that is that they commonly give birth to twins (unless it is their first birth) and that if they are sisters they will almost immediately attempt to kill one another, and this masculinizing serves as a type of camoflage. They are not exactly a mirror image because the result of conquering territory is simply more food. The gestation period prevents females from having the same interest in grabbing extra mating partners from another group, but they can still gain from weakening the other party so that it cannot in turn threaten them.
The final part of the book (excepting the last chapter as merely an epilogue) imagines an “evolutionary feminism”. Even today humanity is strongly shaped by patriarchy. We display a slight degree of sexual dimorphism and the advent of modern weapons makes that muscular difference even less significant, but women in certain situations still experience anxiety and vulnerability alone in the company of males (as Megan McArdle discussed here in the aftermath of DC vs Heller). Males still form gangs, sometimes in the form of armies and empires, to wield power. The world we live in has been shaped to the advantage of the succesful alpha males (Roy Baumeister discusses the internal differences among males within a patriarchal system like ours here). Females, despite the attempt by feminists to “take back the night”, do not form similar support networks as among bonobos to restrain male power. Furthermore, evolution gives them the same perverse attraction to the demonic male as discussed by Overcoming Bias and Theodore Dalrymple. Though the demonic actions of males are harmful to her interests and therefore cause her anguish, a woman who has sons fathered by an example of that type can expect them to be similarly successful. Most cultures throughout history have accepted polygyny (only some Tibetans practice the reverse of polyandry) and even monagamous societies feature mistresses and serial monogamy. This makes traits associated with the demonic male desirable. An ambitious plan would then be to change the very nature or temperament of both males and females. A widespread eugenics program is explicitly considered, but discounted as impractical, as the most demonic males are the least likely to go gently into that good night. The authors look instead to a process they see as already taking place. That is the depersonalization and institutionalization (and to a lesser degree, centralization) of governance, to the point where power comes from the number of ballots rather than barrels of guns or a striking fist. Women already comprise a majority of the population in many countries, they simply have not come together to advance their interests as women and overturn the system. John Lott has argued that they do have diverging political interests (especially if they are not married) and that the result of female suffrage has been a detectable change in policy, more specifically an increase in the size of governemtn. Wrangham and Peterson instead think of a reduction in imperialism as being the result of female political power. However, like males female voters display a bias toward male politicians, even when females perform well (I’d like to link to the Overcoming Bias post on that which focuses on India, but can’t find it, so here is the original paper I think it discussed). Feminism aims to change that, but it hasn’t accomplished much since the mid 90s when this book was written. The very fact that many people find the bonobo model preferable and would like to move toward it would seem to indicate something significant, but the extremely violent indigenous peoples of South America and New Guinea likewise recognize the undesirable nature of their constant fighting (though the book claims at least one South America tribe abandoned their ways under the influence of a few Protestant missionaries). It is my sin that I am Pushtun!
Both books were recommended to me by Mencius Moldbug, and given the last chapters of the last book I am even more surprised that he has not yet discussed gender issues at his blog. MM opposes institutionalization, whether that means direct democracy or bureaucracies and committees. He likes monarchies, the archetypical personalized patriarchy. The authors use as a contrast the northern and southern italian city states, preferring the more republican ones of the north. MM here takes the opposite side. The stated goal of MM’s ideology of “formalism” is to minimize violence, which at first glance would seem to put him in the same camp as the evolutionary feminists. Yet he is upset at the anti-militarism of modern society and hold special ire for the “post-political” New Deal state and European Union. He argues that a hierarchical structure based on violence is inevitable, with the only question being whether it is formalized and therefore more a nature of omnipresent threat rather than actual struggle. However, the ruling regime doesn’t seem to enact much violence, even when coming to power in the so-called “hippie coup” (can you look at the bodycount and seriously compare it to Weimar Germany?). The hated State Department and university/media complex possess neither the ability nor the inclination to wreak violence on their subject populations, as the military and police forces of numerous authoritarian dictatorships have.
Here I get to a point of contention. According to what I had previously read elsewhere, very long-term homicide rates (including war deaths) show a significant, secular decline and while in the U.S crime spiked in the Great Sixties Freakout, it has steadily declined since the 90s (in the comments there it is noted that violent crime in the UK is also declining). In constrast, Wrangham & Peterson say “as we survey societies from ancient Greece to modern-day nations we can detect no clear pattern in the overall rates of death from intergroup violence, which remain between 5 and 65 per 100,000 per year”*. At the end of that paragraph they worry over the new danger of “automatic rifles, fertilizer bombs, dynamite, nerve gas, Stealth bombers, or nuclear weapons”. I found that odd as the works of military history I’ve read state that even ignoring disease (the major cause of death in war for most of its history) war deaths decreased over time even as technology increased, and not because of better medical care but because the bulk of killings in war occurred during routs and increasingly better organized armies have been able to retreat in a safer fashion.
At any rate, during MM’s idealized ancien regime of monarchical Europe, there were a good number of wars and a whole lot of people died. Yet he claims that the epidemic of crime indicates that the status quo is doomed within his lifetime, and people will be clamoring for the return of the Stuarts. He frames the crime issue as one in which largely black and hispanic Dalits wage an ethnic/racial war against white Vaisyas on behalf of the ruling Brahmins (a cosmopolitan bunch also largely white). This is complicated by the fact that the real interracial violence committed by gangs seems to be black vs hispanic, though this is in turn dwarfed by intra-racial violence which is still largely directed at other criminals, and that criminals do not distinguish between Vaisyas and Brahmins (who as a more urban caste are more likely to live nearby). Being white, female and/or without a criminal record results in a negligible possibility of being victimized. The primary hit whites and asians seem to take is in paying taxes to house criminals once they have been apprehended (a cost primarily borne by the upper class and/or blue state residents), a cost that MM indicates he will expand rather than reduce. One might also argue that they shell out more to real-estate agents as demographics move.
It is arguable that there have been larger shifts in the role of gender in our society the past century than race. Contraceptive technologies have separated sex from reproduction and changing social mores permitted large numbers of women to enter higher education and the workforce (though they are unlikely to ever be equally represented in many areas). At Gene Expression it has been argued that our society has been returning to the relative (and I emphasize that word as opposed to “absolute”) gender-egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers. Emulating Burnham or Strauss, one might then claim an esoteric message behind Unqualified Reservations. He seeks a return of patriarchy, though one of the relatively civilized Optimates of the past rather than the more backward one natural selection would give us if current trends continue. This will not result in a reduction of violence, but more likely an increase. However, that would only seem bad to the feminized, emasculated men of the modern era. The best life is one of plunder by force of arms. The problem with Western civilization in the past that led it on the trajectory toward pacifism is Christianity. There was always the germ of a radical social doctrine preached by a madman that has inspired “progressivie” movements throughout time. Liberalism, even (or especially) in its atheistic form is a sect of Christianity. Unlike many self-proclaimed right-wingers, MM has not sought to disassociate himself from the Nazi regime and Hitler. He insists that Hitler was a genuine reactionary and any progressive or “revolutionary” indicators he gave off were bogus. Right-wingers that seek to disassociate themselves from Hitler (Spengler in his various forms in particular) emphasize his paganism and hostility to Christianity. Some also point out that he stated he wished Germany’s religion had been Islam or Shintoism. There is Mencius’ goal. Our society must be converted away from Christianity, and as Shinto holds limited appeal and has a short track record, the answer is Islam. Islam converted some nomadic Arabs with negligible impact on history to a world-spanning empire. Someone or other has mentioned that a society devoid of liberalism, or Christianity or feminine values is essentially one like that of the Islamic world. Islam only ran aground on the wealth and technology of the West, but it has sustained its faith despite that setback and embraced fundamentalism rather than liberalism as the Japanese did to a significant extent. Converting the West to Islam will turn the obstacle of the faith to an ally. This new civilization will both be militarily strong, technologically and economically advanced as well as reactionary and patriarchal, resistant to liberalism. The big question that then occurs to you is how this civilization deals with a rising China. MM has frequently pointed to China and other East Asian countries as models, and this is to emphasize their illiberalism. Without the germ of liberalism they do not represent the constant threat to Islam that neocons did to Iraq and Wilson did to the Second Reich. The Romans and other European powers were long able to live at peace with the Chinese, content as they were with the Middle Kingdom and uninterested in exploration. So it will be with WestIslam. Onward to outer space!
*This appears in the chapter Taming the Demon and cites footnote 19: “Sorokin (1962: 295-341) presents death rates from international war, averaged by century, for Greece (fifth to second century B.C.), Rome (fourth century B.C. to the third century A.D.) and for Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Small and Singer (1983 118 and 252) present annual death rates from wars for 176 states between 1816 and 1980”. The works cited are, respectively, “Social and Cultural Dynamics, vol. 3” and “Resort to Arms: International and Civil Wars, 1816-1980”.
Entitled to an Opinion 
July 2, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Mencius Moldbug writes:
“To think about violent death: imagine that black crime was an environmental pollutant. Or imagine that all these crimes were being committed not by young black men, but by the police. Or even just
imagine the response that the America of 1908 would have to this kind of stuff. (Try going to the library sometime and reading a book of newspapers from the past. You’ll get the spirit very quickly.)
On Utley: the Lattimore policy can’t really be said to supported by the Sino-Soviet split, because the split was in the wrong direction. The Maoist line was that the Soviets were not Communist enough. So instead of USSR-China-America from left to right, it was China-USSR-America. Not an insignificant difference.”
I respond:
Despite the wails of luddite enviro-doomsayers, the environment has been improving for some time. Likewise, crime has been going down. If the crimes had been committed by cops, a sensible route would be to fire cops and not necessarily hire additional ones. As it is right now they are a bit like crimes committed in another country.
You are taking communist propaganda too seriously, as with the left-right spectrum. Tito was likewise too-Stalinist for Stalin, and it is the comparison to him that Utley says is inapt. China came to embrace capitalism when Deng came to power, meshing well with its earlier alliance with the U.S on geopolitical issues. They even supported some of the same groups that the apartheid government of South Africa did.
July 2, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Liberalism, even (or especially) in its atheistic form is a sect of Christianity.
Slavoj Zizek would agree, though his “liberalism” is too extreme for most liberals:
…But the message that the Gospel sends is precisely the radical abandonment of this idea of some kind of natural balance; the idea of Gospels and the part of sins is that freedom is zero. We begin from the zero point, which is at least originally the point of radical equality. Look at what St. Paul is writing and the metaphors he used. It is messianic, the end of time, differences are suspended. It’s a totally different world whose formal structure is that of radical revolution. Even in ancient Greece, you don’t find that—this idea that the world can be turned on its head, that we are not irreducibly bound by the chains of our past. The past can be erased; we can start from the zero point and establish radical justice, so this logic is basically the logic of emancipation. Which is again why I find any flirting with so-called new-age spiritualities extremely dangerous. It is good to know the other side of the story, at least, when you speak about Buddhism and all of these spiritualities. I am sorry, but Nazis did it all. For Hitler, the Bhagavad Gita was a sacred book; he carried it in his pocket all the time. In Nazi Germany there were three institutes for Tibetan studies and five for the study of different sects of Buddhism.
July 2, 2008 at 5:06 pm
I think you need to edit: “through which they give birth and is thus prone to teat”. I mean, hyena anatomy is pretty strange, but perhaps not THAT strange.
Did Moldbug respond at all about the WestIslam thing? Are you completely surmising this on your own or have you actually seen Moldbug write a favorable word about Islam? I’m not saying you’re wrong … I know “esoteric messages” is necessarily an uncertain business so maybe you’ve noticed something I haven’t.
July 2, 2008 at 6:53 pm
MM writes:
“Tito was never to the left of the USSR. That is, he never criticizedthe USSR for reactionary backsliding. He flirted with the West.Whereas Mao condemned Khrushchev for flirting with the West.
The ideology of the Cultural Revolution seems silly now, but it wastaken quite seriously at the time – and not just in China. The NewLeft here was Maoist and the Old Left was Stalinist or Trotskyist, forexample. These three groups have grown into our modern progressives,liberals and neocons, respectively.
Don’t confuse all this with the post-Mao Thermidorean reaction ofDeng, one of my favorite statesmen of all time. Deng was a truereactionary. Nigga rocked. But to suggest that Lattimore was somehowprophesying his emergence in 1948 makes the whole Isaiah-Jesus thinglook tame.”
I respond:
Tito was attacking the western allies and supporting the Greek communists when Stalin wanted to placate Churchill. Internally his policies were too Stalinist for Stalin, as Bryan Caplan mentions here comparing Yugoslavia to China. The Yugoslavian Communist Party issued statements like “the socialism of the Soviet Union has ceased to be revolutionary”.
Deng was a longtime member of the communist party. A real reactionary would have opposed them back when they were out of power rather than joining up. He had supported Mao’s earlier Anti-Rightist campaign when Mao thought the Hundred Flowers initiative had gone too far. Likewise, Mao thought the Cultural Revolution had become excessive and began clamping down on it before Deng came to power, declaring it over in 1969. Like Gorbachev (or Kruschev), Deng permitted reforms because he thought they were necessary to salvage communism in his country (sort of like Keynes on capitalism).
The Sino-Soviet split is usually dated to the 50s. The alliance between China and the U.S began between Nixon and Mao during the height of the cultural revolution. That’s a lot fewer years away from Lattimore’s writings than Jesus from Jeremiah.
July 2, 2008 at 6:55 pm
Thanks for pointing that out, Blode.
July 2, 2008 at 7:18 pm
I think you (or MM, or perhaps both) underestimate the effect that modernity is having on the Muslim world. The Middle East has some of the most quickly falling birthrates in the world:
Some Arab countries, notably Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait and Lebanon, are either below or very close to that stability level of 2.1. Algeria and Morocco, at 2.4, are dropping fast toward it. Some other Islamic countries are also in this zone of population stability or decline, including Turkey (2.1), and Indonesia (2.2). Iran is listed at 2.0, below replacement level, but even more recent data suggests that Iran’s real rate is around 1.7, according to the latest CIA Fact book. Some scholars put it even lower.
http://www.metimes.com/Editorial/2008/01/25/editorial_mideast_fertility_rates_plunge/6336/
In Iran, the fertility has fallen because it was the will of the male-dominated Iranian government that it fall. They got the mullahs involved and men started getting snipped for free after one or two kids. It was men who changed the culture there and the culture remains very patriarchal.
But in other countries in the Mideast, I don’t believe this is the case. Fertility has dropped because of the individual decisions of women, who are exercising greater autonomy.
I’d bet 2 to 1 odds that Islam will become liberal before Europe becomes Muslim in the manner you’ve described.
July 2, 2008 at 8:15 pm
I think I should note that I think Straussians don’t give accurate interpretations (if you click the Burnham link you’ll see I dissent there) even when as in the case of Maimonides and other ancients they actually were being esoteric and in this case I was being tongue-in-cheek. However, I still would like MM to discuss the issue. Perhaps because he’s married and has told some of his close associates about the blog he doesn’t feel comfortable doing so (there’s the Straussian angle again).
July 3, 2008 at 12:13 am
This double review and Mencian critique is almost long enough to merit posting on Unqualified Reservations itself. It’s always clarifying (though humbling) to be reminded that we are primates, and that we can learn much about ourselves by observing their deeds – and misdeeds – though much of what we learn will, again, be humbling.
I think your attempt to cast Mencius as an Islamist is a bold intellectual leap, but terribly unconvincing. Does he really argue that “Our society must be converted away from Christianity?”
It seems to me that his objection is more to the cloaking of Christian (and for that matter, Judaic) principles in the vernacular of secular progressivism. Since Mencius is an avowed atheist, I suspect that he would prefer that we either a) simply drop the ruse and cleanse our political assumptions of their theological underpinnings (unlikely, of course), or that we b)at least identify our theological premises as such, and relegate them to the arena of theological discussion.
This is slightly more attainable, and would to a considerable degree liberate political considerations from progressive premsies. In the West, we are wary of explicitly religious political movements, which is why progressivism evolved in the first place. The beast had to adapt or die.
By your use of the term “conversion” you appear to suggest that Mencius would like to see the West substitute one religious ideology, Christianity (sans God, currently)with another, the potent, warlike, and patriarchical strictures of Islam. Why do you think he proposes, or secretly longs, for such an eventuality? Islm as a politcal movement has a long and glorious history (8th to 16th Century) followed by a long and disasterous decline (1600 to present). Even devout Muslims often find high-octane Islamism distinctly off-putting. In many cases, its more the unmoored losers of the new millenium, highly educated or otherwise, who gravitate toward Islamism, or at least its extreme variants. There unattached, angry primates looking for a gang, with a grudge against modernity, and little enough to lose. As Brando so memorably put it in The Wild Ones:
Intrigued young female: Whatda ya’ rebelling against?
Brando (as a motorcyle outlaw): Whatda ya’ got?
Finally, I would point out, as a matter of irony, that whereas progressivism is a constellation of religious assumptions masquearading (I know it’s misspelled) as a political movement, Islamism is a politcal movement disguised as a constellation of religous beliefs. I realize that the irony is somewhat undercut by the fact that Islam has always had an explicitly politcal dimension; the irony, nevertheless, remains.
The religious tenents of Juedo-Christianity had to adapt to a politcal framework in order to survive in an increasignly secular environment. As the West came to distrust,and ultimately dismiss, clergymen, and put its faith in political solutions, progressivism was born. In the Islamic world, politics is itself suspect, since the culture takes it for granted that most people are selfish, tribal, and corrupt, no one more so than politcians. The universalist hope, such as it is, remains explicitly, rather than covertly, religious. Hence, those in pursuit power caste their bids for such in explicitly religous terms.
There is more I could say about this, but my comment has grown long enough, and I have to get ready for class.
July 3, 2008 at 1:32 am
I apologize for the length, I did not intend for it to turn out the way it did. It just sort of developed that way after I began writing it.
It is doubtful that MM ever gave much consideration to Islam. As a westerner (a former liberal jew and later neocon and even now a supporter of gay marriage) he would be instinctively repelled by it. In his attempt to root out the ideas we have been raised on he goes off in directions disturbing to many modern Americans, and the question occurred to me, why not Islam?
He has explicitly stated that his problem is not modern atheism descended from Christianity. He objects to John Brown and the abolitionists, the Puritan tradition, the dissenting Roundheads and of course Zwingli in Switzerland. These figures were not atheists masquerading as the pious but genuine Christian fundamentalists, who took commonly accepted Christian ideals from the Bible and merely took them to a further extreme than their contemporaries. He quotes the establishment liberals contrasting Stalin with Hitler by noting that the latter seemed to be engaged in a Christian undertaking. At GNXP he forcefully argued against others in the comments that Nazism (at the elite levels at least) was atheism merely masquerading as Christianity so as not to upset the German masses.
Regarding Mencius’ atheism, remember that Strauss himself was likewise an atheist that promoted religion anyway.
“In the West, we are wary of explicitly religious political movements”
Not if it’s Martin Luther King or born-again Jimmy Carter. As has been persuasively argued at Volokh, it is not religiosity that causes wariness but conservatism.
You say that Islam has declined and I agree. I don’t agree with MM on the decline of the west. You and I view Islam from the lens of modern inhabitants of a largely Christian liberal democracy. The Stuarts, Confederates, Stahlhelm and Rhodies are all likewise losers of history, but MM optimistically imagines their return. He repeatedly points out that ambitious people aiming for success should become progressives, while losers are attracted to Revelationism. Does that mean he advocates progressivism?
I’d add that in my own opinion the actual doctrines of Christianity and Islam aren’t important. Islam isn’t that different from Judaism (or perhaps the old Hebrew religion, if we are to make the distinction) as a religion (though it has some conversion-accepting universalism tacked on to the tribal core that also retains some Arab chauvinism). Judaism and Islam look so different to us because of the contingent circumstances of history that shaped the people that identify by them.
July 3, 2008 at 7:31 am
Black Sea, are we not reptiles sprung from the earth and sea?
I believe Mencius is currently dabbling in the works of Evola, which are the next step away from Burnham’s pre-NR writings.
July 3, 2008 at 9:46 am
“Not if it’s Martin Luther King or born-again Jimmy Carter. As has been persuasively argued at Volokh, it is not religiosity that causes wariness but conservatism.”
I’m still not convinced. I clicked on the Volokh link and skimmed a little, but I don’t have time to read through it all.
Still, I’ll throw in my two cents worth by saying that MLK Jr. is neither globally revered nor particularly remembered as a religious figure. Nor is the civil rights movement seen in the West as primarily a religious movement.
I suspect that, if anything, current grade school accounts of the civil rights movement downplay the explicitly religous dimension, while emphasizing human rights, the Constitution, equal treatment under the law, etc. What’s more, as the civil rights movement gained momentum, it became less, explicitly a creature of the black Christian church, and more an all encompassing “social movement.” Then it turned into Black Power. I guess by then the Christian connection had been called into question.
As to Jimmy Carter, well yes, he was (is?) born again. But my original point was not that in the West we are wary of religion per se, or even religious figures, but rather that we are wary of, or contemptuous of, explicitly religious political movements.
Jimmy Carter was involved in a politcal . . . well, not a movement, but a party. He was not a member of the clergy, nor did he proclaim that God had decreed that he lead the American people to the new Jerusalem . . . blah, blah, blah. Had Carter framed his political appeal in such explicitly religous terms, he would never have gotten anywhere near the Democratic Convention. Carter was a peanut farmer and something of a physicist, but these attributes, like his status as a born again, were not central to his political persona.
Admittedly, there’s an overlap between religion and politics in both the eastern and western hemispheres; that was part of the point of my orginal comment. But for the benefit of contrast, consider the case of Osama bin Laden, a politcal aspirant who does not shy away from framing his arguments in explicitly religious appeals, or for that matter, Ahmadinijad. Their base loves it.
July 3, 2008 at 5:21 pm
To be honest, I thought your critique of Mencius was quite weak. The only point of contention I want to make right now, though, is that any nation governed by Sharia law has never been, is not, nor will ever be “technologically advanced.” The Arab world today without oil would be Africa. The Islamic Golden Age was an illusion; a significant majority of advancements during that period was due to recently conquered dhimmis, recently converted Muslims (usually against their will), or the transition of Greek knowledge into the Arab world.
This point to me, among others, shows how your worldview suffers from serious failings. Might I suggest studying Islam? You can start at http://www.jihadwatch.com/islam101/
July 3, 2008 at 5:45 pm
I will remain unconvinced of nearly all criticism of MM until his main point are addressed; that antinomianism is a huge problem and growing worse. While his particular solution may or may not be viable, I don’t see anyone proposing serious alternatives, although that may be simply because Mencius enjoys writing at length so much more than his average critic.
Nevertheless I’m highly impressed with this post. A review in such depth that I barely have to read the books myself, plus interpretation relating it to issues of interest. That’s exactly what I’m looking for.
July 3, 2008 at 6:43 pm
“Baboon” in your post should be “Orangutan”. Baboons are monkeys which live in troops and incidentally are matrilocal (it’s the males that leave their own troop and join anoter at adulthood), a fact which does nothing to prevent their society from being thoroughly patriarchal.
Personally I enjoyed this book, but other readers may find the author spends not enough time talking about baboons and way too much time talking about himself.
July 3, 2008 at 8:11 pm
Thanks for catching that there, George.
Alrenous, antinomianism may or may not be a problem, but trends don’t appear to be getting worse overall. A singularity seems much more likely than antisingularity.
M, relatively speaking the Islamic Golden Age was advanced, in large parts because the illiterate Arabs conquered educated people. If the West became Islamic the same inheritance from kaffirs would occur. If MM really believes that deterioration in government will outweigh advances in technology, it’s a good trade. And linking to JihadWatch really brings back memories. I remember groaning whenever it was Hugh Fitzgerald rather than Robert Spencer writing an entry. I guess I missed when Mr. Davis joined, or possibly forgot it. I recommend Gene Expression as a better site for understanding the sublunary nature of Islam.
July 3, 2008 at 8:50 pm
TGGP: it remains a question whether a strong liturgist religion and an open-minded willingness to innovate are antithetical to each other. Surely all examples up to now point to that they can’t mutually coexist.
And it may very well be true that stability and stagnation outweigh innovation and destruction. Only time will tell. I do agree with you that I doubt that Mencius has considered the real strengths of Islam as a solution to a significant portion of his problems with governance.
Additionally, the reason why illiterate Arabs conquered educated people is not because they were advanced technologically but because Islam is a political religion – it unifies believers in ways that Christianity, Judaism, paganism and what have you do not. Have you read Bat Ye’or?
You write “If the West became Islamic the same inheritance from kaffirs would occur”. That inheritance, just like in the so-called Islamic Golden Age, would be short lasting and fleeting. The strength – and weakness – of Islam is its unwillingness to update itself to modernism, with the Gates of Itjihad being closed, with the passage of abrogation, with the Koran basically being a literal conversation between Allah and Mohammed not subject to the same vagaries as the New and Old Testaments. There’s very little wiggle room unless you’re willing to basically dismiss the Koran and the Sunnah and Sharia law on their face…something which, of course, most aren’t willing to do.
I don’t really read Jihadwatch anymore, as it describes without elucidating past a certain point (Islam is coming to screw us, and we’re letting it happen). However, Islam 101 is really a great intro to the subject for the uneducated.
July 3, 2008 at 10:08 pm
I would actually like to see data on innovation over time in different religious traditions.
I did not mean to imply that the illiterate Arabs conquered because of their technology, I meant to imply that they were backward until they stole the fruits of their conquered people. I think the Islamic Golden Age lasted for a sizable amount of time, but everything is relative I guess.
something which, of course, most aren’t willing to do.
I would argue they are because they aren’t even aware of what they say. The insistence that the Koran be in old Arabic is somewhat analogous to the Catholic latin Bible before the printing press. Even now most Christians don’t know what’s in it. The GNXP link I gave before discusses that sort of thing. Another GNXP post on Eurabia is essential reading. I would also suggest reading Greg Cochran on what threat islam poses to us.
I have not read Bat Ye’or. Freda Utley rubbed me the wrong way because she felt bad about the Chinese people she knew briefly, as a Coptic Christian I doubt Bat would be much better. I bought a Koran a while back for only $7 and I’d feel somewhat guilty about having not finished it while reading a book in which someone else tells me about Islam.
July 3, 2008 at 10:28 pm
Here’s Spencer on the Islamic Golden Age:
“…There are plenty of other examples. The astrolabe was developed, if not perfected, long before Muhammad was born. Avicenna (980-1037), Averroes (1128-198) and other Muslim philosophers built on the work of the pagan Greek Aristotle. And Christians preserved Aristotle’s works from the ravages of the Dark Ages such as the fifth-century priest Probus of Antioch, who introduced Aristotle to the Arabic-speaking world. The Christian Huneyn ibn Ishaq (809-873) translated many works by Aristotle, Galen, Plato and Hippocrates into Syriac, which his son then translated into Arabic. The Jacobite (Syrian) Christian Yahya ibn Adi (893-974) also translated works of philosophy into Arabic and wrote his own; his treatise The Reformation of Morals has occasionally been erroneously attributed to several of his Muslim contemporaries. His student, A Christian named Abu Ali Isa ibn Zur’a (943-1008), also made Arabic translations of Aristotle and other Greek writers from Syriac. The first Arabic-language medical treatise was written by a Christian priest and translated into Arabic by a Jewish doctor in 683. The first hospital in Baghdad during the heyday of the Abbasid caliphate was built by a Nesotorian Christian, Jabrail ibn Bakhtishu. Assyrian Christians founded a pioneering medical school at Gundeshapur in Perisa. The world’s first university may not have been the Muslim’s Al-Azhar in Cairo, as is often claimed, but the Assyrian School of Nisibis.
There is no shame in any of this. No culture exists in a vacuum. Every culture builds on the achievements of other cultures and borrows from those with which it is in contact. But the historical record simply doesn’t support the idea that Islam inspired a culture that outstripped others. There was a time when Islamic culture was more advanced than that of Europeans, but that superiority corresponds exactly to the period when Muslims were able to draw on and advance the achievements of Byzantine and other civilizations….
Take, for example, the medical sciences. Muslims established the first pharmacies and were the first to require standards of knowledge and competence from doctors and pharmacists, enforced by an examination. At the time of the fifth Abbasid caliph, Harun al-Rashid (763-809), the first hospital was established in Baghdad, and many more followed. Yet it was not a Muslim, but a Belgian physician and researcher, Andreas Wesalius (1514-1564), who paved the way for modern medical advances by publishing the first accurate description of human internal organs, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) in 1543. Why? Because Vesaliuus was able to dissect human bodies, while that practice was forbidden in Islam. What’s more, Vesalius’s book is filled with detailed anatomical drawings – but also forbidden in Islam are artistic representations of the human body.
In mathematics, it’s the same story. Abu Ja’far Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (780-850) was a pioneering mathematician whose treatise on algebra, once translated from Arabic, introduced generations of Europeans to the rarified joys of that branch of mathematics. But, in fact, the principles upon which al-Khwarizmi worked were discovered centuries before he was born – including the zero, which is often attributed to Muslims. Even what we know today as “Arabic numerals” did not originate in Arabia, but in pre-Islamic India – and they are not used in the Arabic language today. Nonetheless, there is no denying that al-Khwarizmi was influential. The word algebra itself comes from the first word of the title of his treatise Al-Jabr wa-al-Muqabilah; and the word algorithm is derived from his name. Al-Khwarizmi’s work opened up new avenues of mathematical and scientific exploration in Europe, so why didn’t it do the same in the Islamic world? The results are palpable: Europeans ultimately used algebra, in conjunction with other discoveries, to make significant technological advances; Muslims did not. Why?”
and on it continues…it also talks about Islamic architecture being derivative of Byzantine civilization, as well as a significant absence of Islamic art and music.
I’ll go over the GNXP link…
July 3, 2008 at 11:01 pm
That was rather underwhelming. As he stated, no culture exists in a vacuum. Very rare is the pioneering mathematician who was not dependent on principles discovered by others. I’m surprised there was no mention of the Zoroastrian Persians, who together with the Romans considered themselves the Two Pillars of Civilization. As long as I’m linking to GNXP on everything this post in the Islamic Golden Age tries to put things in perspective.
July 4, 2008 at 4:38 pm
TGGP, I don’t think the Spencer piece was exactly overwhelming either, but it is an important antidote to recent waves of pro-Islamic, pro-North Africa, pro-Arab propaganda that have been filtering into our schools for some time. My teachers constantly referred to Hindu numerals as “Arabic numerals”, and frequently repeated that the Arabs gave us algebra.
This wasn’t nearly as bad as the bizarre way in which the Crusades were portrayed. I’m not a Christian and I’m certainly not a medieval Catholic, but by selectively truncating the frame of reference, the education authorities have created a Christian-bashing fest, or a Pope-bashing fest at the very least. Invasions of Christian Europe by Islamic forces to the south and east are simply not covered – they are not relevant to the “Muslims are poor, innocent, harmless, but highly sophisticated victims” message.
It reminds me of the time my history teacher told us that – as a matter of fact – Israel pursued a “cynical, self-interested foreign policy”. The only other country he had described in similar terms was the United States. Apparently Soviet Russia, Pakistan, Turkey, and the rest of the world pursued some other kind of foreign policies? That was the implication. Leftists mainly poison minds by implication.
July 4, 2008 at 5:28 pm
MM writes:
“Reaction isn’t like revolution. It doesn’t need to be organized. It
just happens. Because it comes from reality, it constantly oozes up
out of nowhere. Electing Giuliani, for example, was a classic
reactionary move from New Yorkers. Did they consciously think: a
Republican for us, liberalism for the rest of the world? Of course
not. Deng is in the same boat. Another case of Conquest’s first law,
except that what Deng knew was governing China.
I discovered Pobedonostsev through reading some history book that
referred scornfully to him as having “a veritable theory of reaction.”
And so he does, though his theory seems to have a lot to do with the
Eastern Orthodox Church. Most reactionaries do not have a theory,
just common sense.
Google Yugoslavia “Third Way” for the ‘non-aligned’ ideology. Not at
all the same thing as Maoism. Interpreting the contortions of the
various socialist party lines in the 20th century is a field in which
many details are misleading.
And confusing the Deng reaction, with the Sino-Soviet split, with the
non-aligned movement, lets the State Department off the hook way too
easily. The kids in Foggy Bottom were never bothered by how ruthless
or evil a revolutionary movement might be. They were just worried by
whether it was aligned with (a) Moscow, (b) Peking or (c) Washington.
If the answer was not (c), they would spare little effort or
squeamishness to make it (c). Of course (a) and (b) were playing the
same game. Most of the ideological stuff is just a cover for classic
gangster politics.”
I respond:
Electing Giuliani wasn’t like a revolution because it was an election. Pinochet or Franco’s coming to power was reactionary and also like a revolution (same with the various putschs in interwar Germany). Those things didn’t “just happen”, there was planning behind them. Deng himself was a communist revolutionary. He was an early participant in communist revolution, and that’s that. Perhaps you can argue that like Utley or Chambers he changed his mind about communism later, but he never openly made such a break with communism so an analogy to Kruschev or Gorbachev seems much more apt.
Conquest’s first law is that any organization which is not explicitly right-wing will become left-wing over time. I don’t see how that applies to an openly communist government such as the one Deng was a member of.
The disdain for theory or ideology is often traced to Russel Kirk. What do you think of him?
I did not confuse Deng with the Sino-Soviet split, I explicitly distinguished them. The split occurred before Deng, under Mao. The issue we are arguing about is the accuracy of Lattimore vs Utley on whether the Chinese communists could be moved from the orbit of the Soviets, taking Tito’s Yugoslavia as the bar to be met. I assert that the bar was passed. As I don’t take the right-left spectrum as seriously as you (all politics is gangster politics in my view, so Trotsky’s left opposition may join hands with Bukharin’s right opposition), I don’t find your initial objection terribly relevant. However, even their your contrasting description of Yugoslavia is innaccurate. Tito followed the same pattern of fervent communist revolutionaries like his neighbor in Albania denouncing the corrupt revisionism of the Soviets.
Finally, some readers would like a response from you on the patriarchy angle. I would as well. It does take up a much larger portion of the post than the Utley stuff.
July 4, 2008 at 5:40 pm
I use the term “Arab numerals” as well. I also use the terms “Frenchy fry” and “Chinese fortune cookie”.
I myself have also taken part in the long tradition of Anglo anti-Catholicism, but I don’t think the crusades are quite as good an example (though on that note it would be better if people specified which of the many crusades they were talking about). The Inquisition might be better. Just today I was rereading the beginning of Rape of Nanking where it mentions Hitler, Stalin, Dresden, Tamerlane, Carthage, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo and gives their bodycounts (though only mentioning the 6 million jews for Hitler). It also mentions the Inquisition, but fails to note how many died. Few do, or the amount of time over which they died (the author points out that Nanking is especially horrific because it took only weeks). Those who want to bash the Catholic Church or Catholicism more generally make little mention of how unique Spain was among Catholic countries. And of course nobody thinks anything of the Moors invading Spain in the first place! I also of course always laugh when newspapers continue to report stories about Muslims fearing a violent backlash after some terrorist attack, though it has repeatedly failed to materialize all the other times in the past (I think one Sikh got murdered after 9/11).
Trita Parsi’s book is an example of an analysis in which all sides rather than just Israel are viewed as cynical and self-intrested. The “realist” school of foreign policy takes that as its initial assumption, though ironically Walt & Mearsheimer’s latest book violates it by discussing the internal politics that result in countries acting against their national interest.
July 5, 2008 at 1:59 am
Two from MM in quick succession I’ll present as one:
“The problem is that however you decode the ideology of Titoism versusMaoism, the implicit assertion of Lattimore et al is that there willbe some advantage, either for America or the Chinese people or both,in a Sino-Soviet split. But of course no such advantage can bedetected, unless you pull Deng out of the future. Rather, the Chicomskilled tens of thousands of American soldiers and tens of millions ofChinese. Advantage, in the big picture: Utley. I definitely am not interested in a return of romanticized patriarchy,whether in Nazi form or otherwise. National Socialism, as perhaps youknow, was often described as a Westernized form of Islam. Yucky. Ofcourse all effective military forces are patriarchal in a sense, butthe paradigm can stay there. Probably the most salient way to describe the difference between theThird Reich and, say, Singapore, Dubai or modern China is that theThird Reich sought to force all its citizens to think obsessivelyabout government. Singapore, Dubai and the PRC seek to force alltheir citizens to not think about government at all. In a stableneocameralist state, no force is required to achieve this objective -any more than anyone is forcing you to avoid having an opinion on thebest way to implement, say, sewage treatment.
And as for the world of urban crime: don’t miss thugreport.com. It isour willingness to tolerate living in close proximity to this that is,by historical standards, remarkably unusual.”
I respond:
As I stated, the bar has already been set at Tito. Utley accepted that bar in her book and asserted the Chinese communists would not meet it. You can certainly argue that the average American saw no benefit from the grand geopolitical game in which Chinese gangsters sided with American gangsters against Russian gangsters. You can also argue that they would have seen no gain in ever opposing the Soviet Union and sending any aid to the Chinese Nationalists or troops to Korea. That’s not the perspective Utley takes.
You have on occassion praised Luxembourg as an example to emulate, and perhaps take control of England. It is not renknowned for its military forces as far as I know (the Swiss do manage to pull that of while also avoiding war). In keeping with Sailer’s Dirt Theory, I think a focus on military matters may be innapropriate. The U.S in particular is protected by oceans to the East and West, and with the Canadians of all people at its longest border.
You had earlier stated that the problem with Nazism was its demotism. It occurs to me that’s a distinct thing from romanticism, although they are intertwined as in Daniel Klein’s Romance of the People. Would an unromantic form of Islam be desirable? Khomeini’s phrase that there is “no fun in Islam” sounds promising. The EU also seems quite unromantic.
I think forcing people not to have an opinion on sewage treatment might not be easily accomplished without coercion, especially if sewage is being dumped into the water supply. The PRC is still afflicted with peasant uprisings, though they remain local and limited.
So people lived with higher rates of crime, but they weren’t willing to tolerate it? What does that mean?
July 5, 2008 at 8:51 am
TGGP writes: “That was rather underwhelming. As he stated, no culture exists in a vacuum. Very rare is the pioneering mathematician who was not dependent on principles discovered by others.” That’s not the point of the passage. The point is that many – I would say most – of the achievements of the so-called Islamic Golden Age were achieved by non-Mulsim dhimmis living under Islamic rule. It goes to show, then, as the non-Islamic population dwindled, so ended the era of the Golden Age. And because you argue that the West might somehow magically fuse with Islam into producing a dynamic, technologically advanced society, this passage directly undermines your main point. Underwhelming? I think not…(maybe it wasn’t written as concisely as you prefer, though)
I’ve read through the GNXP articles, and he is certainly well read and knowledgeable about a great many topics. However, I think he significantly understates the problem of Islamic immigration into Europe, which is growing at an alarming, alarming rate, both internally from having 6-8 kids on average and externally from immigration. Although many immigrants reject the dogmatic interpretation of Islam, especially by the third generation, they retain almost universally the anti-west mentality of Islamic culture.
Additionally, the concept of Eurabia encapsulates more than just the Islamization of Europe – it includes the desire of Europe to expand its hegemony into Islamic lands, including not just Turkey but all of the Mediterranean as well. You’ve heard of the Mediterranean Union concept that Sarkozy’s floating about, right? There’s a great deal of support for it, and the support is increasing.
July 5, 2008 at 5:31 pm
We live in majority Christian societies in which many intellectual accomplishments are not made by Christians. As mentioned, the Islamic Golden Age was comparable to the European High Middle Age, and is regarded as being so Golden because Europe had fallen so far since the Roman era. Afterward Europe made far greater strides and the Islamic world didn’t seem so dynamic in comparison. It’s not like they ran out of astrolabe manufacturers. Mencius has stated that he thinks the decline in governance will outweigh advances in technology, so then he should be willing to forego our current rate of technological advances for a freeze (or possible improvement) in the quality of government.
Razib was initially fearful that several European countries would go majority Muslim within this generation, but the data simply doesn’t support that idea. Christian evangelicals are bouncing back in part due to their high birth-rates in Europe and are numerically more significant.
I’m not really that interested in what European politicians do with regard to the Middle East unless it involves immigration.
July 5, 2008 at 5:57 pm
“I’m not really that interested in what European politicians do with regard to the Middle East unless it involves immigration.” The Mediterranean Union concept has everything to do with immigration. If the EU is expanded to cover North Africa, the immigration rate into Europe would increase *exponentially*. You can read a brief overview here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Union . Keep in mind that while it still hasn’t been implemented, (a) that it’s even debatable in public is astonishing, and (b) as Progressivism seeks to recreate the tower of Babel (all of humanity is “equal”, after all), expanding its domain into North Africa is the next logical step. Keep an eye out for this – the idea will gain ground over the next decade. Here’s a quote from Sarkozy’s speech:
“I invite all the heads of State and government of the Mediterranean rim countries to meet in France in June 2008 to lay the foundations of a political, economic and cultural union founded on the principle of strict equality between the nations bordering the same sea: the Mediterranean Union.”
http://euro-med.dk/?p=565
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2007/12/sarko-is-having-bad-time-sort-of-part.html
July 5, 2008 at 8:21 pm
I didn’t see much about immigration there, though it did mention it as one of the areas it’s supposed to be concerned with. I think it makes more sense to add Turkey to a Medditeranean Union than a European Union because it’s clearly in Asia Minor (I think that’s even the same reason Sarko gave for why it shouldn’t be let in the EU).
July 5, 2008 at 9:29 pm
More from MM:
“Read this book, or at least the first and last chapters:
http://books.google.com/books?id=xZALAAAAIAAJ
The author was a progressive (and an advisor to Woodrow Wilson). Ask yourself what he’d make of thugreport.com.
Oh, Utley is certainly not infallible. But I still reject the equivalence of the non-aligned movement, Third Way, etc (it used to be said that to be a “non-aligned” country meant you were not aligned with the United States) with Maoism. If you complete the spectrum of Cold War socialism, it goes NewDealers-Eurocommunists-Tito-USSR-Mao-Albania. There were an endless series of games played with the actual state relationships – I mean the ideology.
You will certainly not find Tito condemning the USSR for being too friendly with the West. You will certainly not find the USSR condemning Mao for being too friendly with the West, at least not until Nixon went to China – which was a long way after the 1950s. You will find the USSR condemning Tito and Mao condemning the USSR.
If your sewage treatment is shite, you will find people complaining that sewage treatment is needed. Even then they will probably not have an opinion on, say, chlorine versus filters versus lily ponds, and if they do they should not be listened to. Good government is essential to the apolitical state.”
I respond:
I don’t see why I should care much about the opinions of a Wilson man, but I presume he lived through crime rates worse than the current ones, as it was under Wilson that prohibition began. As he seems to praise the decision to shut down saloons and taverns after the riot in Atlanta, I wonder what he thought of the result of applying that policy nationally and persistently. Speaking of riots though, did you read the chapter “Rioting Mostly for Fun and Profit” in Banfield’s Unheavenly City? I would also recommend Thomas Sowell’s “Black Rednecks & White Liberals” for touching on some of the same topics, though the sections on other subjects (like Germans) are also good.
I did find it funny that he mentioned a Japanese and Chinese problem. When was the last time and American used such a phrase? His attitude toward Jim Crow seems likewise anachronistic, but it is couched and somewhat defensive. His attitude toward miscegnation seems the most out of place and he would certainly be shocked by modern opinion (if not necessarily practice).
I’m not talking about the non-aligned movement, because it didn’t exist at the time Utley wrote her book. Seeing as how it contained the clearly Soviet-aligned Cuba and China/US-ally Pakistan which was set against fellow NAM member India (which was in turn supported by Russia) I don’t thing there was much to it except impotent third world countries upset they couldn’t get in the big kids’ club. That was pretty well illustrated by their varying reactions to the invasion of Afghanistan.
Albania and China were opportunistic in the condemnations they issued, they didn’t have a problem supporting Yugoslavia or Romania against the USSR, even as Nixon visited the former they would accuse the latter of a dastardly alliance with the U.S.
http://files.osa.ceu.hu/holdings/300/8/3/text/78-4-288.shtml
Good government has never existed, for reasons explained by Public Choice theory. Bruce Benson and Bertrand de Jouvenel explain how even the old monarchs of Europe were not satisfied with the status quo and constantly sought deleterious “reform” of the sort popular with politicians now. They were constrained then by technology. Just as it allows growth of the host, its advance also grows the parasite.
July 6, 2008 at 3:02 pm
MM:
“Oh, the non-aligned movement is very important. It was the vision of the great and the good. The impotent third-world countries, Yugoslavia included, are the tip of the iceberg. What’s under the water looked very different, and it was neither impotent nor third-world. The term “third world” does not come from the Third World, either, and nor was it invented with anything like a negative connotation in mind.
There was never any such thing as a stable absolute monarchy in Old Europe. That is, there was never a monarch whose control was
absolutely secure, and who didn’t feel he was competing informally with other internal power bases (the Church, the nobility, the cities, …) So the center kept expanding for the same reason it expands now:
informal power networks metastasize.
What is interesting about the Baker book is not the writer’s own
opinions, but the society he is observing, in general quite
faithfully. For example: he lives in a world which treated an attack
by a Negro on a white woman pretty much the way ours treats an attack
by a policeman on a Negro.
Crime rates were *much* lower at the time. Again for a reason.
Search the book for the word “handkerchief.” Or try contrasting it
with this:
http://books.google.com/books?id=qMZEAAAAIAAJ
”
I respond:
What is the importance of the non-aligned movement?
It seems rather pointless to talk about good stable governments when they have as much reality to them as pixies or natural rights.
I would say that our reaction to child-abduction might be more appropriate, though we also have “missing white woman” specials on cable-news.
You are right that crime was much lower in 1908, when the book was written. It shot up above present levels under prohibition but dropped after its repeal.
July 6, 2008 at 3:26 pm
MM:
“I don’t think you’re right about crime being higher under Prohibition – do you have a source?
The Valentine’s Day Massacre, for example, shocked the country. These kinds of things happen all the time now. And as for child-abduction, consider the Lindbergh baby. A celebrity, true, but…
To understand the way 1908 saw crime, google the name “James Byrd.” There is an entire James Byrd industry, still going strong. Reason: people see Byrd as a symptom of a social problem which must be suppressed at all costs. That’s exactly how people used to look at the problem of marauding negroes. Instead of like this:
http://www.brownstoner.com/brownstoner/archives/2008/06/enough_with_the.php
Lasers didn’t used to exist, either.
The non-aligned movement was what the people who created the UN wanted the whole world to be. You’ll find people from the time writing about the UN General Assembly, the Commonwealth, and other meaningless nonentities as though they actually mattered.”
I respond:
The most reliable stats are said to be homicide and auto-theft. I don’t know where auto-theft is, and auto-ownership varied a lot over time, so here are homicide stats:
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/hmrt.htm
Crime had already risen considerably from the 1908 level by 1917, close to the last year shown, 2002. Crime has continued to drop since 2002.
Actually, after clicking on the chart and looking at the data by year I see that in 1908 the rate was 4.8 homicides while in 2004 it was 5.9. The real peaceful years were from 1900 through 1905, which I mistakenly thought 1908 was closer to in the picture.
Lasers still don’t exist in the sense they are made out to be in the popular imagination.
First you say it was important, then you describe it as “meaningless nonentities” that didn’t “actually matter”.
July 7, 2008 at 10:48 am
Why can’t MM post here directly instead of you acting as his intermediary?
July 7, 2008 at 11:18 am
There was a post-Vietnam War revolution in trauma care. Thus, many gunshot victims who today survive would have been homicide victims in earlier eras. One fairly recent study argued that homicide rates would now (1999)be several times higher if the state of emergency medical care had remained unchanged.
http://www.healthleader.uthouston.edu/archive/General_Health/2003/murderrateplunges-0331.html
http://hsx.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/6/2/128
Going back a little further in time, don’t forget the role of antibiotics in saving the lives of assault victims. If the Nazis had had penicillin Reinhard Heydrich would have survived to sit in the dock at Nuremberg-assuming he hadn’t shot himself.
July 7, 2008 at 11:37 am
icr, you can ask him yourself. He hasn’t been active in the comments of his own blog, so perhaps he prefers communicating through e-mail. If he had posted directly or I hadn’t been distracted from posting last night he would have pre-empted your most recent.
MM:
“Homicide numbers are actually some of the least interesting data for assessing total criminality. You are combining numbers for gang wars, crimes of passion, psychopathic outbursts, etc, all of which are very different phenomena. You also see huge improvements which are due to nothing but advances in trauma care. In the 1930s if you hit someone on the head and he had bleeding in the brain, he basically died.
Look, also, at the huge spike right after 1900. This is probably the result of the surge in labor “activism.” It does not mean that general criminality in the US rose by a factor of 3 in the first 10 years of the century.
I would be very surprised if armed-robbery rates, number of offences reported to the police, or similar statistics, were anywhere near their 1970 levels in 1930″
I reply:
If “total criminality” inclues jaywalking and the distribution of illicit substances, I don’t find it interesting. Homicide is the most interesting of crimes and also the least amenable to number-fudging (even official stats are better than looking at the media, there was increasing coverage of violence at schools in the 90s even as it decreased). Victimology surveys show that the crimes reported to the police are an extremely different set from the ones people claim to have experienced. I don’t know why I should discriminate between gang wars, crimes of passion and psychopathic outbursts. Perhaps gang wars tend to kill other criminals (though my guess is that they are also disproportionate victims of unorganized crimes), but then I would have to have something like James Q. Wilson’s Commision on Life Enhancement and Preservation to determine which victims richly deserved their fate. It is true that different crimes don’t necessarily track, as property crime has supposedly fallen much faster than violent crime recently, perhaps due to better security for those with property. High levels of violent crime tend to stretch the forces of law and order more, making it easier to commit other crimes. You might then also infer that criminalizing an activity even if it doesn’t produce violence directly could increase violence by wasting police resources.
Robin Hanson and the Rand health insurance study suggest that modern healthcare doesn’t help much, but it could have been the case that previously it was purely harm. Perhaps there is hospitalization data somewhere that would shed more light on things.
The Haymarket riot, the clashes with Pinkertons at company towns, the assasination attempt on Frick occurred in the late 19th century, with the succesful assassination of McKinley in 1901. The homicide data stays fairly low through about 1905 as I said (though on second thought there is a sizable increase from 1904 to 1905). I think violence in the labor movement was nothing new. I would have to see data from the 19th century to see if it had sharply declined by 1900 though.
On the non-aligned movement, MM writes:
“The epiphenomena didn’t matter. The phenomenon was real.”
I reply:
What is that supposed to mean?
July 7, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Continuing on the two-subject conversational track, MM writes:
“Homicide is a very poor indicator of the size of the habitual criminal class – those who live outside the law. Aka, thugz. Homicide is not an occupational crime. Burglary, robbery, and drug dealing are. I
support drug legalization as much as anyone, but I don’t support criminals.
Of course there has been labor violence in the US since day one – the US is the home of the labor agitator. I am just guessing as to the cause of the ramp. It could easily be a statistical artifact, too.
Your Aspergery focus on “data” makes it hard to sense the qualitative change in the American experience. The fact is that you simply don’t see the idea that some parts of American cities are no-go areas between the Gilded Age and the ’50s. People assume that it’s basically safe to go anywhere in any city. They state this assumption not by stating it, but by failing to consider the possibility of the contrary.”
I reply:
I don’t consider prostitutes and gypsy cab-drivers to be “thugs”. I don’t know what you mean by “support criminals” other than perhaps by patronizing their unlicensed businesses. Speakeasies and open-air drug-markets are not no-go areas. They are to-go areas.
It’s my impression that labor radicalism in the U.S really surged after European radicals came over. The Germans from the 1848 revolutions, for example. Before then U.S radicals were petit bourgeouis more into creating communes.
You can call it Aspbergers, but I prefer the earlier term “logical positivism”. Data talks and bullshit walks, as they say. Or as one of your commenters quoted Linus Torvalds, “If you don’t have numbers, you’re just wanking with an opinion.” Or if you prefer Lord Kelvin “When you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind”. Neither you or I actually lived any time between the Gilded Age and the 50s, and even if we had our experiences would not necessarily be representative. When you try to gain an understanding by reading the literati you find Nobody I Know Voted for Nixon. Part of the reason the tough-on-crime backlash was so delayed was that elites were seperated from and didn’t realize the extent of the problem. The first generation domestic policy neo-conservatives that helped change things did so in part because they had an “Aspergery focus on ‘data'”. Today if you look at the social sciences you will see that it is the subjects which have the most physics-envy and data-obsession (economics and then to a lesser degree political science) that are the least leftist. Historians and those in the humanities are where you are most likely to find Marxists.
On the non-aligned movement, MM writes:
“The Third World is, or was, the American liberal elite’s vision of the world as it should be – just as the Tory imperialists created an ultra-Tory world in India. The “non-aligned” countries got their policies from the Professor Burkes of the world, or their faculty ancestors anyway.”
I reply:
So did it matter or didn’t it?
The difference that jumps out at me is that Tory imperialists actually lived in these colonies, whereas I don’t think the Third World had nearly as many liberal residents. I think college campuses give a better vision of the ideal world of dyed-in-the-wool liberals.
July 7, 2008 at 5:14 pm
1. It would be interesting if there where racially weighted crime stats for the entire century.
2. Does Hanson’s favored Rand study take a broad enough view to account for the impact of long term gunshot and stabbing survival rates, or the impact of antibiotics? I’d be surprised to the quick if murder attempts weren’t significantly more successful in decades past, even if recent trends reveal marginal returns on medical intervention. Attempted murder might be the better metric, though it’s hard to know how much carnage was left unreported in the segregated past. State by state differences would be instructive if they proved at odds with contemporary demographic trends.
3. It seems to me that TGGP’s most salient point concerns MM’s alleged esoteric support for some kind of patriarchal instauration. Having recently read John Lott’s econometric analysis of women’s suffrage (in which he argues that extending the franchise relates independently to the rise of the welfare state and its attendant ills), I can’t help but wonder why MM refrains from addressing this contention, if only to dismiss it.
July 7, 2008 at 5:16 pm
erratum: “where” should be were.
July 7, 2008 at 7:01 pm
The Rand study did not compare time periods, just the effect of giving free medical care to randomly selected people compared to a control group. Anyone would probably get treatment for gunshot wounds, so it wouldn’t be marginal care. However, I do think it’s interesting that we regard medicine in the past as simply superstitious and harmful (with leaches, for example) when there’s little evidence our most modern innovations do any good.
As you can see above, I did ask MM to comment on the patriarchy angle rather than focusing so much on the Utley issues, and I found the response meager as well.
One thing that was different about the past that people often forget is the huge amount of alcohol the average person consumed. I mentioned that to Glenn Loury in an e-mail I’ll reproduce below:
I just watched your diavlog with John McWhorter and was interested with your discussion of cultural change. I generally consider cultures to have a lot of inertia and am skeptical of the ability of well-intentioned people to change them. You mention the temperance movement and stated that it appears to you that people still consume a lot of alcohol. That is the case, but people often forget just how much alcohol people used to consume (for example, around the time of the Whiskey Rebellion). It has gone down a great deal. Is that due to the temperance movement and/or preaching? I can’t say. Have there been cases when a culture that might be deemed dysfunctional has leaders that decided it needed to “do better” and succeeded in making major changes? Thomas Sowell gives as examples the Scottish and Japanese, which both emulated the English. The Japanese were more backward in their technology and social organization, it is my impression that their distinctive culture itself did not change much, which might be difficult to enact from the top-down. The Scottish on the other hand are considered by Sowell to be the originators of inner-city and hillbilly culture, with a tendency toward violence and contempt for education.
I would also note that the white illegitimacy rate has now reached what the black rate was when Moynihan wrote his report. I hear it is high in parts of Scandinavia as well, though children are still raised by two parents (who simply happen to be unmarried). Trends are fortunately going down. There is an interesting series of posts at the site Gene Expression on how boomers lamenting how the kids today are going to hell in a handbasket have things backward:
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/labels/previous generations were more depraved.php
He sent a short appreciative response a little later, which gives me all the more reason to like Glenn Loury. The diavlog I was referring to is here.
July 8, 2008 at 1:08 am
[…] That’s one of the topics in a recent diavlog with Glenn Loury (who I last mentioned here) and Josh Cohen. He even gives a shoutout to Charles Murray (while denying he’s asserting a […]
July 8, 2008 at 2:02 am
Another thread will MM opened up, so I’ll be splitting rather combining all three now.
MM writes:
The Third World matters because it’s our future. The countries overseas are just a leading indicator.
I respond:
I can see one plausible argument for that. But not applied to Tito’s Yugoslavia.
July 8, 2008 at 2:05 am
MM writes:
Read the Sudhir Venkatesh book and then ask yourself again about “prostitutes and gypsy cabdrivers.”
Your problem is that you have no taste for history. The historian’s purpose is to render the world that really existed in terms that would seem fair to you if you’d actually been there. Think of all the ways
in which statistics could be deployed by a 22nd-century historian to misrepresent the world you live in. I’ve already linked you to Carlyle’s discussion of the subject, so I won’t bore you again.
Conservatives and libertarians who have embraced “social science” are playing Calvinball with Calvin. Foolishly, they believe that if they play by the rules they will get “policymakers” to bend an ear to their “studies.” But “social science” was invented in the first place to camouflage a politico-religious agenda – take a look at some of the nutballs who founded the American Economic Association, for example. No one is convinced by “social science” unless they want to be.
Numbers are wonderful in physics. They have o place in literary criticism. If you tried to do physics by the rules of literary criticism, Lord Kelvin would be right to object. When you try to do literary criticism by the rules of physics, you should only expect to be laughed at. And history is a branch of literature.
I reply:
I’ve got too much on my plate to take on another book, especially one I don’t find very interesting (though Venkatesh did provide some value in the data that wound up in Freakonomics). The book isn’t about gypsy cab drivers, so just sum up why I would have a problem with them after I read the book.
Statistics can be used to mislead, but I find natural language to be far more likely to do so. The people with the least reliance on statistics tend to be more heavy on the bullshit, in my experience. Though I could possibly have a severely defective bullshit detector, which could explain why I read weirdos like you and Sailer!
I don’t recall Carlyle discussing statistics, so you’ll have to link to it again.
When does “social science” begin? OrgTheory has as its tagline Alexis de Tocqueville’s quote “the science of association is the mother science; the progress of all the others depends on the progress of that one.” Democracy in America came out in 1835, does that rule out the economics that came out after it such as the Austrian School (or marginalism more generally)? When you talk about the AEA you refer to a specific organization. Wouldn’t you also have to conclude that history is bunk after, say, reading the historians brief in the Heller case, one of whose contributors gets completely beclowned by Eugene Volokh here?
You are arguing against the use of a tactic to persuade a specific group of people. I agree that it is not worth it to try and persuade that group of people of anything. Public Choice theory would actually tell you as much! Then you use that to dismiss the tactic as a means of understanding the world. None of that supports the view that any alternative tactic is preferrable in any way. Are more persuaded by data-free explanations when they don’t want to be? Because I’ve come across quite a few cases in which people whose priors or ideology predisposed them against a position but they were convinced by “social science”.
July 8, 2008 at 2:09 am
I started a third thread going by sending another link on the decline in violence.
MM responded:
The guy is an *appallingly* bad writer. A classic example of the conquest of history by “social science.” Nor does his book, at least the parts that are visible, contain data. Just logorrhea.
Of course the Middle Ages were more violent than the 1950s. Duh. I wouldn’t be surprised if Kling is right about the genetics, but culture also plays a role. There was nothing in medieval Europe, however, that approached the level of deracinated barbarism described by Venkatesh.
I replied:
I completely agree that genetics is not sufficient. The Great Sixites Freakout was not a result of eugenics gone wrong (though lead might have played a big role). When you discuss war, institutions matter (even Greg Clark only denied that they do in the long term, as bad ones get replaced, and he’s talking about economic growth).
Is deracinated the right word? I would say that Europeans got more peaceful as they became deracinated, and the two trends were linked. Gangs are very rooted in the neighborhood. I’m reminded of the woman who lived in the projects and had nostalgia for the days when her much younger sister could wander the streets confident that the local prostitutes would alert her mom if she got in any trouble! It’s not that they have no culture, they have a dysfunctional culture (I think Banfield talks about that in The Unheavenly City, though perhaps I’m recalling the wrong person because his most famous book was The Moral Basis of a Backward Society).
So the result of history being conquered by social science is an absence of data? Did those who proclaimed “history is the story of the acts of great men” have an Aspergery obsession with data?
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