Jews Demand Signs and Greeks Look for Wisdom, but We Preach Christ Crucified

Review of God of the Mind, by Rob Haskell

This blog had its start in a religious discussion, pitting a Christian perspective against an atheist one. That discussion never ended because these viewpoints inevitably talk past each other, based as they are on fundamentally different epistemologies and axioms. Is truth facts, or is it a person? Does it have a capital "T", or a little "t"? Does reality come first, or does faith? With this election, this conflict, usually politely ignorable at the cultural sidelines, has come front and center, as half the country has transferred a Christian style of reasoning to politics, with catastrophic consequences.

I very much wish I had had this book by Rob Haskell back in the day. It lays out in a concise and thorough way all (well, let's say many of) the philosophical and psychological deficiencies of god-belief. It is hands-down the best discussion I have ever read on the subject- well-written, with humor and incisive insight. For example, he provides the bible quote that I have used to title this post, in a discussion of Christianity's approach to reason and intellect. While reams of theology support Christianity with reasons, at the end of the day, any honest theologian and Christian thinker will say that reason doesn't get you there. Faith needs to come first. Only then does all else follow. And this "all" is laced with superstition, suspension of normal rules of evidence, submission to authority, and a need to convert the whole world to the same system of belief. It is, implicitly, a preference for unity and power over truth. No wonder they were marks for the charismatic authority of Donald Trump.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the whole debate is the moralism that creeps into what is ostensibly a reasoned discussion of viewpoints and philosophy. If one does not accept god, Christians have been taught to believe that there is a reason. Not a logical reason, but a moral reason. Depravity is a word that comes up. Lack of belief betrays a moral failure, because god is the foundation of all moral law (those twelve commandments!). Those outside the fold merely want their false freedom to enjoy debauchery and crime, without the nagging conscience, which is apparently implanted not by god at birth, (let alone by evolution, or by moral reasoning), but by regular sermons, loudly professed faith, and bible reading. A bible, we might note, that is full of militarism, sexual abuse, deceit, and political authoritarianism. The whole proposition is absurd, from the ground up, unless, of course, you are of the religious tribe, in which case it has an irresistible logic and allure.

No wonder Christians feel good, right, and justified. And feel a birthright to rule over all, to claim that the US is (or should be) a Christian nation. One where resistance to its moral imperatives would, at last, be futile.

But here we are, getting off track! Rob Haskell is a former protestant missionary and minister, graduate of Regent College, and came to his new positions through deep personal engagement and turmoil. He knows intimately of which he speaks. An interesting aspect of his book is that he is almost more focused on psychology than on philosophy. For it is psychology that drives religious conversion, drives people to prostrate themselves before the void, and drives a faith that calls itself truth. Without the indoctrination by families, for example, no religion would amount to much- certainly not Christianity. And indoctrination of the young is obviously a highly irrational process, combining the most powerful psychological forces known- peer pressure, parental pressure, authority, tradition, community, repetition, fancy costumes. Who could resist? And yet Christians have no problem claiming that the result of all this is belief in truth, with a capital T. 

Haskell recounts an educational experience he had inviting Mormon missionaries to an extended discussion of why he should take up Mormonism. They tout the book of Mormon, which Haskell knows very well is a absurd fabric of early nineteenth century prejudices and speculations. They tout the archeological work a few believers have undertaken to prove their scripture, which is highly dubious, to say the least. But at last, when reason fails and argument slackens, Haskell is urged to pray. Pray hard enough, and the light is sure to shine. And for Mormons, brought up with all the pressures and templates ready-made for their belief, such prayer is very likely to work, activating the archetypes and feelings conducive to agreement with their culture. Will the story or the prayer work for others? Rarely, but occasionally it does strike a nerve, especially in the psychologically vulnerable. Haskell recognizes, uncomfortably, that while the stories are different, the psychological methods used by the Mormons and by him as a missionary are eerily similar.

"This points back to what I've already described, namely that in evangelical thinking, and possibly in all religious thinking, the acceptance of certain crucial and non-negotiable ideas comes first. Then, after that acceptance comes the search for evidence that supports it. But that evidence always gets the short end of the stick. Evidence is great when it affirms the things that are accepted by faith. But here isn't a lot of interest in evangelical circles in evidence itself, or in thinking clearly about evidence. And when the evidence falls short, the believer goes back to where it all started: not evidence but faith. So, it's really a matter of wanting to have your cake and eat it too. There's a built-in permission to be sloppy. 'We like evidence!' says the evangelical, 'so long as it proves our point. but when the evidence brings up difficult questions, we reserve the right to toss it out and appeal to faith.' ... How can you have a serious conversation with someone who thinks like this? It's like talking with your teenager."

Rationalization and confirmation bias are fundamental aspects of human psychology. Science has developed an organized and reasonably effective way to address it, but other institutions have not, notably the echo chambers of current news and social media. We do it all the time, (I am certainly doing it here), and it is no wonder that Christians do it too. The problem is the lack of humility, where Christians revel in their fantastical story, impugn anyone so dense (if not evil) as to not get it, and twist the very vocabulary of epistemology in order to declare that "Truth" comes, not out of reality, but precisely out of unreality- a faith that is required to believe in things unseen and tales thrice-told.

• And he writes a blog, too.
• Example of typical religious condescension, by J D Vance's mentor, James Orr.
• The Discovery Institute will try anything...
• Then there is the no true Scotsman defense.
• The Supreme Court lowers itself still further.
• What makes a human brain?
• We continue speeding ever faster to disaster.
• Poisonous propaganda + AI = our future.

The Politics of Martyrdom Invite the Politics of Extermination

Israel is following a kind of logic, but where does it lead?

We are all horrified by the war on Gaza. But there is some logic to it, despite the pervasive lack of reason. Hamas has set itself up as the never-say-die defenders of Palestinian ideals. Which appear to consist of the non-existence of Israel, and the resumption of Palestinian occupation of all its historical lands. (Though it has to be said that they had been ruled by a long succession of outside powers, from the Romans to the British.) Hamas cared little about the actual Palestinians, who have been pawns in its larger play for power and martyrdom. Like the PLO in earlier decades, Hamas has largely been carrying on an idealistic PR campaign of moral absolutism, resisting the occupier, to the last breath and drop of blood. So they posited that the survival of any member of Hamas was a victory for the "movement". This makes sense in a PR sense, as a moral position against oppression.

But all this also implies the nature of the Israeli response. Against an enemy that never negotiates, or concedes, or makes peace, the only solution (as the Romans found millennia ago) is extermination. Against an enemy that hides behind its own civilians and thinks nothing of operating out of hospitals and schools, in an attempt to play on the residual morality of its enemies, one can understand that compassion takes a back seat to effectiveness.

This is not to say that Israel is right either. They have compounded their original sin of terrorism and violent expropriation by more violence, more injustice, and the slow torturous drip of more expropriation. The West Bank continues to be eaten away by settlers and official Israeli state policy, and Gaza was under debilitating embargoes / sieges. Israel thought it was secure behind its border wall, but it turned out not to be so beautiful after all, for either side. But after the long historical process that has played out, Israel has all the power- the bombs, the planes, the organized political system and military. Hamas and the Palestinians generally have lost every war, and have little but their moral indignation and hatred to stand on. Turning that into extremist absolutism and martyrdom is a recipe for an even worse outcome. 

Their Muslim neighbors and allies took a couple of stabs at helping them, but lost each war to Israel, in comprehensive fashion. Their continuing assistance to the Palestinians is little more than cynical ploy to keep the Palestinians irritated and irritating, without risking their own necks. This was first the role of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, but that mantle has more recently been taken up by Iran. And now Israel is calling Iran's bluff, taking the fight to all its proxies and to Iran itself. They have not set themselves up for extermination, but rather for deterrence, whatever level of destruction that will take. The idea that Hezbollah could just pepper Israel with artillery at will without any reply was not realistic. 

So, can Israel carry out all these logical aims- to exterminate Hamas and degrade Hezbollah and Iran sufficiently to deter further guerilla warfare? That depends on its resolve and military capacity. But it also depends on its resolve to diffuse the overall Palestinian conundrum that, in the grand scheme of things sponsors all these antagonisms, by making a grand deal that finalizes a Palestinian state and territory. And that is where the current government of Israel is fatally uninterested and incapable. It looks like this government would rather be the new Rome, projecting power throughout the Middle East, collectively punishing Palestinians, and forcing Palestinians into a modern international diaspora, (and making itself into a semi-autocratic militarized state along the way), than it is in learning from its own history.

• Sanewashing?
• Negativity sells.
• The big lie. And lots of little lies. They all have a purpose.
• Covid plays keep-away with our antibodies, to come back for more.

Drought Causes Cultural Breakdown

What happened to the Hittites, and the late Bronze Age?

Climate change is already causing wars and migration, misery on a vast scale. The global South takes the heat, while the global North keeps making it, pumping out the CO2. Can we adapt, or is the human population going to decrease, either gently or not so gently, as conditions deteriorate? The answer is not at all clear. The adaptation measures taken by the rich world involve highly contentious politics, and uncertain technology that, at best, requires a great deal more resource extraction. The poor, on the other hand, are left to either try developing (if they can maintain good political and economic governance) to join the rich in their extractive ways, (China, India), or migrate en masse to rich countries (Africa, Central America). All this is going to get worse, not better, since we are still at peak CO2 emissions and only beginning the process of global heating.

Our emissions of CO2 are still going up, not down. Therefore climate change will be getting worse, faster. Conflict is one likely outcome.

Well, migrations and dislocation have happened before. Over the last millennium, it was cold temperatures, not hot, that have correlated with conflict. Epic migrations occurred in the declining days of the Roman Empire, when the Huns drove a domino series of migrations of Germanic tribes that fought their way throughout Europe. What prompted the Huns out of the Asian steppe is unknown, however. Jared Diamond wrote of several other cultures that met their end after exhausing their resources and technologies. A recent paper added one more such case- the Hittites of late Bronze Age.

The Hittites were a big deal in their time (1700 to 1200 BCE, very roughly), running what is now Eastern and Southern Turkey, and occasionally Syria and points South. They were an early offshoot of the Indo-European migrations, and had a convulsive (though not very well understood) history of rises and falls, mostly due to their political dynamics. At the height of Hittite power, they fought Egypt directy at the battle of Kadesh, (1274 BCE), which occured just a little north of current-day Lebanon. This was the complex frontier between Assyria / Babylon, the Hittites, and Egypt. Egyptian history is full of expeditions- military, economic, and diplomatic- through the Levant.

The Hittites were artists as well as warriors.

The Hittites were also one of several communities around the Mediterranean that shared in the late Bronze Age collapse. This is the epic time that saw the Greek siege of Troy, (~1200 BCE), and the "Sea People's" invasion of Egypt. Its causes and details remain a long-standing historical mystery. But its scale was vast. Greece entered its dark age that lasted from 1200 to the 800's BCE. North Africa, the Balkans, Turkey, Levant, and the Caucaus all declined. Assyria and Egypt were weakened, but did not collapse. The latest paper uses tree-ring data from junipers from around the former Hittite capital in what is now central Turkey to more precisely date a severe drought that may have caused this collapse. Drought is just the kind of cause that would have been wide-spread enough and foundational enough to destroy the regional economies and prompt migrations and wars. Wars.. there are always wars, but no single war would have caused the collapse of cultures on such a wide scale, including a weakening of Egypt. Plagues are also not a great candidate, since they do not harm a society's resource base, but only its population. Such population reductions typically benefit the survivors, who rebuild in short order.

Moisture levels inferred from tree ring data, with lower values dryer. There are three consecutive catastrophic years dated to 1198-1196 BCE in this region, which is around the ancient Hittite capital. The ensuing decade was also unusually dry and likely poor for agriculture. The 20% and 6.25% levels of drought are by comparison to wider sampling, including modern data.

The drought these authors identified and located with precision was extraordinary. They note that, using modern data for indexing, the 20% level (representing about 30 cm of annual rain) is the minimum viable threshold for growing wheat. The 6.25% level is far below that and represents widespread crop failure. They developed two types of data from the tree rings, drawn from 18 individual trees whose rings spanned about a thousand years across the second millenium BCE. First is the size of the rings themselves, whose data are shown above. Second is the carbon 13 isotope ratio, which is a separate index of dryness, based on the isotopic discrimination that plants exercise over CO2 respiration under different climatic conditions. 

The same tree rings that provided the inferences above from their geometry (width) also here provided carbon 13 isotope data that lead to a similar conclusion, though with much less precision. High proportions of C13 indicate drier climate, here continuous around 1200 BCE.

The paper shows three consecutive years at the 6.25% level of rainfall, starting at 1198 BC. The ensuing decade was also harshly dry. All this correlates with cuneiform texts found in the Levant that were letters from the Hittites, bemoaning their drought and begging for assistance. But everyone in the region was in a similar position. The Hittite culture never recovered. 

So drought is now a leading hypothesis for the ultimate cause of the late Bronze Age collapse around many parts of the Mediterranean, with Greece and Anatolia particularly affected. While it is reasonable to imagine that such conditions would lead to desperation, migration, and war, there is no direct link yet. The nature and origin of the Sea Peoples who attacked Egypt remain unknown, for instance. The reasons for the seige of Troy are lost to myth. The Illiad never mentions drought, nor would Troy have been in a much better position than Mycenaean Greece, climatically speaking. But the consequences of geopolitical shifts in alignment can be unpredictable, as we continue to experience today. It is exciting (as well as sobering) to get a glimpse into this cloudy history- into a vast swath of human experience that built great cultures and suffered epic defeats.

• The planet can just go to hell.
• And so can our political system and media.
• The next Mein Kampf.
• Maybe governments should really do things themselves.

A Road of Grass- Migrations Along the Asian Steppe

Genomics data confirms that the Avars were of East Asian origin before taking over the Carpathian basin.

Historians have gradually accorded increasing respect to the various Central Asian groups that swept in and terrorized Europe for a millenium, including in turn the Scythians, Huns, Avars, Mongols, and Turks. The Mongols particularly created a golden age of commerce across the Silk Road, which Marco Polo traveled to such great adventure. This history is both extremely dynamic, and poorly documented, as these nomadic cultures left little behind, especially writing. Their roots range from Iran and the Indo-Europeans to the Mongolian and Tungusic regions. A putative "Altaic" language group extends from Hungary all the way to Korea and Japan, though it is a disparate group arising more from interchange and borrowing than from a single origin- testament to the frequent traffic along the steppes.

To settled cultures, both in Europe and in China, these nomads were terrors, living on their horses, infinitely mobile, and possessing powerful weapons like their composite bows. The continual succession of these cultures (unlike, say, the long stability of ancient Egypt) also indicates that they fought constantly among themselves, in true Darwinian fashion. Success revolved around not only technical innovation and a martial culture, but also social abilities to forge groups large and cohesive enough to control vast regions, despite the tendency of warriors to fight ... with each other.

The Avars were one of this succession, historically known as invaders of the Carpathian Basin who set up a brief empire (~570 to 790 CE) after defeating Goths who had in turn succeded the Huns, who had replaced the Romans of Pannonia. At their height, the Avars ruled from Turkey to Austria, but were within two hundred years defeated by the Franks, who were soon followed by the Magyars, who finally stayed to found what is now Hungary. One can see that the Balkans, which lie in this region and towards the Adriatic, have had a tumultuous history. The Avars had reputedly come from the far East, after the nascent Turks defeated the Hunnic / Rouran center, of which the Avars were supposedly a successor, offshoot, or client group. Historians have been divided, though, since there is little evidence of far Eastern influences in the Carpathian archeology, and competing accounts put their origin more Westerly, around the Urals or Caspian basin. 

"The Rourans were defeated by the Turks, who had been their subjects, in 552–555. Their empire fell apart and, according to the contemporary Chinese sources, the core Rouran population was brutally massacred. Some of the Rourans fled to China and soon disappeared from sources. Another group of the Rourans is commonly thought to have migrated westwards and become the Avars of European history"

But a recent paper (largely authored by Hungarians) has settled the matter. They sequenced DNA from numerous burials dated through the Avar era, and compared them to a variety of samples from across the steppes. They find that indeed, the earliest and richest graves of the Avar era have almost exclusively far East Asian DNA markers, from what is now roughly Mongolia, while later remains show increasing admixture with the local Western Europeans. 

"All of the early-Avar-period individuals (DTI_early_elite), except for an infant and a burial with typical characteristics of the Transtisza group, form a tight cluster with a high level of ANA (ancient North East Asian) ancestry. They are located between present-day Mongolic- (e.g., Buryats and Khamnigans) and Tungusic/Nivkh-speaking populations (e.g., Negidals, Nanai, Ulchi, and Nivkhs) together with the only available ancient genome from the Rouran-period Mongolia."

"The remaining 9 late-Avar-period individuals show minor (<40%) to almost negligible (<5%) admixture with ANA-related sources, while the major ancestry component can be approximated by one of the preceding local groups for most of the individuals"

In discussions of these eras, hundreds of years can go by rather quickly. Still, the mobility and dynamism of these peoples is astonishing. Rome had already experienced the knock-on effects of tribes such as the Scythians driving other peoples westward before them. And the Indo-European invasions were something similar, farther back in the mists of time. Such migrations and conquests kept on happening, thanks to the love these people had for their horses, the endless flatness of the landscape, and the rich pickings available among settled cultures around their periphery.

The Steppe region marked in brown. Sites of burial remains that were sequenced are marked, extending clear across Asia, allowing the authors to classify particularly early and high-status burials in the Carpathian basin (left-most) as most related to a far eastern origin.

Today, Russia (whose lengthy period under Mongol rule strongly shaped its culture) has resumed the mortal competition for empire among the flatlands of Central Asia and Eastern Europe. While we can marvel at the relentless valor of Huns and Avars, seeing such ruthlessness up close in our own time isn't abstract history, it is thoroughly appalling.

• The sleeze just keeps getting worse.
• The Webb telescope is working great.
• Making ebikes easy.
• Is the Bible age-appropriate reading material?
• Another reason for inflation.
• Six minutes hate ... and lies.

Toxic Nostalgia

Making Russia great again.

What is it about the past? Even though we are condemned to live in the future, we can't stop fantasizing and fetishizing the past, and wanting to go back. On the gentle side, Proust wrote nothing but loving remembrances of his (sometimes mortifying) past, trying to evoke its moods, textures, smells, and feelings. But why does nostalgia so often curdle into bloodlust and terror? For that is where the Russian autocrat is going with his nostalgia for the Soviet era when Stalin ruled even more autocratically over a well-cowed populace extending from Hungary to the Pacific. Ah, those were the days!

It isn't just our current crisis- far from. The Trumpists want to make America great... again. The Muslim jihadists are bent on reproducing the pre-eminent dominance of Islam of 1300 years ago. The Serbs hearken back to their own grand empire of 700 years ago. Shia muslims fetishize their losses and in a theology of repair and redemption. Jews have both bemoaned their losses of their great kingdoms two millennia ago, and militantly sought their promised land back. And fundamentalists of all stripes yearn to get back to the basic tenets of their faith- the pure origins of incendiary belief and miracles.

It all seems a little over-determined, as though the operative emotion isn't nostalgia exactly, but powerlust, seizing on whatever materials come to hand to say that we as some tribe or culture are better and deserve better than we've got. While the future remains ever shrouded, the past is at least accessible, if also rather protean in the hands of dedicated propagandists. In Russia's case, not only did Stalin help start World War 2 by co-invading Poland, but the prior holocaust/famine in Ukraine, followed by the transplacement of millions of Russians into Ukraine.. well, that all makes this current bout of nostalgia far from sympathetic, however well-twisted it has been for internal consumption. Of course the propaganda and the emotion is mostly instrumental, in a desperate bid to fend off the appearance of happy, secure, and prosperous democracies on Russia's borders, which is the real danger at hand, to Putin and his system.

In remembrance of Russia's great patriotic war, which it helped start.

Yet, such nostalgia is strongly culturally binding, for better or worse. Rising states may have short histories and short memories, resented as the nouveau-rich on the world stage. They are not "as good" in some essential way as those whose greatness has passed into the realm of nostalgia. Worth is thus not in the doing but in some ineffible essentialist (read nationalist/tribal) way that is incredibly resistant to both reason and empathy. It is analogous to "nobility" in the class structure within most societies. In the US, we seem on the cusp (or past it) of our time atop the world stage. Do we then face hundreds of years of regret, comforting ourselves with tales of greatness and seething resentment?

With echos of a deeper past.

• Could the West have been smarter; more generous?
• Apparently, we are all going to die.
• Tires are bad.

Origins in the Other: Moses the Egyptian

Stray notes on what Judaism owes to Egypt.

It is a bitter historical irony that Jesus was a Jew, (as were all the founding Christians), yet his religion was taken up by non-Jewish communities who turned its stories against its originators, casting Jews as the betrayers, stubborn heretics, and generally the other, with disastrous consequences. Well, something similar may have happened at the origin of Judaism, as there is a fascinating thread of historical scholarship and speculation that suggests that Moses was Egyptian, and that much of the religion of Judaism was generated as a mixture of inheritances from, or inversions of, the religion and cults of Egypt.

While the Bible is full of Moses stories, no other historical, let alone archeological, attestation exists. Thus the many authors who have striven to unearth the truth of what happened have had to be creative. The whole thing may be an out and out myth, or unrecognizably reworked. Freud wrote "Moses and Monotheism" as an exercise in retro-psychoanalysis, cutting his totemic father figure down in an imagined Oedipal paroxysm of murder, followed by remorse. Jan Assmann more recently, in "Moses the Egyptian", wrote an eliptical tale of cultural hints and suppressed memories and trauma continually expressed and re-interpreted over time in the "othering", adoption, and inversion of cultural patterns. Manetho, a third century BCE Egyptian priest, wrote a history that puts Moses, originally an Egyptian priest named Osarseph, at the head of a renegade (and leper, for good measure) army which terrorized Egypt sometime in the 1300-1500 BCE period, ending in their expulsion and exile. 

The Hyksos, a semitic people, had a distinctive look, in Egypt of ~1900 BC.

Ever since the reign of Akhenaten was unearthed in the late 1800's, it has been tempting to tie his monotheistic revolution (1353-1336 BCE) to that of Judaism, which was putatively founded in the same general time period, when Egypt was at its height of power and regional influence. In both cases, monotheism was a tough sell, and created antagonism that characterized both episodes. The Amarna period ended with complete reversal- Akhanaten being erased from his monuments and records, and Egypt returning to its traditional ways. Judaism, according to its own documents, and despite Moses's teaching, endured a lengthy period of conflict and consolidation before the monotheistic faction gained ascendence in the post-Babylonian exile period. It also generated the enduring enmity of neighboring polytheists, ultimately resulting in the military defeat and dispersal of the Jewish nation.

So what is the evidence? Moses is an Egyptian name. Like Tutmosis, Ahmose, Ramses, and many others, it means "is born", or "is child of". While there are both Hebrew and Egyptian etymologies possible, Moses is also described as practiced in all the arts of Egypt, including various forms of magic and the secret symbols, i.e. hieroglyphs. Egyptians practiced circumcision, which Judaism obviously adopted with gusto. Egyptians worshipped the ram (representing the leading god, Amun) and the bull (Osiris), which the Jews turned around and sacrificed in their rituals. Cooking meat in milk was an Egyptian practice, which may have been the source of the contrary interdiction in Kosher law. Judaism was anti-iconic, completely contrary to the abundant icons of, frankly, all the other polytheistic religions, though new icons have been snuck in, in the form of the ark of the covenant, the Torah scrolls, wailing wall, etc. The Thummim is a judicial badge and device for divination, taken from the Egyptians. It is indeed likely that originators of Judaism were assimilated Egyptians who left, whether by choice or not. The historian Tacitus noted the inverted character of Judaism vs the Egyptian religion. And Maimonides argued that the laws were a form of treatment for withdrawal from idol-addiction, in his case against the "Sabians", which in reality were the Egyptians, if they were any actual culture at all. But it served other purposes as well, such as cultural glue, which continues to be functional even when all other reasons have become irrelevant and many of the less convenient laws have been cast aside.

Whichever pharoh was the one described in Exodus, its Egyptological details, though accurate, come from a substantially later time, the 600's BC, when it was written, not from the time of the events. And Assmann argues that Manetho, for one, conflated several historical episodes to come up with his account. One was a Hyksos colony of semitic peoples that occupied northern (lower) Egypt through the second intermediate period (~1800 BC) to their defeat, about 1540 BC, by Kamose and his successor Ahmose, who were based in the south. There may have, however, been other incursions of semitic peoples from time to time, especially as records through the less organized periods of Egyptian history are sparse. A second episode was the Amarna period, which was officially suppressed, but which Assmann argues remained vivid as a traumatic memory of religious and existential revolution, informing an Egyptian official's view of "pollution" of the Egyptian culture by outsiders. 

Similarly, one can imagine that the idea of monotheism, so suddenly sprung upon the Egyptians, is something that was knocking around for longer periods of time, both before and since. Assmann goes through a long argument by Ralph Cudworth (who wrote long before the hieroglyphs were deciphered) about a possible "esoteric" theology of the Egyptians, which was monotheistic, while the cult for public consumption was polytheistic. That makes little sense, as all royal tombs and decorations hew (religiously!) to the standard story, and so clearly embody a full cast of characters, and their belief in the Osiris story and hope of continued life in the land of the un-dead. Nevertheless, even without such an esoteric/demotic split, it is natural to wonder about origins, such as where this family of gods arose from, which in turn would send thoughts in the direction of possible monotheism. Perhaps the incredible conservatism of Egyptian culture caused such thoughts to be ruthlessly stamped out, but also prone to occasional eruption in incovenient forms. We in our own time are experiencing the thrill of normative inversion, when a subculture decides that black is white, that all norms should be trampled, and a new god worshipped. 

Even if the Amarna period did not directly foster Moses and the Jewish form of monotheism, the latter owes a great deal to Egyptian culture, likely including some glimmer of the monotheistic idea. Within Judaism, it took a second (and certainly real) exile, in Babylon, to bring the monotheistic idea to fuller fruition, as the last set of prophets called for purification and repentance, the Torah was written down, and the second temple built.

• The sartorial Olympics.
• The supremes throw lower courts under the bus.
• Some dog breeds are just too inbred and messed-up.
• When it comes to swallowing lies, believers have a lot of practice.

Myth and Science

Stories we tell about how things work.

I am reading an ancient book about ancient myths, covering some of what was known of the ancient world's stories circa the mid-20th century (that is, the "developed" ancient world of Egypt, the Near East, China, India, etc.). The authors occasionally seem exasperated that their colleagues- the ancient authors of these stories and myths- do not always take their stories as seriously as scholars themselves do, after having so painstakingly learned the relevant languages, unearthed the precious tablets, papyri, inscriptions, and other sources, compared different versions, and interpreted them in light of the historical setting. No, ancient myths can be playful affairs, evolving in dramatic complexity, freely mutating to serve the needs of the moment in their mutable oral traditions. This is especially true the farther back you go into ethnographic history, such as into the stories of the Inuit and other First Peoples of North America. It is evident that ancient societies varied widely in their theological and mythological sophistication, and particularly how closely entwined these were with the centers of power.

Inuit mythologies and their custodian, the shaman.

The scholarly apparatus around myth studies has a very earnest and modernist cast, which derives from two sources. First is Christianity, which as an extreme political and social elaboration of ancient religions has progressively reified and codified its myths. Inheriting a grab-bag of disparate ancient myths and stories, Christianity shored up its social position and theological bona fides by insisting that it was all true. The more sclerotic and far-reaching its bureaucratic structure, the more tightly it held to the absolute truth of its dogmas. A second aspect was the enlightenment and the rise of scientific modernity. That world view was not interested in playful myths of psychodrama, but in hard truths of how the world really works, stripped of the colorful trappings. Competition with this world view helped to further push religious dogmas in an absolutist direction, to that point where today, both Christian Evangelicals and fundamentalist Islamists insist that their scriptures are literally true, handed down from an all-powerful god who really exists and is not fictive construct meant as a playful expression of our scientific ignorance on one hand, and our love of social drama on the other. Anthropologists took their cues from all this, assuming that the precious myths they were studying had to be expressions of a society's absolute truths, organizing principles, and deepest motivations. But perhaps they were originally ways to pass the time and enchant a few youngsters.

Science is telling stories, too. Are they really so different? On the one hand, our need to orient ourselves in the world remains unchanged from ancient times, so the core purpose of explaining reality and society through complicated tales of causes and effects remains. And to a lay person, the explanations of quantum mechanics or cosmic inflation are no less impenetrable than myths about gods and dragons. Thus the scientists who are the custodians of these stories find themselves in the ironic position of a new priesthood, cultivating the cultural narrative around origins, natural phenomena, biology, and the like, while extending these stories in systematic ways that the priests (and alchemists, and shamans, and druids) of yore could only dream about, if they could even conceive of such reliable beliefs untethered from social drama and social control. But today's scientists can't and won't inject ancillary drama into these stories, so they will remain split off from their traditional roles and uses.

So the telling of dramatic stories and the consequent management of society through the narratives of origins, myths, and meaning- if ancient myths really did fulfill these functions, which is perhaps an anachronistic construction on our part, or at least varied widely with the nature of ancient societies- are skills having nothing, really, to do with the scientific enterprise of today, and thus nothing to do with this new priesthood. Who takes these roles?

Theology would seem the natural place for the living and socially relevant myth. But theology has split definitively from science, from history, and indeed from reality, nurturing narratives that are absurd while claiming they are true, and which in their antiquity and provincialism are impossibly remote from our current concerns, morals, and social ability to relate even allegorically. Theology has thus become lost in a sterile wilderness, doomed to be cut off from its mythical and social power. Even the more liberal and elastic precincts, if they do not insist on absolute literal truth, adhere to the crusty old stories of the Bible, which while occasionally artistic, are mostly a maddening hodgpodge and, frankly, boring. What was riveting in antiquity about lengthy ancestor lists, angry gods, virgin births, and ascending into the clouds is ridiculous today. 

The story-telling mantle has obviously been taken over by Hollywood- by the Marvel series, Star Treks, Star Wars, Potter series, and similar epics of modern fantasy. They bend reality in classically mythical ways, make up their own theology as they go along, (and throw it away as casually with the next installment), and communicate constantly updated social mores. The graphics are otherworldly, the stories and morals are updated, but the fundamental sophistication of these stories can't really be said to have advanced much. They are speaking to human nature, after all- a conversation between our inborn archetypes and the social and technological conditions we find ourselves in.

The key point is that Hollywood myths are taken as intended- as fertile and mind-expanding fantasies with social and moral lessons that are (hopefully) beneficial and relevant for our times. They are not trying to claim their myths as true- that would be absurd. Thus they do not collide with either scientific or theological claims, and use myth as it was originally and truly intended- as the dreamlike realm of symbolic human drama, full of lessons, yes, but not scientific ones, or even pseudoscientific ones.

• An outstanding dissection of just how bad US policy and behavior was in Afghanistan.
• Facebook / Fecebook is a cesspool, by design.
• Dead ender racism.
• A mutagenic drug to save us all.
• How about those great vaccines?
• Some nice piano.

Aisha and Ali

Women's rights and the crackup of Islam.

I am reading the highly interesting book "The Heirs of the Prophet Muhammad", by Barnaby Rogerson. It takes a docu-drama and highly hagiographical approach, yet works in a lot of facts as well. It covers one of the most dynamic and transformative periods in world history, when the newly founded religion, Islam, swept out of Medina to defeat and convert its old enemies in Mecca, then progressively the rest of the Arabian peninsula, into the Byzantine stronghold across Syria and the Near East, the Persian empire, and lastly The Byzantine rump state of Egypt and points west. Let no one mistake Islam for a religion of peace. 

Muhammad left no succession plan, and wise heads got together in turn to appoint the first three successors to lead the community, Abu Bakr, Omar, and Uthman. These were each, in their own way, strong and very effective leaders, just the fortune that Islam needed to press its jihad against each of the neighboring empires. Riches started to flow into Medina, and by Uthman's reign, religious restrictions were eased, wealth spread, slaves and concubines proliferated, and an enormous baby boom occurred in the desert. But Uthman had planted the seeds of destruction, by appointing only his relatives to run the provinces- the Umayyads.

Uthman's reign reeked of nepotism, and he ended up assassinated in a revolt by disgruntled provincials, who took up the standard of Ali. Ali was one of Muhammad's earliest and closest converts, a son in law, war hero, and in personal and thelogical terms, an obvious choice as successor (or Caliph). Ali was acclaimed as Caliph right after the assassination, thus gaining the immediate enmity of all the Umayyads. And there were other problems, which had clearly led the earlier meetings of the companions of the prophet to choose other successors. First, Ali was not an effective leader. A true believer, yes, but starry-eyed, unrealistic, and unskilled in the tribal politics that underlay the new empire and faith. 

Aisha, on her camel, directing the battle against Ali, near  Basra. Turkish depiction, 16th century.

Second, Aisha loathed him. Betrothed to Muhammad at age 6, married at 9, Aisha was his favorite wife, of a stable that grew eventually to 12. Aisha remains a sort of Mary figure in Islam, and was granted a higher pension than any other figure after Muhammad's death, in recognition of her special position. She had once gotten into hot water after being left behind by a caravan, and was brought back to camp by a handsome soldier the next day. Tongues wagged, and eventually the gossip got so bad that Muhammad conjured a revelation from god absolving Aisha of any blame, and bringing heavy punishments on her accusers. What was Ali's role in all this? He had casually advised Muhammad that wives were cheap, and he should just divorce the inconvenient Aisha and be done with it. 

Now, when Ali needed help in his new role as Caliph, Aisha remembered, and whipped up a couple of Muhammad's companions into opposition, and led them personally across the desert to Basra, and into battle with Ali, the battle of the camel, which camel was Aisha's command post. Aisha lost, was personally wounded, and went into a life of retirement in Medina under Ali's protection, helping compile hidiths, providing recollections of the old days, and running a school for women. But the war against Ali went on from this fateful spark, and he gradually lost support to the wilier Umayyads. Thus, Aisha stands as a pivotal figure in Islam and world history, responsible in part for the disastrous Sunni-Shia split, but also a clear standard bearer for women's rights within the world of Islam, an aspect that has clearly been in occultation for some time, especially in what are ironically regarded as the more fundamentalist precincts of the faith.

• Strength and terrorism.
• Lies are a feature, not a bug, of sociopathy.
• We have not been serious about contact tracing in the US.
• Darwin- on target again.
• As if shipping weren't bad enough.

Genetics and the Shahnameh

We have very archetypal ideas about genetics.

Reading a recent translation of the Persian Epic, the Shahnameh, I was impressed with two things, among all the formulaic focus on war and kingship. First was what it did not say, and second was its attitude, which is shared with all sorts of traditional societies, towards blood, nobility, and what we now understand as genetics. This epic, which transitions from wholly myth in the first half to quasi-history in the second, stops abruptly at the Arab conquest. Not a word is uttered past the overthrow of the last Persian pre-Islamic ruler. Not a word about Islam, not a word about the well over three hundred years of history of Persia under the Arab yoke by the time this was written circa 1000 AD. That says a lot about what the author, Abolqasem Ferdowsi, regarded as the significant boundaries of Persian history. Not that he was opposed to narrations of decline and suffering. The final era of the Sassanian Empire was one of chaos and decline, with regicides and civil war. But apparently, that history was still Persian, while the Arab epoch was something else entirely- something that Iran is still grappling with.

The epic is full of physical descriptions- kings are always tall as cypresses and brave as lions, women are always thin as cypresses, their faces like full moons and their hair musky. True kings radiate farr- glowing splendor that they show from a young age, which marks them as destined rulers. But farr can also be lost, if they turn to the dark side and loose popular support. The Chinese have a similar concept in the mandate of heaven, which, however, is not portrayed as a sort of physical charisma or halo. Children are generally assumed to take after their parents, for good or ill. The concept of the bad seed comes up in the Shahnameh, especially in the saga of Afrasyab, king of Turan and long-time antagonist of Persian kings and their champion, Rostam. Persian king Kavus has fathered a great (and handsome) champion, Sayavash. Through several plot twists, Sayavash must leave Persia and is adopted by Afrasyab, even marrying his daughter. But then the drama turns again and Afrasyab kills Sayavash. Thankfully, Sayavash had already fathered a future king of Persia, whom the Persians suspect of bad lineage, due to his descent from Afrasyab- a suspicion that they are slow to overcome.

"By the time the boy was seven years old, his lineage began to show. He fashioned a bow from a branch and strung it with gut; then he made a featherless arrow and went off to the plains to hunt. When we was ten he was a fierce fighter and confronted bears, wild boar, and wolves. ... Seeing the boy's noble stature, he dismounted and kissed his hand. Then he gazed at him, taking in the signs of kingly glory in his face."

Ancient peoples have generally taken nobility and bloodlines very seriously, for several reasons. First, obviously, is that children do take after their parents, for good and ill, just as ethnic groups similarly have some distinctive characteristics. Second is that, for practical as well as psychological reasons, people always seek good rulers and stable ruling systems, which in the aristocratic, patriarchial setting means an orderly transition from king to prince. The fairy tale (archetypal) ending is that the prince and princess take over the kingdom, and everyone lives happily ever after. Third, is that hierarchy of some sort seems to be part of our cultural DNA. Someone or group is always up, others down. Whatever the group or organization and whatever its professed principles, hierarchy re-asserts itself. Those on top want naturally to stay on top, and bequeath that position to their future replicas, i.e. their offspring. To do that they will generate all the practical advantages they can, and into the bargain foster a mythos of just distinction, based on their glorious bloodline, if not outright divine sanction from god. Thus genealogical trees, heraldry, etc.

The Shah is not like you or me...

The ruling houses of Europe over the whole post-Roman Era were infested with these archetypes and mythologies. Marrying "up" or "down" was a vast game carried out across the continent. And what has it gotten us? Prince Charles. It is obvious that something went awry in this genetic exercise of assortive mating, as it did ultimately in the tragedies of the Shahnameh as well. The behavior of royals generally fails to select for all the positive traits that are ultimately needed. Their training fails frequently as well to expose those good traits that do exist. But most of all, genetics is far more of a crapshoot than the archetypes allow. 

Children do take after their parents, but there are stringent and interesting limits. A child gets only half of each parent's genes, and those genes may be from either copy in each parent. That copy might have been totally silent- recessive vs the other dominant allele. Two brown-eyed parents can have a blue-eyed child, if they are heterozygous for eye color. Multiply this over thousands of loci, and the possibilities are endless. This is why traits of the grandparents sometimes are thought to come up unexpectedly, or novel traits entirely. The genetic mixing that takes place on the way to new life is carefully engineered to replicate, but with wide variation on the theme, such that any child is as much a child of its wider lineage and environment as of its particular parents. Genetic defects remix during this process as well, concentrating in some children, and leaving others fortunately free to realize greater potentials. The obsessive concentration of lineages that characterize royalty systems, such as was taken to an incestuous extreme in Egypt, leads to inbreeding, which means the exposure of defective alleles due to excessive homozygosity. We all have defective gene alleles, which are typically recessive, and thus get exposed only when they pair up with an equally defective partner. Thus an extreme focus on lineage and purity leads to its own destruction.

The differences between ethnicities are far less than those between families. Human lineages may have some strongly selected and differentiated traits, such as skin color, but such traits are exceedingly rare. Otherwise, our genetics are a cloud of variation that crosses all ethnic lines. Humans were a single lineage only a few hundred thousand years ago, or less, so broadly speaking, we are all the same. Indeed compared to most species, such as chimpanzees, we have much less genetic variation overall, and are virtually clones, due to the relatively recent bottlenecks of extremely low population that reduced genetic diversity. Our current population size relative to those of the other great apes certainly does not reflect conditions in the past!

Education was another ingredient in the traditional systems of nobility and aristocracy. Only the rich could afford an education, so only the upper crust were educated, thus gaining one more credential in addition to their genetic credentials, over the middle and lower classes. Such notions of aristocracy died perhaps hardest in military circles, where officers were long an aristocratic class, selected for their connections, not their ability. It was one of the great American innovations to establish a national military college to which admission was distributed liberally to deserving candidates, (at the same time as similar academy was set up in revolutionary France by Napoleon). It is obvious that the capacity for education was far more widespread than originally conceived, and we benefit today from the very active diffusion of education for everyone. Yet not all are college material. Some children are bright, some less so. Genetics and early development still count for a great deal- but good (and bad) genes can come up anywhere. That means that in the end, the American system of meritocracy, for all its defects, of which there are many, and despite its significantly unfulfilled promise to many, is a huge advance over the hidebound traditions, archetypes, and injustice, of aristocracy.

But back to genetics- what are we finally to make of genetics, eugenics, and noble bloodlines? It is clear that humans can be selectively bred, just like any other animal. Twins and twin studies make it abundantly clear that all sorts of traits- physical and mental- are gene-based and heritable, to striking extents. It is also clear that historical attempts at eugenics have not turned out well, whether through systems of nobility or more modern episodes of eugenics. The former were largely self-indulgent and self-serving ideologies designed to keep power and status among an elite, within which poor choices in mates and inbreeding consistently led to genetic doom. The latter were ideological exercises in frank racism, no more anchored in positive values, genetic or otherwise, than the aristocracies of yore. There have been occasional successful genetic experiments in human breeding, such as the Bach family, Yao Ming, and Stephen Curry, which show what can be done when one puts one's mind to it! (The Trump brood may also be cited as another, if negative, example.)

But generally, selective breeding implies a single set of values that constitute its goal. Our values, as a society, are, however, diverse in the extreme. We celebrate some people more than others at a political or social level, but have been heading in the direction, since our country's founding, of recognizing the dignity and worth of every person without exception, along with their freedom to form and express their own values. We can neither agree on a society-wide set of specific values that would shape any form of selective eugenics, nor allow individuals to go beyond the bounds of normal mate selection to plunge into cloning, genetic alterations, and the like, to inordinately expand their genetic influence on succeeding generations. All that would strike at the heart of the social project that is America- to foster individual opportunity and merit, while at the same time respecting the rights and worth of each individual- indeed, each way of life. It is likely that, given the technology, we might come to a general consensus to eradicate certain genetic diseases and syndromes. But beyond that lies a frontier of genetic engineering that the US is particularly poorly suited to cross, at least until we have made America great again, so to speak, and become another society entirely.

• Some calming piano.
•  Oh, yeah- remember the tax cut? That went to the rich.
• Some people are prepping for war.
• Maybe low-dose infection is one way to approach Covid-19.
• International fisheries are not just environmental disasters, but human rights disasters.
• The difference between being a con man and being a president.
• Some possible futures for Earth. RCP 8.5 takes us (in a matter of 80 years) to conditions last seen 40 million years ago.
• Followup quote from Frederick Douglass:

"Color prejudice is not the only prejudice against which a Republic like ours should guard. The spirit of caste is malignant and dangerous everywhere. There is the prejudice of the rich against the poor, the pride and prejudice of the idle dandy against the  hard-handed workingman. There is, worst of all, religious prejudice, a prejudice which has stained whole continents with blood. It is, in fact, a spirit infernal, against which every enlightened man should wage perpetual war."

Cliques of Civilizations

Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations", twenty five years on.

Is America great again, yet? Well, that didn't turn out quite as promised. China is ascendent as never before, having vanquished a virus that we simply can not get our heads around. China is also putting the screws on its neighbors, assimilating Hong Kong, building island bases in the South China sea, ramping up soft power efforts in its Belt and Road and other diplomatic initiatives, and slowly building the sphere of influence that it merits as the largest nation in the world. In comparison, we are a laughing stock, our incompetent leadership high and low exposed for all to see.

It is quite a different world from that of Francis Fukuyama's "End of History", which imagined that international conflict would disappear with the close of the Cold War and the march of liberal democracy across the globe. Instead, while democracies did advance significantly in the first post-cold-war decade, progress since has stalled. An alternate model of governance has taken root out of the communist ashes- an authoritarian capitalist fusion of the Russian and Chinese types.

Numbers of democracies rose after the Cold War, then plateaued.

Samuel Huntington wrote his "Clash of Civilizations" in response to Fukuyama, offering a conservative, realist view of history as continuing apace in the post-cold-war era on a very traditional basis- that of civilizations, rather than of ideologies. Donald Trump seems to have read (or skimmed, or heard about, or heard about "people" talking about) Huntington with some attention, since his instincts hew quite closely to Huntington's views. Rather than liberal democracy resplendent and ascendent, Huntington proposes that the new world order will be a traditional sphere-of-influence model, centered on the core civilizations of the world- Western, Chinese, Orthodox, Indian, and Islamic. Africa is so far behind that it does not count seriously in Hungtington's scheme, though that may change a few decades on. The Catholic/Hispanic cultures of Central and South America also do not count for very much in his scheme. These civilizations are based on different religions and ethnic histories, and are centered on core states. The US is the core state of the West, (though the EU may take over that role sooner than anticipated!). Russia is the core state of the Orthodox / Slavic civilization, India is virtually the only Hindu state, and China clearly leads the Sinic or East Asian world.

The Islamic world lacks a clear core or leading state, with Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan all in contention, a contest that is still nowhere near resolution, and involves starkly different visions for the future of Islamic culture. Islam is a special case not only for its lack of a central or core state that can lead and moderate its civilization at large, but also for its general lack of effective governance, and its peculiar historical position of having had its golden age almost a millenium ago, after which the West gained progressive, and eventually overwhelming, superiority. The bitterness this engenders has not been channeled, as in the Asian tigers, into competition and often superior performance vs the West, but rather into regression, grievance, fundamentalism, and a rededication to its own cultural superiority. Thankfully, Huntington forecasts that by about now, the demographic bulge of Islam, which had been fueling much of its internal discontent and violent lashing-out, would moderate and lead to a less combative general culture- a prediction that I think is slowly coming to pass.

One of the most interesting themes of Huntington's thesis is the clique-like banding together of nations with similar civilizations. Unlike the American ideal of international affairs, where all people everywhere just want democracy and plenty of shopping, Huntington sees nations aligning on cultural terms, like people do in many other settings, like high schools, religions, neighborhoods, and so much else. The Balkan wars are, for Huntington, exhibit A. Each contestant was backed by its cultural kin among the larger countries, with the Muslim Bosnians supported by a variety of Muslim states from Saudi Arabia to Iran, the Orthodox Serbs supported by Russia, and the Catholic Croats supported by Germany, particularly the German Catholic church. Likewise, in the first Gulf war, Huntington writes that, while several Muslim countries were, under Americal pressure, part of the military alliance against Iraq, the Arab street was uniformly anti-West and pro-Saddam. His description of these sentiments and how they sapped their government's respective resolve about the war and its aftermath was sobering, and should have given the next Bush administration pause in its headlong rush into its own crusade against Iraq.

Another corollary of the civilizational world as Huntington sees it is that some cultures are odd nations out. Japan is a prime example. Clearly, Japan exists in the Chinese general sphere of influence. But Japan has been closest to the US since its defeat in World War 2, has adopted many Western attitudes and practices, a highly functional democracy among them. It also, through its wartime and pre-war imperialism, has earned the virtually undying hatred of China and Korea, among other countries in the region. What will its future be like in a world where China takes prime position over all of East Asia? Can it band together with anti-Chinese fellow coutries like Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, and Australia to create a balancing anti-Chinese bloc? That looks generally unlikely, partly due to negative US leadership, and partly due to the obvious problems it entails, ending in some kind of vast war.

China's sphere and local conflicts.

What China wants as the regional, even global, leader, is actually quite unclear. The history of Korea is instructive in this regard. China has been Korea's big neighbor for at least 2,000 years, and has repeatedly enforced vassalage, favorable trade, and cultural exchange. But it never took over and tried to exterminate Korean culture the way the Japanese did before World War 2. China clearly seeks control over some of its fraternal cultures, like the Tibetan and Uyghur, and now Hong Kong and ultimately Taiwan. But Vietnam? What China wants out of other nearby cultures such as Vietnam, Korea, and Japan is not entirely clear, and some kind of vassalage relationship may suffice. Perhaps seeing the Yuan as the reigning currency, along with other clearly friendly military and trade relations would be enough for long-term stability.

More darkly, some nations in Huntington's system are "torn", in that they partake of more than one culture and therefore face diffcult conflicts, internally and externally. Yugoslavia was an obvious example, but there are many others. Turkey is one, in that it has for decades tried to enter the EU and be a Western country. But with increasing Islamization, this is increasingly off the table, and Turkey is moving towards leadership as a modernizing influence within Islam rather than being a little fish in the EU and lapdog of the US security establishment. Russia has also made its definitive choice, after centuries of conflicting sentiments about the West, turning against a possible turn to NATO and the EU in the post-Soviet moment, and retrenching as leader of the Orthodox civilization. Was it ever realistic to think that Russia might become a normal, Western parliamentary democracy, after its communist collapse? Perhaps not, though our wretched economic advice surely didn't help.
 
Huntington closes on very Trumpian themes, warning that increasing Hispanic immigration to the US may make us into a "torn" culture, less cohesive in international and other terms. Multiculturalism is clearly the enemy. He spins a truly bravura dystopian scenario towards the end of the book, where China and Vietnam spark a world war (with some blundering US intervention) that spirals out of control, Russia and India allying with the West. The US is hobbled, however, by Hispanic dissention, which causes a lack of fighting resolve, and we settle for negotiation! Yikes!

Much of what Huntington wrote was quite precient, especially in the turns that both China and Russia have taken against the West and towards rebuilding their traditional geographic and cultural spheres of influence in clearly civilizational terms. He warns against American universalism- the idea that everyone wants what we want, we just have to invade their countries and give it to them. That way lies imperialism, pure and simple. And his warning about unity in the US is significant. We need to continue to expect and encourage assimilation of immigrants, not social and political balkanization. But it turns out that the principal risk of disunity in the US comes from the native rich, not the foreign poor. The logic of hyper-capitalism and its related ills of political and media corruption has created a plutocratic class that treats the rest of the country as a vulture capitalist project- a place for tax breaks, pet politicians, flagrant propaganda, and walled compounds served by a feudal workforce. That is what is killing our institutions and destroying our standing in the world.

• Sunk costs and lost souls- Trump's enablers.
• Such as Sessions. But GOP voters are just as complicit.
• Should Australia be independent?
• Man or woman?
• The rich getting richer...
• Small steps in the right direction.

Iran: Pawn in the Great Game

Review of Iran: A Modern History, by Abbas Amanat. Part 1- the great game and a history of victimization.

The lure of victimization narratives is a little hard to pin down, though it is universal. No matter how much power Republicans acrue, they always seem to feel victimized by the still-ascendent liberal culture, by rational or compassionate argument, and indeed by anyone who disagrees with them. Victimization is an assertion of moral righteousness, sometimes proven more pure and righteous in its defeat by forces of darkness than by its triumph. Christianity is a victimization narrative par excellence- of a savior tragically unrecognized in his own day, callously sold out and executed by the ruling powers, but ultimately, though the intercession of miracles, energetic preaching, and what have you, ready to save you if only you too believe this story. Victimization can be as callous and unthinking an ideological postition as its opposite- domination- excusing any extremity and moral lapse in the service of the restoration of what was lost or been suppressed. Indeed, victimization narratives exist in a complex dance with domineering ideologies, and are frequently used by them, as suggested above. The Nazis, after all, were victimized by the Jews.

But how much more intoxicating is all this if you really are a victim? Iran, in its long history, has played many roles. But over the last few centuries, that of victim has been predominant. Its early cultures, before and after the Indo-European invasions of the second millenium BC, usually played second fiddle to the Sumerian, Assyrian, and Babylonian cultures to the west. Then came the high point of the Persian Achaemenid Empire in the mid-first millenium BC, which spread over the entire Middle East, from Afghanistan to Egypt and Greece, and was memorialized extensively in both Greek and Jewish literature. Cruelly truncated by the invasion of Alexander the Great, Persia then went through extended domination by the Greeks in the Seleucid Empire, followed by somewhat cosmopolitan domination by the Parthians, a Scythian tribe from the East, before regaining most of its former extent under the Sassanian Empire, which was truly Persian in origin and culture again. Only to be brutally crushed by the Arab invasion. Gradually, Persian culture re-asserted itself, forming the backbone of the Islamic Golden Age, which whithered amid the Mongol invasions and a reversion to doctrinaire Islam. One hardly knows which oppression to bemoan first.

The Azadi tower. Take that, Brandenburg gate! This is perhaps the most durable and iconic bequest of the second Shah's rule, adopted by all sides in Iran, whether protesting for or against the powers that be.

The coronavirus lockdown has brought me one consolation, which is this lengthy tome on Iranian history, borrowed just before the boom came down, and which the library shows no sign of wanting back. Amanat takes up the story at 1500 CE with the rise of a militant Shiite ruler, Ismail I, who set the tone for Iranian culture up to today: a full-on victimization passion play, with oppressors ranging from Abu Bakr and Yazid I to the United States, heart-rending mourning, and self-flagellation. The story of Iran is one of a small country with big ambitions, which it occasionally fulfills. Why didn't Persia remain a large empire and culture, like Rome did, even after its formal fall? On the one hand, there were too many other competing cultures about. The Persians could not quite put together a world-leading coalition. The Achaemenids, under Cyrus the great, came closest, setting a cosmopolitan standard that was widely attractive and powerful. At least the Jews gave it good press. But it fell apart amid civil war and the usual bane of early empires- dysfunctional or non-existent methods of transferring power. The Safavid dynasty, begun in 1501, set Shi'ism as the national religion of Iran. This had the twin effects of being highly motivational to the "base", while being rather isolating vs the wider world, including the Sunni majority across Islam. The course was thus set for Iran to be a small-to-mid-sized power, a box they are still trying to break out of today, to little effect.

Over the last few centuries, Iran's major antagonists have been the much greater empires of Russia, Great Britain, and the US. While there have been occasional raids from, and forays to, the East, towards Afghanistan and India, generally relations in that direction have been calm, and Persian culture has had significant influence in Afghanistan and Mughal India. On the other hand, expansionism and colonialism from the West and North have been devastating. Iran was barely able to hang on to its territorial and cultural integrity at the worst of times. Russia dealt Iran a comprehensive military defeat in 1826, took parts of the North, and threatened the rest of the country. Through the nineteenth century, Iran tried its best to play the big powers off against each other, playing its part in the great game. But just as often, the British and Russians would make their own agreements to carve up the local countries into spheres of influence, if not zones of occupation. They also engaged in destructive loans, saddling Iran with unpayable debts and increasing foreign ownership of its infrastructure, customs, and other means of paying them back. Russia sponsored a pro-shah coup in 1908. Britain especially forced Iran into a series of bad trade deals, privileged treatment, and forced imports, killing off the Iranian silk industry, among much other economic and cultural damage. And once Britain smelled oil, and switched its navy from coal to oil, (during world war 1), its regard for the integrity and interests of Iran fell even further. Russia and Britain each occupied large parts of the country during both world wars, without so much as a by-your-leave.

What saved Iran was an unexpected favor from Russia. The communist revolution led to an immediate evacuation of Russia's occupation of Northern Iran and cancellation of its debts, and, at least for a brief period, much friendlier relations. But it also led to simmering communist political and guerrilla insurgencies for the next century. Iran kept being knocked about between the great powers, with the US taking an increasing role during and after world war 2. The US had previously been one of the friendlier countries to Iran, providing critical financial advice and political support during its constitutional phase, during the Shuster appointment as treasurer, back in 1911. And the US was naturally thought to be supportive of constitutionalism, rule of law and democracy. But world war 2 changed all that, making the US more or less the inheritor of the British empire. When the first Reza Shah government finally collapsed and a nascent constitutional system arose, one of its first and most popular pieces of business, under Mohammed Mosaddegh, was nationalization of the oil industry. Britain, which ran the Iranian oil fields outright, sharing a paltry 16% with Iran, was outraged. The US, caught in the middle, was unfortunately more sympathetic to Britain than Iran. The US offered a 50% deal, in line with others in the region. This would have been a good compromise, but Mosaddegh had painted himself into a corner. And made many enemies across the political spectrum, not being, at base, a particularly good politician. His ouster, amid a coup staged explicitly by the Iranian military, but with support from the British and Americans, was not a big surprise at the time. Only in retrospect, after the subsequent regime of the second Shah dragged on, decade after decade, with unstinting US support, no matter the excesses of the secret services or oppression of the people, and with the backdrop of the US's brutal wars in Vietnam and Cambodia, did the narrative of the great Satan take shape. It was an understandable, yet also facile, and ultimately misguided response to yet another episode in Iran's long and often tragic history of international relations.

We won't get into the next parts of the story in this post, but reflect that size matters in international relations. The Shah stuck with the US through thick and thin, creating a rare stable environment for Iran internationally. No one questioned Iran's sovereignty, or its position in the cold war. None of its neighbors attacked. But when that sponsorship fell apart amid the Islamic revolution, and Iran started pissing off each of its neighbors near and far, things did not go so well, and remain perilous today. On the other hand, the US played a large part in the Shah's failure to manage internal affairs, losing sight of our principles (as we also did in Vietnam, then again in Iraq) and blindly funding a despot. Our best cases from this period were the various countries (South Korea, Indonesia, Philippines, Taiwan) that got away belatedly, through popular protests, out of US-sponsored dictatorships and towards democracy. Is that the best we could have done?

• Some notes on Iran's process of conversion to Islam.
• Studies in Shiite propaganda.
• Another dysfunctional country failing to deal effectively with the virus.
• And now, for a bit of science.