The Power of Prophecy

What makes prophecy such a compelling narrative device in fantasy and myth, and a psychological fixation?

Humans have been obsessed, from the beginning, with the future. As the only animal conscious of the future, its inscrutibility quickly became a frustrating obsession. One wikipedia page lists 372 forms of divination. Some of the earliest far Eastern writing we have is from divination using bones with wishes or questions written on them. How natural is it, then, to imagine that there is someone on the other end to tell us the answers, or some people gifted intrinsically or through some divine possession or shamanic training to foretell the future? My newspaper still publishes the daily horoscope, a sadly watered-down echo of these most fervent longings to peer into the unknowable.

It has been a fixation in drama, from Oedipus to Harry Potter. The Greeks went to Delphi and received dramatically cryptic answers, which could be famously misinterpreted. Oedipus fell into this trap, fulfilling precisely what he had strained every nerve to prevent. When used in fiction, prophecies are relentlessly fulfilled, since otherwise, why bring them up? Like for the more generic foreshadowing technique, the magic only works when the portents are true, and the characters, while twisting every which way to evade or fulfill them, find in the end that fate has spoken with one voice out of the timeless dimension.

The Harry Potter series makes generous use of prophecy, both in its main plot lines, where Harry is marked in advance in various ways for his extraordinary fate, including the special symbol tattooed on his face, and in one particular episode, where the characters fight it out in a hall of phophetic orbs, climax of the fifth book. The bible, of course would hardly be the book it is without a flood of prophecies. The new testament was in large part composed around the supposed fulfillment of various prophecies made in the old, with some squeezing and patching required. The king of the Jews who came to save the world  bears hardly any resemblence to what the old prophets were expecting! Yet, mysteriously and gloriously, the fulfillment came about in the least expected way, etc... Then the New Testament closes with another round of even more feverish prophecies, in the form of revelations where the mundane world will finally receive its just deserts and be swept away in favor of a new and perfect dispensation.

Stonehenge, in part an astronomical prediction machine.

Obviously, it is empowering to feel even a little in control of fate, a little gifted with insight into the future. Why else are countless people betting on sporting events? Why else make such a fetish of astronomy and the prediction of what can minimally be predicted- the steady progress of the days and seasons? It is endlessly maddening to know that the future is coming, but know so little about it. But the tide has turned a bit over the last few centuries as a new mode of thought came to the fore- science. The successful analysis and prediction of Halley's comet showed on a poplular level the power of Newton's system and its ability to predict the future. Now we can predict the weather with startling accuracy, at least a week or so in advance, and can likewise predict the climate decades into the future, somewhat to our horror. Yet there is so much that still eludes prediction. Even in the physical world, earthquakes remain a frustrating challenge, apparently fundamentally unpredictable. And despite the "end of history", human affairs remain not just unpredictable, but irrational, as our current political regime so amply demonstrates.

In its humbler incarnations, prophecy is merely evidence of intelligence- a keen imagination or intuition that is able to discern where things are going sooner than the next person. This is where sports betting and stock picking get their acolytes. But beyond that it is clearly a fictional device- one that we love in its fateful foreshadowings and tragic struggles, but one that has never risen above that level to divine inspiration, reading the mind of god. Naturally, that is because such a thing does not exist. We are trapped within the plodding arrow of time, as we are under the spatial light-speed limit, as we are under our own mastery of fate, such as it is, having no other to turn to.

• Like we need more billionaires running things, and preaching about the national debt.
• Wealth is the problem, far more than income.
• And we have the candidates to solve it.
• George Will does something good.
• Protect your and your country's health- leave facebook.
• Treason and corruption, continued.
• Income tax rates have no effect on economic growth.
• But what do economists know, anyway?

The Peregrinations of Humanism

What happened to the project of Erasmus? What used to be solidly Catholic turned into atheism, aka "secular humanism".

Have there ever been non-secular humanists? Yes, virtually all were Catholic back when humanism was truly in flower, in the 1400's and 1500's. There have even been humanist popes! Humanism was a big theme of the Renaissance when Western intellectuals turned their attention to the languages and authors of antiquity with new vigor. The preceeding movement of scholasticism had built on an earlier encounter with Aristotle and Neoplatonism, which led to the founding of many universities and reached its peak in the output of Thomas Aquinas. But scholasticism was more concerned with conforming Aristotle to Catholicism and making a show of reasoned logic / dialog, (dialectic), rather than truly plumbing the depths of Aristotle's profound corpus and methods. They knew he was the intellectual giant of antiquity and far beyond their own achievements. Only with humanism was Europe ready to deal more deeply with the ancients.

This was a time when scholars started hunting in earnest for manuscripts hidden in cloister libraries, and encountered both manuscripts and scholars fleeing the now-defunct Byzantine empire. These scholars improved their Latin based on a wider familiarity with these sources, and started learning Greek and even Hebrew. Erasmus of Rotterdam was one of the greatest of these hunters and scholars, and turned his learning into (among many, many other projects) a newly corrected edition of the Bible, with Greek facing the Latin, the first time the Latin Bible had been (intentionally) revised in over a millennium. This story is told in the outstanding book, Fatal Discord- a parallel biography of Erasmus and Martin Luther.

Luther obviously runs away with the show, and the book, by fomenting a fundmental revolution in Western culture. Author Michael Massing suggests that Europe faced divergent paths, Erasmus representing the more liberal, reformist, and moderate course, which could have saved everyone a lot of trouble. Luther read Erasmus's new bible and other writings, was also inspired to learn Hebrew, and based much of his revolution on Erasmus's ideas. But Erasmus never renounced the Catholic church, and hated warfare above all other forms of waste and injustice. He was in this a humanist to the core. Luther was more of a fundamentalist, standing on Sola Scriptura- of his interpretation, naturally- come hell, high water, or martyrdom.

So what is humanism, after all? In a theological sense, it is attention to and learning from diverse aspects of the current and past world, in contrast to assuming that one's scripture contains all knowledge. If the world, humans, and human reason are all made by god, then this wider field of inquiry is not only permissible, but essential, to fully appreciate her work. On a pedagogical level, humanism became the program that Erasmus set up based on his thrilling scholarship- the learning of Latin foremost, from the great classical authors, and then Greek as well, along with rhetoric, grammar, and some logic- the Latin trivium, in short. While revolutionary in the fields of biblical studies, higher criticism, and philology generally, this program eventually fossilized into the "liberal" education in the classics that was standard through the 19th century, plaguing young minds with dead languages, long after Latin had lost its role as the universal intellectual language of Europe.

And on an ethical level, humanism is the sense that truth and scholarship must be beneficial, over their opposites, and that, in line with the rest of renaissance sensibility, human achievements and flourishing are the measure of social and theological systems. While the neoplatonists where quite consonant with the abstract, ethereal concerns of the Catholic church, other authors and ideas from antiquity were much less so, and the humanists, Erasmus as a prime example, turned into a somewhat skeptical if not critical community within the church, urging reform from the bloated, corrupt, militaristic, and intellectually lazy institution it had become.

This breakdown became evident in the confrontation with Luther. In response to his copious tracts, books, and theses detailing the problems of the church, its response was simply to assert that he was wrong, and that any opposition to the pope and tradition was inadmissible. The Catholic church failed to make a serious intellectual case, and it would take decades, if not centuries for it to do so. Book burnings were the first response, followed by the Index of banned books, which featured not only those of Luther, but those of Erasmus as well. This spelled the inevitable end of humanism in the Catholic church, since skepticism and intellectualism are incompatible with hierarchy and fealty.

Humanism had a much longer career in Protestant lands, with their greater freedom and diversity. Charles Darwin came within a hair's breadth of becoming an Anglican minister, and mostly viewed his naturalist interests in the positive light of god's work on earth. But they inevitably parted ways even here, as the mechanisms of nature gradually revealed themselves to be anything but divine. Now one hardly hears about religious humanism, as humanism has become synonymous with thorough theological skepticism and this-world ethics. What would Erasmus say? The EU has named its internal student exchange program after him, in honor of his pioneering role in promoting pan-European projects and intellectual community. He would have been appalled at the way the Protestant reformation bled Europe and led to ceaseless division. But I am sure he would still be in the intellectual, cosmopolitan vanguard, which remains humanist today.

• The Panama Papers is still a story.
• Who wins in Sears bankruptcy? A microcosm of American inequality.
• Making America corrupt again.
• US keeps throwing the Afghan government under the bus.
• Putin's poodle on Ukraine.
• Aging is being reversed.

Inequality Spelled the End of Rome

Historian Michael Grant pins the blame for the decline and fall of Rome on economic and social inequality.

We have never had a government by the rich, and for the rich, quite like today. How this could come to pass as a response to one of the most severe financial panics in our history, to financial mass malpractice, and to the Occupy movement, is quite curious. It is perhaps a testament to the innate temperamental conservatism, coupled with the extraordinary power of money in our media and political system. Where are we headed? One way to think about it is to look to history.

Fabulous relief from a late Empire sarcophagus. Rome was about power.

Rome ruled the Mediterranean for roughly five hundred years, from its scrappy beginnings assimilating neighboring city states on the Italian peninsula to its wimpering end at the hands of successive Germanic armies. Some of its greatest gifts were for politics- running a durable, elitist political system with extremely complicated rules, operating a likewise complex legal system, and treating foreign and allied powers with harshness, but also substantial generosity. Throughout its time, inequality was the rule, including slavery at the very bottom. The system was run by and for those at the top- the senators, landowners, and slaveholders. But at the beginning, there was a great deal of civic virtue- it was a republic, and ambition for the public good / growth of the empire often coincided with personal ambition. But defending a static or contracting multi-continent empire is not as much fun. Increasingly, the rich relieved themselves of taxes and public responsibilities, and the burden of supporting the enormous empire fell on the lower classes, in the form of tax-farming.

This is briefly outlined by Michael Grant in his book "A Social History of Greece and Rome". He stresses at some length that the lower classes- the slaves, the ex-slave freedmen, the poor and middling classes- lived quite miserably, and were treated miserably by the system. But they had no political organization or power, and no consciousness of themselves as a class. They were inert, apart from a few riots and revolts which were always local affairs, driven by desperation rather than principle or organization. This has been true through history. Democracy and other revolutions from below are generally not led from below, but by a faction of the rich, engaged in their customary occupation of competing for power at the top. Our founding fathers were not Scots-Irish hillbillies, but colonial aristocrats disaffected from their fellow lords and peers back in Britain.

So Rome was always nervous about its poor and its slaves, but never faced an organized revolution, let alone a Marxist intellectual critique. This allowed progressively worse treatment as time went on, to the point that free Romans chose to become virtual serfs under large landowners rather than face the tax collectors and military recruiters on their own, leading right into the conditions of the medieval period. A state rests on the allegiance and service of its members. If the rich couldn't be bothered to fund its needs, and the poor were hounded to the point of desperation, of what is such a state made?

"Christian writers, too, support the poor, sometimes with passion, but the effect was one again, in practice, non-existent. The destitute had to be content with the assurance that their plight would stand them in good stead in the next life. Christianity, like to many other institutions, has been blamed for its contribution to the fall of the western Roman empire- because it perpetuated the internal social rifts. And there may be something in this, although the main contribution of faith was to establish a focus of loyalty which was not the imperial court, and was not, in fact, of this world. But the fall of the empire was complex. External pressures played a major part. Internally, the main cause was not Christianity, but the gulf between the rich and the poor whom the rich exploited." - Michael Grant, in A Social History of Greece and Rome

What Americans think inequality of wealth should be like, compared with what they think it is, compared (top) with what it actually is. In fact, the top 1% owns over 40% of the wealth and gets one fifth of all income.

While we in the US have only had such antique social extremes in the slave-holding South, the current level of inequality is, in quantitative terms, astonishing and alarming. The trend of our current administration of giving gargantuan tax breaks to the rich, along with countless other gifts of relief from public good regulations, worker rights, and criminal enforcement, means that we are headed not just back through the New Deal into another gilded age, but possibly well beyond. It is hardly the land of the free if so many are economic slaves to others, with homeless beggars on every corner. As Rome evolved from an aristocratic Republic into a more frankly royal Empire, we seem headed in a similar direction, under a new Octavian who has no patience for the weak, the losers, civil society, democracy, or civility. The state exists for winners. Why anyone (who is not rich) follows him is beyond me, but then the lessons of history are usually learned only by those who don't need them.

• Other theories about Rome.
• Making America great would mean... being more like Europe.
• One consequence of inequality? Murder.
• The euro is dying.
• Wildlife is dying.
• Climate change is causing hunger, and not just for other animals.
• Unfinished business in healthcare- the public option, real negotiation, fair pricing.
• Trump and the "sheriff's star". Even Bill Kristol makes a comment.
• Sleazy fraud.
• Free speech? Not for workers.
• How the Fed thinks.

Was Jung an Atheist?

Short answer: yes. Understanding religion, and believing in it, are two different things.

Jung was highly sympathetic to religion- Christianity in particular- seeking to explain its psychology and origins, and even to replicate it. There is an old joke among Jungians. A child asks her Analyst parent.. are we Christians? And the parent answers: "heavens no, we are Jungians!" While Freud was a rather vociferous atheist, Jung took a much more ambiguous, understanding approach to religion. Rather than a pack of lies, it was a truth, just not about the cosmos. What makes Jungians distinct is their respect for the power and psychology of religion, which they are generally obsessed with, and devoted to understanding. They are more anthropologists of religion than disparagers.

It is common for god and religion in general to embody the psyche of its practitioners. Even atheists take god's name in vain, to express strong emotions. Intellectuals customarily make of god whatever most interests them. Einstein and Spinoza took god to be the universe. Jung took it to be the self. While religion touches on many archetypes and psychic complexes, the nexus around which it all revolves is the self. Am I saved? Will I live ever after? Am I good? Is anyone? What is the meaning of my life? Jung took these questions to be significant and deep, not just the superficial reflections of repressed sexuality. Indeed, his view of the unconscious was much more positive than Freud's, seeing it as a fount of deep insight and healing, whose therapeutic power is not just the exposure and extinguishing of childhood traumas and instinctive conflicts. The unconscious has its own perceptual apparatus and methods of communcation (symbols, images) which can be seen as an autonomous entity within ourselves. I.e. god.

This is why symbology and ritual are so much more important in religion than is theology. All the Western attempts to rationalize the concept of god are so much wasted effort, not only because they are intellectually bankrupt due to the non-existence of the cosmic god they posit. They operate on a typically intellectual level that is totally inappropriate to the subject at hand.

An image painted by Jung, from his Red Book. The unconscious holds dark shadows as well as  compassion.

God is indeed real and an autonomous thing, at the same time it is a psychological construct, arising from our own selves and depths. The psychological concepts that Jung fostered, about an immense and fertile unconscious, which partakes not only of individual concerns, but of communal and cosmic ones, represents a significant and irreversible step in our understanding of religion and its panoply of symbols, motivations, gods, and other artistic paraphernalia.

Late in his career, Jung offered an interpretation of the evolution of Christianity, in "Answer to Job". God, as the manifestation of Israel's unconscious longings and strivings, is in the Pentateuch a thin-skinned, and fickle tyrant. He is immature, and when Job calls him to moral account for the Trumpian way he has toyed with his devoted subject, all god can do is blow up in an insulting twitter-esque rage. This exchange raises to consciousness the primitive nature of the god-concept in this culture, and rankles for several hundred years, at which point the solution becomes to make a better man of god by making him (notionally) into a real man. So, Pinocchio-like, he comes to Earth as Jesus, does good deeds, expresses some compassion, (though unimaginable ego seeps through in the commands for followership and claims of overlordship), and then ritually offers his self-sacrifice to assure us that he has really changed his ways and is now meek as a lamb.

Another self-explanatory image from the Red Book.

Obviously, this made a pretty modest impression on Jews at the time and since. But the combination of monotheism and a quasi-charitable, egalitarian form of god, leavened by Greek gnosticism and other intellectual additions, spread like wildfire through a West enervated by the relentless brutality of Roman civilization, and its fractured spiritual resources.

Many gods have come and gone, as cultures evolve and elaborate new images of themselves and their ideals. While Jung dabbled in some mysticism along the way, and was frustratingly ambiguous and unscientific in his writings on the subject, he laid what we can take as a very trenchant foundation for understanding religion as a psychological phenomenon. In this he followed the lead of William James, who recognized that it is a special area, so heavily subjective that philosophy has little hold. Like other freelance religious practitioners, Jungian analysts today split their time between writing books of uplift and psychological insight, and listening to clients bring up their difficulties, whether shallow or deep. They provide spiritual solace to the lost, while trying to heal the larger culture by bringing to consciousness the powers, compassion, and insight that lie within.

• The planet is burning.
• Workers, citizens, unite!
• An emotion in every chord.
• How China beat the recession- classic Keynes.
• What makes unemployed farmers so much better than other unemployed people?
• And why is the Labor party giving up on labor?
• Resignation- an excellent precedent!
• A difference between just desserts and business models.

Why no Russian Renaissance?

Russia was much closer to Byzantium than Western Europe. So why didn't it feed from the scholarship of the East on the fall of Constantinople, as the West did? Books by John Lawrence and Martin Sixsmith.

OK, this is an unfair question. But if one's closeness to the learning and culture of Byzantium is supposed to be related to one's ability to assimilate it and recover the riches of antiquity that supposedly fed so much of the Western European Renaissance, then Russia was far better positioned than Florence. Russia had long-standing trade relationships and routes to Constantinople, and shared the same Orthodox Christianity. Indeed it still sees itself as the last inheritor of Byzantine culture. Some of the largest cities in Europe in 1000's were Novgorod and Kiev, of the early Rus period after Viking/Varangian invasion of the nascent Slavic areas.

But there were countless hindrances. When the scholars of Byzantium fled the Muslim takeover in the 1400's, did they want to go to Russia? Not likely. Western Europe had already gone through a mini-renaissance in the 1200's, and was incomparably more diverse, academically advanced, and wealthy than Russia at the time. Also, the Mongols invaded Russia in 1237, ruling with a slowly loosening grip till 1480. This would obviously put a serious crimp into any renaissance.

Poland, next-door, had its own mini-renaissance, roughly through the 1500's. Even in this most distant province of Europe, Italian architecture, arts, and science penetrated, and yielded the brilliant response of Copernicus, among others. It turned out that exposure to Byzantium was only a small part of the recipe- a spark, but far from the most important ingredient. Poland's great period was based on riches from trade with the Baltics, and dominion over a great deal of what is Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia today, plus quite a bit of travel to Italy. Prosperity and its consequent cosmopolitanism was perhaps more imporant than contact with Byzantium alone.

Holy investiture

One could also imagine getting too much of a good thing. Byzantium itself was Orthodox Christian, and inheritor of Greek and Roman learning, but had itself nothing we would call a renaissance. There was something about Greek Orthodox Christianity that seems to have been, and still is, stultifying to free thought and scholarship.

Was Islam an influence? In the West, Islam was a transmitter of ancient texts and a source of independent scholarship, via the lengthy occupation of al-Andalus, as well as trade throughout the Mediterranian. This was at least as influential as the recovered treasures of Byzantium. But, being present at the very gates of Constantinople, and as a significant part of the Mongol empire, the Islamic influences must have been at least as strong in Byzantium itself as well as in Russia- but to little avail.

It is not a big point, but the historical irony is that Russia inherited the strong ruler model, the love of ornate ceremony, iconography, architecture, and the deeply entwined church-state model of Byzantium- some of which were rather retrograde characteristics- leaving the West to gain from some of its other, more positive achievements, or perhaps rather, transmissions from a deeper past.

• Taliban poised for success. Despite hearts and minds operation... while the American military seems delusional, like in Vietnam.
• Librarians- on the front lines of homelessness and drug addiction, and community.
• Lawless organization ... our border system.
• Fake news / warfare from Russia. Or Trump. Or Fox.
• Some problems with Bill Clinton.
• "As much as 54% of present high-seas fishing grounds would be unprofitable without large government subsidies."
• Who really owns the jobs issue?

Truth and Enlightenment

What the Enlightenment and Modernity have wrought, and who has problems with it.

As our values of truth and honesty are slipping, it seems worthwhile to review how we got here. People generally have a tenuous relation to reality. What we see through our eyes is only its surface. We can see plants all our lives and yet have no understanding of how they work and how they came to be. Such knowledge has to come through painstaking inference into a mental model, based on clues, experiments, mutations, exceptions, and the like. Humans are champions of inference, as attested by conspiracy theories and religion- ways that our need to for theories of reality outstrips our actual knowledge, sometimes flagrantly.

Historically, there have been occasional periods when intellectuals had the prosperous and calm conditions to make progress on this front, out of the mire of preconceptions, superstitions, and traditions, and into a more measured and rational view of reality. Not that there is ever a perfectly rational view, but there are clearly more and less rational views possible. The ancient Greeks experienced one such period, founding schools of philosophy that lasted hundreds of years, and fostering the greatest scientist, teacher, and thinker of the ancient world, Aristotle. But the greatest such period was the Renaissance and subsequent Enlightenment of Western Europe, when the learning of the ancient world combined with mounting prosperity and technological development to dispell the fog of Christian theology, and made of scholarship an independent, rigorous, and institutional pursuit that continues today.

Painting is an example of this movement. The Renaissance painters learned perspective, and reveled in new powers of realistic portrayal. Realistic painting may now be old-hat, even déclassé, but after the rude iconography of the Middle Ages, it was revolutionary, reminiscent of the incredibly naturalistic statuary of Greece and Rome at their heights. Similar movements in all areas of intellectual life, including science, philology, history, politics, and social thought generally, and philosophy, brought us to modernity, where our relationship to nature is fundamentally transformed, from that of a mystified and dependent spectator, to that of a deeply understanding (if not always respectful) steward. While morals and ethics are not themselves a matter of truth and natural observation, (though they have a lot to do with integrity and honesty), the same truth-finding ethic trained on social institutions brought down, step by step, the superstitious hold of the religio-monarchical system, to the constitutional / social contract systems of today.

Francesco di Giorgio, ~1490, an idealized architectural view.

But some are not happy with this change in perspective. There were obviously losers in this process of cultural and intellectual maturation. Principally religion, which tried mightily to understand the nature of reality, while mediating our relation to it, but couldn't help putting the cart of dogma and power ahead of the horse of intellectual integrity. For honesty and truth begin in the method of getting there. True humility, not the false and preening humility of putting one's god before all other gods and considerations, is the first step to being able to even see the subtle stirrings of nature, and then to follow them out. Charles Darwin was orginally intended for the parsonage, but as he unfurled the relentless mechanism of biology, and experienced its stabs in his own life, he ended up an evident atheist, woken up to a more sober, mature, and we might say enlightened, view of our nature and situation.

Reality isn't always pretty. Facing it takes fortitude and work. Thus the astonishingly durable, if slipping, hold of religion into this, the twenty-first century. Thus also the attraction of fake news and con artists, not to mention religion. Far easier to have comfort and hope in false and familiar beliefs than to accept uncertainty and ignorance, and do the work required to resolve them, even partially. Who would have thought that, at the so-called end of history, when the US won the cold war, and spread its blend of capitalism, relative freedom, and intellectual ambition across the world, that such moral rot would set in here at home, with our plutocrats, (with the connivance of Russia, of all things!), standing at the head of an army of resentful religious traditionalists, straining every nerve to spread distrust, small-mindedness, and lies over the land?

• Intellectuals- the first targets of authoritarians and fascists.
• And State is the department of intellectuals, at least till now.
• Which country takes the cake for lying?
• But our Republicans are in contention as well.
• What's the matter with Kansas.. will soon be the matter with the rest of us.
• ... Until the revolution.

The Purpose-Driven Pastor

Robert Price answers Rick Warren, in The Reason-Driven Life.

We are all seekers for purpose and meaning. But what happens if someone has the answer? We react, naturally, with a good bit of suspicion and skepticism. For we know instinctively that this search is not only difficult and unlikely to yield definitive answers, but also highly personal. Those peddling pat answers and coookie-cutter solutions may have confidence, but rarely have true answers.

So it is with Rich Warren and his book The Purpose-Driven Life. This has been a fundamentalist staple now for one and a half decades, with sales to rival the Bible itself. "You Were Planned for God's Pleasure." Wow! But what pleasures God? Well, now that we are done with sacrificing chickens and committing genocide, it seems that God is most pleasured by people joining fundamentalist churches like Rick Warren's, imagining they are abasing themselves before God, while lording it over all the sorry sinners who haven't gotten the message. Then they are sent out to spread the word and get more people to join up. Warren's ultimate message is to be a drone for the church: "You Were Made for a Mission". As Robert Price quotes:

'World-class Christians are the only fully alive people on the planet.' The outrageous arrogance of this insane boast never seems to dawn on him. Eric Hoffer has Warren pegged: 'The impression somehow prevails that the true believer, particularly the religious individual, is a humble person. The truth is that the surrendering and humbling of the self breed pride and arrogance. The true believer is apt to see himslef as one of the chosen, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a prince disguised in meekness, who is destined to inherit the earth and the kingdom of heaven too. He who is not of his faith is evil; he who will not listen shall perish.'

But Robert Price isn't just taking pot-shots. He is a post-fundamentalist, biblical scholar, and church-goer, as well as an atheist. He has great respect and love for the Bible, enabling a critique that makes Warren's literalism and pretensions to a biblical foundation ludicrous. Time and again, citations that seem so pat are exposed as far more complex, even contradictory, both among themselves, and to the points Warren is making. Warren quotes: "He is a God who is passionate about his relationship with you" Exodus 34:14. But his source is a custom version of the Bible for Warren's fundamentalists. The real translation is " The LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God", which lies among a discussion of how the Israelites should storm and desecrate the shrines of other religions.

Likewise, Warren cites "What pleases the LORD more: burnt offerings and sacrifices, or obedience to his voice? It is better to obey than to sacrifice." 1 Samuel 15:22. The language here is accurate, but this is no invitation to tea and scones, or to a Saddleback encounter group. The obedience demanded in this passage is genocide against the Amalek. One wonders whether this is a god that Warren's parishoners have any knowledge of or desire to get to know. The fact is that the Bible is a cobbled-together melange of historical and poetic texts, riven with inconsistencies, cross-purposes, and moral evil. To believe that one can take it literally, as Warren does, (most hilariously with the Noah story), is intellectually dishonest and incoherent.

And that is the fundamental lesson, in this age of fake news. The internet was hardly the first method of purveying falsehoods. Historians such as Homer and Herodotus never let truth get in the way of a good story, and standards were no higher among the many ancient story tellers and scribes who contributed to the Bible. They all had agendas, as does Rick Warren. Their narratives often begin in fact, and then veer into myth and fantasy, as most evident in the book of Revelations. The whole Jesus story is so full of archtypes and "purpose-driven" fables that it is impossible at this point to separate anything out that might have had to do with an actual person.

No, the Bible is an amazing cultural document, from our brutish and benighted, yet hopeful, forebears. It documents substantial moral and intellectual progress on its pages, in its transition towards a more or less pacifist dispensation (though whether that was by choice, or by Roman force is another matter). We have continued that progress in the modern age by, ironically, leaving its fervid fantasies behind and basing our intellectual life on the firmer foundations of empiricism and humanistic empathy. Fundmentalists work double-time to "prove" that their literal views of God and the Bible are true, but they are doomed to failure. That general intellectual failure is seen both in their amazingly corrupt bargain with Donald Trump and the revanchist Republicans, and in the declining numbers of parishoners in the pews. The decline of religion has been far slower than many had imagined, given that its intellectual foundations have been defunct for centuries, but is ever so slowly coming to pass, however purposeful its pastors.

• Vae victis.
• If the net won't be neutral, why not go to a dark net?
• Saunas may be better than SSRIs.
• Could Ismail Khan solve Afghanistan?
• It hardly needs repeating, whom the tax plan really benefits.
• Medicare is on the chopping block.
• America is in crisis.
• A history of redistribution.
• Online ads for online content ... is not working.

Not the Last Dark Age- the One Before That

Review of 1177 B.C., by Eric Cline, about the decline and fall of the Bronze age around the Eastern Mediterranean

In this time of cultural and political decline, it is useful to contemplate previous cultural cataclysms. While "the Dark Ages" typically denotes the roughly five hundred year hiatus between the fall of Rome and the resurgence of wider cultural ties and development in Western Europe, that was hardly the only extended collapse of high level civilization. A previous Dark Age had followed the collapse of the Bronze Age circa 1200 BCE, leading to the several historically empty centuries before we hear about the classical Greek civilization rising from the ashes in the 700s BCE.

The Greeks cherished their dramatic sagas dating from that prior, heroic epoch, much as the English later looked backwards romantically via the Arthurian saga, going do far as to send Arthur to defeat the Romans in battle. But the battle of Troy was no fantasy- it really happened. The only question is whether it was part of the destruction of the Bronze age, or part of its normal, competitive, affairs.

In fact, it is astonishing what we do know about this age, given its distance from us and the ensuing civilizations. Eric Cline has assembled an excellent guide to this period, the late Bronze age, dredging up a great deal of scholarship old and new on the many civilizations clustered around the Eastern Mediterranean from Italy to Egypt. We owe particular debts to the writing developed earlier in this age, both the hieroglyphic style in Egypt, and the cuneiform style from Babylon, which was adopted by the Hittites and others. The clay tablets so amenable to preservation (especially after fires) have been a gold mine of knowledge about the affairs and attitudes of the time.

Hittite writing from about 3300 years ago, using cuneiform script.

We have correspondence between kings as well as more mundane accounts. We have in some cases both sides of a diplomatic exchange, even a momentous peace treaty between Egypt and the Hittite empire. It is quite amazing. These unearthed records paint a picture of extensive contacts and trade between the states of Cyprus (Minoans), the Mycenaeans of mainland Greece, the Hittites of Anatolia, the Assyrians, the Ugaritic state in what is now the northern Syrian coast, the Canaanites, and Egypt. It is easy to get carried away with globalization analogies and complexity theory. But unfortunately, we have very little to go on when it comes to what ended this period. The Egyptians record enormous battles with "the Sea Peoples", which seems to have been a coalition of several enemies. But they also say they won this war, and the pharoah, Ramses III, was laid to rest in high style, though murdered in an internecine plot. Cline goes through a large amount of archealogical evidence, which shows earthquakes, drought and climate change, internal revolt as well as external invasions during these times. It is, in sum, hard to finger any single cause for the eventual decline of all these cultures into several hundred years of relative silence and decreptitude, (not to mention tomb-robbing), though there may have been a combination.

It was once fashionable to cite the Sea People as the instigators, in an orgy of rapine and destruction, as is related in the Iliad, and the Egyptian annals. It is not clear who the Sea Peoples were, however. They may have been Myceneans, but evidently encompassed other groups as well, maybe even free-booting pirates. And the various destroyed cities of this age were not all invaded, let alone by these groups. The Hittites were sacked by other enemies.

Ramses III mortuary relief showing prisoners from battles with the "Sea Peoples". Note the diverse head-dresses.

Cline resorts to the decline of trade, and complexity theory in his speculations. But a problem is that, despite the excitement of finding trade relations between these states, and royal correspondence, it is highly unlikely that a state like Egypt was substantially dependent on outside trade or other assistance. Such relations were icing on the cake, but hardly fundamental to its perpetuation. The cause has to be found elsewhere, either in general theories of cultural sclerosis and decline, or perhaps in disease or technological innovation. Also, if invasions or revolts were at issue, why did some other state not take advantage of them? The preceding centuries had seen a constant tug-of war between Egypt and the Hittites for control up the Levant, indicating that, were one weakened, others would rush to take up the slack. Yet both went into decline, and the Hittites vanished completely. It may indeed just be a coincidence that many cultures had reached a high level simultaneously, and then at similar times were overcome by ruder powers less inclined to leave historical traces.

The stage of the Bronze age was originally set by the migration of Indoeuropean peoples into the Middle East, founding the Mycenean and Hittite cultures, among others. Their earlier spread was enabled by a suite of decisive technological innovations like horse riding, wheeled carts and chariots, mobile warfare, and herding, which enabled mobility and military success. By the late Bronze age, these were no longer novel and had diffused all over the region. But perhaps some other innovation, like improved and larger ships or nascent iron working, may have tipped a critical balance. Secondly, herding and livestock domestication generated a variety of new diseases, which eventually played such a large role in the destruction of the native peoples of the New World. Perhaps one of these diseases had yet to burn its way through the late Bronze age Mediterranean. It must be said, however, that such an event would probably show up in the Egyptian annals, and also that other cultures managed to recover within a generation or two from devastating plagues, such as the black plague.

Lastly, cultural decline might be inevitable after a long period of stability. Stability breeds complacency and a cultural dynamic where the powerful stay powerful, with ever less merit and justification as time goes on. Their corruption, combined with the resentment of the powerless, can lead morons into power, a bad sign in any age and a sure path to decline, for all their protestations of greatness.

• Conservative "thought".. puts the conservative before the thought.
• But perhaps the thought is better than the action.
• Big data is not the same as understanding.
• 24 hours hate.
• Markets reflect human psychology.
• Xi Jinping and the rise of China.

Who Are the Real Wealth Creators?

Technologists, of course.

Of the various indignities of the campaign last year, the economic ignorance displayed and accepted was particularly galling. The Trump voters of the hinterlands, supposedly angry about their compromised economic position, elected a party and person whose avowed goal is to take more money from our public institutions, the poor, and the middle class, and give it to the rich. This after a near-decade of total intransigence by the same party against restarting an economy that was floored in the banking meltdown and has been limping since. It has taken a decade to get back to more or less normal conditions- time lost to economic growth in general and to countless individual traumas.

Who and what creates economic growth? Is it the "job creators"? Is it Goldman Sachs? Is it the 1%? That is a big question facing the nation, both politically and in straight economic policy. The new administration says yes, yes, yes, arguing that giving the rich hefty tax breaks, not to mention reducing regulations of all sorts in financial and environmental sectors, will help economic growth. Will it? Obviously we have been through all this before, under G. W. Bush and Reagan as well. And the answer is no, it does not increase economic growth. Money going to the rich is money that is, largely, invested in low-risk assets like bonds and real estate.

More generally, does the managerial class create wealth by their organizational prowess? Is Amazon better than Staples, which is better than Pat's Stationery store down the street? Organizational differences make only minor advances in overall wealth, and seem mostly to facilitate the redistribution of labor earnings to ever fewer and richer capitalists. As previously discussed, the power of capital is that it always wins, through good times and bad, in every negotiation, since versus labor, it is always taking less risk.

What Amazon has that Pat's establishment does not is, mostly, new technology. The internet came along and showed that everyone could be connected, instantly. How about using that connection to sell things on a nationwide scale, especially things that are easy to ship? Sears would have been the natural founder of this franchise, based in their nationwide catalog roots, but they had become too invested in their stores to pay attention. Capitalists only deploy the technology that exists. They do very little to generate new technology- that is left to academics and the government. It is technology that keeps revolutionizing our lives and raising our standards of living- our collective wealth. And when it comes to distributing new technology, sometimes the market does a worse job than the government, such as with roads. We could have much better internet infrastructure if it were managed in the public interest as a utility.

Where would the "job creators" be without their cell phones? Where would they be without databases and spreadsheets? Where would they be without electricity? They would doubtless be riding herd over an estate of serfs. They would be just as wealth-creating in relative terms, but all in a much poorer society. The dark ages were dark not because entrepreneurs had lost their will to manage others, but because technological, scholarly, and governing instututional development ground to a halt with the dissipation of the Western Roman Empire. It took centuries of slow, accreting technological progress to make cities as large as they were in Roman times, and make societies as wealthy. By that point, the process took on a life of its own in the West as an ideology of Enlightenment and material and moral progress took hold, maintaining support for learning and innovation which reached unimaginable heights in the twentieth century.

Looking back, we can rue that the fuel of all this transformative progress and wealth creation has been buried reduced carbon, which as our waste product, CO2, is now befouling the biosphere. Our collective wealth has also begotten a vast and completely unsustainable increase in human population, whose many appetites are destroying much else of the biosphere. These are the problems of prosperity, and are, if we are morally responsible, now foremost in our public and private intentions and actions to transition to a sustainable as well as prosperous future.

• Who needs clean water?
• Who will sue on behalf of the public interest?
• Free? We are not free. We are under the feudal thumb of corporations. "Likewise, the origin and success of the factory lay not in technological superiority, but in the substitution of the capitalist’s for the worker’s control of the work process and the quantity of output, in the change in the workman’s choice from one of how much to work and produce, based on his relative preferences for leisure and goods, to one of whether or not to work at all, which of course is hardly much of a choice."
• Trump is the weakling.

American Exceptionalism Rests on the Middle Class

What happens to our country when the middle class disappears? Review of Ganesh Sitaraman's "The Middle Class Constitution".

We are in a crisis right now in the US. Our government has been taken over by plutocrats who are busily reversing every progressive and public-spirited policy they can get their hands on. The worst nightmare of the nation's founders, revolving around demagogues, rule by extreme wealth, deepening political corruption, and mass immiseration, is coming to pass. Thomas Piketty's work on the nature and growth of economic inequality was the first major intellectual shot against this development, from an econometric perspective. Sitaraman's new book is the second, putting our economic inequality and its political consequences into historical and legal perspective, as a far greater matter than mere economics- rather, as a constitutional crisis.

The US has been since its founding exceptional on the world stage, not for our apple pie or iPhones, but for our democratic social system. Now the world is filled with democracies, so our position as one of the more mediocre ones in terms of governance, public services, health status, and overall happiness is perhaps not such a surprise. But at the beginning, we were truly revolutionary, and Lincoln was not far off when he posed the Civil War as a test whether government by the people would survive globally. (Switzerland, however, probably would have pressed on with its own experiments).

Why did this experiment happen here? According to Sitaraman, and to Toqueville, and to many of the founders themselves and other observers, it happened because the economic condition of Americans was substantially one of equality. Immigration put most people on a similar footing, which is to say, poor. The availability of land to all who wanted to work it provided a base of subsistence to these immigrants, and a foundation of modest wealth. The ideology of the early colonies and Republic was one of severe allergy to class distinctions, titles, and the like. There were some wealthy people, but nothing like the disparities that we would see later, either in the guilded age, or today.

Our constitution reflects these origins, and depends on continued rough equality with a predominant middle class. Sitaraman makes it clear that historically, constitutions have always reflected the economic conditions they sought to rule. Where feudalism and serfdom was the rule, so was autocracy. And oligarchy or autocracy have been the rule through the vast majority of human history, with democracy only possible at the lowest levels of rural and small-town society, where equality was likewise occasionally possible. Golden-age Greece, our democratic ideal, was more like an oligarchy of the free men of the city. Karl Marx had a point when he maintained that ownership of the means of production controls the nature of the class system, and thence the political system. Even Aristotle recognized, that while a true middle class polity was impossible in the power-economics setting of the ancient world, it would be the ideal polity, composed of that class of people who are neither so greedy and power-mad that they would factionalize and corrupt the system, nor so poor that their only wish would be to revolt and overthrow it.

Our rough equality continued through the frontier era, when anyone could pull up stakes and get land out west. Conditions were increasingly difficult the farther west one went, until the coastal paradise of California and Oregon gave one last great frontier of fertile land. This availability of land amounted to a job guarantee for its day, allowing any willing person to work and make money regardless of the willingness of an employer to hire. Farming certainly had its own terrible risks, between the weather, pests, and fluctuating markets. But no able person had to be destitute.

Now, we are neither an agricultural society, nor have any frontiers left. We exist in a new form of feudalism where employers have no governance responsibility to their employees. Employees are purely at will, and may be fired at any time for any reason. It is ironic that we so fetishize political freedom and legal equality, while practicing, in our corporate culture, the most retrograde feudalism. For all the regulations that modestly ameliorate this condition, most workers are in a dramatically assymetric and powerless position. It wouldn't be so bad if the economic system were not also unstable, experiencing crises of demand and investment that force millions of workers into destitution. Additionally, the closing of the frontier and other restrictions have made land, housing, and rents increasingly subject to scarcity costs far above their construction costs. This makes destitution a far more probable and chilling prospect.

Sitaraman cites disturbing research into our political system that makes the case that we are already living in an oligarchy/plutocracy. The fact is that each of our politicians is for sale, the media system is run by corporations, and much of the governmental regulatory apparatus that was supposed to protect us from the predatory special interests have instead been captured by them. This latest research shows that the actions of our political system accord essentially none of the time with the preferences of the lower 90% of the population, and all of the time with the preferences of the rich and super-rich. Our so-called leaders, thanks to various forms of legal corruption, are steeped in the social melieu of the rich, its super-PACs, and its propaganda organs, from cable channels, to think tanks, to lobbyists. The rest of us hardly stand a chance. Even at state and local levels, the rich have been funding dramatic new advances in corruption and propaganda, which have turned our nation into a sea of red.

This is how wealth translates to power, and the US may have entered a terminal loop where the plutocracy is so entrenched and so shameless about leveraging that power into yet more power, that there is nothing further to do, short of revolution. The breathtaking nepotism, incompetence, greed, and immorality of our current administration merely puts an exclamation point on a decades-long process that has not only reshaped the political system into a frank plutocracy, but reshaped the economic system as well into one that freezes out the middle class, by dramatically lowering taxes on the rich and reducing public facilities and services, among many other policies.

Middle classes do not happen by accident. The natural course of events, given the Malthusian pressures documented so dryly by Thomas Piketty and many others, is towards competitive differentiation, with winners gathering more power and wealth, which, once it reaches a high level, grows by natural accretion and compounding (where it is not more actively leveraged) far beyond anyone's needs, and losers finding it ever more difficult to find a way into a brutally rigged system. Classically, this was expressed by ownership of land, to which the answer has been land reform, which is to say, expropriation. Sitaraman provides a fascinating aside on the sequel to the Civil War.

"The most eloquent advocate for confiscation and redistribution was Thaddeus Stevens. The clubfooted Pennsylvania congressman proposed confiscating the estates of the top 10% of wealthy rebel planters, which at the time amounted to those with more than $10,000 or more than two hundred acres of land. With that land, which he pointed out would leave 90 percent of southerners untouched, every freedman could be given forty acres. The remainder wold be sold at auction and used to fund veteran pensions, compensate the injured, and retire the war debt. Steven's reasoning acknowledge that this ction would be revolutionary, but he also deemed it necessary for preserving republican government. "The whole fabric of Southern society must be changed," he declared in a speech to constituents in 1865: 

"Without this, this government can never be, as it has never been, a true republic. Heretofore, it had more the features of aristocracy than of democracy. The Southern States have been despotisms, not governments of the people. It is impossible that any practical equality of rights can exist where a few thousand men monopolize the whole landed property. ... If the South is ever to be made a safe republic, let her lands be clutivated by the toil of the owners, or the free labor of intelligent citizens. This must be done even though it drive her nobility into exile. If they go, all the better."

The book ends with a relatively standard plea, in the Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren frame of argument, for higher consciousness of these facts and trends, in order to frame a new phase of social activism. Sitaraman has great respect for the Progressive era of the late 19th century, which brought us the progressive income tax, anti-trust, and the regulatory state, among other innovations. Thinkers and movements of this time took a fundamental look at our system and recognized that one more agency would not be enough- we needed constitutional amendments and deep reform. Today, with the Supreme Court wielding the First Amendment like bludgeon against the very citizens it was designed to protect, drowning them in corporate doublespeak, and with our politico-economic power system declining into bannana republic levels of dysfunction and disparity, it is time again to crank up the volume of protest, and direct it to fundamental and radical aims, such as taking money out of politics, remaking corporate governance on a more democratic model, and restoring a tax and public financing policies that sustainably strengthen the middle class.

• A clown is in charge of our economic policy.
• Pay should not be a big secret.
• Another lie ... and another.
• We need a new privacy regime.
• China is the last country to want any change in North Korea.
• They really are better than everyone else.
• Corrupt enrichment.
• Health care is one of the bigger drivers of inequality.
• Economic graph of the week. Corporations are saving more, growing fatter, while everyone else grows thinner.

The Treacherous Invisibility of Sociality

We are dealing with phantasms, which makes drawing a line among them difficult.

It is easy to take potshots at science for its blinkered focus on the measurable and the concrete. How many people have pulled out the famous Shakespeare line about the many more things, poor Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy? How many times does the newest research in social sciences tell us what anyone with common sense already knows? However, on the other side, the quest by softer sciences, like economics and ecology, to man up and drown themselves in math in order to satisfy their envy of the "hard" sciences. There are clearly conflicting emotions on the matter, which occasionally boil over into Trumpism and general anti-elitism.

But understanding by way of careful observation, useful simplification / reduction / schematization is what all scholarship and learning is about. One can't get around learning about something in detail if one wants to master it, either operationally or intellectually. The scientific method was revolutionary development, not only for science per se, but for philosophy and specifically for psychology. It expresses a skepticism of knowledge gained by theoretical, authoritarian, and armchair means, untethered from whatever the object purports to be, whether physics or biblical texts or history. Just as we suspect statements made by our current president when based on nothing, likewise we should suspect other claims lacking evidence of a rigorous, empirical kind.

But there is a deep problem, which is that our most important issues and forms of knowledge are social, not measurable and concrete. While science struggles to grasp social patterns and knowledge from its particular perspective- and not yet terribly successfully- those patterns are at the same time experienced richly in everyday life by everyone and portrayed with great variety and complexity in the arts. It is the core of drama- who knows what, who likes whom, and can I see through layers of deceit.  All of this is invisible in the conventional sense. It may be encoded somewhere in our brains, but the proper level of analysis is clearly not that of the neuron. As scientists, we are left with questionnaires, polls, and, generally, utter blindness when it comes to this most important apparatus of our lives.

Hard to read?

What hides, and what exposes, the social matrix? Language is the premier medium, of course, going far beyond the pheromones, grunts, dancing, and grooming of other animals. Blushing, facial expression, and eye direction, are a few more biological examples of other ways we externalize our social feelings. Yet there is great value in hiding feelings as well, whether out of politeness or deceit. Indirection, subtlety, puns, jokes, allegories, metaphors, a single look. The cues, even when present, are devilishly hard to read, which prompts theories about how sociality drove gains in human intelligence. So even on the social level, let alone the scientific level, it is hard to know what is going on beneath the surface, where sociality truly resides.

An inference of sociality, constructed in typical mid-20th century fashion.

The result of all this is that we are very enthusiastic inferrers and theorists. Conspiracy theories, truthers, birthers are some of the more extreme manifestations, but we all have to do a lot of reading between the lines just to survive as social beings. What is a soap opera but the carefully and gleefully managed reveal of social facts that are not, in timely fashion, apparent to the participants? Some people are more skilled at all this reading and inferring than others are. Extroverts enthusiastically wade into this murky unknown, while introverts regard it as hostile territory, and tend temperamentally to populate the scientific ranks, struggling to find certainty in an uncertain and largely invisible world.

What becomes treacherous about all this is the over-enthusiastic inference of things that are not there. On the social plane this can be over-sensitivity to slights and oversights. But it can also be religion- the natural inference of sociality to inanimate phenomena. Animism seems the most natural human condition, anthropomorphizing everything around us from insects to mountains, and putting ourselves into subtle social relations with it all. The rise of patriarchy seems to have prompted a massive shift from animistic patheism to father-centric monotheism. The theological object is no more real, however, for being consolidated and blown up out of all proportion. It is still an over-enthusiastic inference of sociality / personhood put on the void. Smarter theists have given up trying to explain particular aspects of reality via crackpot theology, such as electricity or evolution. Yet "everything" is still somehow fostered, created, or underpinned by this phantasm, much as prostate health is "supported" by the latest herbal supplement or hemeopathic nostrum.

What's the harm? On the social plane, over-inference leads to a lot of drama, but is quite finely tuned and bounded by actual, empirical, interactions (though our politically partisan echo chambers breake this model). It is how we evolved to deal with each other. On the philosophical plane, it has been disastrous, giving us centuries of bad ideas, intolerant theologies, and mis-directed energies. Think of all the monks and nuns praying away in their cloisters to non-existent deities for undeserving patrons. And today we are still living in a world at war over religious differences, all based on imaginary inferences created out of the template of our social assumptions and desires.

• Words for the unnamable.
• Lessons from the soaps.
• Ghost-busting.
• What's wrong with experts? What is right?
• Summers heads towards a full employment policy.
• Total mental breakdown.. making us safer by cutting the coast guard and other safety agencies.
• If work doesn't pay, people won't work.
• Manufacturing idiocy.
• Is economics a corrupt cabal?
• What it is.
• Our internet bites.
• Monopolies and rent hurts workers.
• Swamp? How about government by lobbyist?
• Finance wins, not workers.

Cultural Trauma and Authoritarianism

What the Mongols did to the Muslim world, China, and Russia.

Russia is certainly in the news now, and what do you know, but over the holidays Santa Claus brought me Martin Sixsmith's history of Russia. It breezes all too quickly through the first millenium or so of Rus, from its semi-mythical origins in the 800's as yet another Viking outpost, like that of the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons in England, and the Normans in France, England and later in Italy and Palestine.

Sixsmith paints a picture of a reasonably cosmopolitan and open society (centered in Kiev) in the very early period, though always quarreling and lacking centralized leadership and legitimacy, as was true for most other Western regions during the middle ages (and elsewhere in human history). All that changed in 1240, when the Mongols concluded a lengthy conquest, and put Russia under a severe yoke for the following 240 years.

While there has been quite an effort in recent years to rehabilitate the Mongols, one can make the case that the rise of Western Europe over all other areas of the world in the last few hundred years is due in large part to the destruction or hobbling of its competitors by the Mongols. This applies to China, to Russia, and most profoundly, to the Muslim world.

In Russia, the Mongols exterminated entire cities and forced the remainder to pay heavy tributes, as well as a lot of bowing and scraping, to their new overlords. But contrary to Sixsmith's portrayal, the Mongol rule was not terribly heavy-handed. They ruled through the local nobility, which, while neutered, was not destroyed. The Mongols also instituted some administrative efficiencies that accelerated institutional development. Perhaps the main effect, however, was the general trauma of violation and subjugation. With no natural borders, and predatory neighbors, the Russians evidently came to the conclusion that: 1. With regard to governing style, if you can't beat them, join them (i.e. the autocratic, despotic, and extremely effective military organization of the Mongols), and 2. That autocratic central power is the only way to keep Russia whole against its many neighbors. We in the US live in such a pleasant and peaceful neighborhood (Oh, Canada!), yet still are strikingly paranoid about Communism, Islam, immigration, etc.- take your pick. Imagine if those threats were actually real!

The enormous Mongol empire, 1200's.

Sixsmith certainly draws a line between this trauma and the continuing dedication of Russia to statism and autocracy, now exemplified by Vladimir Putin's nouveau despotism. China has ended up in a very similar place, from a much longer history of dynamic centralization, but similar subjugation by the Mongols. It is easy to draw the lesson that strength is the only way to survive in such a rough neighborhood. Yet it is a conclusion a little too-easily drawn by those already in power, whose only real interest is staying in power. Both China and Russia are exemplars of the extremes of depotic rule, particularly after it was given a whole new propagandistic lease on life by a Western ideology far more amenable and convenient than liberal democracy: communism. In China, it works tolerably well at the moment, but only by being radically tamed from the heights achieved by Chairman Mao.

But the saddest trauma was suffered by the Muslim world, which was at its height when the Mongols trashed Baghdad. In the centuries since, they have not gained a continent-wide empire (excepting the conquests and splendors of Mughal period), and have fallen progressively behind Western Europe. Whether the low point was the cavalier carving up of Muslim countries by the British (and French and Russians) after the fall of the Ottoman empire, or the current Islamist insanity, the Muslim world has had an increasingly frought relationship with the rest of the world, and with Modernity.

The Muslim approach to statehood and governance has always been lacking, based as it is on Muhammed as a singular and unreplicable example. A tribal and militaristic style succeeded after Muhammed's death, in channelling the energies of the unified community to winning an enormous empire. The caliphate then kept things together loosely, with religion as the core of identity. But it was always by civil war that God decided on the winners in the battle for the next ruling family. In Europe, the Catholic church (and its monastic affiliates) provided a much more stable model of governance, via election out of an oligarchy of cardinals. Later on, the Protestant reformation prompted ever greater attention to the role of the individual, as arbiter of celestial as well as terrestrial salvation. These threads of practice and theory led, in excruciatingly slow fashion, to the secular democratic state we have today.

When crisis threw Muslims back onto their religion as the bulwark of communal identity, there was little to go on to develop state institutions. Thus states tended to revert to tribal autocracy as the model. In the Arab core of the Muslim world, this remains the rule to this day. In outlying areas, however, such as Indonesia, Pakistan, and Turkey, (possibly Egypt and Tunisia), non-religious ideologies and influences have been more powerful, such as British colonialism, and the active Westernizing secularism of Ataturk. These countries have highly authoritarian tendencies, but have so far successfully cast aside enough of their Muslim ideological baggage to make democratic systems work to some degree.

This lack of legitimate state development in the bulk of the historical Muslim world, perhaps accentuated by the trauma of Mongol destruction, is central to its current complaints. It was central to their lack of resistance to Western imperialism, to their lack of effective post-colonial governance, to lack of human development and the economic development it leads to. It was also central to our disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the US dreamed of quickly implanting democracy, only to be faced by a culture utterly unprepared for it, with far more fissiparous fish to fry. If God anoints the strong to rule over the weak, by way of warfare in general and jihad in particular, what is the point of legally bound representative state institutions?

• Trump and Putin... it makes no sense, unless Trump is a clown.
• Incoming HHS secretary is corrupt.
• We have a media problem.
• Splenetic clown can dish it out, but can't take it.
• Work, yes. Capitalist work, not necessarily.
• Web design.. by the young, for the young?
• Integrity and democracy can make a difference.
• The youth are worried. Then why didn't they vote?
• Are we ready for world equality?
• Thank you, god!
• Why are private schools allowed to exist?
• We need a new economic deal, and we need it fast.
• Economic graph of the week: Corporations are paying less, workers are paying more.