America as Hegemon

The imperial track record is not good, but the hegemonic track record isn't all that bad.

I was recently visiting the USS Hornet, a WW2-era aircraft carrier now turned into a museum on San Francisco bay. Soon after, it was Fleet Week, when the US navy pays a visit to the Bay Area in force, capped by a Blue Angels air show. An appalling display of naked militarism, granted. But also an occasion to reflect on our world-wide empire, the nature of American power, the competence of our military, and the state of things internationally.

It was a little weird, seeing decades-old technology swooping up and down the bay, which has been, beneath this benevolent protection, so restlessly advancing the technological frontier in totally different directions- computers, phones, applications, streaming, social media. Which trends are more important for America's place in the world? Which technologies rule? What are we doing with all this military hardware? I tend to have pretty conservative views on all this, that the US is right to stick with the post-WW2 consensus that our military should be as strong as possible, and partner with like-minded countries around the world to advance the vision of that era, of human rights and democracy for all. 

When we have tried to do this task directly, in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, however, it has generally turned out very badly. The Iraq war was misconceived from the start, and went downhill from there. Despite the laudible aim of sparing the Iraqi people from the continued depredations of Saddam Hussein, the lying and the incompetence at all levels made the cure far worse than the disease, with anarchy and hundreds of thousands dead. But let's write that one off as a George Bush-as-decider blunder.

The Afghanistan debacle is more painful to contemplate, in some ways, in what it says about our fundamental incompetence as an imperial power. Its rationale was straightforward, international support wide-spread, and our power there absolute in the opening acts of the takeover. Yet with all those advantages, we ended up, twenty years later, turning tail and watching our hand-built Afghan military melt away even before we left the country. The Russians had, frankly, a better record in their Imperial Afghan turn. 

It is an appalling track record, really. We evidently and thankfully do not have the advantage of ruthlessness that ancient Rome enjoyed, or modern day spoilers like Russia and Iran. But nor, apparently, do we have the advantage of friendly relations, favorable hearts & minds, and good intelligence. We were constantly led astray by "friends" with all kinds of personal vendettas and agendas. We pride ourselves in our independence from the rest of the world, and thus know little about it, which means that we go into these settings woefully unprepared, besotted by whatever ideological issue du jure is fashionable in the US. Our priorities in Afghanistan seemed to be to hold elections and educate women. But were those the right aims? And even if so, were they carried out with any kind of wisdom and sense of priorities and proper preparation?

Most concretely, our military relationship was a disaster. The US military tried to make the new Afghan military into its own image and graft onto it its own systems and capablities, creating a dependence that caused immediate failure when Afghans caught wind that we were really, actually, going to leave. This was an incredible result, especially after the US military had been responsible for "training" countless militaries all over the world for decades. 

What on earth were we doing? Similarly to the intelligence failures, the military failures came from some fundamental inability to understand the problem at hand, and work with the society as it existed. Instead of creating a sustainable, right-sized, and politically viable force, we just assumed we were the good guys and anything we did was good. There was an intrinsic tension between leaving the society as it was, thereby just funding a reboot of a Taliban-like (or northern alliance-like) force to keep the country pacified, and forcing some change, on social, political, economic, and technological levels, by changing the form of government and associated institutions. The US clearly did not invade Afghanistan to keep everything the same. But by overreaching, we essentially achieved nothing, allowing precisely the group we dethroned to come back into power, and casting the country back into its pre-invasion economic and social abyss. At least, thanks to other technological bequests of the US and the West, the Afghans now have cell phones.

So our military and other institutions do not come off well in any of their recent engagements. It is a case of losing every battle, while winning the war. For we still enjoy a hegemonic position, not thanks to our incompetent and technology-bedazzled military, but thanks to our friends, with whom we still lead the world. The core groups of the anglophone countries, NATO, and the East Asian alliances with Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan remain the core of the developed world, enjoying peaceful relations, democracy, and prosperous economies. China is advancing mightily to displace that grouping, but can not do so alone, and has little hope of doing so with streadfast friends like Russia and North Korea by its side.

Tiers of development. Blue is the developed world, yellow the middle-tier (developing), and red, the lower tiers of development (desperately developing, one might say).

The advantages of joining this developed core are so evident, that one wonders why it is under threat, both from the spoiler countries like Russia, and from endogenous authoritarians in the US, Poland, Hungary, India, and elsewhere. Two decades ago, we were looking at the end of history, when a futuristic society of peace and contentment would inherit the post-cold war earth, Russia would join NATO, and we would live happily ever after. But democracy is a cultural pattern that not everyone can easily understand, especially people who run (or want to run) undemocratic countries. As our framers understood so well, sovereign power is dangerous, and needs to be diluted among publicly competing branches, candidates, officers, and voters for it to be durably controlled, a bit like an atomic chain reaction. It takes wisdom and humility to figure that out and abide by such fundamental (constitutional) rules. 

It is tempting to take that power directly in hand, to satisfy a burning desire to "do something". In the US, a Republican minority has progressively lost its commitment to popular rule and the viability of contemporary governmental institutions. This is, incidentally, only possible because of their special relationship with sources of money and of media influence, without which they would have little popular purchase. In China, the communist party figured that, despite its own history of ravaging its country, it had developed a stable enough system of governance, and had obtained implicit popular support ... reflecting either brainwashing or acquiescence ... that it did not need actual elections or Western-style divided government. And in Russia, the bitterness of its descent into kleptocracy, under the poisoned banner of "capitalism", combined with various snubs from the West and general historical and cultural distance, rendered the idea of becoming a Western country too much to bear.

Each authoritarian system has, like an unhappy family, its own reasons, while the happy families of the West seem to, think along similar lines almost involuntarily, at least until some authoritarian mountebank comes along to solve all our problems by doing away with our safeguards. We are in a grand race to find out which systems are more stable. Those that rely on one person, such as the aging Vladimir Putin, for their decisions, or those that rely on popular will and a controlling set of institutions. The lessons of history could not be more stark, telling us that the former is the bigger crapshoot. Sometimes it turns out well, but more often not. That is why liberalism and deliberative democracy developed in the first place.

There remains a great deal of middle ground around the world. The muslim countries, for example, form a middle tier of populous and developing countries comprising, between Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Turkey, Iran, the Gulf states and others, well over a billion people. Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan didn't help our relations there, but on the other hand, China is hardly making itself loved either, with its extermination campaign in Xinjiang. The cultural patterns of the Islamic world make it a particularly hard sell for Western democracy vs authoritariansim. Thus the brief Arab Spring came to a painful and inglorious end, mostly in whimpers, sometimes in horror. The liberatlization process took a long time in the West as well, measured perhaps from the French revolution, through the revolutions of 1848, culminating the aftermath of World War 2, with developmental delays in the Eastern European deep freeze. Ideas and new social patterns take a long time to take root, even when the templates (Switzerland, the US, ancient Greece) are at hand.

The American hegemony is little more than an agreement among like-minded and friendly nations to maintain their democratic systems, their prosperous (if environmentally rapacious and unsustainable) economies, and to largely offload their military responsibilities on the US. Whether those responsibilities have been well-stewarded is certainly doubtful. But up to this point, the agreement has been highly successful, mostly because the US has been a willing, stable, and vigorous anchor. Can the EU take our place? It is conceivable, but the EU is structurally less decisive. Bodies like the UN or the G20 are even less capable, in any executive sense. So, until we come up with something better, with a hot war against Russia and a cold one developing against China, and while other cultures are slowly chewing over their various problems with authoritarianism, it is critical that the US remain that anchor for the democratic developed world.

• What are the rules, anyhow?
• Bad intelligence.
• History is important to authoritarians, at least.
• Argentina is in the throes of inflation.
• The totalitarian speakership is bad for democracy, as well as being unworkable with thin majorities.

Desperately Seeking Cessation of Desire

Some paradoxes, and good points, of Buddhism.

I have been reading "In the Buddha's Words", by Bhikkhu Bodhi, which is a well-organized collection / selection of translations of what we have as the core teachings of Buddhism. It comes from the Pali canon, from Sri Lanka, where Buddhism found refuge after its final destruction in India after the Arab invasions, and offers as clear an exposition of the Buddhist system as one can probably find in English. A bit like the scriptures of Christianity, the earliest canons of Buddhism originate from oral traditions only recorded a hundred or so years after Buddha's death, but as they are slightly less besotted with miraculous stories, the collection has more of a feeling of actual teaching, than of gnomic riddles and wonder stories, not to mention Odyssean mis-adventures.

Both prophets make audacious claims, one to be god, or its son, the other to have attained a perfectly enlightened state with similar implications for everlasting life (or lack of rebirth, at any rate). Each extends to his followers the tempting prospect of a similarly exalted state after death. Each teaches simple morals, each attracts followers both lay and career-ist, the latter of whom tend to be rather dense. Each launched an international sensation that bifurcated into a monastic/ascetic branch of professional clerics and a more popular branch that attained a leading role in some societies.

But Buddhism has attained a special status in the West as something a bit more advanced than the absurd theology of Christianity. A theology that could even be deemed atheist, along with a practice that focuses more relentlessly on peace and harmony than does what Christianity has become, particularly in the US. It is congenial to seekers, an exotic and edgy way to be spiritual, but not religious.

But how much sense does it really make? For starters, much of the Buddhist mythology and theology is simply taken from its ambient Hindu environment. The cycle of rebirth, the karma that influences one's level of rebirth, the heavens and hells, all come from the common understandings of the time, so are not very particular to Buddhism. Buddhists did away with lots of the gods, in favor of their own heros (Buddha, and the Bodhisattvas), and developed a simplified philosphy of desire, suffering, and the relief of suffering by controlling desire, optimally through advanced meditation practices. Much of this was also ambient or at least implicit, as Buddha himself began as a normal Indian ascetic, trying to purify himself of all taints and mundane aspects. For his Buddhist Sanga, he dialed things back a bit, so that the community could function as a social system, not a disconnected constellation of hermits.

Bodhisattvas floating in heaven. These are Buddhists who have attained enlightenment but not entered permanent heaven, choosing rather to have compassion on humanity in its benighted state.

As a philosophical system, it seems paradoxical to spend so much effort and desire in seeking nirvanna and the benefits of lack of desire. To sit in meditation for years on end demands enormous discipline. To submit to a life of begging and poverty takes great will and desire for whatever is promised on the other side. This is not evidence of lack of desire, much less the kind of wisdom and knowledge that would license its practitioners to advise lay people in their mundane affairs (or politicians in affairs of state). And the ethical system that Buddha promulgated was simple in the extreme- merely to be and do good, rather than being and doing bad, all staked on the age-old promise that just deserts would be coming after death.

No, Buddha was clearly a charismatic person, and his insight was social, not philosphical. Remember that he was a prince by birth and education. I would suggest that his core message was one of nobility- of idealism about the human condition. In his system, nobility is not conferred by birth, but by action. All can be noble, and all can be ignoble, regardless of wealth or birth. For the mass of society, it is control over desire that allows virtue and prosperity- i.e. nobility. Those who are addicts, whether to power, to drugs, to bitterness, to sex, or innumerable other black holes of desire or habit, are slaves, not nobles. This is incidentally what makes Buddhism so amenable to the West- it is very enlightenment-friendly kind of social philosophy.

The monks and Sanga of Buddhism were to be the shock troops of emotional discipline, burning off their normal social desires in fires of meditation and renunciation, even as they were on the hook for a whole other set of desires. Which are, in my estimation, wholly illusory in their aim, despite the various beneficial effects of meditation, in this world. They provide the inspiration and template for the society at large, modeling a form of behavioral nobility that any and all can at least appreciate, if not aspire to, and model in their own circumscribed lives and ethical concerns. I think that is the real strength of the Buddhist system. The monks may be misled in philosophical terms, but they fulfill a critical social role which governs and moderates the society at large. 

The monks provide another benefit, which is population control. One of the greatest pressures on any society is overpopulation, which immiserates the poor, empowers the rich, and can ultimately destroy its resource base. While the monastic institutions are a great burden on their societies, they also help keep them sustainable by taking in excess males who might otherwise become brigands and parents. This is particularly evident in traditional Tibet, despite the corruption of the monastic system by clan rivalries and even occasional warfare.

The fact of the matter is that desire is the staff, even essence, of life. Those who lack desire are dead, and Buddhist monks sitting in endless renunciation are enacting a sort of living death. Nevertheless, they have an important function in their societies, which is one we see replicated in the priests of Orthodox and Catholic Christianity (most of the time) and other ascetics and clerics around the world. Buddha was right that the management of desire is absolutely critical to individual and communal social life. Compare his system, however, with the philosophy of the Greeks, which arose at roughly the same (axial) time. The Greek philosophers focused on moderation in all things- another way, and I would offer, a healthier way, to state the need for discipline over the desires. They additionally fostered desires for knowledge and as complex ethical investigations, which I would posit far outstripped the efforts of the Buddhists, and gave rise, though the Greeks' continuing influence over the Roman and ensuing Christian epochs in Western Europe, to a more advanced culture, at least in philosophical, legal, and scientific terms, if not in terms of social and political peace.

• Meanwhile, a Christian court makes us a Christian nation, like it or not.
•  Length of Covid infection and viral shedding is unaffected by strain or vaccination status.

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.

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.

Eugenics, the Catholic way

Woe betide any tampering with God's nature! However, destroying it with overpopulation is OK.

The current Supreme Court battle puts a spotlight on Catholicism in law and ethics. With the impending justice, six of the nine will be Catholic. The more rightward Catholic justices are coming from a culture that has some peculiar views on itself, on key ethical issues, and on the future of the world. First is its self-righteousness. Fundamentalist Catholics like Antonin Scalia and Attorney General Barr are confident that they come to government service steeped in the most exacting and time-honored moral code- that of the church which has been in existence going on two thousand years. It is a church that has weathered millennia of political turmoil and tectonic shifts of philosophy. But does all that history make it right? Does durability imply anything other than a canny grasp of human psychology, both in keeping its parishioners in the fold, and in keeping the wheels of its authoritarian structures turning? I don't think so. Far better moral systems have been imagined and enacted, and the Church has, time after time, grudgingly taken them up, typically a century after the rest of society. Today, a Catholic woman is nominated to the Supreme Court. Maybe in a hundred years, a female cardinal? 

But what is particularly galling is the prating about the sacredness of life. William Barr has restarted federal executions, to add to all his other lying and subversions of justice, giving one a curious impression of this "culture of life". What is obviously a simple policy of patriarchal power is dressed up in gilded rhetoric of concern for "life", which, maddeningly, is swallowed as gospel by the women who are its victims. For opposition to contraception and abortion are foremost attacks on the agency and full personhood of women, who are demoted to vessels for male procreation. But the Catholic church's policy is not just patriarchy of a demeaning and sexist kind, it also constitutes a eugenic policy. Ron Turcotte, one of the great horse jockeys, born in a family of twelve children in French Catholic New Brunswick, recalled in his autobiography that the priest would make the rounds of local families and berate every woman who did not have babies in diapers. The Catholic imperative is to fill up the world with Catholics, no matter the suffering of women, families, or communities. The entire biosphere groans under vast overpopulation. And what is the answer of the Catholic church? More Catholics, more oppression, more mental straightjackets. Care for creation apparently does not extend to continence on the part of men, basic personal rights or autonomy on the part of women, or to creation in general.

Just another day at the Supreme Court.

So when I hear "distinguished" lawyers, scholars and ethicists from Catholic institutions pontificate about the evils of genetic engineering, stem cell research, or use of embryos in research, (not to mention abortion or assisted suicide, among many other topics) I can not take them seriously as intellectuals- as anything other than mouthpieces of an antiquated system of oppressive, and now catastrophic, archetypes of political and social power. It is one thing to be a scholar of an artistic tradition full of glorious human expression and yearning quests for deeper connection with whatever power animates the world. But with the loss of humanism, then Protestantism, Catholicism retreated into an intellectual fortress of defense, nostalgia, and counter-reformation. The Federalist societies, the constitutional textualists, the Opus Dei fundamentalists... this ecosystem that has funded and nurtured a conservative assault on US legal institutions, apparently heavily Catholic, all are backward time machines fixated on dead controversies and traditional, frankly eugenic, policies of world domination. 

Nominee Barrett's textualism, following Scalia, seems to endanger the last century or two of constitutional interpretation. Whatever is not explicitly enumerated in the text is not, by this view, in the federal government's power. This could include women, (other than the 19th amendment; notably, the word "he" is used repetitively to refer to the president, representatives and other officers), federal regulatory authority in countless areas such as labor, antitrust, and finance, and the very meanings of concepts like cruel and unusual punishment, militias, privacy, due process, "needful rules", and "general welfare". The constitution and statutes are frequently vague, precisely so that society can construct its meanings according to the spirit of the document, not a cramped view of its letter, or a psychoanalytic plumbing of its mental conditions of origination.

Nor is Catholicism alone in this backwardness and revanchism. Islam shares its authoritarian, righteous, patriarchal, misogynistic, domineering mentality, even while lacking a pope. It goes the Catholics one better by approving of polygamy, another eugenic gambit. Consequently, Islam has even higher birth rates than Catholicism, immiserating its populations, stoking misplaced resentment, and imperiling the biosphere. However, Muslims in the US are not at this time constructing legal pipelines into US federal judgeships or dominating the Supreme Court, so their similarities in this regard are of global, but not federal, concern.

• Yes, religion is an issue here.
• Extended video of Barrett expressing her views, as also linked above.
• Abortion was perfectly fine in colonial America.
• Our feudal future, clarified by the GOP.
• Donald's hair is charged to the taxpayer. Also, Ivanka.
• Maybe the whole business deduction system should be scrapped.
• What happens if ACA dies?
• State of our politics- getting people to not vote.

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: Object Lesson of the Enlightenment

Review of Iran: A Modern History, by Abbas Amanat. Part 2- the contest between autocracy, democracy, and theocracy.

Has history ended? Did all countervailing ideologies give up and yield to democracy as the universal form of government and does peace now reign? Apparently not. Indeed, democracy is embattled in many areas as it has not been in decades- even in the US, whose institutions are under sustained attack by a renascent autocratic / plutocratic coalition. Iran has exemplified the contest between the ideals of democracy, human rights, state stability, authority, and religious sentiment in ideologies of government over many centuries. It has been positioned at some remove from, though in durable if not tragic contact with, the European cultures that fostered the Enlightenment in all its aspects. What has been their impact, and what are we to make of the current result?

Amanat provides a magisterial overview of Iran's recent history, (recent meaning since 1500, which leaves out a vast portion going back to antiquity and beyond), focusing on its political systems as they range between autocracy and revolution, growth and decline, consolidation and decadence. Iran was heavily influenced by Europeans starting in the mid-1800's, as the great game got underway. While Russia was unapologetically autocratic, making its menace clearly lineal with previous contests against other invaders, Britain, and later the US, brought a new level of hypocrisy as imperial powers founded on Enlightenment ideals and practices, which were, however, not for foreign consumption.

The Qajar monarchy in the 1800's managed a weak position relatively well, keeping Iran intact and largely sovereign, if also continually corrupt, indebted, and backward. But finally, the modernist winds were too strong, and a constitutional revolution established a constitutional monarchy and parliament in 1906, then again in 1909. This parliamentary system never fully found its footing, however, tussling with the Shah for power, and buffeted through disastrous invasions and occupations during world war 1. It was sort of a Weimar Republic, never attaining full power in military or political terms.

But it embodied the idea of a Western-style, constitutional, democratic system. The addition of an Islamic advisory council was an afterthought and never seriously implemented during this era, since the ulama, or community of clerics, was generally content with its long-standing role of loose collaboration with the secular power, tending to a narrow sector of jurisprudence over religious, business, and personal matters, on a somewhat freelance basis. While the Shi'i clergy had occasionally led protests and fostered limited political activism in the face of gross injustices and suffering from their base among the small merchant class and urban poor, the idea of becoming a full partner in government, or its comprehensive adversary, did not cross their minds, since government was fundamentally unclean and not worthy of theology, short of the return of the twelfth Imam. The clerics were also fully invested in the somewhat corrupt system, having gotten quite rich from their segment of the economy.

But the trauma of the Pahlavi era, broken in the interval between father and son by a hopeful but chaotic constitutional period under Mohammed Mosaddegh, set the clergy- at least some of it- on a more activist path. Both Shahs were dedicated modernizers, dismissive of religion and destructive to the livelihoods and institutions of the clergy. Along with other islamists in the Sunni world like Qutb, they (that is, the less quietist elements, spearheaded by Ruholla Khomeini) started generating a comprehensive critique of modernism, the Pahlavi apparatus, and the West as antithetical to Islam, which it quite obvoiusly was and remains. They found that they still had enormous political power and public sentiment on their side, not among the intelligentsia, but among the common people who had been coming to the mosques, and requesting judgements, and paying their dues all along. All this was seized by Khomeini, who in 1963 gave fiery sermons denouncing the Pahlavi regime, and was duly detained, almost executed, and then exiled to Iraq. The Shah ran an economically successful few decades, but also a brutal secret service and a grandiose view of himself and the dynasty so severely out of step both with native sentiment and with the democratizing / human rights trends in the West, suddenly put on the top of the table by Jimmy Carter.

Faithful Shi'ite Iranians were interested in more spiritual fare than what the Shah offered, and the clerics, through Khomeini, gave them visions of an ideal society, rectified through "dear Islam" to resolve all the injustices and degradations of the Pahlavi era. In return, Khomeini was first elevated to the unprecedented status of "Grand Ayatolla", and then ultimtely to "Imam" status, which had never been done before, the twelfth Imam having been the last of the set, now in occultation. So the revolution rolled on with inexorable power, but also with inexorable revolutionary logic, piling up bodies and hypocrisies as the imperatives of staying in power overwhelmed all other scruples. For example, Amanat mentions with some acidity that, while centuries of Shi'i jurisprudence may not have foreseen the problems of writing a constitution, running foreign policy, or operating a secret service, it had long dealt, and dealt with care and discretion, in contract and property law. But all that went right out the window as the new government "inherited" or expropriated countless businesses and personal properties, took over all major industries of the country, and distributed their management to family members, cronies and loyalists.

Diagram of the Iranian government, from the BBC.

It is through the lens of the constitution and the cobbled institutions that have arisen in Iran that we can see the dialectic between Enlightenment principles and Islamic principles. Khomeini promised a democracy, where power would no longer be monopolized by a somewhat mad Shah. But it also had to be an Islamic democracy, "guided" by the clerics to retain purity and justice. The logic of all this resulted in a thoroughly theocratic state, where there is an interlocking set of instutions all run by the clerics, from the Supreme Leader to the Guardian Council, Assembly of Experts, and Expediency Discernment Council. Each are supervisory, with various veto and appointment powers, leaving the popularly elected parliament with little real power or even representative complexion, since its candidates are routinely disqualified by the Guardian Council for not being conservative enough.

In practical terms, this means that the system maintains just enough democracy to foster some hope and buy-in from some of the populace, while keeping complete control in the hands of the clerics. Will this end in utter corruption of both religion and government? It is difficult to say, but Iran has more of a functional democracy and republican system than many other Muslim countries, which is sadly not saying much. Those who reflect on the very origins of Islam and Shi'ism can readily see that theory of government is not a strong suit of this tradition. I see Khomeini as a demagogue- a Trumpian figure who promised the stars, offered a telling and comprehensive critique of the Pahlavi system, and had a genius for turning a phrase. But he did not promise a coherent and democratic program of governance, rather a messianic dream and relentlessly divisive politics. In the revolutionary process, he always played to the base, favoring extreme positions. A base whose core, there as here, is a religious element of great patriarchial conservatism and dismissive of intellect and compassion. He was fully behind the hostage-taking students, for instance, which solidified support at home while making Iran a pariah abroad.  Hate, of course, was and continues to be central to the Iranian theocracy, from the Great Satan (us), to the little Satan (the Iraq of Saddam Hussein), to the communist Tudeh party, to the Baha'i religion, which they particularly revile and persecute.

At first, the clerics worked with liberals to fashion a written constitution (a significant concession to modernity and Western ideas) and a civilian government. But as time went on, the many contradictions of this approach became apparent, since if the people were given real power, the clerics would lose theirs- that was a lesson of the first constitutions of the early 1900's, and again during revolutionary process in the 1970's and 80's, which saw many contestants for power. The clerics only won due to their cohesion and their ability, time and again, to move the masses with demagogic and messianic appeals.

So the Iranian clerics ended up in unknown territory, creating a government that had no Persian or Koranic precedent, other than putting clerics in charge of everything (including at the top, the monarch-for-life Supreme Leader), and hoping that their own formation, training, and institutions will keep them uncorrupted. At one dire point in the revolution, a hanging mullah suggested that his rather under-supported decisions didn't matter that much, since God would sort it all out in the end, sending those who deserved it to heaven. But by that logic, he should have killed himself first. It is always curious how those who supposedly believe in religion and the glories of its afterlife turn out to have a strong regard for their own lives in the here and now. One would think that meeting one's maker would be a more positive goal, rather than being a mere scrim for power politics in this fallen world.

Iran gets ranked just above China in the democracy index.

Anyhow, Iran has ended up with more torture, more executions, more war, a bigger secret service, a more intrusive state, and less freedom, than the Pahlavi era. It turned out that Islam is not a guarantee of good, let alone moral, governance. Islamic countries generally occupy the lower rungs of the democracy index, and other indexes of development and happiness. This while Islam portrays itself as a religion of peace, of mercy, and of the most exacting jurisprudence and scholarship. The revolutionary government of Iran dabbled in liberalism, and wrote up a semi-democratic constitution, and faced a culture of great diversity and intellectual depth. But in the end, authoritarian logic won out over traditional Shi'i quietism and over most Western trends, creating a sort of Shi'i Vatican writ large, with opaque committees of old bearded men running everything, with additional torture chambers and gallows.

Iran offers an object lesson why the interlocking lessons of the enlightenment are so important- why withdrawing religious projections, drama, and righteousness from the state, in favor of civic secularism, yields a more rational and humane way of life. Why even the most long-standing and cherished religious traditions and "scholarship", while they may serve as selective institutions to weed out the stupid and socially unskilled, are not conducive to the search for objective truth or even a marker of moral superiority.

All that said, the French revolution began with enlightenment principles, which did not prevent a similar revolutionary logic from sending it to appalling depths of brutality, injustice, and authoritarianism. Yet it also spread more liberal, anti-monarchical values throughout Europe during the Napoleonic era, and ended up, after decades of historical development, with true democracy in France and Europe. The whole point of political theory in the Enlightenment was to allow such development via a fundamental humanism and humility in the civic sphere and the state. Its antithesis is messianism of various sorts, from communism to Shi'i theocracy, (even atheist enlightenment, when driven to extremes!), which drives polarization, extremism, and totalitarianism. Iran may yet develop in a softer direction, after what is now forty years of theocracy, but that would take a substantial change of heart on the part of the current ruling class, and perhaps a reduced allergy to Western ideas.

• Happy Quds Day!
• Changing conceptions of masculinity...
• Right wing legal community is going over the deep end.
• It is not clear that California is ready to re-open. Graph of the week:

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.

Iran and Saudi Arabia

Modern propaganda and ancient hate.

Frontline has an excellent three-hour series on the conflict between Iran and Saudi-Arabia. They come off like minuature versions of the US and the Soviet Union- superpowers of the Muslim world enmeshed in an ideological and tribal battle that is fought through proxy forces throughout the Middle East, making a hash of smaller countries and making strange bedfellows with the likes of Israel.

The Shia-Sunni split was always an undercurrent in the Islamic world, but was sharpened by the advent of modern fundamentalism. While the Saudis have always been fundamentalist in theory and corrupt in fact, Iran plunged into total fundamentalism with the revolution of 1979. The documentary discusses how sharply this changed the dynamics in the Muslim world, with Iran suddenly vaulted into the vanguard of the fundamentalist movement. This perennial "back-to-basics" feature of religion became a deeply ideological and psychological response to the muddled end of colonialism and the general failure of modernity in the Muslim world. We hear mostly of its Sunni / Salafist incarnation, as ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, etc. But for the Shia, it had an extra edge of tribal revolt against Sunni oppression.

Shia make up roughly 1/3 of Muslims in the Middle East, with populations in each country. They are a majority in Bahrain, though they have no role in the government. That was the situation in Iraq as well until recently. Iran's fundmentalism is sectarian, not pan-Muslim. Thus, despite ethnic divisions, it has been an instrument to unite Shia populations across the region, such as the Hezbolla party in Lebanon and the now-ruling parties in Iraq. Iran's reach is obviously limited by this sectarian character, but they have been willing to arm their friends to the hilt and send their minions into battle for the most dubious causes, especially the Assad government in Syria, which is composed of another Shia sect.

Saudi Arabia is petrified by all this, partly because they have their own Shia population, but more because their own power projection has been so bungled in comparison. They have assiduously funded fundamentalist madrassas and terrorists, and what do they have to show for it? Hatred from the West, yes, but also quite a lot of hatred from their own spawn, such as Osama Bin Laden, whose disgust with the top-heavy, spoiled, corrupt Saudi institutions was emblematic. Their best friend, the US, conquered Iraq and not only botched the whole project disastrously, but left the country in Shia hands. And in Pakistan, one of their most successful test beds of miseducation, does all the fundamentalism add up to a strong state or a good friend? No, it has led to chaos, double-dealing, and misery.

One of the themes going through this story is propaganda. No one in Iran gets Lebanese Hezbolla fighters to die in Syria for Assad without a very heavy dose of propaganda. A bunch of Saudis do not fly into the World Trade Center without lengthy indoctrination. Fundamentalism in general is the triumph of poorly thought-through ideals and archetypal images over reason and basic decency. The Palestinian cause, now in its twilight, was one long piece of performance art- of grievance and rage as policy and, occasionally, power. And the long Saudi / Wahhabi campaign of Jesuit-style fundamentalist eduction has only furthered the weakness and backwardness of the Muslim world in general, not to mention its violence, particularly against women. The record is appalling, but the mechanism teaches universal lessons- that people can be led in disastrous directions by well-crafted propaganda, based on supposedly profound fantasies.

It is something we are learning in the US as well, to our peril. Does free speech mean that private broadcast networks can spew the most pleasing, and scurrilous, falsehoods? Just how much bilge can the internet contain, and not blow up? Conflicts like the one above, between Iran and Saudi Arabia, are made possible by propaganda, which moves people to extraordinary emotion and effort. World War 2 remains a textbook example, with Germany and Italy transformed by deeply emotional, false, and effective, propaganda. We are in the US at a tipping point, with half the population feeling themselves part of the Republican team, whose life support comes from propaganda that seems, at least to this biassed observer, unworthy of any political discourse or intellectual respect, headed by a President who lies so casually and habitually that we now take it as absolutely normal. How can reason and empathy penetrate this jungle of mean self-righteousness?

Returning to the topic, the current administration's support for Saudi Arabia and hatred for Iran is not easy to understand, on the face of it. Saudi Arabia is at least as destabilizing a force in the world and in the Middle East. Both are explicitly fundamentalist, and both seek to export their ideologies abroad. Both are sources of oil, though the Saudis have far more and play the lead role in world oil prices. We do not care that much on our own behalf anymore, but have strong interests in keeping the oil infrastructure (political, military, and physical) of the Middle East intact on behalf of the developed world, for much of which (Europe, Japan) we have explicit defense responsibilities. So sure, we want to be friendly with Saudi Arabia and continue to have military bases in the area. But we have interest in friendship with Iran as well, which has far greater human and intellectual potential. Both countries have a fraught relationship with Israel, though Saudi Arabia has of late been much more accommodating, in its cynical and conservative/authoritarian way. But Iran's problems with Israel seem similarly superficial, just a way to gain credibility with the Palestinians and other disaffected Muslims. And our own difficult history with Iran, and their vitriolic propagada against us, is hardly reason to fall in line with Saudi Arabia's sectarian program. It would be better to turn the other cheek, as the Obama administration started to do.

If the struggle for supremacy in the Middle East were prompting a flowering of cultural, scholarly, and scientific advances, that would be one thing. But the reality is far more tawdry, where the Saudis just buy more arms from the US to dump on Yemen, and Iran coopts and arms Shia communities in the neighborhood, destroying Lebanon in the process, and bidding to do the same in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. The collision of irrational ideologies, served by up-to-the-minute propaganda methods, run by governing structures ranging from dysfunctional to medieval, is a toxic brew not likely to enhance the culture or living conditions of those in the region any time soon.

• The next level for propaganda.
• What happens when police don't care.