Beard Of Wisdom.com

This ongoing series on Slate.com discusses a number of things which frequently come up on BeardofWisdom, but I’m on an Ottoman kick today so I’m going to concentrate on Wu’s discussion of Mormons and the Amish. He’s certainly right that our treatment of these groups isn’t precisely consonant with a law code based on the individual (and the centralized state). We don’t do very well accommodating intermediary organizations, largely because we tend view these as putting unwarranted restrictions on their members’ rights. In some ways they have to, or else postmodernity, by breaking down geographically bounded communities (even as it creates purely voluntary un-geographic communities), will be the death of them–as Wayne has pointed out, this will probably happen to the Gnostics/Mandeans soon.

Ironically, it’s also postmodernity that allows the Amish and the FLDS to survive. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the (successful) government attacks on the Mormon Church, and the less successful moves against the FLDS and the Amish, all came between the late 19th century and the mid 20th century. This was the heyday, especially in the US and Europe, of the drive toward consolidated, monopolistic, uniformly sovereign nation states–which can’t tolerate smaller intermediary institutions. Since the ’60s, we seem to have become disillusioned with this effort, and hence the tolerance for the FLDS or the Amish. But really this is just returning to the pattern of states throughout human history–there has always been this tolerance of autonomous communities, sometimes even institutionalized (also in Russia), by empires which couldn’t impose their will uniformly on all their subjects. Now we have the means, but apparently not the will.

There’s also a lot of historical precedent for the situation Wu describes with pornography laws in the US. I know there’s some history of Catholic states tolerating prostitution better than Protestant ones, but I’m more familiar with the Ottoman case. In theory, it was illegal for Muslim subjects (though not for Christians) to consume alcohol, but usually no one was bothered for drinking in their own home–not just because there wasn’t a sufficient police force to monitor this, but because there was an assumption of the sanctity of the home. (Ah, those backward anti-modern Muslims!) Exactly the same combinations of reasons we don’t prosecute “normal” pornography on the internet.

So I don’t think any of this is really new, just a return to premodernity and the natural state of human societies. As long as I’m wandering all over the place, I’ll return to the Amish/FLDS situation: don’t the benefits of federalism also apply here? And isn’t federalism just a rationalistic, codified, modern recognition of this ancient tendency toward divided sovereignty?

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Bjorn Lomborg reacts to Gore’s Peace Prize:

With attention and money in scarce supply, we should first tackle the problems with the best solutions, doing the most good throughout the century. If we focus on solving today’s problems, we will leave communities strengthened, economies more vibrant, and infrastructures more robust. This will enable these societies to deal much better with future problems - including global warming. Committing to massive cuts in carbon emissions will leave future generations poorer and less able to adapt to challenges.

Gore has an unshakable faith that climate change is the world’s biggest challenge. To be fair, he deserves some recognition for his resolute passion. However, the contrast between the Nobel winners could not be sharper. The IPCC engages in meticulous research where facts rule over everything else. Gore has a different approach.

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I would say, “Happy Che Day,” but unless you plan to overthrow the US government or execute hundreds of prisoners without trial, then it’s unlikely your celebration would be very true to the legacy of Che Guevara. Maybe as passive participants in bourgeois oppression, we could commemorate him by shooting ourselves in the head?

This Robert Scheer article in The Nation is fascinating. First, because the only negative words about Guevara are asides that he was “flawed” and that it’s “fortunate” that current revolutionaries “prefer” the ballot to the gun. The linguistic sleight of hand is also classic Nation material: “Little was reported about…why someone who claimed to be obsessed with helping the poor was executed, gangland style, on the order of a CIA agent.” There’s no evidence in the article that Guevara actually tried to help the poor in any way except by killing their alleged oppressors, but that doesn’t matter to Scheer. He has no trouble creating an equivalency between an empirical fact and an unjustified, self-serving claim by Guevara.

But the best example of Scheer’s shell game is in the fourth and fifth paragraphs: “Che was a Cuban Communist” trying to “spread his evil message…right?” No, because “Che was not a Communist in what we think of as the heavily entrenched, bureaucratized Cuban mold.” Catch the fallacy of equivocation there? “Cuban Communism” just changed meanings! In the first example it means an evangelical ideology dedicated to spreading itself, while in the second it means a conservative, immobile tyranny. So what we’ve just been told is that Guevara was NOT trying to “spread his evil message”… as proven by the fact that he became disillusioned when Castro STOPPED trying to spread the “evil message.” Something’s wrong with that logic. (The second definition also makes me think that Scheer’s one of those who believes Communism never really existed, so it can’t be blamed for Communists’ atrocities.)

But this is all immaterial, because if you read the article again, you’ll see that it isn’t really about Guevara at all. It’s about the horrible misdeeds of the US, and the point of the article is for Nation readers to nod in sympathy as Scheer confirms what they’ve already known, that the US is stupid and evil. Guevara has no independent existence or agency—and certainly his victims don’t—because he’s only there to show up US crimes and mistakes. Talk about dehumanizing the Third World.

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The most recent PhD comic got me thinking. Conventional wisdom, even among fairly liberal people, seems to be that communism will always fail because people are too greedy to share–call it “the Tragedy Of The Commons,” if you like, or “the Incentive Problem.” But I don’t think this is historically true.

As in the comic, or in The Onion (and again here), the assumption seems to be that Communism establishes a communal set of goods which tempts people to take more than their fair share, so the system breaks down. But can anyone think of a Communist or socialist country in history that has ever managed to accumulate such a set of communal goods to be shared? I can’t. Because in order to get that community stock of goods, you have to confiscate them from their prior owners, which means you have to centralize power and probably use violence. Human nature being what it is, there will always be someone who will hijack this mechanism for his own benefit. [Obvious Cliched Examples here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.) So, long before the Tragedy Of The Commons or the Incentive Problem rear their ugly heads, there will be tyranny.

Thus the problem with Communism isn’t that it always breaks down, but that it can never really begin. In this sense die-hard Marxists are right, Communism has never actually existed. But they fail to realize that people are people, and it doesn’t matter how long they fantasize, communism can never work and will always devolve into bloody tyranny.

Obviously Communism is dead, but I think this is still an important point because of the eternal allure of schemes that promise that we can just start over from scratch. We can’t. Everything happens in a historical context, and Communism’s real failing is that it doesn’t recognize this. Communists are so busy fantasizing over how the world will be that they usually don’t give much thought to how they’ll accomplish the preliminary step from the world-as-it-is to the world-with-goods-consolidated. But it’s exactly this step that will end in gulags and unmarked graves, long before the Incentive Problem ever shows up.

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From the AP:

 Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez threatened on Monday to close or take over any private school that refuses to submit to the oversight of his socialist government as it develops a new curriculum and textbooks.

“Society cannot allow the private sector to do whatever it wants,” said Chavez, speaking on the first day of classes.

All schools, public and private, must admit state inspectors and submit to the government’s new educational system, or be closed and nationalized, with the state taking responsibility for the education of their children, Chavez said.

How do you say “Lysenkoism” in Spanish?

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Brendan at Social Science++ took an amusing look at how free a country is likely to be based on what it calls itself. I think it’s interesting that “kingdoms” tend to be more free than “republics”. But the moral of the story: don’t take a job on the People’s Democratic Socialist Island of Islamic Arabs.

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This is one of the most interesting articles I’ve read in a long time, continuing Nicholas Wade’s streak of finding fascinating and unexpected theories. The theory seems overly broad and sweeping, like something Jared “I’m a Geographic Determinist” Diamond would write, but it seems a bit more historically grounded, it’s thought-provoking, and it makes an entry in several debates that are important not only for world history, but also for current affairs:

1. It breaks down a simplistic Marxist view of Europe entering a new stage of History first and therefore being able to push everyone else around.
2. Coupled with findings that a) even pre-industrial home manufacturing in England was being transformed in the early 1700s by “capitalist” production methods (systematization; an emphasis on efficiency, etc), and b) that forms of capitalism were emerging in the Middle East and Southeast Asia before European contact, this theory moves us back from a materialist emphasis on technology to a view that ideas DO matter. (But only sort of, since Clark argues the ideas come from evolution.)
3. This is in turn awesome because it brings us back to the old question, “why didn’t the Middle East industrialize?” You could answer this by saying “well, of course they couldn’t, because they didn’t have the same resources of iron ore, coal, and hydropower that Europe did, and this answer does get us somewhere. BUT, if capitalism and industrialization are more about applying new ideas to the methods and resources you already have, then isn’t the question still open? And the article, at least, doesn’t satisfactorily explain why Clark’s theory proves that England in the 18th century, of all places, had this evolutionary epiphany.

This is not meant to be a post that’s only interesting to me, so I hope other people will weigh in with their thoughts–especially Wayne and Kyle, what’s an economist’s perspective on this?

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Development in Africa has been a huge concern for many people. The folks over at ONN weigh in on the issue.
Their comments about Fisher Price were particularly insightful…

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