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?

Share This

• Comments (1)

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.

Share This

• Comments (9)

NOVA put together an interesting site concerning the death camp experiments that occurred during WWII.

You will be asked the following question eight times: “Based on what you now know, do you think doctors and scientists should be able to use data from Nazi death-camp experiments?” Each time, you must answer Yes or No to that question, and each time you will get a different counterargument meant to challenge your decision. Before answering the question for the eighth and final time, you may elect to read all 14 counterarguments — seven for and seven against using the data — before making your final decision. At that point, you may choose Yes, No, or Undecided.

Many of the counterarguments are the same ideas rehashed over and over, but they also discuss many of the cruel experiments that the Nazis performed.

I personally think it’s ok to use the information, and I’d venture to say it’s wrong to prevent others from using the info if they believe it to be appropriate.

Feel free to post your thoughts and opinions in the comments section.

EDIT: I forgot to mention that clicking on the image will take you to NOVA.

Share This

• Comments (0)

I have to admit that I haven’t read Marshall, but I’ve seen him critiqued pretty heavily by the most recent generation of US WWII military historians (most notably Michael Doubler and Peter Mansoor), as part of the general effort to rehability the reputation of the US army in Europe. There’s apparently good evidence that Marshall was sloppy or maybe even dishonest in his research methodology (the argument is summed up here), and some WWII soldiers’ memoirs have explicitly said Marshall’s ratio didn’t apply to their units. (The only example I can remember is this one.) So I’m a little bit dubious of any argument that relies on Marshall. (From my reading of the critiques of Marshall, I think Grossman is right that soldiers more often just aim a little high, rather than not shooting at all as Marshall argued.)

And I agree with Joe that whatever inclination we have against killing (I think more societally conditioned than natural) is more easily overcome when dealing with those we know and who’ve offended us. A book I read recently argued that humans have been extremely violent throughout most of our history, and it’s only modern states that have managed to curb our tendency toward domestic violence. But when those states send people off to fight each other, isn’t there much less emotional motivation to kill?

Share This

• Comments (3)

I do not read much about military history because I usually find it boring, but Wayne found this article and it surprised me. I guess I do not know at all if what he is saying accurately represents the evidence, or if the studies he sites have any merit. However, he seems to consider a variety of arguments, so it appears plausable.

This stuck out to me as problematic:

“I have realized that there was one major factor missing from the common understanding of this process, a factor that answers this question and more: the simple and demonstrable fact that there is, within most men and women, an intense resistance to killing other people.”

“Indeed, the study of killing by military scientists, historians, and psychologists gives us good reason to feel optimistic about human nature, for it reveals that almost all of us are overwhelmingly reluctant to kill a member of our own species, under just about any circumstance.”

I could easily mistake these passages as stating that people have this same reluctance to violence at home, in regular society. Most murders, rapes and other violence are directed at people who know their attacker. On a battlefield you do not know the person you are harming, but if you know him, live with him, or have a grudge against him, you might feel compelled to hurt him. You may even feel justified.

There might be hope for less violence on a battlefield (although that seems to be self-defeating), but I do not think it applies at home, where we do not need to manufacture contempt against others.

Share This

• Comments (2)

The typical conservative responses to homosexuality often rely heavily upon how “unnatural” homosexuality is. Dr. Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, for example, posted these comments on his blog (posted July 30):

Our language has reached some important natural limits of meaning. A recent media report considered the increasing number of homosexual couples, both male and female, who are now “having babies.” Well, these same-sex couples are not “having” babies in the sense that language has customarily been used. When a same-sex couple “has” a baby, everyone knows that there is more to the story. A homosexual couple simply cannot “have” a baby the same way that a heterosexual couple can. This is a matter of the natural order and biology, not mere social custom.

And a little later on the same post:

This is a very important observation — and a crucial reminder that the natural order of things has a way of asserting itself in the end. Mr. Young [the author of an article to which Dr. Mohler is responding] wants people to “understand that gays are utterly normal.” And this would mean that the issue “never crosses people’s minds” — that no one notices anything unusual when two men hold hands or if a man says “meet my husband.”

Share This

• Continue reading this post...

• Comments (0)

A couple of years back, Dr. Woo Suk Hwang of South Korea published false stem cell/cloning research. While his initial claim to have successfully performed the first stem cell extraction from a cloned human embryo turned out to be false, however, a BBC article indicates that he might have stumbled upon another discovery. Apparently, the stem cells that he worked with “may be the first in the world to be extracted from embryos produced by the so-called ‘virgin birth’ method, or parthenogenesis.”

The article continues:

Professor Surani [from the University of Cambridge] said Hwang’s unwitting step forward might actually prove more useful than efforts to clone human embryos, which he had claimed fraudulently.

“I’ve always promoted the idea that efforts should be made to produce embryos from human eggs - it is far less ethically challenging, and the efficiency of these cell lines is likely to be higher than those produced from cloned embryos,” he said.

“Far less ethically challenging”? Now I am no scientist, but I find it hard to believe that forcing parthenogenesis in a lab is any less ethically challenging than cloning a human in a lab. The same questions remain over whether it is ethical to actually extract stem cells from embryos in the first place (regardless of whether the embryo is created through the traditional sexual reproduction, through in vitro fertilization, cloning, or parthenogenesis). The same questions remain concerning whether it is ethical to create or force the creation of someone in a lab, even if it is something that has happened naturally in other species of animals. At root, the exact same questions are raised concerning the beginning and sanctity of human life.

Share This

• Comments (0)

There’s a fantastic editorial by Canadian MP Michael Ignatieff in the NYT today. A few quotes:

“The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas just as much as professional thinkers do, but they can’t afford the luxury of entertaining ideas that are merely interesting.”

“The costs of staying will be borne by Americans, while the cost of leaving will be mostly borne by Iraqis. That in itself suggests how American leaders are likely to decide the question.”

“Many of those who correctly anticipated catastrophe did so not by exercising judgment but by indulging in ideology.” [He goes on, without explicitly saying so, to basically endorse the paleoconservative critique of the Iraq War, not the DailyKos critique. Definitely worth reading, coming from a Canadian member of the Liberal Party.]

And best of all: “The vital judgments a politician makes every day are about people: whom to trust, whom to believe and whom to avoid.” [So, are political scientists doing the right thing by talking about Theory all the time, or are historians really on the right track?]

Share This

• Comments (1)