Another Pernicious Doctrine – Story of Civilization VIII.ii.i-VIII.ii.viii

Chapter ii of Durant’s Age of Louix XIV is a review of the religious policies and conflicts under Mazarin and then Louis.  My first reaction to reading this chapter was “Ohforchrissake more dumb morons killing each other over crap that’s not even real.”  The chapter features such delights as soldiers grabbing a nursing woman’s baby, tying her to a bedpost, and then spitting into her mouth when she tried to remonstrate with them, not to mention plenty of rapes and murders, plus the economic suicide of France in the final persecution of the Huguenots.

But it finally occurred to me after going through the Thirty Years’ War, the English Civil War, the French Wars of Religion, and all the delights of the Spanish Inquisition, that perhaps these people were on to something.  In a way, after all, all of these conflicts – except in the inadequate degree of their brutality and insanity – map almost perfectly onto the European pogroms against the Jews.  Specifically, the conflicts were precipitated as much by ethnic, cultural, and class differences as by religious differences.

But what is most telling is what I have referred to in Judaism as the “pernicious doctrine”.  Specifically, as many a Jew will attest, the Jewish religion is a set of beliefs centered around the core doctrine that the Jews are a race of people set aside and under the special protection (or at least observation) of God.  I have always found this notion a bit frightening: if David is one of the “chosen ones” and I am not, what does that mean?  In the Torah, it means many things, but one of those things is definitely that Yahweh will glorify himself by helping the Jews to slaughter and otherwise lay low non-Jews.  The present conduct of the state of Israel seems to provide the best interpretation of what a chosen one is today… any Jew can become a citizen of Israel, provided that he has documentation that he is racially Jewish, but the non-Jews already living in Israel are not granted even the most basic perquisites of citizenship.  Never mind colonization, nuclear armament…

But perhaps it was wrong of me to restrict this line of thinking to Jews.  After all, is not any doctrine that holds that a certain class of people is the elect of God equally pernicious?  Sure, it is much easier for me to fake being a Calvinist than to fake being a Jew, but I could only do so by sacrificing my own creed and integrity.  The rabid certainty of the tiny Calvinist minorities in England, France, and the United Provinces that they alone had access to the truth, that their way was right and that all tradition and previous thought was in error… this rabid certainty, and the slaughters that it led to was a far more offensive arrogance than the arrogance of the Jews of the time, who proudly hid their worship out of sight.

Perhaps even we are no better than they were.  Would we not enforce our views on the rest of the world if we could?  Do we not abjure God with as much certainty as they affirmed Him?  Do we not see with complete clarity how we alone can see the truth among the blind multitudes?  Sure, it is no God that has chosen us, but that does not make us any less elect.

The only thing that stops men from complete mutual slaughter is the lack of the appropriate tools.

Still, let us consider the case of the French Huguenots who were murdered by the dragoons that Louis forced them to quarter at their own expense.  How foolish, how arrogant of them to believe that they had access to especial knowledge about the ways and plans of an unknown Deity!  How incredibly foolish, and incredibly arrogant, for them to stake the only goods they had ever known, their own lives and the lives of their children, on such visions!  We will not say that they deserved what they got, but only that they reaped what they had sown.

English vs. French – Story of Civilization VIII.i.i-VIII.i.viii

English vs. French here will cover the differences between the English Civil War and the French civil war called the Fronde.

Both wars were backed by similar concerns: outrage over oppressive taxation and what was felt by the business class to be incompetent management of the national economy. In both wars, the targets of popular outrage were the chief ministers of the king. For the English, these were Thomas Wentworth and William Laud; for the French, it was Cardinal Mazarin, the successor of Richelieu.

So given these similarities, why was it that the English Civil War resulted in the beheading of a king, while the French civil war ended in a pacification that led directly to one of France’s greatest eras? Perhaps we may merely list the differences, and not be condemned if we suppose that these are the answers.

First, the English Civil War had an underlying religious component that was entirely absent from the Fronde. Specifically, many of the dissidents were Puritan-leaning, as against the Anglican (almost Catholic) government. By contrast, in France, the dissident religious element, the Huguenots, had been quelled by Richelieu’s ruthless military suppression at the siege of La Rochelle. Subsequently, Richelieu broke the back of Huguenot military inclinations by granting the Huguenots terms of such generosity that, given their military defeat, they could not refuse: access to all offices in France, complete religious freedom, and the sole condition that Catholic worship be permitted in Protestant-dominated cities. Whereas in England the capital was the touchstone of Protestant discontent, perhaps because of Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, Paris was enraged on entirely secular grounds.

Second, Louis XIV may have escaped the fate of Charles I merely by having been too young. Given the regency of Mazarin and Louis’s mother, these suffered the brunt of the popular outrage, while Louis was almost pitied for the incompetence of his regents. After the suppression of the Fronde, the streets of Paris resounded with cries of “Vive le roi!” – though perhaps this was merely out of a sense of self-preservation. Charles, of course, had been ruling intractably for many years, and could plead no such excuse.

Third, and cited by Durant as the critical element, the French revolt failed to receive the support of the most powerful noble in France, the Great Condé. Instead, this able general sided with the royalty. The greatest general of the English Civil War was Cromwell, leading the revolt.

The third element is most puzzling to us. Following Tolstoy, we are inclined to think of wars as massive and bellicose movements of people animated by some cultural or ethnic difference to shed each other’s blood. How could the whim or ability of one man have such force of the movements of a human tide? Surely the Condé was merely, again, following Tolstoy, a Napoleon-ic figurehead? Of course, our suggestion that Louis escaped Charles’s fate merely by being young is no better an explanation than that the Great Condé was great.

But perhaps there is something in that religious explanation. Protestantism, wherever it arose, was nothing more than the expression of cultural, class, and ethnic differences. In England, Puritanism, like Calvinism everywhere, was the expression of the labor, artisanal, trade, and business classes of their own peculiar ethos; in England, the fight of this class for expression took the form of the English Civil War. In France, it instead took the form of the French Wars of Religion, which were a forty-year bloodbath in which, as in England, the Calvinists revolted against the government. Because it was expressed directly as a revolt on religious principles, the resolution of the Wars of Religion brought no resolution to the other problems that the revolt expressed (oppressive taxation and incompetent economic administration).

Poor Goldman Sachs

Just a quick thought about Goldman and the Fabrice Tourre scandal: why is Goldman’s stock taking such a hit. As of this morning, it’s still down twenty percent from when the announcement was made.

The answer is not, I suspect, that the market is expecting Goldman to suffer a twenty percent confiscation of assets when the SEC drags Goldman into court. Rather, my guess is that Goldman is losing twenty percent of their customers because those customers now fear them.

Think about it: if you were a patron of some restaurant, and then found out that the restaurant had an arrangement with the local pickpocket that enabled him to lift your purse while you were eating, would you keep going there? Probably not.

It’s the same way with the sophisticated investors (or at least twenty percent of them). Sure, they knew all along that Goldman was only in this for Goldman; before, they had gone in thinking that, knowing this, they could beat Goldman at its own game. Now they know better. The real story here is the “sophisticated investor” dupes that bought Goldman’s trash… anyone at this level of investing or lower should be grabbing their money and running.

Incidentally, this probably applies to holders of Goldman’s stock too. If it’s the job of people who work at Goldman to outsmart other people at financial transactions, does it really make sense to put up capital for these people on the promise that they’ll repay you out of the profits? Is the law really solid enough that they’ll have to deal with you in good faith? And if it’s not, are you really so smart that you think you’ll come out of a deal with them ahead? And how about once you consider that it’s a well-documented fact an enormous share of investment bank profits go back into compensation as opposed to dividends?

In short, my guess is that the twenty percent kidney punch that Goldman took when the SEC trotted out its charges reflects a partial ostracism of Goldman from the financial community. Twenty percent of sophisticated investors out there are sophisticated enough to know they’re not as sophisticated as Goldman.

The Whimsy of History – Story of Civilization VII.v.i-VII.xxiii.vi

Life encroaches, and our great enterprises fall to ashes. So it is that with so many flies buzzing about our carrion flesh, it is all we can do to keep reading, let alone keep thinking. This note on the Story of Civilization, like much else in life, could be titled “Multum in Parvo”.

I pass by a fascinating age in European history – which has produced, among other things, what might be the most profound painting to date, including the likes of Murillo, Velazquez, and Rembrandt – only to note something entirely new to history that occurred in this era. Of course, each of these words must have its proper emphasis and definition. When I say “new to history” I mean “new to accurately recorded, reliable history that actually happened for sure”, not “that never happened before” since it surely did.

This is the whimsy of history: small events leading to great outcomes, tiny discrepancies yielding unexpected outcomes. There are two that I have noted in this period.

The first is the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre. In brief, the the royalist Catholic and rebel Huguenot factions in France had been fighting for nearly half a century. When Charles IX acceded to the throne of France, he made peace with the Huguenots by marrying his sister to one of their leaders, Henry of Navarre. As time went on, Charles, a young man, came increasingly under the influence of Henry and one of the Huguenot generals, Coligny, who was not acting as Charles’s adviser in statecraft.

The Catholics, already upset by Charles’s closeness with Coligny, were further upset when he advocated military assistance for the Protestant revolt in the Netherlands. Eventually, Charles’s mother, a fervent Catholic, argued to Charles that Coligny and other powerful Huguenots were plotting the overthrow of all Catholic elements in the government. She faced Charles with the suggestion that either the Protestants would assassinate her, or they must be assassinated first. Charles, after much badgering, agreed, and in despair at ordering the assassination of his close friend Coligny, cried out something to the effect of “Kill [Coligny] if you wish; but you must also kill all the Huguenots, so that not one is left alive to reproach me. Kill them all!” The Catholic faction took him at his literal word, closed the gates of Paris, and over the next several days, slaughtered five thousand Huguenots in the city.

This was a momentous event at the time, met by leaders of other countries with shock and horror or gratitude and congratulations, depending on whether they were Protestant or Catholic. In terms of slaughter of unarmed civilians, the event appears to be unprecedented by any contemporary events for a city not invaded by a foreign army, and appears to surpass even the pogroms against the Jews in sheer density of slaughter.

The event raised tensions between Catholics and Huguenots for decades, and conceivably led to the assassination of Henry IV decades later, for committing the same crime against Catholicism for which Coligny had been assassinated: the contemplation of aid to the revolt in the Netherlands. And all of this could have been avoided had Charles, in his state of agitation, cried out anything other than “Kill them all!”

Of course, perhaps it could not have. The murderous propensities of the Catholic-Huguenot strife had led to plenty of bloodshed before, and the tension between the two factions within Paris perhaps required a resolution of some sort. But it is easy to conceive that Charles could have exiled prominent Huguenots – or all Parisian Huguenots – or could have placed additional restrictions on Protestant worship within the city, even invited in the Inquisition.

The other strange event was an outcome of the revolt in the Netherlands. The revolt had been carried on primarily by a vocal and militant Calvinist minority in the northern cities of the Netherlands, with close ideological kinship to the English Puritans, the French Huguenots, and the Scottish and Swiss Calvinists. The amazing thing about this Calvinist minority was its power in proportion to its size. Durant estimates the Calvinists at less than five percent of the population even in the northern Protestant part of the Netherlands, and yet the managed to carry all before them, defeating massive Spanish armies on land and sea (admittedly with a couple helpings of guerrilla warfare, now called terrorism), and carrying their own unwilling countrymen with the revolt.

Once this minority emerged victorious, they put in place a series of laws severely restricting the free exercise of other religions in the Netherlands. The problem was that with only five percent of the population adhering to Calvinism, the laws were utterly unenforceable. Other religions continued to hold their services, but, because they lacked political power, could never enforce their own versions of intolerance. The result was that Calvinism, Catholicism, Lutheranism, with Calvinism lacking the manpower to be intolerant, and the other religions lacking any power whatsoever. In the end, religious freedom emerged out of this contradiction.

Of course, it will again be argued that there were other factors (there always are). The Netherlands was at a geographical crossroads between Catholic France, Anglican England, Lutheran upper Germany, and Calvinist Switzerland. Furthermore, they were a trading power, whose docks were open to merchants of every country and creed; as religious intolerance only opposed commercial prosperity, the Netherlands made their choice early in their history, and on the side of prosperity. But even if such things led to similarly tolerant behavior in neighboring Calais, or neighboring German cities, or even London, it was only in the Netherlands that they could become, in effect, the policy of a nation, and the intolerant, power-holding Calvinist minority, balanced against the silent, stubborn masses, was the tool by which this policy was born.

The Prisoner: Living In Harmony

Every hero has his kryptonite, and for the best heroes, the kryptonite is often another person.  So Luke Skywalker will not use the Dark Side of the Force until Darth Vader voices aloud the prospect of turning Luke’s sister instead.  So Spider-Man cannot be opposed until he is distracted by a threat to Mary Jane.

These kryptonites are not merely a useful plot device, a way of luring the hero into greater dangers than his inherent virtues and discretion would normally allow him.  They are also a symbol for one of society’s most potent weapons against the individual.  To wit, his friends.  No man who cares for someone else is without weakness.  No man who loves someone has nothing to lose.  And so in the end, even the most passionate revolutionary has a stake in the status quo.

Only by learning to abandon such things can the hero be free from weakness.  So Keyser Soze, when enemies attempted to take his family hostage, chose to shoot the family rather than gives his enemies a constant weapon against him.  So George Clooney says in Heat, “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in thirty seconds flat…”  So Eastwood’s “Man with no Name”, or his Dirty Harry, or most of his heroes, while defending the innocent with a caring detachment, are all unattached monoliths, emotionally impregnable.  Only this way can they engage in total war.

The weapon can be used in reverse, too.  So in “Living In Harmony”, once the woman Number Six decides to care for is killed, Number Six himself is provoked to violence.  In wars throughout history, the defense of loved ones and domestic safety are almost universally at least nominal casus belli.

As in “Living In Harmony” so in real life.  At the end of the episode, it is revealed that the entire conflict Number Six entered upon, and the city and people he had fought, were all illusory, and that he was still a prisoner in the Village.  Just so, the tools that authority uses to manipulate our wills are mostly dreams and lies, and when we learn to look beyond them, we are only in a very cleverly-constructed prison.

The Prisoner: Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling

“Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling” contains a lot of thematic overlap with a previous episode, “The Schizoid Man”.  In both episodes, the guardians of the Village make radical attacks on Number Six’s sense of identity.  In the earlier episode, they sedated him for weeks, grew a mustache onto him, added moles, and changed his hairstyle.  This time, they used a magical device to transplant his mind into a completely different body and erase all memory of his captivity in the Village.

While adding little on a philosophical level to “The Schizoid Man”, “Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling” is notable for its degrading depiction of Number Six’s former spy organization, which is ultimately supposed to represent all authority.

First, there is the plot entire.  The reason for switching Number Six’s identity this time is not merely sadism, as it was in “The Schizoid Man”.  Instead, the idea is that once Number Six finds himself in a body not his own, he will find the doctor who invented the device, who has gone into hiding.  In finding this doctor, Number Six will lead the authorities to him, so that they can capture him and force him to make some desirable improvements to the device.  If we do not find such a scheme to be great evil, it is only because we have been jaded by the past actions of the leaders of the Village, and our own leaders.

But the authorities are not merely evil, they are incompetent.  Once the doctor returns to the Village, in a mere few hours, he tricks everyone, transfers his own mind into the body of one of the Village’s operatives, and escapes.  The entire plot, the expenditure of so much manpower, was all for nothing.  Does this not remind us of our own futile wars against elusive terrorists who time and again slip through our fingers?

While Number Six is searching for the doctor, he has a number of revealing encounters with his superiors in his spy organization.  Their reactions are equal parts astonishment and utter indifference; we can sense that there is no real friendship or warmth among such men.  Their skepticism is untempered with sympathy.  What’s more, it is revealed that one of the men is the father of Number Six’s fiancée (before his own kidnapping).  The man has not told his daughter anything at all about Number Six (not even a mundane lie); such considerations are secondary to the requirement for secrecy.  To these men, the exercise of power is the only end in life.

Finally, “Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling” contains a brief but interesting exchange on the contributions of science to society.  Number Two is trying to persuade the doctor to fix his device:

Doctor: “How [Rutherford] must regret having split the atom.”
Number Two: “Yes… almost as bad as splitting the identity of two human beings.  Unlike all the king’s men, only you can put them together again.”
Doctor: “Don’t rely on it.”
Number Two: “Why make this stand now?  You must have known what you were doing when you invented the wretched process.”
Doctor: “Only people like you make it wretched.”

We are inclined to take a middle ground.  The pursuit of knowledge is not evil, but its application to evil ends is necessarily evil.  The power-mongers and oppressors are evil, and their tendency is to use knowledge for evil ends.  But that does not excuse the scientist from some share in the responsibility for that evil, for he made it possible.  What’s more, we are inclined to think that all of us would use that knowledge in the same way, did we have the power to wield it.

The Case for Not Killing a Fellow American

Why shouldn’t we kill Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Muslim cleric living in Yemen and apparently providing material aid to terrorists?  So what if he’s an American citizen… if he’s putting other American lives in danger, he should be taken out, right?

It seems that even the most emphatic opponents of assassinating al-Awlaki, such as Keith Olbermann, think that if we can achieve some level of certainty about the above propositions – that al-Awlaki offers material aid to terrorists and puts American lives in danger – that it’s time to call in the hit squad.  So is there a real case against killing al-Awlaki, or are we just arguing about degrees of certainty?

Well, to start with, let’s cherry-pick some phrases from the Constitution that seem to prohibit the extra-judicial assassination of Americans:

First, Amendment V: “No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger…”

This part seems pretty clear.  If it’s a crime that al-Awlaki has committed, he must be tried by a grand jury before being “held to answer” for his crime.  In the most conservative interpretation, this last phrase means that he shouldn’t even have to explain his actions without an indictment, never mind worry about his life – but more on that later. The exception referring to time of war or public danger only applies to individuals serving in the military, and is presumably meant to indicate that these individuals can be tried by courts-martial.

More Amendment V: “nor shall any person… be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…”

Obviously what constitutes “due process of law” is subject to an enormous amount of interpretation, but the legal precedent for giving the executive branch free rein to execute Americans at will does not exist, so for the al-Awlaki execution to be legal, at the very least, it needs to be challenged and confirmed in a federal court.

Amendment VI: “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury…”

Once again, if al-Awlaki has been accused of a criminal offense, trial by jury seems like a right.

Article III: “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witness to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.”

I’m inclined to think that al-Awlaki is guilty not of a crime, as covered in the Bill of Rights, but of treason, as covered here in Article III.  But once again, the Constitution seems pretty explicit about how treason has to be handled.  Nobody can be convicted of treason without the testimony of two witnesses who observed the overt act (two people who were actually there when al-Awlaki did something, not two relaters hearsay) or confession in court.  We don’t have either of these pieces at the moment.

So all this having been said, it doesn’t actually say in the Constitution anywhere that the government can’t kill citizens willy-nilly.  At best, we have the “due process” clause and a bunch of explicit procedures for treason and criminal offenses.  Now I’m ready to assume that the government must require some sort of legal process before deciding to execute someone, but if someone disagrees, let him state his position – that the government can execute citizens at will – clearly, so that everyone else can pick sides in an informed way.

So, due process.  Ultimately, the power to decide the meaning of this clause lies with the people.  We elect the President, he appoints the Supreme Court, and they decide.  Alternatively, we just make the Constitution more explicit.

In most cases of Constitutional dispute, I’d be against such a liberal distribution of the power to interpret – explicit, clear writing like that of the First and Second Amendments shouldn’t be interpreted against its meaning.  But in the case of due process, it’s much less clear what the original meaning was – which isn’t to say some scholar couldn’t dig something up about what the founders had in mind, but rather to say that the words themselves lack a clear relation to actual things and people.  “Due process of law” is more of a general thing than “the right to keep and bear arms”.  We know what arms are.  Due process could be anything, any process that you can think of that’s legal in nature.

So the simplest case against not killing al-Awlaki lies in the interpretation of the due process clause one way or another.  I’d be in favor of defining this clause to mean that no American can be executed for any reason at all without a trial, whether he be accused of a criminal offense, a treasonous offense, or (like al-Awlaki) neither.  The exception, which judicial precedent seems to have fleshed out in some detail, would be individuals violently and dangerously resisting arrest – which al-Awlaki has not.

The reason for doing this is that it keeps power in the hands of the people, and not the government.  There is no reason to assume that our government will always be benevolent or well-disposed toward us, and so it is prudent to limit the government’s ability to do harm to individuals.  “National security” or “terrorism” may seem like serious threats to our country, but very few people would contend that they are existential threats.  To permit the government to kill at will – or what is the same, its own discretion – is an existential threat.  To set a precedent that will echo through centuries – the killing of Americans – to solve a problem so fleetingly contemporary and narrow is a foolish apposition of the great threat of future tyranny against the tiny threat of a man who persuaded another man to put dynamite in his underwear.

In this particular case, today, the slippery slope seems to be so short and obvious that it ought hardly to bear mentioning.  We are trying to kill al-Awlaki because he is a terrorist.  But Bill Ayers has been called a terrorist, so why don’t we just execute him too?  And Obama associated with Bill Ayers, so he’s probably a terrorist too.  Plus his last name is Muslim.  Maybe we should take him in for extrajudicial questioning and indefinite internment just to be safe.  The power of “Homeland Security” has already been abused, in the few short years since it’s been implemented, to track down legislators who were disrupting a quorum call in Texas.  The Bush administration seems to have flung accusations of anti-Americanism at all of its opponents on every issue, and Fox News commentators have tarred anyone who opposed any step of the war with the taint of aiding terrorists.  Is it really such a leap for some legislator to agree and declare the killing of people aiding terrorists legal?  I’m not saying it could happen tomorrow, but what about ten years from now?

No.  Responsible, far-sighted individuals will realize that the cession of power to the government is dangerous and nearly irreversible.  Trusting the government to only use its power for good is foolish.  Government only behaves with discretion until it doesn’t, and then people get hurt, and justice trampled.

There is one final school of thought that sanctions the killing of al-Awlaki, and this school deserves attention because it is widespread and pernicious.  I would refer to this school as the “apathetics”.  These are people who observe that the Bush administration, in its pursuit of the war on terror, accidentally killed an American in a raid, and that FDR put the Japanese in internment camps, and that the Branch Davidians were massacred without trial, and so how is this any different and why should we care, this is just what governments do, and at least this time it’s a relatively good government doing it for a relatively good cause.

This apathetic school of thought should not be mistaken with pragmatism.  These are not people who are seeking to pick their battles and try to channel human nature rather than dam it.  Rather, they are people who will not lift a finger to fight unless it’s in their own immediate and direct self-interest.  They have no care for principle; human nature is the law of the land, and we are just living in an advanced and veiled state of anarchy.  Law is merely the tool of the strong, or anyone who can turn it to their ends, and has no inherent meaning or moral value beyond any application it may have to the pursuit of one’s own immediate and direct self-interest.

Perhaps these people are right.  Perhaps we who are not apathetics are romantics, or idealists.  But let us hope that if we are not, they will be consumed in the bonfire.  Let us hope that if the tide of human oppression ever again swells over the battlements of arrogance, the apathetics, that human dike of Pangloss and inertia, will be swept away with the crimes for which it apologized.

Shakespeare – Story of Civilization VII.iii.i-VII.iv.vii

Durant sums up the case for Shakespeare as follows: “These are the three epochal gifts of the world’s drama, and we must, despite our limitations, welcome them all to our deepening, thanking our heritage for Greek wisdom, French beauty, and Elizabethan life.  (But, of course, Shakespeare is supreme.)”

What confluence of forces produced Shakespeare?  We must first acknowledge that, like Michelangelo, Shakespeare was not produced by his environment, but only made possible by it.  The wealth and prosperity of England, the religious ebb that gave free rein to dramatic performances, and the scholarly tide that introduced nearly all of the classics into England in just a few decades, made Shakespeare possible.  But Shakespeare was unique.

But perhaps to understand Shakespeare fully, we must understand his background.  In reading about Elizabethan literature, I found a quite striking thesis in the figure of Sir Philip Sidney.  He argued, in brief, that the purpose of literature was to elucidate morality.  Philosophy, he acknowledged, could do this, but it tended to get lost in the general precept.  History also could touch on morality, but was relentlessly confined to the inane details of what actually happened (or worse, an ignorance thereof).  Literature, Sidney argued, provided the happy medium; in accessible examples, it could speak to men of concrete, specific things – thereby escaping philosophy’s shortcomings – while avoiding the problem of relying on the limited storehouse of examples that history provides.  Perhaps, in literature, there could even be a beauty that even the best philosophy struggles to attain.

Sidney’s argument was, in a way, an apology for the prevalence of extremely moralistic allegories as one of the chief literary forms of his time.  Shakespeare’s early drama, like other drama of the time, was to some degree an outgrowth of allegorical fiction.  In the early tragedies, like Richard II and Richard III, the principle characters are personifications of qualities, about which the story turns, and a moral is pointed.

Shakespeare’s genius lay (among many, many other qualities) in his eventual ability to overcome this overly symbolical way of writing and achieve complex characters; modern taste cites Hamlet as the best example of this achievement.  Without Shakespeare to lead the way, would the subtleties of Thackeray, or the moralistic novellas (Citizen Kane, Gone With the Wind, It’s a Wonderful Life, Casablanca) of our own era ever have come into existence?  Probably, but perhaps after much lost time.

For the time being, we will follow Durant in thinking Shakespeare the greatest of the great.  Many of his works have been added to the Recommended Reading.

On the Wealth of Nations – Story of Civilization VII.i.i-VII.ii.viii

Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was published in 1776.  What is remarkable about it is that it took two hundred years for some like Adam Smith to come along and synthesize the observations and come to the conclusions that he did.  Of these conclusions, the most notorious is the thesis that market freedom is essential for prosperity; in the modern day, some regard this thesis as categorically eliminating the use of government interference in any economic sphere.  But to understand Smith’s thesis, it is necessary to understand the context out of which his writings grew.

As I said, The Wealth of Nations is remarkable not because it contains revolutionary content, but because it took so long for someone to synthesize all of this content.  The vast majority of the problems that Smith concerns himself with were already endemic in the England of Elizabeth (1558-1603).

The labor market was the market that labored most heavily under government oppression.  During or before the reign of Henry VIII, there had been a severe shortage of labor in England as a result of plagues that decimated the lower classes.  For a while, wages had skyrocketed, until the government intervened to save the moneyed class the trouble of paying their workers what they were worth.  Under Henry VIII, these wage controls blossomed into a full-fledged, all-encompassing government regulation of labor.  Vagrancy or unemployment was subject to severe penalties, men found to be unemployed could be pressed into employment by any member of the upper class, wages were subject to strict upper and lower limits, working hours were fixed by the government, and unionization of any sort was absolutely prohibited.  Under Elizabeth, it was further decreed that workmen could not even leave their job and seek other employment without first obtaining the permission of their local justice of the peace (although firing them was similarly difficult).  (Incidentally, compare the beginning of Directive 10-289.)

Today we would call these “labor market rigidities” and lament them.  This is a direct result of Smith’s forceful illustration of the problems that such laws created.  Such problems will be easily imaginable even to those who have not read Adam Smith.  To wit, and most especially, the inability of workmen to quit their jobs and follow the demand for labor resulted in severe labor shortages in some regions at the same time that other regions suffered mass unemployment.

Smith railed with great effect against other sixteenth-century ideas too.  Mercantilism, the doctrine that a nation ought to emphasize the import of raw materials, the export of finished goods, and the hoarding of currency, was a spawn of the sixteenth-century, and ably defended by William Cecil, Elizabeth’s most influential counselor.  Mercantilism then as now resulted mostly in trade protectionism: tariffs on imports and subsidies for exports.

Did Elizabeth’s England prosper because of or despite what we now view as serious flaws in economic policy?  Being intellectually enslaved to modern free market dogma, I am inclined to think that England prospered despite these flaws.  In fact, I would go so far as to say that England’s rising prosperity – result of control of sea trade, a rising population, and relative peace with foreign powers – itself caused the flaws in economic policy.  It’s easy to see how wage controls that never rose as fast as price controls would be in the interest of a mercantile class rising in wealth and political influence.  Likewise, it’s easy to see how trade protectionism would appeal to English merchants seeking markets and monopolies for their goods at the expense of foreign competitors.

Mercantilism is far from dead; it persists everywhere in the world today, but most especially in China.  One is inclined to have at least some hope for China if my hypothesis above is true.  If it is true, then a rising middle class in China is molding China’s (ultimately self-destructive) mercantile policy for the sake of its own interests.  Perhaps this class will eventually rise to seize political and intellectual freedom too.

And yet, one is inclined to wonder… China is now hailed as the future world hegemon, and its economic growth, which is attributed to its mercantilistic  and protectionist economic policies, is cited as a harbinger of its future power.  Also cited as an ominous sign is its hording of U.S. currency (in the form of debt), which is the world’s current equivalent of what gold was to Elizabeth’s England (and even more worthless).  And if Elizabeth’s England did so well, inaugurating the British Empire that was to dominate the world for the next two to three hundred years, or more if you count the United States as a lineal descendant and heir to Great Britain, why should we not fear that China’s mercantilism will have the same result?  Was Adam Smith really right?  The same financial class who loudly lauds the free market at home seems to expect China’s anti-free market mercantilism to trounce us in the coming decade?  Perhaps my entire hypothesis is a result of my enslavement to our current, obviously contradictory groupthink?

Edit: for lamentable spelling, because my editor did not proofread the post, and the hack who wrote it was evidently sleep-deprived and in a hurry.

The Prisoner: Hammer into Anvil

“Hammer into Anvil” is the second episode in The Prisoner that deals with jamming (see here for an introductory description).  In this episode, it is Number Six jamming Number Two.

“Hammer into Anvil” has little new thematic material after “It’s Your Funeral”, but it stands out in other ways.  For one, Number Six has an unusually large share of the balance of power in this episode.  Compare to “A Change of Mind”, wherein Number Six was fighting for the very possession of his own mind, and only winning by means of a few lucky breaks; in this episode, he takes the initiative at the outset, and doesn’t lose it once for the entire episode.

“Hammer into Anvil” gives a more personal portrait of the paranoia of the Village leadership than “It’s Your Funeral”.  In “It’s Your Funeral”, the jammers play on the paranoia inherent in the methodology and actions of the Village leadership.  They use the obsession with constant surveillance to distract the leaders.  In “Hammer into Anvil”, most of the guardians seem suspicious of whether Number Six is actually plotting against Number Two.  It is only Number Two himself that becomes seriously concerned.  His paranoia does not merely distract him, but causes a complete emotional breakdown that renders him incapable of fulfilling his leadership role.

Overall, there’s not much here.  This is a “light” episode, at least for The Prisoner.  There are several amusing fight scenes, one in which Number Six just seems to be having fun.