A History of Crashes – Story of Civilization IX.i.i-IX.iii.vii

As the stock market appears to be sputtering its way into another nosedive, perhaps it is time to take a deep, calming breath.  There is no better source of deep calming breaths than the staid perspective of history.  Booms and busts are as old as joint stock companies themselves, and those have been around for quite a while.

The earliest modern bust was the Dutch tulip bubble of 1637 (seriously).  Fortunately for the Dutch, the damage from the tulip bubble was limited to a few rich people.  To find a truly catastrophic bust or two, we must look a bit later in history, at the British South Sea Bubble and the French Mississippi Bubble, which burst together in 1720.

The trading companies involved, the South Sea Company and the Mississippi Company, were not the first joint stock companies (by which we mean any company whose ownership is divided among several individuals and transferable between individuals).  The British East India Company, the Dutch East India Company, and others had already been around for a hundred years or so.

What was different about the South Sea Company and the Mississippi Company was the manner and purpose of their founding.  They were not formed, like modern companies, by wealthy individuals pooling capital, or by investment bank-mediated IPOs.  Instead, the South Sea Company and the Mississippi Company were vehicles for the conversion of government debt.  Both the British and French governments had large amounts of public debt in circulation; these bonds were relatively illiquid (or else they would have functioned as the precursor to modern paper money).  What’s more, they traded at well below their face value; in modern terms, we would say that they traded at extremely high interest rates, and that this reflected a low expectation that they would ever be paid back.

The public was given the choice between retaining, in the language of the Aughts, these toxic assets, or converting them, at face value, to ownership shares in the trading companies.  The attractiveness of the shares, then was obvious.

Nonetheless, from the very beginning, the uncertain outcome of the South Sea and Mississippi enterprises should have been obvious.  The French and English governments had little extant infrastructure or staff for handling trading ventures.  In Britain, it was proposed that the dividends to be paid out to shareholders be funded not by actual trading ventures, but by a government tariff on South American exports.

But the prospect of access to a steady stream of unearned income was far more attractive than continuing to hold worthless government paper.  It also attracted the public interest, and fueled dreams of overnight millionaires and unfunded retirement nest eggs in quite the modern vein.  Since shares were transferable, and since there were many more people desiring shares than there were shares, prices shot up.  In England, the government tacitly validated the higher prices by issuing new shares at those prices.

Shares traded at 2,400% in France, 1,300% in England of their original issue value.  In short, speculation ran riot, millionaires were made in a day, and the geniuses who invented the schemes were lavished with public adoration.  Then, word came round that the Mississippi project was encountering difficulties.  In both Britain and France, the directors and economic leaders sold their shares at great profit; then, word reached the common people, and valuations collapsed.  Stories of suicide and ruined families abounded.  A public clamor arose that the incompetent directors of the companies, who had failed to realized the expected profits, be punished.

Does any of this sound familiar?  It seems that “black swans” are as old as finance.  So, looking through the objective lens of three hundred years, what can we conclude about these bubbles?  (And let us piously insist that we mean to say nothing at all about recent events.  No, not a thing…)

First, it is obvious in retrospect that the primary cause of the bubbles was rampant speculation unfounded on any realistic assessment of the likelihood of profits.

Second, both France and England responded with bailouts, and things seem to have worked okay.  England’s bailout was in the best modern tradition: the Bank of England and the East India Company, other major financial players, bought £ 18,000,000 of the company’s stock (TARP?); the shareholders who remained were rewarded with a 33% dividend.  France, lacking major financial power players like the Bank of England, started printing paper money to fund its bailout, which was effectively our modern quantitative easing, and despite causing runaway inflation, this acted as a stimulus to both agriculture and industry.

Yes, it is all “Woe, woe, bailouts, injustice!”  But in Durant’s narration, the first British Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, did the right thing in taking decisive leadership and initiating a bailout to stop a destabilizing panic.  The consequences of such a panic to Britain’s international status might have been ruinous, and had Walpole taken a stand on too much principle, we might snicker at his incompetence today.

Durant also praises John Law, the leader of the French system, and takes pains to note that, after the Mississippi bust, and despite the fraud of several high-ranking members of the Company, Law’s own accounting was found to be flawless.  Durant goes so far as to write the following:

“The people, whose mad speculation had caused the collapse of the System, held Law responsible for all difficulties… repeated riots express the feeling of the public that it had been deceived by financial tricks, and that the upper classes had profited at the expense of the community.”

Imagine a modern politician describing our most recent crisis in such terms!  History keeps secrets for no man, though.  We can now clearly see that Walpole, in the twenty years succeeding the South Sea bust, was a minister of the first order.  Law, with his perfect book-keeping, was shattered by the harm he had done, refused appointment to a financial post in Russia, and lived in poverty to the end of his days.  Those who absconded, stole, or sold on insider information are revealed to be the animalistic slaves to greed that they were.

In the end, individuals were ruined, but nations healed.  France and Britain were still in ascent; the Enlightenment and the Napoleonic Wars were yet to come.

Looking through the years, we can resent a little bit the greed that animated the buying and selling of stocks, and wonder at the eagerness with which the public greeted financial innovation it did not understand.  We resent even more the greed of those who did steal and cheat, even the ones who did so behind the fig leaf of legality.

We recognize that there were two sides that permitted the evil that transpired.  Our sympathy lies with the middle class, which had no choice but to pay Walpole’s taxes to fund the bailout.  Perhaps it is harder to be so sympathetic today, when representative government has lain the responsibility for our leaders’ actions squarely in our own hands.  It is up to us to find a Walpole that will not only enact our bailout, but find a way to pay for it too.

On Middle-Class Morality

Some things never change.  One of the delights of studying the last four hundred years or so of history has been to see how so many of our current cultural obsessions are lineal descendants of identical social movements in the England of the 1600′s.  One suspects that these movements themselves were lineal descendants of older movements, obscured by the amnesia of a race that, like a child or an animal, is conscious only of the present.

Consider middle-class morality.  The Puritan movement was a reflection of a class identity.  It was most popular among what might have been England’s lower middle class.  Artisans, tradesmen, shopkeepers… these were people who worked hard, had enough money to be literate, and therefore read the Bible.  They took pride in their work, but also their independence and their liberty.  They were no peasants, or even yeomen, tied to the land.  They were free Britons.

Puritanism answered the psychological needs of this class perfectly.  First, any movement symbolizing the ethos of this class had to convey a sense of superiority.  Though the middle class was hard-working, it also suffered a constant sense of inferiority in class-conscious England.  Sure, the English artisan was proud of his work, and he was no beggar, but he still had to remove his cap and bow to the peer of the Realm, and he was constantly having his face rubbed in the prosperity of the merchant or the doctor of law.

But wait!  Because the artisan was a Puritan, he was divinely elected for eternal salvation; ultimately, he would spend aeons laughing at the Catholic/Anglican/deist/atheist/infidel upper class roasting in the pits of hell.  The Puritan was predestined and chosen.  He was God’s chosen.  Inferiority complex: solved.  What’s next?

Well, there’s the troublesome issue of money… no matter how well the green-grocer did, he would never be able to clothe his wife in extravagant raiment or entertain his friends on silver plate.  What’s more, to maintain his status, he had to work hard; he couldn’t fritter away his time or his small capital in gambling, drinking, and whoring about town.  Good thing, then, that all of these things are sins that send you to hell forever.

This is of course another nail in the coffin of the inferiority problem.  The Puritan could take endless pride in his somber, pauper-like existence, devoid of the joys and delicacies of life, because he was living according to God’s code, and all of those vulgar displays of wealth that so infuriated him were sins that would send their perpetrators straight to hell.

It’s hard for this bigot – evidently an apologist for the immoral upper class – not to see a direct parallel between the Puritans of yore and the atheistic humanists of the modern middle class.  Your average young, obnoxious member of the middle class gives up meat and hot showers because they’re bad for the environment.  He gives up white bread and soda because  they’re bad for your health.  In the ideal world, he thinks, these things should be outlawed for everyone (think blue Sundays, but every day of the week), or at least saddled with a punitive vice tax.  If you show him that local vegetables are actually more harmful to the environment than imported meat, his rationale shifts (it doesn’t matter what to, does it?).  If you point out to him that his annual plane trip wipes out all of the environmental savings of his asceticism, he shrugs his shoulders and asks how he should live without his family.

But he gets a great sense of superiority from the fact that he drinks tea instead of wine, and eats tofu instead of red meat.  He will tout the endless health benefits, and then wonder why his nursing wife is anemic.  For the greatest weapon of the Puritan, ancient and modern, was his unshakable sense of certainty in his own predestination.  He can cite to you a thousand Bible passages scientific studies that explain why his lifestyle is the one true one and all others are evil.

The eternal frustration of the Puritan is the sense of inferiority that none of his asceticism can quite erase.  His Honda Fit, though oh-so-fashionable (if you have wide-rimmed glasses, you’re still scum without a Fit), still leaves him with a feeling of unease when the bankers’ BMW purrs down the street.  Sure, he’s been happily monogamous with his girlfriend for ten years, but since they’re such excellent awesome people, they’ve waited until now to get married, not even needing to make promises to each other because they have such character.  Nonetheless, she has wide-rimmed glasses too, and he probably envies the way his buddy that went to law school bags a new secretary every week.

What really offends the Puritan, though, is the notion that anyone but he contributes to the betterment of mankind (unless it’s a minority… their mere existence improves mankind).  You see, our modern-day Puritan works for a non-profit, or maybe a hip start-up with an important message, or maybe he walks the ivory halls of academia.  Either way, his job is pure.  He hasn’t “sold out”.  That’s what the bankers did, and the lawyers.  Those reprobate souls can only pursue their own selfish good, and only through evil means.  Consider the recent financial crisis… this was a gigantic conspiracy where everyone from the lowliest analyst to the drunkest vice-president knew that they were peddling crap and that it would fall into somebody else’s backyard.

Of course, the modern-day Puritan hates the rich so much because he’s almost one of them.  He might have a sister in law school (she’s studying to become an environmental lawyer, you know, the not-sinful kind), and anyway, he himself is hoping to earn a substantial chunk of money someday ($100k isn’t that much, not enough to send you to hell at any rate).

In short, the Puritan doesn’t get out much, doesn’t have much fun.  But he’s better than you, and he hates you for it.

The Stupidity of Philosophers – Story of Civilization VIII.xxi.v-VIII.xxiv.vi

I have often thought that many of the theories of the great minds of the past could have been entirely avoided by a proper training in modern natural science.

Nowhere can we find a better illustration of this hypothesis than with Gottfried Leibniz.  Leibniz’s most famous contribution to philosophy is his theory of monads: monads are the fundamental constituents of all reality; they possess mental characteristics, and a monad underlies each man’s consciousness; they strive and change according to their own will, and each one is independent of the outside universe, but perceives it.

Leibniz had apparently been inspired by the reports of the first microscopists of cells, and the tiny organisms inhabiting diverse matter.  Of course, cells, it turns out, are quite different from monads, and are governed by the same laws as the rest of the world, which, it turns out, is not composed of monads, but rather of atoms.

Some apologists will argue for Leibniz, translating perception as influence, monads as electrons or subatomic particles, and so on ad nauseam.  There is no ground for such interpretations.

This is not to argue, as I have suggested in my title, that Leibniz was stupid.  He, along with Newton, invented calculus, and his theory of geology was remarkably consistent with the most modern ideas.  He was a scholar of high repute and had far-seeing ambitions for the future of academia.

It just seems unfortunate that, like Spinoza, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and Berkeley before him, Leibniz should have devoted so much time and effort to a purely deductive philosophy which took as its starting point an undeveloped and largely ignorant science.  The weak metaphysics of these philosophers may have prevented them from building their theories of ethics and government on solid ground.  Modern philosophy is in a much stronger position, having been freed from metaphysical pursuits by the advances of physics, and losing the need for deduction with the ever-increasing panorama of history now opened before us.

So where are the philosophers?

The Enlightenment and David Brooks – Story of Civilization VIII.xx.i-VIII.xxi.iv

David Brooks has done it yet again.  In one of his trademark templates, what one reader called the “David Brooks adversarial dualism” template, Brooks this week compared the thinkers of the Scottish and French Enlightenments.  The beginning and concluding sentences provide the meat of the article, surrounding a cheesy and  insubstantial interior (think KFC):

“When I was in college [sic] I took a course in [sic] the Enlightenment… … …The Scots were right, and the French were wrong.”

Wow.  Wow.  Wow.

One of the signal observations that the student of history brings to the study of philosophy is the thesis that, for the vast majority of even the greatest thinkers, their thoughts and works are emphatically the product of their times.  So Plato, in an Athens devastated by war with Sparta, advocated a Sparta-like ideal city-state.  So Machiavelli, having observed Cesare Borgia’s subjugation of all Italy, apostrophized an ideal version of him in The Prince.  So Hobbes, writing as a friend of the hated English nobility, and a tutor to the exiled Charles II during Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate, argued that absolute monarchy was the only way to rule a state.  And so John Locke, child of Puritans and dependent of the Whiggish Shaftesbury family, wrote in defense of the Glorious Revolution, and the natural right of man to remove an unjust sovereign like James II.

The Glorious Revolution was precipitated in part by an attempt of James to re-assert the privileges that Charles I had claimed for the monarchy; James was a believer in absolute monarchy.  James ordered an edict of toleration published throughout England, several Anglican prelates refused to proclaim the edict, James had them arrested, and a jury refused to convict them.  In short order, Protestant leaders invited William III to conquer England, and he did so with virtually no resistance from James.

By the execution of Charles I, the lackadaisical rule of Charles II, the over-extension and fall of James II, the elevation of William III to office by Parliament, the weak rule of the pious Queen Anne, and a thousand other factors, the English people experienced a gradually weakening monarchy.  Scotland shared more or less in all of these developments, having shared monarchs with England since the death of Elizabeth.

Meanwhile, France was under the rule of Louis XIV, who thanks to the iron fists of Richelieu, Mazarin, and Colbert, enjoyed power untrammeled by any Parliament or troublesome nobles.  In 1698, while England was enjoying the fruits of the Glorious Revolution and the English Bill of Rights, France was suffering from dragonnades and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.  It is hard not to think, then, that this historical context played some rule in the separate developments of the Scottish and French Enlightenments.

In short, the English, enjoying the fruits of two revolutions, one quite bloody, could afford to be gradualist.  The French, laboring under ever-increasing tyranny, could not.  Institutions calcify, and sometimes pass the point from which they can be changed by moderation and gradualism, which is how Brooks describes the products of the Scottish Enlightenment.  The “radical” polemicists on both the left and the right to whom Brooks refers believe we have passed the point of no return.  To achieve clean and honest government, drastic changes are necessary.

There is some merit in their arguments; heroic figures expected to represent cherished causes have caved to the demands of the political “center” that Paul Krugman so frequently mocks.  This “center” seems to have no tenets beyond expediency, reelection, extreme hawkishness, and the spending of government money on anything, anything, anything.  Think Joe Lieberman.  He’s such a centrist!

Consider the case of Barack Obama, who has continued and exacerbated the usurpation of government power by the Bush administration for the prosecution of the war on terror, though it would have cost him almost nothing to concede this power and end the abuse.  What a moderate!

The temperament that is necessary for pragmatic government, the shrewd canniness of an Obama, is usually the temperament that applies an equal pragmatism to affairs of personal ethics.  A Representative who would adopt a practical plan for the enactment of his ends would first ensure that he will be around beyond the next election cycle in order he may have time to work toward his ends.  Sure, I’m against healthcare reform, but if I can get a big enough piece of pork that I’ll get reelected, maybe I’ll get that gay marriage amendment onto the books.

We do not need such engineers; we need warriors.  It may be true that engineers govern with the least disruption, but for many simple citizens, our country is the embodiment of our greatest intellectual achievements as a species, and it sickens us to see its core inhabited by the unclean.

But we are the radicals.  The “moderates” and “centrists” would prefer to sit in their homes, devote themselves to their hobbies, and hope only for peace and a government good enough to leave us relatively undisturbed.  Ironically, this was the philosophy of Pierre Bayle, the father of the French Enlightenment.  Chew on that, Brooks.

A Word for the Steam Engine – Story of Civilization VIII.xiii.i-VIII.xix.v

When looking back on history and cataloging the great advances in human history, it has become fashionable (at least among certain bloggers) to look upon the invention of the printing press as one of the greatest, and perhaps soon we will look at the Internet as the next greatest.  Behind these are items like Columbus’s crossing of the Atlantic, the teachings of Jesus, the application of gunpowder to warfare…

Here, then, I would like to put in a word for the steam engine.  One might argue that when man invented the steam engine, he became man, and ceased to be a child.  Children can easily grasp the workings of a windmill or a water mill, or how a horse may pull a plow through the ground.  The power that moves trains and automobiles, however, is beyond the child’s imagination.  It is miraculous and mystical.  Looked at from this way, as the miraculous granting of motion and autonomy to inanimate objects, the steam engine began what electricity and the internal combustion engine have completed today, making all the wonders of modern life possible.

It is strange to imagine, then, that almost hundred years passed between the invention of the steam engine and its use to power a boat or land vehicle.  Durant cites as one of the possible reasons for the slow adoption of steam power, even in applications for which no other solution existed, such as the draining of deep mines, the fear of technological unemployment.  In other words, economic leaders may have feared that the benefits introduced by the steam engine did not outweigh the unemployment it would cause as a result of the extreme efficiency with which it could perform the jobs of many men.

The idea that this fear at this historical moment held back progress seems unlikely, given the Malthusian predilections of English leaders at the time, combined with labor laws that, in oppressiveness and inflexibility, had not significantly advanced from those instituted by Henry VIII.  Nonetheless, the suggestion of it highlights the reasons that technological unemployment is not to be feared.  What that we now enjoy in life would have been possible without the steam engine?  Looking at the possessions surrounding me, I can reasonably guess that not a single thing that I can see was made by human hands unaided by electricity, and I can know with certainty that every object was brought here, and probably the building materials of the very room I inhabit, by automotive power.

In short, as Adam Smith suggested, it is the highest aim of every man to sit on his butt and contribute absolutely nothing of value to society.  The steam engine and other technologies have enabled both a greater proportion and a greater number of men than ever before to achieve this transcendental value amid more affluence than ever before.

Poverty persists of course, but perhaps that is because the means of subsistence remain, relatively speaking, among the more expensive of humanity’s products.  Here we can see that after the cost of land and the cost of transportation (which is probably mostly the cost of commuting, and might safely be considered not even a part of a worker’s income), food is the chief expense of the average American family.  To eat today is more expensive than nearly any other marvel of the modern age: the multifarious inanities of cable television, Internet pornography, air conditioning, or even education or healthcare (access to the miracles of modern medicine).

It’s bizarre.  Like Isaac Newton, we ought to resent this eternal slavery to our lowliest needs.

Story of Civilization VIII.xi.i-VIII.xii.v

“You’ve fallen victim to one of the classic blunders… the most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia.”  So says the villain in Goldman’s Princess Bride.  In my mind, I have always added a bit more detail to this blunder… “never get involved in an invasion of Russia in the winter”.  Everybody knows about Napolean’s disastrous invasion of Russia, but Napolean was only joining a long and illustrious list of would-be conquerors.

One of the invasions that preceded Napolean’s was that of Charles XII, a young and militarily aggressive king of Sweden.  He entered Russia with 44,000 men and endured one of the coldest winters in memory; according to Durant, soldiers’ spit congealed before it hit the ground, and birds fell dead in mid-flight.  By the time Charles caught up with the Russian forces, which had been burning peasant crops and dispersing their cattle as they moved, Charles’s army was reduced to roughly half of its former size.  Under the pressure of Russian cannon fire, the starving Swedes surrendered, and Charles fled to Turkey.

Don’t mess with Russia in the winter.

Titus Oates – Story of Civilization VIII.viii.v-VIII.x.iv

Following the Restoration of the Stuart line to the throne of England in 1660, there was an extended and boring struggle between the by now predominantly Protestant people of England, and the few remaining Catholic apologists, who had a sympathetic ear in the ambiguously Catholic Charles II.

In 1670, Charles signed with Louis XIV the Treaty of Dover, by which he committed himself to alliance with Catholic France and the restoration of Catholicism in England.  Meanwhile, he issued a “Declaration of Indulgence” which loosened and abated the governmental persecution of non-Anglicans, including Catholics.

This development, as well as the Catholicism of Charles’s brother James, led the English people to fear a Catholic or “Popish” plot to restore Catholicism (which, ironically, as we have just mentioned, is precisely what Charles himself intended).  The fears manifested themselves in one Titus Oates.  This man appeared before the King and testified that there was a Jesuit plot to assassinate him, elevate his brother James to the throne, and impose Catholicism on England by the sword.  Charles considered the matter absurd, and laughed to Oates’s face at some of his claims, but Charles’s Privy Council took the matter more seriously, and at the behest of Parliament, a full investigation was unfolded that lead to the execution of numerous powerful Catholics.  The prosecutions did not cease until one of the chief judges overseeing them caught Oates in an obvious contradiction.

If these events sound familiar, it is probably because of their close resemblance to the Red Scare and the McCarthy era.  What’s more, they resemble any number of spurious claims of imminent threats to our nation in the modern era, from the WMDs in Iraq to the birther movement to the efforts by gay teachers to “recruit” students.  Like all of these efforts, although Titus Oates’s testimony was completely fabricated and ultimately shown to be so, his efforts succeeded in tarring the legitimate, legal pursuit of the toleration of Catholics with the taint of treason.

What’s striking about the Titus Oates affair is that in the entire Story of Civilization, this is the first clearly documented instance in history of a fabrication of this nature, one of sufficient power and popular backing to crystallize the zeitgeist of a xenophobic, disenfranchised minority.

What’s also striking is that the people who Titus represented where an amalgam of the ascendant Puritans, Anglicans, and anabaptists (Baptists) in England, as against the Catholics.  These same populations would be some of the first to settle America, and the modern disaffected WASPs are both their intellectual and blood heirs.  Can it be that this one ethno-cultural clique, throughout recent history, has achieved and maintained power through a continuous line of hypocrisy, self-deception, and outright lies?  Doubtless, history is not so simple, but it is hard not to wonder whether Joseph McCarthy, George Bush, or even Betsy McCaughey did not learn a thing or two from Titus Oates.  It is also tempting to wonder how future historians, forced to condense the goings-on of four hundred years into two or three pages, may condense the Titus Oates affair and the Puritans of seventeenth-century England with the Red Scare and the Protestants of twentieth-century America.

Story of Civilization VIII.vi.i-VIII.viii.iv

Dutch history holds a peculiar intrigue for me.  From 1550 to 1750, the Dutch were extraordinarily productive in several areas.  They produced Rubens, Vandyck, Hals, Rembrandt, and in the minor artist Jacob van Ruisdael, some of the most profound landscape painting that our historical journey has yet shown us.  (Consider his “Wheat Fields“.)

As previously discussed, they also produced the first substantial, lasting religious toleration since the Reformation – although the neglected Poland produced substantial religious toleration, it turned out to be fleeting – and the first republican government outside the cantons of Switzerland – although again, this government flourished under what was essentially the one-man rule of Johan de Witt.

But the thing that really caught my eye in Durant’s history of the Dutch during the age of Louis XIV was the re-occurrence of the dikes as a military tool.  Durant originally cited the dikes as a decisive element in the victory of the northern, Protestant states of the Netherlands in their war for independence against Spain.  The armies of William of Orange had suffered substantial defeats throughout the war, but the Spanish generals were unable to make military progress against the northern states because, according to Durant, Dutch guerillas called the Beggars of the Sea unleashed the dikes to halt the advance of the Spanish troops.

I thought it sounded reasonable enough at the time that, as a one-time military strategy, this might work.  But when the dikes emerged again as the decisive element in stalling the advance of Louis XIV through the Netherlands in his quest to extend French territory to the Rhine, I raised an eyebrow.  How, precisely, could these dikes be the solution to every Dutch military problem.

The answer is fascinatingly complex and ingenious.

Regicide – Story of Civilization VII.v.i-VII.viii.xi

The history of England after Elizabeth and Shakespeare is the story of decaying social stability, and the relentless maneuverings of nobility for power.  Ultimately, it leads to the execution of Charles I by Oliver Cromwell, who led a revolt against Charles due to Charles’s apparent Catholic sympathies and oppressive taxation.

Of course, the true story is not so simple, and yet much simpler.  The socio-cultural-economical forces that rebelled against Charles were indeed fighting in the name of a Puritan/Calvinist ideal of protestantism far removed from Charles’s Anglican faith, which was almost Catholic.  But the leaders and instigators of the rebellion, and its figurative head, was the British Parliament.  Charles, after Parliament had voted to strip him of many of his ancient prerogatives, and had prosecuted and even executed some of his closest counselors, declared several leaders of Parliament to be guilty of sedition, and attempted to arrest them.  They fled, and the rest of the Parliament, fearing for its own collective neck, quickly dissolved and began to raise armies.

Oliver Cromwell only became a major figure once the fighting began.  He turned out to be the most effective general on the Parliamentary side of the conflict.  Ultimately, Charles was defeated, but even at this late point, there was not a thought of regicide – only of a resolution of the forces that had brought Parliament to such discontent in the first place.  As the leaders of Parliament negotiated with the captive Charles for a more limited, constitutional monarchy, Charles struck a deal with Scottish armies (for Scotland had been legally inherited as an English realm by Charles’s father) to restore him to power regardless of Parliament, on the basis of a simple deal with the Scottish parliament.

The British Parliament, now recognizing itself to be in severe danger, continued negotiating with Charles, hoping to save its own position in the event that the Scottish armies could forcibly restore Charles to power.  And so we come to the point: the reason that none of this worked out, and that none of these negotiations succeeded, was quite simple.  It was an ancient tradition that, upon a monarch’s ascent to a contested throne, or successful survival for an attempted coup, all those who had opposed him were to be executed.  The Parliament itself seems to have hoped to avoid this fate, but the leaders of the army, and particularly Oliver Cromwell, were convinced that upon Charles’s restoration, a general slaughter of the Parliament’s armies would ensue.

For this reason, Cromwell and the army, and the members of Parliament representing them, vociferously opposed any attempts to reach a settlement with Charles.  Instead, once the Scottish forces were defeated, they proposed to try Charles for treason.  The overwhelming majority of the members of Parliament thought this measure radical, and refused it.  The army, continuing to fear for its own survival, ejected all members who opposed Charles’s trial, bringing Parliament from its pre-war size of five hundred down to roughly fifty.  The fifty nominated a jury to try Charles, and by a slim majority, this jury found him guilty and voted him to death.

So, in brief, Charles was tried and executed by a totally illegal court operating as a front for an army, led by Cromwell, that had two choices: to permit the legitimate operation of Parliament to restore Charles to power, leading to its own slaughter, or to kill Charles, violating nearly sacred traditions, and against the will of the English people.  It would have taken a group of leaders principled beyond all human precedent to induce the army to the former choice!

In conclusion, the regicide itself did not reflect the forces that had initiated the rebellion, but rather a simple will to survive on the part of a few rebels.  Ignoring all historical precedent – for the moment – one could imagine that, absent the principle outlined above whereby all rebels must always be executed, there is absolutely no reason why the execution of Charles could not have been avoided.  Popular will did not call for it.  Parliament did not wish to allow it.  Charles himself was probably willing to make enough concessions to eventually retake the throne.  Only the will of Cromwell and his fellow leaders caused the trial and execution of Charles.

I say all this not merely to review history, but to reflect on its nature.  It sometimes seems that history is written in blood; our next post will deal with the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.  It is of course impossible to imagine what I hypothesized above, that Charles could have promised not to kill the rebel leaders upon re-ascending the throne.  Even if he could promise it, he would not have been believed, and even if he were believed, he would have gone back on such a promise anyway.  But is it not a shame that this must be human nature?  Death is horrible, for it is absolute and eternal.  To wreak death on another human being is the final, most horrible statement of hatred, for it is irrevocable.  And yet throughout history, death is a panacea.  Was religious ardor in this era so great that death was not feared, in confidence of Heaven?  I doubt it; men were probably as secretly skeptical in this age as in ours.  They killed each other on precedent, and because of the law that one must kill or be killed.  This was Cromwell’s imperative.

It is a miracle that in our own era, some people have become so “civilized” that they no longer view death as a panacea.  How is it that we have gradually, by degrees, been able to back down from the precedent, to not need to answer every threat with death?  Perhaps it is the atomic bomb that has matured us; perhaps it is America’s own unique religious history that has acted as a beacon to Western civilization.  Or perhaps it is only the spread of knowledge.  Whatever it is, I think that our ability to solve our own social problems without resort to killing is history’s greatest gift to us, and one that we should reflect carefully and vocally upon before we do resort to killing (as in the Middle East now).

Louis XIV – Story of Civilization VIII.iii.i-VIII.v.x

Was the reign of Louis XIV really a good time for France?  Durant goes to great lengths to highlight the glories of Louis’s reign, but every now and then, we get a glimpse of the real France simmering under the surface.  For instance, during Louis’s wars of territorial expansion toward the Rhine, his oppressive taxation drove some areas of France nearly to starvation.  Before they began rioting, the peasants in this regions had been subsisting on a sort of bread made of acorns and hope.

Many events of Louis’s reign can also be described with considerably less favor than Durant has described them with.  The art of the reign, for example, produced numerous copies of classical pieces, many of excellent quality, and a set of French imitations of equal quality.  But all of this art ultimately was for the gratification of one ego: the features under Alexander’s helm in Le Brun’s paintings were Louis’s (and this is how Le Brun attained his prestige), and the Chariot of Apollo, an excellent work, was merely an allegory of Louis.  Even in the case of the beautiful gardens at Versailles, how many acres of farmland were subsumed for the enterprise?

In literature, Louis had few scruples.  Though he went to great lengths, as we have discussed, to ensure the safety of his soul by the murder and oppression of his fellow men, he licensed the comedy of Molière, the type of which had previously been considered to promote immorality.  He licensed the satire of Molière, and the mockery to which Boileau and La Bruyère submitted their enemies, for this king had a fine sense of humor, except when it came to himself.  De Bussy endured the Bastille for a year for including in his gossip a quip about the King’s sister-in-law.