Story of Civilization – IV.xxxii.vi – IV.xxxiv.v

It is curious how some of civilization’s greatest goods can arise from its greatest evils.  Durant devotes the early part of Chapter XXXIV to discussing the difficulty of obtaining books during the Middle Ages.  The greatest libraries of the time possessed some fifty volumes, and the price of a book was the year’s labor of an educated man – perhaps some $50,000 today.  The poorest American today has access to greater wealth of knowledge than the best man of the Middle Ages.

What is striking about this extreme premium placed upon books is the contrast it highlights between the Middle Ages and classical Rome and Greece.  In these times we hear of bibliophiles collecting vast libraries with hundreds of volumes, and of vaster public libraries such as the one at Alexandria.  We hear of rich men and states who employed teams of copyists to multiply their ages’ literary wealth.  Literature flowered over and over again during the long lives of these civilizations; by contrast, in the Middle Ages, Durant writes almost as if new books were unwelcome.  This is because the extreme cost of a book meant that once a new book was written, it was unlikely to be copied.

What is the reason for this sharp contrast between classical and medieval civilization?  As I have emphasized, the rare commodity was not literature itself – some, though not all, of the classics were available in one or a few copies – it was the actual books.  Thinking about this from an economic perspective, some component of the materials necessary for the construction of books must have been extremely rare and precious: either the ink, the paper, the templates, or the labor.

Durant writes nothing to suggest that there was any shortage of ink or paper in the Middle Ages, and indeed, commercial activity seems to have generated copious amounts of records, suggesting that both of these materials were in good supply.  While the templates – i.e. the books to be copied – were of course rare, it does not seem to me that their rarity alone explains the price of books.  In the first place, the availability of templates should have increased exponentially as books were copied.  In the second place, it would not have been necessary to expend the huge price necessary to buy a book to acquire a template; a mere loan would have been sufficient, or access to a library.  Even if such loans were difficult to obtain, if just one or a few books had generous owners, these books would have been copied, all other materials being cheap, and would have proliferated over all of Europe.  There are no such examples, beyond the components of the Bible.

This leaves labor.  I am left to wonder if the burden of repelling barbarian raids, and expanding an infrastructure against a hostile wilderness, and under the strain of a growing population, did not make labor so valuable in the Middle Ages that clerical occupations, and in particular copying, became insupportably expensive.  In classical times, the labor for copying books had almost always been slave labor; when cheap slave labor disappeared, so too did literature, until the Renaissance, with which came the printing press.

On the one hand, copying books is the luxury of a mature civilization, one that has mastered its material needs and has wealth to devote to culture.  On the other hand, at least at times, the Middle Ages evidenced this wealth (in generating cathedrals and other cultural productions), and yet books did not proliferate.  A mature civilization could conceivably copy books without slave labor, but the price, as mentioned above, as was true for the Middle Ages, would be the price of an educated man’s labor for the time it took to copy the book.  By contrast, slave labor has the advantage of being essentially free; support the slave under whatever miserable conditions you will, and you get books.  Capture an educated slave, and you have captured as many books as the slave has years of life left in him.  This reduces the price of books to the price of the manual labor the slave could otherwise have been doing in that time… such a price is surely less than that of the labor of an educated man.

The answer could lie in another explanation: perhaps it is not supply that was the problem with medieval books, but demand.  Perhaps there was simply no demand for books, and so they were very not made, and therefore rare.  The extraordinary enthusiasm that greeted each new translation of Aristotle, and the labors of devotion and entire universities that sprang up over the meager existing knowledge of the Middle Ages, though, suggests to me that demand was not at all slack.

Slavery, of course, was a great evil.  That is why we invented the printing press, and then the Internet: now, we can have our words for free, and we must only use slaves (safely stowed away offshore) to produce our clothes, food, and other fancies.

Story of Civilization – IV.xxvi.iv – IV.xxxii.v

The story of the Middle Ages is in large part the story of the Roman Catholic Church.  But what exactly was the Church?  It was not a state, though at times it acted like one.  It was not merely a religious organization, as we currently understand the concept.  Nor was it a cultural or ethnic collective, for it contained within it a broad range of Western European cultures.

I would posit that there is in fact no single word that can describe the Church of the Middle Ages, that it was an entity unique to history.  It was unique both in the breadth and depth of its influence on the peoples under its control, and in the relative lack of civil control it exercised relative to what would be usual for an entity of its size and power.

Perhaps the key to understanding the nature of the Church lies in the tangled webs of the feudalistic power structure.  Feudalism revolved around lords, who controlled the land, and vassals, whom the lords permitted to use the land in exchange for allegiance.  (Cf. Wikipedia.)  A lord himself could be holding lands “in fief” from another lord, and be his vassal.  In fact, almost all lords were vassals, at least in name, to some higher lord; the Pope and a few kings were the only exceptions.  Lords were responsible for the internal peace and external security of the lands under their control.

A common practice was for a feudal sovereign to give his lands as a gift to the Pope, and become the Pope’s vassal, in exchange for Papal support, usually in the form of a declaration of the sovereign’s righteousness in a war against his neighbors.  At one time or another, it seems that nearly every sovereign in Europe resorted to this tactic (e.g. Portugal).  The consequence was that, in theory, the Pope exercised secular power over much of Europe, although the giving and taking of Papal fiefs was frequent enough that at no time did the Pope come near to complete control.

Such power was theoretical at best; it is not clear that the secular power that came theoretically with Papal suzerainty was ever exercised with much success beyond the Papal States.

This is not to say that the Pope had no power, or even little power.  If money is power, the Pope was for much of the Middle Ages the most powerful man in Europe, by far.  The Church directly owned huge fractions of land in all of Western Europe, ranging from a fifth (England) to half (Livonia), and on lands that it did not own, it received the tithe, or tenth part of the revenue.  These lands accounted for the local revenues of the Church, and may have paid the expenses of the Church’s numerous charitable works, and the building of its monasteries and cathedrals, the latter of which are perhaps the grandest cultural achievement of the Middle Ages, or perhaps any age.

But the true power of the papacy rested, I think, in the revenues that went directly to the Pope.  He siphoned from various sources of local revenue, and had his own revenues as well.  What is important, in the end, is that his income is estimated to have been greater than that of all of the lesser sovereigns of Europe combined.  It was this income that tempted so many popes into wars, crusades, and power struggles.

This was the nature of the papacy, but what was the nature of the Church itself?  The theological and ethical elements of Catholicism were as important in the Middle Ages as ever, and local priests and monks propounded constantly the doctrines of what might be called traditional Christianity; indeed, one of the few virtues of the modern Catholic Church is that it has functioned remarkably well to preserve these doctrines relatively unchanged.  The most striking figures of this local dissemination of Catholic doctrine were the mendicant saints, of whom the most prominent example is Francis of Assisi.  Saint Francis lived a life of extreme poverty and asceticism, preaching the faith both by word and example, and following what he regarded as the simplest essences of Jesus’ teachings.

Not all saints were as benign as Francis.  Saint Dominic was one of the prime movers of the Inquisition.  Perhaps it was merely the juxtaposition of two unrelated stories playing tricks on my mind, but as I read the story of Saint Dominic, I could not help but compare it to the story I had just read of the remarkable escape of a New York Times reporter from the Taliban.

Indeed, perhaps the Taliban is the closest modern analogue of the Church of the Middle Ages.  Like the Church, the Taliban, according to Mr. Rohde, exercises both secular and religious control over a large area of Afghanistan/Pakistan.  Without speaking of the higher echelons, at the lower echelons, the Taliban and the Church look remarkably similar.  The vast majority of the subjects are simple people of faith; the actual footsoldiers of the faith, be they inquisitors, monks, priests, or mendicant saints, or alternatively, soldiers, guards, and insurrectionists, have diverse motivations, but share several things in common: they are usually young men, removed from what might be regarded as the normal occupations of youth, and in particular, social intercourse with young women.  The Inquisition inflicted similar terrors in some localities that the Taliban inflicts on the civilians of its own state today, to wit constant fear and occasional violent death.

As I have remarked previously, the great sin of modern Christianity is hypocrisy; the great sin of modern Islam is the violence it commits in the name of faith.  As I have said before, in truth, Islam is a religion of violence, but perhaps hypocrisy is the lesser of the two evils.  It is to be hoped that Islam will soon mature, with wealth, from a religion of violence to a religion of hypocrisy.

A Sermon – Isaiah 9:1-6

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom a light has shone.  You have brought them abundant joy and great rejoicing, as they rejoice before you as at the harvest, as people make merry when dividing spoils.  For the yoke that burdened them, the pole on their shoulder, and the rod of their taskmaster you have smashed, as on the day of Midian.  For every boot that tramped in battle, every cloak rolled in blood, will be burned as fuel for flames.  For a child is born to us, a son is given us; upon his shoulder dominion rests.  They name him Wonder-Counselor, God-Hero, Father-Forever, Prince of Peace.  His dominion is vast and forever peaceful, from David’s throne, and over his kingdom, which he confirms and sustains by judgment and justice, both now and forever.  The zeal of the Lord of hosts will do this!”

In this passage we have expressed the messianic hope that is one of Christianity’s most spectacular messages.  One can hardly read this passage without getting goosebumps at the wondrous descriptions of the savior.  The messianic hope, indeed, is one of the three fundamental virtues of Christianity: faith, hope, and love.

A priest could preach a very moving sermon on hope, and on the blessings that a savior could bring to the world.  How wondrous it would be if one God-man could rescue us from the strife and faction that infests every corner of our world, could wrest from us the poverty and pollution that we cling to as a heritage.  How wonderful to be children again, with a Father Forever to watch over us, to administer to us justice, and to take responsibility for us!

The greatest evil of Christianity is just this false hope.  No such things will occur.  Old men will never be innocent again, the flower of our youth is gone forever.  Peace will not be seen on Earth in our lifetimes, nor justice, nor cleanliness.  A religion that preaches that these things will be delivered to us, given to us, as our destined heritage, is a false religion.

God is dead, and so we must be the heroes of our own lives.  This message is chilling, but also liberating.  We are freed from the slavery of expectation, empowered to take action.  If we wish for peace, we must work for it.  We must create our own peace, our own justice, our own prosperity.  It will not be given to us.

There is no power watching over us, no savior to redeem our sins.  No “something out there” loves us; it is only we that love ourselves, and only we that are protecting ourselves.  It is only we that can grant happiness.

Those we have wronged, we have wronged, and only they can forgive us.  Those who have died in poverty, misery, and violence, are dead forever.  Some will say that to deny the Christian storyline denies their suffering meaning, but I say the opposite.  I say that to affirm that story, to claim that this suffering is part of some deity’s grand scheme of good, or to say that it will be some day redeemed or made right, this deprives that suffering of meaning.  Only by recognizing the great magnitude of evil that our own failings as a race have allowed to happen will the meaning of that suffering emerge; only by owning these sins, and learning from them, will that suffering and those sins become part of a better future.  Even still, the horrible truth remains: for those that lived and died in suffering, there is only suffering.

It has been said by some, ironically, that “Freedom is Slavery.”  I say that this is true, and its converse too.  The slavery of religion brings freedom from responsibility; to be a servant of God is to be free from the responsibility for the evil that occurs in the world, to be free from the eternal sorrow at the irredeemable suffering that has already occurred.  To be a servant of God is much like being a “citizen” of the Chinese state; it is the obligation of God the Messiah, or the state, to provide justice and judgment, peace and heroism, in the end.  It is not for the Christian or Chinese slave to question the directives of his master; his duty is only to obey, no matter to what atrocities this may lead.

Freedom is slavery.  To reject these doctrines, that someone else, some other power, will save us and provide for us, is to be burdened with a responsibility that the weak-minded think so awesome that they assign it to super-human entities.  In a way, our responsibility as free people is even greater than that which the Christians assign to their God… we must not only make the good real, we must first learn what it is… God has the fortune of already knowing this.  But once knowing the good, it becomes our onerous duty to advance it at every step; every second of leisure, every diversion, is time stolen from the harshest of masters.  For not to advance the right is as great a sin as to advance the wrong.

This Christmas, instead of seeking a new savior in the world, a hero who will bring us peace and justice, let us realize that only we can be such heroes, and the longer we fail to recognize this, the greater are those things we irrevocably lose.

On Bernie Sanders and Tom Coburn

In the Senate today, Bernie Sanders and Tom Coburn got into an altercation over an attempt by Mr. Sanders to insert a single-payer amendment into the healthcare bill.  Mr. Coburn asked that the 767-page amendment, which would have been the ultimate Christmas present for Democrats, and anathema to Republicans, be read aloud on the Senate floor.  According to one reporter, the exercise would have taken eight hours.  This possibility prompted Mr. Sanders to withdraw the amendment, though not without some sharp words for his colleague.

This is part of a larger trend: a major, if subtle, Republican tactic to drum up popular opposition to healthcare reform has been to cite, as frequently and as loudly as possible, the huge numbers of pages of legislation that healthcare reform would consume.  In response, Democratic talking heads have used the Republican complaints about length as an example of the absurd, trite, and insubstantial nature of the Republican opposition to healthcare reform.

So the question: can the length of a bill be sufficient reason for opposing it?  I would like to submit that the answer is yes.  Arcane and lengthy legislation removes power from citizens in a variety of ways.

First, a 767-page amendment is difficult to read.  When Congress publishes thousands of pages of legislation a year, how is the average voting citizen supposed to keep up?  I am all for civic participation, and I would accept the proposition that the average American does not care enough about or invest enough time in the government, but it is simply not reasonable to expect working Americans to come to a considered conclusion about several pages of legalese for each day of the year.  In this way, by making legislation lengthy, it is almost guaranteed that only a tiny minority of the voting public will ever have any direct knowledge of what it contains.  Very few people will be able to perform primary evaluation of the legislation.  Very few people will actually know what it contains.

This forced ignorance of the American public has several pernicious consequences.  First, it is in part responsible for our current culture of partisanship.  When a voter cannot read the legislation, he turns to the news media to inform him.  Thus, by means of several mostly redundant thirty-second soundbites a day, he acquires in his mind a caricature of the legislation.  This image is further distorted by the almost inevitable intentional or unintentional bias of most popular media outlets, ranging from Fox News (intentional) to the New York Times (apparently unintentional).  In the end, the voter is reduced to chanting a slogan – “Healthcare is a right!” or “Universal healthcare is socialism!” – while having a thousand micro-debates on parts of the bill that never make it to the President’s desk, such as the “kill Granny” provision.

The same hapless ignorance that distorts the creation of legislation is also a danger to citizens once the legislation has been passed.  Consider the tax code: a frequent complaint against it is that its complexity enables rich citizens, who can hire lawyers, to make careers out of sifting through the tax code, understanding its complexities and loopholes, and in this way performing legal pirouettes so as to pay less taxes than even the poorest among us.  Meanwhile, the rest of us can never be quite sure that we’re not committing tax fraud – sure, I filed my 1040, but did I spend the extra twenty minutes tracking down Schedule 4149 to make sure that I’m eligible to file just a 1040?

This state of ignorance can be induced by any complex piece of legislation.  For example, suppose that healthcare reform passes: how will you determine what you must do to be in compliance with the law?  Will you read the entire piece of legislation?  Unlikely.  Have you read the entire tax code?  No… if you’re responsible, you’ve probably paid someone else to do your taxes, someone who has the time and resources to understand the tax code, or if you can’t afford this, you’ve done them yourself and hoped for the best.  In just the same way, if healthcare reform passes, the very same insurance companies that are taking your money now to offer you “protection” will switch their packs of lawyers from finding ways of denying you coverage to finding short, snippy tidbits of information they can give you about the new legislation (that come with no guarantees, of course).

In short, complex legislation, regardless of its intended effect, transfers power.  It transfers power from the citizens, who are the ultimate source of the law, to bureaucracies, both governmental and corporate, who have the time and resources to understand complex legislation.  Common citizens, ignorant of the law, are at a disadvantage against these organizations.

This is not an argument against big government.  One can imagine a tax law as simple as a flat tax that would produce the same level of income as the current gargantuan tax code.  One can imagine a brief charter for a governmental healthcare corporation.  This is simply an argument that, no matter one’s political beliefs, in a democratic society, all expression of the law must be comprehensible, so that it is subject to the evaluation of the citizens, because the citizens themselves are ultimately responsible for the justice of their society.

I do not say that complex legislation cannot work under any conditions; a society like China’s is well-suited for complex legislation.  The servile populace, under the iron fist of a sprawling governmental bureaucracy, has no hand in the justice of its own society.  The government, subsuming all power itself, also subsumes all responsibility.  The common Chinese citizen cannot be expected to understand the way his government works; he can only hope that it will be just to him, and reward or punish him according to his deserts.  He gives up his freedom of action and his political voice, and in return, he is freed from the responsibility of helping to provide his society with justice.

How nice it would be if in our country we didn’t have to worry our pretty little heads with understanding laws before they’re passed.  Help make this a reality!

Story of Civilization – IV.xxv.ix – IV.xxvi.iii

In later volumes of The Story of Civilization, France will become a predilection of Durant.  Indeed, if we were to take him as our sole source of history, we would be inclined to the view that we owed nearly all of the graces of modern life to France.

In The Age of Faith, France takes its first strides toward greatness, and in the present section, France experiences its first taste of world preeminence as an independent power.  Philip Augustus, king of France from 1180 to 1223, was primarily responsible for this rise.  The subsequent decline – at least in relative influence – during the Renaissance can probably be attributed to the disastrous kingships of his successors Louix IX, Philip III, and Philip IV.  Philip Augustus conquered new territories for France, Louix IX gave that territory away to appease his neighbors and emptied the treasury for charity, Philip III tried to conquer new territory but failed through misfortune and incompetence, and Philip IV went to war with the Pope, the Jews, and the Templars in an effort to restore the treasury.

The most remarkable of these kings is Louix IX “The Saint”.  The quotation marks are unmerited, as after his death, the Catholic Church made him an official saint.  It is said that when one of his subjects complained that his religious devotion made him unfit to be king, he merely agreed with her, showing the same complaisance that he showed to the hostile neighbors snapping up his territories.  Aside from the money he spent on the poor, he spent vast sums purchasing forged Christians relics (e.g. Jesus’ crown of thorns, miraculously preserved for a millenium) and on two pointless crusades.  The true Christian would not be fit to be a king.

The last several chapters have been a bit of a drag.  Durant has passed through the history of nearly every European country from Portugal and Ireland all the way to Russia, Hungary, and Byzantium, detailing the major political developments in each country from 600 – 1000.  I would dare so almost nothing of great interest happened during these Dark Ages.  Having completed the cycle, Durant has begun it again, reciting the political history from 1000 – 1300.  Can anything be gleaned from this recitation of wars, kings, and laws?

There is one generality that I have observed: most government is monarchy, although the Pope directly controls some areas, and some cities achieve the status of free communes, or even, in some cases, oligarchies (cf. Venice).  Monarchy being the most abundant form of government, Europe of this time experiences it in all gradations from the weak feudal king to the absolute tyrant.  What is interesting is that in not one of these governments – not the strong kings, the weak kings, the communes, nor the oligarchies – not in one is there any mention of divine right.  In this most religious of times, most governments based their claim to power on frankly on might, commercial advantage, or political connection.  Portugal, for example, was the product of a naked power grab by a Burgundian knight, Henry, who was involved in the crusade against the Moors in Spain.  Henry sought independence, and over several generations, the matter was disputed, until it was submitted to the papacy for arbitration.  The Pope initially decided against Portuguese independence, until the Portuguese king offered Portugal as a papal fief.  Under the influence of this bribery, the Pope declared Portugal independent.  In this way Henry, by strength of arms, and the Pope, for political considerations, created a new kingdom.

I find it interesting that not only is God not cited in the political history, but neither is the good of the people.  Between the divine right of kings, and the divinely-granted rights of the people (cf. our own Declaration of Independence), most political theory after 1700 ultimately traced the origins of government back to the rights of either kings or people.  But in the Middle Ages we hear nothing of this.  Perhaps the people of this age were simply more practical, or too busy to care.  In the Middle Ages, as at every other time in history, there were many poor, few rich, and an ambitious middle class; what does the form or shape, of the government matter?  The oligarchy of Venice was the result of a totally illegal move by the merchant class wherein it declared itself alone able to hold Venice’s offices, and then murdered the leaders of the opposition.  Nonetheless, it ruled as well as, if more venally than, any other government of the time.

As a student of political history, and an eternal idealist, I would like to believe that political philosophy, and the ideas underlying a government, matter very much.  The Middle Ages do not support my case nearly so well as the histories of Greece and Rome.  Perhaps the firey idealism and vigorous political cultures of these older civilizations are the reason that, in the popular imagination, history is a vast dross from Caesar to George Washington.

Story of Civilization – IV.xxii.iii – IV.xxv.viii

Herein, among other subjects, are discussed the Crusades.  In hindsight, the Crusades were, simply put, one of the most magnificent follies of the Middle Ages.

The easiest aspect of the Crusades to criticize is their misdirection.  Nominally, the purpose of the Crusades was to capture and defend Jerusalem, the holy city wherein Christ had preached and died.  In actuality, few of the Crusades ever reached Jerusalem, and most of them caused much more damage to other towns and peoples along the way.  Beginning with the very first preaching of crusade, crusaders persecuted the Jews that they ran across and destroyed towns in their paths.  In the Fourth Crusade, this behavior culminated in the conquest of Byzantium, and the establishment of Western-ruled feudal domains there.  Although some diversions, such as the sieges of Antioch and Damascus, were the results of strategic considerations, most of the Crusades simply failed to reach Jerusalem, diverted by riches or disorganization.

From a sociological perspective, this turn of events seems hardly surprising.  Take a large group of men, give them arms, and put them among foreign peoples and far away from home, with empty bellies and no money.  What is the expected result?  That the armed men will ask the foreigners around them for jobs so that they can earn their bread?  The end of the Crusades could have been predicted by one who knew no history.

More remarkable than the Crusades of men, which resulted in slaughter typical of the Middle East, i.e. the massacre of the entire populations of Antioch, Jerusalem, and other cities, was the Children’s Crusade.  According to the popular telling, a boy named Nicholas led 30,000 children from Germany over the Alps into Italy, preaching that the waters would part for them, allowing them to walk to Jerusalem and peaceably convert the Moslems to Christianity.  Instead, many died traversing the Alps, and upon reaching the sea, the people dispersed.  Another, similar crusade led by a child ended in ignominious failure when greedy merchants gathered the children onto ships and sold them into slavery in Africa.  Such events would truly be remarkable, if they had actually happened.

Of course, in reading these stories, one thinks them incredible, literally, and in fact-checking with Wikipedia my commentary about the other Crusades, I stumbled across the modern theory that the Children’s Crusades were completely misunderstood by medieval historians.  The explanation is essentially that the Latin word for child was also a pejorative slang term for a poor, rural peasant (think “country boy”), and that in actuality, these crusades were composed not of children, but of dispossessed poor.  This explanation has the ring of truth; what is remarkable in the end is the child-like credulousness with which Durant treats the story.

The primary explication of the modern theory is here, but unfortunately is not yet free; a web search for Raedts will presumably yield more detailed information.

We can never know what facts of our own era will be laughed at tomorrow.

Story of Civilization – IV.xx.vi – IV.xxii.ii

Chapter XXII is primarily an overview of life in feudal Europe from 600 to 1200.  In many ways these years were truly the heart of the Dark Ages.  Technological and cultural progress were at a minimum.  Even monasteries did naught but preserve the writings of previous ages.  Religion exercised an iron grip over what little time there was for thought amid toil and barbarian violence.  All in all, it does not seem to have been a fun time to be alive.

And yet, Durant sees a great accomplishment in this period.  The toil of the Dark Ages, he says, produced modern Europe.  The relentless fight against drought and famine, the impositions of the corvée (forced labor by peasants for the construction of public works, such as the drainage of marshes or the building of roads), and especially the discipline brought to these works by monastic labor all made what was once a jungle into a hospitable farmland.  How to test Durant’s assertion?  If all the industry of the medieval peasant was constructive, we would expect the amount of population that the land of medieval Europe could support to have increased from 600 to 1200.  Wikipedia be praised, this appears to be true: extremely rough estimates suggest that the population of medieval Europe may have tripled over this time period.  This is a massive expansion, and must have required much development, or much additional infrastructure to support so many more people.

Two important caveats exist.  First, the population at the start of the period was a minimum caused by plague and the devastation of what infrastructure had supported larger populations during the Roman Empire.  Second, the population at the end of the period was at a maximum that would precipitate Malthusian revenge, which is to say that it exceeded the capacity of the land to support it.

I am inclined to think, however, that these caveats do not substantially weaken the overall point, and that the expansion of population did indicate an expansion of the ability of the land to support people.  Speculation on demography is based in part on numbers of settled villages and similar statistics.  The abandonment of a settlement is not necessarily the result of a failure of the land… particularly considering the Black Death, if a village was wiped out, there would be nothing to prevent people from moving right back in and living off of that land, technically speaking.  The success of a Malthusian element like the Black Death may owe as much to the vicissitudes of bacterial evolution as to the inevitability of the Malthusian cycle.  It may, to be sure, have been triggered by the population’s achieving a critical mass that could not be safely exceeded without advances in public health, but again, the lack of public health infrastructure does not mean that the infrastructure that had been developed, in terms of drained marshes, cleared forests, cultivated land, drilled mines and wells, etc., was in any way flawed or unimportant… it’s just that public health was a rate-limiting component to advancement.  If clean water, vermin control, and well-spaced dwellings had been instituted before all of these other developments, the population crash might have come from famine, or more likely, the sort of standard of living-induced decline seen in Europe today.

Seen from this perspective, Durant may very well be right that modern Europe owes much to the toil of the Dark Ages.  Durant’s term for the period, “The Age of Faith”, is not so pejorative as it may seem at first blush.  What faith in the future it must have taken to perform such exhausting labor.  What faith to invest so much for the sake of generations to come!  What faith in the goodness and desserts of future men!

The Prince of Darkness Speaks

Rupert Murdoch has used his latest corrupted acquisition, the Wall Street Journal, to make public his beliefs about the future of journalism.  He appears to be setting the stage for a deal between News Corporation and Microsoft wherein Microsoft pays News Corp. to prevent its stories from being aggregated by Google.  News Corp. wins by making money, and Microsoft wins by getting customers to look at its new Bing search engine, which has exclusive access to many of News Corporation’s wildly popular holdings, such as the Wall Street Journal.

I must admit that I half agree with Murdoch.  There’s no reason he shouldn’t be able to make an arrangement like this, and no reason the government should have anything to say about it.  Google has essentially been stealing Murdoch’s content, and turning the traffic that it generates into revenue.  Furthermore, as Murdoch says, the model is unsustainable.  In short, Murdoch’s absolutely right that the arithmetic does not work; current journalistic enterprises will not be able to generate enough revenue from their current business model to cover the costs of producing content.  And it’s not the government’s job to fix this.

But how, precisely, does Murdoch plan to fix the problem without help from the government?  My guess is that if a consumer can get from Bing to a Wall Street Journal story without spending any money, a Google computer can too.  Ultimately, the only thing standing between Google and the Wall Street Journal is the law, and those who currently decry the mean old law stopping them from doing things they want to do will soon be seeking the protection of intellectual property law.

Murdoch asserts that in the end, news consumers are smart enough to know that news isn’t free, and that if they want value, they’ll have to pay for it.  If Murdoch ever watched Fox News, he’d know that most of his holdings are mere memetic masturbatory organs, and consumers are smart enough NOT to pay for that.  Just because a million people watch a program doesn’t mean the ideas in that program are new or that the people presenting them invented them.  Just Monday, Glenn Beck spent nearly an entire episode rehashing the work of Andrew Breitbart.  Why should Fox be making money for that?

In the long run, everyone will get their just desserts… but some people will be surprised to be eating crap sandwiches instead of money pie.

You heard it here first – Friedman on Cheney

In Thomas Friedman’s Wednesday column in the New York Times, he reiterates a point that I made several months ago: climate change and nuclear proliferation present similarly grave threats to humanity’s future on Earth.  Furthermore, as Dick Cheney apparently preceded both of us in pointing out, the catastrophic nature of certain potential outcomes from climate change or nuclear proliferation, even if such outcomes are unlikely, makes preparation for – or aversion of – those outcomes imperative.

Dick Cheney, of course, was merely using the “one percent doctrine”, as Ron Suskind called it, as an excuse for doing whatever he wanted.  What’s shocking is Cheney’s inability to see that his own argument applies to global warming.  How can so many people who believe we should hunt terrorists to the ends of the Earth just to avoid the small possibility of a nuclear attack not believe that we should convert to a green economy to avoid the small possibility that humanity will be wiped out by extreme weather?  The reverse question applies, too: how can so many environmentalists not believe every person entering the United States should undergo a full body cavity search, or that we should occupy every nation that even might be harboring terrorists?

Is it possible that people just don’t understand the one percent doctrine?  My own previous explanation may have gotten lost in verbiage, so here’s a simpler way of thinking about it.  Suppose you have a farm with a thousand apple trees.  If you lose more than five hundred trees in a given year, you will go out of business.  Now suppose there was a pestilence going about, and you estimated that there was a ten percent chance that you would lose a hundred trees… would it make sense to buy insurance, at slightly unfair odds, against the pestilence?  No, because even if it hit, you would only lose a hundred trees, and you could just hope to have better luck next year.  But what if there was a two percent chance that you would lose five hundred trees?  Then it would make sense to buy insurance, even if the odds were slightly unfair, because you’d want to avoid the possibility of going out of business.

In just the same way, nuclear proliferation and climate change call for an aggressive response.  Sure, the recent revelations of fraudulent scientific activity cast doubt on years of global warming research, but to the average citizen, shouldn’t it appear that there’s at least a chance that there’s enough other research out there to indicate that global warming is real to justify action?  If there’s a one percent chance that the scientists aren’t lying, don’t we have to take the threat to humanity’s existence seriously?

The Prisoner: The General

“The General” is a broad-based satire of modern education. It mocks deconstruction and examines the shortcomings introduced into education by the necessity of educating huge numbers of people.

There is much in “The General” to suggest a desire for a return to a study of the classics and the Great Books.  In several places, “The General” criticizes modern education, represented by the Village’s Speedlearn program, as empty.  “Finding things a bit strange?” the Professor’s wife asks Number Six.  “That is the trouble,” he replies, “I can’t find anything at all.”  When he steals into her house, he enters a tastefully decorated room filled with draped busts.  One is inclined to suspect that they are Greek or Roman, but when Number Six removes the drapery, we are surprised to find that they are busts of the leaders of the Village.  In other words, the leaders of the modern educational movement idolize only themselves, and not the great thinkers of the past.  Finally, the question that Number Six uses to destroy the General (which turns out to be a computer) is simply “Why?”  He asserts that no machine can answer this question, nor any human.  All of these examples point to a thesis that education ought not merely to fill our heads with science and the sterile literature of today’s educated class, but instead to teach us true art, to expose us to things that stir the soul and suggest where we might find meaning.

One scene, in which Number Six inquires of the Professor’s wife why a student is standing on his head (“to gain a new perspective”) reminds us that satire of education is an old art.  Recall a similar scene from Aristophanes’ Clouds.  Strepsiades is examining Socrates’ “Thoughtery of wise souls”:

Strepsiades: …[W]hat are those fellows doing, bent all double?
Disciple: They are sounding the abysses of Tartarus.
Strepsiades: Why do their rumps point toward heaven?
Disciple: They’re being taught astronomy too.

The hollowness of modern education is further examined with “Speedlearning” itself.  Speedlearning’s motto is “100 percent entry, 100 percent pass.”  In just fifteen seconds, Speedlearning enables all of the citizens of the Village learn a complete college course in history, and they can then go about quoting to each other facts about the Boer Wars.  The knowledge turns out to be shallow, though; the citizens know the rote facts, but they attach no meaning to them.  When Number Twelve, a sneaky rebel, asks Number Six, who has just finished the Speedlearning course, “What was the Treaty of Adrianople?” Number Six responds “September, 1829”.  The students of Speedlearning are unable to adapt the facts they have learned to new situations.

I think there is much value in this satire.  We live in an amazing age.  The Earth is more populous than ever before, so much so that up to six percent of all people ever born are walking the Earth today.  Literacy and the availability of accumulated written wisdom are both more widespread, and reaching far greater absolute numbers of people, than at all previous points in history.  Despite all this, the student of history knows that the behavior of people today is not substantially different from the behavior of the uneducated masses of forgotten eras.  We are still subject to xenophobia, jingoism, manipulation, greed, and religion.  How can this be, given the nearly free availability of knowledge?  The failure cannot be in anything but the agents we have chosen to disperse that knowledge, educators who have seen fit to mock and destroy the accumulated wisdom of ages.

For those fortunate enough to have studied the classics, some secrets are known.  Plato could not teach us to be wise, but he at least filled us with a desire to be wise.  He could not teach us the truth, but he at least assured us that it existed.  What is the ignorance and denial of modern America but a complete escape from the desire to know, and the belief in absolute truth?  We see in the anti-intellectualism, the anti-scientific movement, and the race for wealth only the simple fact that people have not been taught to strive for goodness and wisdom.