Tag: history

Complexity and the fall of empires I

Ugo Bardi has a fascinating post on the way in which Rome hit its limits and how even those Romans who perceived its decline failed to understand why it was happening:

The Meditations [of Marcus Aurelius] is a statement from a man who was seeing his world crumbling down around him and who strove nevertheless to maintain a personal balance; to keep a moral stance. Aurelius surely understood that something was wrong with the Empire: during all their history, the Romans had been almost always on the offensive. Now, they were always defending themselves. That wasn’t right; of course.

But you never find in the Meditations a single line that lets you suspect that the Emperor thought that there was something to be done other than simply fighting to keep the barbarians out. You never read that the Emperor was considering, say, things like social reform, or maybe something to redress the disastrous situation of the economy. He had no concern, apparently, that the Empire could actually fall one day or another.

Now, I’d like to show you an excerpt from another document; written perhaps by late 4th century. Probably after the battle of Adrianopolis; that was one of last important battles fought (and lost) by the Roman Empire. This is a curious document. It is called, normally, “Of matters of war” because the title and the name of the author have been lost. But we have the bulk of the text and we can say that the author was probably somebody high up in the imperial bureaucracy. Someone very creative – clearly – you can see that from the illustrations of the book. Of course what we see now are not the original illustrations, but copies made during the Middle Ages. But the fact that the book had these illustration was probably what made it survive: people liked these colorful illustrations and had the book copied. So it wasn’t lost. The author described all sorts of curious weaponry. One that you can see here is a warship powered by oxen.

Of course, a ship like this one would never have worked. Think of how to feed the oxen. And think of how to manage the final results of feeding the oxen. Probably none of the curious weapons invented by our anonymous author would ever have worked. It all reminds me of Jeremy Rifkin and his hydrogen based economy. Rifkin understands what is the problem, but the solutions he proposes, well, are a little like the end result of feeding the oxen; but let me not go into that. The point is that our 4th century author does understand that the Roman Empire is in trouble. Actually, he seems to be scared to death because of what’s happening. Read this sentence, I am showing it to you in the original Latin to give you a sense of the flavor of this text.

“In primis sciendum est quod imperium romanum circumlatrantium ubique nationum perstringat insania et omne latus limitum tecta naturalibus locis appetat dolosa barbaries.”

Of course you may not be able to translate from Latin on the spot. For that, being Italian gives you a definite advantage. But let me just point out a word to you:”circumlatrantium” . which refers to barbarians who are, literally, “barking around” the empire’s borders. They are like dogs barking and running around; and not just barking – they are trying hard to get in. It is almost a scene from a horror movie. A nightmare. So the author of “Of matters of war” is thinking of how to get rid of these monsters. But his solutions were not so good. Actually it was just wishful thinking. None of these strange weapons were ever built. Even our 4th century author, therefore, fails completely in understanding what were the real problems of the Empire.

Now, I would like to show you just another document from the time of the Roman Empire. It is “De Reditu suo”, by Rutilius Namatianus. The title means “of his return”. Namatianus was a patrician who lived in the early 5th century; he was a contemporary of St. Patrick, the Irish saint. He had some kind of job with the imperial administration in Rome. It was some decades before the “official” disappearance of the Western Roman Empire; that was in 476, when the last emperor, Romolus Augustulus, was deposed. You may have seen Romulus Augustulus as protagonist of the movie “The Last Legion”. 1Of course that is not a movie that pretends to be historically accurate, but it is fun to think that after so many years we are still interested in the last years of the Roman Empire – it is a subject of endless fascination. Even the book by Namatianus has been transformed into a movie, as you can see in the figure. It is a work of fantasy, but they have tried to be faithful to the spirit of Namatianus’ report. It must be an interesting movie, but it has been shown only in theaters in Italy, and even there for a very short time; so I missed it. But let’s move on.

Namatianus lived at a time that was very close to the last gasp of the Empire. He found that, at some point, it wasn’t possible to live in Rome any longer. Everything was collapsing around him and he decided to take a boat and leave. He was born in Gallia, that we call “France” today, and apparently he had some properties there. So, that is where he headed for. That is the reason for the title “of his return”. He must have arrived there and survived for some time, because the document that he wrote about his travel has survived and we can still read it, even though the end is missing. So, Namatianus gives us this chilling report. Just read this excerpt:

“I have chosen the sea, since roads by land, if on the level, are flooded by rivers; if on higher ground, are beset with rocks. Since Tuscany and since the Aurelian highway, after suffering the outrages of Goths with fire or sword, can no longer control forest with homestead or river with bridge, it is better to entrust my sails to the wayward.”

Can you believe that? If there was a thing that the Romans had always been proud of were their roads. These roads had a military purpose, of course, but everybody could use them. A Roman Empire without roads is not the Roman Empire, it is something else altogether. Think of Los Angeles without highways. “Sic transit gloria mundi” , as the Romans would say; there goes the glory of the world. Namatianus tells us also of silted harbors, deserted cities, a landscape of ruins that he sees as he moves north along the Italian coast.

But what does Namatianus think of all this? Well, he sees the collapse all around him, but he can’t understand it. For him, the reasons of the fall of Rome are totally incomprehensible…. There would be much more to say on this matter, but I think it is enough to say that the Romans did not really understand what was happening to their Empire, except in terms of military setbacks that they always saw as temporary. They always seemed to think that these setbacks could be redressed by increasing the size of the army and building more fortifications. Also, it gives us an idea of what it is like living a collapse “from the inside”. Most people just don’t see it happening – it is like being a fish: you don’t see the water.

What Bardi’s illustration of complex system dynamics and decline make very clear is that Robert Prechter is almost surely correct and collapse is not only unavoidable, but we are already firmly into the decline. One need merely look at the decaying state of American infrastructure to see an echo of the decline of Roman roads; travel is still safe but that may not be the case in another century.

The most important thing to draw from Bardi’s article is the realization that most people, including those at the very top, will find the process incomprehensible and whatever policies are taken will prove to be irrelevant and pointless. As with companies, it is the success of the great societies that sows the seeds of their eventual failure, with Rome it was the limits of legionary utility, with the USA it is more likely to be the limits of trade and immigration utility. It is the continued reliance upon that which made a society strong that tends to prove ultimately fatal because nothing proceeds on linear paths.

One thing the discussion with the free traders has taught me is that most Americans can no more grasp the idea that too much trade is possible any more than most Romans could understand that too much farming or too many legions were possible. After all, those two pillars of the Roman economy were the historical basis of Rome’s original enrichment, so how could a source of enrichment ever prove to be a source of impoverishment, let alone societal decline?

I’ll have more thoughts on this in another post tomorrow.

History is freedom

Brandon Smith notes the collectivist hatred for heritage and history:

A distaste or hatred of heritage is very common at the onset of any collectivist restructuring. These restructurings usually target principles of individual liberty and self governance while masquerading as a fight against oppression or corruption. The old principles are either presented as too outdated and insufficient to deal with the new problems of a culture, or, they are presented as the actual SOURCE of the problems of that culture. In either case, the elites wielding the collectivist machine inevitably call for a purge of all bygone ideals.

In Communist China, Mao instituted the Cultural Revolution, which encouraged the mindlessly mesmerized collectivists in the Chinese populace to destroy everything which represented the past. Artwork, buildings, historical artifacts, books; even teachers and proponents of any brand of pre-communist heritage were targeted.

In Fascist Germany, the Nazis destroyed countless books and manuscripts, rewrote German history, censored and removed thousands of artworks, instituting state designated artforms that depicted the collectivist vision of the new society.

In Russia, the Communists focused intently not only on liquidating manuscripts extolling the methods of different eras, but also the people who wrote them. Under Lenin and Stalin, the goal was to annihilate the memory of the world before, even if it meant annihilating the masses along with it.

A complete reformation of educational infrastructure came next. The children of the collectivist age had to be indoctrinated as if there had never been another way of doing things.

These purges, as numerous examples have shown, are only temporary. The great conundrum for the elites has not only been the obstacle of memory, but the obstacle of the soul; that inherent quality in human beings that compels us to pursue freedom, balance, and truth, regardless of the constraints of our environment. The documents and remnants of heritage that oligarchs seek to destroy are ultimately only expressions of our inborn consciences. Deep down in each person, no matter what they have been conditioned to believe, there is a well-spring of vital ideas that conflict with the mechanizations of collectivism. Individualism finds a way to surface, and so, the central rulers must start over once again, looking for an insurmountable method of control.

I’d never associated my love of history with my intellectual affinity for human liberty. I’d merely regarded history as a useful tool for potentially avoiding past mistakes. But it is true, the totalitarian thirst for eliminating and creatively rewriting history does tend to lend some credence to the idea that the knowledge of history is important, perhaps even integral to understanding and upholding human freedom. The goal of the totalitarian is always stasis, which involves not only destroying the future and turning it into a facsimile of the present, but the past as well.

This seemed apt

I thought this comment at In Mala Fide was particularly on target in light of the ongoing discussion at Wängsty’s place:

Jonathan Haidt has shown that most liberals are simply people who only care about care/harm and fairness, while discounting loyalty, respect for authority, and purity/sanctity. For liberals there are no transcendent moral values, only utility and fairness. Furthermore, other scholars have found that most people tend to rely less on those latter three moral foundations when they are comfortable and safe. Which means that liberalism is the natural and spontaneous result of living in a safe and prosperous society. Haidt has also found that liberals can’t even understand loyalty, respect for authority and purity/sanctity. So they tend to think their political opponents are just being massive dicks.

The landmark performance of the National Front in France yesterday makes it very clear that conventional left-liberalism can’t survive economic hard times. As unemployment continues to rise and economic pressure intensifies, people will quite naturally become far less indulgent of the various absurdities that the Left continues to push on the populations of the West. It’s simply not credible to argue “immigration is good for the economy” when the youth unemployment rate is north of 50 percent and 50 percent of college graduates are either unemployed or working at jobs for which their degrees are absolutely unnecessary.

History has always been cyclical and it is not different this time. I pointed out that peak atheism corresponded pretty closely with the tech boom, and I think it is safe to conclude that we have likely passed the peak of social liberalism and multiculturalism as well. The problem, of course, is that while some left-liberals will return to sanity, many more will move to the hard left, or what the Communists call “the fascist right” and all of the violence that necessarily entails.

It’s worth noting that according to Haidt, the only arguments to which liberals are likely to convincing are utility-based. You’ll note that those are the sorts of arguments upon which I tend to heavily rely when engaging in discourse with them.

The end of the Holocult

Germany is finally rejecting the self-serving religion of collective ethnic responsibility for historical crimes:

Sharp criticism of Israel, particularly from the left, has long been a tradition among European intellectuals, and Mr. Grass’s poem caused little stir on the Continent outside of Germany. But political and scholarly elites here have more often resisted that trend, tending to see basic support for Israel as a German responsibility, if not a necessity, after the Holocaust.

But the public response to the furor over Mr. Grass’s poem suggests that that attitude is breaking down as World War II recedes into history. “In the populism you see surfacing on a large scale, the public is all behind Grass,” said Georg Diez, an author and journalist at the magazine Der Spiegel who has written critically of the poem.

One needn’t be a Holocaust denier nor an anti-semite to recognize the fundamental absurdity of the “Never Again” cult. After all, there is no more justification to hold the Germans of today responsible for the large-scale slaughter of the Polish and Russian Jews sixty years ago than there was for medieval Christians to hold the Jews of their day responsible for crucifying Jesus.

The Holocaust doesn’t justify anything. It doesn’t justify Jewish paranoia about American Christians, it doesn’t justify open immigration, it doesn’t justify Israeli aggression in the Middle East, it doesn’t justify American aggression in the Middle East, and it certainly doesn’t justify the neocon willingness to sacrifice American interests for Israeli ones. The Holocaust was just one of the many bloody historical tragedies that illustrate the fallen state of Man, and it wasn’t even unique at the time given the Nazi slaughter of the Slavs, the Soviet slaughter of the Ukrainians, and the Japanese slaughter of the Chinese that all took place during the same historical milieu.

Nor is it necessary to justify the existence of Israel. Israel has the same right to defend itself that every other nation does. Israel has the same right to exist that every other nation does. Israel is neither a saintly nation that can do no wrong nor an evil fascist state that can do no right. It’s just a small nation-state that is both praised and criticized to a degree that greatly exceeds what its actions merit.

Now, despite the best efforts of Hollywood’s Jews to preserve it as a useful propaganda device, people are increasingly beginning to abandon the iconic notion of collective ethnic responsibility for past events. This is in part due to immigration, as I doubt any of the 50 million Central and South Americans now resident in the United States feel any more residual guilt for the Holocaust than they do for 19th century slavery or the Mongol invasions. But it’s also due to the perspective that the passage of time always eventually brings.

It’s hard to believe in the historical uniqueness of the Holocaust in the light of the Killing Fields of Cambodia and the massacres in Rwanda. It’s even harder to believe that the National Socialists were viciously attacking completely innocent scapegoats for absolutely no reason in light of how the members of an ethnic group that comprises only 2.1 percent of the U.S. population are now massively overrepresented in the House and Senate, at 6.2 percent and 13 percent respectively. And while the Federal Reserve isn’t doing anything it hasn’t been doing since 1913, it probably doesn’t greatly help the Jewish cause that Ben Shalom Bernanke is the individual now presiding over a particularly problematic stage for the US fiat currency.

Anyhow, my thought is that if a small and distinctive group of people want to band together and acquire as much political power as possible, they had damned well better be sure to do a good job of running things for the benefit of everyone, not merely their own particular interests, because if they’re simply going to play the interest group game, eventually the majority or one of the larger minority groups is going to band together and do whatever is necessary to throw them out of power and keep them out. The fact that the two primary interests of the U.S. Congress presently appear to be a) sending trillions to Wall Street and b) supporting Israeli foreign policy does not bode well in this regard, as it suggests that there is a small, but real risk that if the U.S. economy crashes and the nation begins to divide on its ethnic fault lines, even Americans may eventually find themselves casting about for an all-too-familiar scapegoat.

The voice of the failed revolutionary

It is truly amazing to see how many revolutionaries are historically clueless intellectual totalitarians, regardless of whether they are socialist, communist, democratic, religious, or secular revolutionaries. It underlines the fact of how unusual the American revolution was:

One of the biggest mistakes of this revolution, and there are plenty to go around, was that we allowed its political aspects to overshadow the cultural and social aspects. We have unleashed a torrent of art, music and creativity, and we don’t celebrate or enjoy it, or even promote it. We have brought the people to a point where they were ready to change. To change who they are and how they act, and we ignored that and instead focused all of our energies in a mismanaged battle over the political direction of this country. We clashed with the military, and we forgot the people, and we let that small window that shows up maybe every 100 years where a nation is willing to change, to evolve, to go to waste. Even the work that was being done, it focused on teaching them their political rights, or superficial behavioral things like “don’t litter” or “don’t break traffic laws”, and nothing regarding respecting the women or the people from other faiths that share this cursed land. Wasn’t a priority back then, because in our arrogance and hubris we assumed that people will change by themselves. That they will act right, despite the fact that throughout the history of humanity, there wasn’t a single proof that people, by themselves, will act right. Sorry everyone, we were arrogant and idealistic. Forgive us.

Now, this Egyptian revolutionary is obviously much more decent than some. One doesn’t get the idea that he is willing, let alone eager, to kill anyone in order to make them “act right”. But it underlines the point that I have repeatedly made with regards to the atheist tendency to commit mass slaughter once in power; every revolutionary has to make a choice once he reaches a position of sufficient power and learns, to his historically ignorant astonishment, that the mass of people are simply not going to go along with his plans for them.

The dreadful reality of history is that there are few governments so bad that they cannot be made much worse by a revolution. And in the very rare instance of the non-totalitarian revolutionary, the great majority of intellectuals and people alike tend to regard them as a combination of naive and crazy. This is why Ron Paul’s libertarian revolution, regardless of its merits, is unlikely to succeed. Which, of course, does not mean that it is not a worthy one.

Those who don’t know history

One of the most startling things about reading Rothbard’s An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought is how old many of the issues presently being discussed today are. Consider the following passage in light of the FOMC meeting today:

Josiah Child’s pamphlet and his testimony before Parliament were centrepieces of the debate swirling around the proposal. Child’s critics pointed out effectively that low interest in a country is the effect of plentiful savings and of prosperity, and not their cause. Thus, Edward Waller, during the House of Commons debate, pointed out that ‘it is with money as it is with other commodities, when they are most plentiful then they are cheapest, so make money [savings] plentiful and the interest will be low’. Colonel Silius Titus pressed on to demonstrate that, since low interest is the consequence and not the cause of wealth, any maximum usury law would be counterproductive: for by outlawing currently legal loans, ‘its effect would be to make usurers call in their loans. Traders would be ruined, and mortgages foreclosed; gentlemen who needed to borrow would be forced to break the law….’

Child feebly replied to his critics that usurers would never not lend their money, that they were forced to take the legal maximum or lump it. On the idea that low interest was an effect not a cause, Child merely recited the previous times that English government had forced interest lower, from 10 to 8 to 6 per cent. Why not then a step further? Child, of course, did not deign to take the scenario further and ask why the state did not have the power to force the interest rate down to zero.

Notice that these critics of artificially low interest rates already knew in 1668 what Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve still deny today. Force interest rates too low and the result will not be an increase in loans and subsequent business activity, but a rather reduction in the number of loans, decreasing business activity, and even an increase in the number of mortgage foreclosures.

It’s hardly possible to claim that the outcome was unforeseeable, much less some sort of black swan, when it was foreseen 342 years ago, more than 100 years before Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations. I cannot recommend APHET enough. It is the absolute gold standard of economic history and I have been astonished how many of the core concepts I was taught were developed decades after Adam Smith actually preceded the man by centuries. And I finally understand why Schumpeter thought rather more highly of Turgot than Smith in his excellent History of Economic Analysis. I haven’t finished APHET yet, but I have already learned more economic history from this monumental two-volume work than I did from the works of Friedman, Schumpeter, and Hayek combined.

In related news, the Federal Reserve announced the following: “The Committee also decided to keep the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and currently anticipates that economic conditions–including low rates of resource utilization and a subdued outlook for inflation over the medium run–are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels for the federal funds rate at least through mid-2013.”

And by “exceptionally low”, they actually mean “artificially low”, you understand. It seems relevant to cite the way Rothbard noted that the anticipated bankruptcies and mortgage foreclosures weren’t the only expected result from the forced lowering of the interest rate.

Even more revealing was Child’s reply to the charge of the author of Interest of Money Mistaken that Child was trying to ‘engross all trade into the hands of a few rich merchants who have money enough of their own to trade with, to the excluding of all young men that want it’. Child replied to that shrewd thrust that, on the contrary, his East India Company was not in need of a low rate since it could borrow as much money as it pleased at 4 per cent. But that of course is precisely the point. Sir Josiah Child and his ilk were eager to push down the rate of interest below the free market level in order to create a shortage of credit, and thereby to ration credit to the prime borrowers – to large firms who could afford to pay 4 per cent or less and away from more speculative borrowers. It was precisely because Child knew full well that a forced lowering of interest rates would indeed ‘engross all trade into the hands of a few rich merchants’ that Child and his colleagues were so eager to put this mercantilist measure into effect.

Translation: if you’re concerned about growing income inequality, then you should support higher interest rates, not rates that the central bank has artificially forced down to zero.

Mailvox: the Muslim myth

The aptly named Sub Specie has fallen for a common legend believed by many of the half-educated and historically illiterate:

“If it weren’t for the goddamn Muslims, we wouldn’t have great ancient literature!!! They preserved it for us, you know. Oh, fcuk, no, you didn’t know…did you? Not only did they preserve all that s#it, but they contributed so much to math, medicine and science (ironically while Europe was a chaotic s#ithole full of rotting bodies).”

It’s always interesting to receive what apparently is intended as a history lesson from someone who quite clearly knows nothing of the Eastern Roman Empire. The idea of “the Arab transmission of the classics” is false, as should be readily apparent to those who are aware that most of the ancient works lost to the West were “discovered” in conquered Spain, not the Middle East. Moreover, it is obvious that the Muslims did not contribute much of their own in the interim period when they possessed the Greek classics and the post-imperial Latins did not.

“The Arab transmission of the classics is a common and persistent myth that Arabic commentators such as Avicenna and Averroes ‘saved’ the work of Aristotle and other Greek philosophers from destruction. According to the myth, these works would otherwise have perished in the long European dark age between fifth and the tenth centuries, had the Islamic philosophers not preserved them by translating them into Arabic, to be passed on to the Latin philosophers in the West after the reconquest of Spain from the Muslims during the twelve and thirteenth centuries. This is incorrect. It was actually the Byzantines in the East who saved the ancient learning of the Greeks in the original language, and the first Latin texts to be used were translation from the Greek, in the 12th century, rather than, in most cases, the Arabic, which were only used in default of these. “

The danger of Wikipedia

The nice thing about Wikipedia is that you can always find a quote for every subject. The dangerous thing about it is that you can easily find yourself applying such quotes incorrectly when you clearly don’t know a damn thing about the subject:

The easy thing now might be to proclaim that debt is evil and ask everyone — consumers, the federal government, state governments — to get thrifty. The pithiest version of that strategy comes from Andrew W. Mellon, the Treasury secretary when the Depression began: “Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate,” Mellon said, according to his boss, President Herbert Hoover. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system.”

History, however, has a different verdict. If governments stop spending at the same time that consumers do, the economy can enter a vicious cycle, as it did in Hoover’s day.

The minor point that David Leonhardt omitted from his article is the small fact that Hoover didn’t listen to Mellon. Mellon’s strategy was never enacted. Hoover overrode the objections of his “liquidationist” Secretary of the Treasury and embarked upon a spending program that was increased faster, in percent of GDP, than anything that FDR subsequently did. The failure of Herbert Hoover was not a failure of austerity, it was the same failure of Keynesian interventionism that FDR repeated.

There are 112 comments from the educated readers of the New York Times following the article. Not a single one points out this fundamental error. So, it appears that the old adage about those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it is more than a little applicable to the present situation.

Calvin Coolidge on the 4th

Chad the Elder highlights an important historical speech by one of the greatest American presidents:

“Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man…are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions…Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish.”

He also observes that the Declaration’s principles are final, not to be discarded in the name of progress. To deny the truth of human equality, or inalienable rights, or government by consent is not to go forward but backward—away from self-government, from individual rights, from the belief in the equal dignity of every human being….

We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first…If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things which are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed. We must keep replenished, that they may glow with a more compelling flame, the altar fires before which they worshipped.”

This illuminates the great blunder of the self-styled “rational materialists”. Because they know nothing of history, they assume that the fruits of Christendom are its foundations. Christianity alone did not create the freedom and subsequent wealth of the West, but it was one of the most important elements. And without that element, without a population steeped in that element, it is logically apparent that the fruits of it will gradually wither, one by one.

Coolidge was merely recognizing a truth that was equally obvious to the Founding Fathers and astute visitors such as de Tocqueville alike. The concept of “Progress”, which itself is an evil fruit of a 19th century Christian heresy, is nothing more than a descending return to the historical norms of impoverished slaves forcibly ruled by an immoral and unaccountable elite.