The Versatile Blogger Award is a casual honor, bestowed by any one blogger onto whomever else that blogger deems worthy. I have mine thanks (lots of thanks!) to SodStar, over at her eponymous blog: http://sly0208.wordpress.com/. The Versatile Blogger Award comes with certain obligations which, as I know them, are as follows: 1) the recipient is to attach the image you see here to his acceptance post; 2) the recipient is to post 7 random facts about himself; 3) the recipient is to nominate other recently-discovered blogs. (This is similar to a game of blogger tag that was going around a few years back.) I happily accept the award and will gratefully fulfill the attendant obligations, but oh the chaos into which this simple nomination has thrown poor Alamanach! I almost don’t know what to do.

To explain the problem that faces me, I need to start with, of all things, the 2012 presidential election. There is a certain candidate on the Republican side who has been sharing his views on immigration, Israel, and various other issues of the day. (If I wanted to, I could identify him by name, and then either praise him to the skies or lambast him, and either would probably yield me hundreds or thousands of hits. But if this were that kind of blog, then the half dozen of you who follow me, wouldn’t.) I dislike him as a candidate and would not want him as president not because of his particular stance on any of those issues, but because of a lack (so far as I can see) of a unifying vision, a lack of an underlying philosophy that guides his thinking. In any enterprise, it is very valuable to have some fundamental assumptions, some operating principles that inform our approach to the various practical work that we seek to do. For example, Ronald Reagan had some very clear ideas about capitalism, democracy, human freedom, and God, and from these general ideas he came up with philosophically consistent answers to problems such as the Soviet threat and the air traffic controllers’ strike. One may vehemently disagree with Reagan, but the man had some broad ideas and he tried to follow them.

A different example might be more elucidating. I wrote recently about my aid work in Afghanistan, and the runaway success of one program in particular: http://alamanach.com/2011/11/25/aid-for-labor/. The only difference between that program and the other, unsuccessful ones was the set of ideas that were driving it. My program was based on some very clear notions of freedom, justice, and property rights, and my notions are very different from those of the people managing other programs. A different general philosophy at the outset led to different solutions to the particular issues of the day, with results significant enough for me to write about. Ideas matter. The ideas upon which America was founded resulted in a country so advanced and so prosperous, it actually put people on the Moon. No one before could even dream of such a thing, and America did it. Read Democracy in America if you want to see how incredibly far America has traveled from her values. It stopped being recognizably America decades ago. We are going to have to relearn our founding principles if we are ever to have a great country again.

This has everything to do with blogging. This blog has certain operating assumptions, and I discussed them on the About page:

(T)hese posts… are not about me, or my life, or the funny thing my toddler said while we were driving to the grocery store this afternoon. There are plenty of other blogs that do that; I don’t want to read them and you probably don’t either. While you will sometimes learn a little about me by reading these pages, the emphasis is clearly on other topics. Who I am is not important.

Such have been the assumptions, for better or worse. After four years of doing this, I can state that they are not true: you do want to read those other blogs, and as it turns out, so do I. I like SodStar’s blog. I like some other blogs that I am going to tell you about. It turns out that the baby really did say something funny on the way to the grocery store. That lightweight stuff makes for enjoyable reading, I’m sure it is far easier to write, and it attracts readers. Readers would be nice. But such have been the assumptions, and a small readership has been the result.

Small, but high quality: I see from the comments how smart you readers are, and the genuine value that you get out of the posts I write. That’s more important than racking up numbers on my stats page, and if I have shared any ideas that have stuck with anybody, then the blog has been a worthwhile endeavor. I have started with my assumptions, and I am happy with the result. (And here is as good a place as any for me to publicly thank TiEsQue, the man who cajoled me into starting this blog. Thanks, TSK; you were right.)

So I have my blogging philosophy and I am sticking to it. How I wish we had a presidential candidate who would do the same. My immediate issue of the day right now is that I need to post seven random facts about myself. Ah, but that is in total contradiction to the philosophy! What to do? Such is the chaos into which this simple nomination has thrown poor Alamanach!

OK, I will make you a deal: I will list seven random facts about myself if you allow me to first speculate on the problem with American politics today and the need for a philosophical grounding in all we do. That already being accomplished, here are the seven facts, all of which I am sure you will want to skip:

1. Yes, my IQ is really freaking high. The most careful measurement of it that was ever made involved two one-on-one sessions with a psychometrician, each a few hours long and separated by about a week. I don’t want to give you a number because 1) I’m shy, and 2) The margin of error overlaps the limit of the test; I border on the unmeasurable. They can’t really say what my IQ is. But guys, don’t worry about that. Intelligence, while nice to have, is an overrated commodity. Having it is no guarantee of success, and lacking it is no guarantee of failure. Far more important in life is persistence. The person who knows how to not give up will beat the person with all the brains every single time. Here is maybe the single best piece of advice on worldly success I could give a person: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPnudujlBZI&feature=related. Maybe the biggest mistake in my life came about when I let slip away a woman whom I believed, incorrectly, I could never have. You see something you want, go get it. Also worth considering is this: http://www.birdsnest.com/garcia.htm. IQ doesn’t matter. What is needed, and needed badly, is a man who can get a message to Garcia.
2. I think the Rolling Stones are a better band than the Beatles. In fact, I don’t know how there is even a debate about this. The Stones have the better drummer, the better lead vocalist, the better bass player, and a pair of guitarists who, together, are better than the one other guitarist. (If Lennon was a better singer than Jagger, then show me a demonstration of technical virtuosity equal to Emotional Rescue.) The Stones have been around longer, they have the larger catalog, and they have songs just as good as the best songs of the Beatles. The Beatles have sold more records, but that does not make them better; the Beatles were one of modern mass marketing’s first really successful attempts at brainwashing a whole population into buying something. The Beatles were not a bad band– they were good– but they were not as good as the Rolling Stones.
3. On my web browser, I have the dictionary set as my home page. True.
4. I have a public appearance coming up. I will be attending the World History Association’s 2012 Annual Symposium in Siem Reap, Cambodia,  January 2, 3, and 4. Anyone seeking kisses or assassinations attempts, you now know where and when to be.
5. When I was a kid, I had a really bad fall from my bicycle– the bike and I did three somersaults together– and tore one of my nostrils open. A plastic surgeon had to put my nose back together. Does this mean I have had a nose job? I suppose so.
6. I like riding my bike. I like it like women like chocolate. (Come to think of it, I also like both women and chocolate– but let me not get sidetracked.) I don’t get all kitted out as though I’m in the Tour de France; I’m not, and all that equipment seems pointless to me. I’m not racing for speed or training for exercise or athleticism. I just like riding my bike. I prefer a two-speed bike because all those gears are a hassle. I like fat tires and wide handlebars. I like to have a basket and a back seat, so that I can carry cargo or a person. I’m not in a hurry. If I am, I’ll just peddle faster. I like riding my bike.
7. I recently went almost a year without updating this blog because I have fallen in love, very much in love, with the most wonderful, incredible, amazing woman I have ever known. This is the same woman mentioned in point 1. Dealing with that tectonic shift in my life kept me a little busy, and the ground is, even now, still moving beneath my feet.

So much for the tedium of my dull and uninteresting personal life. On to the nominations. I have three. (There was a fourth, but I lost the link.) In accordance with the rules, these are all blogs I have come across recently. For blogs that have stood the test of time, see my blogroll. In reverse order of the estimated age of the blogger:

• Kayla’s Wonderland by Dranyamalyak first caught my attention with a short story titled Killing You. With a title like that, how could I not be interested? Dranyamalyak has a sizable collection of critics, for reasons I have yet to figure out. She is, if I have inferred correctly, a college student with the sort of rambling, thoughtful blog that one often sees from college students. This sort of thinker is a lot of fun to engage with, and fun to watch. And I really liked that short story.
• Assia’s Kaleidescope by Assia recounts the recipies and adventures of an expatriate living in Singapore. Yes, recipies– my very first blog post mentioned wine, and ever since, WordPress has been pushing me to a bunch of cooking sites. Assia’s background is too complex for me to reliably describe, but it sounds like she’s living a nice life.
• Fr. Ted’s Blog by Fr. Ted, an orthodox priest. He and I got into a lengthy discussion about the morality of incandescent light bulbs, and I disagree with most of the things he says. I’ll certainly defend to the death his right to say it though, and I am happy to nominate him for the Versatile Blogger Award.

If I could, I would nominate SodStar for an award, but since she is the one who nominated me, I have to assume it doesn’t work that way.

So, that’s that. Thank you all for coming, and be sure to visit again next month for an exciting discussion on the autorecombinant biochemistry of immunoglobulin DNA. You won’t believe what my daughter had to say about it during our drive to the grocery store…

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The 2006 coup in Thailand has been described in terms of an ongoing struggle between the Thai military and the Thai citizenry. (See, for example, Chambers 2010.) According to this view, the military rose in power because of the coup, bringing with it various non-democratic changes to the political system. This model views the people of Thailand more-or-less as an amorphous whole. The divisions between Red Shirts and Yellow shirts are treated essentially as the transient political movements of the moment, and only passing attention is given to the predominant economic strata within these groups. I offer a different interpretation, one that introduces the concept of transcendent loci of political power. Political identities such as Pheu Thai or Yellow Shirts may come and go with the times, but immortal sociopolitical forces within Thai society have existed in some recognizable form or another for hundreds of years, and will survive all of Thailand’s modern-day political intrigues. When interpreted in terms of these transcendent loci, the Thaksin phenomenon and the political clashes that have continued are revealed to be aberrations, contrary to the ordinary structure and flow of Thai political life. The conflicts cannot last, because the opposing parties of today are, in the transcendent sense, natural allies; their reconciliation is inevitable. This interpretation suggests a profound stability to Thai political life, in spite of great bang and clatter at the surface.

Maritime, Coastal and Land-Based Powers

To identify our first transcendent locus, we turn to early Ayutthaya. Baker (2003) identifies two principle types of premodern Southeast Asian states, the hinterland and the coastal. Forward (2009), in describing modern Southeast Asia, distinguishes between maritime and coastal states. For Forward, a coastal state borders the ocean, but its maritime interests are preoccupied with national defense, and do not make international trade or shipping a priority. Modern Indonesia is an example of a coastal state. Both of these sets of designations are useful, but to bring them into accord, we will take what Baker calls coastal states and refer to them as maritime states.

And Ayutthaya, Baker claims, began as a maritime power. Maritime powers in premodern Southeast Asia possessed the following characteristics: they extracted resources from the ocean, and also from China via trade; They sometimes copied the tribute system; they favored trade over religious splendor; they were highly cosmopolitan, international centers; they typically paid little attention to land administration; few of their documents and little of their architecture survived to our time. Land-based powers were almost exactly the opposite: they extracted resources from land and forest via manpower; they built walled cities for protection; they used sacred good to attract pilgrims; they raided neighbors for manpower; they developed complex law codes and social hierarchies; their monuments and records have come down to us, due to the manner of their construction. (Baker 2003)

A maritime state is almost necessarily literate, and this is due to the nature of shipping. In order to engage in trade across the seas, one must have ships. Ships capable of traveling the ocean are large, complicated, and expensive. Ships are also subject to peril, as the seas they traverse are inherently hazardous. For an individual to own even one ship requires significant wealth, but to reduce the risks of the seas requires an entire fleet. For maritime trade to be economically feasible, the maritime state must find a way of spreading such costs around. (Ferguson 2008)

There are a few ways to do this. First, all shipping could be owned by the state, perhaps under the nominal ownership of the king. Short of that, all other options involve some form of joint ownership. Ships could be privately owned, with ownership spread among multiple shareholders. Joint ownership reduces an individual’s exposure to the risk of losing an entire ship; for the cost of a single ship, one might invest fractionally in, say, ten ships. Under fractional ownership, the random loss of one ship does not mean the loss of all; 90% of the investment is still safe. On the other hand, joint ownership complicates the process of fleet management; there may be ten owners with ten opinions instead of one.

Private insurance is yet another option, and in fact insurance first grew out of the needs of the shipping industry. With insurance, one person may own any given ship, but all ships are covered by insurance policies, and so the shipping industry as a whole absorbs random losses. (Ferguson 2008) Here we might say that it is risks, rather than ships, which are owned jointly.

However the problem of risk is settled, there are also economies of scale to consider. A larger ship is generally more economical to operate than a smaller one; though crews get larger as a ship’s size increases, they do not get proportionally larger; there is only one captain, no matter the size. Cargoes, naturally, increase with ship size, and this introduces a new difficulty. A ship’s capacity will eventually exceed the produce of a farmer, and even with the consolidation efforts of wholesalers, multiple owners may have their interests represented in the ship’s hold. A ship’s cargo is, effectively, a matter of joint ownership.

Joint ownership, whether of a ship’s cargo, or a ship itself, or of any other capital investment, is a complicated matter, and one that demands literacy. Joint ownership requires widespread literacy, and maritime trade is virtually to manage without joint ownership. It is for this reason that early civilizations throughout Southeast Asia which had active international trade are better known to us than those that did not. We can trace the step-by-step flow of goods throughout maritime Srivijaya, but we are unsure whether land-based Dwaravati was even a distinct political entity.

At the same time, writings from land-based powers are more likely to survive to our day. Land-based powers carved into stone inscriptions praising the greatness and power of their monarchs, and glorifying their gods. Maritime powers had less use for the theatrics of rule, and their monarchs tended to be successful businessmen rather than conquering warriors. While they almost certainly would have been more prolific, maritime state would also have tended to be more prosaic, and less worthy of permanence. (Baker 2003)

Therefore, we see that maritime powers are characterized by comparatively higher education levels and more international engagement than land-based powers. They are also less vertically structured than the highly stratified land-based powers. The character of a society is heavily influenced by whether it is predominantly maritime or land-based in its orientation, and Thailand (and Siam) has wavered between both identities throughout its history. At times it has been very outward-looking and trade-oriented. At other times, it oriented itself around an especially powerful king. This spectrum of land and maritime orientations, and a state’s moveable position on that spectrum, is an important transcendent locus, influencing the politics of the day while maintaining its own existence over centuries.

Armies and Navies

The next transcendent loci are both found within the military. To speak of the role of “the military” in Thai political affairs is to paint with too broad a brush, and prevents us from clearly seeing the military’s twin transcendent loci at work in Thai politics. A military has its own fine structure, and one major anatomical feature must always be borne in mind: an army is very unlike a navy, and in the political sphere, the two will often work at cross-purposes. This is due to differences in mindset inherent to the two forces, with the result that their political ideologies will tend to differ in predictable ways. This holds true in countries other than Thailand as well.

An army can draw its service members from any socioeconomic portion of the population. Any healthy male, whether rich or poor, educated or ignorant, can be made into a useful army soldier, if given the proper training. A navy, on the other hand, requires well-educated service members. There is no non-technical job in a navy, and training the uneducated for naval careers is considerably more difficult than similar training in an army. For this reason, the top ranks in a navy tend to over-represent the middle and upper-middle classes in a society. In an army, many of the top generals may have climbed up from humble, rural, and impoverished upbringings. (Heginbotham 2002)

The capitalization costs in an army are lower than a navy on a per-serviceman basis, because army equipment is rarely on the scale of naval vessels. Any given naval serviceman is likely to command more value in material assets and more destructive power than an army serviceman, and this leads to organizational cultures in which improvisation and individual judgment finds more tolerance in an army than a navy. An infantryman with a rifle faces fewer regulatory procedures and can inflict less damage if things go wrong than the navigator on a frigate—and yet both may be of the same rank and have comparable experience. Also, different navy personnel are more likely to have dramatic differences in the amounts of material they each command, while the distribution of material wealth in an army tends to be more uniform. (Heginbotham 2002)

A navy’s mission is fundamentally expeditionary, while armies either operate at home, or dominate and occupy a single place. This brings naval personnel into contact with numerous foreign cultures, and in a context of more-or-less equal footing; a cosmopolitan worldview is fostered. Armies rarely need to adapt to foreign cultures; it is usually the foreign culture which must adapt to the occupying army. The army experience is more insular for the individual serviceman than a similar career in the navy. (Heginbotham 2002)

These organizational differences have important political implications for the state. When all these factors are taken together, navies, by their nature, foster amongst their servicemen a liberal, outward-looking, and trade-oriented worldview. Armies tend to be inward-looking, they are more accustomed to uniform distributions of wealth, and they are likely to identify with the rural masses of their society. (For convenience, I label the two views liberal and integral.) This is reflected in the types of politicians that their officers tend to support. Liberal, trade-oriented politicians tend to attract the support of naval officers, while politicians with integral policies tend to attract supporters from the army. (Heginbotham 2002)

Upon reaching office, politicians remember where their support came from, and defense spending is allocated accordingly. Thus the Free Thai movement of World War II, which had a liberal parliamentary leader, attracted important support from the navy, and it introduced a constitution that was more democratic and less nationalist than the pre-WWII domestic policies of then-PM General Phibun Songgram. The navy budget soared in the following years, while the army budget sank, and this trend reversed when the army retook control in a 1947 coup. The army and navy wrestled for control of the country for years, until General Sarit came to power in a 1957 coup.

The lower-middle or middle-class backgrounds of Sarit and the other army officers who dominated the Thai government between 1957 and 1980 helped to shape the distinctive integral nationalist ideology held by those individuals. The army’s leadership defined the nation’s first task as narrowing regional and class disparities, while attempting to lift the national economy though coordinated state-led efforts. They devoted much of the state’s energies to developing the economy and infrastructure of the impoverished, landlocked northeast. They also shifted the emphasis of national education policies away from improvements in higher education (a pre-1957 priority) to guaranteed access to basic education. Throughout this period, the army’s leader were profoundly suspicious of free markets and entrepreneurs, whom they described in the 1980s as “dark influences” in the Thai countryside. (Heginbotham 2002)

For these reasons, to denote certain political forces simply as “the military” is too indistinct. Whether it is the army or the navy matters, because it is this which will determine the politics that follow.

Oligarchies and the Executive

Like the military, the general population has its own anatomical features that transcend contemporary politics. In any society, there is an upper class of one sort or another. We may call it an aristocracy, or an oligarchy, or the bourgeoisie, or any number of other names, depending on the details of their composition and character. But whatever the name, there is inevitably a segment of society that enjoys better-than-average economic privilege and some stability of position. These people are generally the ones best served by a society’s traditional culture and social order, and have the most to lose if that order and culture is radically changed. That is not to say that they are always opposed to any change, but they do tend to be the counterbalance to populist instability, and they moderate the speed at which change occurs. In the Constitution of the United States, this role is designed into the Senate, which acts as a brake on the more mercurial House of Representatives. For our purposes, we will label this transcendent political locus an oligarchy. (Hans-Adam 2009)

Oligarchical political power can have various bases, and it is frequently in the socioeconomic standing of the oligarchs themselves. Someone who commands great wealth can put that wealth to many uses, most of which will have greater or lesser implications for society at large. This alone gives them political power, regardless of whatever status as an elected official they may hold.  It is not in all places and all times based on this, because one other transcendent political locus is the executive, which may relate to the oligarchy in various ways.

Human history from the beginning of the agrarian revolution until the American Revolution at the end of the 18^th century shows that, at least in larger states, a combination of a hereditary monarchy with religious legitimation and an oligarchy was usually more successful than other models. There were different ways to become a member of the oligarchy. If the monarchy was strong, the monarch decided who would become a member of the oligarchy. If the oligarchy was strong, other methods decided on its membership: elections, casting lots, wealth, military achievements, education, or membership of certain families or classes of the population. A strong oligarchy was able to reduce the monarchy to a religious symbol, as was the case in Japan between 1615 and 1868. In that period political power rested not with the emperor, but with a kind of hereditary prime minister, the so-called shogun from the noble house of the Tokugawas. (Hans-Adam 2009)

The executive power typically brings with it a legitimacy that would be difficult for an oligarchy to possess. The executive may be a hereditary monarch with divine sanction, and in fact, such has been the arrangement in Thailand (and Siam) throughout its history. In modern Thailand, the power of the executive, as defined for the purposes of this paper, is divided, with some portions of it legitimized through democratic elections.

Due to particulars in the cosmology of Hinayana Buddhism, a king parallels Vishnu because a king sits in the palace, which mirrors Vishnu’s home on Sumeru. Theoretically, in the interpretations of some people in the past, anyone who sat on the throne would be king. Thus it came about that

(m)any Burmese and Siamese kings therefore were virtual prisoners in their palace which they did not dare to leave for fear it might be seized by an usurper. The last king of Burma, Thibaw, preferred even to forego the important coronation ritual of the circumambulation of the capital to offering one of his relatives a chance to make himself master of the palace while he was away. (Heine-Geldern 1942)

The extraordinary number of coups in Thailand suggests that little may have changed; the executive power, evidently, is perceived by the coup makers as being possessed by whoever occupies the geographic center of that power. That oligarchies are not subject to coups (by its nature, nothing short of a Rousseauian revolution can overthrow an oligarchy) illustrates an important difference in the character of oligarchies and the executive power.

The oligarchy of a society often has a semi-antagonistic relationship to the executive power. Oligarchies can attempt to limit the power of the executive through their top-down control of economic resources, social institutions, and the like. The executive power can often try to get around an uncooperative oligarchy by making bottom-up appeals directly to the people. In a broad sense, this pattern can be seen in virtually all societies: democratic and authoritarian, modern and primitive. (Hans-Adam 2009)

Thailand’s oligarchy is represented, in large part, by the Yellow Shirts. It is also to be found in the Parliament and among business leaders. The Thai monarchy, in this model, is not part of the oligarchy, but is viewed as an elaborate and rarified component of the executive power. (Most of the rest of the executive power lies with the Prime Minister.) The Red Shirts, it is proposed here, reflect interests not of the oligarchy or the executive, but of the mass of the people. That many Red Shirts are, like most Yellow Shirts, from Bangkok’s middle class should not distract us; transcendent political loci exist across an entire society and persist for centuries; they have existence only in terms of a population, and cease to exist at the level of individuals. The interests represented by the Yellow Shirts are the interests of an oligarchy, while the interests of the Red Shirts are the interests of a general population. How the individuals who make up these groups came to find themselves on whichever side they happen to be on depends on the personal stories of all those individuals, and need not concern us here.

The justification for identifying the Yellow Shirts as representatives of the oligarchy is an inference based on the fact that the Yellow Shirts come overwhelmingly from Bangkok. Bangkok, in turn, has some 15% of the country’s population but commands some 50% of the wealth; these are the people most invested in the country as we find it today. These are the people who have the strongest incentive to be wary of change. (Kraisak 2011)

The transcendent political loci identified above include maritime vs. local states, the differing ideologies of the army and the navy, and the tension between executive power and the oligarchy. Because maritime states are generally outward-looking, trade-oriented, and educated, there will generally be a natural affinity between such states and their liberal, middle-class, navies. We would expect oligarchs, too, to be somewhat maritime in their thinking and allied with naval officers—if for no other reason than because their wealth and power would bring them into contact with the foreign nations at their state’s borders. On the other side, there is a natural cohesion within an inward-looking land-based state between an exalted executive power and a rurally-recruited, redistributionist and nationalist army.

(Please note that the natural antagonism between the two sets of loci should not in any way be interpreted as some sort of Marxist class conflict. A transcendent locus, it should be obvious, possesses no class consciousness—or any other kind of consciousness. The antagonism is an unconscious tension between the process of becoming one type of state or another, and has little to do with power struggles between conscious actors. Significantly, any given individual could be a part of any or all of these loci simultaneously, which would be nonsensical under a dialectical interpretation.)

With these loci staked out, we are now in a position to understand the 2006 coup, and to judge the stability of Thailand’s current political order.

Thaksin Shinawatra

Telecommunications billionaire Thaksin Shinawatra became Prime Minister by appealing to the long-overlooked rural population of Thailand. He came to power at a time when the Thai PM was an especially powerful position, and he made the shifting of power from bureaucrats and professional politicians to business leaders a matter of stated policy. He was opposed by various wealthy and powerful elements in Thai society, he was accused of violating lese majeste laws, and he was eventually forced out of office by the army. Taken together, Thaksin neatly defies any easy categorization in terms of the loci identified by this paper. His strong pro-business orientation, difficulties with the army, and (supposed) antagonism to the monarchy would make him part of the oligarchy, while his appeal to the masses, identity as a strong executive, and displacement of various government apparatus in favor of his own people all speak to land-based sensibilities. Fortunately, categorizing Thaksin is not necessary; he is an individual, and individuals defy categorization all the time. What is important is how the transcendent loci responded to him.

Thaksin became Prime Minister in 2001, under a constitution (from 1997) that established a strong executive power. “Though well-intentioned, new rules under the 1997 Constitution inadvertently yielded negative impacts on Thai politics, resulting in democratic authoritarianism.” (Kitti 2007) For example, there was the 90-day rule, which had been intentioned to strengthen loyalty to political parties. Under this rule, a politician was required to be a member of a political party for 90 days before running in an election. However, the PM had the power to dissolve Parliament and call a snap election in 45 days—thereby freezing out troublesome opponents, under the right circumstances. This rule had the effect of preventing party defections, thereby reducing challenges to the PM.

Another introduction was the party-list system. Some districts had proportional representation, while some had only a single (“party-list”) member of parliament (MP). Previously, proportional-representation MPs won elections by cultivating relationships with powerful patrons local to their districts. These patrons were the local leaders within their communities. Through combinations of entrepreneurship and organized crime, patrons amassed power and influence that they used to both manage their districts and to earn the loyalty of the population; in exchange for license and loyalty from the people, the local patron was expected to help the population and protect them. A prospective MP sought out the support of his district’s patrons. Thus MPs rose from the bottom up, and were well known to their constituents. (This is scarcely different from traditional Siam’s power structure, in which local, provincial rulers were lords within their limited domains, but they were subsumed under and loyal to the chakravartin, the high king over all.) Party-list candidates were essentially assigned to their districts by the political party, and had less incentive to interact with their constituency. (Kitti 2007)

Additionally, an MP elevated to a cabinet position ceased to be an MP. This necessitated a by-election in the MP’s home district, and it also gave the new cabinet member a strong incentive to avoid dismissal or resignation from the cabinet; there was no returning to Parliament, except by getting elected all over again. This created a strong incentive to elevate only party-list candidates to cabinet positions; their loyalty in the cabinet was assured, and the party effectively chose their replacements in the Parliament. Later, Thaksin was able to weaken the cabinet rules in a way that allowed anyone, even non-politicians, to be members of the cabinet. (Kitti 2007)

Thaksin made it clear that he had little faith in the ability of politicians to govern Thailand in the era of globalization, often citing the 1997 financial crisis as evidence. What were needed were businessmen, who understood how businesses and economies worked, and who could design policies that would maximize Thailand’s economic competitiveness on the world stage. Thaksin brought into the government business leaders who were of the same mindset.

In their view, it would be anachronistic and harmful to leave the country in the hands of provincial politicians and bureaucrats, who were seen as incapable to deal with a globalized and competitive world. As noted by Dhanin Chearavanont, the head of the CP Group, “This is an age of economic war. It’s crucial that we have a prime minister who understands business and the economy.” Chatri Sophonpanich from Bangkok Bank shared a similar view. (Kitti 2007)

Thaksin also sought to undercut the state bureaucracy, claiming that it was too strong, and standing in the way of development.

Over time, a pattern emerged, and here is where Thaksin ran afoul of transcendent loci of power. The business leaders who entered politics under the Thaksin government saw their businesses make profits from government concessions far beyond those made by companies not involved in politics. The politically connected businesses often enjoyed a semi-monopoly status within their markets, and would see annual incomes from concessions alone in the tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars. (Kitti 2007) According to the model put forward by this paper, this should be a windfall for the oligarchy.

But it was only for some of the oligarchy. Bureaucrats, professional politicians, and non-politically connected businesses were increasingly shoved aside by businesses and people loyal to Thaksin. This was not a windfall for the oligarchy, but rather upheaval within the oligarchy. Thaksin was extremely upsetting to the old order of things within this locus, and the locus convulsed and complained bitterly: it was the oligarchy, in the form of the Yellow Shirts, who most loudly opposed Thaksin.

If that interpretation is accurate, then why was it the army that pushed Thaksin from power? Thaksin’s popular appeal, easy to see among his Red Shirt supporters, should make him a natural ally of the army. In fact, the “watermelon” phenomenon—people who wear the green uniform of a soldier but are personally sympathetic to the Red Shirt cause—has been remarked on by other writers. (Chambers 2010)

The key is to understand the relationship between the oligarchy and the executive. The two may sometimes be semi-antagonistic, but not at all times; in fact, they need each other. The executive power brings a theatrical awe and emotional intensity to government that is difficult for an oligarchy to provide, while the oligarchy commands people and assets that an executive, in the absence of an oligarchy, cannot command. We should not be distracted by their occasional antagonism; these two loci are symbiotic. Thaksin threw the oligarchy locus into such chaos, that the executive locus was compelled intervene; the army was sent in to extirpate the malefactor, and order within the oligarchy was restored.

Going forward, we find Thailand today in the peculiar position of having its army, supposedly more-or-less on the side of the Yellow Shirts, and in opposition to the Red Shirts. Viewed through the prism of transcendent loci of power, we see that such an arrangement cannot possibly last; the oligarchy of a maritime state and its army are too ideologically distinct, and the affinities of the army will eventually lead it back to the support of a land-based rural populace. Throughout all of this, little has been heard from the Thai navy. Given all the trouble that Thaksin caused for the oligarchy, in is difficult to imagine that the navy would side with him, his pro-trade, pro-globalization policies notwithstanding.

Perhaps Thaksin’s best chance for a return to power would be to drop his liberal trade agenda, and use on his appeal to the masses to install himself as the strong executive of a land-based power. This, however, would bring him into conflict with the other component of Thailand’s executive locus, the monarchy. That institution is held in such high esteem that the army and the oligarchy will unite to protect it. There can be only one chakravartin, and it seems that Thailand will not allow it to be Thaksin.

Bibliography

Baker, Chris, “Ayutthaya Rising: By Land or Sea?”

Chambers, Paul, “Thailand on the Brink: Resurgent Military, Eroded Democracy.” Asian Survey. 50 no. 5 (2010): 835-858.

Ferguson, Niall. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. (New York: Penguin Press, 2008)

Forward, Chris, “Archipelagic Sea-Lanes in Indonesia—Their Legality in International Law.” Australia & New Zealand Maritime Law Journal. 23 (2009): 143-156.

Hans-Adam II, The State in the Third Millennium. (Liechtenstein: Van Eck, 2009)

Heginbotham, Eric, “The Fall and Rise of Navies in East Asia: Military Organizations, Domestic Politics, and Grand Strategy.” International Security. 27 no. 2 (2002): 86-125.

Heine-Geldern, Robert, “Conceptions of State and Kingship in Southeast Asia,” The Far Eastern Quarterly. 2, no. 1 (1942): 15-30.

Kraisak Choohavan, Private lecture at his home in Bangkok, Thailand: August 26, 2011.

Kitti Prasirtsuk, “From Political Reform and Economic Crisis to Coup D’état in Thailand.” Asian Survey. 47, no. 6 (2007): 872-893.

Handmade Afghan doll: click for larger view

If our aid efforts in Afghanistan have largely gotten us nowhere, we would do well to consider that most of them are implemented in a way that amounts to Marxism: the central authority distributes goods according to people’s needs, with the expectation that those people will produce according to their abilities. Humanity spent the twentieth century proving that such a model does not work, so it is incongruous that we would attempt it in Afghanistan. At one point during the last three years, I was given control of an aid program operating in rural Dand District, south of Kandahar City, and I was free to employ my own market-based implementation strategy. I may report that we not only sparked booming economic growth in all our target villages, but we also wrested two villages from Taliban control and formally aligned them with the Afghan government. Think about that: an aid program seized ground from the enemy without a shot fired or a life lost. If we want to win in Afghanistan, I offer this program as a blueprint.

We must begin with a sound philosophical basis, and to that end, the first thing to understand is the nature of justice. Justice is the act of giving to someone that which is due him. We know a thing is due a person if, by taking it from him, we do more harm to ourselves than we do to him. That is how Thomas Aquinas defined justice, and perhaps it is for that very reason that no one in the aid community seems to know anything about it. Foreign policy is based on the cynical calculations of realpolitik, and to a realist, any appeal to Christian virtues would be embarrassing. The realists prefer to think of justice as something man-made, and hence arbitrary; we get to decide what justice is. That is their definition, but it doesn’t work; I will be sticking with Aquinas.

A typical foreign aid program is flatly unjust. Goods are given to recipients who did nothing to earn them, which is essentially the same as saying that goods are taken from donors who did nothing to deserve losing them. If what Aquinas says is true, then that means that the recipients will suffer worse in the exchange. And in fact, that is exactly what happens. Take for example a program in which the poor of some village are given livestock. Afghanistan has seen several such programs. The donor takes the loss of the price of the livestock, but nothing more. The recipient gains livestock, but also loses quite a bit. For one thing, local livestock prices are depressed, potentially wiping out the established livestock traders who were operating prior to the aid program; the recipient now lives in a poorer environment than he lived in before.  Furthermore, initiative and pride are obviously eroded. The recipient is pushed toward beggary, and many Afghans have now spent years living from one aid handout to the next. Aquinas was right, and justice is an immutable law of the universe.

Sometimes in these typical programs caveats are added, such as prohibitions on the recipients selling their livestock for a year, or a requirement that they give away the animal’s firstborn to another poor family. This brings us to the next thing to understand, the definition of ownership. To own something is to enjoy a monopoly on its use and disposition. A restriction as all-encompassing as a prohibition on selling means that the recipient cannot be said to own the livestock. The donor still owns it, the recipient is merely tasked with caring for it. A requirement to give away the firstborn is almost equally problematical. Who owns the offspring until such time as it is weaned? What incentive does the first recipient have to care for the newborns until such time as they can be given to their new owners? Who is liable if the offspring should die early? Without answers to such questions, the livestock is limited in the degree to which it can be an economic asset.

From such considerations, we can begin to see the underpinnings of human freedom. If it is a matter of justice that someone owns some livestock, then it is a matter of justice that he is free to do with that livestock as he sees fit. Freedom, justice, and property rights are three faces of a unified thing, and we cannot remove any one without destroying the other two. This is why Marxism and all its derivatives could never work. Abolishing private property is utterly unjust, and necessarily does even more harm to the state than to the disenfranchised individuals who, theoretically, lose everything. The suspension of freedom needed to carry out such an abolition can never be undone, because there is no longer just ground on which to establish freedom. Marxism was a moral absurdity from its very beginning.

With ownership and justice properly understood, it should be easy to see that any aid program will have to be just if it is to do its recipients any good. Perhaps livestock are, in fact, the solution to rural Afghanistan’s problems, but how we go about putting that livestock into their hands will make all the difference. A program distributing vocational training, or wheat seed & fertilizer, or solar-powered water pumps, or whatever other panacea comes into vogue in Washington, faces the same constraints. Giveaways do not help, they only hurt. Careful selection of recipients (programs usually target the poor, or women, or the ethnically disadvantaged, or some other demographic) makes no difference; justice is immutable. Our implementation methods must be just, or our efforts will be counter-productive.

So how to do it? In the case of my program, I was tasked with livestock distribution, vocational training, and construction of light infrastructure items (culverts, flood protection walls, irrigation control gates, etc.) in selected villages in rural Afghanistan. This program was funded by an international aid agency (the donor) that shall go unnamed, under a contract awarded to a private company that shall also go unnamed. (I was hired on a contract basis for the term of the program, and while I won’t say what the name of the program was, those of you involved all know who you are. If anyone out there legitimately needs to know which program this was, leave a comment and I will be able to contact you directly.) The donor probably had it in mind that we would give livestock for free to any villager whose income was below some arbitrary threshold; that is what all the other programs do. As I have just shown, that would have been unjust. Instead, we established a work program, and offered villagers a deal: anyone who comes to work on our project will be paid in sheep. The more work one does, the more sheep one can earn. No consideration was given to rich or poor, married or widowed, whole or crippled; it was open to all. We called this the aid-for-labor implementation strategy.

Doing it this way accomplished many things at one stroke. First, only people who were interested in sheep showed up to work for sheep. A conventional distribution program could not make such a separation. For more reasons than man can imagine, there will always be some impoverished Afghan or other who, as it happens, cannot make use of a sheep. There will also be somewhat better-off Afghans who, again for more reasons than we could imagine, will be desperate for some sheep. To give sheep freely to the first and not at all to the second is dumb, but that is exactly what a demographic-based giveaway will do. By opening it to everyone and demanding something in return, the recipients become a self-selected population, and we can gauge from the amount of work we get out of them how important to them our aid package actually is. If no one turns up to work, then sheep are not so valuable as we thought. Thus, market forces provide a feedback mechanism that can help us to better shape our aid efforts.

Selection of the work program must also be on a negotiated, rather than command, basis. All too often, aid agencies and military forces have assumed that any work, so long as it employs people, is to Afghanistan’s economic advantage, and works to our favor. The most derided example of this approach has been the hiring of villagers to clean their own irrigation canals. Afghans used to do this work on their own, without being paid. In paying them to do it, resources that otherwise might be used constructively instead contribute to a culture in which locals now refuse to improve themselves without an outsider paying them to do so. (Also, it turns out that there is no correlation between employment and levels of violence. This runs counter to prevailing assumptions, but empirical analysis has shown it to be the case. See Berman, et al. 2011.) Canal cleaning, thankfully, has now been largely discredited, but the deeper lesson to recognize is that make-work gets us nowhere. If we seek to hire locals, we must hire them to do work for which there is a bona fide demand.

Identifying such demand is not hard, if we are humble enough to recognize our own self-serving objectives. We do not seek the economic prosperity of Afghanistan because of our unconditional love for Afghanistan; we seek it because we believe that Afghan economic prosperity works to our political advantage. We need not be ashamed to admit this. Therefore, we should seek out work that advances our political interests. My first step in community engagement was to sit down with the maleks of each village, away from the other members of their community. I told them that my purpose was not to build infrastructure, or to distribute sheep, or to deliver vocational training, but rather what I sought was to make them strong within their villages. A strong malek, I believed, would better be able to resist the Taliban, and that was what I wanted in exchange for my aid. (For a good discussion on the relationship between a community’s political coherence and its resistance to insurgency, see Kilcullen, 2009) If I were to use my aid package to create a labor pool within their villages, I asked the maleks, then to what end would they personally like to see that labor employed?

As it happened, all of the maleks wanted to see new irrigation structures built. This was something our program had planned to do anyway, and I tried to get them to see that they could maximize their utility if they chose something else. But after so many years of receiving free aid and of having only a nominal role in shaping that aid, all of them had a well-practiced smile-and-nod response to people like me; they were never asked for substantive input, and they did not realize that I was off the script. As work progressed, they became more aware of their power to guide our program, and their requests became more thoughtful and imaginative. But for the first round, irrigation structures it was.

The maleks were allowed to choose freely which structures they wanted, and where, within the funding limits of the program. This is another deviation from the way things are normally done. Normally on projects of this sort, an engineer surveys the village and identifies the work needed to create the optimal irrigation system. The decision is normally not left to locals because too often they make choices that can leave them “worse off in the long run,” in the words of one critic. But this again smacks of central planning and is unjust. It also suffers from a simplistic understanding of irrigation’s purpose and what “worse off” entails. Will some maleks make poor choices? Certainly. Others will make good choices. Many will make choices which are technically competent, if not ideal, but which simultaneously balance political needs as well. Maleks can judge, better than can outside engineers, whether a technically perfect irrigation system is preferable to one which, while perhaps not perfect, is able to secure the support of powerful interests in the community. To win an influential family over to the malek’s side may be worth a little inefficiency in the village irrigation system. Only a malek can be trusted to make such judgements.

Some maleks will make better judgements than others, and time will reveal all. By allowing maleks to own the planning process, we allow them to own the credit or blame that will eventually follow, and everyone will know who the capable maleks are. Later, when it comes time to select district-level leadership, the community will have a good basis for selection, because they will know which malek did a good job of managing things like his village’s irrigation system. When we have our outside engineers make “better” decisions for them, we rob maleks of this basis of political legitimacy, and we leave the community in the dark as to who their most talented people are.

So, the maleks were given a free hand in choosing what they wanted built. They were also tasked with recruiting and organizing their local residents into labor pools. There was enough technical skill pre-existing within these communities that no subcontractors were needed. Had that not been the case, had it been necessary to bring in, say, some professional masons, then we would have left it up to the maleks to choose the contractor that they liked. There was only  a finite amount of money available for each village, and so the maleks would have had an incentive to choose carefully. To guard against undue favoritism in the selection of the labor pool, our field workers went amongst the villages, spreading the word as broadly as possible that there was a program coming, residents would be able to earn sheep, and that they should see their malek for details. This transparency measure made it impossible for any unscrupulous malek to funnel all the work to his own family.

Our side supplied the construction materials, and work progressed quickly. Often, pairs of local laborers would team up, each working alternate weeks on construction while the other tended to the pair’s farms. They would then share in the sheep that they jointly earned, typically selling the animals to some other village resident who was too wealthy to be a laborer, but who desired sheep.  These arrangements came about spontaneously, at the bottom level, and had not been anticipated or directed by those of us positioned higher up. It was a beautiful example of a market economy’s ability to self-organize, and of its ability to push resources out to those who can make the best use of them.

And this gets at another idea that is important to understand. An economy is not sheep and irrigation structures and cars and houses and things. Those are merely the material goods that move through an economy. An economy is a complex set of relationships between people. The better the organization of those relationships, the better the people will be able to exploit the material resources that are around them. The material stuff is not what’s important; material stuff is all around us, and is free for the taking. It is the networks of people that are important, and some networks– some economies– are much stronger than others. By delivering our aid in a manner that was negotiated and market-driven, we spurred the creation of relationships– such as the pairs of laborers and their customers– that an ordinary giveaway would be unable to motivate. Give a man a free sheep and he has no incentive to connect with his fellow man. Offer to sell men sheep, and they have an incentive to organize in a way that will get them the maximum amount of sheep for the minimum cost.

The vocational training deserves brief mention. Many vocational training programs in Afghanistan pay a stipend to students for their attendance, ostensibly to offset lost wages. We did away with this. Ideally, I wanted to charge a nominal tuition to students, but there was too much precedence and inertia working against me. I succeeded only in eliminating the stipend. But thanks to that, only students who were interested in the course content had a reason to come to class, and attendance ended up being very good. We also implemented one simple control measure that other aid workers may want to incorporate. A subcontractor provided the training, and we required of this subcontractor course syllabi, plus test questions and answers for each week of the course as part of their proposal package to us. Our field staff, using the contractor’s test questions, then gave pop quizzes over the course of the training. This turned out to be a very easy way to ensure quality of education.

Kandahar Province is the first or second most dangerous part of Afghanistan, depending on how one chooses to compile the statistics. To ensure the safety of our field staff, we extracted promises from each of the maleks that so long as we were within their villages, we would be safe. I made clear to them that if anything should happen to anyone on our team, then all work would be halted immediately: no irrigation structures, no livestock, no vocational training. If somebody wanted to attack an aid program, they would have to go find somebody else: the deal is, we get left alone. The maleks agreed to this, and our entire project never suffered a single attack.

Part of this was due to the influence of the maleks, part of it was due to the fact that everyone in the community had an interest in seeing our program succeed; everyone stood to gain by it, in one way or another, and because it was open to all, no one had cause to feel alienated. As the economy self-organized and livestock started moving through it, new businesses and jobs started appearing. Village shops started stocking discretionary items like children’s toys, because people suddenly had the wealth to buy such things. A girl in one village started making colorful rag dolls, which her grandmother sold in the family store. The maleks were thrilled, and we took the opportunity to ask a favor of them: we asked for them to introduce us to the maleks of the next five villages that we wanted to enter. This they were happy to do, and the entire process started over.

We were originally tasked with working in eleven villages, with the understanding that security concerns might prevent us from reaching all of them. Towards the end, we had successfully worked in all but two of them. These last two turned out to be hard Taliban villages, opposed to the government of Afghanistan, and a source of violence. Most aid programs would have nothing to do with such a place. I sent in our best field worker to quietly seek out and meet with the most influential families of these two villages and to speak with them. Our message to them was straightforward: The prosperity we had been delivering to the surrounding villages, we wanted to bring to them. But they had no maleks, and so we had no one with whom we could negotiate. If they could but appoint some maleks– anyone they wanted– have these men get approved in writing by the District Governor as the official maleks, and have these men sit in on the weekly District Center meetings with the other maleks, then we would recognize them and would bring all this aid into their villages.

It turned out that one family effectively ruled the larger of these two villages, and that they were taking orders from a family patriarch in Quetta, Pakistan. He refused our offer, but his own family argued with him. They saw all the new wealth around them. In some villages, people had pooled their money to hire one resident as a shepherd, and this person took all their flocks deep into the desert for graze. This was a job that had not even existed before, and it was just one of many. They wanted this, and they debated with Quetta for a long time.

In the end, the family broke. Defying Quetta and shattering relations, the two villages appointed a pair of nominal maleks, they met with the governor and secured his written approval, and the maleks became regular attendees of the weekly district shura council meetings. Our aid flooded in, followed close behind by some other aid programs; these villages wasted no time in securing as much aid as they could. I received confirmation last month that those two villages remain on the government side to this day.

We can win in Afghanistan, and this program proved that it is possible for aid and development projects to significantly impair the insurgency at the local level. I know of no other aid program that has operated in this way, but it can be done. It hinges on a conscious avoidance of command-economy practices, and on a proper understanding of justice, freedom, and property rights.

References:

Berman, Eli, et al. “Do Working Men Rebel? Insurgency and Unemployment in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Philippines.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 55 (4) 2011: 496-529.

Kilcullen, David, The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)

Pavel shot Haddel.

CHAPTER 2

Haddel set down the empty rifle without making a sound. With two hands, he slid his knife noiselessly from its sheath. If he could sneak up behind Pavel, he still had a chance to kill him.

His boots were unreasonably quiet on the tile floor. Haddel had always been one of those who could sneak up on pretty much anybody. He could breathe, walk, and move silently; his lithe body simply didn’t make the noises that other people’s bodies did.

He found Pavel in an anteroom, peering out a window. Pavel’s pistol was drawn, and his fear was palpable. It flashed across Haddel’s mind that fear would be the last emotion Pavel would ever know. He adjusted his grip on his knife. He was ten feet away, and he could attempt to close the distance through either speed or stealth. He decided on stealth.

CHAPTER 3

Pavel was sure he had killed at least three of them already.  The one with the rifle, he couldn’t tell. That one, Haddel,  wore a officer’s uniform, and had obviously been the leader of the manhunt. If it was down to just Haddel and Pavel, Pavel reasoned, then he still had a fairly good chance. Any reinforcements would be much too long in coming, and so he could either kill Haddel, or wait until dark to slip away. The stolen gold would still be where he’d buried it, about a mile from here, and then it was some forty miles to the border.

Forty miles was a long way to go without a vehicle and without friendly support. But Haddel was the only man left who knew that Pavel was at large, and once Haddel was taken care of, nobody would be looking for him. Meanwhile, there was a panoply of villages and hamlets throughout this corner of the country. He could take a zig-zag path through them, buying his food on the local market and keeping a low profile. So long as he remained the gray man, no one was likely to remember him.

At that moment, Pavel happened to look behind him.

CHAPTER 4

Pavel retreived the sack from the flaming wreckage. This had been quite a stroke of luck. The Ardanian commandos who had smuggled this out of Kalcheninkia had been trying to transfer it into Hottiland. Who could have known that this wretched mountain weather would bring down their plane right at Pavel’s feet? Here was the chance to make the best of a bad situstion and return her highness’s gold to its rightful owner. He bundled the precious cargo into his Bergen and continued on into the snowstorm.

Not much later, the four Ardanian pararescue soldiers arrived in a Land Rover. Haddel tried to radio in to report what they had found, but the storm cut their reception to hash. There were obviously no survivors in this burning scrapyard of metal. The snow was coming down fast, but it had not yet obliterated Pavel’s tracks, and the men could see that he had picked over the crash site and left the scene. Nightfall was perhaps two hours away. Whoever this scavenger was, Haddel decided, there was still time to catch him and secure any sensitive materials he may have grabbed.

Pavel spotted the Land Rover making its way down the switchback behind him. It was unlikely that any Ardanian citizens would be driving on this road in such a storm, especially with the spectacular plane crash blocking the way. That meant the authorities had already reached the wreckage, and were now following the tracks he was leaving in the snow. Pavel fairly leapt from the road and made for a wooded ravine. If he could evade his hunters long enough, it would be dark, and the difficulty of finding him in this valley would rise exponentially. If he wanted to see Kalcheninkia again, he had to make sure he was not caught with the gold.

He scanned the terrain ahead of him. The woods were heavy along the west side of the valley, and the ridge line there was a sloping, rolling blanket of snow. A river ran the length of the valley, off-center, hugging the east wall. And a wall it was; a talus slope at its base, giving way to a forbidding rocky ledge. Pavel thought he could make out some caves in the east wall, though it was hard to tell through the snow. The road cut right between the forest and the river. This was unfortunate, as the forest offered excellent concealment, but its proximity to the road would make it easy for search parties to reach. He saw that the road crossed the river by means of a small suspension bridge, not far from where he was. He wondered if he had enough time to demolish it before the Land Rover got too close. Then he noticed a spur from the road that led to a ruin of an old country mansion.

CHAPTER 5

When Kalcheninkia first attacked Ardania, it had taken most of the world– especially the Ardanians– by total surprise. Just a month before, the two countries celebrated the opening of the Taleshent Railway, connecting the capitals of the two countries for the first time. A free-trade agreement had been signed just three years back, to much international fanfare, and the travel restrictions between the countries had been abolished a generation ago. The two countries were, most Ardanians thought, good friends.

So, when Kalcheninkian bombers destroyed the capital city, it was as bewildering as it was devastating. They cut all the major roads and rail lines, bombed almost all the government offices, hit most of the major factories, and incinerated the police headquarters.

The Ardanians were a stunned, demoralized people, too paralyzed by shock to fight. It has been said that war draws the best a country’s of men out of obscurity and thrusts them into the forefront. That was certainly the case here. Captain Benoy– who had attended the academy with Haddel– devised a bold plan to parachute a commando team into the Kalcheninkia royal family’s residence at Vertrieme, steal the princess’s ceremonial golden cloak, and escape into the high mountains for exfiltration by helicopter.

It worked, and the capture of the royal cloak, though purely a symbolic victory, was of immense moral value. The Ardanian public believed its country capable of anything, and the Kalcheninkians could not have been more humiliated. Captain Benoy was immediately promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, and made an advisor to General Trellis. The Ardanians executed the war with an increased vigor from that day forward.

CHAPTER 6

Pavel had joined the Kalcheninkian army immediately after school. His father had been a bank manager, his older brother an engineer, his younger brother co-owned a restaurant. Pavel possessed too much intensity and self-discipline to ever be happy in civilization, and army life suited him. He started in the infantry, attended airborne school, later joined a ranger battalion, showed considerable talent as a sniper, and after seven years in uniform, was quietly recruited into Lima Company. Lima Company was, on paper, an army logistics unit.  (I repeat that this was their role on paper, which explains why we first found Pavel crouched behind the wall of a derelict house, 40 miles inside Ardania, with three Ardanian pararescue soldiers dead and a fourth about to die. What other destruction Pavel may have left in his path is not important to our tale.)

Pavel’s career path, though difficult, turned out to be more stable than that of his father and brothers. The free trade agreement had hit the small middle class of Kalcheninkia surprisingly hard. His father was the first to lose his job, because Ardania’s financial services sector was considerably more sophisticated than Kalcheninkia’s, and later his older brother lost his job because it turned out that Ardania’s engineers were better, too. Pavel, with his soldier’s wages, and his younger brother, with the restaurant, were supporting a family of 14.

The politicians, possibly, had foreseen this sort of calamity, but the poor vote too, and there were more of them, and free trade had lifted their prospects considerably. Ardania was buying up entire Kalcheninkian industries, replacing most middle management, but keeping the laborers. Somewhere down the road this would likely destroy Kalcheninkian culture, but somewhere down the road was still a great many election cycles away. Politicians can’t see that far.

Royals can, though, and the king had resisted any free trade agreements that changed things too much or too quickly. Had the royal authority over governmental decisions not been so drastically weakened by the 1961 constitution, King Fyodor would have had the power to stop the whole thing. But monarchies went out of style during the ninteenth and twentieth centuries, and so here in the twenty-first, a king no longer governed his own country. Prime Minister Titov, holding together a coalition government through skill and diplomacy, pushed through a free trade agreement that offered a little something for nearly everyone in the Kalcheninkian Parliament.

After the free trade agreement went into effect, the papermill in which Titov’s wife had controlling interest saw its stock price boom, and Titov– on paper, as it were– became the richest man in Kalcheninkia. Stock wealth is theoretical, though, and Titov shrugged off any uncomfortable questions from critics by showing off his crummy house and two dingy cars.

Titov was originally from Allop, a little village on the eastern end of Kalcheninkia that became part of the country of Bressa as part of the 1961 peace accords. Bressa and Kalcheninkia shared a common language, ethnicity, cultural heritage, and religion, and were the sorts of countries that outsiders have trouble keeping separate. Their histories were so intertwined and they so often made common cause that as a condition to entry into the UN, they had to agree never to both sit on the Security Council at the same time.

Now some years back, tensions began to grow between the large countries of Genarea and Hottiland. The two had never gotten along very well, and it happened that a Hottiland exchange student studying in Genarea was arrested on narcotics charges. The Hottiland government, at the time needing to bolster its sagging approval ratings at home, chose to make an issue of this and publicly decried the charges as fabricated. They cut off all sales of wheat to Genarea. Genarea responded by signing a formal alliance with the city-state of Gudenstadt, a city so positioned that it could cut off most of Hottiland’s access to the sea, if it so chose. The exchange student was deported and things settled into a new equilibrium.

Hottiland had a long-standing alliance with Ardania already, and when Kalcheninkia and Ardania signed their free-trade agreement, Genarea feared that they might be losing the Bressa-Kalcheninkia bloc to the Hottiland sphere of influence. They hastily began secret talks with Bressa for an alliance. Kalcheninkia, unaware of this, demilitarized their border with Ardania, in keeping with what they thought were the spirit of the times. The Bressa alliance was then publicly announced, and the Kalcheninkians suddenly realized they were standing on the wrong side of the fence.

The president of Hottiland made the same miscalculation that the Genareans did, and assumed that Kalcheninkia was on his side. By his calculations, this put the military balance of power firmly in his favor, and so he massed troops on the Genarean border, preparing to invade. The Ardanians readied an aggressive attack on Gudenstadt, a city they were certain to wipe out. War was imminent, but at the eleventh hour, Titov saw a way to stop it before it could start.

Hottiland had an island off of Kalcheninkia’s coast which Kalcheninkia had long claimed as its own. Titov watched polls as closely as any polititian, and he knew that this disputed island, as a political issue, was of high importance to the educated classes– the very people who now blamed him for the free-trade fiasco. At a secret meeting in Gudenstadt, he negotiated Kalcheninkia’s price for its entry into the inevitable war between Generea and Hottiland. (If there had to be a war, may as well make the best of it.) Kalcheninkia would strike the Ardanian capitol, taking that country out of the fight in one stroke. Due to their geographic proximity, the Kalcheninkian air force– and only the Kalcheninkian air force– could reach the capitol faster than the Ardanians would be able to react. This would save the millions of lives in Gudenstadt and render the Hottiland alliance too weak to continue the campaign. The island would go to Kalcheninkia as part of the ensuing peace agreements. The war would be short, limited, and decisive; everybody wins.

CHAPTER 7

Haddel hated Gudenstadt. He hated their wealth, he hated their superior attitudes, and he hated the way their society was structured. Gudenstadt had broken away from Ardania during the chaos of 1960, its renegade generals deftly fighting off every major power in the region. The martial law they instituted was limited and effective, and the country morphed into a plutocracy after oil was discovered in the seventies. As a military man himself, Haddel could appreciate a country that won its independence by force of arms, and so far as that went, he had nothing to object to. But Gudenstadt was split along ethnic lines, with the Medans– who were a protected minority in Ardania– holding majority power and exclusive right to all the positions of wealth and privilege in the country. The minority Ardans in Gudenstadt were relegated to menial labor and crushing poverty. None of this was official policy, of course, but everyone in Ardania knew what Gudenstadt prejudices were like, and knew that this was the unspoken reality. In Haddel’s eyes, Gudenstadt was a Medan revenge fantasy come to life, propped up by oil wealth.

Haddel’s wife had a friend whose husband, Alex, was an Ardanian Medan. Alex was a good man, and didn’t buy into the bigotry of the Gudenstadt Medans. His company sent him to Gudenstadt frequently, to negotiate with vendors and see customers. It happened once that Alex found a Gudenstadt Ardan copper broker, new to the business, who was offering copper more cheaply than the established competition. Alex saw this as a good opportunity to develop a new supplier, and offered this competitive young upstart a contract. The police arrested Alex later that day on a supposed visa irregularity.

It was three weeks before the matter was settled and Alex was allowed to return to Ardania. In the meantime, Haddel’s family had to fill the gap back home, shuttling children to school, cleaning leaves out of gutters, and fetching Alex’s wife when her car wouldn’t start. These were minor errands, and objectively were nothing more than nuisances. (In fact, Haddel rather enjoyed supervising the boys after school, as it gave him an opportunity to talk with them and teach them things.) But these interruptions gave a tangible reality to the bigotry which, for Haddel, had until this point existed only as theory. There is an important difference in the hatred one feels for enemies known only through hearsay and the enemies whose malice has reached into one’s own life. Haddel spent an afternoon trying to get that car started, an afternoon of remembering all the reasons why he hated Gudenstadt.

Haddel was a career officer, and joined pararescue immediately after the academy. A pararescue soldier’s job is to find and retrieve downed pilots from behind enemy lines. To do this, they had to be able to insert themselves deep into enemy territory, move about undetected, find their pilot, provide whatever medical care was necessary, extract the pilot and themselves, and all the while be prepared to deal with any hostile force that they encountered. The pararescue soldiers were probably the most elite troops that Ardania possessed.

An ancilliary role of pararescue was to provide close protection services– bodyguards– to high-ranking government officials while travelling abroad. Haddel did a brief stint in this line of work early in his career, assigned to platoon working out of the Ardanian embassy in Gudenstadt. Typically, a small team of enlisted men would be assigned to a government dignitary whenever travelling outside the embassy. Haddel believed in hands-on leadership, and he would ocassionally assign himself to a close protection team in order to see the world from the perspective of the troops he led.

By chance, this resulted in Haddel’s being present when the Ardanian ambassador signed an agreement with Gudenstadt which, among other things, obligated the government of Ardania to nationalize its insurance industry. The ostensible Gudenstadt rationale for this was that Ardania companies were the de facto insurer of choice for most homeowners in Gudenstadt, and that rates were chronically too high for homes along the flood-prone southern bank of the deep-water channel that bisected the city. A nationalized insurance industry would, the argument went, have the financial strength to provide insurance at affordable rates. In return for this, Gudenstadt agreed to accept high Ardanian tariffs against seafood coming in from Gudenstadt, as a means of fostering the Ardanian fishing industry.

Though they would certainly never say so publicly, Gudenstadt secretly believed this deal to be monstrously lopsided, in their favor. Nationalizing the insurance companies would guarantee that policies and rates would be determined by political, rather than economic, considerations, and this would lead increasingly towards unrealistically lavish coverage and arbitrary, fickle pricing shedules. Bureaucratic machinery would have to grow, and this would necessarily increase the percentage of GDP that Ardanians tied up in insurance. Also, it would be the Ardanian government that would be hurt most by the next hundred-year flood. The tariffs would hurt, not help, Ardania, because that’s what tariffs do. They would hurt Gudenstadt somewhat as well, but their economists calculated that they would hurt Ardania more.

Why set out to hurt Ardania? Because it was an article of faith among the statesman of Gudenstadt that in foreign affairs, “the strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must.” A weak Ardania was good for Gudenstadt, and what was good for Gudenstadt was good absolutely. They rejected the idealist’s proposition that there could be a broader persepctive that was in any way meaningful. Morality, they argued, applied to individuals, and not to states.

CHAPTER 8

Haddel could see the back of Pavel’s neck, and could see that his throat must be exposed. The crouched position Pavel was in put his head conveniently low. Haddel would grab Pavel’s chin from behind with his left hand, drive the knife into his chest with his right, and work the knife handle quickly back and forth, like the stick shift of an evil car. He took a few steps forward.

At that moment, Pavel happened to look behind him. There had not been any sound to alert him, it was just a random check, and it saved his life. Pavel jumped to his feet, with his pistol pointed at Haddel’s chest.

Haddel dropped the knife and a fear filled him that made him forget everything. He forgot all about being an elite pararescue officer, about the rightness of Ardania’s cause, and about Kalecheninkia’s treachery. He forgot anything about Ardans and Medans. He forgot his friends, he forgot his family, he forgot his wife. All he could see, all he could know, was an index finger curled around a trigger that was connected to a hammer that was poised to strike a primer that would vaporize a powder into gas that would project a lead ball out of the barrel and straight through his heart. In an eyeblink of time, faced with that gun, Haddel dropped his knife and was profoundly sorry that he’d ever had any idea of stabbing Pavel. He wanted to live, and he wanted Pavel to live, too. In that sliver of a moment he changed his mind about everything, and he would have said and done anything Pavel asked, if he would just agree not to pull that trigger.

But alas, Pavel shot Haddel.

FUNDAMENTALS

Trigrams are simple graphical representations of certain cosmic forces. They are of prehistoric Chinese origin, and of tremendous importance in Taoism. Taoists understand the universe to be made from fundamental forces of yin and yang. Yang is positive, penetrating, and full, while yin is negative, yielding, and empty. (Positive and negative are used here in the sense of presence or absence, rather that something good or bad. Yin is negative in the sense that the empty space of a doorway is negative, while the positive beams and hardware that frame the doorway are yang.) From the interplay of yin and yang come all other things.

We can represent yang as a solid horizontal line, and yin as a broken horizontal line. A stack of any three such lines creates what we call a trigram, and the eight possible trigrams represent eight cosmic forces:

So Heaven, for example, is all yang. Wind is one line of yin followed by two lines of yang. (Trigrams are always described from the bottom line up.) Fire is one line of yang, one line of yin, and then another line of yang. There are many other symbolic associations with the trigrams; Earth is the mother, Heaven the father, Thunder the eldest son, and so on. Why these particular combinations of yin and yang equate with these particular forces could be the subject of its own post, and will not be discussed here.

Two trigrams stacked make what we call a hexagram, and you can verify for yourself that there are 64 possible hexagrams. The hexagrams represent various processes of change. The Chinese sage Confucius wished he could have another fifty years of life just to study the hexagrams, so there is no end to what could be written about them. They, too, are beyond the scope of this post.

Hexagram #36, "Darkening of the Light," also known as "Injury to the Enlightened." (Click for larger view.)

Traditionally, the eight trigrams have been displayed by arranging them in a circle. The arrangements of Earlier Heaven and Later Heaven are the two most common, and will be the subject of this post.

Later Heaven is also called the King Wen Arrangement. Wen was an early king in China under the Sahng Dynasty, and a devoted student of the I Ching,  a book that catalogued the hexagrams and commented on them. Wen developed the arrangement that bears his name over 3000 years ago. The origins of the arrangement of Earlier Heaven are lost to history. It may have been developed by a man named Fu Xi almost 5,000 years ago, or its development may even be prehistoric. In any case, both trigram arrangements are extremely old. The millennia have not robbed them of their power to fascinate.

Nepalese astrological ornament, with trigrams almost in the King Wen arrangement. (Click for larger view)

MEDITATIONS

I will call a pair of trigrams opposites if one can be converted to the other by exchanging all yin lines for yang and all yang lines for yin. For example, Wind (yin, yang, yang) is the opposite of Thunder (yang, yin, yin), Water (yin, yang, yin) is the opposite of Fire (yang, yin, yang), and Mountain (yin, yin, yang) is the opposite of Lake (yang, yang, yin).

I define steps as the number of intervals from one trigram to another along the circle of a given arrangement. If we look at how opposites are arranged by King Wen, we find that Wind is one step from Thunder, Earth is two steps from Heaven, Lake is three steps from Mountain, and Water is four steps from Fire.

We have 1, 2, 3, 4. If we look at the west half of the arrangement, we see that it is symmetrical about the east-west axis. The east half deviates from this symmetry, though only slightly. Furthermore, a nearly-symmetrical arrangement such as this is the only one possible if there is to be a 1, 2, 3, 4 set. This near-miss at perfect symmetry reflects the restless, ever-changing nature of our world. Our world is made of cycles (the years, the seasons, the tides, etc.), but the cycles never quite fall into static perfection. They never repeat exactly, and so the universe constantly slides off into some new identity.

I call one trigram the inversion of another if flipping over one results in the other. For example, the inversion of Thunder is Mountain, the inversion of Wind is Lake, the inversion of Water is Water. The invertible trigrams are also arranged in a way that is nearly symmetrical about the east-west axis.

The four left-behind trigrams are self-inversions. They are Fire, Earth, Heaven, and Water.

These are arrayed with perfect symmetry about the east-west axis. Also, each of these four trigrams, by nature of their self-inversion, are of a higher order of symmetry than the plainly invertible trigrams. The self-invertible have two axes of symmetry while the plainly invertible have only one.

Thus, distinguishing according to the property of invertibility yields two families of trigrams. The plainly invertible, from our 1, 2, 3, 4 scheme, are all either of steps 1 or 3 from their opposites; odd numbers. The self-inversions are all of steps 2 or 4 from their opposites; even numbers. Even numbers are themselves symmetrical, in that they can be split exactly in half. This is not so for odd numbers.

Therefore, the trigrams are either of a symmetrical, even, perfect class, or they are of a lopsided, odd, imperfect class. When we consider what each trigram sybolizes, we see instantly that the odd is a manifestation of the even, a specific drawn from a general.

The plainly invertible, the manifestations, are arrayed nearly symmetrically. This reflects the imperfection of the created world. The self-invertible, the sources, are arrayed symmetrically. This reflects the perfection of the divine plan.

Some readers may have noticed that the connections between trigrams were all drawn through (approximately) the center of the circle, and that this observation of the circle’s center is a bit arbitrary. Nevertheless, doing so may have helped certain visual ideas to be properly understood. We now consider opposites, inversions, sources, and manifestations without deliberate reference to the circle’s center, and in both the Earlier Heaven and Later Heaven arrangements.

First, opposites:

Lines drawn connecting opposing trigrams reveals that Earlier Heaven is like a cyclops. With one eye, he can discern no distance, only angle, and everything is judged relative to himself. Later heaven, like Copernicus, has two eyes, and can understand distance. The illusion of size does not fool him, for he understands everything in its own regard. But his world has no center.

Additional commentary on my own meditation: Copernicus, if you are not catching my metaphor, discovered that the Earth orbited the Sun, and thereby dislodged humanity from the center of the universe. Renaissance art introduced the idea of perspective, through the technique of foreshortening. This, too, dislodged humanity from the center of the universe, because it required an appreciation of the fact that different observers will see differnet things. The Copernican Principle, as astronomers call it, is the idea that no point in space is special, or fundamentally different, from any other point in space. This Idea of perspective, this Copernican Revolution, has been vital to the development of science and technology.

(I associate Copernicus with Later Heaven because in a simple method of perspective drawing, the artist draws all vertical lines parallel, but “horizontal” lines are skewed such that they all meet at a common vanishing point. The 2, 3, and 4 lines in the construction above resemble this technique.)

But there are some things which Copernicans, people with two eyes open and looking at a deep, foreshortened world, simply can’t see. We sneer at a one-eyed cyclops for his belief that he is at the center of the world, for his inability to see with perspective, but in this we are mistaken. There is an order to the cyclops’ world– just look at how the opposites of Earlier Heaven line up. There are some things in the world that can only be understood– indeed, can only be perceived– in relation to us. Values, for example, and notions of right and wrong, need a world with a center if they are to be perceived.

Copernicus, with his two eyes, is blind to a reality that the cyclops can see with his one. The cyclops, with his one eye, fails to see the depth that Copernicus can see. Neither is wholly right, and neither is wholly wrong. Most humans, however, see with a cyclops eye, and whole civilizations have prospered and thrived, having never opened their second eye. I know of no purely Copernican culture, and I imagine any such culture would be short-lived and incredibly hellish. Science, wonderful as it is, does not come naturally, and it does not have all the answers a human needs. 

Earlier Heaven’s lines are all equal, all of four steps. Later Heaven has a line of each length; one, two, three, and four steps. From the outset, Later Heaven contains the elements of the following two constructions, Earlier Heaven does not.

Three lines of length one and one line of length three join sources to manifestations in Earlier Heaven. (The three lines of length one move generally east to west, while the one line of length three moves west to east.) The lines joining Heaven to Wind and Water to Lake are taken as a fundamental, parallel element. Fire/Thunder and Earth/Mountain provide additional instructions. Joining the ends of these initial lines with lines only of length one or three provides the remaining parallel elements. An octagonal star results which, as we should know, symbolizes breathing.

 Additional commentary: The eight-sided star formed from an octagon is a frequent theme in art, particularly Islamic art. Note that it has a smaller octagon inside it. If propagated outward, a larger octagon could be constructed outside it. The web of criss-crossing lines that form the star also form a dizzying pattern of triangles that can seem to point inward, or outward, as the artists chooses to emphasize them. These triangles can cover all of space.

A wind from God blew over the face of the waters. Genesis 1:2. God spoke the world into existence, and wind is often translated from Hebrew as spirit. God then breathed life into Adam, who went on to give names to the animals. At the moment Christ died on the cross, he “cried again with a loud voice and breathed his last.” Matthew 27:50. Speech, breath, wind, and spirit are intimately related to each other.

The constant in-and-out cycle of breathing resembles the restless inward and outward orientation of the eight-pointed star’s triangles, and hence the symbolism. The eight-pointed star, like the divine breath, can be expanded to cover all of space.

Later Heaven, meanwhile, joins its sources to manifestations with two lines of two and two lines of four, creating a square grid. Such grids are useful for measuring area. But the area of a circle cannot be found exactly.

Additional commentary: To find a square’s area, one simply multiplies a square’s side by itself. The area of a circle is much harder to find, because Pi is a transcendental number. If a circle’s area is known, then it will be impossible to say exactly what its radius is, and if its radius is exactly known, then it will be impossible to say exactly what its area is. This does not stop us from making very accurate and useful approximations. Scientific axioms and theories are among these approximations, and they attempt to put into neat little boxes phenomenon that happen in a wild, imperfectly explored universe. One cannot understand the world solely through scientific theory any more than one could square a circle.

I am not sure what to make of the joining of inverses.

But Later Heaven joins by means of askew one and three lines. They are the mirror image of the askew one and three found in the Later Heaven opposites construction.

Groups of lines joining the massive and the massless yield polar opposites.

Earlier Heaven is a pyramid: many unrelated elements put together to reach a holy pinnacle. Later heaven is a tree: an axiomatic root branching into a panoply of theorems. Both are rotated 45 degrees. I know not why.

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All images were created by me, and I release them into the public domain.

Vercingetorix surrenders to Julius Caesar

Consider the civilized and the barbaric. There are many differences between the two. The civilized enjoy the benefits of rule of law, while barbarians tend toward tyranny. Civilizations usher in technological advancement while barbarians are technologically static, if not regressive. Civilizations have the potential for enlightenment, barbarians usually don’t have words so large as ‘enlightenment.’ But I believe there is one difference that explains all the others, one molecular component of culture that spells the difference between societal advance and decay.

CIVILIZATION’S ADVANCE

That molecule is respect for the individual. The west has possessed this ideal since at least as far back as ancient Greece, and it has become perhaps the core value defining western civilization. To greater or lesser degrees, it can also be found in other civilizations, and in a few places it scarcely exists at all. Contrary to this ideal are forms of collectivism, in which every individual is slave to the group, and despotism, in which every individual is slave to one supreme individual. Societies are not all of one type or another; these poles are formal extremes, and every actual society in practice falls somewhere in between.

By “respect for the individual” I mean that every person is recognized as possessing certain rights simply by merit of his being alive. “That all men are created equal” is a strong statement of this idea. The degree to which the west has adhered to this idea has waxed and waned over the centuries, but it never went away, and the west seemed to finally commit to it irrevocably with the Magna Carta. Respect for the individual is why slavery in America was ultimately doomed; whether the founding fathers had abolished it from the outset in 1776 or allowed it to linger for another 100 years, there was simply no way that an institution so inimical to western values could survive forever.

This molecule ends up having profound and far-reaching effects. It all begins when two people disagree. Any two people being fundamentally equal, disputes between them do not carry automatic resolution. If you and I, say, disagree about the chemical composition of the atmosphere, I do not get to carry the day simply because I am the Alamanach. I may be the Alamanach, but you are whoever you are, and neither of us is automatically right. If all people are equal, then our only recourse is to try to get at the objective facts of the matter, and see what those facts indicate. Whoever has the facts on his side wins the argument.

To this end we perform experiments, we take measurements, and we attempt to reason. Western civilization has been known to take some comical detours in its attempts at inquiry, but always there has been the desire to get at objective truth. Medieval scholastics, however pedantic their discipline and poorly grounded their beliefs, recognized the worth of logic and reason, and valued objective facts over the dictates of human authority. Modern science could never have emerged had it been otherwise.

Inquiry inevitably leads to discovery, and from discovery comes innovation. Our inquiry into the behavior of the atmosphere can lead to discoveries in thermodynamics, which in turn allow for innovations in engineering. This same process functions in philosophy, economics, politics, the arts– any field one can name. As these innovations accumulate, civilization advances. No other civilization has advanced as far or as persistently as the west because no other civilization has put as great an emphasis on respect for the individual.

That said, respect for the individual is by no means exclusive to the west. Though it may not take so central a place, the idea does show up in other cultures. India’s caste system, for example, in spite of its fundamentally restrictive nature, acknowledged inherent worth even of people from lower castes. This is utterly unlike, say, ancient Persia, in which every last person in the empire was a slave to the king. That India advanced further as a civilization is easy to see. India’s innovative contributions to the world include the concept of zero and two of the world’s major religions. Ancient Persia’s cultural achievements are so meager, I am unable to name any of them.

THE BARBARITY OF DESPOTISM

To understand just how extraordinary the idea of respect for the individual is, it helps to look at a culture that lacks it. Afghanistan, as it happens, is far on the despotism end of the spectrum. In Afghanistan, every group has a village elder, tribal chief, business owner, or other single human figure whose authority is in every way superior to everyone else in the group. (For convenience, let’s call this generalized authority figure the chief.) If there is a dispute between two people, the solution is to determine the opinion of the chief. What the chief says, is. The idea that there is an objective, measurable reality that exists regardless of man’s opinion is never considered. Inquiry into that reality never begins because the possibility of such inquiry is never even imagined. 

This has subtle but powerful results. For example, there are countless Afghan construction companies in that country right now, with contracts from the US Army Corps of Engineers, USAID, and other western organizations. These construction companies are building (or trying to build) roads, schools, army barracks, police headquarters, irrigation canals, and almost any other item of basic infrastructure one can imagine. Contractually, they are all required to have a Quality Control (QC) department of one form or another. Western agencies want QC because they recognize the value that independent verification brings to a project. The Afghans have no concept of “independent verification;” they maintain these departments because their chief tells them to. The purpose of QC is not understood, but neither is it questioned. The chief has dictated that it shall be. That is enough.

As you would imagine, the quality of these QC departments is exceptionally poor. There is little or no independence from the construction management personnel, actual inspections are rare, and reports are disorganized and empty. These QC departments are Potempkin villages, existing only out of contractual requirement.

Instead of independent verification, Afghans rely on human authority. If a construction foreman says a particular job has been done, that is enough. If the owner of the company says the work is correct, no argument is conceivable.

To come at this from another direction, consider what Adam Smith had to say about the economic bases of human authority. The picture he paints can be helpful when trying to appreciate the radically different worldview possessed by someone lacking any notion of individuality.

An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith, 1776

A Tartar chief, the increase of whose flocks and herds is sufficient to maintain a thousand men, cannot well employ that increase in any other way than in maintaining a thousand men. The rude state of his society does not afford him any manufactured produce any trinkets or baubles of any kind, for which he can exchange that part of his rude produce which is over and above his own consumption. The thousand men whom he thus maintains, depending entirely upon him for their subsistence, must both obey his orders in war, and submit to his jurisdiction in peace. He is necessarily both their general and their judge, and his chieftainship is the necessary effect of the superiority of his fortune. In an opulent and civilized society, a man may possess a much greater fortune, and yet not be able to command a dozen of people. Though the produce of his estate may be sufficient to maintain, and may, perhaps, actually maintain, more than a thousand people, yet, as those people pay for every thing which they get from him, as he gives scarce any thing to any body but in exchange for an equivalent, there is scarce anybody who considers himself as entirely dependent upon him, and his authority extends only over a few menial servants. The authority of fortune, however, is very great, even in an opulent and civilized society. That it is much greater than that either of age or of personal qualities, has been the constant complaint of every period of society which admitted of any considerable inequality of fortune. The first period of society, that of hunters, admits of no such inequality. Universal poverty establishes their universal equality; and the superiority, either of age or of personal qualities, are the feeble, but the sole foundations of authority and subordination. There is, therefore, little or no authority or subordination in this period of society. The second period of society, that of shepherds, admits of very great inequalities of fortune, and there is no period in which the superiority of fortune gives so great authority to those who possess it. There is no period, accordingly, in which authority and subordination are more perfectly established. The authority of an Arabian scherif is very great; that of a Tartar khan altogether despotical.

The Tartar khan Smith describes would find absurd any suggestion that his followers possessed rights equal to his own. The khan’s followers, too, would be unable to comprehend such an idea. All their lives they have lived in a world in which the khan owned their lives; their entire reality is structured around social inequality.

Cynics may claim that the west, too, has plenty of example of human authority dictating the reality that everyone else must live with. The difference is that in the west, there is always the possibility of dissent. One lone voice with the truth on its side can pit itself against any human authority– sometimes without great effect, perhaps, but there is still that one voice having its say. In the west, truth can be avoided, but it cannot be eliminated. In Afghanistan, there is no such thing as dissent, there is no speaking truth to power, there is no understanding that there is a “truth.” The word has no meaning, except insofar as truth is what the chief says.

For this reason, there is no inquiry– there would be no point. In cultures lacking any concept of individual rights, there is no pursuit of new knowledge. The sciences, even in their primitive forms, being nonexistent, there is no discovery, and no innovation. Furthermore, innovations that are introduced from the outside are never truly mastered. Cars, guns, computers, explosives, and airplanes have all been introduced to Afghanistan, and Afghans have learned how to operate each of these. They have not, however, made them their own. Do not look for a clever new application of the PC to come out of Afghanistan. Do not look for them to improve fundamentally upon Semtex or the AK-47; that kind of inventiveness is denied them by their own culture. Unconsciously, they seem to believe that computers exist because some rich and powerful person like Bill Gates decreed them into existence.

THE BARBARITY OF STATISM

I pick on Afghanistan only because of my recent experience. Barbarism has existed in many times and places, and not always in the form of despotism. In variations of statism, the group as a whole wields total authority over every individual. This may be a slight improvement over despotism in that there is equality between people, but there is still no respect for the rights of the individual.

A lucid and chilling apology for statist barbarity appears in Julius Caesar’s account of the siege of Alesia in 52 BC. Caesar had been campaigning in the barbarian territory of Gaul for six years, advancing Roman domination and rule of law. Caesar was no saint– this adventure was a piece of political opportunism on his part that later helped him to become emperor, and he invaded Gaul on flimsy excuses– but by all accounts he was lenient towards those he had conquered and fair towards his own men.  He was not a saint, but certainly he was not a monster.

Gaul was nearly pacified when Vercingetorix rose from obscurity and proved to be Caesar’s most capable adversary. After fighting various engagements, Caesar managed to get Vercingetorix and his army buttoned up inside the walled town of Alesia. The Roman legions, long masters of siegecraft, immediately threw up a “line of contravallation;” a fortified siege wall encircling the town. Because there were numerous Gallic reserves still operating in the country, the Romans also erected an outer ”line of circumvallation” to protect themselves from attack.

Vercingetorix and his army were trapped inside Alesia, unable to communicate with the Gallic relief army outside. The Romans had heavy defenses facing both inwards and outwards.

(Our knowledge of this siege comes principally from a book Caesar himself later wrote, Commentaries on the Gallic War. Sometimes publishers title this book simply Commentaries, or I have also seen it as The Conquest of Gaul. Whatever the title, it is an excellent book, and I highly recommend it. It gives insights into the character of Caesar, it recounts important historical events, and it is a good primer on military science.) 

Outside Alesia, the free Gauls assembled a large relief army to attempt a rescue of the city…

Commentaries on the Conquest of Gaul
Julius Caesar, c. 50 BC

In Alesia, however, they knew nothing of these preparations; the time by which they had expected relief was past and their corn was exhausted. So they summoned an assembly and considered what their fate was to be. Among the various speeches that were made– some advising capitulation, others recommending a sortie while they still had the strength– the speech of Critognatus, a noble Arvernian whose opinion commanded great respect, deserves to be recorded for its unparalleled cruelty and wickedness.

‘I do not intend,’ he said, ‘to make any comment on the views of those who advise “capitulation” — the name they give to the most shameful submission to enslavement; in my opinion they ought not to be regarded as citizens or allowed in the assembly. I will concern myself only with those who advocate a sortie. You all approve this suggestion, as showing that we have not forgotten our traditional courage. But it is not courage, it is weakness, to be unable to endure a short period of privation. It is easier to find men who will voluntarily risk death than men who will bear suffering patiently. Even so, I would support their proposal– so much do I respect their authority– if it involved no loss beyond that of our own lives. But in making our decision we must consider all our fellow countrymen, whom we have called to our aid. If eighty thousand of us are killed in battle, what heart do you suppose our relatives and kinsmen will have when they are compelled to fight almost over our corpses? Do not leave them to continue the struggle alone when for your sakes they have counted their own danger as nothing, and do not by folly or rashness, or by lack of resolution, ruin all Gaul and subject it to perpetual servitude. Because they have not come on the appointed day, do you doubt their loyalty or constancy to our cause? What? Do you suppose the Romans are working day after day on those outer fortifications to amuse themselves? Since our countrymen cannot get messengers through the cordon that is drawn around us, to assure you that they are coming soon, believe what the enemy are telling you by their actions: for it is the fear of their coming that keeps the Romans hard at work night and day.

‘What counsel, then, have I to offer? I think we should do what our ancestors did in a war that was much less serious than this one. When they were forced into their strongholds by the Cimbri and Teutoni, and overcome like us by famine, instead of surrendering they kept themselves alive by eating the flesh of those who were too old or too young to fight. Even if we had no precedent for such an action, I think that when our liberty is at stake it would be a noble example to set to our descendants. For this is a life and death struggle, quite unlike the war with the Cimbri, who, though they devastated Gaul and grievously afflicted her, did eventually evacuate our country and migrate elsewhere, and left us free men, to live on our own land under our own laws and in possession of our rights. The Romans, we know, have a very different purpose. Envy is the motive that inspires them. They know that we have won renown by our military strength, and so they mean to install themselves in our lands and towns and fasten the yoke of slavery on us for ever. That is how they have always treated conquered enemies. You do not know much, perhaps, of the condition of distant peoples; but you need only look on the part of Gaul on your own borders that has been made into a Roman province, with new laws and institutions imposed upon it, ground beneath the conqueror’s iron heel in perpetual servitude.’

At the conclusion of the debate it was decided to send out of the town those whom old age or infirmity incapacitated for fighting. Critignatus’ proposal was to be adopted only as a last resort– if the reinforcements still failed to arrive and things got so bad that it was a choice between that and surrendering, or accepting dictated peace terms. So the Mandubian population, who had received the other Gauls into their town, were compelled to leave it with their wives and children. They came up to the Roman fortifications and with tears besought the soldiers to take them as slaves and relieve their hunger; but Caesar posted guards on the ramparts with orders to refuse them admission.

There is evidence of some measure of equality in Vercingetorix’s army. Open discussion took place between those who wanted to capitulate, fight, or cannibalize, and such discussion would be pointless if Vercingetorix were an absolute despot. On the other hand, the needs of the group take absolute precedence over the rights of any individual; the state is supreme.

In the end, Alesia fell, and Vercingetorix was taken to Rome in chains. Historically speaking, this was not an aberration; in our own day, one statist system after another has proven inferior to liberal democracy. However illogical it may seem, the needs of the many do not outweigh the needs of the few. Civilization demands that the needs of the few– the rights of the individual– be preserved.

Why does eating the few for the sake of the many consistently lead to failure? The answer might again come back to innovation. No statist system can judge every individual on his own merits because there are simply too many people and they are all, ultimately, unique. Categories are necessary if any sort of sense is to be made of a population (“those who were too old or too young to fight” is a category), but as soon as a person is categorized, his unique personhood is lost. I am not a male or an American or a father, I am the Alamanach. And note the use of the definite article: there are no others. Were their others, it would be a class we were talking about, not an individual. Classes are acceptable as a bit of linguistic shorthand, but when moved to action, it must not be forgotten that I am not a father as other men are fathers, I am a father only in the unique way that the Alamanach is a father. I am an American only in the way that the Alamanach is an American. I am male in the way that the Alamanach is male. “The Alamanach” contributes to the definitions of those classes, not the other way around.

States forget this. More accurately, states lack the vast machinery that would be needed to deal with this. Fathers, Americans, and males a state can possibly deal with, but a vast gaggle of individuals– the Alamanach, the Mike Ferrugia, the Xenlogic, the dranoel (and all the rest of you hep cats)– quickly overloads any attempt at organization. The only recourse a state has is to preserve us in our classes (father, American, male, etc.) but destroy us as individuals.

This happens in countless ways far less intense than cannibalism. In a perfect statist system, individuals would not have to pay for their education because the state would provide it. Unavoidably, the state would then have control over which education an individual receives. For myself, I attended college for triple the standard amount of time, and came away with two very different bachelor’s degrees. The second degree was in engineering, though everything in my academic career previous to college indicated that I had no aptitude for mathematics. Under a statist system, I never would have been allowed near an engineering program; state resources cannot be wasted on someone who shows every likelihood of failure. My unique education never would have happened.

Without that education, we never would have had this: http://alamanach.com/second-order-differential-equations-and-dark-adaptation-in-vertebrate-photoreceptors/. That paper, in which the author was working way outside his field, demonstrates how mathematical analysis alone can sniff out physiological mechanisms operating at the cellular level that our experiments and instrumentation cannot detect directly. Neurobiologists (themselves usually not very strong at math either), have been slow to take up this idea, but someday it will matter to somebody. Innovations relying on this sort of mathematical technique will come, and civilization will be the stronger for it.

Those innovations are possible because I and people like me are free to engage in our own pursuits. We are free to develop into our fullest and most productive of possible selves. If I want to go to college for twelve years, it does not matter that such an education would make no sense for anybody else: I am the Alamanach, I live in a society that respects the individual, and I can pursue any course of living I like. So can anyone else. Denied such freedom, most individuals in a statist system never have an opportunity to flower, and their unique contributions to the world are forever lost.

GOD

As noted above, respect for the individual can be traced back at least to ancient Greece. Long centuries later came Christianity, and when we compare Christianity’s core value of love for one’s fellow man with the west’s core value of respect for the individual, it is no wonder that the west came to embrace Christianity so firmly.

If Christian values are the same values that allow civilization to flourish, then could it be that even God is on the side of respect for the individual? It seems to me that He would be. God created individuals, it was man that created states and despots. Civilization has divine roots, barbarity is in its origins wholly mundane. This suggests that states and despots could be entirely unnecessary, provided that civilization, respect for the individual, were sufficiently advanced.

~

My adventures in Afghanistan are finished and I am safely back home, hopefully to stay. To celebrate, I leave you with one of the most successful accumulations of innovations I can think of.

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Leader image is Vercingetorix Throws His Weapons at the Feet of Caesar (oil on canvas, 1899) by Lionel Royer (1852-1926) and is in the public domain.

Siege of Alesia map was prepared by the Department of History at the United States Military Academy (West Point), and as a government publication is in the public domain.

Special thanks to reader Phillip Grayson who suggested a line of thought the fruits of which appeared briefly in this post.

I was there the night they blew it up. The Burj Dubai was to be the tallest building in the world, but it never happened; they changed its name to the Burj Khalifa at the last minute, and then the explosions started.

My career has been advancing swiftly over the last few years, and I arrived at the Dubai airport that evening with my mind still reeling from the news that a concept paper I had contributed to was making the rounds among certain Washington-level individuals. Certain other people were keen on hiring me, possibly for some very exotic work. I was trying to decide what to make of all this, and as my Indo-Pak driver whisked me to my hotel, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit like a big shot. It was an uneasy feeling.

The streets were thick with cars, and Dubai’s invisible army of laborers thronged the sidewalks and bridges. They were all crowding for a sight of the fireworks that would be starting soon.  The last few years have been good to Dubai, too, and it has sunk its fortunes in the most grandiose building projects imaginable. The citizens of Dubai are too well-off to engage in anything so low as labor, and so triumphs like the Burj Dubai have been built by architects, engineers, builders, and construction workers brought in from all over the world. Some 80-90% of Dubai’s population is foreign expatriates.

Amplifying my illusion of importance, my company had arranged every detail of the trip in advance. This driver, my hotel, tomorrow’s business—they’d paved the whole way. The hotel already knew I was coming and had me checked in within minutes. I was on the rooftop lounge sipping a fruit smoothie fifteen minutes before the Burj Dubai’s ceremony. I had a clear view of the tower, and few other guests were up here; it was me, a plush chair, my drink, and the wait staff.

I had time to reflect on life’s vicissitudes. If I had ever strived for worldly success, here it was. I didn’t have to move a muscle. I was, in that moment, sought after and chauffeured and catered to and pampered, and about to witness the same spectacle that all the other big shots had come to see.  I had arrived. Now that I was here, was this where I wanted my life to be?

Unhesitatingly, no. Dubai was the perfect symbol for what I faced, because the city itself was soulless glamour. Yes, they had the tallest building. They had an indoor ski slope, a three-story fish tank, and the world’s biggest shopping mall. Anything man could build, Dubai could have. The sheikh was very proud of that, and on this night all of Dubai had gathered to celebrate their triumph of artificiality, to celebrate this building that had already garnered obvious and justified comparisons to the Tower of Babel.

Dubai can have anything man can build, but man has never built a tree. Man can’t build the blood in your veins or the air in your lungs or the passions in your heart. Man can rear children and raise them up, but the souls of those children come from a source deeply inscrutable to us. There is more, Dubai, in Heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in your materialism.

On the other hand, God had placed me in this moment, on this roof. The things man does create are not entirely without merit, and luxuries are meant to be indulged in once in a while. This was the day God had made. I was allowed to enjoy it.

The lights of the skyscraper sprang to life, and the pyrotechnics erupted all along the sides of the building. It was a windless night, and so the smoke accumulated as the fireworks continued. The building looked like it was getting blown to bits. I enjoyed the show, and it was a good drink, and it had been fine weather on the roof that evening. But I felt dizzy and unsettled as I left.

~

My feet took me to the lobby, and when I saw her I felt drawn to her right away. I don’t know why that was—maybe something about her clothing or her face, or maybe it was some intangible thing in her demeanor. Anyway, she was an expatriate like me, but she was one of these Dubai expatriates and from the Philippines, while I was an American working in Afghanistan. A simple hello turned into a few seconds of banter, which turned into a few minutes of chatting, which stretched into several minutes of talking, which lasted two hours. It was one of those. They don’t happen very often.

We had a lot in common; similar concerns about our jobs and being away from home, similar unease about the same unsettling things we had seen during our time in the Muslim world, similar disappointment with Dubai’s superficiality, and similar yearnings for something more real. I talked about my mixed feelings about my own success. She discussed a historically significant ancestor of hers.

It occurred to me that she and I were two threads of history, crossing by chance. She was part of this great population of expats participating in Dubai’s grand experiment in building. Dubai will succeed or fail, but future historians will study this phenomenon of imported labor that outnumbered the natives 5 to 1. The contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan are their own historical phenomenon.

As for the natives of Dubai, she told me about one person she knew of who did nothing all day. Elaborate meals were laid out for him at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and when he wasn’t eating he was smoking his water pipe. All his waking hours, he would sarcely move from his seat. I told her that this sounded like the Koran’s description of the afterlife:

These are they who are drawn nigh to Allah, in the garden of bliss. A numerous company from among the first, and a few from among the latter. On thrones decorated, reclining on them facing one another. Round about them shall go youths never altering in age, with goblets and ewers and a cup of pure drink; they shall not be affected by headache thereby, nor shall they get exhausted, and fruits such as they choose and the flesh of fowl such as they desire. And pure, beautiful ones, the like of hidden pearls: a reward for what they used to do. They shall not hear therein vain or sinful discourse, except the word peace, peace.

That sounded nice the first time I read it, but only the first time. It is the life of an invalid. Perhaps this is what Muslims aspire to, but it is not for me. I have a physical body and I exist in time and there is good work to do, as I’ve described elsewhere. (http://alamanach.com/2008/12/26/on-time-part-two-hope/) Anyway, a doctrine of idleness will find little resonance among expats; we have come to work. It is our reason for being away from home, our reason for being expats.

~

5 to 1. Most of Dubai’s population has no stake in the place. Polls show some 90% of Dubai expats intend to make their money and leave. This is a problem the sheikh seems to have overlooked. With no emotional investment, workers will invest their time in Dubai, but not their hearts. Without that there is no cultural development, no arts, no reaching beyond one’s grasp. Emotional investments are too expensive to be risked on Dubai; that kind of energy needs to be reserved for life back home.

The skyscraper was a statement to the world that Dubai was modern, advanced, and a world-class city. Dubai has, I think, missed the point. Wealth does not make cities great; greatness comes from those intangibles, the spirit of the people and spirit of a place. One of the most celebrated eating establishments in Chicago is a grungy, greasy diner under Michigan Avenue called the Billy Goat Tavern. People don’t love it for its towers of steel and glass (it doesn’t have any), they love it for the stories connected to the place. People love Paris not because of the Eifel Tower, they love it because it’s Paris. The spirit of the place gave rise to its landmarks, not the other way around. Dubai is all landmarks, no spirit.

In an earlier post, I made the claim that the sword is mightier than the pen, and went on to show why muscle is more capable than brains. (http://alamanach.com/2008/06/20/the-sword-is-mightier-than-the-pen/) This tension between the physical and the intangible causes no end of difficulties for people, and my favoring muscle over brains might suggest that landmarks trump spirit. I have come to realize lately that when resolving the dichotomy, the scale of things needs to be taken into account. When material quantities like time and space are small, such as over the course of a war, the physical trumps everything; justice is meaningless to a bullet. But when the scales become large, such as over the lifetime of a society, the intangible makes itself felt; one bullet is not enough to make an unjust society into a just one, no matter how perfectly that bullet is placed.

Genghis Khan, of all people, demonstrates this for us. He saw the need for law, and perceived that an intangible yoke of ordinance would unify his unruly clans and give them organization. Organized, his people had it in them to create the largest land empire the world has ever seen. Their mounted archers were undefeatable, their physical hardiness and speed of movement uncanny. But without intangible law, they were nothing.

All other great leaders, too, have benefited from a vision of one sort or another. Captain Bligh led 18 men in a lifeboat across a thousand miles of open ocean, driven by the burning need to see justice done. Ulysses S. Grant, unconcerned with his own career and possessing an uncanny ability to see his opponent’s intentions, defeated Confederate armies at every turn. Captain Robert Scott, as a tragic example, led his men to destruction after his vision couldn’t accommodate his becoming merely the second man to reach the South Pole. Amundsen had reached just it days before they did, and Scott’s disheartened team perished during the long hike back to the sea.

Ghengis, Bligh, Grant, Scott—these people have something else in common. They struggled. Dubai does not do this; Dubai hires expats to do its struggling for it. (The lead architect for the Burj Khalifa, an American, has said that a lot was learned from this skyscraper, and that at this point he would probably have no trouble building something 1 kilometer tall. Note who it is that has the benefit of these lessons.) One does not see big shots struggling, either; that’s part of what makes them seem big.

~

Would I like an end to struggle? It seems to me there is still blood in my veins, air in my lungs, and passions in my heart. Whatever I may have achieved so far, there is still more I could be doing. God has given me much—I’d had my own taste of Islamic paradise on the roof the other night—but for all that, God doesn’t seem to be finished yet. Well then, I guess I’m not finished either. If I want to stay humble in the face of success, I might start by reminding myself that there is yet more I could become.

So the next day I went to the bookstore. I’d been planning this anyway; I picked up the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, and I also bought Diplomacy by Henry Kissinger and The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang. These were normal purchases for my own professional development. I then went to a different section of the store. I have a knack for getting to some pretty off-the-wall, remote places in the world, places almost nobody else can reach. Someday I’ll tell you the Registan story. Wherever I go, there are usually people. Some people are so remote that there is nothing discussed in Foreign Affairs that will ever touch them. But they are still people, and they are affected by other things. I bought Essential Clinical Immunology, Microbiology; A Systems Approach, and An Introduction to Clinical Emergency Medicine. Let’s see what else I can learn how to do.

I also bought a book of poetry by Pablo Neruda, but that was for my new Philippina friend. 

Image: NASA

If Orion is visible in the east just before dawn, then it must be August.  Empires may rise and fall and governments may rewrite calendars, but no project of man can alter the course of the stars in the sky. I saw Orion this morning and it was August. They can take away my office and my phone, my calendar and computers, they can shutter the schools and burn all the books, but they cannot budge Orion from his track through the sky. It is August.

The sky can tell us much more than just the date. Some of our most important questions of epistemology are answered for us by the stars. Epistemology is the study of the validity, limits, and basis of knowledge. How do we know what we know? Lots of very smart people, especially during the twentieth century, enjoyed shooting holes into knowledge that the rest of us would have thought was certain. Here is one brainy fellow agonizing over the color of his table:

The Problems of Philosophy
Bertrand Russell
1912

Although I believe the table is ‘really’ of the same colour all over, the parts that reflect the light look much lighter than the other parts, and some parts look white because of reflected light. I know that, if I move, the parts that reflect the light will be different, so that the apparent distribution of colours on the table will change. It follows that if several people are looking at the table at the same moment, no two of them will see exactly the same distribution of colours, because no two can see it from exactly the same point of view, and any change in the point of view makes some change in the way the light is reflected… We know that even from a given point of view the colour will seem different by artificial light, or to a colour-blind man, or to a man wearing blue spectacles, while in the dark there will be no colour at all, though to touch and hearing the table will be unchanged… When, in ordinary life, we speak of the colour of the table we only mean the sort of colour which it will seem to have to a normal spectator from an ordinary point of view under usual conditions of light. But the other colours which appear under other conditions have just as good a right to be considered real: and therefore, to avoid favoritism, we are compelled to deny that, in itself, the table has any one particular colour.

One has to be very careful with such a line of thinking. Any of our senses can be fooled, and one might soon be doubting all of one’s senses, and doubting everything one knows. Illusion is a powerful problem. Is illusion invincible?

The sun and Moon predate Bertrand Russell, they predate polysyllabic words, they predate spelling color with a u, they even predate tables. Anyone who has watched the full Moon rise from the horizon has been struck by how much larger the Moon appears then than when it is overhead. The Moon does not change size, nor does it approach the Earth by an appreciable amount over the course of a night. It should seem the same size at the horizon as when overhead, yet it does not. This phenomenon has been visible to all, from tribesmen on the Serengeti to erudite philosophy professors. Those on the Serengeti might have no understanding of orbital mechanics, but even they can see that the Moon, on rising, appears freakishly large. Is it really that big? The sight of it practically begs for confirmation.

Such confirmation isn’t difficult. Tie some twigs together for a measuring device and one can work out that the Moon at the horizon has the same angular size as when it is overhead. (Measure carefully enough, and you will find it is actually ever so slightly smaller at the horizon; there is half the Earth’s diameter of distance more than there will be at midnight.) The Moon isn’t any bigger, that is just an illusion. This illusion is there for any to see, and has been with us since the beginning.

There are lessons within the lesson. The apparent size of the Moon has little functional importance for the human condition. It does not affect how we eat, where we live, what we wear, or who we like. As far as illusions go, it is a very safe one. No one is likely to lose their life due to the Moon appearing bigger when at the horizon. Despite its harmlessness, the illusion is easily noticed. We see the Moon virtually every night, no matter who we are or where on the planet we live. (If you never go outside at night– well, that’s your problem.) We all know how big the Moon is, and we all notice that dramatic change in size when it rises. The illusion is harmless, but it is right in front of us, a bright, glowing sign in the sky.

The sign says: “Hey! Look! Things aren’t always what they appear to be! Illusions exist!” We don’t need Bertrand Russell to warn us about illusion, the Moon has been warning us all along. The sign says something else, too. It says we can get around illusions, if we are alert to their possibility and we do a little checking. It takes only a little bit of checking to confirm that the Moon, in fact, stays the same size– illusions are not invincible. And if illusions are not invincible, then there must be some reality in the perceptions that our senses bring us. Though it is possible for our senses to sometimes be fooled, it is also possible for them to report truth. Like Orion heralding August, the Moon is there to teach this to all of us.

(The sun, by the way, is subject to the same illusion as the Moon, but we generally do not stare at the sun, and so the phenomenon is not as widely known.)

The Moon somewhat and the sun especially are bright objects. The night sky itself is dark. The darkness of the night sky is patently obvious, but that darkness contains another profoundly important lesson. As with the Moon on the horizon, one need not be highly educated in order to tease out what that lesson is; it is there for all of us to see. The night sky is dark, punctuated with bright points called stars. It does not matter that some people might not know what stars are (giant balls of ionized gas, billions of miles away), it matters only that we have points of light, and an expanse of dark. It is not all light, nor all dark; there is heterogeneity.

Heterogeneity has some profound consequences, as I have discussed elsewhere: http://alamanach.com/2009/03/28/for-b/. Heterogeneity requires that there be a difference between This and That. Such a difference requires that there be boundaries between This and That, and if there are boundaries, then things are not all equal; some things could be special. Astronomers traditionally have been repelled by the suggestion that some region of space could be special. Over the centuries they developed what we now call the Copernican Principle, which holds that Earth is not in a central or special position. In practice, no point of space is considered to be special; the average density of matter and the laws of physics here are assumed to be the same as the average density of matter and the laws of physics anywhere else in the universe. For a long time in astronomy there was a related idea that the universe was infinitely old. Were that the case then time would be subject to the Copernican Principle, too; the average denisty of matter and the laws of physics now would be the same as the average density of matter and the laws of physics then. (The “infinitely old” model of the universe got stabbed through the heart when Edwin Hubble discovered that all galaxies are moving away from each other. Research Einstein’s cosmological constant for more on that story.)

The only trouble is, the sky is dark. If the universe were infinitely large, infinitely old, and uniformly populated with stars, then in every direction we looked, our eyes would land on a star. The night sky should be as bright as the sun. (This is known as Olbers’ Paradox, by the way, after Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers.) That the sky is dark is one of the most fundamental and profound astronomical observations we can make.

What space would look like were it not expanding. Animation from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons 3.0: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

We do not need to know about the Copernican Principle in order to recognize the heterogeneity that bright stars in a dark sky express. But since I expect that you, dear reader, do happen to have some understanding of modern astronomy, let us look at the astronomer’s resolution to Olbers’ Paradox.

The conventional solution is that the universe is of finite size and is expanding. This expansion necessitates that the universe is of finite age, too. Because light moves at finite speed, everywhere we look we are looking into the past. Where it is dark, we are looking into places where no star had yet formed. Because of the expansion of space, the incredibly bright event of the Big Bang has been red-shifted into invisible microwaves. Only by applying boundaries to space and to time can we resolve the paradox.

A more whimsical solution to the paradox suggests that the universe is not expanding, but rather that the stars are in a fractal array, and that as scales of measure increase to infinity, the average density of matter decreases to virtually nothing. Mathematically, this could give us a dark sky, but we would have to give up our Copernican notion of uniformity throughout the universe.

Either way, the Copernican Principle gets its wings clipped. Either there are boundaries, or there are special points in space. There is heterogeneity. Anyone who can see that the light has been separated from the darkness can see that. 

Another very simple observation we can make about the sky is that we are exposed it. Even if we do not know what stars are, we can see that there is nothing between us and them. Stars cannot be touched by man, and so like a pristine forest or mountains, they are as wild as anything else in nature. Unlike forests and mountains, stars are always around– one only needs to step outside. The fluctuations of Betelgeuse, the solar flares of EV Lacertae, and the volcanoes of Io are just outside our door, and often in line-of-sight from where we stand. Even if we lack technical knowledge of stellar dynamics and xenoplanetary geology, our imaginations still can make us aware that similarly wild things could be happening out there. The stars, whatever they are, are untamed, and we are present for all their activity.

There are two lessons to draw from this observation. The first is especially pertinent to those who live in urban areas and do not see the wilderness much. That lesson is that the world is a wild place, and even the high walls of civilization do not keep all the wildness out. The risk of the unknown will always be with us. We try to minimize that risk through all kinds of means, and these days we have defanged a lot of it. Someone born into a prosperous country like the United States can expect to be safe and comfortable for virtually every moment of his entire life. There is no need to go hungry, to sleep outdoors, to risk injury, or to be faced with physical hazards at all. There are exceptional cases of people whose lives have gone terribly wrong, but they are a minority. Most people in such countries will feel the bite of hunger, of cold, of pain, and other hazards only if they choose to launch some voluntary adventure. Life can be so comfortable that we forget that the world is fundamentally a wild, risky place. The stars remind us.

The other lesson is that we are free. With no boundary between us and the stars, there is nothing to prevent any one of us, individually, from travelling to them. This is not to say that the problems of gravity, distance, and life support do not exist; they do. But there is no problem of authority. We do not need anyone’s permission to travel to the stars. There is no boundary to cross, no private property to invade, no neighbors between us and our destination. The stars are above us, it is only a matter of going. T.E. Lawrence had to do more negotiating when he crossed the Fejr desert than any of us would have to do to reach the stars. This lesson of freedom should not be lost on us.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom
T.E. Lawrence
1922

It was obvious from Wejh we had only one road: to march inland through the Billi hills: to cross the railway, and pass through the Fejr desert to Wadi Sirhan by Jauf: and then to march up Wadi Sirhan and westwards to Jefer, in front of Maan. There we could concentrate, and either strike at Maan or slip round it, and march down the Turkish line of defenses to Akaba. This was the unguarded way, the line of least resistance, and the only possible one for us. It would be an extreme example of a turning movement, since it would involve us in a desert march of perhaps six hundred miles to capture a trench within sight of our ships: but there was no alternative, and it was so entirely in the spirit of my sick-bed principles that its issue might well be fortunate, and would certainly be instructive for us. We plumped for it.

There are lessons within lessons. When we study the night sky, even without the aid of sophisticated apparatus or deep scientific knowledge, we can learn about the trustworthiness of our senses, the boundaries of space and time, the basic wildness of the world, and our own individual freedom. These lessons are available to anyone with eyes to see. And what is the lesson within those lessons? It is that the Bertrand Russells of the world do not have a monopoly on knowledge, or wisdom. God put these lessons here in plain view for everybody. Everybody has access to knowledge, to wisdom, and to the secrets of the universe; they are written in the stars. Look around and you will discover they are written in the plants, in the birds, the rocks and rivers and trees. The most subtle and ineffable facts of metaphysics are written in language as plain and solid as a mountain. Truth is all around us, not for the elites to ration out at their whim, but for any of us to share in freely. This is August.

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The Moon image is from NASA, and like most of their images, it is in the public domain. It is available on their website: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_290.html

The animation illustrating Olbers’ Paradox is licensed under Creative Commons 3.0. I’d have included the original author’s name, but that information was not available to me. The Creative Commons 3.0 license is here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ and the animation can also be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Olber%27s_Paradox_-_All_Points.gif

The text excerpts from Bertrand Russell and T.E. Lawrence are both in the public domain.

Books are generally a waste of time. Most books are not worth the paper they are printed on, and I have actually burned quite a few books in my day. One time I was in a remote part of the Outback, and I needed fuel for the water heater so that I could take a hot shower. A book happened to be the most readily available fuel source for this task, and it was some random piece of trash that I had already read, so up in smoke it went. I don’t tell that story very often, even though I did the right thing. I had a warm shower that morning, which is a lot more benefit than I ever got from reading that stupid book.

This worthlessness of books is true only in the general case. Publishing houses churn out endless lines of garbage, expertly printed and bound. But it is not true in specific cases. There are certain books that ought never be burned, even if all of civilization has come to an end. These books are a tiny minority of the whole.

Yet, though they are a tiny minority, there are more of them than you can read in your entire life. A man could restrict his reading to only the great books of history’s various cultures, and even if he were the most enthusiastic bookworm, still he would never get through it all. We live in a wonderful time when a lot of the world’s best literature has been translated into English (of that which was not composed in English to begin with), and modern binding methods produce sturdy volumes that anyone can afford. Used books can often be had for trifling amounts.

Short perhaps of homelessness or war, there is no reason why any person– even a poor person– could not, over time, amass a very large collection of books. Books fall into the category of durable commodities, and the purchase of good books is one of the smarter uses of one’s disposable income. Adam Smith discussed the value of durable commodities in Book 2 of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. I quote him here at length:

from An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

by Adam Smith

1776

The revenue of an individual may be spent, either in things which are consumed immediately, and in which one day’s expence can neither alleviate nor support that of another; or it may be spent in things more durable, which can therefore be accumulated, and in which every day’s expence may, as he chuses either alleviate or support and heighten the effect of that of the following day. A man of fortune, for example, may either spend his revenue in a profuse and sumptuous table, and in maintaining a great number of menial servants, and a multitude of dogs and horse; or contenting himself with a frugal table and few attendants, he may lay out the greater part of it in adorning his house or his country villa, in useful or ornamental buildings, in useful or ornamental furniture, in collecting books, statues, pictures; or in things more frivolous, jewels baubles, ingenious trinkets of different kinds; or, what is most trifling of all, in amassing a great wardrobe of fine clothes, like the favourite and minister of a great prince who died a few years ago. Were two men of equal fortune to spend their revenue, the one chiefly in the one way, the other in the other, the magnificence of the person whose expence had been chiefly in durable commodities, would be continually increasing, every day’s expence contributing something to support and heighten the effect of that of the following day: that of the other, on the contrary, would be no greater at the end of the period than at the beginning. The former too would, at the end of the period, be the richer man of the two. He would have a stock of goods of some kind or other, which, though it might not be worth all that it cost, would always be worth something. No trace or vestige of the expence of the latter would remain, and the effects of ten or twenty years profusion would be as completely annihilated as if they had never existed.

As the one mode of expence is more favourable than the other to the opulence of an individual, so is it likewise to that of a nation. The houses, the furniture, the clothing of the rich, in a little time, become useful to the inferior and middling ranks of people. They are able to purchase them when their superiors grow weary of them, and the general accommodation of the whole people is thus gradually improved, when this mode of expence becomes universal among men of fortune. In countries which have long been rich, you will frequently find the inferior ranks of people in possession both of houses and furniture perfectly good and entire, but of which neither the one could have been built, nor the other have been made for their use. What was formerly a seat of the family of Seymour, is now an inn upon the Bath road. The marriage-bed of James the First of Great Britain, which his Queen brought with her from Denmark, as a present fit for a sovereign to make to a sovereign, was, a few years ago, the ornament of an ale-house at Dunfermline. In some ancient cities, which either have been long stationary, or have gone somewhat to decay, you will sometimes scarce find a single house which could have been built for its present inhabitants. If you go into those houses too, you will frequently find many excellent, though antiquated pieces of furniture, which are still very fit for use, and which could as little have been made for them. Noble palaces, magnificent villas, great collections of books, statues, pictures, and other curiosities, are frequently both an ornament and an honour, not only to the neighbourhood, but to the whole country to which they belong. Versailles is an ornament and an honour to France, Stowe and Wilton to England. Italy still continues to command some sort of veneration by the number of monuments of this kind which it possesses, though the wealth which produced them has decayed, and though the genius which planned them seems to be extinguished, perhaps, from not having the same employment.

The expence too, which is laid out in durable commodities, is favourable, not only to accumulation, but to frugality. If a person should at any time exceed in it, he can easily reform without exposing himself to the censure of the public. To reduce very much the number of his servants, to reform his table from great profusion to great frugality, to lay down his equipage after he has once set it up, are changes which cannot escape the observation of his neighbours, and which are supposed to imply some acknowledgment of preceding bad conduct. Few, therefore, of those who have once been so unfortunate as to launch out too far into this sort of expence, have afterwards the courage to reform, till ruin and bankruptcy oblige them. But if a person has, at any time, been at too great an expence in building, in furniture, in books or pictures, no imprudence can be inferred from his changing his conduct. These are things in which further expence is frequently rendered unnecessary by former expence; and when a person stops short, he appears to do so, not because he has exceeded his fortune, but because he has satisfied his fancy.

Books, then, are a rather intelligent use of one’s money. When we consider that a good book requires investments of time and money exactly equal to that of a bad book (slight as those investment are), we realize that there is no real barrier to being well-read. One can just as easily be well-read as poorly-read. The only regimen that would be less demanding would be absolute illiteracy.

One can just as easily be well-read, but is there any advantage to being well-read? What is it that makes the supposedly great books so great? The answer to this question is worth exploring. More people praise great literature than actually read it, and so the real value of these books is sometimes misunderstood.

First of all, reading great literature makes one a better reader. Good writing improves one’s sensitivity to how things are written. A skillful author will make broad use of his language’s resources, layering double-meanings and unique grammatical constructions to express ideas that were, until the author wrote them, never expressed before. Good writing is lean and efficient, and the great books are characterized by a sort of tightness; their authors include nothing that is extra. Their ideas are expressed in as few words as possible.

Just as fine cuisine helps a person to be more discerning in the taste of food, fine writing helps a person to be more discerning in reading. Imperfections are more easily spotted when one is not accustomed to them, and so imperfections in bad writing stand out. Imperfections in any form of art tell us about the biases and foibles of the artist. By reading better books, we develop the ability to see through the writing, and into the heart of the writer. This ability serves us whether the writing in question is a sonnet or an email.

Secondly, reading great works promotes imagination and critical thinking. The educational system in America has been broken for so long, people can no longer identify everything that is wrong with it. A few of the problems we know about– the system is too favorable to untalented teachers, our math and science scores are weak in comparison to other countries, Music, Gym, and Recess tend to be neglected– but the biggest problem is now no longer even recognized. We have stopped teaching the classics.

Great books are loaded with original ideas. By definition, these books are ground-breaking, important literature. Other works, such as the textbooks used in schools, are derivative. We do not read Galileo or Gibbon, we read books based on the works of Galileo and Gibbon. We do not read Cicero or Caesar, we only read about them. With these derivative works, the ideas get passed on, but only indirectly and weakly. If we read the original authors, we move ourselves that much closer to their original inspiration. We get to wrestle with the same ideas that they did, and to the same level of detail. No derivative work can do this as completely as the original.

This wrestling with ideas is a process the original author has to go through, and the derivative author does not. Martin Luther literally stayed up all night, agonizing over the problem of salvation through works. No writer since him has ever had to do so– Luther has already done it for us. His 95 theses were not the result of bland and sterile scholarship, they came from a passionate, desperate human struggle.

Passion and struggle drive the imagination and prompt the mind to action. The indirect and weak ideas of a derivative work, while sometimes illuminating, are never as firm, trustworthy, and definite as the sharp and rugged ideas in the great books. The reader will find details in great works of literature that every subsequent writer has either overlooked or did not think worthwhile to mention; only by reading Luther can we know what Luther directly thought and felt. The omissions that must come with second-hand works rob inquiry of a solid starting point, and muddies the thinking process. If we want our children to be good thinkers– or if we want to be good thinkers ourselves– then we need to read better books.

Another strength of great books is that they teach the reader more, teach it faster, and teach it better than any other books. Consider, for example, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. This book is important for a number of reasons. For one thing, it is a thorough account of an important war that occurred between the Greek states. It also happens to be the work that founded the Realist school of foreign policy; the mighty Athenians at one point declared that “the strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must,” a philosophy that guides many of the diplomats and foreign policy thinkers of our own day. It is an important book in the study of military science as well. Perhaps most famously, it is considered the first more-or-less objective work of history ever composed.

There are no end to the textbooks, encyclopedia articles, and other derivative works that explore these facets of Thucydides’ book. One could read them, or one could simply read Thucydides. Here is what Thucydides has to say about his objective approach to history:

from History of the Peloponnesian War

by Thucydides

431 BC

Having now given the result of my inquiries into early times, I grant that there will be a difficulty in believing every particular detail. The way that most men deal with traditions, even traditions of their own country, is to receive them all alike as they are delivered, without applying any critical test whatever. The general Athenian public fancy that Hipparchus was tyrant when he fell by the hands of Harmodius and Aristogiton, not knowing that Hippias, the eldest of the sons of Pisistratus, was really supreme, and that Hipparchus and Thessalus were his brothers; and that Harmodius and Aristogiton suspecting, on the very day, nay at the very moment fixed on for the deed, that information had been conveyed to Hippias by their accomplices, concluded that he had been warned, and did not attack him, yet, not liking to be apprehended and risk their lives for nothing, fell upon Hipparchus near the temple of the daughters of Leos, and slew him as he was arranging the Panathenaic procession.

There are many other unfounded ideas current among the rest of the Hellenes, even on matters of contemporary history, which have not been obscured by time. For instance, there is the notion that the Lacedaemonian kings have two votes each, the fact being that they have only one; and that there is a company of Pitane, there being simply no such thing. So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand. On the whole, however, the conclusions I have drawn from the proofs quoted may, I believe, safely be relied on. Assuredly they will not be disturbed either by the lays of a poet displaying the exaggeration of his craft, or by the compositions of the chroniclers that are attractive at truth’s expense; the subjects they treat of being out of the reach of evidence, and time having robbed most of them of historical value by enthroning them in the region of legend. Turning from these, we can rest satisfied with having proceeded upon the clearest data, and having arrived at conclusions as exact as can be expected in matters of such antiquity. To come to this war: despite the known disposition of the actors in a struggle to overrate its importance, and when it is over to return to their admiration of earlier events, yet an examination of the facts will show that it was much greater than the wars which preceded it.

With reference to the speeches in this history, some were delivered before the war began, others while it was going on; some I heard myself, others I got from various quarters; it was in all cases difficult to carry them word for word in one’s memory, so my habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said. And with reference to the narrative of events, far from permitting myself to derive it from the first source that came to hand, I did not even trust my own impressions, but it rests partly on what I saw myself, partly on what others saw for me, the accuracy of the report being always tried by the most severe and detailed tests possible. My conclusions have cost me some labour from the want of coincidence between accounts of the same occurrences by different eye-witnesses, arising sometimes from imperfect memory, sometimes from undue partiality for one side or the other. The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.

If you have read through those three paragraphs, congratulations: you are an expert in Thucydides’ methods. You have also learned something important about how the Greeks tended to conflate history and legend. Read the entire book and you will learn a great deal about geopolitics, ancient Greece, military science, rhetoric, and psychology. These lessons will not be superficial or hollow, there is serious knowledge to be gained from that one book alone. And as it is with Thucydides, so it is with all the great books; their information density is incredible.

The fourth benefit of great reading that I want to discuss comes from the cumulative effect of the other three. When one is a skilled reader with direct, detailed knowledge of many important topics, one becomes a bulwark against the ignorance of “conventional wisdom,” able to contribute richly to any serious conversation. Such a person is an intimidating opponent in a debate and a capable defender of the ideas that hold together civilization.

That might sound grandiose, but it is true. Civilization is built upon, among some other things, the ideas that people have had over the millennia. Those ideas form the structure of our culture. When we paper over that structure with derivative works, people forget what the original ideas underneath really were. A person who has read great books, who has studied civilization’s founding ideas, does not fall into such errors. That is a person who can correct others.

Take, for example, the Prussian military officer Carl von Clausewitz. His book On Waris perhaps the finest monograph on the subject ever written, superior even to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Clausewitz is one of those writers that many people talk about, but few actually read. When the do read him, they usually read the beginning and ending of his book, and skip the dry, technical middle. There are famous quotes from Clausewitz about war being the continuation of politics by other means. The fame of his quotes and paucity of people who have actually read him has resulted in many people thinking that Clausewitz was really some sort of political theorist.

This evaluation is laughable. Clausewitz was interested in military science, and the bulk of his book is taken up with detailed considerations of very specific military problems. The following is an excerpt from a chapter on the defense of rivers. From some very practical observations, he demonstrates that a proper river defense can hold off an enemy of any size:

from On War

by Carl von Clausewitz

1832

The time required to build a bridge determines the distance from each other at which the corps charged with the defence of the river should be posted. If we divide the whole length of the line of defence by this distance, we get the number of corps required for the defence; if with that number we divide the mass of troops disposable, we shall get the strength of each corps. If we now compare the strength of each single corps with the number of troops which the enemy, by using all the means in his power, can pass over during the construction of his bridge, we shall be able to judge how far we can expect a successful resistance. For we can only assume the forcing of the passage to be impossible when the defender is able to attack the troops passed over with a considerable numerical superiority, say the double, before the bridge is completed. An illustration will make this plain.

If the enemy requires twenty-four hours for the construction of a bridge, and if he can by other means only pass over 20,000 men in those twenty-four hours, whilst the defender within twelve hours can appear at any point whatever with 20,000 men, in such case the passage cannot be forced; for the defender will arrive when the enemy engaged in crossing has only passed over the half of 20,000. Now as in twelve hours, the time for conveying intelligence included, we can march four miles, therefore every eight miles 20,000 men would be required, which would make 60,000 for the defence of a length of twenty-four miles of river. These would be sufficient for the appearance of 20,000 men at any point, even if the enemy attempted the passage at two points at the same time; if at only one point twice 20,000 could be brought to oppose him at that single point.

…

In all the practical affairs of human life it is important to hit the right point; and so also, in the defence of a river, it makes a great difference whether we rightly appreciate our situation in all its relations; an apparently insignificant circumstance may essentially alter the case, and make a measure which is wise and effective in one instance, a disastrous mistake in another. This difficulty of forming a right judgment and of avoiding the notion that “a river is a river” is perhaps greater here than anywhere else, therefore we must especially guard against false applications and interpretations; but having done so, we have also no hesitation in plainly declaring that we do not think it worth while to listen to the cry of those who, under the influence of some vague feeling, and without any fixed idea, expect everything from attack and movement, and think they see the most true picture of war in a hussar at full gallop brandishing his sword over his head.

Such ideas and feelings are not always all that is required (we shall only instance here the once famous dictator Wedel, at Zullichau, in 1759); but the worst of all is that they are seldom durable, and they forsake the general at the last moment if great complex cases branching out into a thousand relations bear heavily upon him.

We therefore believe that a direct defence of a river with large bodies of troops, under favourable conditions, can lead to successful results if we content ourselves with a moderate negative: but this does not hold good in the case of smaller masses. Although 60,000 men on a certain length of river could prevent an army of 100,000 or more from passing, a corps of 10,000 on the same length would not be able to oppose the passage of a corps of 10,000 men, indeed, probably, not of one half that strength if such a body chose to run the risk of placing itself on the same side of the river with an enemy so much superior in numbers. The case is clear, as the means of passing do not alter.

Should you ever find yourself defending a river, you now know how. Should you ever find yourself defending Clausewitz’s purpose in writing On War, you now have some insight into that, too. The people who read about great books without ever reading the books themselves know neither of these things, and are vulnerable to popular misconceptions about their own culture.

That is just Clausewitz, and perhaps your interests do not extend to military science. But people just as often cite Plato, Aristotle, Newton, and Freud, having never read what they wrote either. Some people try to discuss Socrates, unaware that he left us no books. Such people are disconnected from their own culture and less informed about the world in which they live. They have not reached their full potential and are less able to operate in the world than they otherwise might be. The solution for them is to read better books.

I have tried to emphasize four major reasons for reading the great books of the world: such books make us more discerning readers, they improve the mind, they allow us to experience the author’s struggles directly, and they make us into more capable citizens. There is one negative issue I have not touched on; the great works are intimidating. Some of them are long, all of them are old, at times they are dry, many are hard. First I would point out that some are short, light, and easy. Nikolai Gogol’s Diary of a Madman can be read in one sitting and is laugh-out-loud funny. As for some being hard or dry, anyone who has reached this sentence will not encounter that problem. Smith, Thucydides, and Clausewitz are as hard as they come. If you can read those three– and you just did– you can read anyone. Do not be afraid to read better books.

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The works by Adam Smith, Thucydides, and Carl von Clausewitz are all in the public domain, as are the particular translations employed here.

The bookshelf photo is copyrighted by the author. It may be reproduced on a website if a link is included to this page.

The ideas discussed here are based on a year spent in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in a position that allowed for exceptional learning opportunities. Others have already learned these lessons, but the contractual nature of this work and the rapid turnover that it encourages have prevented these lessons from being institutionalized. If we want to win, this needs to change. To quote the U.S. Army Counterinsurgency field manual, “In (counterinsurgancy operations), the side that learns faster and adapts more rapidly– the better learning organization– usually wins.” Here, then are the lessons that operations in the field have to teach us.

Recognize who really holds the power It is almost certainly not the legitimate government. If the government held power, there would not be an insurgency. But this does not mean that the insurgents hold the power, either; if they did, they would be the government. The two are in competition and struggling against each other. Who is more powerful in any given time and place is an open question, and it may well be neither of them.

In the rural areas of southern Afghanistan– which is most of the region– real power is held neither by the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (IRoA) nor the Taliban, it is held by local village elders. Within their respective territories, these gentlemen are the most powerful people in Afghan political society. Their geographic range is limited, but within that range their word is usually law. The Taliban recognize this political reality, and in most cases they cannot operate in an area without at least the implicit consent of the relevant elder.

There have been occasional attempts by the Taliban to terrorize an uncooperative village into giving support. Sometimes this works. Sometimes it does not. There have been cases– plenty of them– in which an elder, supported by his village, has turned away the Taliban and denied them whatever support or rights of access they were seeking. There have been cases of villages taking up arms against the Taliban when the Taliban’s actions were not in the villages’ interests.

Find the people in the middle and get them on your side In any insurgency, most people are not wholly one one side or on the other. Afghans especially tend not to be idealogues, and historically have sided with whoever appeared to be winning. The villages just discussed are a clear example. They usually have the power to resist the Taliban, if they choose. For an aid project being implemented in the vicinity of such a village, this is critical.

Winning the middle is the entire goal of a counterinsurgency. Insurgency is a form of asymmetrical warfare not because of the relative strengths of the two military adversaries, but because of the style of engagement. While insurgents rely heavily on guerilla tactics, terror, and propaganda, the counterinsurgent relies on improved government services, beneficial aid programs, and his own (generally more honest) propaganda. The insurgent seeks to delegitimize the government through violence. The counterinsurgent seeks to legitimize the government through the only thing that makes any government legitimate– earning the consent of the governed.

To help the government earn that consent, it is up to aid and development workers to win the great undecided middle. We do this by using the vehicle of our aid programs to make contact with communities and bring them better services. In the course of this contact we can learn their grievances and either address them within the context of our own programs, or communicate those grievances to other counterinsurgents who are better positioned to address them.

Collect and analyze intelligence During an insurgency, any time something blows up, it means somebody is upset about something. With the exception of a few lunatics– too few to make a difference– no one starts war for the sake of having a war. As Augustine pointed out, man starts war not because he hates peace, but because he seeks a peace that suits him better. The good news is that there is usually some common ground to be had between the insurgents and counterinsurgents, common ground from which negotiations can start. It is possible that among the hard-core insurgents, located at one extreme end of the spectrum, there might be no common ground to be had. But among the great unwon middle, there is always the possibility of negotiation.

The dedicated insurgents at the extreme far pole are beyond the scope of aid and development programs. They are for the military to deal with, using those methods peculiar to a military. Such extremists are rare, even among armed combatants. Many of those who take up arms to fight with an insurgency are of imperfect motivation, and may be turned under the right circumstances. In southern Afghanistan we see a great deal of this. Many Taliban fighters during the annual summer offensive are rural adolescents who simply have nothing better to do with their time. Rather than be a drain on village resources during the lean summer months, their village elders release them to go fight with the Taliban.

There are also those who side with an insurgency only when and for as long as it suits their own purpose. It was mentioned above that elders can allow or forbid Taliban activity within their area. Sometimes they may allow it simply because doing so is less troublesome than preventing it. Other times they may allow it because permitting what the Taliban have in mind may help settle a score with a rival, or will bring some perceived economic advantage, or some other trifling personal reason.

These sorts of intrigues are what fuel both insurgencies and counterinsurgencies. If some locally powerful figure has a dispute with his neighbor, or he wants to make some gain for himself, these are issues the counterinsurgent can engage to positive effect. Aid and development organizations are perfectly poised to deliver infrastructure and services that redress such grievances or help achieve such anticipated economic gains. These are exactly the actions that starve insurgencies and bring peace.

The only way to deliver the right aid to the right people, in a way that will neutralize incentives to side with the insurgents, is to gather and analyze intelligence. Aid and development workers must know, in close and personal detail, the social dynamics playing out in their areas of focus. They must keep track of who is doing what, and why. They must identify individuals and their motives. Without this knowledge, aid is delivered blindly, stupidly. Aid delivered unintelligently is without net effect, and perfectly useless for advancing the cause of peace. 

Hire local people to provide security Unlike aid and development projects in pacified countries, operations in war zones require a heavy layer of security. A number of contracting companies have sprung up in recent years to provide these services. Close protection of expatriate staff is often provided by retired military members working as security contractors.

Protection of project sites, when required, usually falls to local security firms employing local nationals. In practice, this may not be local enough. In southern Afghanistan especially, a real local is someone from the immediate area of the project; anyone else is an outsider. In some places, a person from only a few villages away is distrusted as a stranger.

It should be pointed out, though it should not need to be explained, that people do not want armed strangers prowling around their neighborhood, particularly during an insurgency. When aid projects bring in security workers from any distance away, this can create friction with the community and encourage attacks on the project. Keep in mind, most of the community is in that great unwon middle, and has no reason to extend trust to armed outsiders just for the sake of some aid project.

A better method is to hire members of the immediate community to provide security. This accomplishes a few things at once. It eliminates issues of friction due to outsiders, and it also gives like-minded community members a common cause to rally around. By organizing security around an aid project, they are also organizing in a way that will help them to resist hostile insurgents.

Also, involving a community in  a project’s security involves them in the project itself. Whatever changes in political allegiance a person may feel in the future, if he once helped to build the bridge near his village, he will be that much less likely to blow it up some day in the future. Additionally, by hiring security locally, that much more of the community will have been engaged with and will have a channel of communication with the counterinsurgency side. This is outreach, and the ability of our aid programs to contribute to it should not be underestimated.

Beware of the lure of standards There is an understandable temptation to apply first-world standards of quality and safety to any aid project, particularly those involving construction. It should be pointed out that building codes in all places are a matter of local policy, not some global standard. Even the International Building Code (IBC) is applied– or not– at the will of the local government. (Building codes are usually established at the municipal level.)

The mistake is often made that applying the IBC, or U.S. workplace safety standards, or others such foreign standards, regardless of codes at the local level will be “better” than what the local law requires. Sometimes there is no statutory local code, and aid organizations resort to something like the IBC as a default policy. This is a mistake for three reasons. First, it assumes in the absence of statutory code that there is no code at all, when in fact builders all over the world generally know what they are doing. Social mechanisms that a foreign aid worker cannot see exist to identify and correct poor workmanship.

Secondly, what is a suitable standard in the first world is not “higher” or “better” than other standards, it is merely more suitable under those first-world conditions. Most insurgencies do not take place in the first world, and the conditions which both allow for and require first-world standards simply do not exist. We can understand this if we keep in mind one cruel truth: the more expensive stuff is, the cheaper lives are. The United States maintains extraordinary standards of safety– automobiles come equipped with side-impact airbags for example– and it goes to such lengths because lives there are so precious. The average American commands a huge amount of wealth. Or, what amounts to the same thing, a huge amount of wealth supports just one average American. In America, stuff is cheap.

Elsewhere, stuff is expensive, and so human lives are cheap. Far less capital is spent on the support of any one person. Under these economic conditions, a higher level of risk is justified for any given endeavor; lower levels of risk cannot be supported economically and would prevent a project from going forward. It would be nice if some of the wealth from, say, America could be applied to boost the safety of a project in, say, Afghanistan, but all of Afghanistan would have to be lifted to the level of America before the first-world safety of one project could actually be realized; aid programs to not happen in a vacuum.

(This relative cheapness of lives extends to expatriate staff as well. We routinly take on risks in an insurgency environment that would never be accepted back home. We sacrifice much just to be here, we have high turnover, and some lose their liberty, or their fortune, or even their lives through just one act of foolishness. In this place, our lives are cheap too.)

The third reason why we should work to local standards is that there is, after all, an insurgency to deal with. Effort spent on expensive attempts to impose foreign standards is effort that could otherwise be employed in additional counterinsurgency activities. We have a war to win, and a road that is built by men without hard hats is better than no road at all. The accidents which come from construction projects and other activities are much smaller in number than the destruction wreaked by an insurgency, and the sooner the insurgency is defeated, the sooner better working practices can be introduced. Though it would be nice to introduce improved practices right away, the insurgency is a far greater threat and must be given priority.

Do not impose foreign work standards. The local standards will do.

Remember that they are spying on you One of the great challenges in counterinsurgency operations is distinguishing combatants from the civilian polulation. Aid and development organizations work particularly closely with locals, hiring them as house staff, office staff, and for field positions. “Capacity building,” in which locals are trained in various skills, often figure prominently into development programs. Locals play a major and trusted role in our operations. The insurgents are aware of this, and their home field advantage makes it far easier for them to infiltrate us than for us to detect them.

Insurgencies are also fertile ground for petty criminals and organized crime. The latter may or may not have ties to the insurgency, and will frequently try to win lucrative subcontracts from aid organizations. They have also been known to infiltrate military units, getting their younger, more educated members hired on as interpreters or getting the uneducated hired as cleaners. This happens more frequently than many seem to realize. It is usually done for the purposes of data gathering; reports of sabotage or violence by employees are extremely rare.

Kidnappings and violence outside a protected compound, however, are common, and are often guided by inside knowledge. For these reasons, local employees should never be trusted with any information that is at all sensitive. Expat staff movements and details about anyone’s security arrangements should be especially guarded. If they do not need to know something, do not tell them.

Understand what “failed state” means The Fund for Peace, a think tank based in Washington, D.C, defines a failed state on the basis of twelve complex indicators that include elemental factors such as food supply, presence of refugees and internally displaced persons, opportunity for social interaction, and so on. Note how fundamental such factors are to human growth and development. Chronic problems among any one of these will prevent a person from fully realizing a healthy, mature adulthood.

One of the principle causes of the failure of a state is the loss by the legitimate government of the monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force. This is exactly the condition that exists during an insurgency, and an insurgency threatens to ruin a state, if that state has not already failed.

Afghanistan, having been at war for over 30 years now, became a failed state a long time ago. No one who has grown up here has experienced a normal life. Because of this, most Afghans do not possess the level of intellectual sophistication that is common elsewhere in the world.

A specific example will be the safest way to illustrate this. A short test of logical syllogisms was given to a sample of eighteen Afghan men last year. The test was administered in both English and Pashto, and a sample syllogism was provided to illustrate the idea behind the test questions. The following was a typical question from the test:

1. No pomegranate orchards are in Kandahar Province.

2. Rahmatullah’s orchards are in Badakhshan Province and Kandahar Province.

3. One of Rahmatullah’s orchards grows pomegranates.

 Where is Ramatullah’s pomegranate orchard?

Three subjects– less than twenty percent of the total– managed to answer correctly. Everyone else either answered incorrectly, or failed to give any intelligible response. This result was typical across the entire test, and it should be noted that no one was able to finish in a reasonable amount of time; even the top performers, all of whom possessed post-secondary educations, took at least twenty minutes to answer just five questions. No one achieved a perfect score.

Such limitations are by no means insurmountable, but where they exist, they must be kept in mind. Populations that are operating with this kind of deficit need hands-on guidance if they are to participate in implementing aid programs. Subcontractors and local field staff, routinely tasked to carry out complicated work at a professional level, require guidance, teaching, and an occassional helping hand. They should not be expected to deliver output at a first-world level unassisted.

Aid and develoment programs that succeed in guiding their staff and subcontractors succeed in capacity building. This can be some of the most personally rewarding work that an expatriate aid worker will perform. It requires, however, close engagement with the local nationals, and all the tolerance and patience that such engagement entails. Expatriate staff who do not have an aptitude for such cross-cultural work are best suited to positions that have no local nationals reporting to them.

Aid needs to be demand-driven, not supply-driven No aid program will last forever. No country will receive aid forever. When those supports are removed the country must be able to stand on its own, or else the entire exercise was a vanity. If aid is to be effective, it must be effective in the long term.

To achieve this, aid has to be responsive to market forces. Regardless of whatever type of economy a country tries to establish, free market forces will always be the underlying reality. Artificial policies can distort those forces, but they can never eliminate or rewrite them, no matter how much some leaders may try. Only aid that makes sense in a free market will have positive long-term effects.

For this reason, the particulars of an aid or development program should be shaped by demand. Infrastructure programs offer a clear illustration of this. Currently, the two largest USAID contracts in Afghanistan are devoted to road building, with some discretionary funds for miscellaneous smaller projects such as wells and first aid clinics. In practice, this discretionary funding has been going to wells almost exclusively; wells are simple, useful, and people are always happy to have them.

But by getting to used to offering only wells, and building only roads, these aid programs become supply-driven; there is a plentiful stock of wells and roads, and they are free to more-or-less anyone willing to have them. Being free, people accept them whether they need them or not.

Smaller programs have seen success here by having a variety of infrastructure items they are capable of building– roads, bridges, culverts, wells, irrigation canal intakes, flood protection walls, and so forth– and by having a variety of items to offer a community, they have been better able to meet those communities’ particular needs. Not everyone really needs a well. Different people need different things.

In southern Afghanistan, demand-driven approaches hold great promise in the particuar problem of poppy displacement. Many farmers harvest poppy for purely economic reasons; they can get a good return on their investment. Modern agricultural methods would yield a return on licit crops that outstrips what could be made illicitly with poppy, if only the tools and knowledge of such methods could be introduced. An aid program taking a demand-driven approach could provide such things in negotiated exchange for voluntary poppy reduction. For example, in exchange for a farmer converting 5 acres of poppy over to wheat, he might receive wheat seed, an irrigation system, and a grain silo. By negotiating with him, it can be determined just how valuable his poppy field is to him really, and what it would take to get him to part with it.

Aid of this sort has to contend directly with the forces of the market. If such an approach were implemented throughout southern Afghanistan, an agricultural sector would be built that was robust, competitive, and able to survive in the long-term. This would starve the Taliban of funds and make lawful society appear more attractive to the unwon middle.

Offer an alternative In Afghanistan, most people do not especially favor the Taliban. They remember what Taliban rule was like, and do not desire to go back to it. At the time of this writing, the current government is extremely corrupt, and is engaging in criminal activity at every level. Bribery, extortion, and drug trafficking rule the day. As one Afghan businessman put it, one must choose between paying bribes to the current government, or accepting beatings from the Taliban. Afghans recognize that for all its faults and excesses, the Taliban regime did provide law and order, something which presently they lack.

If a counterinsurgency s to succeed, it must have a viable alternative to the insurgency that it can offer. Perhaps here more than anywhere else the political nature of the conflict becomes clear. Aid and development organizations conduct good-governance programs, and without success in this area, all the infrastructure, health care, education, and food programs count for nothing.