Pay Attention to the Details

 Over to The New Yorker there is long and well done evisceration of evolutionary psychology. It has in it, however a howler of an interpretive error. Gottlieb offers a little anecdote from Darwin's reception:

The idea of natural selection itself began as a just-so story, more than two millennia before Darwin. Darwin belatedly learned this when, a few years after the publication of “On the Origin of Species,” in 1859, a town clerk in Surrey sent him some lines of Aristotle, reporting an apparently crazy tale from Empedocles. According to Empedocles, most of the parts of animals had originally been thrown together at random: “Here sprang up many faces without necks, arms wandered without shoulders . . . and eyes strayed alone, in need of foreheads.” Yet whenever a set of parts turned out to be useful the creatures that were lucky enough to have them “survived, being organised spontaneously in a fitting way, whereas those which grew otherwise perished.” In later editions of “Origin,” Darwin added a footnote about the tale, remarking, “We here see the principle of natural selection shadowed forth.”

The problem here is obvious. Natural selection and Empedocles' just so story have nothing whatsoever to do with one another. Darwin hadn't heard or read and was not working in that intellectual tradition. He was, rather, engaged in a  modern scientific endeavor in which the facts mattered. Take, as an example, the peacocks tail or sexual selection. As Gotlieb points out Darwin, like all of us, was a prisoner of his culture. Nonetheless, he recognized that females had enormous influence on evolution even though it violated his cultural assumptions about women's inferiority.

In addition, Lamarcks' theory of acquired characteristics, which is a nearly perfect example of just soing, was one of Darwin's targets as were all the then current just so stories about speciation.  Darwin, for all his faults and warts, was most emphatically not just soing and, indeed, one reason why the Darwinian solution to evolution, natural selection plus descent with modification, was and is so important is that it provides both a wealth of evidence against just so but also a nearly-perfect example of how the application of scientific method to a knotty problem can resolve the problem and limit the distortion of cultural assumptions.

Historishically Thinking

The current The New Yorker there is a review (sub req) of a work of fiction the author of which once said

[i]creasingly, I am less interested in writing about fictional people because it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story.

Her response to her lament was to write a work of fiction interlarded with "facts," we are supposed to believe.

I have said this before and I will say it again: if you don't want to write fiction don't but for god's sake stop pretending that fiction dedicated to factiness is somehow or another factual.

Were she really bored with fiction, instead of tired with all the hard work of making everything up, she could write, I don't know, a biography or a work of history. No really, I doubt, to be honest, that either would be any good as the discipline of either biography or history writing is rather different than the discipline required to write fiction but still.

Historishical

Steven Colbert is famous for, among other things, coming up with truthiness and factiness. Rich Santorum recently showed how a commitment to both that plays out in real life. In the recent Red Plenty book event over to the Crooked Timber a new an equally troubling idea is slowly emerging: historishical. As near as I can figure, Red Plenty is a work of fiction with some documents attached, which is to say it is a work of fiction.

The key difference between thinking historically and thinking historishically is that historians cannot make stuff. Confronted with lacunae they can, it is true, reach for the unstable verities of other social science, weasel words like might or may, assertions of must or had to, or they can attempt the no less slippery reliance on analogy. Or they admit to making a guess but  rely on their general mastery of the subject matter to  paper over the idly speculative guessing game.



However, the best historians when confronted with a lacuna, Heydrich's motivation say, or what the Nazis said to Hindenburg during the fateful meeting, etc, remain calmly silent secure in the knowledge that you don't get to know everything and that making stuff up is just not on.

On the other hand, some of the respondents are confused about Red Plenty's genre based on its truthiness and historishical nature. As one. put it

[i]t probably works well as history, though I really don’t know enough about Russian history to judge. It certainly has the feel of the best kind of history -  it captures what it (probably) felt like for the people under examination when the past was modern, and exciting, and uncertain and contingent, and all those other things that we have trouble imagining the past as.

Another confused the making up of stuff with historical accuracy arguing that

[b]y using fiction, Spufford is able to make abstract accounts of how the Soviet system operated concrete, and concretely horrible. The collage of stories allows him both to portray individuals striving to reach goals and the overarching system that encompasses those individuals.

For all of the authors citation of Hayden White's notion of emplotment, making stuff up is the opposite of concrete and has little to nothing to do with history as a discipline, which seeks to  make events concrete by using the facts of the matter to create a coherent and plausible account  of the event or whathaveyou under consideration.

If Santorum highlights the dangers and dementedness of truthiness and factiness, Ryan Lizza recent essay on Obama's second term highlights the danger of historishical thinking. He "argues" that

[i]f he manages to win this year, it is likely to be by less than that, which would make him the first President in a hundred and twenty-four years to win a second term by a smaller margin than in his initial election. Whatever a mandate is, Obama won’t have one.

It is worthwhile here to note that Lizza, relying on the work of Robert Dahl Lizza has already dismissed the idea of a presidential mandate as a "myth." This means, according to Lizza, that if Obama survives a close reelection he wont have something that doesn't exist much as in a similar fashion if I follow the rainbow I won't have a non-existent pot of gold.

The reasons for Obama's "likely" election year squeeker are the horrid economy and and the bizarre idea that

[b]arring a disastrous revelation or blunder, Mitt Romney will be a more formidable opponent than many assumed during his rightward lurch to secure the Republican nomination.

As Steve Benen has shown in an on-going series of posts, Romney cannot tell the truth and, as anyone who has watched the man in action can attest, he is the black hole of charisma and a human gaffe machine. In other words, if Romney suddenly becomes some one else and if the press refuses to expose his lies and mendacity he just might be a formidable opponent. I give Lizza the last point but cannot really cede the first.

Lizza also offers some "historical" analogies from other presidents second terms in an attempt to shore up his idle speculation on Obama's second term. The problem here is that historical moments are radically contingent on the subjects and object of this or that moment in histortory. As a result, history is one long narrative of radical rupture. A historian's task, oddly enough, is to explain the long or short series of events, individuals, choices, and motivations that allow us to understand or comprehend the rupture. However, as a form of predictive science history doesn't work at all and the other social science offer only owl of Minerva like dim outlines predicated on there being no rupture.[1]

Think about, as one example out of a million, the Soviet Union's collapse. It was not predicted by experts on Soviet politics. Ditto the events that followed on from 9/11.

The world as it actually is and the future that awaits us as a collective entity, out private future is the grave, is beyond knowing and using the historishical mode to describe or illuminate the impenetrable future is not just a fools game, it is sign of intellectual dishonest yoked to a careerist's desire to be interesting in the service of  individual advance.

[1] I would make an exception for the repitition of past mistakes, financial booms leading to busts, faith in markets, allowing homicidal maniacs to take the reins of state, and related etc.


UPDATE:
New material added and, no, I am not going to tell you what.

Justice

Much of the Old Bailey is online!! And searchable!! Good news!! Why? Because on 12 July 1683 justice was not perverted for one Jane Dodson, who was

an Old woman, was Tryed for a Witch, it being Swore against her, that she used divers Hellish Arts and Inchantations to destroy divers Persons especially that she lamed and distorted by her Cunning in Witchcraft and Sorcery, one Mary Palmer , and killed another as the Evidence believed, but not making it appear what means she used, or how the matter was brought about, and divers Persons appearing to Testifie her Life and Conversation, she was Acquitted .

Yeah "divers Persons" and the British tradition of not using torture. Nowadays? Not so clear.

On Last Thing

on Romney's lineage according to an essay in the NYT, Romney's dad oversaw a Johnson era idea that he, Romney pere, thought was the bee's knees: mortgage backed securities. They failed spectacularly. This shouldn't have surprised any one. Building prosperity on the back of housing never worked.

Not Bad For an Economist

Paul Krugman has two nice posts up on Hungary from an actual expert. Go figure.

History Remains a Discipline; Economics is a Bunch of Blather

Over to Naked Capitalism there is a two part series on economics and how it got that way. One interesting point is that 

the grey- beards summarily expelled both philosophy and history from the graduate economics curriculum; and then, they chased it out of the undergraduate curriculum as well. This latter exile was the bitterest, if only because many undergraduates often want to ask why the profession believes what it does, and hear others debate the answers, since their own allegiances are still in the process of being formed. The rationale tendered to repress this demand was that the students needed still more mathematics preparation, more statistics and more tutelage in ‘theory’, which meant in practice a boot camp regimen consisting of endless working of problem sets, problem sets and more problem sets, until the poor tyros were so dizzy they did not have the spunk left to interrogate the masses of journal articles they had struggled to absorb.

In other words, if you want to assure that you will be wrong for evermore on any issue of importance assume that you are now and for evermore right and that this righness arose without and prolonged period of intellectual struggle.

History's Got Rhythm

I mentioned recently that Hungary was looking more and more like much of 1930s Europe, i.e., fascistically inclined. Some years ago a guy wrote a short but convincing book about the censoring of Doblin's Alexanderplatz from Weimar's radio waves being an ideal way of understanding the forces that destroyed Weimar. In a recent article on Der Speigel online we learn of how Hungarian culture is being "reclaimed" by the fascists and authoritarians who now dominate its parliament. There are also hunger strikes on because of press "manipulation," unpunished violence against racial minorities, and other unpleasantness.
.
Perhaps becasue they are overly concerned with the non-democratic imposition of the neoliberal project, Europe and the US are essentially silent on the dangerous trends, they are more than willing to defend the sanctity of an independent central bank. A quick search of the NYT for Jobbik finds three results two of which are Krugman in an op ed and on his blog and one a straight news report from the most recent election. The same for Hungary gets a few more hits but nearly all of them on Hungary's economic circusmstances. There's very little on the Department of State's webpage on either and search of Secretary Clinton's remarks for the past year yields zero.

Why bring this up. The world is a dangerous place what with multiple American wars some declared, others undeclared, and at least two winding down and it's easy to get distracted and miss the real danger what with all the enforcing of austerity and pommeling poor people.

Slavery and Debt

David Brion Davis makes the point, somewhere or another, that the writing wasn't developed to create love poetry but rather to make clear who owned whom. Slavery, in other words, is a bed-rock institution of civilization whether western or other. 

As I mentioned, I think David Graeber's argument in Debt has a problem with slavery. On pages 167-8, for example, he suggests that most found slavery "perverse," "unnatural," and "tawdry." On 168, he insists that no one ever took the justifications for slavery seriously. This is an odd and very difficult to maintain argument. For most of human history, as he mentions on 167, slave revolts aimed not at the institution of slavery but rather on the fact that this slave and his fellows objected to they themselves being enslaved. Spartacus, in other words, wasn't striking a blow for universal brotherhood and freedom but rather for his personal freedom and, almost assuredly, his desire to return home and continue to his life with his slaves. Haiti's slave revolt is another example, as is  Cabeza de Vaca's time among the natives when he was enslaved and yet retained ownership of his "black." Graeber metions the odd case of Equiano (167) a former slave who had to be convinced to become an abolitionist. Slavery was an institution like any other and, with the exceptions of the few like the Greek Skeptics and the Quakers -- one of whose diary you can and should read, it was accepted.

He makes the rather astonishing claim that by 600 CE

the slave trade appears to have died off, and slavery itself was a waning institution, coming under severe disapproval from the Church. (171)

As evidence for this he offers this bit of nonsequetor

St. Patrick, one o f the founders of the Irish church, was one of the few of the early Church Fathers who was overtly and unconditionally opposed to slavery.  (171, note 15)

In Charlegmagnes capitulatory of 802 we find :

Secondly, that no one, either through perjury or through any other wile or fraud, or on account of the flattery or gift of any one, shall refuse to give back, or dare to abstract or conceal a slave of the emperor, or a district or territory or anything that belongs to his proprietary right; and that no one shall presume to conceal or abstract, through perjury or any other wile, fugitive fiscaline slaves who unjustly and fraudulently call themselves free. 

 The Church so  hated slavery that it named Karl der Grosse Holy. There is little in the way of evidence that the Church took any steps, beyond rhetorical moves like discouraging Christians from enslaving Christians, which no one heeded, to end slavery. Indeed the rapidity with which the Iberians and others created slave-based society in the New World and the  wide-spread slave trade, with which the Church was complicit, is evidence of the Church's lack of concern about slavery as an institution.

Or consider the Graeber's claim about no one taking justifications for slavery seriously and Stephens' famous Cornerstone Speech.

The new constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution African slavery as it exists amongst us the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson in his forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. This idea, though not incorporated in the constitution, was the prevailing idea at that time. The constitution, it is true, secured every essential guarantee to the institution while it should last, and hence no argument can be justly urged against the constitutional guarantees thus secured, because of the common sentiment of the day. Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the "storm came and the wind blew."

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics. All fanaticism springs from an aberration of the mind from a defect in reasoning. It is a species of insanity. One of the most striking characteristics of insanity, in many instances, is forming correct conclusions from fancied or erroneous premises; so with the anti-slavery fanatics. Their conclusions are right if their premises were. They assume that the negro is equal, and hence conclude that he is entitled to equal privileges and rights with the white man. If their premises were correct, their conclusions would be logical and just but their premise being wrong, their whole argument fails. I recollect once of having heard a gentleman from one of the northern States, of great power and ability, announce in the House of Representatives, with imposing effect, that we of the South would be compelled, ultimately, to yield upon this subject of slavery, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics, as it was in physics or mechanics. That the principle would ultimately prevail. That we, in maintaining slavery as it exists with us, were warring against a principle, a principle founded in nature, the principle of the equality of men. The reply I made to him was, that upon his own grounds, we should, ultimately, succeed, and that he and his associates, in this crusade against our institutions, would ultimately fail. The truth announced, that it was as impossible to war successfully against a principle in politics as it was in physics and mechanics, I admitted; but told him that it was he, and those acting with him, who were warring against a principle. They were attempting to make things equal which the Creator had made unequal.

As I said last time, I am not at all clear as to what good these, and other errors on slavery's history, do for his argument. One thing they do do, however, is undermine his attempt to get his history right as a means of overcoming others' errors.

Closing Time

Some years ago, Aristotle argued that there is a 

reason the rich and the poor are regarded in an especial sense as parts of a state. Again, because the rich are generally few in number, while the poor are many, they appear to be antagonistic, and as the one or the other prevails they form the government. Hence arises the common opinion that there are two kinds of government- democracy and oligarchy.

It's important to note, that Aristotle insisted the the rich and their riches were beneficial only to the extent that "the wealthy . . .  minister to the state with their property." By which he means that wealth is a means to the end of creating a thriving city-state; should, he suggests, the wealthy use their wealth to further enrich themselves they are, in the Greek sense, idiots and, consequently, a destructive force. 

With the collapse, or apparent collapse, of this democracy's commitment to the poor, it would seem, in Aristotelian terms that we are entering a period of oligarchy.  I offer you, consequently, mad man Jack London's Ernest Everhard and various versions of Woody Guthrie's genius:



or



and



comedic relief



 

Economics Still Not a Science; History Remains a Discipline

In this post Paul Krugman laments the ignorance and mendacity of many of his colleagues and in this one extolls history as means of informing economics. I would go further and insist that one needs to think historically to aid in the creation of policies and the single most important "lesson" from history is that lots of things that were once true, particularly about social, political, and economic arrangements, were contingent truths and that reliance on contingent truths is a really lousy way to run a railroad.

Was It Ever Thus?

The other day, I mentioned Taft and the treaties of arbitration. Today marks the 100th anniversary of a TR op-ed dealio denouncing Taft. In it, he argues that the Spanish American war was one of many incidents in which the US put "righteousness" ahead of "peace." Plus, he argues that the US would never push around smaller countries, like Cuba or Columbia, just to get what it wants. Furthermore, what if those danged foreigners told us we couldn't discriminate via immigration policies and laws? Outrageous idea he fumes.

Clearly, TR was a loon, whose ability to ignore reality was quite stunning and whose bizarre notions of masculinity meant more and better killing of things in the service of peace, prosperity, and environmental protection. Still, it's worth asking if today's morons any worse?

Or is it the case the cumulative errors, fibs, self-deception, lies, and the terrible policies that result have created a situation in which more of the same means we're doomed?

What's Wrong With These Videos?

Johny Cash at San Quentin:



And this:



No, I don't mean a country singer standing by the least among us but rather to paraphrase Blazing Saddles: Where's all the Black Folks At?

Peace Through Arbitration

As I mentioned, I've been reading Bernhardi's Germany and the Next War. It's filled with all manner of brilliant arguments. For example, not only is war great fun and evidence of non-decadentness but it's morally right because of the laws of nature. Indeed, the only way to tell if one nation has the right to take over the territory and, as by the way, markets and natural resources, he really does say that, is to fight to the death. The winner has the right to take all the loser's  stuff. Call it the Donald Trump theory of international a relations.

As one of the institutions/attempts to stop so necessary and great an event as a war between the great powers from breaking out, Bernhardi, like TR and for the same reasons, finds President Taft's attempt to set up some kind of an international arbitration council to resolve any and all conflicts between nations beneath contempt and slander on the greatness of humanity as mass murderer. As it turns out, August 4th was the hundredth year of the anniversary of the signing of these treaties between Britain, France, and the US. What always surprises me when this sort of thing comes up, is how easy it is to forget not only Norman Angell and  Ivan Bloch but also the whole peace movement and its successes and failures.

But the thing that is most forgotten is the extent to which, in the USA and elsewhere, the peace movement was populated by businessmen and supported by the Chamber of Commerce and the Rotarians. The business men were the pantywaists Bernhardi warned against. Odd, that.

WWI: Origins and Causes

Around 1912 General Friedrich von Bernhardi penned a little ditty called The Next War in it he argued, among other things, that he

must first of all examine the aspirations for peace, which seem to dominate our age and threaten to poison the soul of the German people, according to their true moral significance. [He] must try t prove that war is not merely a necessary element in the life of nations, but an indispensable factor of culture, in which a true civilized nation find the highest expression of strength and vitality.

 It's easy, if you ignore what actually happened, to argue that things in the past happened because of impersonal forces and the like. When, in fact, it happened because a sufficiently powerful group of people thought that what they were about to do, start a war say, was in the world's best interests.

History Trumps Lawyers, Guns, and Money

LGM has recently added Eric Loomis to its list of bloggers. A historian, he brings a much needed perspective to the otherwise comfortable Neo-liberal consensus of the more active posters. He has so far shown that Yglesias isn't all that bright, although he phrased it differently, and now writes to remind us that

neoliberal globalization is also a series of discrete decisions made by individuals, bureaucracies, organizations, and governments.

Exactly. The only nit I would pick is that he lumps "progressives" in with the supporters of Yglesianism. I would also say that given the tone of the debate over there on, for example Wikileaks, a more aggressively left view under-girded by a historians commitment to the concrete is welcome.

History Matters

For a very interesting discussion of why few historians take originalism serious see here. A key point

Historians devote their lives to understanding the past, so one would surmise that they, above all others, would be drawn to the theory of originalism. One might attribute the resolute anti-originalism of most historians to the fact that they are generally more liberal than the population at large and thus oppose originalism for political reasons. Although political orientation may account for some of this animus, their hostility to originalism has less to do with politics and more to do with questions of historical interpretation and method. When most historians look closely at originalist arguments, what they usually find is bad history shaped to fit an ideological agenda—what historians derisively call “law office history.”

The author does a really fine job of destroying Yoo, of which activity there ought to be more. 

History Remains a Discipline: Analogy Edition

Lots of people are going to use Bush I's popularity after Gulf I as an analogy to any increase in Obama's popularity after Osama's assassination. It's important to remember that Gulf I was an invasion fought to get rid of history's greatest monster that ended without getting rid of the monster, who the majority of America had never heard of. Osama, on the other hand, is a long-sought and well-known example of history's greatest monster part twenty thousand. Plus and also, his death comes at the end of a long week in which Obama showed that he has no time for silliness because, you know, he is busy killing Osama, to say nothing of his making the point, with jokes yet, that he has no time for silliness because he is busy doing important things, like killing Osama. The events and any increase in popularity Obama obtains are different in kind, degree, and import.

When Lies Aren't Really Lies or; The Limits of Oral History

It what can only be called a profound misunderstanding of the meaning of "fabrication," Megan McArdle muses on people lying about their pasts that

[t]his isn't necessarily fabrication; it's just that we pick and choose what we recall, and those who are happy will selectively recall the best parts, while those who are unhappy will accentuate the negative.

It is necessarily fabrication when you pick and choose this and that to create a false picture of the past. This why oral history is limited use.

Wrong-Headed

Francis Fukuyama is famous for being wrong. Wrong about the end of history, wrong about Neoliberalism, and wrong, I am guessing here, to tell his wife that her butt did, in fact, look big in those jeans. Despite all this wrongness, he continues to prosper and now in what can only be seen as singular opportunity to be exceptionally wrong about nearly everything, he has released the first of two books in which he

mines the fields of anthropology, archaeology, biology, evolutionary psychology, economics, and, of course, political science and international relations to establish a framework for understanding the evolution of political institutions.

Ever eager to take humanity's ability to create its own history, he

posits a link between Darwinian natural selection and political evolution. Because human nature has universal, evolved characteristics, he writes, "human politics is subject to certain recurring patterns of behavior across time and across cultures." Biology, he continues, "frames and limits the nature of institutions that are possible."

He want's to answer one

 fundamental question: Why do some states succeed while others collapse?

It's nice to see that his faith in fictive totalizing narratives wasn't diminished by the failure of Hegel's claim about the course and nature of history to bear anything like fruit. We can only wait in breathless anticipation for the inevitable moment when Fukuyama, once again, admits he was wrong.