Democracy threatened today? Not much

11 October 2022

Democracy is threatened today? From inside or outside? Not much.

•  More resilient than many suspect, expect.
  • 1/ it works! Despite the imperfections, argument.
  • 2/ it now has its teeth into a major global bloc, institutions / processes cemented by generations of experience.
  • 3/ challenges, threats [inside or out] only encourage vigilance and unity.
• Real threats? Titanic exogenous shocks, like what undid Weimar Germany, Tsarist Russia.
• Historically recent and sudden: a radical antidote to traditional autocracy, mankind’s costly default condition for 5 millennia.
• 2022 a bad year for autocracy: Russia, PRC and Iran. The model a dud.

The Thinking Centre [1] now often worries about the “death of democracy”, its fragility, how it “emerged in very special circumstances just two centuries ago”, its current threats, especially from within, the drop in poll support for “democracy”, appeal of a “strong man” in face of sharply polarised electorates, economic and other “problems”, now including climate change.

But we need question this from a much wider perspective.

Democracy is likely be much tougher than many realise. It withstood gales in the 20^th C, and ironically is likely today much stronger for it. Just as Mr Trump’s outrageous questioning the umpire, his finale on Jan 6^th 2021 will likely do a service for democracy in the US.

HISTORY

The history of democracy – real full franchise rules-based liberal democracy – is very patchy till after WW2.

There was a dramatic start made long ago by the direct democracy reached for a time by some city states in ancient Greece, an extraordinary and radical outcome for its times [despite imperfections like no citizenship for slaves] considering there has been no other such case in the history of humankind till recent centuries.

Parliamentary democracy finally emerged in Europe, particularly Britain from c 11^th C CE, but over many centuries, such that the franchise was extended painfully slowly, women [about half the population] not getting the vote till 1920 in US and 1928 in Britain! And this after centuries of European states marauding autocratically across the globe. In the US the jaundiced democracy of John Adams time did not allow for the slaves either, comprising near 20% of the population.

So it really only took root after WW2, and with sudden unexpected and sustained success.

The two main progenitors of WW2, Germany and Japan, switched immediately to democracy.

India was freed from its colonial patron, remains the world’s largest democracy, despite religious factional unrest. Later, importantly, also outside the old West, it eventually made further great strides in E Asia, in S Korea and Taiwan, then also in the large state of Indonesia.

A tragedy of the 20^th C was how domestic violence engendered by world wars [from the self-inflicted calamity of WW1] deflected both Russia and China from a reformist path to democracy, both countries falling to nationalist “Communist” extremists, the nightmare of which we still live with today, in the Ukraine and in PRC threatening Taiwan.

Meanwhile the economic chaos of the 1929 Crash delivered the other 20^th C tragedy of Nazi Germany [before which its parliamentary vote was c5%], throttling Weimar Germany’s tangible democratic progress.

However the success of democracy in withstanding the tumultuous calamitous irruption of  1914-45 [thanks especially to the US, also, ironically, the USSR], and its emphatic post WW2 consolidation – in face of ongoing Cold War hostility – is testament to its appeal and support in the old West [ie US and Europe] and now in the non-West converts, ie especially East Asia.

DEMOCRACY TODAY

Yes autocracy has had a tenacious hold for millennia, has been “the default condition of mankind”, at great cost across history since mid 4^th millennium BCE.

But now real liberal democracy, especially post WW2:

• Has demonstrated its historically radical capabilities, as an antidote to destructive traditional autocracy,
• Has its teeth into a major world bloc [US / Europe / European outliers, and now through Asia: India, E Asia], cemented by democratic institutions and processes having now endured for generations, evident for example in the US after Jan. 6^th 2021, when Trump gained NO official support – from courts or government arms – for his far fetched self serving false claims about the 2020 US election result.

Also – at least in theory, on the face of it, in word if not deed – its principles of free and fair elections, of human rights, of governance etc are now widely acknowledged internationally, by most international organisations, starting with the UN, even if not in practice when autocrat powers use their powers within these organisations to obstruct democratic process.

Ironically, perversely, even autocrat power themselves acknowledge the principles by pretending to implement them, by mounting legislative bodies and courts, conducting elections, even if in word only, like Russia’s annexations in Ukraine October 2022 based on referenda there.

PROGNOSIS

Because of its sustained success, its now strong institutions and processes, and the fierce commitment to its principles by its practitioners – in face of hostility outside and inside – liberal democracy will likely stay as tenacious as it was in the 20^th C when it faced violent autocracy.

John Adams apparently said “democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes and exhausts itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. But what did he know of democracy then? Circa 1800. What cases had he in mind, when the history of real democracy was still very thin?

No advanced well established democracy has yet fallen “from within” and it seems highly unlikely any will.

Challenges from opponents inside [Trump etc; CRT, Woke activists, Cancellers etc, especially in tertiary education] or outside [Putin and Xi etc] are likely only to continue to encourage vigilance and unity among supporters.

The only real threat to democracy evident from history is exogenous economic and political chaos, the likes of which upended both Weimar Germany and the nascent democracy in pre WW1 Tsarist Russia, though in both cases democracy was still only weakly manifested.

2002: TOUGH YEAR FOR AUTOCRACY

Russia under Putin is embroiled in what seems like an existential blunder, at a terrible price to its neighbour.

Putin’s outrageous return to traditional free for all imperialism is now reminding the democracies how much they value their model, their freedoms, just as did the post WW2 Cold War when the Soviet Union swallowed East Europe and with PR China oversaw the Korean War.

China is struggling with a lopsided economy hamstrung simply because the leadership is scared stiff by democracy, and demographically challenged too.

Finally protest has again erupted in Iran’s theocratic autocracy.

Note: 1/ Death of democracy is now a live threat, Intolerance and fear are rapidly undermining our world order. JONATHAN SUMPTION, The Australian, Inquirer October 7, 2022

Democracy is going through a rough time. It is openly challenged by autocratic states like China, Russia and Iran. In the West’s oldest democracies, it is challenged from within by growing numbers who have lost faith in it as a form of government.

Farming human nature: the long potholed road to the rules-based liberal order

Farming human nature: the long potholed road to the rules-based liberal order

• The rules-based liberal order is a radical, universalist antidote to c5000 years of destructive traditional free for all selfish identity competition.
• We have farming of human nature to instead constructively harness competition, hence human capabilities: skills, ambition and imagination.
• It’s needed more than ever in a crowded, connected world, facing global challenges.
• But it remains an uncomfortable reality for many identities sorely afflicted by the past selfish illiberal West that the same West, ironically, also eventually uncovered the overarching remedy.

In trying to make sense of long history we strive to stay with the evidence and park our pre-conceptions.

1/ Summary: universalist rules-based liberal order, radical answer to millennia of traditional free for all competition

In comparatively recent historic times the rights and rules-based liberal order – liberal democratic private market capitalism – founded on authentic popular consent, has suddenly emerged as a radically successful collective institutional model [government overseen structures and processes] in its economic, health and political outcomes by:

• Effectively farming human nature, domesticating inherent competitiveness to constructively harness it – and human skills, innovation, ambition and imagination – for a far more rewarding collective outcome,
• Thus directly defusing the long traditional model of unregulated autocratic selfish identity competition [for power, resources, breeding] – which has plagued human history for millennia, delivered mostly chronic poverty and violence – by collectively corralling and supervising competition, crucially by making all identities equal before democratically determined rules, all free to express themselves but from behind the barrier, subject to the rules.

The model is not easy, above all requires a critical level of community commitment, thus still fails in many nations today where traditional identity loyalties predominate.

Also within the West today many are understandably indignant their ancestors were sorely afflicted by past [and present?] illiberal Western policies and behaviour – “people of colour”, First Nations peoples etc – so struggle to accept a model fashioned by the same West.

But those now seeking official preference for their identity as compensation will just be returning to the traditional illiberal model. 

The outcome will always be sub-optimal because the liberal order is always vulnerable to illiberal autocracy, from within and without, from selfish people / identities, small and large, tempted to cheat, cross the line, to seek to impose their authority on others in their selfish interests, social behaviour which at great cost has near monopolised history till recent times.

However defusing the ruinous traditional model seems more urgent than ever now the technologically advanced world is suddenly connected like never before and apparently facing existential planetary challenges; and not least when two major nation states also remain wedded to the old order, openly hostile to a cooperative global liberal order.

2/ Perspective today: compelling observations

For eons humanity lived in small groups spread across the Earth, each with little knowledge or awareness of most others. Then from c1500 in particular, the start of the European Age of Discovery, this started to change, with gathering speed, and today technology [24/7 news, internet etc] knits near the whole of humanity, globally.

Secondly, it’s obvious humanity’s aggregate economic and technical advance is now adversely impacting the planet’s biosphere, perhaps even existentially for homo sapiens, and a myriad of other life, much / most of which is crucial to the ongoing welfare of homo sapiens.

Third, after near 5000 years of urban „civilisations“ the rules-based liberal order [applying, broadly, to ~ 40% of world population] within a few centuries has suddenly delivered radical advances in technology and material / health / freedom outcomes, which advance has also centrally contributed to planetary pressures.

In contrast life for most in the past 5000 years has been Hobbesean, and a life which lingers for many still today where strong local attachment to traditional identities has negated meaningful support for constructive cooperation for a greater collective outcome, for peace, prosperity and freedoms.

3/ Traditional political model: illiberal autocracy

a/ Illiberal autocracy fitted the mid 4th millennium BCE take-off: competitive human nature met a radical leap in technology & resources

Motivated mainly by survival in a restless natural world, minds among competitive innovating bright homo sapiens slowly advanced technology across eons: tools, fire, better tools etc. Sometime through the Middle Paleolithic [c300-50kya] the [important] religious impulse also began to manifest.

From mid 10^th millennium BCE, in the wake of the last ice age, farming / agriculture emerged, taming cereals [and other plants] and animals, from small settlements mainly in the Levant, starting to end millions of years of human hunter gathering.

Then from mid 4^th millennium BCE, c5000 years later, sustained adverse climate shift provoked a radical extension of humanity’s farming of nature, a second agricultural revolution, again in the Near East, based on intense large scale riverine irrigation [Iraq and Egypt] which triggered the relatively sudden emergence of literate affluent urbanised “civilisations”, generating unexpected large economic surpluses which soon also funded temples and especially – fatefully – armies.

A crucial ingredient was a radical take-off in technology, especially metals [bronze, later iron], also pottery / textiles etc, artisan manufacturing, and then especially writing, which encouraged the economic and cultural take off, facilitating commerce and government and crucially allowing science / knowledge / history / literature to be stored and passed down.

A recent paper by P Turchin et al. investigating theories to explain the radical “Holocene transformation”, drawing on a now large relevant database, broadly aligns with this overview: “The best-supported model indicates a strong causal role played by a combination of increasing agricultural productivity and invention/adoption of military technologies (most notably, iron weapons and cavalry in the first millennium BCE).”

Centralised elitist autocracy suited the new urbanised world [led by kings / emperors working with nobles and priests] and for c5000 years since the ubiquitous traditional political model for humanity has been selfish centralised illiberal autocracy, variations on it, which can be framed as unregulated, free for all, selfish identity competition / promotion, where identity [individual or group] is compounded of one or more of: 1/ birth / family / ancestors; 2/ tribe, clan, nation; 3/ race, ethnicity; 4/ „story“: religion, myth; 5/ gender.

From this model the overwhelming outcome for humanity across millennia has been chronic poverty and brief lives, and chronic violence, micro and macro, within states and between them.

China at the east rim of Eurasia has long remained an unstable, often violent, inward, dualistic monolith, a Han core later wrestling northern non-Han tribes. The militant, culture thin tribes north twice prevailed [Mongols c1279 and Manchu, c1640], but each time adapted to the monolith, moved into the Chinese house. So China remained a traditional under-performing inherently sub-optimal autocracy for millennia, achieving only some islands of relative calm and prosperity [eg early 6^th C Sui dynasty, early 7^th C Tang dynasty, and periods of the 11^th C Song dynasty] in otherwise mostly a sea of strife. In a long history there were not even brushes with proto-democracy and then mid 20^th C WW2 allowed Maoism to take charge and revert to staunch autocracy.

However at the west end of Eurasia liberal democracy did eventually arise from among a clutch of states, if from a long gestation. Unlike in China, a number of competing [if shifting] coherent independent hereditary political entities emerged and while the history was chronically violent, destructive across many centuries, the competition was eventually constructive in terms of advancing their economies and knowledge, and finally bearing the liberal model.

b/ Knowledge advance misappropriated by autocracy

A persistent problem in human history has been how the mostly slow but relentless advance in technology / knowledge has been misappropriated by competing ruling autocrats in pursuing their deemed self interests, funding extravagant lifestyles and especially opportunistic warfare, inflicting wide violence and denying material benefits to most common people.

So, ironically, technical progress also included progressively more lethal military means:  spears and axes, bows and arrows, horses / stirrups, metals [bronze then iron], gunpowder and guns / artillery, high explosives, ships and planes, and finally nuclear weapons.

Thus in Europe the traditional might is right model kept generating wars which became deadlier as weapons became more effective and as economic resources to fund armies grew ever larger: Medieval wars [eg the Crusades, 100 Years War], 17^th C religious wars [especially the 1618-1648 Thirty Years War], 18^th C wars [spreading offshore to Americas and Asia], Napoleonic wars and especially 20^th C WW1 and WW2.

4/ The rights and rules-based liberal order: eventual radical success

a/ Radical historic outcomes

Post WW2 period finally saw the emphatic radical success of government regulated / overseen, rules-based liberal democratic private market capitalism, delivering dramatic advances on an historically unparalled scale in 1/ health / longevity; 2/ alongside a leap in income / wealth; in technology and science; and 3/ meaningful individual freedoms; all broadly in stunning contrast with the preceding c5000 years.

The model is founded above all on authentic full franchise popular consent, however difficult to implement in practice, institutionally, in the face of near constant undermining by myriad competing private interests, identities, seeking official public advantage.

A compelling case study is modern Europe, which after millennia of traditional inter-state violence, and, later, centuries of imperial predation abroad, has been transformed, after two shocking wars finally discredited long running militant, imperialist nationalism, arriving abruptly at hitherto unforeseen peace and prosperity, now embodied institutionally in the 27 member, c450m people, European Union.

Ironic it is therefore that the Europe which oversaw such a destructive unjust experience, internally and externally, did also finally uncover the political answer, radical rules-based liberal democracy, bringing competing identities to heel by making them all submit to common rules, determined fairly, with authentic consent by the people.

This is an uncomfortable reality to accept for many representatives from non-Western peoples, “people of colour”, given the appalling relevant history in many non-West countries, especially the Americas, Africa and parts of the Near East and Asia.

It was also proved a shocking reality for the West because the same traditional model delivered self-inflicted calamities like European religious wars, the French Revolution, the US Civil War and the 20^th C catastrophe of WW1 etc. 

The post WW2 success of democracy among non-Western peoples in East Asia is a second radical outcome – starting with Japan [like Germany, defeated in WW2], thence S. Korea and Taiwan, both now enthusiastic democracies – above all demonstrating its universalist efficacy.

The cases of Taiwan and S Korea [and also the former East Germany] are revealing through showing that in divided countries where the same ethnic / cultural mix is kept constant adopting a liberal model achieves far superior economic and political outcomes than repressive autocracy.

Stefan Dercon recently [„Gambling on Development etc“, 2022] importantly observes that in recent times some less liberal even autocratic countries can also achieve meaningful development take-off if the governing „elite“ puts its mind to it, rightly highlighting that competent central government focussed on the goal is an essential ingredient for any country to so succeed. Bangladesh is cited, also obviously PR China’s lift off launched by Deng c1980, and „Communist“ Vietnam is another clear instructive case.

But these can be seen as exceptions which help prove the rule, in that they are far outnumbered by cases where the autocracy is much less „enlightened“, remains selfish, kleptocratic, regressive.

Secondly, no authentic liberal democracy has failed to take-off economically.

b/ How the liberal rules-based order works

The overarching liberal rules-based order model makes inherent common sense because it directly addresses the obvious failures in the traditional political model, ie by institutionally domesticating, refereeing the competition between any and all identities through making them all equal before consensual, democratically determined, government supervised / regulated rules, ie within a purpose-designed collective framework of structures and processes.

The model is the radical antidote to traditional free for all, selfish identity competition.

It is also by definition universalist by encompassing, applying to all identities.

They can all express themselves, constrained only by rules commonly agreed, determined democratically, collectively, by all the citizenry, on the basis that all agree to submit to them.

But this still leaves most identities availed of radical freedom of expression by history’s standards.

It turns destructive competition on its head to instead constructively harness its benefits – and human skills, innovation, aspirations and imagination – enabling humanity to more optimally manage, cope with, make most of the explosion in knowledge.

c/ International recognition today

In global forums today the liberal rules-based order is loudly abused by some obvious major antagonists, wedded to the autocratic old order.

But striking too is that in the same forums the core principles of the liberal model – human rights, free and fair elections, independent judicial processes, conflicts of interest, sound governance etc – are now widely acknowledged, approved, in words if not always deed.

This now includes many international organisations, starting with the United Nations and its many affiliates.

Curious too is how many obvious autocracies openly pay lip service to the same model by pretending to deploy liberal principles, thus pretend to operate representative parliaments / elections, also courts, when they are patently no such thing, are working arms of the executive, not independent.

d/ Signs of liberal societal behaviour in history

Liberal proto-modern behaviour arose in the past but rarely, only when given the opportunity, left alone by neighbours, eg especially in Homer’s Classical Greece for a few centuries from 8^th C BCE in the wake of the climate forced eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age collapse, but tapping thought from the Near East; later in the peripheral northern forest Germanic / Norse tribes in Europe, importantly when they settled in Britain from 6th C CE; and later in Medieval / Renaissance Europe, especially in some Italian city states / communes from the 11th C [though „despotism“ prevailed by the 14-15th C], thence through rediscovery of Classics, as educated minds [including some inside the Church, in monasteries and universities] asked more questions, shaken too by the 1348 Black Death.

5/ Liberal order emergence: struggled with illiberal reaction within, and later without.

Self evidently the traditional autocratic might is right, identity promoting model has near monopolised history since the emergence of „civilisations c5000 years ago, overseen by competing hereditary monarchies and associated aristocracies, and in the West an institutionalised Christian Church then impressing at all levels of secular authority until the 17^th C.

Thus in the West the long journey from 10th C Britain [where proto-democratic tribal behaviour arrived with the Germanic settlers] was compromised by birth rank and inheritance [fanning inequality]; by advancing military technology; by the Christian Church, complicit with autocratic secular leaders, exploiting human appetite for the tempting supernatural; and also by the genetic lottery, in all states throwing up incompetent kings and able ambitious opponents from any rank.

So the rules-based liberal order which eventually emerged was long plagued by ongoing selfish traditional / reactionary behaviour by the West, at great cost to itself as well as others:

a/ the wars in 16th C Renaissance Italy from c1500 when the opportunistic French monarchy was lured in.

b/ the Church‘s reaction to the emerging humanististc Renaissance, then the Reformation, culminating in the devastating 16th and 17th G religious wars .

c/ from c1500 CE, predatory European global imperialism, applying the traditional model, availed of latest technology / knowledge as the Age of Discovery revealed lucrative new domains abroad.

Since WW2, when the liberal order finally got traction there have been major ongoing problems coping with remnants of the Old Order, especially the Soviet Union and the PRC: the invasion / 45 year occupation of East Europe by the USSR, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the PRC still threatening hostilty to Taiwan, and now the shocking unprovoked Ukraine invasion by Putin’s imperialist neo-Soviet Russia.

Interesting is that the famous Faust story is a relevant foundational myth for the West and the liberal order, though ironically was born in the 15th C as [unconscious?] propaganda for a then anxious Church, wary of rising open minded curiosity of nature and humanity’s place in it, ie the radical essence of the liberal order.

So the original story decries this mindset as hubristic and ungodly, the fallen Man not knowing his place and redeemable only through God’s grace [and the Church’s services].

It painted Faust not just as feckless but also, revealingly, not as a rational authentic Renaissance man but as quasi-religious, like the Church looking for an answer not through rational enquiry but magic, another supernatural quick fix, making the story a false polemical parody.

However the pivotal bargain at the heart of the story – surrendering the dear and precious for the “miraculous” – can be overturned so that the liberal subscriber bargains not with Satan but with himself and fellow humanity, offering his precious mortal life, rationally working with others, constructively, to gain “miraculous” knowledge outcomes if he and like-minded competitive humanity take responsibility.

This bargain is also the heart of Mary Shelley’s uncannily prescient 1818 Frankenstein, where the ambitious, innovative Doctor did not finish the job, did not take full responsibility for his creative project.

6/ Outlook for liberal order: positive, but vulnerable

a/ Illiberal reaction

The rules-based liberal order is not destined to succeed teleologically.

But given the right opportunity, the right collective societal circumstances, then societies / communities will likely gravitate towards the model through popular understanding of its demonstrated logical advantages, ie from where it has succeeded.

To succeed it crucially needs critical mass in shared supporting values, in societal cooperation and culture in a common commitment to a consensual rules-anchored democratic framework to tame inherent human competition, instead harness it for constructive collective outcomes.

There is a strong case that its long term outlook globally is broadly positive:

b/ the model now at last has important traction globally, critical mass: including about 11% of world population with the core West, 13.5% with E Asia, 31% with India, and around 40% adding Indonesia, Brazil and others.

c/ where it has traction it has generally achieved emphatic relevant outcomes since WW2.

d/ most [but not all] people when educated and exposed to liberal values generally grow to favor and accept them.

However a quick glance at the world today also shows the model is not easy to implement, does not run itself, demands sustained vigilant leadership, is always vulnerable to undermining or attack by one or more covetous identities, and in particular will not succeed where traditional loyalties predominate, especially ethnic, nationalistic and religious.

Also the world today still has to cope with two large well armed openly hostile such states left over from the 20^th C, one even now having launched a major unprovoked war in Europe against a democratic neighbour.

b/ “Unnatural shocks”

Also history is prone to unexpected shocks which can make life harder for the liberal order:

a/ exogenous natural factors: geology [volcanoes / earthquakes]; disease; climate change, both natural [evident major impacts on humanity in the deep past] and now apparently anthropogenic;.

b/ endogenous societal shocks.

a/ Events. In the 20th C the July 1914 micro gunshot put a match to a tense macro context, triggering WW1 after a few roomfuls of narrow minded leaders in 3 European capitals returned to traditional militant diplomacy without pausing to consider the implications of the latest military capability [weapons and much greater supporting economic resources] available to all sides. The results were calamitous, resonate to this day in Ukraine.

Secondly, it’s possible the devastating interwar Depression could have been avoided by better Central Bank coordination.

b/ Personalities can matter? The course of history might be quite different without Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin and now Putin.

Striking is how serious societal unrest – and the gullibility of many people, quasi-religious mindsets susceptible to “saviours” – can be exploited by ambitious autocrats, like in the French Revolution [Terror, Napoleon], WW1 [Bolsheviks], the Depression [Hitler], and WW2 in China [Mao].

c/ Technology? Beyond concern for climate there is debate about the dystopic possibilities from ongoing technical innovation, across many industries, candidates like Artificial Intelligence.

However rational analysis is vulnerable to the religious impulse, risks revisiting traditional appetites for Apocalypticism.

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Thomas Mann – unlikely liberal cerebral Teuton

Paul Thomas Mann [1875 – 1955, 80]                                                      

Unlikely liberal cerebral Teuton  

Addressing the radical enigma of Modernity, traps and challenges

His Magic Mountain echoes Homer?

Achilles the driver of History to WW1

Odysseus our Modern Man, anchored to home and the farm

Thomas and brother Heinrich at Berlin train station

1/ Summary

• The big picture: Mann’s subject was no less than the subjects of the modern world coming to grips with it.
• Magic Mountain [1924] is his Comedia, general therapeutic template for one and all approaching the human predicament, for living life in one’s time, the modernising world in his / our case.
• It can be seen as echoing Homer, completed just after the catastrophic devastation of World War 1 which therefore celebrates Achilles in the Iliad, whereas Odysseus in The Odyssey is our Modern Man, our homo sapiens on a long challenging life journey, the traveller, the crafty rational enquiring man who accepts his humanity, mortality, in the end craving not war but going home.
• Mann’s final [incomplete] Felix Krull was also important, complimenting the Magic Mountain, a case study in how not to live, feckless, wasting opportunity. Irresponsible?
• Thus [the radical] modern world presents a Faustian bargain: the modern technology infused world, now relentlessly evolving, offers freedom, material release and radical opportunity. But at a cost.
• Thus it demands diligent, vigilant collective management to succeed, brings existential risks if managed irresponsibly, and magnified by the implications of ceaselessly innovating technology, risks already graphically illustrated by two world wars in the 20^th C, basically self-inflicted by Western nations in Europe, avoidable, unnecessary.
• World War 1 saw a clutch of leading European powers succumb to traditional nationalistic enmities, but armed like never before by their modernising industrialised economies.
• Mann’s blue blood mainstream German family background inclined him to join the popular nationalistic welcome for WW1, saw it constructive for Germany.
• But eventually, after the tiefer Schock of WW1, wrestling the wider evidence, he showed courage to change his mind, switched to support “liberal democracy”, unlike many in his intellectual milieu.
• His “liberal” views in Germany forced him [from 1933] to join the illustrious European refugee flight to America, where he became an unlikely, incongruous polemicist, eventually from his Los Angeles’ Pacific Palisades base, until ironically late in life [1952] perverse American Cold War paranoia shooed him back to Europe.
• His literary path bloomed early with Buddenbrooks [1901, at 26], then his magnum opus Magic Mountain [1924, 49] helped secure the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature, at only 54.

2/ The Magic Mountain [1924]

The Magic Mountain [Der Zauberberg] is at heart a comedic exegesis. A tract of jolly and dark foundations.

Having been amused, tutored, enlightened for 7 years among the snowy orogenic heights in Switzerland our young hero Hans Castorp heads off to… WW1!

MM – commenced 1912, bottled 1924 – straddled the incidental hiccup of WW1 and his wife’s sanatorium experience [offering a “mixture of death and amusement“], and Freud etc.

Thus on the menu were “sources of the destructiveness.. of civilised humanity”.

Time is a leitmotif, here showing the influence of the then [post 1907] very popular French thinker Henri Bergson [1859-1941, 82] who claimed a “new” way of “knowing” which he called “intuition”, temporal, through the “duration”, a flowing, “meditations on the tempo of experience“, though offering no obvious evidence for this view.  

Time flies or drags. Cf Heidegger, Einstein’s theory of relativity.

The mountain is important as an ironical each way stage, an oxymoronic “hellish paradise”?

And he responds to music. We hear the Berghof listening to “Der Lindenbaum” from the Winterreise.

The characters are “allegorical”, each having a job to do, views to shout and share, led by HC our “questing knight”, like the “pure fool” seeking the Grail, as in Parsifal.

All up “erudite, subtle, ambitious…  ambiguous..  blends a scrupulous realism with deeper symbolic undertones..”

T Mann and his Hero HC are “natural science” men [like Hobbes, Locke et al], starting with, leaning on detached empirical engagement with All About.

He explores the world through MM, a learning as you go “road journey” book, especially following the example of J Goethe’s Werner, a “novel of education” [bildungsroman].

And a little masochistic malady helps in accessing heuristic clarity. Mann: “what [Hans] came to understand is that one must go through the deep experience of sickness and death to arrive at a higher sanity and health . .”

Two roads?

Mann : “.. HC ..once says to Madame Chauchat, there are two ways to life: One is the common, direct, and brave.

The other is bad, leading through death.. the genius way.

This concept of illness and death, as a necessary passage to knowledge, health, and life, makes The MM into a novel of initiation.”

Thus did Dante also take the Hard Way in the Comedia.

And what better “school” than a sanatorium half way up the Swiss Alps, packed with overpaid life fretters arriving with suitcases, valises brimming with pressed silk underclothes, Benedictine and neuroses or worse.

Goethe is TM’s “representative of the bourgeois era“, the middle way.

The main debate in the House of Coughers, is between

• “Settembrini [a torch bearer for the Enlightenment, Prometheus, a Weimar Republic man, progressive, liberal, pro-democracy, tolerance, human rights, secular humanism,
• and ex-Jewish Jesuit Naphta, feeding off “philosopher George Lukács’s Hegelian Marxism and Communist zealotry”: who champions both the reactionary Church-goer and the secular radical, the illiberal neo-Romantic social engineers. No room for democracy. We know best. The multitude are deluded, unaware of where their best interests reside, succumbed to “false consciousness”.

Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain can be interpreted as echoing far ago Homer, completed just after the shattering unexpected catastrophic devastation of World War 1 – a shocking 5 year inferno consuming Europe after many decades of buoyant prosperity – which can cast as celebrating Achilles in the Iliad, graphically juxtaposing the grinding murderous “honourable” conflict with nostalgic memories of humana pace et felicitate, children playing, the weary woodsman plods homeward.

But WW1 can also be seen as the explosive apotheosis of near 5000 years of “History” since “civilisations” arrived from mid 4^th millennium BCE, driven by many manifestations of Achilles.

Whereas Odysseus in The Odyssey is our Modern Man, our – finally liberal – homo sapiens on a long challenging life journey, the traveller, the striving, crafty rational enquiring man – if imperfect, prone to hubris, betrayal – who ultimately accepts his humanity, mortality, in the end craving not war but going home, to family and the farm.

So Odysseus, “or man of twists and turns” is also a cheerleader, mentor for “liberal democracy” as the radical new universalist model to trump age old chronically violent destructive unregulated identity competition, by making ALL identities equal before the Rules / Law, which are determined democratically, by consent.

3/ Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years: a warning to the modern world.     

This work, developed across near 40 years [a short story conceived, written by 1911, published 1936, later expanded but not completed, published posthumously], continues a polemical thread for Mann, in presenting the brilliant, talented, charming Felix, who deploys his talent as… the effortless conman, sociopathic, supremely amoral, immoral.

Our unpredictable hero was enchanted with being clever for its own sake.

But he was not only amoral, he was irresponsible, in not pursuing societally constructive endeavours, and in thus wasting his obvious talents.

So he recalls characters like the aimless, fickle Dr Faustus and the psychopathic Talented Mr Ripley, and also even the “brilliant” Dr Victor Frankenstein, who created his “monster” but forgot to take care of it.

They are all warnings to the modern world, a world offering prodigious opportunity, which thanks to the technology genie has opened up extraordinary access to material bounty, to clever productive technical interventions in many fields [especially health, roughly doubling the average lifespan], to exploding knowledge of the natural world.

BUT it’s a world that not only does not run itself, rather a world that requires even more thought and hard work to succeed, to crystallise the historically relatively sudden radical increase in opportunity.

It needs responsible, prepared tutored open-minded citizens, deploying a receptive mentality.

This is obvious in the still many “failed” states in certain global regions, trapped at low levels of per capita income, overseen by incompetent and / or corrupt autocratic governments, despite the reasons for, gustatory circumstances of, the comparative success of high income liberal democracies now being well known.

The new world, the Brave New World, comes with a Faustian bargain, with Handle with Care instructions in the Technical Manual, offering radical opportunity but in return requiring, demanding diligent responsibility in managing it, especially managing the implications of the erupting technology, the dangers of which were broadcast above all in Mann’s lifetime by not one but two world wars, nightcapped by 1945’s Hiroshima, and now evident in more recent times by: 1/ global environmental challenges; 2/ pressure on wild life numbers and habitat; 3/ climate change; 4/ cyber warfare by selfish identity promoting criminals and disaffected states.

4/ Thomas Mann’s politics and existential disposition?

Mann proved ultimately a good guy, a liberal humanist, later campaigned hard for liberal democracy, compelled by the stark and mind numbing evidence from his times.

Though this came after a learning journey himself?

In WW1 he rooted for King Bill and the pickelgruber [sic] helmets.

And “for a long time also he questioned traditional Western democracy with its inevitable basis of expansive capitalism”.

Yes interesting, c1924 like for heaps Bright Minds before democracy worried him. The mob. Anarchy beckoning. So “liberal democracy”, trusting the wider franchise took time, came later.

Earlier, “he .. questioned ..radicalism.. traditional Western democracy with its inevitable basis of expansive capitalism…. [after] .. Europe lay in ruins after World War I… under the influence of Goethe’s humanism, he began to turn into an ardent defender of the German Republic” [Cliffs].

Goethe’s humanism was important?

So finally he found America? Like through Walt Whitman, and Goethe: “..  like Goethe over a century before.. [he] celebrated America ..symbol of a new social order..” [Mann’s lecture Goethe and Democracy, Library of Congress in 1949].

“the realization that the only significance of the individual lies in what he accomplishes for humanity. The concept of the “communal bond” emerges.” [CIiffs].

But he overlooked America mistreating the blacks and the native Americans!

Many white Americans not facing this bitter illiberal history till much later.

5/ Curious evolving thoughts on Germany, war and democracy

5.1/ Summary: got there in the end.

Critics mine Mann’s extensive literary oeuvre for his mutating thoughts on the pressing issue of liberal democracy, during his lifetime above all, when WW1 arrived when Mann was 39, Hitler assumed power at 57 [propelling him across the Atlantic for 19 years], and started WW2 at 64.

His intellectual journey was complex in its details, many twists and turns, but the central salient point is that in the end, and certainly by WW2, Mann was emphatically converted to liberal democracy [ie real full franchise representative democracy, not the mendacious Potemkin versions] – despite its fractious turbulence – which was surely not the case for many of his learned cultural contemporaries.

He wrestled with Germany’s history and literature and in his works around the time of WW1 made some odd remarks, coming directly from his emphatic upper echelons German background, shown in not understanding that “politics” are unavoidable, the dangers of chest-beating chauvinist autocracy, or how democracy works, is designed to defuse these dangers.

In “Reflections” [1918] he somehow discerned how both the war and Nietzsche would be good for democracy!

However by 1938 he could write: “Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.” [The Coming Victory of Democracy, 1938], suggesting by then he understood that in any society – and certainly in modern, literate ones – there is at the popular, grass roots level a widespread democratic impulse, a strong appetite for democracy, for a working political model based ultimately on popular consent.

5.2/ The journey

He published Buddenbrooks 1901, age 26, and the novella Death in Venice 1912 [“the strange allure of “decadence,” illness and death”, C. Beha, NYT Sep. 2021].

With outbreak of war 1914 he offered a long essay, “Thoughts in Wartime”, a conventional hurrah for a good cleansing war: “.. expressed “the need for a European catastrophe”: “Deep in our hearts we felt that the world, our world, could no longer go on as it had.” [Mann].” [C. Beha, op.cit.].

He was criticised by many, including brother Heinrich Mann [1871-1950, Los Angeles]! “who published a historical study of his own, ostensibly about Émile Zola and the Dreyfus Affair but really a defense of liberal democracy..” [C. Beha, op.cit.].

At the end of WW1 Mann published [1918, but not translated to English till 1983!] “Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man”, “a 500-page assault on democracy, enlightenment and reason”. [C. Beha, op.cit.], [Betrachtungen Eines Unpolitischen, translated into English, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 1983]

He contrasted “civilization” and “culture”: “Civilization “involves reason, enlightenment, moderation, moral education, skepticism,”[Mann], whereas culture represents “the sublimation of the demonic.” As such, it “belongs entirely to the other side … a deeper, darker, impassioned world.” [Mann]” [C. Beha, op.cit.].

So he resisted democracy because he saw the people lacking “civilisation”?!

He showed in Reflections a lack of understanding of democracy. He thought “[politics] ..embodied revolt and disorder, destroyed traditional values, and contained the danger of a “complete leveling, a journalistic-rhetorical stultification and vulgarization” [Mann] [NYRB 1996], like in France and the West. ”I don’t want the parliamentary and party horsetrading that poisons the whole of national life with politics…. I don’t want politics. I want objectivity, order and decency.” [Mann].

This was naive, not recognising the obvious overarching reality that societies cannot escape “politics”, in which case there’s no question democracy is the answer, in the best interests of all, not any particular leader / faction who gains control.

However James Seaton [Vol 1 No 1, 1989; War, Literature & the Arts Journal, Vol 1 No 1 1989, “Thomas Mann’s Wartime Reflections”] offers a more nuanced view:

“The greatest importance of Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man at the present time, it seems to me, is its demonstration of the power of self criticism as a basis for cultural criticism”.

He shows Mann the music loving “German patriot” wrestling the democracy inclined “unpatriotic or “unGerman””  “civilization’s literary man” [Der Zivilisationsliterat].

In the end in Reflections Mann even – improbably! – enlists Neitzsche for democracy!

Thus, Mann: “the powerful strengthening of the literary critical element in Germany that Nietzsche brought about signifies progress in the most dubious, most political sense, in the sense of “humanization,” progress toward Western democracy.

And he recognises his own double nature, “the “literary” part of his nature is ultimately as real as the conservative, patriotic side”. [Seaton, op.cit.], and even that of WW1!

Seaton: “For Mann the war itself has this same double nature. On the one hand, it is “an unparalleled primeval eruption” [Mann], but on the other hand it means the acceleration of both technological progress and progress toward democracy.”

Mann: “ The war cannot fail, must not fail, to supply the conservative, delaying forces, and all irrationalism, all “reaction” as well, richly with new spirit, new blood.

But I knew on the day of its outbreak that the war would above all signify a powerful step forward for Germany on the path to democracy.”

Seaton chastises Mann for suggesting “that such critique [as Reflections] can lead only to the dissolution of what is most valuable in human life.

Instead, the personal and cultural critique which Mann performs in Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man and in his great novels provides the kind of insight made possible by the performance of the peculiarly human activity of self-reflection.

So far no discipline and no science has discovered a methodology for generating such insights.

 Instead, we must depend on the old, unreliable sources: art, religion, philosophy, and the unclassifiable “reflections,” both personal and cultural, of writers like Thomas Mann.”

Though he did then throw “his support behind the new Weimar government [C. Beha, op.cit.].

In an essay [1922] titled “On the German Republic,” he acknowledged that “democracy can live on a certain plane, the same plane as that of German romanticism,” [Mann],“ [C. Beha, op.cit.].”.

Later “it was in The Magic Mountain that his real reckoning with the reactionary mind played out” [Lilla, NYRB, May 2021].

Then “With the rise of fascism, Mann’s ambivalent acceptance of democracy became full-throated support.” [Lilla]

But Mann was wary about “artists” becoming “political”, because it would compromise their freedom, authenticity, honesty, would mean tailoring their writing to fit political objectives.

Thus, “What Mann loved about the literature of the 19^th C, as opposed to that of the 18^th, was what he called its greater subservience to reality, by which he meant its ambiguity, its resistance to formulas.” [Lilla, op. cit.]

The Coming Victory of Democracy [1938] was adapted from a lecture series he delivered Feb. – May 1938, broadcast over the US, supporting the US fighting Nazi Germany, “explains his moral, political, and artistic reasons for desiring and predicting the victory of democracy [in] his native country”.

5.3/ Mann’s main themes and influences

An early influence on Thomas and his older brother was the “Romantic” German writer [poetry, essays, criticism] Heinrich Heine [1797-1856], Jewish, from a merchant’s family in Dusseldorf, a fan of Napoleon’s shake up of the old order, exiled in France from 1831 after his “progressive” views irritated the ruling authorities, as a leading advocate for the informal reformist Young Germany movement, c1830-50, favoring democracy, “socialism”, separation of church / state, emancipation of Jews, equal rights for women.

Mann was rare, an odd fish per contra the flock of early 20^th C wailing Teutonic gloomsters, like Spengler and the Frankfurst School [W Benjamin et al], all shying from modernity like Dracula from the Cross, the Molochs from the Light.

Yes thus he was “shocked” by the outcome of French Revolution, and quite right too, another self-inflicted calamity, bring a year or so of “reform” and 23 years of Continental wide war.

He was keen on music, the Romantics, Wagner, whose Tristan impacts The Magic Mountain? “The story does not move from a beginning to an end but surges and subsides in a vacuum of timelessness..”

And Leon Tolstoy 1828-1910) was big for him too, bringing the template of the wide ranging epic, and joy in the “battlefield” detail?

And the frowning Arty Schopenhauer [1788-1860] mattered, positing each of us as Wills. We all called Bill!

Just infernal Drive: “In his The World as Will and Idea S celebrates the will as an insatiable force without conscious purpose or direction“, and Reason is no help.

His life answer, response was.. renunciation! Hide with your dog! ” Reason is pointless, useless: “Since the will is “blind,” all participation in life is to be avoided” [Cliffs].

Nietzsche (1844-1900] was also sceptical about constructive engagement, was “ convinced of humanity’s inability to perceive anything but phenomena, never reality behind them“.

But unlike S he “violently affirms the will to life“.

But again reason [represented by Apollonian Man] is useless against irrationality, as are attempts at constructive rational collective behaviour.

So he “ revolts against all notions of truth and morality“, regards religion as delusion, sees the will as “fiercely individualistic… sees the democratic ideal as the institutionalization of the “herd morality” “, rejected the bourgeoisie and nationalism.

But Mann by clear contrast was a brighter, more optimistic soul, accepted the “irrational” will but rejected destiny as only glum contemplation, rather saw action working with reason for the collective social good remaining a fruitful option, including coping with Man’s irrationality, passions and emotions.

Offering even ripe yellow nectarines.

So Mann hits Nietzsche and Schopenhauer out of the ground, for six.

Wagner mattered for telling stories, the grand epic. So “.. not difficult to detect Wagner’s influences in Buddenbrooks, this “epic train of generations interwoven by Wagnerian leitmotifs,” [Mann].

 In The Magic Mountain, the countless stages of Castorp’s journey toward self-education are tied together by leitmotifs.

The story does not move from a beginning to an end but surges and subsides in a vacuum of timelessness.

This is a literary parallel to Wagner’s concept of eternal melody — a single, continuously surging, all-encompassing melody within which each motif flows and ebbs in harmony or contention with every other one”. [Cliffs].

6/ Life

Well born in a Baltic business family, educated Lubeck then Munich where lived 1891-1933, when the Nazis drove him to Switzerland, thence US 1939 after Czechoslovakia fell, to Princeton in USA, then from 1942 in Los Angeles, Pacific Palisades, joining a prominent German expatriate community there.

During WW2 he was one of few German expatriates to openly attack the Nazis [in broadcasts via the BBC] but then after WW2 as the Cold War with USSR set in he was specifically targeted by McCarthyism for his liberal views, forced to testify to the HUAC as “suspected Communist”, openly rebutting allegations.

It encouraged his return to Europe, in 1952 [77], living Switzerland.

Struggled with his “sexuality”.            

Review ‘The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity’

Review The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity [1]

Hard to escape the last c5000 years of history, and especially the last c500 years?

1/ The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Graeber and David Wengrow; 2021; Allen Lane [UK] / Farrar, Straus and Giroux [US].

A/ INTRODUCTION

This is an important and ambitious book, probing the deep history of humankind, back into the Palaeolithic, and wondering above all could there have been a relatively kinder outcome today.

The focus of the book is before recorded history, mainly addresses archaeological and anthropological evidence.

From their survey they muse that the overall outcome today might have been different: 1/ fewer authoritarian governments; 2/ less hierarchy / stratification / inequality; 3/ less “exploitation”; 4/ more personal freedoms etc.

In particular, coming out of the last ice age they speculate we had choices along the way which might have upset the inevitability of the conventional long term narrative of “linear progress”, from hunter-gathering through farming / agriculture through cities / urbanisation to “civilisations”, defined by science / technology, higher income, and literacy / writing etc.

However a close scrutiny of history since the rise of Near East “civilisations” from 4^th millennium BCE, then especially over the last c500 years since the Renaissance, offers no obvious instances where relevant agents had “choices” which might have softened the overall collective outcome for humanity

B/ SUMMARY

Contemplating the modern world in the context of humanity’s deeper past the overwhelming confronting reality is how radical has been the effectivetake off of technology informed liberal democratic modernity – and how recent, mostly post WW2 – delivering for large numbers globally historically unparalleled income / health / longevity outcomes, and practical individual freedoms.

However despite the success of the novel liberal democratic model – notwithstanding imperfections – it still applies only to about 13% of the world population, or 37% adding India, Brazil and Indonesia.

This suggests the model is not necessarily easy to adopt.

In wondering how matters might have been different today for global humanity, and taking advantage of the ever growing relevant data sets, the authors focus on investigating conditions in human societies long ago, probing the “dawn” in the Palaeolithic and Neolithic, but arguably evidence from the last 5000 years matters much more for the ancestry of conditions today than the 5000 years before that [into the Neolithic, back to the start of the pivotal shift from hunter gathering to farming], let alone further back to the Palaeolithic, because it is more recent, much more extensive, and in particular offers an evident discernible long thread to conditions in recent times.

Thus, owing it seems to sustained adverse climate shift, large cities [urbanisation] integrated with adjacent large scale irrigation – thence “civilisations”, writing, science and technology – suddenly arose from late 4^th millennium BCE in the Near East Fertile Crescent, especially lower Mesopotamia, also Egypt.

It became a radical new political-economic model driven by its fortuitous economic success, bringing forth centralised autocratic government [hence hierarchy / stratification, suited to organising the economic activity] overseen initially by priests then soon kings / emperors demanded for their martial and leadership skills, because the economic fecundity of the cities quickly encouraged warfare, military competition for the scarce suitable sites.

It quickly established a new model – based on competing militant autocracies overseen by priest / ‘church’ assisted ambitious hereditary monarchs and self-interested implicated aristocracies – which has essentially prevailed till today.

Thus, looking at recorded history following the rise of Near East / European “civilisations”, and also China / Asia, striking is how sustained and tenacious have been militant autocracies, and per contra how rare has been even proto-democratic state experience, let alone the dramatic post WW2 break out by liberal democracies.

Autocracy has apparently been the naturalor de facto state of affairs, despite being inherently unstable, violence-prone, and economically sub-optimal, owing mainly to: a/ the genetic lottery for kings and their challengers, and b/ no formal institutional mechanisms for leadership succession, disputes resolution and testing / acknowledging popular consent; c/ mostly ineffective property rights.

Looking closer at history from this long period we see democracy only emerged where:

1/ some dispersed groups of people were encouraged by common adversity / opportunity to co-operate among themselves to address existential challenges, and in so doing uncovered material innovations in technology and culture;

and 2/ they could do this mainly on their own devices, their lands and people not ready prey to intruding covetous autocratic imperial powers, run by hereditary ruling kings and complicit priests.

Classical Greece [7^th – 4^th C BCE] was the stand out case study, a unique and radical proto-modern experience, for its politics, economy, philosophy and culture [literature and art]. It emerged among peripheral dispersed peoples in some city states [poleis], apparently in response to opportunities provided by a conducive regional political context, after sustained adverse climate shift c1200BC existentially upended large eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age empires, allowing the Greeks to go about their business, freed of intruding imperial overseers.

China at the east rim of Eurasia has long remained an inherently unstable, often violent, inward, dualistic monolith, a Han core later wrestling northern non-Han tribes. The militant, culture thin tribes north twice prevailed [Mongols c1279 and Manchu, c1640], but each time joined, adapted to the monolith, moved into the Chinese house. So China has remained a traditional under-performing inherently sub-optimal autocracy for millennia, achieving only some islands of relative calm and prosperity [eg early 6^th C Sui dynasty, early 7^th C Tang dynasty, and periods of the 11^th C Song dynasty] in otherwise mostly a sea of strife. In a long history there were never even brushes with proto-democracy.

At the west end of Eurasia liberal democracy did slowly, finally arise from among a clutch of countries / states, especially England, also early Mediaeval ‘Italy’ and later the Netherlands, but slowly and painfully

What seems important is that, unlike in China, a number of competing [if shifting] independent political entities emerged and that while the history was chronically violent the competition was eventually “constructive” in terms of advancing their economies and knowledge.

The sustained common thread in the long problematic gestation of “Western civilisation” [especially since the 16^th Renaissance]was, has been, the very “un-Western” identity-biased reactionary behaviour [compounded especially of hereditary [birth] status, nationalism, religion, also imperialist racist exploitation] resisting violently the practical emergence of identity blind “Western” values/ ideals.

The emphatic post WW2 consolidation of technology informed affluent liberal democracy – only 75 years so far – offers a dramatic contrast with the millennia since large cities arose. A feature now has been its spread beyond Europe, to others regions globally, especially in east Asia, to the extent that identity-blind “Western” liberal values [cf free and fair elections, governance, individual human rights etc] are now recognised globally, like Newton’s Laws having universal relevance, as expressed especially through the charters of the UN and many other international bodies.

That reformist “Western” values did eventually, finally emerge, gain real traction in the wake of WW2, bears some analogy to how cautious mammals survived the long reign [over 130my, c200-66.0my] of the dominant dinosaurs, then prospered afteranasteroid defined the K-Pg boundary. Thus did the WW1/WW2 “asteroid” soundly cauterise long reigning reactionary politics in Europe [also Japan], allowing “Western” values tofinally take root, in the West then also especially beyond.

The authors wonder could matters have been different [better?] today.

But the post WW2 break out by liberal democracy may be even more fortuitous than it appears.

Thus given England’s pivotal pioneering role in nurturing liberal democracy [cf its Mediaeval proto-democratic behaviour, from the Saxon / Viking / Celtic 10^th C through the Norman 13^th C, to charters and parliaments, thence to it launching modern parliamentary party politics in the early 18^th C after sidelining its monarchy in the 17^th C] it’s hard not to see how the absence of the protective English Channel would have considerably altered the course of European history, like facilitating much easier engagement by France and Spain with England.

Secondly, the recent history of Europe would surely have been quite different if Nazi Germany had chosen not to invade Russia in June 1941.

Overall, in the face of all the relevant evidence it’s hard to take seriously the authors’ contention that past state actors had available “choices” such that the world today could be much different, like freer and less “stratified”, and still just as well off economically and technologically. This leaves their hopes perhaps more as wishful thinking, drawing on evidence selected and arranged to fit preconceptions?

C/ WORLD TODAY

A visiting Martian, with no immediate access to relevant available history, would soon observe two broadly different ways of life among global states in themodern world, a radical dichotomy:

1/ Liberal democratic states [more or less, with local variations] in Europe, North America, some states in east Asia and outliers like Australia and New Zealand, with conditions are marked by:

a/ emphatic comparative economic “success”: high per capita income; superior health / longevity; generally competitive private markets; private property; effective rule of law; and the economies supervised / regulated by governments, trying to keep competition fair and in accord with the “rules”.

b/ comparative political “success”: eg comparatively high personal freedoms; effective representative democratic legislative bodies; full franchise voting participation.

2/ Assorted other “states”, near all experiencing various degrees of comparative “failure” in terms of economic success, social violence, low effective personal freedoms, autocratic governments.

The group includes two notable large states [PR China and Russia], both subject to “revolutions” in the 20^th C which steered both abruptly away from liberal reform, instead reinstalled vigorous autocratic traditional nationalism, if under the guise of an ideology imported [ironically] from West Europe.

The heart of the liberal democratic model – compared with long running traditional centralist autocracies – is deliberately, constructively, harnessing theskills and self-interested aspirations / ambitions of freely associating individuals, employed by or owning businesses, operating in competitive mostly private markets, but, crucially:

1/ subject to effective rule of law [including enforced property rights], the markets supervised / regulated by competent governments to keep competition fair, to police infractions of the rules.

2/ governments are in turn “supervised” by the “people”, their consent expressed through laborious democratic institutional processes.

The model has been radically successful but in practice is always effectively sub-optimal, imperfect, not least because:

a/ There are always malefactors in all societies at all time, to steal, to try to skirt or bend the Rules, since tomb robbing in old Egypt. It includes individuals, gangs, corporations, and some agents now state sponsored.

b/ Economic and technical change are inherent in the model, hence is constant shift in employment structures, from which there will always be casualties.

c/ Inequality is an issue, even a problem. Some degree of hierarchy / stratification is inevitable in the economic processes, though it’s long been even more evident in most traditional societies? Especially „civilisations“.

d/ Liberal democracy does not run itself, needs, importantly, citizens prepared for it, through education, socialisation, training, starting with family, community. It needs and open minded tolerant mind-set, commited to the model, and does not work where cultural „soil“ is hostile, a major reason the model has failed to take root yet in much of the world.

Note that a successful private liberal market economy is crucial to effective expression of individual freedoms:

i/ it is the main venue for facilitating expressing freedom: of expression [cf the media], movement, association, job choice etc

ii/ private property is crucial to exercising individual freedom, for funding life activities, family, work and play.

In its absence: a/ individuals have far less effective freedom, are much more dependent on the state, hence on decisions by bureaucrats; and b/ the economic outcomes for the state are well below optimal.

A crucial overarching principle is that all citizens are equal before the law, the institutional democratic / government processes being identity neutral, ie oblivious to birth status, nation, race / ethnicity, religion, gender.

The visitor might wonder why the gap between the two groups but would not know:

• that in terms of economic, political, health / longevity and science / technology outcomes, the liberal democratic model – notwithstanding internal debate and dissent – is by far the most radical outcome in human history.
• But that the success of the liberal democracies is very recent historically, only clearly evident since WW2, only about 75 years ago, whereas recorded history, say since the emergence of large cities, goes back near 5000 years, and anatomically modern humans [AMH] have been around over 100,000 years.
• The gestation of effective practical liberal democracy was long and painful.
• The success of liberal democracy in states depends much on conducive cultural “soil”, that most of the states struggling with social, economic and political outcomes do prioritise promotion of traditional loyalties, identities like birth rank / status; / nation / tribe; religion, and also gender.

D/ THE JOURNEY: Why the “take off” by homo sapiens now?

Based on fossil evidence, especially from Africa, primate species Homo / Australopithecus have been evident / evolving for at least say 5 million years, but the “take off” by AMH occurred only during the last 50-100ky, ie during the last 1-2% of this long time interval.

A pattern of successive ice ages began c40my ago, during the Eocene epoch, but intensifying near the end of the Pliocene epoch, during the subsequent Quaternary period’s Pleistocene epoch [2.58mya – c11,700y], evident in approximately 13 interglacial periods over the last 1 million years.

The “take off” finally occurred during last of these ice ages, from c50kya, during the Upper Paleolithic period, where evidence of “progress” in homo cognitive skills / behaviour is now widely established, especially in abundant “ice age art” [well known in Mediterranean Europe, in France and Spain, but also now known in Asia [Indonesia] and possibly Colombia], and also in burials.

Why not a take off after the previous ice age, during previous interglacial period, c 120kya? Presumably AMH were in some way not quite “advanced” enough.

Note there is speculation that the compressed succession of Pleistocene ice ages may have helped eventually provoke or “force” advances in homo life enduring / survival capabilities, these repeated major adverse climate shifts stressing, challenging group survival.

E/ THE JOURNEY: Human nature?

Human nature is focussed above all on survival, meaning competition for 1/ food and shelter, and associated resources and lands; and 2/ women, among the males.

Importantly overlaid on these circumstances there emerged by at least the Palaeolithic an important spiritual dimension, appetite, especially as species homo became aware of his mortality and as he tried to make sense of, adapt to his fickle natural circumstances, especially like weather and climate, also tectonic activity, like volcanoes and earthquakes.

H/ THE JOURNEY: Hunter-gather bands

The humankind social-political model for millions of years was hunter-gathering, in small bands and tribes, nomadic within regional locales.

Evidence for how this model worked comes from palaeontology and archaeology, and also from anthropological research on relevant groups surviving into modern times.

There’s much evidence hunter-gathering was not all that peaceful and “democratic”, was relatively violent, within and between bands. Also there would have been little personal freedom, analogous to choices available today for many in affluent liberal democracies.

People then were part of small communities with clear gender roles for a start, the women mainly assigned to breeding, child care, food gathering and preparation, with little formal role politically.

Competition was likely inherent, within and also between bands, and especially among / between males, for authority and women.

I/ THE JOURNEY: Why the big gap [c5000y] from farming / agriculture to big cities?

Farming / agriculture emerged in the Levant region of the Fertile Crescent [in today’s Syria, SW Turkey] after the Last Glacial Maximum [LGM, c 20kya] and, in particular, in the wake of the comparatively sudden end of the Younger Dryas cool period [which had interrupted warming after the LGM for c1200y], around c9500-9700BC.

There some hunter-gatherers started to establish small settlements / villages / small towns, started small scale farming, to domesticate grasses and other plants, and to herd / domesticate animals like sheep and goats, undertaking pastoral activity.

Some groups were near the coast, allowing access also to sea and shore food.

Many likely continued hunting and foraging alongside the settled activities.

And some also started to investigate irrigation where conditions suited.

But the big puzzle then is why it took approximately another 5000 years before large cities emerged. Why not in another 1000 years, or 10,000 years?

This suggests that something happened to provoke, impel, force the change, and that something approximately mid 4^th millennium BCE [c3500ya] was almost certainly sustained [100s of years?] adverse climate change [cold and dry, aridification] at the end of the Holocene Climate Optimum [HCO], especially in lower Mesopotamia [on the Twin Rivers] and Egypt [on the Nile], there feeling the end of the African Humid Period, c16-5.5kya, the drying of the Sahara.

In both cases much larger settlements than before [cities] emerged comparatively quickly alongside, integrated with large scale river-based irrigation.

The lower Mesopotamia location, near the Persian Gulf, came with rich fertile soils [from long fluvial deposition], responsive to irrigation, and also allowed access to food from the nearby marshes and sea.

J/ THE JOURNEY: Big cities – radical new model, “take off” heralding first “civilisations”

There was a marked step difference between small scale farming alongside settlements [numbering 1000s of people?] and the big cities [c50-100k?] / urbanisation which heralded a radical new society model, in multiple dimensions.

1/ Economy

The big cities, starting almost certainly with Uruk [hence ‘Iraq’], arose alongside large scale river based irrigation [a long familiar technology but on small scale] to oversee, integrate with the now large scale food production activity.

This required organisation and direction of the workforce, and storage / distribution of the produce.

Also growing artisan activity in the cities in turn provided various goods like: 1/ those used in food production; 2/ consumer goods, textiles, pottery, jewellery etc; 3/ weapons. Metal working technology [launching the Bronze Age] was a key associated innovation.

Note this was mainly a centralised command economy model, with a minor role for private markets which would become important much later.

2/ Politics

The new economic imperative demanded, suited, major central administration and organisation, so brought forth a centralised autocratic / authoritarian political-economic model, meaning hierarchy / stratification and limited personal freedoms.

It also seems priests had important executive duties initially but kings quickly emerged – especially because of demand for martial services [fighting] – and in turn, before long, emperors, like Sargon of Akkad.

Thus the economic fecundity of the cities encouraged warfare, military competition for them, exacerbated because the number of attractive riverside irrigation sites would have been scarce.  

3/ Religion

Religion became important, reflecting a big popular demand for the tempting proposition of possible advantageous supernatural engagement, through acceptance of, belief in divine agents, various providential deities, especially given:

a/ offering explanations for fickle nature: climate / weather, also tectonic activity, volcanoes and earthquakes, which their societies had existential exposure to.

They were dependent on rainfall far away to feed the big rivers, but that could mean too much water [floods] or too little [drought], and also include storms.

b/ the obvious ubiquitous appeal of an after-life;

These beliefs were reflected tangibly in the large resources applied to religious purposes, especially to temples, and in Egypt to the elaborate expensive tombs for the religion infatuated pharaohs.

4/ Writing / literacy

Writing seems to have emerged in the big cities from around 2750 BCE, ie about half a millennium after big cities arrived, and apparently provoked in the first instance by it facilitating the business of the new city-states, especially administration of the economy, as well as religion and politics.

It obviously proved a radical and far reaching innovation:

a/ in the present time dimension it facilitated various purposes: administrative, economic, scientific, cultural.

Thus it allowed issuing orders, keeping lists and records etc [eg names, agreements, re produce / property / personal relationships]; eventually reflection on science, philosophy, history etc; and writing texts, stories etc, for religious and secular purposes.

b/ but also especially it allowed for storing, accumulating knowledge for communicationto future generations.

So beyond the practical demands from administration and the economy, writing quickly served major science and cultural purposes, mainly for the state initially, but later among private people, groups.

5/ Science / technology

These vital subjects were advanced alongside the political and economic activity, and included maths, astronomy, metal working, and technical engineering innovations.

Over the long term future ongoing technical innovation became a crucial facilitator of economic success, underwriter of productivity growth.

 6/ Education

Education emerged to train workers [religious and secular], eventually through schools, universities etc., helping to prepare citizens for their roles. Early schools in the Fertile Crescent trained scribes for the laborious task of writing cuneiform tablets.

K/ THE JOURNEY: Big cities – militant, competing kings & complicit priests, dominant model for next 5000y?

The new political-economic model was a radical shift, proved very productive economically [as long as the climate was favourable], throwing off a large economic surplus, unexpectedly, fortuitously.

Politics quickly adapted to these radical economic circumstances, the big economic surplus soon applied especially to temples and palaces, and above all to armies.

Thus warfare quickly became endemic among /between the various “states” as ambitious self-interested kings / emperors fought – competed – to protect / defend their domains, and often to seek to acquire others.  

Thus beyond overseeing economic and religious activity, with the close if subordinate support of priests, a king’s primary role was military, as a soldier.

In broad terms competing militant autocracies overseen by hereditary monarchs soon became the dominant political model for nigh on the next 5000 years, common and tenacious historically, alongside some remaining hunter-gatherers, and also nomadic / pastoral peoples [clans, tribes etc], some of whom proved historically important, if transiently, like the 13^th C Mongols.

Demonstrably too this militant autocracy model was inherently unstable, came with almost chronic warfare, prone to violence at the macro and micro level, owing to:

1/ the genetic lottery in all hereditary regimes; among rulers and the population of potential opportunistic challengers [“loved of the distracted multitude”]: especially within royal families, among implicated aristocracies, and generals.

This lottery is highlighted by the many past “successful” autocrats still famous [or infamous] today, some from now long ago: cf Sargon, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Robert Clive, Napoleon, Hitler.

Far less well known are the many incompetent people who acceded to inherited roles far beyond their capabilities or interest.

2/ no formal orderly institutional mechanisms for: a/ leadership succession; b/ disputes resolution; c/ facilitating expression of popular opinion, especially consent re major policy issues.

Hence there was chronic brawling over succession and chronic revolts by disaffected populace, as well as chronic violent competition for lands, resources, on a micro [banditry] and macro level [kings etc].

L/ THE JOURNEY: Democracy a rare experience

Democracy or proto-democracy was historically a rare, mostly absent experience in Europe and the Near East across near 5 millennia after the arrival of large cities / “civilisations”.

The obvious [unique?] case study is Classical Greece where radical free thinking proto-modern behaviour emerged after c650 BCE, among dispersed peoples in some poleis [city states], apparently in response to opportunities provided by a conducive regional political context.

Thus sustained adverse climate shift c1200BC [a ‘climate asteroid’] existentially upended large eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age empires, allowing the dispersed Greeks to go about their business, freed of intruding imperial overseers. In doing this the Greek city-states over 100s of years established a buoyant maritime trading economy, including a network of “colonies” up and down the Mediterranean.

But also emerging security threats, especially from the Achaemenid Persians, encouraged the devising of formal collective democratic arrangements [an early expression of the social contract], to seek popular consent for collective “state” action, to consult adult male citizens, for them to participate politically, in particular in return for their service as hoplites [citizen soldiers] when the need arose for everyone’s mutual benefit, given the decentralised state could not afford a standing army.

It proved famously successful, though success later [early 5^th C BCE] went to Athens head when they stumbled into to the self inflicted calamity of the Peloponnese Wars.

Thirdly the Greek success was enabled by another proto-modern breakthrough, the practical recognition that their gods were basically projections of their own human lives and therefore no use as intervening spiritual agents to be accommodated and importuned, that ultimately their “fate” was mostly in their hands.

Alongside, off the back of, sustained economic success the Greeks achieved pioneering knowledge advances in philosophy, maths, practical science and technology, history, literature, much of which still resonates today, but also drawing importantly on some cultural outcomes from the nearby older Empires, especially re maths, writing, literature and art.

The Greek achievement was transmitted ahead via the Roman Republic/ Empire, later helped too by Islamic states helping to preserve and pass on texts.

The eventual radical West Europe outcome also seems influenced by the quasi-democratic political practise of the Germanic and Norse tribes, who eventually invaded Britain, and the Vikings Normandy.

Both groups were relatively dispersed, protected by their peripheral forests from predatory outsiders [as the Roman general Varus found out] and unaccustomed to submitting to imperial overseers.

Both seemed inclined to proto-feudal political models, in terms of a chief’s relations with attendant warriors, such that the chief either delivered or risked his job, a mindset which fitted later proto-capitalist behaviour.

The emergence of proto-capitalism [cities / towns / villages, artisan industry and literacy] in West Europe from around 1000CE paralleled the rise of Classical Greece, again occurring opportunistically in the wake of failed overarching centralised states, among the trading communal city states in proto-Italy, over half a millennium after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

This foreshadowed later feudal arrangements in early Mediaeval Europe, where nobles / barons “contracted” with the monarch, again involving an important military purpose, embodied in the 1215 Magna Carta in England [and subsequent charters], also the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath in Scotland.

M/ THE JOURNEY: China, case study for “tenacious autocracy”

China was condemned largely by geography and its emergent post Neolithic / Bronze Age ethnic/racial mix to appear early as an isolated monolith, at the far east [Pacific] end of Eurasia, long remaining an inherently unstable, often violent, sluggish, inward, dualistic monolith: ie a Han core later wrestling northern non-Han tribes.

Thus the peripheral militant, culture shy tribes north aggravated the instability and twice prevailed [Mongols c1279 and Manchu, c1640], but each time joined, adapted to the monolith, moved into the Chinese house, adapting to its culture and ‘civilisation’, though usually reminding the Han centre who had won.

So China has remained a traditional under-performing inherently sub-optimal autocracy for millennia, managing some islands of relative calm and prosperity [eg early 6^th C Sui dynasty, early 7^th C Tang dynasty, and periods of the 11^th C Song dynasty] in a timeline that is otherwise mostly a sea of strife.

Ithas never escaped the destructive competition of a violent centralised inward looking autocracy, economically regressive [more about tribute from foreigners than trade], prone to the genetic lottery in all dynasties, henceto destructive competition among capable ambitious militant leaders, inside and outside the tent. It also wasted large resources on projects like the “Great” Wall, and imperial personal excess.

Consequently its history is marked by occasional “successful” leaders pulling the shaky ship together for a time until again “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” and it succumbs once more to periods of unrest, sometimes long, hungry and bloody.

In a long history there were never even brushes with proto-democracy, the radical rule of law and evidence based competitive private market economics that informs liberal modernity.

N/ THE JOURNEY: long painful gestation of “Western” liberal democracy, last c500y

At the west end of Eurasia liberal democracy did slowly, finally arise from among a clutch of countries / states.

What seems important is that, unlike in China, a number of competing if shifting independent political entities emerged and that while the history was chronically violent the competition was eventually “constructive” in terms of advancing their economies and knowledge.

However a common thread in the long turbulent gestation of WC was, has been, the very “un-Western” identity-promoting reactionary behaviour, resisting violently, the practical emergence of Western values/ ideals, compounded of nationalism, religion [the Christian Church resisting secular reform] and later imperialist racist exploitation.

Glimmers of secular reform arrived in the Italian Renaissance, starting with emergence of trading city states from the 11^th C [cf Amalfi, Pisa, Genoa, Florence, Venice], but were swallowed in the 16^th C by reactionary politics, when the French armies arrived [starting with Charles VIII], invited in.

The early 16^th C Reformation [seeking relaxation of the Church’s central hand in Rome]was soon swallowed by the religious [civil] wars of the Counter Reformation, in 16^th and 17^th C, as the Church and sympathetic secular rulers fought back, violently, devastating much of today’s Germany.

The global European Exploration Age, begun by Portuguese in late 15^th C, soon mushroomed into competitive offshore imperialism: predatory extractive endeavour by the then major European powers [Spain / Portugal, England, Netherlands], especially in the Americas, Asia and Africa; reflected above all in the Americas by industrial scale slavery [around an improbable 10m trafficked across the Atlantic] and slave staffed plantations, mines etc.

The 18^th C Enlightenment [evident especially in France, Netherlands, England and Scotland] was swallowed by the 1789-1815 French Revolution / French Wars. Thus the reformist initiation of the French Revolution, part inspired by the French Enlightenment [les Philosophes] wasfast swallowed by very un-“Enlightened” nationalistic French tyranny, responding to violent reactionary support for Louis XVI from his royal neighbours after he thoughtlessly condoned, sanctioned their interference. So France was soon at war and after an initial stumble found itself keen and successful, heralding c20 years of age-old Continental warfare, mostly orchestrated by Napoleon, only now the participants were much better armed than before, the conflict that much deadlier

Likewise, in flagrant breech of its founding principles, the lauded promising “Enlightened” 1780s American Revolution was swallowed by vile traditional “anti-Western” identity abuse: 4m slaves by c1860. The North pressing to keep the Union triggered a calamitous Civil War which still left the race problem alive, when slavery was subsequently repackaged for another century.

Finally – fatefully, ironically, like an exercise in karma – the competing European imperialists brought their nationalistic rivalry back home and inflicted the unnecessary calamitous WW1 on themselves, which by sad improbable chance then spawned the tragic Russian Revolution, robbing Russia of a likely easier path to liberal modernity, for it was not a “reformist” revolution, rather a reactionary revolving back to a neo-Tsarist autocracy / dictatorship.

Post WW1 financial mismanagement by the major powers brought about the calamitous Depression, which – far worse than the shocking economic dislocation – allowed Hitler and his Nazi Party to gain power. The Nazi vote at the May 1928 elections was only 2.6% [winning 12 seats of 491; 18.3% Sep. 1930 [107/577] and 37.3% July 1932 [230/608].

WW2, including the frightful Japanese chapter, then conspired to deprive China also from a realistic chance at liberal modernity when Mao’s “Communist” forces [the ideological template imported, ironically, from Europe] prevailed late 1949 over a depleted KMT.

But like in 1917 Russia the “Revolution” returned China to a traditional neo-Han nationalistic autocracy which today still remains at war with the modern world, and more so through the recent authoritarian swerve away from Deng’s ersatz capitalism [markets reform borrowed from the successful West].

Thus was the gestation of the practical implementation of Western values a long hard road.

O/ THE JOURNEY: post WW2 break out of “Western” liberal democracy

The emphatic post WW2 consolidation of technology informed affluent liberal democracy – only 75 years so far – offers a dramatic contrast with the millennia since large cities arose.

A striking feature has been its spread beyond Europe, to others regions globally, especially in east Asia, to the extent that “Western” liberal values / principles [cf free and fair elections, governance, individual human rights] are now recognised globally – at least de facto – as, like Newton’s Laws, having universalist applicability, expressed especially through the UN and related international bodies.

In Europe democracy finally took root in Germany after the war, and then across East Europe after the neo-Tsarist Soviet Union imploded at the end of the 1980s, undoing its post WW2 imperialist intrusion there.

But the most dramatic and informative experience has been in east Asia where effective democracy has succeeded in a region culturally and geographically far from Europe and one lacking any meaningful expression of the model its long documented history.

This outcome was quicker in a Japan traumatised by its wartime devastation, the 1945 nuclear denouement finishing wars they started with invasion of Manchuria Sep. 1931; extended July 1937 [China] and Dec. 1941 {US et al].

South Korea’s journey was much longer, more problematic, as a remnant from the Soviet union sponsored Korean War then not sloughing off military rule till the 6^th Republic from 1987.

Taiwan’s path was obviously complicated by hostility from the PR China but its 1971 ejection from the UN [replaced by PRC] stimulated deliberate and now successful embrace of effective democracy.

Democracy has also made progress elsewhere in Asia, notably in India [in the wake of decolonialisation] and Indonesia.

Selling „Western“ liberal values

Selling „Western“ liberal values / „Western“ liberal democracy

Challenging for both sides of the argument?

A/ Summary

• „Western“ liberal democracy [WLD] / „Western“ liberal values: FIRST identity neutral / blind political model in history. Only post WW2, after a long and painful gestation.
• Hence universally valid, and now spreading, esp E Asia etc.
• Radically successful model, against long humankind history:
  • a/ economic / material / health outcomes;
  • b/ meaningful individual freedoms.
• But SEPARATE:
  • the destination / outcome: „Western“ liberal values“ [WLV], the ideals,
  • from its gestation: the badly stained historic journey of „Western“ Civ’n [WC]: esp last c500 years, long and dark, fouled from the inside by sustained reactionary anti-liberal identity abuse [IA], esp racism, mass slavery.
  • But ironcally including self-inflicted calamities! French Rev’n/ wars; US Civil War; WW1.
• So „Western“ values NOTHING to apologise for.
• Successful, but NOT an easy model to implement [still only c13% of world, c35% looser definition].
• Needs the right cultural „soil“, right open mindset, right preparation for citizens.
• Thus struggles with / defied by entrenched traditional loyalties, cf tribalism, religion etc.[Afghanistan!].
• Challenging for both sides.
  • NOT easy to accept by many critics,
    • Irony is the outcome [„Western“ values] is the answer to their criticism.
    • Most non -„Western“ lands display much worse identity abuse today, socioeconomic failure.
  • NOT easy to sell. Not helped by many „centrist“ defenders [Western politicians, historians etc]:
    • NOT facing the confronting reality of the past, the very dark history, especially in USA, also UK etc.
    • Not recognising the huge challenge for many traditional / indigenous peoples in adapating to the new model, in it overturning their longstanding cultures.

B/ Need to differentiate, separate the journey [Western civ’n] from destination [Western values]

 1/ the HISTORY of WC [which gestated, mothered the liberal democratic [LD] model.

Yes history dark. Long hard, very painful for many.

Fouled by anti-„Western values reactionary abuse from inside the West, violent imperial predation, especially by race. Slavery was shocking.

Unfortunate that the USA, now the leading WLD, was the worst culprit, through slavery, in flagrant contradiction of founding principles. At a time when Europe was reforming.

AND 2/ the DESTINATION: „Western“ liberal values [WLV], the principles, the liberal dem model

C/ So „Western“ liberal values NOTHING to apologise for [1]

1/ WC outcome, FIRST liberal democratic model in recorded history.

• identity neutral / blind
• all equal before effective independent rule of law
• full franchise representative democracy
• formal institutional democratic processes for popular consent
• individual rights

2/ Radical outcome, unparalleled historically.

 Profoundly successful, BOTH materially [hence health / longevity too], and politically, meaningful personal freedoms

3/ Because is identity blind it has universal application, by definition. Like Newton’s Laws.

Thus importantly now see the model is working non-Western countries, especially in E Asia, India, Indonesia etc. Even Samoa!

D/ But NOT easy model to implement

Thus today applies to only c13% world, 37% with Brazil, India, Indonesia.

Because

a/ Always malefactors, thieves, who try to skirt or bend the Rules. Since tomb robbing in old Egypt. Includes individuals, gangs, corporations. Some agents now state sponsored.

b/ Economic change, technical change, inherent in the model, hence constant shift in employment structure.

Always casualties from this as jobs change.

c/ Inequality is an issue, a problem?

Some degree of hierarchy / stratification is inevitable in the economic processes.

Though it’s long been even more evident in most traditional societies? Especially „civilisations“.

d/ Does NOT run itself. Need citizens prepared for it, education, socialisation, training, starting with family, community.

Need open minded tolerant mind-set, commited to the model.

Does NOT work where cultural „soil“ is hostile, ie where traditional identities / loyalties are entrenched, where is strong group identity compounded of one or more of 1/ tribalism / nationalism; 2/ race / ethnicity; 3/ religion; 4/ gender.

Thus MOST of world still trapped by traditional loyalties, MOST laboring under authoritarian governments.

E/ Western civ. critics: confuse the journey and the destination

The ship of critics [Woke, CRT, Take the Knee, #MeToo, Cancellers] confuse the journey: Western Civ“; and the destination, the outcome: the ideals, „Western“ liberal values [WLV], liberal modernity, „Western“ liberal democracy.

Very different.

They miss:

1/ Irony that the same WC that gave other peoples so much abuse [and also their own] ALSO provides the answer for them today! To their passionate complaint [ie identity-abuse [IA], especially by color and gender]. „Western“ liberal values. Not easy to swallow?

2/ CRT etc claim that racism inherent in WLV is dishonest, denies reality.

Strays into neo-racism when it becomes openly identity promotional, as superior.

So makes the same error as the long afflicted Western Civ‘n journey, and as in near ALL tradional societies.

3/ Difficulty of adapting to, benefiting from „Western“ values. Not easy. Need right education, socialisation etc.

Crucial that non-white communities take responsibility, especially at grassroots, in families, local communities.

4/ Some „victims“ understand. Eg African-Americans, despite being „victims“. Do NOT promote their identity over their life mission; cf Zora Neale Hurston, Norman Lewis; Thomas Sewell, Jason Ridley, J McWhorter etc.

5/ Multiculturalism is a popular theme, since 1980s. Works so long as it does NOT hides identity promotion, in the official / public arena. Seeking preferential advantage.

6/ Hypocrisy: most NON-„Western“ lands today display far more identity-abuse, far worse economic / social outcoms, than „Western“, cf Africa, Mid and Near East, parts Asia and Latin America.

Most African-Americans in US have made much progress there and are far better off than in Africa.

7/ Like hypocrisy during Cold War. When many in West [on Left] lambasted their countries, ignored far worse abuse in Communist countries. Started pre WW2 in USSR, Left tolerance of Stalin. Post WW2 of Mao.

F/ Lib dem model / „Western“ values BADLY sold by many protagonists [2]

Not just a matter of glorifying its radical economic and political success.

Like the critics many do NOT clarify [as here] the dramatic DIFFERENCE between the journey „WC“, AND the destination, outcome, the model, the ideals, principles.

Yes the the ideals are radically appealing.

But:

1/ Many do NOT honestly face the shocking aspects of the journey, lingering into the present.

Thus still reticence, failure of many in the West to at least acknowldge, face „sins of fathers“.

Includes many in the liberal „centre“, especially in USA, cf S Wilentz etc.

Eg evident in heated debate over statues, eg Jefferson, Columbus. Both too compromised to be openly celebrated, pedestalled.

Common riposte that slavery always part of history.

YES but newly independent USA should have known better! This was not ancient history, but in 19th C; after Britain started facing the immorality of it; and was on a huge opportunistic scale, the slave population growing about 7 fold to c4m by 1860, especially south, on land bought from the French, or wrestled off Mexico, or taken from Native Americans.

2/ Also NOT sympathetic enough to challenges facing „non-Western“ peoples adapting to WLD, WV.

Major problem for these people, especially indigenous / First Nation peoples, especially for First Contact generations.

Overturns their worlds.

BIG challenge for them to adapt.

Many still living with memories of BOD, bad old days!

1/ News item: Thurs 28th October 2021, S African cricket wicket keeper Quenton da Koch was bailed up for not Taking the Knee with his team, ordered by SA C Board to do so. Later he buckled, „apologised“.

2/ News item: Sat 30 Oct, ABC RN; we hear Australian Federal Education Minister Alan Tudge. Shocking.

Yes of course there were difficulties for indigenous people, he said, but „don’t forget magnificent achievements since 1788.. joys of democracy.. which we fought for in WW1 and WW2…“. Sounded triumphalist.

Then exposed his failure when tabled the O word after an SBS indigenous lady was critical: „I find her remarks offensive..“?!

Thoughtless reply, showing NO sympathy, understanding, that, like it or not, our „Western“ civilisation has swallowed their culture!

They are left with NO choice but get on board.

But alas today many live in an untenable no man’s land.

German Peasants’ War [1524-25]: know thy place!

German Peasants’ War [1524-25]: know thy place!

• Major lower class insurrection in SW and S “Germany”, claiming over 100k killed?!
• Joined by some sympathetic radical Reformatory clerics, seeing the rebels “doing God’s work”.
• Main motive protesting their economic lot, but political complaint too, summarised specifically in the pioneering 12 Articles.

SUMMARY

The German Peasants’ War was the largest insurrection in European history before the French Revolution. It began in the Black Forest / Swabia in late summer and fall of 1524, spread east as far as the Tyrol [1526] and Salzburg] and NE to Franconia and Thuringia, peaked around Easter of 1525, was brutally quashed by ruling Princes, taking over 100k lives among the rebels.

By the late 15^th C in “Germany” a symbiotic overlap of politics and religion had emerged in common / joint opposition to the Church in Rome, to its long sacralistic intervention in their local affairs.

German clerics led by M Luther objected to intrusive rule / venal behaviour of the Roman Church, sought reform [eg when ML posted complaints in 95 Theses at Wittenberg, 1517], alongside secular German nationalistic political complaint among the German Princes against the Church, favoring independence from Rome, especially not paying them taxes: “German money for a German church.“.

This common cause triggered the pivotal Reformation, joined soon after by nearby England under monarch Henry VIII, where also arose secular and clerical opposition to Rome.

Criticism, resentment of, disenchantment with, the Church had earlier gathered pace in Europe after the massive Continent-wide societal shock of the Black Death in 1348, joined in England by John Wycliff [late 14^th C] who then influenced Jan Hus in Prague, in turn sparking violent widely destructive revolt by the Hussites in Bohemia, c1420-1431.

The short but lethal German Peasants War was mainly caused by underling economic suffering long simmering in the 15^th C among many peasants across southern “Germany”, but it spilled also into political complaint.

Before the 1524 irruption this grievance had already become violent a number of times in the mid and late 15^th C.

The background to peasant unrest was complex.

The peasant class had benefited from the Black Death, the scarcity of labor lifting real wages later in 14^th C into the 15^th. But at the behest of the noble and knight classes  Roman civil law [displacing common law] then ate into these better circumstances, especially by confiscating / enclosing common lands near villages, forcing some peasants into at least quasi-serfdom.

Revolt broke out in – was largely confined to – the south because a/ it had a stronger tradition of village self-government, of communal sense of rights, and b/ the knight class was relatively stronger south and itself under pressure from Princes so it was mainly knights leaning on the peasants.  

The rebellion was led mainly by better off aspirational peasants. This and and stronger communalism south reflected in the Twelve Articles at the Free Imperial City of Memmingen March 1525, which proved a landmark document in the ancestry of modern liberal democracy in specifying rights of the populace: 1/ freedom for serfs; 2/ access to forests / lakes for food and wood; 3/ no laboring obligations not agreed to; 4/ fair rent for land; 5/ rule of law: laws agreed not arbitrary.

The peasants willingness to finally vent their frustration in emphatic armed revolt in 1524 undoubtedly had one eye on the then recent [1522-23] Knights Revolt in the nearby Rhineland [eg briefly besieging Trier] and, secondly, they were also by then well aware of the reformist hostility to Rome by clerics like Luther.

Strangely too then was how some of the clerical Radical reformers saw specific common cause with the lot of the peasants and actively joined their violent uprising, notably Thomas Muntzer [c1489-1525] who with an apocalyptic millenarian / end of world mindset saw the rebels doing God’s work [“as the instruments of God.”] and their high born opponents in the employ of Satan.

Luther – “born a peasant”, ear to the ground – became involved, in Dec. 1521 warning of possible peasant unrest. Then after being personally threatened by the violence he famously about turned and loudly castigated the rebels, canvassed harsh measures.

The arrival [c1470s] and spread of printing fanned reformist agitation, including specific demands of the rebelling peasants [cf 12 Articles].

BACKGROUND: context / causes / agents

1/ Communalism in the HRE. The later Middle Ages ‘great agrarian depression’, in wake of the 1348 Black Death that weakened the lords, strengthened peasants, through scarcity of labor, encouraged a wide movement for village self-government (communalism) in Holy Roman Empire, especially in central and southern regions.

2/ Czech religious revolt, early 15^th C, seeded by Jan Hus, [c1369-1415, influenced by English priest, academic and theologian John Wycliff [1320s – 1384], engendered the Hussite Wars, Bohemian Wars, Christian Hussites versus HRE Sigismund / Papacy / loyal monarchs. Reformer Jan Hus was executed 1415 and HRE Sigismund, brother of Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia [d c1420] gained permission from Papacy for crusade against Hussites!

Hussite community included most of the Czech population of the Kingdom of Bohemia and formed a major spontaneous military power. They defeated five consecutive crusades proclaimed against them by the Pope (1420, 1421, 1422, 1427, 1431),

July 30, 1419 – May 30, 1434; mostly the Lands of the Bohemian Crown; Outcome: defeat for Radical Hussites, victory for Moderate Hussites. End of Hussite Wars in 1431, Bohemia ravaged, pop. of Czech lands, c2.80–3.37m c1400, fell to 1.50–1.85m by 1526. Adjacent Bishopric of Würzburg also; Jan Hus Charles University in Prague. Priesthood, BA degree, preach in Prague, opposed Catholic Church in Bohemia, eg ecclesiology, simony, the Eucharist. Alexander V elected as a pope, Papal bull excommunicated Hus. Continued to preach. Council of Constance, Hus lured with indemnity, but arrested, executed 1415.

3/ Princes implemented, took advantage of Roman civil law, replacing old Common law.

Princes attempted to force their freer peasants into serfdom by increasing taxes and introducing Roman civil law.

Roman civil law advantaged princes, brought all land into their ownership, eliminated older feudal concept of land as trust between lord and peasant, contract that conferred rights / obligations on both. Hence confiscation of property and revenues, peasants now serfs.

4/ Imperial knights, “lesser nobility”, a key agent in rebellion, through a/ them leaning on peasants, especially down south, because Princes leaning on them; and /b their revolt sending message to upset peasants.

Hurt by a/ Princes taking advantage of Roman civil law, and more in the north, “many of the lesser nobles had already been subordinated to secular and ecclesiastical lords, thus their dominance over serfs was more restricted”.

 b/ rise cities, urbanisation, growing wealth of merchants; and

c/ change in military technology / methods, losing business to mercenaries.

Contrast with England where a single monarch ruled centralised system, versus cluster of Princes in “Germany”, thus English king [from Henry VII] taxed merchants and did not take land from nobles.

1495 Reichstag banned private warfare, traditional business for knights, further hurt them.

Knights offside with towns, owed them money and offended by Church’s privileges, wealth, arrogance.

Hence Knights’ Revolt, knights of Rhineland rebelled against Princes 1522–1523, led by Franz von Sickingen, rhetoric was religious, after Luther, but main complaint economic, besieged Trier in 1522, aimed at Archbishop, opponent of Luther. But failed.

Knights opposed by both Lutheran and Catholic Princes.

5/ Clergy. Under pressure

a/ Renaissance humanism on the march. Erasmus etc. Church “beginning to lose its overwhelming intellectual authority.”

b/ corruption. ML targeting sale of indulgences, selling remission for sins. Also simony: selling church offices and roles or sacred things. Extends to other forms of trafficking for money in “spiritual things”. Appointment of ecclesiastical officials,  bishops and abbots, by a secular authority came to be considered simoniacal, key issue during the Investiture Controversy. And pluralism, holding several offices.

Radical reformers [cf Zwickau prophets, Anabaptists [believing in adult baptism, ie by their choice] emerged in the Church, more stridently opposed to Rome, and some of these actively joined the peasants’ violent uprising, notably Thomas Muntzer [c1489-1525] who with an apocalyptic millenarian / end of world mindset saw the rebels “as the instruments of God.. God’s elect [who would disclose his will”, ie having God on their side, and saw their opponents, the nobility, as in employ of Satan.

They believed in individual conviction, saw no role for institutional Church, and wrote a lot about their complaints.

Ulrich van Hutten [1488-1523, knight, scholar, satirist, Protestant reformer, bitter critic of Rome eg The Letters of Obscure Men] and other humanists.

Martin Luther [1483 – 1546), theologian, priest, Augustinian monk. Disputed indulgences, eg in Ninety-five Theses of 1517, refused renounce at demand of Pope Leo X 1520 and HRE Charles V at Diet of Worms 1521, excommunicated, outlawed by HRE. Taught that salvation, eternal life are not earned by deeds but received by God’s grace through believer’s faith in Jesus Christ as redeemer from sin, challenged authority and office of pope, saw Bible as only source of divinely revealed knowledge, and opposed sacerdotalism / priesthood, all baptized Christians to be a holy priesthood. Translation of the Bible into the German vernacular big impact on church and German culture.

6/ Towns: patricians [ruling / governing wealthy families, in town councils, held all the administrative offices], part of usurping common lands. Merchants / burghers, from guilds Many towns exempt from taxes, again increasing burden on peasants. Plebeians, new class of urban workers, journeymen, and peddlers. Barred from higher positions by patricians.

7/ Peasants: pent up economic and political grievances.

Earlier unrest, 1476 Wurzburg, then Bundschuh risings [Upper Rhine 1439, 1443, 1444; 1476 Tauber Valley; 1493 Alsace; 1502; 1513 Lehen; 1517 Upper Rhine], 1514 Poor Konrad revolt, risings 1513-1517.

The background to peasant unrest was complex.

The laboring rural peasant class, bottom of the traditional hierarchy, had benefited from the Black Death’s savage cull of the workforce, making labor much scarcer, thus helping lift real wages later in 14^th C into the 15^th. But then introduction of Roman civil law [displacing traditional common law] by ruling Princes – and also resorted to by Imperial Knights below – ate into these better circumstances, especially by confiscating / enclosing common lands near villages, forcing some peasants into at least quasi-serfdom.

However revolt broke out in, was confined to the south because:

a/ it had a stronger tradition of village self-government (communalism), thus more sensitive to perceived rights and to imposts from above;

and b/ the knight class was relatively stronger south, but was itself under pressure from Princes, including shrinkage of the knights traditional role of providing military service, losing this to mercenaries.

So it was mainly knights in turn leaning on the peasants.   

The inclination to rebel was led in particular by better off aspirational peasants and this together with stronger communalism south was reflected in the Twelve Articles [Zwölf Artikel] summarising their complaints, devised and agreed by the Upper Swabian Peasants Confederation [including Baltringer, Allgäuer, Lake Constance] at the Free Imperial City [ie reporting to the HRE not a Prince] of Memmingen March 1525.

The Twelve Articles was a landmark document in the ancestry of modern liberal democracy in specifying rights / demands of the populace: notably 1/ freedom for serfs; 2/ access to forests / lakes for food and wood; 3/ no laboring obligations not agreed to; 4/ fair rent for land; 5/ rule of law: laws agreed not arbitrary.

The so-called Book of One Hundred Chapters [1501-1513] [also] promoted religious and economic freedom, attacking the governing establishment and displaying pride in the virtuous peasant. [Gerald Strauss, 1971]

8/ Printing, literacy. Printing a vital tool. Spread the word, for reformers, including peasants. And slowly rising literacy, esp towns. Church losing its monopoly on schools

WAR

Goal

Agitated for the redress of grievances, hence political reform, stronger local government.

Encapsulated esp in pioneering 12 Articles.

War – overall

Inexperienced, poorly armed rebels faced off against experienced princely armies, including professionals, some cavalry, well armed, with artillery.

Rebel armies lost all but one of the pitched battles.

Rulers’ response delayed because forces away in Italy, for Charles V. Swabian League fielded army under von Walburg. HQ in Ulm.

War – course

Started in SW, 1524, Stuhlingen, S of Black Forest, Countess of Lupfen, ordered peasants to collect snails for thread spools. Soon c1200 gathered, created a list of grievances, elected officers, and raised a banner.

Within a few weeks most SW Germany in revolt, from the Black Forest, along the Rhine river, to Lake Constance, into the Swabian highlands, along the upper Danube river, into Bavaria and the Tyrol.

16 Feb 1525, villages belonging to city of Memmingen rebelled, demanding from city council improvements… complained of peonage, land use, easements on the woods and the commons, as well as ecclesiastical requirements of service and payment…Unexpectedly, the peasants delivered a radical uniform declaration.. Twelve articles outlined their grievances, rejected many of the demands.. articles of Memmingen basis for the Twelve Articles agreed on by the Upper Swabian Peasants Confederation of 20 March 1525.

The Twelve Articles (Zwölf Artikel), part of the peasants’ demands of the Swabian League. First draft of human rights and civil liberties in continental Europe after the Roman Empire? Gatherings in the process of drafting them considered to be the first constituent assembly on German soil.

On 6 March 1525 about 50 representatives of the Upper Swabian Peasants Groups (Baltringer, Allgäuer, Lake Constance), met in Memmingen, deliberate their common stance against the Swabian League.

One day later proclaimed the Christian Association, an Upper Swabian Peasants’ Confederation. Met again on 15 and 20 March 1525 in Memmingen, adopted the Twelve Articles and the Federal Order (Bundesordnung).

Examples among many similar programmes developed during the German Peasants’ War that were published in print. Twelve Articles printed over 25,000 times within the next two months.

Kempten Abbey Insurrection 1525; Battle of Leipheim April 1525; Crushed in a battle at Frankenhausen, fought May 15, 1525. More than 5,000 peasants were killed. Battle of Böblingen May 1525. Battle of Königshofen June 1525. Siege of Freiburg im Breisgau May 1525. Second Battle of Würzburg June 1525.

Swabia more moderate than Franconia?

M Luther cautious April 1525, “Admonition to Peace”, then vehement opposition, after near being killed in Harz, in May1525, Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants.

Toll: peasants > 100k died, from 300k; rulers, army 6-8.5k, losses minor.

Varying local conditions

movement for local self-government worked in Switzerland, which not revolt in 1524-26.

some other southern areas remained quiet too, eg strongly ruled duchy of Bavaria.

Also Lower Rhineland (north of Cologne) and the north German lands.

So revolt engulfed HRE’s southern and central tiers, where local govt ambitions frustrated, nobles weaker, spilling over into French-speaking Lorraine and Italian-speaking South Tyrol.

Joined in Saxony and Tyrol by miners, and by some burghers in many small towns.

Outcome

Main thrust of revolt from aspirational better off “peasants’.

Varied greatly: some areas repression, grievances unredressed; others much better, burdens were ameliorated.

Psychologically, the revolution was a major event in the early Protestant Reformation: it strengthened the convictions of some that religious abuses formed the main reasons for rebellion; it bolstered the arguments of others that the new.

Hobbes: too tolerant, forgiving of the autocrats who litter history

Thomas Hobbes [1588-1679, 91]

1. Pointed the way, pioneering through recognizing Man in charge of his own affairs.
2. Task to apply Reason to optimise his collective predicament [especially less shooting] and with no God to help.
3. His answer was trading freedom for more “safety”, but stayed with the ancien regime through bowing to absolute leaders [like Charles I], in theory based on consent [sovereignty of the People] but in practice fundamentally flawed because no effective accountability by the leader.
4. And no recognition of individual rights.
5. Understandable product of his violent times.
6. But he overlooked self-interested violent tenacity of autocrats, evident today even in the face of emphatically successful liberal democracy.

• Hobbes was a pioneering thinker in recognizing Man as a biological product, a material animal, in charge of his own affairs, applying Reason to observation, analysis, imagination, remedial action.
• Hence saw no available tangible resort to spiritual entities.
• He evinced a strong interest in science, cf Galileo [who he met late 1635 in Florence], and then in particular claimed the same principles / methods were applicable to Man organizing his affairs – especially politics – and for him applying a specific “mechanistic” model, one now seen as off centre: “heavily indebted to Galileo.. .. all phenomena.. qualities like temperature or color.. mathematical objects .. very nature of human thought itself must be understood as arising from the motions of material bodies. [Jesseph 2004}
• Knowledge started with examination through the 5 senses, scrutinized with imagination, this separating us from [other] animals.
• A “Nominalist” he rejected Neo-Platonists treating “universals” as real.
• Historic context: through his study of history [disastrous Peloponnesian Wars, hubristic debacle forpioneering civilized Athenian democracy] and his own violent times – Elizabethan England, hence James I, Charles I, English Civil War alongside in Europe the Dutch fight with Spain [80 Years War, 1568-1648] and the 30 Years War [to 1648] – he was conscious of societal / communal violence as a major problem, a chronic unhappy“state of nature”.
• He analysed reasons for violence: 1/ competition [for gain, power]; 2/ diffidence [for safety, defence]; 3/ glory [for reputation, honour].
• So his politics addressed challenge to devise an optimal system to reduce violence, at a time when reformers challenged the old order, divine right monarchies and Church.
• His answer to problem of violence was strong central command: the Leviathan, a Monarch, a Dictator. Man formed, joined a “political society”, “as the only guarantee of safety..” [ACG], headed by a monarch [or a group, oligarchy] in theory subordinate to a sovereign People, the ultimate authority, but who surrender their “natural rights” in return for safety.
• The Leviathan has “two inalienable rights” [ACG]: 1/ “cannot have power taken away”; 2/ “cannot be charged with treating subjects unjustly”. He “invokes idea of a “law of nature”..” [ACG}.
• Only one constraint on Sovereign: if he fails to deliver “safety” the People can “disobey.. even rebel” [ACG]giving them  ultimate authority, making the Sovereign subordinate. In theory.
• But there were two pressing flaws:
  • a/ no practical effective accountability of Monarch.
    • Right through recorded history, across near 5 millennia, to this day, we see the violent tenacity of determined capable ambitious self-interested autocrats [kings, emperors, caudillos, dictators] and their self-interested supporters.
    • In practice they proved very hard to “vote out”, resisting forcefully any rebellion, unconcerned about its legitimacy”.
    • A strong autocrat may have made life relatively safer than a weak one but in practical, absolute terms politcs remained violent, as history clearly demonstrated.
    • Thus Leviathans used war both extend their domains and defend them, against internal or external attack.
    •  The absence of a formal consent based leadership succession process engendered chronic violent instability.
    • So activities of “absolute monarchs” frequently threatened “safety” of the people, but with no meaningful redress.
    • A core challenge for Politics was making ALL agents accountable to the People, especially the leaders, recognized later through [independent]: parliaments [and full franchise], courts, security [police], ie authentic checks and balances.
  • AND b/ no formally, legally recognised individual rights, especially security for private property, also freedom of expression, of assembly, from “arbitrary authority”.
• So Hobbes reactionary views basically supported pre Civil War Charles I, as an absolute monarch.
• Interesting was Hobbes apparently having little to say about the importance of England’s pioneering liberal institutional progress, the slow emergence from end 12^th C – ie across over 400 years by then – of England’s Parliament and courts, alongside the Crown, notwithstanding the narrow franchise, sidelining most of the population, but prescient progress the same.
• Hobbes argued with Robert Boyle over the role of experiment in science, missing its importance. Boyle recognized Laws of Nature and the role of experiment in investigating them, but Hobbes did not.
• Importantly he saw no role for religion in government. God off the bridge.
• Life? Born in year of the Spanish Armada he was very long lived for his times. Luck smiled early, a rich uncle opening the way to Oxford age 15, so well educated, and leading to a well connected job afterwards, tutoring the Cavendidh family. He was well travelled too, sometimes to skirt apparent danger, like most of 1640-50 he self-exiled in France. He generally exercised his body in the morning [played tennis till around 75?] and his brain later.

Quentin Skinner and “republican liberty”

ACG cites Quentin Skinner, “compelling criticism of Hobbes” in preferring “republican liberty”, from old Rome to Renaissance, through to Civil War, Republicans like John Harrington, Algernon Sydney, John Milton.

For QS “republican liberty” means “liberty as absence of dependence” [WSE: thus dependent on, exposed to the will of another, like the ruler, Leviathan], hence free of any arbitrary power [WSE: ie free of the will of a Monarch, his arbitrary power].

Hence for Republicans the rules are known, beyond them you are free.

Versus Hobbes’ liberty as “absence of impediments to motion..” [TH: De Cive];

And “ absence of external constraints” {Leviathan]

For QS this introduces a “distinction between liberty and power”.

Liberty as “absence of restraint” [Hobbes] is Isaiah Berlin’s negative liberty, versus positive liberty of Republicans.

QS view has been criticized as extreme [cf LRB, Sep. 2008, “Why It Matters”, Ellen Meiksins Wood], thus in England it does not take account of “a state governed by a partnership of monarchy and unitary parliament.. ..unlike … Europe or anywhere else..

[Ie] a landed class whose power and wealth depends far less than those of Continental aristocracies on autonomous juridical, political and military powers, or on venal office in the state. .

.in which the [English] landed aristocracy derived its.. wealth from its control of property, while the central state, ‘the Crown in Parliament’, maintained public order.”

Thus in England the landed aristocracy, working with parliament, meant inherent [embedded, structural] inequality, because the rest of society, the lower orders, ie especially the rural peasantry, was disenfranchised, were locked outside, did not participate in politics, reserved for the upper orders [aristocracy and later burghers] and parliament.

Some [on the Left] see similar circumstances today, structural inequality, leading them to support, seek “arbitrary” remedial, corrective interference by Leviathan, the central government.

Wallace Stevens – the unlikely Hartford St Boniface

Wallace Stevens – the unlikely Hartford St Boniface

• An unlikely radical modernist: a detached, boorish, buttoned up conservative bigot.
• A radical modern axe-man, the suited suburban insurance executive, the subversive lunchtime stroller.
• Down to Earth, quietly assailing timeless allegiance to seductive religious delusion: elaborate, protean.
• An effortless erudite word conjourer, only feted later, engaging the Mystery authentically.
• Sharp words and dry humour: by phrases, thickets, legions.
• The Hartford St Boniface axing the Tree of Faith.
• Hiroshima did not pare the precariousness of his Human Predicament.
• Happy in his own company, exposing truth in the kindest old fashioned Miss Marples way.
• But never left his country, by boat or plane.

The Human Predicament
In an unpublished review of WB Yeats’ “Responsibilities and Other Poems” [1914] poet H.D. [Hilda Doolittle] wrote “it is the great overwhelming mechanical daemons, the devil of machinery of which we can hardly repeat too often, the war is the hideous offspring.” [‘Responsibilities’, Agenda 25, no. 3–4 (1987-88)].
Like many kindred nostalgic cultural observers, Romantics stranded by industrialisation, she bemoaned materialist modernity, not just for devouring the countryside but for sapping traditional spiritual loyalties and especially then for its hideous offspring of war, World War One.
They cared little for modernity’s radical Enlightenment-infused democratic liberal reform – blessed relief for the impoverished masses – slowly if painfully becoming evident, led mainly by Britain, protected by the Channel from regional imperial appetite.
But blaming the Enlightenment-informed modernity for the French Revolution and then the tsunami of 20th C violence launched by World War One is a costly misconception.
Just the reverse, that war and its hideous offspring [the Russian and Maoist Revolutions and World War Two, outcomes still resonating today], and the earlier French Revolution, were born not of “reform” but rather of anachronistic traditional identity politics – compounded of religion, place and race, expressed from 16th through 20th C as competitive imperialist nationalism – and which has plagued history more or less since the birth of large urbanised “civilisations” around the mid 4th millennium BCE in southern Mesopotamia, there by the Twin Rivers, integrated with nearby large scale irrigation, an economic model uncovered soon after in Egypt alongside the Nile.
Oddly enough this outcome, around 5000 years after hunter-gatherers started settling in and about modern day Syria was forced by adaptation to adverse climate shift.
But the model proved radical, unexpectedly lucrative economically, enough to fund temples, palaces and then especially armies, down to August 1914 when a roomful of backward looking European leaders succumbed again to traditional competitive rivalry on the battlefield, except by then in the early 20th C availed of the best military capabilities their modernising economies could provide, in volume and lethality.
Just over a century earlier the French Revolution brought forth about 2 years of “reform” and 24 years of war after the French – responding to reactionary external incursions and “reforming” their military capacity in response – discovered how successful they were at war, not least later through the capable outsider Napoleon, another clever marauding ego in the footsteps of Sargon and Alexander and who road tested a new model of Total War.
Anyway so it was that after that roomful of men failed to do their homework the horrors of the first half of the 20th C added a ghastly new wing to the Human Predicament.

Wallace Stevens response
There are only two broad alternative philosophical responses to engaging the Human Predicament, life’s existential mysteries – tribulations, conundrums, joys – notwithstanding that humankind’s understanding of the reality of his natural circumstances has been transformed owing to astonishing advances in science, alongside liberal modernity, revealing Man is the unlikely clever conscious product of eons of improbable biological evolution reaching back near 4 billion years, back across multiple ice ages over the past million years, across multiple mass life extinctions in the last 0.5 billion years since the Cambrian Explosion, and then across another 3.5 billion years of archaic cellular life in the Proterozoic period.
So Man can resort to therapeutic religious artifice, to self-serving fabricated religious belief, personalising providential deities.
Or he can throw away the God crutches and think for himself, stand on his own feet.

It is ironic that the main radical modern poet – addressing World War 1 and its bitter fruit – was not with H.D. among rabble rouser Ezra Pound’s colorful London set of mostly sniffy Romantics but the unlikely Wallace Stevens, back in suburban US, the strolling suited suburban insurance executive, the buttoned up conservative boorish bigot raised a strict Christian, the erudite word conjourer, the art collecting literary axe-man engaging the Human Predicament authentically with just a palette of words, quietly undermining timeless allegiance to elaborate religious delusion: the Hartford St Boniface axing the Tree of Faith, and who never left his own country, despite his interest in French art and having the means to travel.

Above all Stevens saw humankind addressing existence as an opportunity for poetry [1], like Hart Crane, an early fan of Stevens. So he argued for Man taking the wheel, and in particular saw poetry as “a means of redemption”, writing: “After one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.” [Opus Posthumous, 1957].
Through exercising the imagination poetry can deliver the “supreme fiction” (Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, 1942], through voices like the chanteuse at Key West.

As a leading radical modernist he presents oddly, the conservative from a strict Christian upbringing.
He was an unlikely rebel, raised on a strict Christian religious diet [Protestant Pennsylvania Dutch], living mostly among the remains of a Puritan neighbourhood, a bigot at home in a suit in the suburbs, a Republican who sometimes liked a drink.
But radical he was taking an erudite literary axe to traditional Faith, and at a time when this was much less fashionable than today.
The substance of his poetry is subversive, a radically modern “open minded” Enlightenment driven assault on Faith as an authentic and meaningful response to the Human Predicament.
Unlike some contemporaries – like Pound and the Imagists, even TS Eliot – his poetical word style was not overtly radical, but evolved out of the mainstream, out of the variegated inherited edifice.
But it was erudite, calling mostly on traditional poetic device, reflecting his interests and thorough education, in due course attracting a wave of critical academic comment. Second, it showed lyrical creativity, recalling past poets like Yeats and Keats, and also even his famous contemporary TS Eliot.
So if the style was not radical by itself, the way he used it was, soon evident when set against conventional contemporaries.

His appetite for intellectually curious poetic rumination was stoked by his intelligence, commitment, personality and times:
He was academically precocious, bright, erudite, well educated, and well connected culturally. He wrote and published poems but was not well connected with his peers and the wider literary world.
And he was committed to the task.
He was not readily social, shy, generally aloof in company and often frustratingly “lonely” [2], if availed of a “dry humour” [5].
So he was happy on his own.
Also poetry perhaps helped in coping with an awkward marriage.

He was also generally conservative politically, and bigoted if not racist [3, 4], this fitting his later regular Florida experience, among carousing Southerners, like his close relationship with a conservative racist “Confederate” judge, Arthur G Powell [2].
He drank time to time and sparred, down south 1935 verbally with R Frost and 1936 physically with E Hemingway.
He was also keen on art [6], his 20s overlapping the pivotal pre WW1 decade of the ongoing revolution in Western art begun in mid 19th C France, roaring on through WW1 and beyond. He saw imagination exercised through art as kindred to his poetical craft, though his collecting tastes were conservative, behind the current play, nothing much past Cezanne’s time?

His ambitious poetical focus on addressing nothing less than the human predicament was surely encouraged by his creative span overlapping over half a century of tectonic violent world irruption, the sudden late 1914 [he aged 35] unleashing of not one but two world wars and culminating improbably with the arrival of species-threatening nuclear weapons, brandished by two then three antagonists. The atomic bomb resonated with the Apocalyptic religious mindset familiar from his New England life context.

Eliot and Williams
Stevens was 9 years older than another famous American modernist poet, TS Eliot [1888-1965], but started much later, his 1923 Harmonium collection landing 6 years after Eliot’s 1917 Prufrock and Other Observations.
Eliot too was Harvard educated [1906-10, versus Stevens’ 1897-1900], but then soon after [1914] he left for England and for good.
Both were ambitious in scope, both wrestling “a vision of ultimate reality” [7], but quickly ending at opposite poles, the pessimistic Eliot retreating to the arms of the Church, worrying about “the decay of sacred authority” posing “a crisis of community” (8).
But Stevens on the other hand grasped the nettle, saw God as a human creation. “.. modernity shows us that the truth of religion was always a fiction, a fundamentally poetic construction…” [9] and had Eliot in mind when expanding on this view [10] .
Stevens never met Eliot but he knew well another American modernist poet, William Carlos Williams [1883-1963], after they met in New York across some years before WW1, especially in The Others, “a group of artists and painters” founded by WC Arensberg, including Marianne Moore [1887-1972].
Like Stevens Williams long maintained an important day job, as a children’s doctor, and also established himself as popular poet.
His broad poetic motive was similar [11], ie fashioning words to cope with, make some therapeutic sense of life, but his taut cryptic approach was less academic and more accessible. Also he wrote consciously as an American, as some manner of “foreigner” there.

Notes
1/ “One of the general themes … how the general decay of personal religious belief in practice enters into the way in which these poets imagine what poetry is…. “It is a habit with me to be thinking of some substitute for religion,” Stevens says in a letter. “My trouble and the trouble of a great many people is the loss of belief in the sort of God in whom we were all brought up to believe.” Stevens, however, responds to this problem vigorously. He tends to see it… as an opportunity.” Hammer, L; Yale Modern Poetry Lectures, 2007; Lecture 21, Wallace Stevens [contd].
2/ Bruce Bawer , “The Single Artificer”, Hudson Review spring 2016,
3/ “His conservative political opinions led him to champion Mussolini and cheer his accomplishments in racist terms: “The Italians had as much right to take Ethiopia from the coons as the coons had to take it from the boa constrictors.” Dunne, Susan; Wallace Stevens Bio Takes Another Look At A Complicated Poet, Hartford Courant, 9 June 2016
4/ “Stevens was a judge for the National Book Award in poetry in 1952. All six judges were white men. While they waited for one of the judges who had been delayed “by a snowstorm,” the rest looked at photos of the judges from the previous year. These included Gwendolyn Brooks, who had served on the jury when Stevens won the prize for The Auroras of Autumn. When he saw the photo of Brooks, Richardson writes,
Stevens remarked, “Who’s the coon?” (The meeting, it should be noted, took place after lunch, which for the poet had probably begun with two healthy martinis and continued with a fine bottle of wine.) Noticing the reaction of the group to his question, he asked, “I know you don’t like to hear people call a lady a coon, but who is it?” “ Hammer, L; Shadows Walking With Wallace Stevens in New Haven; LA Review of Books, July 3, 2021.
5/ Wallace Stevens: The Real and the Made-Up; Helen Vendler, New York Review of Books, July 14, 2016
6/ Eg influenced Stevens’s poetry in “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” It refers to Picasso saying that a painting is “une somme de destructions,” Or “a horde of destructions”. Stevens saw the quotation in a special issue of Cahiers d’art devoted to surrealism. https://www.poets.org, Wallace Stevens: The Problems of Painters and Poets; February 04, 2005
7/ Hammer, L; Shadows Walking With Wallace Stevens in New Haven; LA Review of Books, July 3, 2021.
8/ Hammer, L; Yale Modern Poetry Lectures, 2007; Lecture 19, Wallace Stevens.
9/ Hammer, L; Yale Modern Poetry Lectures, 2007; Lecture 1.
10/ In this regard , “Stevens wrote his poetry in conscious opposition to Eliot and the poets and critics influenced by him..”. Hammer, L; Shadows Walking With Wallace Stevens in New Haven; LA Review of Books, July 3, 2021.
11/ “.. Williams held the conviction that poetry was, in his friend Kenneth Burke’s phrase, ‘equipment for living, a necessary guide amid the bewilderments of life.’
The American ground was wild and new, a place where a blooming foreigner needed all the help he could get.
Poems were as essential to a full life as physical health or the love of men and women.” Benfey, C; The Blooming Foreigner, The New Republic, 23 November 2011

TAGS
Wallace Stevens, Hartford, St Boniface, Tree of Faith, WB Yeats, H.D., Hilda Doolittle, Romantics, World War One, Enlightenment, French Revolution, Russian Revolution, Maoist Revolution, identity politics, urbanisation, civilisation, Mesopotamia, Twin Rivers, Egypt, Nile, hunter-gatherers, August 1914, Napoleon, Sargon, Alexander, Human Predicament, liberal modernity, science, Cambrian Explosion, Proterozoic, religion, God, Ezra Pound, Hart Crane, TS Eliot, Florida, Arthur G Powell, E Hemingway, New England, Harmonium, William Carlos Williams, The Others, Marianne Moore

A sensible French head when many around Europe were about to lose theirs

Michel de Montaigne [Eyquem] [1533-92, 59]

Humanist, common sense, grounded, evidence-based “man of letters”

Rightly sceptical, especially of the Learned

Democratically inclined, all have something to say

“Man cannot make a mouse but makes gods by the dozen.”

But nevertheless stayed with his God! Perhaps cultural and practical reasons?

Died planting cabbages?

Summary

Not a formal philosopher, more an inquisitive all rounder, a sensible common sense chap, especially then, as the blinkered Counter Reformation gathered pace, fanatics purveying religious extremism, not long after Bosch’s raft of admonitory dark fantasies, lingering with God in the Mediaeval paddocks, recoiling from the then well in hand Renaissance.

For Montaigne not easy making sense of it all, especially Man.

“Life part madness, part wisdom….. Truly man is a marvellously vain, diverse, and undulating object..”

Enquiring, sceptical, suspicious of the Learned, the pedantic and academic, the arrogant and overconfident.

We are all capable of thinking, insight. “1000s of village women .. live more gentle, equitable lives than Cicero..”

Humorous.

He mocked dense, hard to read books, like Plato! Saw writers hiding behind obfuscation!

His pioneering, influential proto-modern Essays [1580, 1588] a wandering discursive enquiry, “inspired by Plutarch, Lucretius”, Erasmus – “I am myself the matter of my book” – recognised later for:

1/ scepticism, his “spirit of freely entertaining doubt”, summed up by his famous “Que sçay-je?” (“What do I know?”.

2/ his questioning of authority, conventional “received wisdom”. “The plague of man is boasting of his knowledge..”

3/ but being curious all the same.. “no wish more natural than the wish to know..”

3/ and in this the importance of using one’s own judgement, faculties.

4/ his democratic inclinations: we all matter, all have something to say.

5/ and relying mainly on concrete evidence not abstract theorising.

6/ hands on active approach to life, make the most of it!

“The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use”.

Unlike many philosophers [Epicurians, Schopenhauer] he was NOT a renunciator.

7/ his early “rational” thoughts on psychology, education?

But it was not all a detached academic exercise, rather it was aimed also at authorities who might patronise / employ him.

His work made waves, reverberated, eg inspiring F Bacon’s Essays of 1596 in England.

P Desan [2018} makes a case for MM being more political than not, likely disappointed he did not achieve more? But reviewer [American] T Gregory [LRB] doubts this, aptly quotes MM in support.

I agree, based on the Essays MM was too experienced, thoughtful on the human condition, to fall for that, more interested in an Aristotelean balance. Thus “[MM} loved poetry” and TB’s quote of Horace [James Michie’s 1964 rendition of Ode 31, Book I] hits the spot:

Here’s what I crave most, son of Latona, then:
Good health, a sound mind, relish of life, and an
Old age that still maintains a stylish
Grip on itself, with the lyre beside me.

Religion?

For whatever reason Montaigne’s scepticism did make room for at least one [providential] god!

Though likely this was mainly for socio–cultural reasons, not captivation with shelves of Christian doctrines, “a function of his socially conservative instincts.. for him religion was an integral part of culture. Faith was for him a custom, so to speak.. ”.

Importantly he saw religion as mainly matter of simple faith not reason, knowledge: “fideism: minimising the role of reason in religious knowledge, and maximising the role of faith.”

Though given his Essays, the sceptical frowning vein, and resort far more to Classical sources than Christian, some [P. Desan?] see at least quasi-atheism in the background? So that his “belief” is simply cultural.

Others disagree, “we must be careful not to pull him across the Enlightenment divide.”.

So why really did he believe? Justify it?

Maybe simply because practically speaking it made life much easier? To keep one’s head below the parapet.

Life’s short and there was plenty to explore, investigate, and proclaiming atheism then would toss a mighty spanner into this, taking time, money and maybe his life.

Background

He was well born as Michel Eyquem in Aquitaine, Bordeaux, especially thanks to great grandfather Ramon who prospered as a Bordeaux herring merchant, of Jewish [Spanish / Portuguese] ancestry, who 1477 bought a manor at Montaigne, 30 miles east of Bordeaux, in Dordogne.

His family “belonged to the larger and more permeable class of lower nobility… in two ways: by inheriting his father’s seigneurial estate, and by becoming a magistrate, which made him a member of the noblesse de robe, or a robin..”

Father ordered Latin only in lessons and then had the good sense to die 1568 so our hero could [1571, age 38] retire to the family estate, to a tower therein to reflect, cogitate, alongside an epic book collection.

He published Essays 1580, age 47 [added more later, eg 3^rd book 1588], partly as a job application, aimed at [Catholic] Henry III, who succeeded Charles IX in 1574. Accordingly he re-upholstered his public name, as ‘messire Michel, Seigneur de Montaigne, Chevalier de l’ordre du Roy, et Gentil-homme ordinaire de sa chambre’.

Henry was assassinated 1589, succeeded by Protestant Henry of Navarre, as Henry IV.

As Mayor of Bordeaux Montaigne “kept Bordeaux loyal” to both Henries.

Health issues arrived in 1578 and 1580-81 travelled, a long clockwise loop through France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria to Italy, and back to France, part searching a health “cure”.

His itinerary from Germany took him across the Alps through the Brenner Pass to Italy, to Padua and Venice, Bologna, Florence, Siena and Rome. On the return he veered east through Spoleto and Foligno [on the Giro route in 2021, Mon 17^th May] to the Adriatic, and back through Urbino and Florence to Lucca, where he stayed for the “waters”, and where he learned his pitch to Henry III managed to have him elected Mayor of Bordeaux, if missing his preferred ambassadorship to the Holy See.

He returned to Aquitaine via Piacenza, Vercelli, Mont Cenis, Lyon and Clermont Ferrand, then served as Mayor till 1585, tackling plague and Fr Wars of Religion, starting 1562, “four decades of sieges, battles, mob violence, negotiations, assassinations, persecutions and reprisals between France’s Catholic majority and Protestant minority..”.