Observation v. Illusion

Events in Egypt (at this point marked by Square Cleansing of Brotherhood Supporters), had me asking myself this morning: “Did anybody really win the French Revolution?” The boiling eventually stopped, but looking for a winner—as in who achieved power in that endless flux— the best answer is that Napoleon Bonaparte was the victor. He gained ultimate power and ended the Revolution when, in a coup, he dispersed the so-called Directorate and replaced it with the Consulate (1799). He was then a mere 30-year old self-made general of genius.

Refreshing my memory of the Revolution by reading the highly-condensed Wikipedia article on the subject, I though that the text sounded like instant commentary describing the boiling of a stew. You want chaos? There it is. In 1789 France had a population of 28 million—a large enough number to produce the kind of chaos that is not really describable. Egypt today has a population of nearly 83 million.

The parallels are many—because, in fact, upheavals such as the French or the Egyptian revolutions are best described as natural events. They happen when social structures reach a certain social paralysis and then, quite spontaneously, rearrange themselves—not unlike tensions in the earth’s crust that produce periodic quakes. In that process, inevitably, chaos results. And the chaos eventually ends when order is restored, always by military force.

While the chaos rages, all manner of illusory ideas will lend color to the madly rising steam that rises from the bubbling pot: such as progress or the fervently sought arrival of millennium. The deep intuition in the human soul—that all of us are destined for a better realm—gets projected to the here and now. But here and now is not where that takes place. But what is going on, here and now, is much better described as the mechanics of society. When these have frozen up while life’s energies continue to push demanding change, chaos happens.

The Libertarian Impulse

What is behind it? Where does its energy come from? Could it come from total gridlock—the inability of the collective to do anything at all? To view the libertarian impulse as arising from principles, from a philosophical stand, would seem to be unfair. Humans are so obviously a social species that libertarianism, taken to its ultimate expression, becomes rationally incoherent. It is much more accurate to see this impulse arising because the collective has ground to a halt, can no longer act—although it ought to. And then the healthy impulse is to find some other level where action may still be possible.

This thought arose as I read a profile of Thomas Massie in the Wall Street Journal this morning. Massie is a freshman congressman from Kentucky, a leader of the radical right, a young man of obvious technical and entrepreneurial talent and vigor—and married to a lady of matching traits. One of his exploits, replacing a defective water heater at the Lewis County, KY jail—by buying a used one on e-Bay and installing it himself, saving the county $6,500 in the process, is told here and illustrates the tendency.

One of my own more memorable insights into social change came from studying the French revolution—and never mind its bloody and half-insane political flowering. It’s the background where the insight was hidden. France had become paralyzed over centuries, had become a frozen place, a collective that no longer functioned. You could not go from one county to the other—just to cite one example—without buying enough salt to last you a lifetime. Travelers, of course, could not buy and carry so much salt in actuality—never mind across three county borders—but the purchase of it was necessary anyway—and had to be paid, or lesser bribes forked over to avoid it. Napoleon’s true achievement was wiping the slate clean, once and for all—of this and many other insane laws that time and custom had imposed.

Politics is just the most visible surface marker of things going on deep down in a society. The libertarian impulse, therefore, is a healthy one—one reason why, sometimes wondering about our own reaction, Brigitte and I, who are communitarian in orientation, that word underlined, sometimes agree with the likes of Rand Paul and Thomas Massie.

Further Notes on “Climates”

Prelude to the French Revolution

From “Social Aspects in Interpreting the French Revolution, 1789” by Abha Trivedi, University of Lucknow, available here from the Annual Proceedings of the Florida Conference of Historians, Volume 15, February 2008. The Emphasis is mine.

After a long period of prosperity, France witnessed serious economic depression in the 1770s and 1780s which caused resentment and bitterness as all classes faced a decline in their status. Production declined, unemployment increased and the recession soon reached to the agricultural sector. Severe drought in 1785 worsened the situation as the yields were short. Furthermore, in 1788 the harvest was ruined by an abnormally wet summer and conditions became even worse in 1789. Alexis de Tocqueville disagreed with Carl Marx’s contention that worsening conditions create a situation favorable to revolution. Tocqueville noted: ‘It is not always by going from bad to worse that a country falls into a revolution and that the French Revolution broke out when conditions were improving.’ He further noted, ‘the state of things destroyed by a revolution is almost always somewhat better than that which immediately precedes it.’ [1] In 1962 J. C. Davies supported Tocqueville as he observed, revolutions are most likely to occur when a prolonged period of objective economic and social development is followed by a short period of sharp reversal.[2] This seems to be borne out by the general economic trends of the eighteenth century.

[1] Alexis de Tocqueville, The Ancien Regime (Fontana ed., 1966)

[2] J.C. Davies, Toward a theory of Revolution, in J.C. Davies (ed.), When Men Revolt and Why.

Prelude to the Nazi Era in Germany

From “German Economy in the 1920s” by Daniel Castillo (here); Castillo was a junior in college studying business economics at the time of writing. The text has been edited a tiny bit.

At first Germany tried to recover from the war [World War I] by way of social spending. Germany began creating transportation projects and modernized power plants and gas works. These projects were all used to battle the increasing unemployment rate. Social spending was rising at an unbelievable rate. In 1913 the government was spending approximately 20.5 marks per resident; by 1925 spending had risen to almost 65 marks per resident; in 1929 it reached more than 100 marks per resident. The rising amounts of money used for social spending combined with plummeting revenues that caused continuing deficits. Eventually municipal finances collapsed in 1930. Although it seemed as if the collapse was due to debt, in actuality ordinary budgets were the reason for the initial collapse. Municipal officials and politicians were unable to restore order to the budgets. Further adding to Germany's economic problems, the revenue from income tax began to fall. In 1913, more than 53% of all tax revenues came from income, but in 1925, it had dropped to 28%. As the returns from income tax decreased, the government began to depend much more on state trade and property taxes. The government also became highly dependent on the profits made from municipal utilities, such as electric power plants.

Even with all of Germany’s economic shortcomings, it could have still been possible to make reparation payments if foreign countries had not placed protective tariffs on Germany’s goods. With the income Germany could have gained by selling goods in foreign countries, for relatively low prices, reparation payments could have become feasible. The protective tariffs made this idea impossible and further depressed the German economy. Faced with reparation payments they could not afford, Germany began printing exaggerated amounts of money. This threw Germany into a state of super inflation. Inflation reached the point where millions of marks were worthless. Cartoons of the time depicted people with wheelbarrows full of money who could not buy a loaf of bread. “With the approach of world crisis foreign lenders withdrew capital and markets further closed against German imports” (Sweezy 8 [not in source]). The United States was an extremely significant example of this. When the U.S. was hit by the great depression they immediately sought to get the loans, which they had made to Germany, paid back. This, in addition to all of Germany’s other problems, practically caused the German economy to collapse.

To this I would add a number or two. In April of 1919, the exchange rate was 17 marks for the dollar. In April 1923 the rate was 24,000. In December of that same year, the rate was 4,200,000,000,000!

Is it not difficult, in retrospect, to imagine the prevalent climate of opinion in France in the 1770s and 1780s and in Germany in the 1920s and the 1930s…

Polarization

“Polarization” is a rising word these days, but only its upswings can be dated. We tend always to be polarized about something. The current convulsion seems to have begun soon after Obama’s election to the presidency—when the Right realized that change might actually be attempted…and the Left to its horror that it might not. The deadlock in the Senate; the hysterical opposition to universal health care; the Tea Party; and the gathering storm over an as yet unnamed Supreme Court nominee are markers. I got to thinking... In the 1950s we had the communist-anticommunist split. That one had its flurries too, peaking in the McCarthy hearings. A century earlier we had Free and Slave, peaking in the Civil War. And fifty years before that time, in England, anyway, people were anxious that the French revolution might succeed more widely across Europe and come to England with the guillotine. Looking back produces disappointment. We don’t live in unusual times. The ultimate battle of Good v. Evil is not about to begin tomorrow; nor will it be followed by the End of History. The patterns repeat. The words of the song might change but not its melody.

A Tea Party in Flatland

The chief marker of a secular era is its worldly and temporal character—this in contrast to a religious era in which the spiritual and eternal aspects of reality are emphasized. Let’s ignore the debate about the claims of either era and proceed. In secular times the spiritual and eternal are simply denied all standing but are tolerated as life-style choices. In religious times the world is still recognized as real, but its importance is minimized. If we express the secular in geometrical terms as a flat surface and the religious as a vertical, it turns out that the religious conception of reality is the more complex of the two. It has a third dimension that the secular times lack. So far, so good. In a flat cosmology time itself is a function of matter with its threefold divisions into past, present, and future.

When troubles erupt in secular ages, two ways of coping with the problem tend always to surface—and only two. Only two because a transcending movement into the vertical, as it were, isn’t thought to be possible. Part of the public embraces the future which, still unknown and not yet realized, may be envisioned to hold the sought-after relief. The others, especially those in a better economic shape—who tend to remember better times—envision the solution to lie in a return to an earlier and happier period. Living memories are short; hence the real past is largely forgotten or only selectively recalled. Thus the past’s as good a canvas on which to paint a golden age as is the future.

Futurism and archaism. These labels were framed by Arnold Toynbee, the cyclic historian. In effect, of course, both are futuristic in the sense that any new order much desired will be achieved, if achieved at all, in the future. The labels therefore refer to strategies. Futurists wish to achieve the new order by ridding themselves of current restraints; archaists hope to bring back into the present what they imagine has been lost.

The French Revolution serves as a classical and large-scale example of a real try at futurism. Its henchmen even changed the names of the months on the calendar. The current Tea Party movement serves as a minor example of an archaist reaction to the initiatives of the Obama administration. That administration is wrongly seen as futurist in its intentions. Alas, it’s merely rational—but unfortunately also inept. Its futurist coloration is a very pale shade of pink and derives from the illusion that change can be made almost entirely by magical PR gestures intended to influence public opinion.

Secularism see-saws this way, back and forth. These dreary rounds remind me of Hell’s fourth circle where, on a flat piece of territory, hoarders and squanderers roll gigantic rocks against each other, crash, separate, and do it all again. Here is the scene in Dante’s words in Dorothy Sayers’ translation (Inferno, Canto VII, 22-36):

         As waves against encountering waves advance
             Above Charybdis, clashing with toppling crest,
             So must the folk here dance and counter-dance.

         More than elsewhere, I saw them thronged and pressed
             This side and that, yelling with all their might,
             And shoving each a great weight with his chest.

         They bump together, and where they bump, wheel right
             Round, and return, trundling their loads again,
             Shouting: “Why chuck away?” “Why grab so tight?”

         Then round the dismal ring they pant and strain
             Back on both sides to where they first began
             Still as they go bawling their rude refrain;

         And when they meet, then each re-treads his span,
             Half round the ring to joust in the other list;
             I felt quite shocked, and like a stricken man.

But you don’t have to go to hell to see it. CNN will bring it to you live.
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For more on “Charybdis,” see the previous post.