An Early Definition

I came across an interesting quote about degeneration today from a late nineteenth century book on biology:

Any new set of conditions occurring to an animal which render its food and safety easily attained, seem to lead as a rule to Degeneration; just as an active healthy man sometimes degenerates when he becomes suddenly possessed of a fortune; or as Rome degenerated when possessed of the riches of the ancient world.

Sir E. Ray Lankester, Degeneration: a Chapter in Darwinism (1880), p.33. (link).

This paragraph is often quoted by replacing the words “an animal” by the words “a species” and then stopping at the word “Degeneration.” Thus in the Wikipedia article on Lankester. There the article’s author also adds the following: “Lankester extended the idea of degeneration to human societies, which carries little significance today, but it is a good example of a biological concept invading social science.” One would like to see why the definition does not apply to us. But, in any case, every author may interpret the past as he sees fit…

The general observation from history is that an expanding, energetic civilization tends toward decadence—not because it is fighting for survival but because it has achieved some form of lasting and extraordinary wealth. In our own case that wealth has taken the form of “energy slaves” traceable to fossil fuels. But the Roman case had its own parallel: living human slaves.  What that looked and felt like is rendered by Will Durant in Caesar and Christ, Simon and Schuster, 1944, pp. 111-112. The segment deals with an era known as the Agrarian Revolt in the Roman Republic, extending in time from 145 to 78 BC, thus the period immediately preceding the rise of Julius Caesar, who became the first emperor of Rome and thus closed the republican era of Roman history:

The first cause was the influx of slave-grown corn from Sicily, Sardinia, Spain, and Africa, which ruined many Italian farmers by reducing the price of domestic grains below the cost of production and marketing. Second, was the influx of slaves, displacing peasants in the countryside and free workers in towns. Third, was the growth of large farms. A law of 220 forbade senators to take contracts or invest in commerce; flush with the spoils of war, they bought up extensive tracts of agricultural land. Conquered soil was sometimes sold in small plots to colonists, and eased urban strife; more of it was given to capitalists in part payment of their war loans to the state; most of it was bought or leased by senators or businessmen on terms fixed by the Senate. To compete with the latifundia the little man had to borrow money at rates that insured his inability to pay; slowly he sank into poverty or bankruptcy, tenancy or the slums. Finally, the peasant himself, after he had seen and looted the world as a soldier, had no taste or patience for the lonely labor and unadventurous chores of the farm; he preferred to join the turbulent proletariat of the city, watch without cost the exciting games of the amphitheater, receive cheap corn from  the government, sell his vote to the highest bidder or promise, and lose himself in the impoverished and indiscriminate mass.

Roman society, once a community of free farmers, now rested more and more upon external plunder and internal slavery. In the city all domestic service, many handicrafts, most trade, much banking, nearly all factory labor, and labor on public works, were performed by slaves, reducing the wages of free workers to a point where it was almost as profitable to be idle as to toil. On the latifundia slaves were preferred because they were not subject to military service, and their number could be maintained, generation after generation, as a by-product of their only pleasure or their master’s vice. All the Mediterranean region was raided to produce living machines for these industrialized farms; to the war prisoners led in after every victorious campaign were added the victims of pirates who captured slaves or freemen on or near the coasts of Asia, or of Roman officials whose organized man hunts impressed into bondage any provincial whom the local authorities did not dare to protect. Every week slave dealers brought their human prey from Africa, Spain, Gaul, Germany, the Danube, Russia, Asia, and Greece to ports of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea….

I’ve quoted this passage years ago now in a by-now-vanished version of LaMarotte. It seemed to fit today’s notion that there is a reasonably ordinary (if very huge and collective) explanation for the growing disorder in a society. Thinkers have been calling that “decadence” beginning in the late nineteenth century.

Uncle Aristarchus

In 1775 22-year-old Deborah Champion traveled from Westchester, Connecticut to Boston carrying a secret message sent by her father to General George Washington. She first carried the message under her bodice (corset) and later hidden under some food in a saddle-bag. I have this from a letter from a treasure house of letters referenced below. She managed to get through the British lines in the pre-dawn hours; she was taken for an old woman because she wore a calash. Reading eighteenth century letters is educational. A calash was a hood, a word that came from the French calèche.

Now, apart from the war-time tensions and the employment of young virgins to carry messages hidden on their bodies, something else left the most vivid impression on me reading this letter. Deborah traveled in company of an elderly slave named Aristarchus. Slaves in Connecticut? Yes. Learning about the relationships between slave owners’ children and slaves is also educational. Here is a quote from the letter Deborah wrote to a friend named Patience:

You remember Uncle Aristarchus; he has been devoted to me since my childhood, and particularly since I made a huge cask to grace his second marriage, and found a name for the dusky baby, which we call Sophranieta.

Deborah also refers to the slave’s wife as Aunt Chloe. On the trip itself she also encounters blood relatives—Uncle Jerry, Uncle Starkey, and Aunt Faith.

I got to thinking about Deborah and Uncle Aristarchus after reading this fascinating letter—and tried to internalize what it might have been like for a child, in those days, growing up in a household with slaves—and how that might have shaped a child’s the views of that wretched institution, especially under circumstances where the slaves were, as here they seemed to be, almost members of the family and addressed with honorifics children in those days, and in my own childhood too, used when talking or referring to elders. Regarding honorifics, I’ve had occasion to mention that subject tracing the Mma in Mma Ramotswe a while ago here.

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Women’s Letters, America from the Revolutionary War to the Present, edited by Lisa Grunwald and Stephen J. Adler. Dial Press, 2005.

The Three Hundred Year Millennium

Societies are invariably layered. The small upper layer leaves its impression on history; the life of the vast supporting foundation is much less documented. What we see at the top is wondrous diversity of expression, the consequence of freedom from necessity. But in our blessed three-hundred year millennium, and what that means I’ll soon unpack, we’ve had the luxury of detailed historical research. Hence we have discovered that the brilliant flowers at the rising stems of societies are largely based on the exploitation of people who live on the edge of need. You might say that in the best societies the agricultural sector actually had some limited, recognized rights, in the better societies serfdom supported wealth and that slavery appeared only in civilizations fully in decay. Unfortunately for many, many people, civilizations can decay for hundreds of years; thus slavery played a dominant economic role in the Roman Empire virtually from its earliest times.

In theory majorities can overwhelm minorities, but to exert their power they must be organized. But when the majority is struggling to survive, it cannot develop and then organize. Humanity is also very adaptive—both to servitude and mastery. Once the masses are cowed, they will remain peaceful unless harshly provoked; and those above are quite adapted to their luxuries and able to stare injustice right in the face and ignore it stalwartly. Hence the existence of slavery in this very country; it was well-entrenched in a nominally Christian society and supported by a highly organized triangular trade—English manufactured goods to Africa, slaves to the New World, and raw materials back to England. We might call it globalization.

Now sometimes I picture myself unhappily as a kind of Cato the Elder. He was the fellow in Rome who never gave a speech without pronouncing, at the end of it, “Carthage must be destroyed.” Thus I find myself announcing—no matter what the subject—that “Oil is going to run out.” Yes. And it’s likely to run out in the current century. I call ours the three hundred year millennium because the Age of Oil (more precisely of Fossil Fuels) will have lasted no more than three centuries when it comes to its end. And in this time, and very temporarily indeed, we’ve enjoyed the blessings of millennium: we’ve managed to have energy slaves rather than the human kind. But as slavery in the United States in the nineteenth century illustrates, it’s not beneath a God-fearing and civilized nation—whose towering scribe of holy documents, Jefferson, enjoyed their services—to return to the traditional ways of humanity. You think it couldn’t happen? Now that’s naïveté.

People who speak savanarola, as I often do, are supposed to offer solutions to the problems that they raise. I don’t believe that the “problem-solution” pairing is relevant here. Vast collective phenomena cannot be fixed. But the insights of a few people in the generations before mine greatly helped me to cope with the rather minimal challenges of this rich millennium. Insight is valuable. And marching toward the future aware of what is in the offing, if passed on, will definitely help at least minorities to do what can be done.
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For a more detailed discussion of the timeline presented here, see this kick-off post on LaMarotte.

The Lens of History

I’ve been attracted throughout my life to methods of seeing that which is much smaller or much greater than eye can focus. We don’t need tools at our own natural scale. We need not engage in social science to understand our own clan—meaning all the people to whom we are related by blood or marriage. The eyes and ears suffice. When ours was a young family first sinking roots in the United States, we didn’t even need a bank statement to know our net worth. We had a sheaf of treasury notes accumulated during service in the Army, and we could just count the envelopes; and we kept most of the money we earned at the apartment in cash.

Later I learned the power of statistics—and came to admire and value the services of our statistical agencies. Doubtless the greatest humanity has ever produced are resident, right now, right here in the United States. This is not an exaggeration. A start at celebrating them is recorded here, but I haven’t gone beyond an introduction. In any case, there is nothing quite like lenses that will bring the seemingly invisible into focus, and therefore praises to the makers of the Hubble telescope and NASA for putting it up in the sky; and equal praises to honor Edwin Hubble (1889-1953), one of the modern day’s pioneers.

Knowledge dependents on pattern-acquisition, as it were: seeing enough of very large things so that their lawful behavior becomes evident. And in this category I also place mythologies at the exalted and histories at the mundane end of the spectrum. Mythologies sum up the totality of human intuition about the nature of transcendental reality. History is our lens for understanding the immediate arrangements of society writ large.

As I’ve mentioned a couple of posts back, I was looking back at Rome again. I’m now and have always been fascinated by the transition between the republican era and the later monarchical phases, the Roman Empire. It really was monarchical although the Romans did not want to use the word “king.” The imperator was what we call “commander-in-chief,” and I smile a little in noting how that phrase developed legs during the last administration; so did the word “decider.” But never mind that. I would emphasize that the transit of Rome from republic to empire was not some kind of symbolical transformation of the sort our modern media love to engineer and then to detect in what they are pleased to call analysis. No. The transition followed a century of social disturbance beginning around 133 BC and ending in 27 BC. It was a period in which the powerful and moneyed oligarchy that ruled Rome was first challenged in 133 by the election of Tiberius Gracchus, restored to dominance by Sulla (around 82 BC), followed by Caesar’s rise to power after a major civil war (48 BC), and ending with the rise to power of Caesar’s adoptive son, Octavian (later Augustus) in 27 BC.

Worth noting here is that this brief period holds most of the events and the personalities the American public knows about Rome from the movies: Caesar, Cleopatra, Anthony, and Brutus. A few other, later figures appear because they were particularly violent: Caligula, Nero.

Ultimately the battle here was between the moneyed class of large scale ownership (in the Roman context this meant the ownership of land and slaves)—and the people without means or relying on small parcels of land, handicrafts, or shops. The power, when it finally shifted, came to be vested in the state (not the little people), the state controlled by a single person, and that person backed by armed forces of which he was the commander-in-chief, thus imperator. The emperor also held all other meaningful political offices for life. As a tribune-for-life he had absolute veto powers over legislation, as censor-for-life he could order a census or appoint or remove senators, he was princeps of the Senate, meaning “first, most eminent, chief”; from this word we get the later meaning of prince. He was also the pontiff, thus the chief religious officer—butI need not go on. He essentially formulated, proposed, and caused legislation to be passed and then enforced by a bureaucracy consisting principally of his own servants, free and slave. The state had become the sole ruler and the emperor the sole ruler of the state. The Republic of Rome came into being in 509 BC and ended with Caesar in 48—a span of 461 years. The Empire lasted to about 476 AD, thus another five centuries. After the imperial period began, the change in power was never again a collective enterprise. It took place by family arrangement or by violent intervention backed by a military force.

What brought the transition about? The abuse of money-power. In the Roman setting it took the form of vast importation of slaves who displaced and impoverished the ordinary citizen. And in our case? We need but look around.

Let’s use the lens of history to look at our times. Using it suggests that those who say that we’re in an imperial time today are just idly chattering, symbol-mongering. No. We’ll know it when it comes. We’re presently enduring the misrule of a vast moneyed oligarchy. But other illusions need also to be set aside. Those who dream of revolution, whereby the “little people” will finally take power from the forces of capital, should not romantically imagine a process that will end in “direct democracy.” Never. Democracy—the kind we actually value, the kind that is still practiced at the local level of small communities—belongs to a middle stage of civilization, the time when the middle class actually has power. When that class gets shouldered aside by the vast oligarchies that currently rule us, the stage is being set for a century of chaos. That century will be violent—as were the 106 years that separated the tribune Gracchus from the emperor Augustus. After that the vote won’t matter any more. But a kind of order will return. And at the working level—which never really changes—the responsible people will, once again, clear off the rubble, mop up the blood, and get back to doing the necessary.

Economic Foundations

The writing of blog entries, with the implied possibility that people all over the world might just chance to see it, has a somewhat bracing effect on something that I’ve engaged in all of my life—the keeping of diaries or notes. When doing the latter the only presumed audience is yourself, and the reasonable use of the time is to clarify ideas. But when you have the feeling of people peering over your shoulder, you tend to feel the pressure to get things right, to look things up. The process becomes more stimulating. You tend to follow up on hunches and seek out the hard copy of things you remember reading. Thus one of my recent posts somewhere reminded me that the late Stephen J. Gould had written a scathing book about abuses in science. Gould has figured in my thought as a genuinely original thinker—on evolution and much else. It was he who proposed an explanation of evolution (with Niles Eldredge) by a process of “punctuated equilibrium,” thus abrupt departures over against gradualistic changes based on tiny increments. I happen to have a minor (and meaningless) link to the man in that we shared the same literary agent over many years. In any case, having been reminded, I found one of three copies I own of Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man and put the book on my nightstand. But this only by way of introduction—and a little plug for a fine writer on difficult scientific subjects.

I spent several nights perusing the book, particularly the dreary story of how IQ testing began and why it is the sham that it is. But the other night, and now we’re getting warmer, I dreaded once more being awash in the abuses of thought to which Modernity is prone. And not wishing to get out of bed again for one of those midnight hunts of my shelves, I just eased out a volume within my reach but buried deep in time and began rereading Will Durant’s Caesar and Christ. The book was there because quite a long time ago I was restudying the reign of Diocletian—and in the course of that discovered that both that great emperor as well as Constantine were what today we would call Serbs—not Italians at all. In fact when Diocletian retired—to raise those prize chickens of his—he did so in what is today Split, the largest coastal city of Croatia on the Adriatic.

I skipped the introductory chapters that take us to the dawn of Caesar’s time and began reading Chapter VI, “The Agrarian Revolt”—and once more felt the shock I’d felt on the last reading years ago, as my marginal notes throughout the book make clear. I put a representative quote on another blog, visible here, explaining the causes of the revolt which, in due time, set the stage for Caesar’s rise and the days of empire in Rome: slavery. My marginal notes and my refreshed memory of the first reading have to do with the economic foundations of civilization. Ancient civilization was undoubtedly based on agriculture; and Rome’s slow-motion collapse began with the introduction of slavery on a large scale. Rome had transformed its economic base from yeoman farming to military conquest—which yielded the slaves and impoverished its masses. And for me this has obvious parallels in that American civilization was also founded on agriculture; indeed, it was heavily supported by—guess what? Slavery. When cotton was king, it was slaves that produced it. Only later, when we discovered a new kind of slave, did the economy shift from agriculture to industry. That industry, in turn, manifesting predominantly in manufacturing, depends on energy slaves, the fossil fuels.

Now it is worth noting that the imperial period of Rome dawned when the importation of slaves on a grand scale began to deform the Roman Republic—as the quotes on LaMarotte clearly show in summary. We face a similar but two-pronged challenge today, albeit we appear to be at an earlier stage of the problem. And these things are all too clear to me because, for the past twenty years, I’ve either been directly or indirectly the chronicler of manufacturing in the United States—in a statistical series originally called Manufacturing USA and now Manufacturing & Distribution USA. I looked up some data the current editor, Joyce P. Simkin, has complied in the latest edition. It shows decline in manufacturing employment (this predates the automotive collapse) from 17.8 to 13 million people between 1982 and 2006. The decline has been accelerating. This is one prong of the challenge—our yielding a function to imports, not of slaves, as it were, but to those who work at much lower wages than we pay. The second prong of the challenge is that manufacturing in the modern sense is unimaginable without fossil fuels, and we can now clearly see that these fuels will be pretty much exhausted by the end of the twenty-first century.

When I then peruse the shocking consequences to society that the heavy uptick in slavery produced in Rome, I find it entirely appropriate to suggest that we should put our house in order, at every level, in anticipation of bad times to come—not just the usual bad times that come routinely, punctuating our equilibrium, but major transformations that will make the future, even if we master fusion power, utterly different from what we see all around us today.