This week at the library: artistic bears, Vikings, and l'affaire Dreyfuss (also snow, lots of snow)

Dear readers:

Troubling news. I awoke yesterday to find ice falling from the sky, and would think the atmosphere broken if I were not so well-read, and had not heard of this thing called 'snow', which the falling ice eventually turned in to. Roads are closed in my area, with schoolchildren trapped in their classrooms and others mired on the interstate, now littered with car wrecks. I only live three miles from work, though, so even if I had gone in before the roads were closed all would have been well. As it is, I'm enjoying a weekend in the middle of the week.  Fortunately I have a pile of books to keep me warm!

Before the snow, I treated myself to a new work by Robert Harris in An Officer and a Spy. Harris is a varied author of historical fiction, with works ranging from classical Rome to the Cold War in Russia.  An Officer is set in late 19th century France, and is a retelling of the Dreyfuss Affair.  I enjoyed that over the weekend, and on Saturday I spent several long hours in a bookshop. I found a lot that interested me, but nothing so enticing I couldn't resist buying it. Eventually I bought a book on the Vikings just to avoid leaving empty-handed. I figured it would be a while before I got around to reading that, but considering that I am in the middle of the first season of The Vikings, a History-channel dramatization, I may start it sooner. I'm been a little wild for the Vikings since starting Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Stories series. Speaking of which,  I am hungrily awaiting The Pagan Lord to be checked in at the library, as it should be the triumphant conclusion of that series.

Currently I'm increasingly into Poor but Proud, a history of the poor in Alabama, and nibbling on When Elephants Weep, which concerns the emotional lives of animals. Those two will be my focus for the next week, and then starts February and another Great War read.

Well, happy reading to all -- I'm off to stare at the snow in wonder again.

Ship of Rome

Ship of Rome
© 2009 John Stack
368 pages

            Three hundred years before it became an empire, the Roman Republic started its ascension toward power when it took on the Carthaginian state  for control of first the island of Sicily, and then the entire Mediterranean. Their struggle unfolded over the course of over a hundred years and ended with the complete destruction of Carthage, but it began with an ignominious Roman defeat. As mighty as Rome’s legions were on land,  the war with Carthage made control of the sea a must. Ship of Rome is a tale of naval warfare set during the first Punic War, as mighty yet humiliated Rome sought to find a way to  make good on its naval weakness.  It’s the story of two men, a Roman legionnaire turned marine named Septimus, and his friend and brother-warrior, the  Greek captain of the good ship Aquila. Together they attempt to save Rome from defeat, and redeem  their lost comrades.

            Roman historical fiction is typified by political intrigue and battles on land, not naval stories;  Britain was a naval empire, not Rome. But the war with Carthage made sea superiority a must, just as Britain’s war with Germany made air dominance a requirement, regardless of English naval accomplishments. In Ship of Rome, a Roman army officer and a Greek sea captain serving on the same ship are key players in the opening battles of the first Punic War, when Carthage decides to turn the delicate balance for power between the two states’ holdings in Sicily into open war,  first blockading a supply port and then luring the Roman fleet into a disastrous battle.  The Carthaginians are skilled at naval warfare, and Rome has no time to train its men sufficiently to surpass their rivals experience. But a way must be found, or the legions in Sicily will die a slow death of disease and starvation. Complicating matters is the rivalry between the two Roman consuls over who will get the glory for turning the side, and their mutual treachery of one another is only given spice by the wiles of the merciless Carthaginian admiral, who early on is thwarted by the Aquila and wants revenge.   At least Atticus and Septimus can count on one another to cover the other’s back – at least, when Septimus isn’t distracted by his little sister making goo-goo eyes at his comrade, who for all of his virtues can’t help not being properly Roman, but only merely Greek.

            Ship of Rome is a fantastic read, novel both for being Roman fiction set on the high seas, and for being a sea story set in the classical world. Naval combat during the Punic War bears little resemblance to that of the Age of Wooden Ships and Iron Men that has produced series like the Aubrey-Maturin novels or C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower. There are no cannon broadsides here; combat consists of ramming and boarding;  these ships’ weapons are the six-foot long bronze rams on their front ends and the swords, shields, and arrows of the men aboard her.  Readers of sea stories will find it engaging, but there’s combat on land and in the courts as the consuls vie for power, not to mention the interpersonal conflict like that between the senior consul and his slave, a gladiator who is biding his time and waiting for an opportunity to strike for freedom – but not before taking the consul with him.  For all this strife the plot matures nicely, and even gives a slightly villainous character some sympathetic development.  John Stack has delivered here a book with a lot of appeal; for my own part, I’ve already ordered its sequel, Captain of Rome.

Related:
Review of same at Seeking a Little Truth
Armada, John Stack

The Bonobo and the Atheist

The Bonobo and the Atheist: in Search of Humanism Among the Primates 
© 2013 Frans de Waal
313 pages

 Frans de Waal has written extensively on moral instincts within the great apes, in books like Good natured and Primates and Philosophers. In The Bonobo and the Atheist, he reviews his experience with chimpanzees and bonobos over several decades with an eye for what they might teach us about human morality. His express purpose is to find hope for building a moral human society outside the bounds of authoritarian, belief-dependent religion, but he’s more interested in examining the basis of natural morality than in condemning religion. Taking a cue from Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists, he acknowledges that religion and human culture have thus far been inextricably bound. His studies of chimp and bonobo behavior, and studies of human behavior, indicate to him that there is more to morality than simple genetic-biased altruism;  we are bound to our communities, kin or no, through deep social instincts, and it is these that are the basis of our morality.

Throughout the book, de Waal explores moral impulses revealed in the behavior of chimpanzees and bonobos. Although chimpanzees have a reputation for violence,  even they discipline one another for failing to practice self-restraint: a challenger for an alpha position can't bite with impunity, nor can adults bully the young who have not yet learned appropriate behavior; violators of these norms and others, like stealing or cheating, are punished with a round of shrieking and beating.  Their morality isn't limited to instinct; it is also informed by their intelligence. As mentioned, youngsters are 'taught' appropriate behavior, indirectly;  chimp youths can chase females in estrus, but as they start to become 'teenagers', they're regarded as potential challengers by the reigning males and taught their place, even if they're not yet  capable of reproduction.  Other cases demonstrate that chimpanzees can take stock of what they've done and remember it later; a chimpanzee who bit a trainer's finger off was later visibly ashamed, isolating itself and covering its eyes; when the human saw him again, the chimp recognized him and attempted to examine the hand.

These behaviors may be safely assumed to be evolutionary boons to a social species, helping mitigate physical damage caused by struggles for power, or preventing competition within the group from destroying it. Moral instincts and acculturation allow a tribe to work better together, and the same holds true for humans. Once our morality would have been guided by the same measures: our every indiscretion would be noticed by the people we lived among, and remembered; we could be directly accountable for our behavior. Once human populations became too large for these tribe-level measures to handle, however, religion became useful, and for that reason not a single human culture today is without it.  Even in the modern era, increasingly secular, we are forging a new path in the form of a civic culture that attempts to foster healthy behavior without the necessity of believing in elaborate creeds.  It is de Waal's hope that the humanist approach, of practicing a moral culture for the sake of human needs, informed by human experience,  will prove workable, though presently its most vocal proponents are men who have limited their advocacy to merely attacking religion, which is fruitless and makes as much sense as 'sleeping furiously'.  Still, he is hopeful that natural morality will prevail eventually; it does have the advantage of being instinctual. Humanity has as much hope of purging itself of its conscience as it does of  becoming asexual.

Although most of de Waal's own experience comes from observing bonobos in an artificial environment, a spacious exhibit in Arnhem Zoo that prevents some pertinent aspects of behavior from manifesting themselves, he couples it with the studies of other populations in the wild.  The Bonobo and the Atheist, like its title, is an interesting discussion that combines primate behavior and the evolution of religion. What is missing, I think, is any mention of Natural Law, which  would have given his mention of civic culture considerable heft. Humans have been attempting to discern moral convention from nature since Aristotle, both inside religion and out of it. A comparison between declared belief in the Rights of Man according to constitutions and charters and the inferred rights in religious texts ("Thou shalt not kill" inferring a right to life, for instance) would have been most interesting. Both in de Waal's view would be expressions of humanity's inherent moral instincts, but civic belief has the quality of being open to change when necessary; a humanistic moral culture would not be limited by dogma. Simply creating a healthy moral culture won't make religious domination a thing of the past -- it has other virtues, other contributions that must also be made good for -- but it would be a start in creating a world more concerned with the needs of people than power, priests, and convention, and less dependent on something as volatile as beautifully dangerous religion.

de Waal's observations and insight prove again remarkable.

Related:

• The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt  (whom he quotes from)
• Religion for Atheists, Alain de Botton (mentioned)
• Chimpanzee Politics, The Age of Empathy, Primates and Philosophers, Our Inner Ape, etc. Frans de Waal 

This week at the library: Punic war on the high seas, elephants,

Those intrigued by The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion may be interested in today's episode of EconTalk, featuring an interview with the author on the book. The host referred to it as the most extraordinary book he's read in the last ten years, which is high praise considering how many interesting books he's read. 

This past week I finally read Starship Troopers by Rob Heinlein, and found it excellent reading; although the author is generally more militaristic than I'm comfortable with (I've read a few of his essays from The Extended Universe, but not the book properly),  Troopers was more about virtue than the military.  I also finished my first piece in the Great War tribute I'll be doing the rest of the year; I wanted to start off with a general history and Keegan offered as concise but complete a narrative as I could have hoped for. The next read in this series will be Forgotten Voices of the Great War, compiled by Max Arthur. It seems to be a history of the war told in passages from diary entries and interviews of soldiers,  mostly on the Entente side, with a few scattered civilians thrown in. I haven't begun reading it yet, as it's a recent arrival  from interlibrary loan.   This morning I finished off Silent Thunder, which was a decidedly odd collection of nature collections; although it's the accounting of a scientist about her extensive elephant observations, and contains her discoveries (the great creatures' ability to use infrasonic sound for communication across long distances, previously only thought to be used by whales),  it's also on the mystic side. The author does a lot of dream interpretation, some of it involving elephants, and because I read part of the book while in bed  during the weekend with fever, I thought I might have been delusional. That's not the case; Silent Thunder is just an atypical book. 

I'm unsure as to my reading for this current week; I have a nice pile of interesting books I brought home from my university library last week, and distracting me from it will be John Stack's Ship of Rome. 

The First World War

The First World War
© 2000 John Keegan
528 pages

The dawning of the 20th century seemed to promise nothing but good tidings for the civilized world; telegraphy and steam were knitting it together,  economies were flourishing, and progress was on the march. Then an Austrian noble was shot, and everything went to hell. The First World War is a comprehensive history of the Great War, beginning with the optimistic state of Europe in the 1910s and ending with a retrospective. The text covers the war's best known front, the western line of trenches gutting France, as well as every other, including the many varied struggles in the east (Germany v Russia, Austria v Italy, Russia v Austria,  and Russia v the Turks just to name the principles; other fights in the Balks, like those in Greece and Bulgaria are also examined),  across the world as colonies changed hands, and on the sea. Keegan's success  in taking a widespread conflict and delivering a concise narrative over it can't be overstated.

Although the Great War began with confrontation between the Austrian-Hungarian empire and its Serbian neighbor, it broadened into a global conflict because of the dense web of alliances between European nations and ethnic hostility in the east.   Germany supported Austria's aggressive blame towards the Serbs for the death of Archduke Franz Ferninand, the Russians supported the Serbs, the French supported the Russians, and the British supported the Belgians who had the impudence to put up forts defending the best route from Germany to France: Belgium itself.  In the east, a handful of Balkan nations loathed the great powers who wanted to rule them, or once had; Greek animosity toward the Turks brought them in.  The great powers of the east, Russia and Turkey, also wanted a piece of each other.  I've long  resisted referring to the Great War as a world war, but after reading this there's no doubt in my mind it fits: the complexity of fronts is mind-boggling. Although Austria-Hungary's bellicose attitude toward Serbia initiated the conflict, I almost felt sorry for them considering how many fronts they were fighting on.  Keegan's skill is also obvious when addressing the human side of the conflict; his depiction of the Battle of the Somme drives home its obscene waste, but while he covers the miseries of the soldiers' lives, he doesn't villainize the generals.  The First World War history and thoughtful commentary, as Keegan reflects on the difficulties inherent in commanding battles that took place across such massive fronts,  and coping with the new technologies that turned traditional tactics into those inviting slaughter.

On the whole, I'm most impressed with the narrative and the history; there's scant mention of airplanes, which I would say is odd in light of von Hindenberg's claim, "No airplanes, no Tannenberg!", but there's a lot of history packed into this book and some elements have to be underplayed; airplanes' role as scouts and artillery spotters can't merit much in a book that has to cover campaigns like Verdun in only a few paragraphs.  Another minor flaw is Keegan's motivation for the United States being purely military, a response to submarine warfare; there's no mention made of the amount of lending the U.S. was giving to the Entente powers.  The work is excellent otherwise, definitely suitable for people who want a general introduction to the war.

Related:

• To End All Wars, Adam Hochschild
• Storm of Steel, Ernst Juenger
• The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman
• All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Remarque

Toward a Truly Free Market

Toward a Truly Free Market: A Distributist Perspective on the Role of Government, Taxes, Health Care, Deficits, and More
© 2011 John C. Medaille 
282 pages

 "I been a-wonderin' why we can't do that all over. All work together for our own thing, all farm our own lan'.[...] I been thinking about us, too, about our people living like pigs and good rich land layin' fallow. Or maybe one guy with a million acres and a hundred thousand farmers starvin'. And I been wonderin' if all our folks got together and yelled..."

(Tom Joad, The Grapes of Wrath)

Toward a Truly Free Market argues for an economic system based on neither an unmoderated free market nor an authoritarian command structure, but on  moral principles that put human needs, not ideological purity, at the center. At the heart of these principles is the concept of distributive justice. After sketching out the general problems of conventional economics, Medaille claims that capitalism and socialism are more alike than different. The constant lack of equilibrium in a capitalist economy, the fact that labor is never paid enough to ‘clear the markets’, dooms capitalism to a series of booms and busts, and it is that cycle that distributive justice is intended to remedy, because attempts to 'fix' capitalism through intervention have only led,  to increased economic and political power in the hands of a few. Toward a Truly Free Market offers a fairly comprehensible 'third way' to economics, one that defies partisan labels and offers a humane vision for the future.

The distrubist worldview envisions a society in which both political power and the ownership of production (on which political power depends) are as widely distributed as possible. In this society, no one is an employee; almost everyone has an owner's stake in society, whether in the form of a family farm, a small business, or membership in a cooperative. The idea doesn't originate with Medaille; although aspects of it have been imagined since modernity began (Thomas Jefferson's agrarianism, for instance),  it was argued for under the name Distributism beginning in the 19th century -- as part of the Roman Catholic church's social doctrine. Then, Catholic authors like G.K. Chesterton argued for it as a moral alternative. as a system that would protect the integrity and autonomy of the family against both the ravages of factory dependence and state socialism; now, with distributist ideas  developing a life of their own outside the Church, Medaille takes an economic tack by first examining the weakness of economics without justice, which attempts to reduce land, people, and money to commodities, and then explaining the principles of distributive justice, moving from the general to the particular.

While classical economics begins with the material ("Economics is the study of how scarce resources with alternative uses are distributed"),  distributist economics begins with people: Medaille describes an economy as how a society is provisioned.  His criticisms of socialism and capitalism bear out that provisioning isn't necessarily material; he laments over the destruction of local economies, the brokenness of families, working long hours at jobs which offer no meaningful compensation, only a paycheck, and the fact that people at all levels of society, from the family up through the neighborhood, city, and state become increasingly dependent on the national government, leading to the death of civic society as Citizens become clients and case numbers.  This is true whether the system chosen is capitalism or socialism,  Medaille's solution includes "remoralizing the market, relocalizing the economy, recapitalizing the poor, and reinvigorating local politics".  Operating principles of distributism include solidarity, or the belief that political decisions should be handled by the smallest capable agent; thus, a city would be responsible for its schools, and a state for its highways. Medaille elaborates on how distributive ideas can inform taxation, industry, healthcare, and government policy.  Although he sees a place for government (keeping the currency sound, pricing in externalities, national defense),  distributism rejects a top-heavy state. Politics, like a house,  must work from the ground up, from civic participation to tax funding.  That funding comes not from income or property, but on the land itself. Decentralization is a recurring theme; Medaille's idea on fixing healthcare includes having a range of licenses, beginning with the quasi-medical and progressing to  doctors of medicine) not only would this allow more people to enter the medical field, as they could more easily move between study and practice (a given person might take a license as a midwife, and then use that to pay for more advanced training in obtstritcs or general medicine), but it would result in better healthcare over all, as seasoned and highly-trained doctors would only see problems that could not be resolved at the lower levels.  He advocates for an end to "supply-push" economics, in which companies produce a given number of goods and then use advertising to gin up interest in them, when general-purpose machinery that can adapt to produce anything that is needed by the local economy ("demand-pull") is a more intelligent and just use of finite resources. Otherwise we are merely producing landfill.  

Toward a Truly Free Market is a fascinating book. The beginning  is the most challenging,with the discussion of the 'distributive' and 'corrective' aspects of justice, and  the difference between use-values and exchange values, but understanding what the author means by justice is rewarding once he begins writing about a system that is based on it. Although distributism proper began in the Catholic church, being developed in papal encyclicals, I've encountered its ideas in various and sundry places:  James Howard Kunstler wrote on the virtue of Georgist taxation in The Geography of Nowhere, Chuck Marohn of Thoughts on Building Strong Towns is a firm believer in subsidarity, and the push for local economies, especially local food movements, is gaining serious traction in the environmental and health movements.  Although some aspects were more harder to imagine, like the revival of guilds or the practicality of cooperatives,  Medaille includes sections on communities like the Mondragon Cooperation which put these principles to work. Although there's some economics to digest, the book picks up steam as it moves toward public policy. A fly in the ointment is that Medaille assumes readers have heard of distributism; he doesn't elaborate on it at the start. He develops the idea throughout the book, so strangers won't be lost, but they have to be willing to jump in. This is perhaps explainable given the book's Catholic publisher; since distributism is part of the Church's social doctrine, it almost has a ready-made audience. The claim that capitalism and the state have an unavoidably symbiotic relationship with one another could have used further development; I've heard the same claim from hard-left circles, too, and would be interested in understanding the full reason why. Medaille operates on the idea that the state is necessary to keep capitalism from destroying itself, but Hayekians believe capitalism would have worked out its inner inconsistencies if meddling interventionists didn't keep getting in the way, like suppressing a fever that's intended to kill an infection. (Medaille takes more than a few shots at the Austrian School throughout, which is amusing given that Hayek drew on a distributist work, The Servile State, in his The Road to Serfdom. )

Many national-level reforms mentioned here don't have a prayer of materializing in the current political climate, but a philosophy as locally-focused as distributism can get along.  Determined people can build little sanctuaries of restoration in their own communities, with or without government sanction;  even urbanites can relocalize their food, and cooperatives of all kinds are possible, and already in practice. There's a lot of cause for hope here, and Medaille offers a thoughtful criticism of our current system which is outside the usual complaints.

Related:
Books and essays by Wendell Berry
small is beautiful, E.F. Schumacher

Starship Troopers

Starship Troopers
© 1959 Robert Heinlein
263 pages

The worlds of the Terran Federation are under constant assault by the malicious Bugs, whose hideousness drives dogs insane and who don’t even have the decency to build their civilization out of buildings that can be blown apart:  the swarming arachnoids have to be dug out of the ground.   Juan Rico didn’t join the military to save truth, justice, and the Terran way of life, however; humankind was largely at peace when he took his oath. Instead, he joined because his best friend did, and because the school  hottie was signing up to become a pilot. Juan, or Johnny, didn’t get to be a pilot, though; that program prefers women’s faster reflexes.Johnny wound up in the Mobile Infantry,  part of a literal killing machine. During his  basic training, however,  a Bug attack completely destroyed Buenos Aires, and it’s up to Johnny and his follow boots to take the war to the enemy.  Starship Troopers is half political philosophy, a third speculation on future warfare, and a fifth wartime action plot.  The best known of Robert Heinlein’s works, alongside Stranger in a Strange Land,  Starship Troopers’s fame stems from its easy-to-loathe insectoid menace and its controversial politics; it well deserves its classic status.

Starship Troopers opens with images of future spaceborne wars, though space is something traveled through, not the battlefield itself; there are no capital ship duels here, only the paratrooper-like deployment and operations of Johnny and the rest of Terra’s finest.  If mobile infantry brings to mind foot soldiers jumping from trucks and riding through the countryside, cast that out of your mind; an M.I is one man in an armored suit, weighing tons  but powered and as responsive to the slightest movement that it might as well be skinned. The suit allows every trained soldier to be a one-man army, making the tanks of ancient days look like pushovers. Every M.I. is worth more than a thousand of the enemy, and that’s no hyperbole.

            But Starship Troopers isn’t chiefly about the Bug War or how sophisticated electronics  and space will alter combat. Throughout the book, largely through reminiscences of his training days, Rico’s understanding of why he’s fighting develops, laying before readers a political philosophy which is the basis for the book's 'controversial' status. In the Federation, the voting franchise is limited to those who have paid their dues in the form of Federal Service, people who have proven that they have characters capable of engaging in self-sacrifice for the good of the nation; people whose sense of duty will keep them sober when they exercise the vote, and mitigate corruption as far as possible. Starship Troopers is paean to the highest ideals of republican soldiery, drawing on classical history, from Greece through Rome; if you've ever read Once an Eagle, it's rather like that. The main argument of Troopers is that politics requires virtue, and for Heinlein, the sacrifice required in military service is the best way of sussing out the virtuous.  The military isn't the meter by which society is run; in fact, those who apply to do their service are actively discouraged and given plenty of opportunities for second thoughts once they've begun.  Other elements of Heinlein's society which have been criticized, like the use of violence as discipline, aren't an example of the military governing civilian life; that's simply the way Heinlein thinks children ought to be raised and how criminals ought to be deal with, and are separate arguments.  The most objectionable element of the worldview developed here is the author's contention that man doesn't have a moral instinct. He views humanity as a wild animal that has to be civilized through culture every step of the way, but if we had no moral instincts such inculcation could not possibly take.

Although I started this book prepared to see in it a glorification of war and authority, it is far more thoughtful than that. The tech speculation is fascinating for a work written in 1959, though the closest we've come to realizing  any of his ideas is helmets with HUD displays, or perhaps remotely-controlled robots.  (In Heinlein's world, the powered suits are controlled with radio signals.)  This is definitely a worthy read.