For the most part, higher education has been replaced by vocational training. That transition has been driven by two main factors.

First, our society puts a dollar value on everything. The “value” of higher education is measured principally by the difference in lifetime income it can produce.

Second, our society espouses the myth that everyone should have and can benefit from higher education. That results in a massive influx of students who have neither the aptitude nor the inclination to pursue traditional subjects. To serve those students, colleges and universities change their curricula to incorporate more job training.

The real “villain,” if there is one, is the irrational esteem that society gives to university degrees as a measure of personal worth. A good, honest, hard-working ditch digger with a high school diploma is just as important as a university professor with multiple doctorates. There is no need to force everyone into the “higher education” path, and we shouldn’t do it. But we do.

What caused the American “Civil War”?*

That question provoked a serious, thoughtful debate between readers of this blog. In the Comments section of my article, “The Hijab and the Flag,” they exchanged views, arguments, and more facts than I had ever known about the Civil War.

One of the readers, who hails from Canada, thinks that slavery was the paramount reason for the Civil War. Another, who lives in Virginia, thinks that economic and Constitutional issues were most important.

The official reason for the war, as the story is told today, was to eliminate the undisputed evil of slavery. As the saying goes, “history is written by the victors.”

Because most people have little interest in history beyond graduating from high school, they accept that explanation without question. And even some people who do think about history conclude, based on their reading, that slavery was the cause of the war.

People in former Confederate states, however, are less inclined to accept the official explanation. The reader in Virginia is one of them. And when I mentioned the dispute to a software engineer from Louisiana, he agreed that “of course,” economic concerns were paramount and that slavery was a side-issue.

Identifying Causes

But it’s not as easy to identify “the cause” of a historical event as many people believe.

It’s difficult enough to identify “the cause” of an event in a laboratory. Identifying “the cause” of a historical event is particularly difficult. Almost all events have multiple antecedent factors that can be identified as causes: historical events are particularly complex. Which factor we identify as the most important cause is not entirely subjective, but there’s a large element of subjectivity and interpretation.

Consider a simple case. One billiard ball hits another billiard ball, and the second ball then rolls into a pocket of the billiards table. What caused the second ball to roll into the pocket?

Without hesitation, most people would say that the collision between the two balls was the cause. But what about the player’s deft use of the cue to start the first ball rolling toward the second? What about the perfectly-flat surface of the table, without which both balls would roll in unpredictable directions? And what about the bet that the player made with a friend that he could make the second ball roll into the pocket?

All those factors, and many more, were required for the second ball to roll into the pocket. Which factor we identify as the cause of an event depends on several factors. We tend to say that the cause of an event is:

• Something that closely precedes it in time.
• Something close to it in space.
• Something in the situation that changes.
• Something in the situation that we can control.

It also depends on what kind of story we’re telling and for what purpose. If we’re teaching a college physics class and explaining vectors, then we focus on the relative directions, mass, and velocity of the balls. If we’re doing surface integrals in calculus, we focus on the surface of the billiards table. If we’re discussing psychology, we talk about the motivations of the players. And so on.

Our Purpose Influences Our Choice of a Cause

The point is that in even the simplest situations, there are many causes involved in producing a single effect. And historical situations are almost never simple.

Moreover, our goals and interests determine which causes we consider most important. It is thus unsurprising that historians beholden to the Union emphasize slavery as a cause: they want to justify the Union’s invasion and subjugation of the Confederacy. Confederate historians are in a similar situation. They want to justify the Confederate states’ secession and independence. Therefore, they emphasize economic issues and the states’ Constitutional right to secede, just as they downplay the issue of slavery. Neither side is being dishonest. Both are merely interpreting the evidence in light of their own world-view, values, and assumptions.

Similar reasoning appears in other contexts. In medicine, for example, doctors tend to identify the cause of an illness as a factor that they can treat, such as a bacterial infection. Other causal factors are involved, of course — such as nutrition, the general health of the individual, and so forth — but doctors can usually do something about a bacterial infection. So they identify the cause pragmatically, since they can prescribe a drug for it. Other factors are more or less ignored.

The most we can fairly say is that slavery, economic issues, the Southern states’ Constitutional right to secede, and the political dominance of the Northern industrial states were all causes that led to secession of the Confederate states. They were also causes of the Union government’s war on the Confederate states. Note that the war is separate and independent of the states’ secession, which the Union government could have allowed as the U.S. Constitution required.

Thus, to ask “what caused the American Civil War?” is too vague a question. One factor might have been the most important cause of the Confederate states’ secession, and a completely different factor might have been the cause of the Union’s decision to invade and subjugate the Confederate states. We really must separate those two questions.

Dispelling Myths About the Confederacy

To help understand why Confederate states seceded from the Union, it’s important to dispel a few myths about the Confederate states, racism, and slavery.

Myth: Confederate racism was unique

Many, perhaps most, people in the Confederate states were racists in that they considered blacks inferior to whites. Historian David M. Potter notes in his book The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861:

This was the doctrine of the inherent superiority of whites over Negroes. The idea was not distinctively southern, but it did have a distinctive significance in the South, for it served to rationalize slavery …

As Potter observes, the belief in white racial superiority was not unique to the South. It was quite common among those of European ancestry until very recently. The Scottish economist Adam Smith, considered the father of modern economics, makes a side comment in The Wealth of Nations (1776) that the wealth of a European peasant:

…exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages.

(Book I, Chapter I, at the very end of the chapter)

The English writer Walter Bagehot said in his book Physics and Politics (1872) that

The mixture of persons of different race in the same commonwealth, unless one race had complete ascendancy, tended to confuse all the relations of life …

(Chapter 1, “The Preliminary Age”)

And of course we have the words of “the great emancipator” himself, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, who said that:

I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people. And I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe forever forbids the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.

And as much as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

(Lincoln-Douglas debates, debate at Charleston, September 18, 1858)

Those are shocking statements today, but they were common beliefs of white Americans until the middle of the 20th century. They were not unique to the Confederate states.

Myth: Most Confederates fought to defend slavery

A very poignant statement of most Confederates’ reasons for going to war was given by Robert E. Lee in April of 1861.

Lee, who was a colonel in the Union Army, had been offered command of all Union military forces. Instead, because he considered himself first and foremost a citizen of Virginia, he resigned his commission and took command of Confederate military forces. In his resignation letter of April 20, 1861, Lee wrote to Union Army General Winfield Scott:

[My resignation] would have been presented at once but for the struggle it has cost me to separate myself from a service to which I have devoted the best years of my life and all the ability I possessed. During the whole of that time, I have experienced nothing but kindness from my superiors and the most cordial friendship from my comrades …

Save in defense of my native state [of Virginia], I never desire again to draw my sword.

(Annals of America, Volume 9, pp. 258-259)

On the same day, Lee wrote to his sister, Anne Marshall:

With all my devotion to the Union and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have, therefore, resigned my commission in the Army and, save in defense of my native state, I hope I may never be called on to draw my sword.

(Annals of America, Volume 9, pp. 258-259)

If the leader of the Confederate military forces thought that slavery was an issue, he did not consider it an important enough issue to mention.

My point is not that slavery was a non-issue. It clearly was an issue for some people on both the Confederate and Union sides. However, many other people in Confederate states considered their states’ self-defense and right to self-determination (as sanctioned by the U.S. Constitution) to be the most important issue.

Myth: Most Confederates approved of slavery

If many Confederate citizens went to war to defend their states and their communities, rather than to defend slavery, then the idea that they supported slavery becomes less of an obvious corollary.

In fact, many southerners did disapprove of slavery and expected it to be abolished peacefully. The most important factor in their disapproval of slavery might have been the ideals of human equality that they professed and genuinely believed. Potter notes that:

[Racism] furnished southerners with a way to avoid confronting an intolerable paradox: that they were committed to human equality in principle but to human servitude in practice. The paradox was a genuine one, not a case of hypocrisy …

Southern leaders of the late 18th and 19th centuries had played with the idea of some day eliminating slavery. That was, in part, why the South had acceded to the exclusion of slavery from the Northwest Territory in 1787 and to the abolition of the African slave trade in 1808. It was why a limited number of southerners had emancipated their slaves …

(Potter, op cit, p. 459)

One of the people who despised slavery was none other than Robert E. Lee, who wrote to his wife in 1856:

In this enlightened age, there are few but what will acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil in any country.

Lee both hoped and expected slavery to be ended peacefully, as it had been in other countries:

Emancipation will sooner result from the mild and melting influence of Christianity than from the storms and contests of fiery controversy.

Given the prevalent anti-African racism in the South (and the North, and pretty much everywhere else), it would be foolish to deny that some people did support slavery. But enlightened people did not support it, whether they fought on the Confederate side or on the Union side.

Myth: War was necessary to eliminate slavery

The institution of slavery was not unique to the Confederate states. It was also legal in the Union states of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri, as well as in the District of Columbia. The U.S. Supreme Court had found it Constitutional in 1857. And, of course, slavery had existed all over the world for thousands of years: in the Middle East, in Greece (where slave labor made possible the otherwise enlightened moral and philosophical life of Athens), in the Roman Empire, in Asia, and of course in the countries of Europe. As the Encyclopedia Britannica observed:

The economic regime of every society which has recently become sedentary is founded on the slavery of the industrial professions.

(Encyclopedia Britannica 11th Edition (1910), Vol. 25, p. 216, “Slavery”)

When the American Civil War took place, slavery had already been eliminated peacefully in most European countries and their colonies. Britain abolished slavery by an act of Parliament in 1833. France did it in 1848, Portugal in 1858, and Holland in 1863. Latin American and South American countries were a little ahead of their European mentors: Argentina did it in 1813, Columbia in 1821, and Mexico in 1829.

As noted earlier, many Confederate leaders opposed slavery. Because slavery had been abolished peacefully in other countries, there was every reason to believe that the same thing would happen in Southern states. The fact that war, destruction, and massive bloodshed were not needed to abolish slavery does not make it impossible as a motivation for some Union government officials. But it does make it less rational.

As Usual, Many Causes

Where do we look for the causes of the American Civil War? Do we look at the views of a majority of people in the Union and the Confederacy? Or only at the views of politicians and newspaper editorial writers? Or do we restrict it to people with real power to make war happen or to avoid it?

Like most historical events, the American Civil War had multiple causes. There were good and bad people on each side. On each side, some hated black people while others, like Confederate General Stonewall Jackson, regarded blacks as the spiritual brothers and sisters of white Americans. For some people, slavery was the one and only issue, just as today, there are “single-issue voters” who care only about abortion or war. For other people, Constitutional concerns, self-determination, or the preservation of the Union were paramount.

It seems to me that the whole enterprise of attempting to find a single cause for a large and complex historical event is mistaken. What we should do is admit that it has multiple causes, and then try to learn whatever we can from what was one of the most destructive and tragic episodes in American history.

———————–
* I call it a “civil war” only because that is the phrase almost universally used to describe it. In fact, of course, it was a war of secession like the American Revolution. Confederate states wanted their independence but the Lincoln administration, acting against the U.S. Constitution, refused to allow it.

Alexander Pope's Essay on Man

Let’s take a break from current events to contemplate some truths that will out-last the next news cycle.

You’ve probably heard this quote, but you might not know its source:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast.

That’s the only line most people know from “Essay on Man” by the English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744). The more complete version of the quote hints at the wisdom contained in the rest of the poem:

Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be, blest.

In other words, people are never satisfied with what they have. We always hope for a “blessing” that is yet to come. Rich people want to be richer, or to be loved; tyrants want more power; humble people wish for more material comforts or security. What we have is seldom good enough for us. We always want more, and we think ourselves ill-used because we don’t have it yet.

Pope’s “Essay” is replete with such insights, beautifully and often poignantly expressed.

About the complexity of human nature, he writes:

What would this man? Now upward will he soar,
And little less than angel, would be more;
Now looking downwards, just as grieved appears,
To want the strength of bulls, the fur of bears.

But Pope has a prescription for all that discontent:

Presumptuous man! The reason wouldst thou find,
Why form’d so weak, so little, and so blind?
Ask of thy mother earth, why oaks are made
Taller and stronger than the weeds they shade.

Then say not man’s imperfect, Heaven in fault;
Say rather, man’s perfect as he ought.

Who finds not Providence all good and wise,
Alike in what it gives and what it denies?

Pope recommends an attitude of serenity and acceptance toward things we can’t control. In this, he anticipates the serenity prayer written by 20th-century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr:

God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.

Pope  saw that people are not merely thinking beings, as some contemporary writers insist. They are also buffeted by self-love, emotion, and instinct that bias their judgment:

Two principles in human nature reign:
Self-love, to urge, and Reason, to restrain.

Self-love and Reason to one end aspire,
Pain their aversion, pleasure their desire;
But greedy that its object would devour,
This taste the honey, and not wound the flower.

If only the executives of BP had used their reason to “taste the honey without wounding the flower,” the Gulf of Mexico wouldn’t have been damaged by BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill. But like all of us, the people running BP fought an internal battle. In their case, the battle was joined between self-love (the desire for more, more, and more profit regardless of consequences) and reason (understanding the importance of protecting the Gulf, its people, and its other living creatures).

The same principle applies to Wall Street banksters who wrecked the world economy. In a different way, it applies to politicians who lead their countries into wars of aggression to enrich themselves and their friends by destroying other nations and killing hundreds of thousands of people.

Even if it’s sometimes hard to overcome self-love, reason gives us the ability to see and do the right thing:

This light and darkness in our chaos join’d,
What shall divide? The God within the mind.

But we need to be careful how we live and what we do, because repeated exposure to evil can make it seem normal:

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

Every person is vulnerable to the siren song of self-love, so we must be on our guard against it:

Virtuous and vicious every man must be,
Few in the extreme, but all in the degree;
The rogue and fool by fits is fair and wise;
And even the best by fits what they despise.

Pope alludes to the joys and the brevity of human life:

Behold the child, by Nature’s kindly law,
Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw.
Some livelier plaything gives his youth delight,
A little louder, but as empty quite.
Scarfs, garters, gold amuse his riper stage,
And beads and prayer-books are the toys of age.
Pleased with this bauble still, as that before,
Till tired he sleeps, and life’s poor play is o’er.

What insight he packs into those eight lines! All through our lives, one trifle after another catches our attention. Shallow and stupid as they often are, such trifles fill our days with joy. And though the toys get more expensive as we get older, mostly they’re still just toys, whatever ponderous nonsense we tell ourselves about them. We love them not because they’re precision instruments, or because they’re important, but simply because they make us happy.

We occupy ourselves with rattles, then romance, and early or late with religion. At the end, as Shakespeare says, we fly away to “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns,” our life’s poor play over at last. And we barely pause to take a bow before the curtain falls on our little drama:

Hope humbly, then; with trembling pinions soar,
Wait the great teacher, Death, and God adore.
What future bliss, He gives not thee to know,
But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.

We live with our little joys for the moment and with our giant hope for the future. It’s less poetic than Pope, but “what’s not to like?”

All hail Marx and Lennon.

The Times newspaper of London recently ran an article and reader forum asking a question that no American newspaper would dare to ask:

“Was Marx Right?”

The Marx in question, of course, was not Groucho, Harpo, Zeppo, or even the 1980s pop-rock singer Richard Marx. It was Karl Marx (1818-1883), whose villainous shade terrified generations of schoolchildren, and more than a few American politicians, from 1917 to 1991.

That terrifying figure, of course, was the Marxist boogeyman of right-wing legend. The real Marx was a considerably less threatening presence. He wasn’t a very nice fellow, to be sure: a personality defect he shared with Beethoven and Wagner. Mostly, however, he was just an academic scribbler with dreams of changing the world.

But the question “Was Marx right?” is too blunt an instrument. Right about what? Marx was an economist, political philosopher, social analyst, activist, and anti-Semite. He had a lot of opinions about a lot of things. Some of them were daft. Some of them, however, are starting to seem pretty brilliant.

Marx the Classical Economist

Unlike the nightmarish cartoon of his alter ego, Marx did not come out of nowhere. He followed in the footsteps of other classical economists and tried to solve problems that had stumped them.

Chief among his predecessors was Adam Smith (1723-1790), who in 1776 published The Wealth of Nations, a book that set the agenda for all work in economics since then. Conservatives and libertarians often wear ties bearing Smith’s picture, but they’ve never actually read anything he wrote. They wouldn’t like him if they did.

What Economics Does

In talking about Marx or any other economist’s theories, it’s important to understand what economics really does.

Almost all economists, for example, talk about what tends to  happen in the long run and “at equilibrium.” But the long run is always in the future and the economy is never at equilibrium. All economists, regardless of their ideological biases, tell a story about how they think the economy works and where they think it’s going. They can often cite evidence to support their stories, but the economy is so complex that that there’s usually some evidence to support almost any theory.

As a result, it’s impossible to “prove” that one economist’s story is right and another’s story is wrong. What you need to do is compare what the story says with what you see going on in the world. How closely do they match? How well does a story explain the current economic situation and predict future economic developments? Does a story make internal sense?

A story that matches reality, explains well, predicts future events, and makes internal sense is a good economic story. Marx’s story is a fairly good one. So is the story told by Keynesian economists. So is the story told by monetarist economists, though the true parts of that story are included in the Keynesian story. Conservatives often prefer the story told by Austrian economists, although — or perhaps because — that story has turned into little more than an apologetic for big business.

How Workers’ Wages Are Determined

Marx was trying to solve a problem that had baffled earlier economists, including Adam Smith.

First, they assumed that economic value* is created by labor. Therefore, if it took the same amount of labor to produce two things, then they had the same economic value. Market conditions can affect prices in the short run, but in  the long run, the prices of goods tend to reflect how much labor it takes to make them. According to classical economists, that is the “natural price” toward which the actual market price will gravitate over time. Thus, the natural price in classical economics corresponds to the  “equilibrium price” in modern economics: the price toward which the actual market price moves over time but almost never reaches.**

Second, they assumed that if two things exchanged for each other, then they had the same amount of economic value.

Third, they assumed that when workers got paid, they were exchanging the products of their labor for the money from the capitalist.

By those assumptions, the products of workers’ labor should tend to be equal in economic value to the money paid by the capitalist. But if the capitalist pays workers exactly what their produce is worth, and then sells it for exactly what it’s worth, then there’s nothing left over for the capitalist. Where does the capitalist’s profit come from?

Marx answered that the capitalist was paying for not for the products of the workers’ labor, but for the workers’ labor power: for their ability to produce. Instead of buying what the workers made, the capitalist was basically renting their ability to make it. And notice what Marx did: He took the same facts as Adam Smith, but told a different story explaining those facts.

Like any other commodity, the workers’ labor power has its economic value (price) determined by how much labor is required to produce it. In other words, wage levels are determined by how much it costs to feed workers, house them, and sustain their ability to produce value for the capitalists.

How Surplus Value Turns into Profit

Suppose that it takes only four hours of an eight-hour working day for the worker to produce enough to keep himself or herself alive and producing. Under the capitalist system, that’s the value of the worker’s labor power and that’s how much he or she will tend to get paid in the long run.

But the workers still work an entire day for the capitalist, who pays them only for half a day. The extra half-day for which the workers don’t get paid is the “surplus value” that the capitalist receives as profit.

Note that this isn’t because capitalists are bad people: some are and some aren’t. Surplus value exists because of the way the capitalist system works. The capitalist doesn’t produce anything himself, but he gets money because he has money. Most modern economists disagree with this view, but in Marx’s time, it was a tremendous insight and a great leap forward.

Modern Economics Takes a Step Backward

Most modern economists take a more, shall we say, “cooperative” attitude toward capitalism.

Instead of saying that the worker’s labor has a specific value — even if that value is sometimes difficult to calculate — modern economists say that its value is subjective.

In other words, the worker’s output has no specific value: instead, it’s worth whatever the capitalist says that it’s worth. There can be no “surplus value” because the value of what each worker produces is defined as whatever the capitalist pays him or her.

No matter how low wages get or how high profits get, no matter how unfairly the system is rigged in favor of Wall Street, corporations, and the politically-connected rich, it’s all good.

The workers get paid only a pittance because that’s all their labor is worth. The capitalists and their top managers get paid a fortune because — well, because they must be contributing something valuable or they wouldn’t get paid so much. That’s what passes for logic in modern economics.

Money Distorts Our View of the World

Marx’s greatest insight was in seeing how capitalism distorts our way of seeing the world.

Under an economy of simple commodity production, each worker produces a good or service. He/she exchanges that good or service for money, and then exchanges the money for other goods and services. For example, a farmer grows wheat, exchanges some of the wheat for money, and uses the money to buy clothing.

So the pattern of economic life is C-M-C: commodities get money, which in turn gets more commodities. Useful things are the beginning and end of the process, with money seen only as an instrument to get them.

Under capitalism, however, the capitalist starts out with money, uses it to buy goods and services (raw materials, machinery, and labor), and then exchanges the result for more money.

The pattern is now M-C-M: money is the beginning and end of the process, the Alpha and the Omega. No longer merely an instrument to buy useful things, money becomes the center of the capitalist society’s worldview, as it has become the center of ours.

Economic Crises and Unemployment Are Essential

Marx saw occasional economic crises not as a problem for capitalism, but as an essential feature of the system.

Economic crises throw people out of their jobs and into the “reserve army of the unemployed,” to strike terror into any workers who still have their jobs. That makes wages drop and gives capitalists relatively more profit both during and after the crisis.

The current recession follows the pattern Marx predicted. As millions of workers have lost their jobs, and others have taken pay cuts, Wall Street and corporate profits are higher than ever before. There are currently five unemployed people for every new job. Hundreds of people apply even for the most menial and low-paying job openings. Workers know that they can easily be replaced. It’s a race to the bottom.

Update: The New York Times gave additional confirmation of this phenomenon in its July 26, 2010 article “Industries Find Surging Profits in Deeper Cuts.” As the article observes:

Many companies are focusing on cost-cutting to keep profits growing, but the benefits are mostly going to shareholders instead of the broader economy … “There’s no question that there is an income shift going on in the economy,” Mr. Harris added. “Companies are squeezing their labor costs to build profits.”

Marx on Balance

Marx didn’t get everything right. His explanation of what causes economic crises (changes in the “organic composition of capital”) is dubious. His conception of human nature (not discussed here) is completely unrealistic. But on balance, particularly in economics, he got a lot more things right than many modern economists. Maybe that’s why we hear so little about him in our time.

——————————————–
*Classical economists distinguished between economic value (price) and use-value (usefulness). To illustrate the difference, Adam Smith compared water to diamonds. The use-value of water is much greater than the use-value of diamonds: if you don’t get any water, you’ll die. Paradoxically, however, the economic value of diamonds is much greater than the economic value of water. A thing must have use-value in order to have economic value, but they’re not the same.

**The difference is that classical economists thought the natural price of goods was determined by how much labor it took to produce them, but that supply and demand also influenced the current price. Modern “neoclassical” economics says that the equilibrium price of goods is determined by supply and demand, but that labor costs also influence the current  price. The two viewpoints are essentially mirror images of each other, with classical economics focusing on how production affects prices and modern economics focusing on how market conditions affect prices. Both are valid viewpoints, and each is useful in analyzing different aspects of the economy.

For More Information

Marx, Karl, Capital, Volume I. London: Penguin Classics, 1976. There are three volumes of Marx’s Capital, but you can get most of the essential ideas from Volume I, which is available inexpensively in paperback.

Sweezy, Paul M., The Theory of Capitalist Development. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970. This is a classic, definitive, clearly-written primer about Marx’s economic theory. If you just want to get the basics, it’s the best.

Tucker, Robert C., ed., The Marx-Engels Reader. New York: W.W. Norton, 1978.

People on both sides of the Atlantic often misunderstand what the American revolution of 1775-1783 was about.

If you look at the writings of the American founders, many of them proclaimed that they were fighting for their “rights as Englishmen.”

They did not see political separation from Great Britain as a break from their traditional political ideals. Instead, it re-affirmed those ideals in the face of what they saw as the crown’s mistreatment of its colonial subjects. It was only later that the American revolution was re-envisioned as a radical change like the French revolution.

Americans and Britons are still much more alike than different. Our common traditions, language, and civilisation make us the most natural of friends in every area, not just the political.

A co-worker, who just turned 28 and is younger than I am, mentioned that he has high blood pressure.

That reminded me of how fortunate I am to be healthy. It also reminded me of my favorite quote from Alexander Pope‘s Essay on Man, published in 1734:

Hope springs eternal in the human brest,
Man never is, but always to be, blest.

Pope’s point is that we are never satisfied with what we have. No matter how well-off we are, we always want something better.

His ideas are still relevant today, which reminded me that knowledge and learning are very much a social project. We engage in an extended conversation not merely with other people in our own time, but with people in the past and future.

Each of us has a unique and important contribution to make. But together, we create a result that is more than just the sum of our individual contributions. As Robert Oerter remarks in The Theory of Almost Everything, his excellent book about the development of particle physics:

The Standard Model [of elementary particles] was cobbled together by many brilliant minds over the course of nearly the whole of the twentieth century, sometimes driven forward by new experimental discoveries, sometimes by theoretical advances. It was a collaborative effort in the largest sense, spanning continents and decades.

The idea that human beings are self-contained units (“individualism“) might have some applications, but it’s incorrect as a general picture of who and what we are.

We do not become who and what we are in a vacuum, but by interacting with and learning from other people. Without that, most of us would still be grunting in caves and hunting for berries to eat. What affects one of us, affects all of us. As Jesus said,

Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. (Matthew 25:40)

Its individualist bias is the essential flaw in libertarianism, as well as in the closely-related (and more explicitly Nietzschean) preachments of Ayn Rand. Both see human nature as something you can identify by studying an individual person in isolation from others. As far as they’re concerned, you can take an individual human being, put him or her in a box, do some tests, and that gives you a good definition of human nature.

In fact, their view of human nature is even less accurate than that. They believe you can throw away every part of a person except for the reasoning part of the brain. You can then base your concept of human nature solely on rational calculation and economic self-interest.

Libertarianism is thus an ideal political philosophy for a population of disembodied brains. For real human beings, it is somewhat less appropriate.

Copyright 2010 by N.S. Palmer. May be reproduced as long as byline, copyright notice, and URL (http://www.ashesblog.com) are included.

Last night, I was asked to expatiate on the question “What is mathematics?” I didn’t have a lot of time to compose my thoughts, but here they are:

Mathematics is the study of the fundamental structure of reality, together with a set of techniques that enable us to study it.

Although it has many practical applications, its main value is in helping us to understand our world, as well as to show us a powerful, beautiful, and inspiring vision of Truth itself: not of this or that particular truth, but Truth in the Platonic sense, transcendent and all-encompassing.

Only partly in jest, the English philosopher and two-time Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell wrote (in his book A History of Western Philosophy) that mathematician Rene Descartes had a simple proof of God’s existence:

1. If God does not exist, then mathematics is impossible.
2. But mathematics is delicious.
3. Therefore, God exists.

The sheer delight and deliciousness of mathematics have been the primary motivation of mathematicians throughout the ages. Practical applications, important as they are, have seldom been as significant. The mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) discovered abstract techniques and concepts that seemed useless in his time, but are now central in understanding particle physics and string theory. The famous British number theorist G.H. Hardy once remarked (in his book A Mathematician’s Apology) that he had never done any work with a practical application in mind. Hardy added:

Any genuine mathematician must feel that it is not on these crude achievements that the case for mathematics rests … In these days of conflict between ancient and modern studies, there must surely be something to be said for a study which did not begin with Pythagoras, and will not end with Einstein, but is the oldest and youngest of all.

In the 20th century, a few mathematicians denied the transcendent character of mathematical truth. Calling themselves “constructivists,” they argued that mathematics was purely a human creation. They contended, therefore, that mathematical truth was limited to what had been, or at least could be, proven by human mathematicians.

But the constructivists’ argument, whatever its merits, could not drown out the resounding call of mathematical inspiration, the irresistible vision of mathematics as truth, beauty, and goodness, that continues to uplift mathematicians and draw them forward.

Matthew Arnold? Who’s that? Didn’t he play a character on the TV series “Roseanne”?

Nope, that’s a different Arnold. As far as I know, they’re not related. Actor Tom Arnold, who appeared on “Roseanne,” is funnier but has said little about the human condition.

Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold was a 19th-century English poet and social critic who has a lot to say that illuminates our current problems. In his day, he was most famous as a poet, being considered the third-best poet of the 19th century, right after Tennyson and Browning. His other claim to fame was as a son of Thomas Arnold, the real-life headmaster of England’s Rugby School who was fictionalized in the popular 1857 novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays and makes a cameo appearance in the 1969 novel Flashman.

Today, most people read almost nothing that was written before last month, let alone before they were born. As a result, they have no inkling that the furious debates they hear every day are pretty old stuff.

The same issues and arguments arise in society after society, century after century. They arise because they come not from technology or any unique conditions of the present era, but from human nature and the nature of human society. Those things don’t change.

Matthew Arnold on Empathy for Others

There’s a joke about the run-up to the Bush-Cheney regime’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell are sitting in a tavern. Rumsfeld says to the bartender, “We’ve decided. We’re going to kill a million Iraqis and Britney Spears.” The bartender, in horror, gasps “Why are you going to kill Britney Spears?” Rumsfeld laughs and turns to Powell triumphantly. “See? I told you that nobody would care about the million Iraqis.”

Matthew Arnold would understand that joke.

In his book Culture and Anarchy, Arnold describes how Englishmen of his time viewed other races and nationalities:

It never was any part of our creed that the great right and blessedness of an Irishman or, indeed, of anybody on earth except an Englishman, is to do as he likes. And we can have no scruple at all about abridging, if necessary, a non-Englishman’s assertion of personal liberty. The British Constitution, its checks, and its prime virtues, are for Englishmen. We may extend them to others out of love and kindness, but we find no real divine law written on our hearts constraining us so to extend them.

In other words, we reserve our empathy mainly for our relatives, our group, and our nationality. Anyone outside those groups is a second-class citizen of the human race.

We wouldn’t explicitly think of them — whether “they” are Irish, African, Arab, Muslim, or members of some other group — as sub-human, undeserving of compassion or human rights, but that’s how our baser selves feel about them. That’s why we instinctively recoil at the suggestion of killing Britney Spears but are less troubled, at least on a gut level, with the idea of killing a million “foreign devils” who look different from us, who speak an unintelligible language, and who follow a “heathen religion.”

Matthew Arnold had never heard of sociobiology or kin selection, because in his time those theories hadn’t been invented. But he would have understood their basic idea: We tend to help those who are genetically related to us. We regard with suspicion anyone who is not so related. The closer the relation, the greater the emotional bond, so people in the same family have the greatest loyalty to each other. People in the same group or nationality, though more distantly related, are more likely to share genes than people in different groups or nationalities. Hence, they regard “their own” people as having human rights, but are ready to attack and kill “the other” people.

Later in the same essay, Arnold wrote:

And then the difference between an Irish Fenian and an English rough is so immense … [The Irish] is so evidently desperate and dangerous, a man of a conquered race, a Papist, with centuries of ill-usage to inflame him against us … with no admiration of our institutions, no love of our virtues, no talents for our business, no turn for our comfort!

A few substitutions can bring that passage up to date:

And then the difference between an Arab and an American is so immense … [The Arab] is so evidently desperate and dangerous, a man of a conquered race, a Muslim, with centuries of ill-usage to inflame him against us … with no admiration of our institutions, no love of our virtues, no talents for our business, no turn for our comfort!

As the popular saying goes, S-S-D-D: “Same stuff, different day.”

Atheists on the Warpath

It’s Christmas time, and that means one thing: Atheists are on the warpath. Again.

According to Roy Speckhardt, executive director of the American Humanist Association, their message of Christmas cheer is

… just to say that you can be good without God, so their atheist neighbor down the street shouldn’t be vilified as though he is immoral.

Also, of course, if you believe in God, they think you’re a gullible fool. Either that, or you’re so terrified of death that your reason has deserted you and you’ve taken refuge in childish fairy tales.

But let’s get back to Mr. Speckman’s point. Matthew Arnold had a fair amount to say on the subject. He was no secular humanist, but by 19th-century Victorian standards, he was quite a freethinker. He was frankly sceptical about the Biblical stories of miracles, but he didn’t want to get rid of the Bible or belief in God. He just wanted to reinterpret them in ways he thought were compatible with modern science. So atheists find him congenial in a lot of ways.

However, unlike contemporary atheists, Arnold recognized the great value of faith in God and in a transcendent moral order to which we are all accountable. He writes about Christianity, but his remarks apply to any theistic religion (such as Judaism) that includes a strong and enlightened moral code. In his book God and the Bible, Arnold writes:

At the present moment, two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is.

Nobody with eyes in his head claims that an atheist can’t be a good person. It’s just more difficult to be a good person when one believes that there is no transcendent moral order and that one will never be called to account for one’s misdeeds. Life is hard enough for most people. Why make it harder for them by taking away beliefs that reinforce their conscience and strengthen their better selves? Psychology, history, and common sense testify in unison on behalf of Bible-based religion.

Thus, whether true or not, the Bible and theistic religion are socially beneficial. Given that there are also persuasive (though not conclusive) reasons for believing them to be true, it becomes, in the words of George Bush’s CIA director, a “slam dunk.”

Freethinker that he was, Arnold was also too smart to believe that we can safely ignore history and human experience that show the value of faith in God. In that respect, he was a conservative. Another passage in God and the Bible reads like a description of today’s fashionable atheists:

Only when one is young and headstrong can one thus prefer bravado to experience, can one stand by the Sea of Time, and instead of listening to the solemn and rhythmical beat of its waves, choose to fill the air with one’s own whoopings to start the echo.

Readers of a good newspaper seldom have any shortage of blog topics. Quite the contrary: the question becomes how many of the day’s topics there is time to cover.

Of course, good newspapers are few these days. In the United States, there are The New York Times and the McClatchy newspapers. The Wall Street Journal‘s news pages are still pretty good, even if its editorial pages have gone the way of Fox News. Most other remaining newspapers are corporate pablum unfit to line the bottom of a parrot cage.

In the UK, there’s The Times, as always: published since 1785. In spite of being owned by Rupert Murdoch, The Times is a thoroughly respectable and quite intelligent newspaper. American readers might find it a bit challenging. For a slightly less staid and more opinionated perspective in the UK, there’s The Guardian. Also popular is The Daily Mail, roughly the UK counterpart of The New York Post.

Drug Industry Lobbyists Write Speeches for Congresscritters

Today’s Sunday New York Times, as usual, brings a surfeit of topics. The front page reveals that at least 42 Congressional opponents of health care reform got their talking points directly from a lobbyist for Genentech, one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies. Presumably because it could not be verified, the article does not state whether the talking points were delivered in brown paper bags full of money.

Teenybopper Vampire Stardom — Worth It?

The Arts and Leisure section leads with a profile of Kristen Stewart, a teenaged actress who is pop culture’s flavor of the month by virtue of her starring role in the lucrative “Twilight” vampire movies.

She comes across as nice enough, though obviously no Mayim Bialik in the brains department: very few people are. I don’t know if I should envy her for all the money she makes or pity her for growing up in the cut-throat world of showbiz and the unforgiving glare of publicity. Each of us has his or her path to walk, and we all encounter a mix of good and bad. She’ll probably be okay.

What Should We Call This Decade?

The “Week in Review” section covers a range of topics both serious and less so. It leads with an article about what we should call the first decade of the 21st century:

“You know the rules: coin a pithy, reductive phrase that somehow encapsulates the multitude of events, trends, triumphs, and calamities of the past 10 years.”

Some of the suggestions are “the era of misplaced anxiety” and “the decade of disruptions.” Personally, I favor some variation on “the Bush-Cheney nightmare.” Whatever else happened since the year 2000, the United States and the world will need a long time to repair the damage from the Bush-Cheney regime’s irresponsibility and criminality. That overshadows everything else that occurred during the period. A good start would be to arrest and try the regime’s principal actors, but that’s not going to happen.

Why People Oppose Gay Marriage but Really Don’t Care That Much

Another article puzzles over the fact that most Americans oppose “gay marriage” but still adore Ellen Degeneres, the lesbian comedienne who recently married TV actress Portia de Rossi.

I, too, oppose gay marriage and support civil unions, but it’s not on my top 10 list of important issues. My sense is that outside of fire-breathing religious circles, opposition to gay marriage is a mile wide and an inch deep.

Most people have at least an inchoate sense that marriage has always been about having children and raising them in a traditional family. The idea of altering a fundamental social institution to make a minority of a minority feel better about itself strikes them as excessive. They also realize that the word “marriage” isn’t needed for gays to have relationships and even marital rights. They’re fine with gays having relationships. They just want marriage to stay marriage, and not be turned into something else for the sake of political correctness.

The “God Gene,” or “Why Religion Is All in Your Head”

Another article deals with “The Evolution of the God Gene,” and speculates that people believe in God because it gave their ancestors an evolutionary advantage over the non-religious. The author does try, albeit unsuccessfully, to be even-handed in adjudicating between theists and atheists:

That religious behavior was favored by natural selection neither proves nor disproves the existence of gods. For believers, if one accepts that evolution has shaped the human body, why not the mind too? What evolution has done is to endow people with a genetic predisposition to learn the religion of their community, just as they are predisposed to learn its language. With both religion and language, it is culture, not genetics, that then supplies the content of what is learned.

The article’s main thrust, however, remains its conclusion that people believe in God because their brains are wired that way, not because God actually does exist.

But the argument proves too much. People’s brains are also wired to support three-dimensional vision and hearing, which presumably conferred an evolutionary advantage over species without those abilities. And almost no one argues that people see and hear a three-dimensional world just because their brains are wired that way, and not because reality corresponds in some manner to what they perceive. The same applies to belief in God.

Honestly, I think that I prefer Richard Dawkins’s over-zealous hostility toward belief in God to the kind of condescending “pat on the head” that believers get from atheist writers who are trying to be fair.

Once upon a time, it was the Carthaginians who were coming to get you. Or the Etruscans. Or the Spartans. Or the French. Or the Germans. Or the Japs. Or the Spanish. Or the Catholics.

For most of the 20th century, it was the Godless Commies who were hiding under every bed. They worked tirelessly, so we were told, to subvert all that was free and good in our societies. They infiltrated the schools to poison the minds of our young. They infiltrated the labour unions to cripple industry. And they agitated for so-called “civil rights” to foment rioting and “uppitiness amongst the Negroes.”

Since the Bush-Cheney regime’s signature event of “9/11,” it’s been the Heathen Muslims who are out to get us. They’re not Godless, but they’re even worse: they really believe in all that religion stuff. They take it seriously. And they’re every bit as sneaky as the Godless Commies: anyone could be a secret Muslim, and probably is. They’re infiltrating your neighbourhood. They’re building mosques. They’re recruiting the blacks. They’re plotting mayhem. They’re comin’ to gitchya, and they’re gonna take yer wimminfolk, too.

Oh, Good Lord, do we have to go through this homicidal foolishness yet again with another so-called “enemy”? I guess that we do.

“The Other” Is Always Out to Get You

All people have evil impulses: that’s part of being human. In the Jewish tradition, the impulse to evil is called yetzer hara , while the impulse to good is called yetzer hatov. In Christianity, the impulse to evil is embodied in the idea that man is a “fallen” being who is not good by default, like the angels, but who must choose good over evil. For Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, our impulses to evil were in the part of our minds called the Id, while moral conscience was in the superego. These concepts even found their way into popular culture, in classic science fiction movies such as “Forbidden Planet,” about which I will say no more because everyone should see it and I don’t want to spoil the ending. In terms of evolutionary biology, we inherit amoral animal impulses from our pre-human ancestors.

We dislike finding these evil impulses in ourselves. They make us feel ashamed, so we often try to deny that we have them.* One way to deny it is to attribute them to somebody else, via a psychological process called projection. Transactional analysis, a modern popularization of Freud, calls this strategy I’m OK, You’re Not OK. The group to which we attribute our own evil impulses is called the other.

Psychologically, the other is a group of people on whom we project all of our own undesirable qualities: our aggression, lust, dishonesty, irrationality, envy, and so forth. It’s like a film screen on which we watch the horror movie of our own worst and most frightening selves.

We use the other group as a scapegoat for our own sins and shortcomings. By doing so, we symbolically cleanse ourselves of evil and achieve self-esteem. But even if it makes us feel good about ourselves, demonizing the other makes us perceive it in wildly unrealistic and negative terms.

The situation becomes even more dangerous if we can talk ourselves into attacking and killing the people in the other group. Because we see those people as a symbol of our own evil impulses, we see destroying them as a symbolic way to destroy the evil in ourselves. Unfortunately, such acts of aggression mean that we are following our evil impulses instead of eliminating them.

In the West, many people perceive Muslims as “the other.” The situation is complicated by the fact that many Muslims see us as “the other.” Each group attributes only the best, most peaceful motives to itself and only the worst, most aggressive motives to the other. The only way we’re ever going to live in peace is for each group to achieve some realistic understanding of the other group. Freud would say that we need to move beyond seeing each other as psychological symbols of our own projected evil, and see each other instead as real human beings.

Islamic Courts: Coming Soon to Your Town?

The most recent alarms about Islam were raised in a September 14, 2008 article in The (London) Sunday Times. That article was followed two months later by a November 19th New York Times article about the increasing number of Islamic courts in Great Britain and the existence of similar courts in the United States.

According to The Sunday Times:

The government has quietly sanctioned the powers for sharia judges to rule on cases ranging from divorce and financial disputes to those involving domestic violence. … Previously, the rulings of sharia courts in Britain could not be enforced, and depended on voluntary compliance among Muslims.

The follow-up article in The New York Times added that:

But ever since the archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, called in February for aspects of Islamic Shariah to be embraced alongside the traditional legal system, the government has been grappling with a public furor over the issue. [In addition,] Courts in the United States have endorsed Islamic and other religious tribunals, as in 2003, when a Texas appeals court referred a divorce case to a local council called the Texas Islamic Court.

To their credit, both newspapers mention, though without emphasis, three facts that are vital in determining how much of a “threat” Islamic courts are to Western political and legal rights. They leave out a fourth, historical fact that’s also relevant.

Fact #1: Islamic Courts are legally equivalent to arbitration

First, the Islamic courts offer services that are legally equivalent to arbitration — nothing more. Arbitration is a cheaper, faster alternative to trying cases in court. If both parties agree to binding arbitration, then the arbitrator’s decision has the force of law — in Britain, it falls under the Arbitration Act of 1996. That much has nothing to do with Islamic courts. It applies to everyone. In Britain, as in other countries, private arbitrators can decide cases that otherwise might go to court. Sometimes, the private arbitrators are Islamic scholars, but they’re just applying an already-existing law.

In addition, people who take their disputes to arbitration (Islamic or not) go because they agreed to do so. No one is forced to do it.

The New York Times article begins with the statement: “The woman in black wanted an Islamic divorce.” That case is representative. If you want an Islamic divorce, you can’t get one from secular government courts. The article continues:

Indeed, most of the courts’ judgments have no standing under British civil law. But for the parties who come before them, the courts offer something more important: the imprimatur of God.

Fact #2: They handle only civil cases

Second, they handle only civil cases such as divorce, inheritance, and property disputes. Criminal cases, whether involving Muslims or not, are handled by the mainstream legal system. Islamic law (“Shari’a”) has historically prescribed more severe punishments than modern Western societies consider reasonable, but such cases are not handled by Islamic courts in non-Muslim countries. According to one Islamic jurist quoted in The Times, “All we are doing is regulating community affairs in these cases.”

Fact #3: Other religions have similar courts

The Times notes that:

Jewish Beth Din courts operate under the same provision in the Arbitration Act and resolve civil cases ranging from divorce to business disputes. They have existed in Britain for more than 100 years, and previously operated under a precursor to the act.

So there’s nothing new or unique about Islamic courts. Jewish and Christian courts don’t bother us. The only difference is that we haven’t been conditioned to think of Judaism and Christianity as breeding grounds for terrorists.

Fact #4: Historically, Islamic countries gave similar rights to their own religious minorities

That applies especially to Judaism and Christianity, which Islam regards as its closest religious relatives. Jews and Christians living in Islamic countries are considered dhimmi, that is, “protected people” whose religious practices are officially tolerated by the Muslim state (The Concise Encyclopedia of Islam, p. 117). Dhimmi had to pay a special tax and were subject to restrictions that varied depending on the country. However,  Bernard Lewis, a Princeton University professor who is a world-renowned authority on the Middle East and Islam, writes:

The position of non-Muslims in the Muslim world was in general far better than the position of non-Christians or, still worse, deviant Christians in most Christian countries. … In the Ottoman Empire until the 19th century reforms, dhimmi communities, Jews and Christians of various churches, formed their own communities, under their own heads and subject to their own laws, administered by their own courts, in such matters as marriage and divorce, inheritance, and much else. (Islam: The Religion and the People, pp. 56-57.)

Most Britons and Americans don’t know that, but you can be sure that most Muslims know it. And they see Islamic courts as nothing more than equal treatment.

Islam: Religion of Terrorists?

But isn’t the main problem that Islam is a religion of terrorists?

No. It’s true that some Muslims are terrorists. And it’s true that you can find violent passages in the Qur’an (the Koran). But those things apply equally to Judaism, Christianity, and most other religions.

In any large social or religious group, a minority of people will be prone to violence and hatred. In almost any religious tradition, some elements will be enlightened and some will be barbaric. Here are a few relevant facts:

• When two Muslims greet each other, they say Salam alaykum (“peace be with you”), which is closely related (because Arabic and Hebrew are both Semitic languages) to the Jewish greeting of Shalom aleichem (“peace be with you”).

• The five pillars of Islam are (1) The creed “I testify that there is no God but Allah. I testify that Mohammed is the prophet of Allah.” (2) Prayer; (3) Charity; (4) Fasting; and (5) Pilgrimage. If you do all five of those things correctly, then surprise! You’re considered a Muslim. Notice that “terrorism” is not on the list.

• “Muslim fighters are commanded not to kill women, children, or the aged unless they attack first; not to torture or otherwise ill-treat prisoners; to give fair warning of the opening of hostilities or their resumption after a truce; and to honor agreements.” (Lewis, op cit, p. 151)

• “The emergence of the by now widespread practice of suicide bombing is a development of the 20th century. It has no antecedents in Islamic history and no justification in terms of Islamic theology, law, or tradition. It is a pity that those who practice this form of terrorism are not better acquainted with their own religion.” (Lewis, op cit, p. 153)

Can’t We All Just Get Along?

Singer-satirist Tom Lehrer said it best in his song about “National Brotherhood Week:”

Oh, the white folks hate the black folks,
And the black folks hate the white folks.
And the Hindus hate the Moslems,
And everybody hates the Jews.

It’s not easy to see “the other” as someone just like ourselves. However, if we want to be true to the best lights of our religions and our civilizations, we have to try: Jew, Christian, and Muslim alike, along with Buddhists, Hindus, atheists, and everyone else.

It’s our planet and our societies at issue. We can make them into a heaven or a hell. God, by whatever name we call Him, won’t force us to choose one way or the other. He’s leaving it up to us.

* Freud made the very important distinction between having evil impulses and acting on them. We all have evil impulses: that’s part of our nature. Merely having evil impulses does not make us evil. It’s what we choose to do about our evil impulses that determines our moral status. It’s in the choice to turn away from our evil impulses and follow the path of goodness that we become morally good beings.