Review of Neal Stephenson’s “The Baroque Cycle”

(This is a repost of a review written in 2008)

Neal Stephenson's trilogy, The Baroque Cycle, is a must read if you are interested in any of the following: history, The Enlightenment, science, philosophy, reason, how ideas shape world events, the birth of capitalism, pirates, battles, or love stories. Yes, this isn't so much a book review as a trilogy review, but the books can't really be separated.

Stephenson is perhaps best known for his "cyberpunk" science fiction work, most prominently Snow Crash (1992). The Cryptonomicon (1999) was a break from the pure sci-fi realm, and was a brilliant integration of the themes of pre-Internet bubble high-tech entrepreneurship, cryptography, and WWII history. Yes, the book really did span from WWII to the late 90's, and it worked.

However, The Baroque Cycle is unlike anything else he has written, in theme, scope, and depth. It's not just a work of historical fiction, but a celebration of reason and ideas, and the impact both had on the world. First, let's look at the history.

The books follow three primary fictional characters as they weave in and out the massive scientific, philosophical, economic and political changes of the period from 1680 to 1713, and the real world people who shaped the events. As a quick refresher, here is a short list of some of the events from that period in history, all of which are integral to the novels:

• The failed 1683 siege of Vienna by the Ottomans
• Protestant revolution and Oliver Cromwell
• The Restoration
• The Glorious Revolution in England (overthrow of James II and the Catholics)
• 30 Years War
• War of Spanish Succession
• The rise of the Hapsburgs
• Principia Mathematica and the philosophical battles between Newton and Leibniz
• The emigration of Protestants from England to the American colonies
• The Spanish Inquisition

The first character we meet is Daniel Waterhouse, an eminent Natural Philosopher, member of the recently established Royal Society, and close friend of Isaac Newton. The second main character is Jack Shaftoe, an English vagabond who by chance takes up with the Polish army at the siege of Vienna, meets and kills a Janissary (Ottoman warrior), and in the process rescues the third character, a young slave girl from the northern British Isles, Eliza.

Through the course of the novels, these fictional characters interact with all sorts of famous historical figures, from Newton and Leibniz to Kings (James II, William III, Louis XIV), Queens, Electors, a young Ben Franklin, Peter the Great and John Locke, just to name a few. The reader follows them on travels throughout Europe, the Middle East, India, the Americas, and Japan. There are thrilling naval and ground battles, political intrigues, and sword fights.

This is just the backdrop, however. The primary focus of the novels is to showcase the enormous changes in the "system of the world" as Stephenson put it, and these changes were wrought by ideas.

Through Daniel Waterhouse, we see the battle of ideas between reason and mysticism, science and religion, at the start of the Enlightenment. We see the political changes in England, the fight for representative government and religious freedom.

We watch as Eliza rises to become a brilliant, self-interested and rational capitalist, playing and creating the early stock markets, all the while orbiting in the nobility around Louis XIV. As a former Turkish slave, we see her use her money, influence and intelligence to battle slavery and attack the Asiento trade.

Through Jack Shaftoe's travels and adventures, we explore the state of the rest of the world and see the stark contrast between the brilliant energy and progress of England and the backward mysticism and barbarism of the Spanish colonies, India, and southeast Asia. We see Jack struggle with understanding the economic changes in the world as the feudal systems are replaced by markets, banks, complex investments and production of wealth.

All of these threads are woven together in a great heroic story, and through it we witness an amazing period in history as old systems of government, economy and science are turned on their heads, and the stage is set for the birth of a new nation in the Americas. The books end in 1713, but they present the rebirth of reason, progress of representative government, and nascent ideas of individual rights that were exported from England and were the bedrock of American thought.

Stephenson portrays these ideas with a great sense of life and expert skill. The books aren't without some philosophical problems, but they are minor. Overall, they make up a brilliant work of art, and you will be glad to have read them.

If you intend to buy the books...
On Amazon, you will notice that there appear to be many more than just three books in the series. This is because after they were initially released, Stephenson split them into sections, roughly three per original book, and sold as smaller volumes. I recommend buying the original three, however. Their titles are:

• Quicksilver (Vol. 1)
• The Confusion (Vol. 2)
• The System of the World (Vol. 3)

-----------
Update: Make sure to read my review of Ed Cline's Sparrowhawk series. If you would be interested in an amazing historical fiction portrayal of the American Revolution that rivals (and I think betters) the quality and scope of The Baroque Cycle, you'll want to read this review and then the books.

Will 2012 be 1936 Redux?

In 1936, the country was still in the stranglehold of the Great Depression, and despite billions of dollars of government largesse, (largely to swing states and politically important groups) unemployment was still hovering near 20% and more Americans were "on relief" (make work jobs and welfare) than was the case 3 years prior. This last despite FDR's solemn promise to reduce the number of people on relief.

The Supreme Court started to declare some New Deal programs unconstitutional and the Republicans were winning back some key congressional seats, as the country seemingly began to wake up to how destructive the New Deal really was. FDR's poll numbers were diving and Republicans salivated at the chance to kick FDR out of office in November.

On election day, FDR crushed the Republican candidate, winning 523 electoral votes to the challenger's 8, which is the largest margin in American history.

What happened?

Two things happened. First, FDR used his printing presses and his political machine to flood swing states with cash and jobs. From Burton Folsom's New Deal or Raw Deal?:

In 1935, Congress had allocated $4.8 billion for the newly created WPA to use for relief work, and much of that cash the president had personal discretion in distributing. What that meant was that state governors had to come hat in hand to Washington hoping to persuade the president to build roads, dams, bridges, and model cities in their states.

...In the four months before the 1936 election, 300,000 men were added to the WPA. In the month after the election, 300,000 were promptly removed from WPA work. As Thomas Dewey observed, "Three-hundred thousand men and their families moved on and off relief as pawns of New Deal politics."

...When, for example, Roosevelt heard that thousands of WPA workers were to be laid off October 1—the month before the election—he told Morgenthau, "I don't give a god-damn where he gets the money from but not one person is to be laid off on the first of October."

Clearly, this was an assault the Republicans could not fight. "As the campaign wore on, and with the New Deal money spigots turned on high, Landon [the challenger] fell behind more and more. Landon won a majority of donations from businessmen, but that cash was dwarfed by Roosevelt's federal money machine. Roosevelt's patronage trumped Landon's protests of high prices, high taxes, failed programs, and executive usurpation of power."

It seems like a clear cut answer, and that alone likely sunk the Republicans despite the clear evidence in their favor. However, something else made it impossible for them, no matter whether they had a stellar candidate (they did not) or more money than FDR.

The second thing that led to FDR's landslide victory is that the Republicans were entirely lacking in principles. Folsom indicts them, then and now:

Landon had a dilemma, and it has been a Republican dilemma ever since 1936. So many Americans were now working in federal programs that he risked offending about ten million voters if he argued for cutting programs to balance the budget. But if he agreed to continue the programs, then the balanced budget crowd would be unhappy and the people on the programs, although no longer angry, would still have no real incentive to ditch the man who created so many of their federal jobs. As one reporter quipped: "Don't switch Santa Clauses in mid-stream." Roosevelt accurately attacked Landon in Syracuse as follows: "You cannot promise to repeal taxes before one audience and promise to spend more of the taxpayers' money before another audience.... You simply cannot make good on both promises at the same time."

Sound familiar? On the one hand, in the midst of widespread unhappiness we have federal largesse working in the favor of the statist incumbent. On the other hand, we have wishy-washy, unprincipled statists making laughable and half-hearted arguments, all the while supporting the same basic goals as those they are fighting against.

Will the 2012 election end up with the same result as the 1936 election? Time will tell, but if history is any guide, it's doubtful the country will see any relief from this disastrous presidency any time soon.

"What is your back-up country?"

I've asked myself this question a number of times in the past year.

When do you suppose the citizens of imperial Rome first realized that their way of life had tipped into inexorable decline?

A few foresaw the impact of Caesar's usurpation of the rule of law, marking his ascension as the beginning of the end. . . .The plebeian masses, accustomed to bread and circuses, were probably oblivious until Rome was finally sacked. Everything was fine yesterday, how did these barbarians arrive at our gates?[. . .]

The other day while out to dinner with a number of tech investors and entrepreneurs the conversation turned to a disturbing subject. "What is your back-up country?" These people weren't kidding. Property was being purchased. Contingency plans were being made.

What will it take to make most people realize that the grand American experiment is tottering on the brink? The destruction of their life savings? The nationalization of vast industries? The high seas teaming with pirates? A humiliating military defeat at the hands of primitives in a far off land?

Make sure to read Bill Frezza's whole piece at RealClearMarkets. It looks like he's starting to see the Endarkenment coming, too.

While I've given some thought to contingency plans, I think it's likely that if America falls down it will be uglier than we can imagine, and it will drag the rest of the world down with it for a long, long time.

[HT: Doug Reich]

The Typical American

It seems that foreign observers often have keener insights about the fundamental American nature and sense-of-life than do Americans themselves.  The following was written in 1929 by British historian B. H. Liddell Hart, in the preface to his biography, “Sherman: Soldier, Realist, American.” In the years after the Great War, Hart was attempting to learn historical lessons to avoid the horrific and useless mass casualties of deadlocked trench warfare, and in the process, seemingly developed a healthy admiration for the man and his country:

This study of Sherman is an attempt to portray the working of a man's mind, not merely of a man's limbs and muscles encased in uniform clothing.  The man is William Tecumseh Sherman who, by the general recognition of all who met him, was the most original genius of the American Civil War.  And who, in the same breath, is often described as "the typical American."  To reconcile the apparent contradiction, of the exceptional and the general, is a problem which in itself invites study and excites the creative imagination.  It is curious that the attempt at a solution has been neglected for so long.  For if this man was both so original in mind and so characteristically American, that combination—which many in Europe would say was paradoxical, if not improbable—may help to illumine our understanding not only of the last seventy years but of the tendencies still in the womb of fate.

. . .this study of Sherman may serve to give the European reader a clue to the better understanding of the American character as it has evolved from its "prototype," and to give the American reader an opportunity of testing, by the acid of Sherman, the purity of the present product and how far the reality corresponds with the ideal set up by that most realistic of idealists.

If that doesn't get you fired up to continue reading the book, I don't know what would.

Yet, at the same time, I can't help but think about what Liddell Hart—transported 80 years into the future—might have to say about how the "purity of the present product" in America stands up to the acid test.

Flexible Tactics, Integrated Strategy, Inflexible Purpose

While reading Nothing Less than Victory: Decisive Wars and the Lessons of History by John David Lewis the other day, I came across something that I knew immediately I needed to post here. In the chapter about William Tecumseh Sherman, Lewis examines Sherman's goal-directed actions as he planned and executed his march through the South, and how he refused to make sacrifices or take any irrational actions that might stand in the way of his ultimate goal. For instance, he did not get bogged down in any battles over entrenched positions.

Most of all, he had to keep a firm eye on his strategic goal, to get from Atlanta to the sea, and then to move north to meet up with Grant. This goal would take precedence over secondary targets, such as taking a city like Augusta; it was the end point that must not be forgotten. All else was a means to an end.

These observations allowed him to adopt a strategy of "multiple objectives." His goal was the sea and then Lee's army in the north; these were certain. But he left open where he would arrive at the sea; this could depend on circumstances. Major Thomas Osborn wrote that no one—from the generals to line officers—knew Sherman's destination, but "no one had any misgivings about the success." Scipio may have used the same approach when planning the assault on New Carthage, and later when moving by sea to the coast of Africa; the particular terminus could be left open. For both commanders, a firm goal and fluid actions to attain that goal were not incompatible; flexible tactics within an integrated strategy could achieve an inflexible purpose. In this way he could keep the enemy off guard and unsure of where he was going. "I can take so eccentric a course" Sherman wrote "that no general can guess my path." [italics in original, bold added]

The sentence I highlighted above could be a motto for a successful life, let alone an effective and principled way to wage war. It can apply broadly to any goal-directed action. Do you want to find a new job? Save for a vacation? Write a book? Lose weight? Identify your goal, your long-range purpose, develop an integrated strategy taking into account all variables, possible conflicts, and most importantly your principles, and then keep your eyes open for any tactical measures that will move you relentlessly toward your goal.

Note that this is in no way being pragmatic. An integrated strategy means that it relies on principles, values, and morals, and any particular tactic that would violate those would not ultimately move one closer to his goal. The moral is the practical when one's morality is egoistic and one acts based on reason.

A firm goal and fluid actions to attain that goal are not incompatible; flexible tactics within an integrated strategy can achieve an inflexible purpose.

Kleist and Kant: The Destructive Nature of Anti-Reason Philosophy

A popular and gripping characterization in literature is that of the bright flame that tragically dies out too soon. The promise of youth—creativity, passion, innovation—is painfully, brutally crushed, and the path such destruction takes through the ideas, actions, and influences of the character make for dramatic fiction.

The sketch Ian Brunskill provides of the Enlightenment-era author Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) suggests that his was a real-life version of this tragic arc. Brunskill’s review of a collection of Kleist’s works is a fascinating account of that story. As a measure of how extraordinary Kleist’s life was, he notes that scholars have long been confounded by Kleist’s short life and career, and the violence of his death.

A century ago, a distinguished Austrian scholar observed that Heinrich von Kleist was "the most difficult problem in literary history" and that the more we learned about him, the more of a problem he became. That state of affairs has not changed.

Kleist's short and mostly unhappy life was a muddle of contradictions. His small dramatic oeuvre ranges disconcertingly wide, from comedy of manners to domestic tragedy, from social realism to gothic fantasy. His prose, of which Peter Wortsman has here collected and translated a welcome new selection, is stranger and more unsettling still. Romantics, Expressionists and Existentialists have all claimed him as an inspiration. Kafka called him a "blood-brother." But Kleist belongs to no literary school and remains, as Thomas Mann observed, in a class uniquely his own. Outside the German-speaking lands, he is all too little read.

While Brunskill and others see Kleist’s work and life as a “difficult problem,” we shall see that it is not such a mystery after all. Ayn Rand held that ideas drive the course of human history, and also that ideas—those both explicitly and implicitly held—guide individual men’s lives. What happens when one of the most profound and fundamental philosophical battles in history is waged not only in the halls of academia, but in the mind of one young man?

Kleist’s Cultural and Philosophical Milieu

Kleist grew up during the zenith of the Enlightenment, the era when man was throwing off the shackles of mysticism and tyranny and exploring what reason and freedom could provide for this life on earth. To his great misfortune, however, he also lived in the time and region that would become the seat of the Counter-Enlightenment. As philosopher Stephen Hicks writes in Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (pp. 24-27):

The era from 1780 to 1815 is one of the defining periods of the modern era. During those thirty-five years, Anglo-American culture and German culture split decisively from each other, one following a broadly Enlightenment program, the other a Counter-Enlightenment one.

While the French experimented with English Enlightenment thought before succumbing to Rousseau and the terror of the French Revolution, “[m]any Germans, however, had been suspicious of the Enlightenment long before the French Revolution. . . most were deeply troubled by its implications for religion, morality, and politics.” Their response was growing hostility to the Enlightenment. This was the culture in which Kleist grew up.

Brunskill echoes this idea in his review as it played out for Kleist himself. Brunskill briefly describes Kleist’s promise and the change that came over him after exposure to the first and greatest of the Counter-Enlightenment thinkers:

Kleist in his youth had espoused with enthusiasm all the optimism of the Enlightenment. Reason would conquer all; happiness would come with experience and understanding. In March 1801, however, by his own account, he seems to have encountered the thought of Immanuel Kant (it is not clear what precisely he read), and his world fell apart. By testing the nature and limits of human knowledge, Kant had sought primarily to establish the possibility of a meaningful metaphysics. To Kleist, however, it was much grimmer than that: Kant had shown, he believed, that empirical knowledge was unreliable, reason illusory, truth unattainable and life quite meaningless. "My sole and highest goal has vanished," he wrote. "Now I have none."

This encounter with Kant’s ideas, and the terrible transformation it caused in Kleist, has been termed his “Kant-Krise” or “Kant Crisis.” This was the internal clash of Enlightenment thought and its antithesis, and Kleist’s attempt to make sense of his world again. Significantly, most modern thinkers believe Kleist’s interpretation of Kant is severely mistaken, at best. Recall that the accepted wisdom is that Kant was an Enlightenment thinker and defender of reason. Brunskill says that Kleist’s reading of Kant “was an extreme overreaction, not to mention a misreading of Kant's philosophy, but Kleist was like that.”

“[I]f, in Kleist's hysterical misconception of Kant's critical philosophy, truth is no longer even theoretically possible, then a literature arising out of this conclusion would point in both directions toward a void,” is one of the ways author Robert Norton describes the situation, in a review of James Phillips’ The Equivocation of Reason: Kleist Reading Kant for the University of Notre Dame’s Philosophical Reviews. “For Phillips, Kleist's works enact his realization that understanding in any conventional meaning of the word is no longer possible.”

Brunskill and Norton hold that Kleist got Kant wrong, but they both agree that the impact of Kleist’s understanding had a profound impact on his work, and imply that it ultimately led to his destruction. As Brunskill says:

Through it all [his troubles, trials, and adventures] Kleist wrote, though to no very wide acclaim: essays, anecdotes, shorts stories, plays. Then, on Nov. 21, 1811, at around four in the afternoon, on a small hill by the shore of the Wannsee lake just outside Berlin, having first shot dead a woman called Henrietta Vogel, who was the wife of an acquaintance and who in the subsequent autopsy would be found to have been suffering from incurable cancer, he placed a pistol in his mouth and killed himself. He was 34.

Kleist was young, bright, and full of promise, and brimming with Enlightenment optimism. In reading the works of Immanuel Kant, Kleist believed that the foundation of his worldview had evaporated in a cloud of internally consistent and impossible to refute arguments, “that empirical knowledge was unreliable, reason illusory, truth unattainable,” and to Kleist, the result was that he saw life as being “quite meaningless.”

That Kleist’s interpretation had a profoundly negative impact on his mind is not at issue, as we have his own words to confirm it. But was his interpretation correct? Was this a tragic misreading of Kant, or did he grasp earlier than most the logical implications of Kant’s work, and the tragedy was that he couldn’t think his way out of it?

Kleist as Prophet of Postmodernism?

Kleist thought that Kant’s ideas had cast him adrift in an unknowable sea, slashing his moorings to an objective reality he used to think it was possible to know, and this apparently led to his ultimate self-destruction; it seems he simply could not live in that new unknowable world. Though as mentioned before, Kant is generally seen to be a part of the Enlightenment, not counter to it, and as a defender of reason. Here again we must turn to Stephen Hicks and his excellent book, Explaining Postmodernism, where he says, (p. 28)

Kant is sometimes considered to be an advocate of reason. Kant was in favor of science, it is argued. He emphasized the importance of rational consistency in ethics. He posited regulative principles of reason to guide our thinking, even our thinking about religion. . . Thus, the argument runs, Kant should be placed in the pantheon of Enlightenment greats. That is a mistake.

The fundamental question of reason is its relationship to reality. Is reason capable of knowing reality—or is it not?. . . This is the question that divides philosophers into pro- and anti-reason camps, this is the question that divides the rational gnostics and the skeptics, and this was Kant’s question in his Critique of Pure Reason.

Kant was crystal clear about his answer. Reality—real, noumenal reality—is forever closed off to reason, and reason is limited to awareness and understanding of its own subjective products.

As Hicks later notes, this is both a crucial and controversial interpretation. It is outside the scope of this essay to delve more deeply into the arguments in favor of this position, so instead I will simply include one more passage from Chapter 2 on Kant and the Counter-Enlightenment and suggest that you read it and judge for yourself.

In the history of philosophy, Kant marks a fundamental shift from objectivity as the standard to subjectivity as the standard.

Wait a minute, a defender of Kant may reply. Kant was hardly opposed to reason. After all, he favored rational consistency and he believed in universal principles. So what is anti-reason about that? The answer is that more fundamental to reason than consistency and universality is a connection to reality. Any thinker who concludes that in principle reason cannot know reality is not fundamentally an advocate of reason. That Kant was in favor of consistency and universality is of derivative and ultimately inconsequential significance. Consistency with no connection to reality is a game based on subjective rules. If the rules of the game have nothing to do with reality, then why should everyone play by the same rules? These were precisely the implications the postmodernists were to draw eventually.

Based on the limited evidence presented, it seems that Kleist grasped these implications quickly and deeply, and it shook him to the core. "My sole and highest goal has vanished. Now I have none."

Kant the All-Destroyer

Untethered from reality as he thought he was, Kleist’s life became a mostly unhappy “muddle of contradictions,” and of his writings Brunskill says:

The universe inhabited by the characters in his works is bleak and bizarre. . . In his essay "On the Theater of Marionettes," an ironic, fictionalized dialogue, Kleist considers Man's fall from Eden and asks whether human self-consciousness is less a blessing than a curse. The characters in his works, particularly in his extraordinary short stories, try to make sense of a senseless world, to behave rationally in the face of madness, to act with purpose while at the mercy of cruel chance.

. . .Fate, for the lovers in "The Earthquake in Chile," is utterly malign. Religious faith, for the iconoclasts in "Saint Cecilia or the Power of Music," amounts to murderous bigotry. Political principle, amid the racial strife of the Haitian revolution in "The Betrothal in Santo Domingo," is a cloak for primal violence. Recounting these horrors, Kleist does not moralize or philosophize. He does not even try to explain.

In Norton’s review of Phillips, we see an evaluation that supports my points, from two thinkers who are nevertheless sympathetic to Kant’s ideas (prior to the passage below, Norton writes, “Phillips has many highly original and thought-provoking takes on ostensibly familiar Kantian topics.”):

The consequence, as Phillips describes it, is a terrible erosion of the real world, the realm of positivity, into complete relativity, or contingency. . . In this way, Phillips wants to show that the terror Kleist experienced when confronted by the critical philosophy was entirely warranted: Kant's elevation of Reason necessarily entailed the derogation of the world. This is also where the two writers meet, or as Phillips puts it: "Kant and Kleist together pursue a work of destruction". But whereas Kant destroys the world for the sake of philosophy, Kleist takes the fragmented pieces that no longer cohere as the signs of a kind of negative truth. For Kleist, error becomes the supreme, indeed sole principle.

Hicks explains the philosophical implications of what Kant did (p. 42):

Kant’s contemporary Moses Mendelssohn was thus prescient in identifying Kant as “the all-destroyer.” Kant did not take all of the steps down to postmodernism, but he did take the decisive one. Of the five major features of Enlightenment reason—objectivity, competence, autonomy, universality, and being an individual faculty—Kant rejects objectivity. Once reason is so severed from reality, the rest is details—details that are worked out over the next two centuries. By the time we get to the postmodernist account, reason is seen not only as subjective, but also as incompetent, highly contingent, relative, and collective. Between Kant and the postmodernists comes the successive abandonment of the rest of reason’s features.

Could this philosophical path to postmodernism give us insight into the inner turmoil experienced by Kleist? Based on his fiction as described by Brunskill, it appears that Kleist explored most of the key philosophical themes comprising the abandonment of reason in pursuit of postmodernism.

And ultimately, in a bizarre episode, he shot a woman and then himself, ending his brief life. To me, this reads like the eulogy of a man of reason who became unhinged by the adoption of tragically contradictory premises. In a way, it reminds me of a real-life variation on the internal philosophical and psychological struggles of Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and the self-destruction of virtuous promise when exposed to the horror of malevolent ideas, as exemplified by Ayn Rand’s character of Cheryl Taggart in Atlas Shrugged.

The impact of ideas reverberates throughout history, but also in the minds of individual men. Good ideas, objectivity, reason, further men’s lives and allow them to reach new heights of creativity and productivity. Destructive ideas have the opposite effect. In most men, the good and bad ideas mix in an unexamined mishmash, and the benevolence of others and the security of modern industrial society allow them to evade the consequences while carrying on their lives. But as shown by the following passage from Nietzsche, some men are deeper and more profound thinkers than that, and the ideas they hold have more of an impact, for good or for worse.

The . . . danger is to despair of truth. This danger confronts every thinker who begins from Kant's philosophy, assuming that he is a vigorous and whole human being in his suffering and aspiration and not merely a clacking thinking- or calculating-machine.... As soon as Kant would begin to exert a popular influence, we should find it reflected in the form of a gnawing and crumbling skepticism and relativism; and only among the most active and noble spirits, who have never been able to endure doubt, you would find in its place that upheaval and despair of all truth which Heinrich von Kleist, for example, experienced as an effect of Kant's philosophy. "Not long ago," he once writes in his moving manner, "I became acquainted with Kant's philosophy; and now I must tell you of a thought in it, inasmuch as I cannot fear that it will upset you as profoundly and painfully as me. We cannot decide whether that which we call truth is really truth or whether it merely appears that way to us. If the latter is right, then the truth we gather here comes to nothing after our death; and every aspiration to acquire a possession which will follow us even into the grave is futile. If the point of this idea does not penetrate your heart, do not smile at another human being who feels wounded by it in his holiest depths. My only, my highest aim has sunk, and I have none left."

The end of Nietzsche’s quotation of Kleist, “My only, my highest aim has sunk, and I have none left,” appears to be a slightly different translation of the quote used by Brunskill, and obliquely referred to by Phillips. The absence in their accounts of the of crucial context of Kleist’s words, and of Nietzsche’s agreement and support, is now glaring. Nietzsche said, in effect, “No wonder the poor boy self-destructed.”

As dramatic and tragic as Kleist’s life and death are, it is instructive to move back for a moment from the individual to the historical, and note that the destruction of Kleist by the ideas of Kant is a sad and sadly accurate allegory on the state of Western civilization. “Once reason is so severed from reality, the rest is details,” whether it is in the mind of one poor man, or the course of an entire culture.

The state of our culture now bears striking similarities to the “muddle of contradictions” in Kleist’s life as the last vestiges of Enlightenment thought in America tear themselves apart at the seams. We are living Kleist’s life, writ large across the tableau of Western civilization.

Kleist was unable to resolve the contradictions between Kant’s philosophy and his own love of reason and the world—or worse, he accepted Kant’s ideas wholly—and it destroyed him. The culture itself is in the midst of the same battle, but fortunately for us, the philosophical answer that was unavailable to Kleist is ours for the taking. Ayn Rand’s ideas, and specifically in this context her epistemological discoveries, re-engage and expand the battle for reason, bringing it back to its proper place as the faculty for knowing objective reality. It is idle speculation to wonder if such ideas could have saved Kleist—though my guess is that they certainly could have given him a way to escape the trap he was in—but it is clear that if an Enlightenment culture is to be reclaimed and reinvigorated with reason, Rand’s ideas will be a key to the salvation that never came for Kleist.

My Favorite Teacher's Failure as Object Lesson on the Importance of Learning History Properly

I can distinctly remember the sense of doom I felt when I drew the topic for my research paper/presentation out of the hat. It was my senior year in high school in my favorite class with my favorite teacher, and what could have been a fun and fascinating project quickly turned into a deepening sense of dread for the hours and hours to come, slogging through a topic I had no interest in.

Mr. O’Brien was my favorite teacher. He taught my 10th grade English class, and he was funny, smart, motivated, and one of the few bright spots in my otherwise wasted three years at the central Minnesota school. I had the benefit, or perhaps misfortune, of having lived in Colorado until then and had a taste of a truly excellent high school, so I knew just how terrible things were. Mr. O’Brien’s class was one of the few things I didn’t hate about Minnesota.

In senior year, he taught Humanities, which was a full year survey of the sum total of human history through art, music, and philosophy. It was thrilling. I can still remember learning about Platonic Forms for the first time, and thinking how odd the entire concept was.

Sometime after winter break, it was time to start work on our big research papers, from which we were also to craft a presentation for the class. The trouble was we couldn’t pick our own topics. Mr. O’Brien put numbers in a hat which was passed around the class. As someone picked a number, they shouted it out and Mr. O’Brien read off the corresponding topic as he wrote it on the blackboard. It was a crazy amalgam of topics from “The Hohenzollerns” to “The Great Wall of China” to “The Battle of Marathon,” none of which we had covered during the year. I sat in suspense and apprehension as the hat was passed to me. I don’t remember what my number was, but I certainly remember the topic: Mary, Queen of Scots.

This was perhaps the first time I had ever heard the name. I didn’t know what to think, but I was a bit worried. Other students were similarly perplexed and concerned. “But what do you want me to write about the Great Wall of China?” someone asked. “Whatever you want,” Mr. O’Brien replied. “What is a Hohenzollern?” a kid named Randy asked. “Go look it up,” was the reply.

I checked out some books and started reading, and it was an incomprehensible mess. All I could find was what seemed to be soap operatic accounts of he said/she said, he betrayed/she betrayed. I didn’t have an iota of context for what was happening or why. So I put it together the best I could, got my ‘A’, and that was that. I walked away knowing just as little as I did before.

What was Mr. O’Brien thinking? It wasn’t until recently that I thought of this episode again, and came upon a theory. I think he was attempting to rectify the terrible lack of classical education we all had. I never took history, even in Colorado; it was all Social Studies, and therefore, basically worthless. It was an endless stream of disconnected facts, rote memorization, and a healthy spattering of multiculturalism. Mr. O’Brien’s Humanities class was designed to give us a taste of what we had been missing all along, and the research papers were just a part of that. But in lobbing contextless topic grenades at us in the hopes of getting us to dig deeper into history, he failed miserably. His assignment violated the hierarchy of knowledge, leaving us flailing away in a pool of sinking concretes (a mess of facts that, rather than helping to form a concept, piles up and sinks out of sight, out of mind.)

I had thought then that the presentation portion was training to help our public speaking skills, and it likely was to some extent. But I suspect that as each topic was designed to get us to dig deeply in one area, the presentations were meant to teach the other students about the topics they didn’t research themselves. Then after the whole exercise was completed, we would theoretically all be richer for it. This also failed miserably.

A few students got juicy topics that were easy to grasp, or to which they already had some context. “The Battle of Verdun,” in comparison, would have been a cakewalk to anyone who had seen an old war movie. The majority of topics were as disconnected from our context of knowledge as was mine, and the other students got as little out of the exercise as I did. As a result, their presentations were as superficial as mine was, and thus no one got anything out of anything.

The tragedy of all of this is that these topics are fascinating, if you have the right contextual knowledge. I applaud and respect Mr. O’Brien for what he did for me in that Humanities class--and even for what he was attempting with the research papers--but in trying to rectify over a decade of mis-education in history by forcing random topics on us with little guidance and almost no historical context, he was hanging us out to dry.

What a shame it was that I had no idea who Mary, Queen of Scots was, or why she was even worthy of study. If I had only known about the English Reformation and Henry VIII, and about his establishment of Anglicanism and the later reign of Bloody Mary who set about trying to reclaim England for the Pope, I would have understood Mary, Queen of Scots and her conflict with Elizabeth. The intrigues with Spain and the other powers in Europe would have made sense, and in the wider context of the Reformation on the Continent, the struggles between Protestantism and Catholicism would have made the story that much richer.

Instead, I spent weeks of work in a haze, reading, writing, practicing my presentation, all the while having no idea why anything I was doing had any value at all. I felt somewhat betrayed by Mr. O’Brien back then, since such an arbitrary exercise didn’t fit in with the otherwise logically constructed course. Looking back on it now, I understand what he was trying to accomplish, and why he failed.

Hiroshima as Rorschach Test

Required reading in high school twenty years ago was the book Hiroshima by John Hersey. I remember being appalled at the graphic scenes of death and destruction. And because I also grew up in the era where actual teaching of history was replaced by social studies, I had very little context for evaluating whether dropping the atomic bombs was justified or not. I had seen enough old movies to know we had fought the bad guys for the right reasons, and I even knew that the assertion was that Truman dropped the bombs to prevent more American deaths from an invasion of Japan, but Hiroshima was very compelling--not enough so to convince me to condemn the bombing as immoral, but most of my classmates did. It wasn't until years later that I went back to the topic and sorted it all out.

Warren Kozak writes in today's Wall St. Journal that on this, the 64th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, the historical event "has become a Rorschach test for Americans. We see the same pictures and we hear the same facts. But based on how we view our country, our government, and the world, we interpret these facts in very different ways."

While attempting to present a balanced argument, contrasting both sides of the debate, he clearly thinks that the risks of an invasion to American lives and the calculation that dropping the bomb would force a surrender were more than sufficient justification for the action. It's worth reading his whole argument.

But if the topic interests you and you're curious about the details of the war with Japan, how America's actions were rationally self-interested and thus some of the most moral in the history of war, and how Japan came to be one of the freest, richest countries on Earth mere decades after near total devastation, run, don't walk, to The Objective Standard and buy the article "Gifts from Heaven": The Meaning of the American Victory over Japan, 1945, by John Lewis. From the free bit you can see on the web:

The victory over Japan remains America’s greatest foreign policy success. Today, we take for granted a peaceful, productive, mutually beneficial relationship with the Japanese people. But this friendship was earned with blood, struggle, and an unrepentant drive to victory. The beneficent occupation of Japan—during which not one American was killed in hostile military action—and the corresponding billions in American aid were entirely post-surrender phenomena. Prior to their surrender, the Japanese could expect nothing but death from the Americans.

If there is one historical event that every American should study, beyond the American Revolution and the Civil War, it is America’s victory over Japan in World War II. Even more than the victory in Europe in the same war—in which we divided Germany with the Soviets—the victory over Japan remains the cardinal example of a complete, unambiguous, and fundamentally unshared American military victory.

Debates on the Founding Era - Part 2

In the last post, a commenter asked why the "apparent omission" of mention of individual rights in the Constitution, which was also one of the questions Uttles asked all along. My reply was long, so I'm reposting it here (edited slightly). The quotes I pulled bear directly on many of the issues discussed previously, and though they are long, I think all of the text is relevant to the debate.

What follows is part of the political and historical context of what the framers thought and argued for. It is crucial also to keep in mind the explicit and implicit philosophical and moral context of the time, the climax of the American Enlightenment, and the following from Leonard Peikoff's The Ominous Parallelssets that context well:

The Americans were political revolutionaries but not ethical revolutionaries. Whatever their partial (and largely implicit) acceptance of the principle of ethical egoism, they remained explicitly within the standard European tradition, avowing their primary allegiance to a moral code stressing philanthropic service and social duty...

The American Enlightenment, like the European, came to an abrupt end. "Its ideas were soon repudiated or corrupted," writes Herbert Schneider, "its plans for the future were buried, and there followed on its heels a thorough and passionate reaction against its ideals and assumptions." It was a reaction prepared for by the Enlightenment itself, by its own philosophic deficiencies, by the seeds it had nourished and allowed to sprout—the seeds of an irrationalism it was not equipped to combat and an altruism it predominantly endorsed.

With this philosophical context, it is easier to interpret the historical context, and identify 1) what the framers thought about rights, 2) why they thought it unnecessary and perhaps even counterproductive to include specific protections in the Constitution, and 3) that even if they had written a rock-solid defense of individual rights it would have been a floating abstraction, and not a strong enough protection from undermining by their contradictory premises and the mounting philosophic war that was to soon come from Europe.

---

I found some good historical quotes and notes in Miracle At Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention May - September 1787 by Catherine Drinker Bowen.This book details the debates, including quotations from all the members of the Convention and other relevant items from the press and other quarters. The following quotes are from the chapter about the rejection of a Bill of Rights (Ch. 21, pp 244-248):

When the Constitution was published in the newspapers… and the Antifederalists gathered their strength for opposition, nothing created such an uproar as the lack of a bill of rights. What had the Convention been thinking of, to neglect a matter so elementary, so much a part of the heritage of free people?

The Convention’s stand, however, was reasonable, if mistaken. No delegate had been against such rights. Merely they considered the Constitution covered the matter as it stood. And when… Pinckney and Gerry moved for a declaration “that the liberty of the press should be inviolably observed,” Roger Sherman said at once it was unnecessary; the power of Congress did not extend to the press. Seven to four the states again voted no.

There is a fascination in reading the delegates’ later defense of their position. To Alexander Hamilton a bill of rights was more than unnecessary. It would be dangerous, he said. “Why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power [in Congress] to do?” Hamilton argued that bills of rights originally were stipulations between kings and their subjects, like Magna Carta, which was “obtained by the barons, sword in hand, from King John.” Whereas in the American government the people, having surrendered nothing and retained everything, have no need of particular reservations.

So here we see it put forth that the specific rights need not be enumerated because it was assumed that the Constitution was a strict bound for action that Congress could take, and nothing more. All rights not mentioned were held by individuals. This is essentially the argument given in the 9th amendment: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

The Constitution was, in their mind, was a basic list of instructions for creating the forms of government, and did not require more grand statements that, as Hamilton said, “would sound much better in a treatise of ethics than in a constitution of government.” Further quoting Bowen:

The new Constitution in [James] Wilson’s view was not a body of fundamental law which would require a statement of natural rights. Rather it was municipal law, positive law… Not a declaration of eternal rights but a code for reference.

Quite evidently the Federal Convention looked on its work as practical, everyday business; all along they had avoided high-flown phrases about the rights of man. Such rights, John Dickinson was to argue… “must be preserved by soundness of sense on honesty of hears.” Compared with these qualities, what, he demanded, are bills of rights? “Do we want to be reminded that the sun enlightens, warms, invigorates, and cheers” or how horrid it would be, to have his blessed beams intercepted, by our being thrust into mines or dungeons” Liberty is the sun of society, and Rights are the beams.”

Liberty is like the sun, and Rights follow naturally as beams of sunshine. They are in the very air, these men said, so why should we list them? The Constitution only describes the very few things that the government may do, and nothing else.

That being said, others did see something insidious afoot, or were prescient about the slow creeping of tyranny.

In Portland, Maine, a printer name Thomas Wait… maintained “there was a certain darkness, duplicity and studies ambiguity of expression running through the whole Constitution which renders a bill of rights peculiarly necessary. As it now stands, but very few individuals do or ever will understand it, consequently Congress will be its own interpreter.”

To this, Bowen says that arguments like this were only responses to ideas that were too new, and “minds offended by novelty are apt to complain of darkness or ambiguity in matters not yet digested.” Of course, we know that Wait was unfortunately very correct.

One of Patrick Henry’s fellow Virginians provides a good conclusion to this investigation. As Bowen writes:

With charity and much perceptive good sense, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, a congressman—no member of the Convention and fiercely anti-Constitutionalist—excused the Convention’s fault concerning a bill of rights. Lee said that when men have long and early understood certain matters as the common concerns of the country, they are apt to suppose these things are understood by others and need not be expressed. … The framers looked upon the Constitution as a bill of rights in itself; all its provisions were for a free people and a people responsible. Why, therefore, enumerate the things that Congress must not do?

In the end, they all thought that individual rights were as plain as the nose on your face, and the culture was such that it was inconceivable that there could come a time when the government would not protect them. Americans had made it out of Plato’s cave. Who in their right mind would go back in?

Of course they were wrong, but also, they simply lacked the knowledge to better ground the theory of individual rights in reality. Ayn Rand said (paraphrasing and recalling from memory… if anyone can find a reference please let me know) that she could not have developed her philosophy without the example of the Industrial Revolution. I take this to mean that seeing the example of near free market capitalism helped concretize the value of liberty that previous philosophers were only able to vaguely imagine.

So I come back to my initial assessment that the Founders accomplished something amazing and they deserve our thanks for the amount of freedom and prosperity their works afforded us. But now, armed with more complete knowledge, we need to carry on the fight if we are to fully secure our liberties.

Debates on the Founding Era

I had no idea posting the video of John Ridpath's talk about Patrick Henry would incite such a debate, but it did. For five days, a blogger named Uttles and I have been debating, sometimes contentiously, the merits of the Constitution and the motives of the men who wrote it.

I think it has been a very interesting exchange of ideas, and so I'm going to reproduce it here so it doesn't languish in the obscurity of buried comments. With some parts of the comments redacted -- where we sniped at each other a bit -- here are the (perhaps ongoing) C. August vs. Uttles debates.

[Update: see Part 2 of these debates]

---

Uttles said... 7/9/09 5:28 PM
Patrick Henry is my hero. I watched this speech and I don't think it did Henry justice. Yes, it did tell about a lot of the great things he did, but it didn't focus on the great things he's not recognized for. The passage of the Bill of Rights is wholly due to Henry, this is true, but the constitution is still a flawed document that has allowed such things as the Sherman Act, The Federal Reserve Act, the Income Tax Amendment, etc, etc, etc. The constitution did not go far enough to protect individual rights and Henry knew it. He gave a great many speeches before, during, and after the Virginia ratification convention outlining the many reasons that the constitution was itself anti-federal, and why it destroyed individual rights. The great tragedy of our time is that we all think the constitution instituted liberty when in fact it destroyed it.


C. August said... 7/10/09 1:11 PM
Your statement about the Constitution has me wondering if you're not evaluating it in the correct historical and philosophical context. You said that people "think the constitution instituted liberty when in fact it destroyed it," but that statement is based on what I think are some major misconceptions. In my view, that notion ignores the facts of reality and the state of knowledge of the foundation and source of individual rights that the Founders had.

As Peikoff said, to paraphrase, America was founded with an amazingly good political system, but built on a wobbly foundation.

The Founders looked to the natural rights thought of Locke and others, who based their theory of natural rights on their supposed "god-given" existence. So they held an implicit individual rights-respecting philosophy in their politics, but explicitly advocated Christian altruism as the ideal. These contradictions -- ones that weren't resolved until Ayn Rand just 50 years ago -- also showed up in the Constitution.

You can't on one hand laud the Founders for establishing the first moral society and government on earth which sprouted unprecedented freedom and prosperity for generations, and on the other hand fault them for not having knowledge which wouldn't be available for another 200 years. Their accomplishments, Henry's and the rest, were the pinnacle of human achievement at the time. For that they deserve the justice of our deep appreciation.

Their contradictions and the insidious forces of anti-life philosophies proceeded to erode the wobbly base upon which the Founders built the political protections of our liberties, to the point where today they are under great peril. But their ideas and the government they created were vulnerable precisely because they lacked the knowledge that wouldn't come for 200 years.

I agree that this seems tragic... it was so close, so agonizingly close, and the success that did happen was a testament to how close to being right they were. But now we have the knowledge, and it's time to work to fully reclaim the liberties that Henry fought for.

All I'm saying, to sum up, is that we owe the Founders their due, including for the creation of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, but because we are armed with greater knowledge due to Ayn Rand's works, we can identify and fix the problems they couldn't solve.


Uttles said... 7/11/09 12:00 AM
First off, let me say that I do not have the time to study this enough to be considered an expert, but about 6 months ago I did read the Federalist Papers, the Anti-Federalist Papers, and Son of Thunder (about Patrick Henry - my favorite anti-federalist.) It was at that time that I drew my conclusions about the Constitution.

Having said that:

You can't on one hand laud the Founders for establishing the first moral society and government on earth which sprouted unprecedented freedom and prosperity for generations, and on the other hand fault them for not having knowledge which wouldn't be available for another 200 years.

I disagree with this. The founders clearly had the knowledge or the Declaration of Independence wouldn't have been written the way it was. Sure, they didn't identify it as Objectivism and yes they did make reference to a creator but more importantly they identified our rights as natural, inseparable from our lives.

My theory on the chain of events is this: The new found wealth of the gentry class in the colonies was in jeopardy with the crown issuing more and more edicts governing trade, culminating in the stamp act. The ruling elite (who were not capitalists by any means, they were the pull peddlers and pull profiteers using the might of the British governors to their advantage) were fine with that silly college boy Jefferson writing the Declaration of Independence because they had seen in the reactions of the people to "Common Sense" how that language got the regular folks all fired up and ready to fight, but when the war went on for years and the colonists actually won it the reality struck them that they were now faced with a country full of individualists who wanted to have complete control of their lives. This would mean that their most dreaded enemy, an able competitor free of the shackles of government, could take them down.

So a compromise was made. Instead of constructing a government for the sole purpose of protecting individual rights (as the Declaration states so succinctly) they decided to allow each one of the states full sovereignty so that they could in fact govern their people however they wanted to. This is when the Articles of Confederation were instituted. Those articles contained no language whatsoever about individual rights.

It then became apparent that the large monied interests in certain states were not able to effectively control their customers in other states. This was mainly the banks vs the farmers as the banks were using currency manipulation to put the farmers into a state of perpetual indentured servitude (kind of like how everyone in America is now an indentured servant to the government.) So then, they invented a crisis here and a crisis there along with imagined foreign crises to scare the people into amending the original Articles. Never let a good crisis go to waste, right?

Only they didn't amend the Articles. As is what happens in any compromise situation, evil always wins. They came back to the table and pulled a bait and switch. Neither Jefferson nor Henry were able to make it to the new convention, so they had little barriers for their new plan: centralized power completely overruling the state governments and having no specific protections of individual rights: The US Constitution.

To see what I'm talking about in all of its obvious glory, just look at these two intros:

"When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

and

"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Now, can you honestly say the constitution was created to protect our individual rights? I say it was created to erode them. Why else would they have had to add 10 amendments to the thing to outline certain rights that the people should have? Because they didn't want the people to actually have them, but they had to get Patrick Henry to shut up somehow, so they "let" us have a few derivative rights, but not the natural rights of free men.


C. August said... 7/14/09 6:38 AM
I have read arguments from both the Federalist and Anti-Federalist (Democratic Republican) sides, and I generally come down on the latter's side of the debate. However, as I have said before, they all suffered under a lack of knowledge of the metaphysical grounding of rights, of the understanding that rational egoism is the only valid and just moral system, and even of the science of economics and that laissez-faire capitalism is the proper political and economic system. Even Jefferson employed mercantilistic policies against the British, restraining trade and thus violating individual American's rights. This is because they didn't fully grasp the contradictions between their explicit (altruism) and implicit (egoism) moral codes.

Where you see some sort of grand plan by the authors of the Constitution (and apparently all the states that ratified it?) to actively destroy the liberties that they had all just fought a long and horrific war to secure, I see honest mistakes and a general context of knowledge that lacked certain fundamentals.

Philosophy and ideas shape history, and we're seeing today the failure of the culture to continue progressing from the contradictions present in the founding era, towards the full, proud embrace of rational egoism. Now that we know, because of Ayn Rand, the proper philosophical foundation for rights and what political system fully protects them, we can pursue it to secure those rights. But pointing to the difference between the Declaration and the Constitution and asserting that everyone should have grasped the true nature of individual rights by reading the Declaration is absurd. It took Ayn Rand, 200 years later, to figure that all out.


Uttles said... 7/14/09 10:17 AM
Your entire argument rests on the notion that the founders had nothing but good intentions and the only reason they didn't explicitly define and protect individual rights in the constitution is that they didn't understand objectivist philosophy and its ramifications.

To me, that argument is clearly false. Obviously they hadn't discovered Objectivism (I wish they had) but they had discovered the importance of individual rights, as well as the consequences. Evidence of this exists in the writings of the day, from Paine to Henry to Jefferson and on. There were many invocations of individual rights throughout the prominent pamphlets and essays of the time, including Brutus, the anonymous Farmer, etc.

So for some reason, the members of the convention that created the constitution decided to omit any such declaration or definition of individual rights (despite Jefferson's great work on the Declaration.) It is not factually correct to say they omitted this because of ignorance. So then why did they?

Look at the circumstances of the individuals who created the constitution and you will see.

Also remember that many scare tactics were used to get states to ratify the constitution, including threats of revolts, indian attacks, British reprisals, etc, etc. Also remember that it wasn't a vote of the individuals within a state that was required for ratification, and that the individuals in each state were represented by those who were voted in by a strictly limited electorate.

Again I am not sure of the mechanisms of this process... conspiracy, fear, lack of conviction, political expediency, debt pressures... I don't know. I doubt much written history of anything negative on the part of the Founders would have been allowed to survive this long anyway - history is written by the winners. The point is that the result, the product of the founders, tells you everything you need to know. The constitution had to be amended immediately to include the slightest notion of individual rights, a patronizingly short list of derivative rights from life, liberty, and property, and this is a tragedy that mere ignorance could not have afforded.


C. August said... 7/14/09 11:14 AM
I understand what you're saying, and you make good points about the conflicting pressures the founders had to address. I'd also add the concern they had in looking at how the ancients fared in creating their governments: they did not want to repeat the mistakes of the Greek city states, or of the Roman republic. And, they were concerned with the very real threat from Europe.

In this situation, the framers of the Constitution set out to figure out how to construct a government that would unite the states which were essentially at economic war with one another, and that would "secure the blessings of liberty." In that context, they held the moral truths of individual rights as self-evident, which means that they didn't need to be fleshed out... they were obvious and everyone agreed on them. Obviously, they were wrong.

They also operated under conflicting moral codes. I think you are simply not giving enough credit to this crucial fact. That is the "wobbly base" I mentioned earlier, and you'll see where I got that idea in the following quote.

Leonard Peikoff wrote, in the Ominous Parallels (p 118, end of Ch. 5):

Such was the American conflict: an impassioned politics presupposing one kind of ethics, within a cultural atmosphere professing the sublimity of an opposite kind of ethics.

The signs of the conflict and of the toll it was to exact from the distinctively American political approach were evident at the beginning. They were evident in Jefferson's proposal for free public education; in Paine's advocacy of a number of governmental welfare functions; in Franklin's view that an individual has no right to his "superfluous" property, which the public may dispose of as it chooses, "whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition"; etc.
...

Philosophically, America was born a profound anomaly: a solid political structure erected on a tottering base.

The Founding Fathers did not know that the era in which they lived and fought and planned was on the threshold of yielding to its antipode. They did not know that they had snatched a country from the jaws of history at the last possible moment. They did not know that, even as they struggles to bring the new nation into existence, its philosophic gravediggers were already at work, cashing in on the period's contradictions: in the very decade in which the Founding Fathers were publishing their momentous documents, Kant was publishing his.

Symbolically, this is America's philosophical conflict, running through all the years of its subsequent history. The conflict is: the Declaration of Independence, with everything it presupposes, against the Critique of Pure Reason, with everything to which it leads.

You may be right that some of the framers of the Constitution had bad intentions -- and here, I can only assume that you have Hamilton fixed in your mind as one of the villains -- but I think even Hamilton actually believed what he was doing was right. And in the absence of a better argument than "rights come from God and are unalienable," there was little more than a conflict of opinions.

Even had they asked Patrick Henry to write the Constitution with a full enumeration of rights, just like we might hope to have, the seeds of philosophical destruction were already sown in the wider culture. Because they could not ground individual rights in their proper metaphysical base and recognize egoism as the proper morality for man, they were vulnerable to attack. A better Constitution may have warded off the decline a bit longer, but that document in itself could not have protected the culture as a whole.

History has shown that calling individual rights self-evident is not a proper defense of them against their philosophic enemies. That "tottering base" is the cause, and we're now dealing with the effects.

More Thoughts on Scipio Africanus

Although the title of this post refers to Scipio, I'm more concerned now with his historians. In my previous Scipio-related post, I described B.H. Liddell Hart as "a good historian." Upon reading Dr. John Lewis' book review of another work on Scipio, I have my doubts as to how good he was.

Dr. Lewis reviewed Richard A. Gabriel's Scipio Africanus: Rome's Greatest Generalin the Michigan War Studies Review, and he has this to say about Scipio, Gabriel, and Hart:

Richard Gabriel, a retired U.S. army officer and a distinguished and prolific military historian, has set out to correct a historical injustice: the misunderstanding and neglect that is often the fate of great military commanders. There is a plethora of books on Hannibal, who launched a war of conquest and was defeated, but no current scholarly biography of the genius who defeated him. B.H. Liddell Hart's 1926 Scipio Africanus: A Greater than Napoleon was written in defiance of the anti-Scipionic, pro-Hannibalic works then flooding the market, but as Gabriel notes, that work is neither scholarly, accurate, nor comprehensive. ... Gabriel has crafted an energetic narrative that remains true to the evidence. He stresses Scipio's stature as "Rome's Greatest General," without falling into conjecture or unsupported encomium. [bold added]

So, while Scipio is still deserving of more positive treatment than he has generally received, it seems that the only historical work I have read about him was overly gushing and inaccurate in places.

Dr. Lewis notes that Gabriel's book "exposes inconsistencies in the major sources—Polybius gets some dressing down, while the poetic Punica of Silius Italicus is given a bit more credence than it deserves—and then presents commonsensical solutions to the problems that arise." I had intended to read Polybius next, but I think I'll get more out of Gabriel's treatment, and will then be better armed to tackle Polybius with a more critical eye.

Considering the positive review by a man I know to be an expert, it looks like I have another book to add to my reading list!

ARCTV - Ridpath on Patrick Henry

Thanks to Myrhaf for making me aware of a video posted to the relatively new ARCTV. (new to me, at least)

John Ridpath, in February of 2004, gave a speech detailing the history and many shining moments of Patrick Henry, one of America's greatest heroes. To paraphrase something B.H. Liddell Hart wrote about the great Roman general Scipio Africanus:

For proof of this claim look at the progressive and co-ordinated steps by which, starting from the valley in America's darkest hour as the storm clouds of the British menace gathered, Patrick Henry climbs steadily and surely upwards to the summit of his aims, and plants America's flag on the sunlit peaks of freedom. Henry is a mountaineer, not a mere athlete of liberty. The vision that selects his line of approach, and the oratorical gifts which enable him to surmount obstacles, are for him what rock-craft is to a climber.

This video by Dr. Ridpath is incredibly moving. He gets choked up speaking about the greatness of the man, and I got choked up watching it. Watch the video by clicking on the image below. You won't regret it.

Musings on Scipio Africanus and B. H. Liddell Hart

Scipio Africanus, the Roman consul and general who saved the Republic by defeating the supposedly unbeatable Carthaginian, Hannibal, and winning the Second Punic War, is an historical figure whose greatness has been unjustifiably ignored. In 1926, the military historian B. H. Liddell Hart set out to rectify this, and published Scipio Africanus: Greater Than Napoleon.

This book was recommended to me in the comments of a previous post and at just over half way done, I can already heartily second the recommendation. It's a thrilling, insightful story of a true hero and military genius, and Liddell Hart draws on a near contemporary of Scipio, the Greek historian Polybius, who was able to interview Scipio's close confidant and direct subordinate, Gaius Laelius, as well as gain access to the Scipio family archives. That events over 2,200 years ago could have such a detailed, objective account is simply amazing (in addition to the work of the Roman, Livy, who Hart references and appreciates but doesn't trust as much, out of concern that Livy was propagandizing the glory of Rome).

Now, on to a few unrelated musings on Liddell Hart's work.

Musing 1: You keep on using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. (Inconceivable!)
It wasn't until just last night, half way through the book, that I solved a puzzle that had bothered me until that point, having to do with Hart's use of the word moral. Hart, in describing Scipio, mentions repeatedly that not only was he a military genius, but in the modern terms, he could read people. In other words, he could very effectively rally his troops, and lead them, not with cruelty or overly authoritarian means, but by understanding their motivations and guiding them, and he called this a moral quality. He also describes Scipio as wanting to "strike not at their flesh, but at the moral Achilles heel" of the enemy, and that a delay after the capture of one city "allowed the moral effect" of the city's capture "to sink into the minds" of the enemy.

What the heck does he mean by "moral"? Finally, the particular construction of a sentence gave me the clue I needed. I unfortunately can't find it, but it was essentially like this: "Scipio was able to raise up the moral of the troops to fight even harder." So Hart often, but not always, means morale! Sometimes he means "taking moral actions," sometimes he means esprit de corps, and sometimes a strange mix of the two. This will help as I finish the book.

Musing 2: A Good Historian Is Not Immune From Mistakes Or Sour Grapes
Just because Liddell Hart has written an excellent history of Scipio Africanus does not mean that he, himself, is immune from some significant mistakes in other areas of history. The biggest one that jumped out at me occurred on page 72. Here, Hart describes what happened in Spain after Scipio initially expelled the Carthaginians. Scipio then fell ill and there were rumors of his death. Some of his troops took this as a cue to revolt, and two of the Romans' major Spanish allies, the tribes led by Mandonius and Andobales, also revolted. Here is what Hart wrote about this episode.

Mandonius and Andobales, dissatisfied because after the expulsion of the Carthaginians the Romans had not obligingly walked out and left them in possession, raised the standard of revolt, and began harassing the territory of the tribes faithful to the Roman alliance. As so often in history, the disappearance of the oppressor was the signal for dependencies to find the presence of their protector irksome. Mandonius and Andobales were but the forerunners of the American colonists and the modern Egyptians. There is no bond so irksome as that of gratitude. [bold added]

The context for this sentiment is that B. H. Liddell Hart was British. I can only assume that in comparing the revolt of barbaric tribes of Spanish warriors and the American Revolution, he seems to think that the colonists should have shut up and paid their taxes as "war debt" for the French and Indian War. In other words, the principled American fight for unabridged liberty was unjustified, and they should have been grateful to the crown, showed due deference, and kept quiet.

This, Mr. Liddell Hart, is clearly a case of sour grapes. It's also horribly, drastically wrong, and shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the conflict. This seemingly offhand comment, added to a few others, makes me think that Hart's evaluation of Scipio, though generally good, may be skewed to be overly negative. I think I'll have to look up the original writings of Polybius and Livy.

Hart also wrote a book on William Tecumseh Sherman, and his view of America as expressed above makes me wonder how he would treat a polarizing hero like Sherman. Has anyone read it? John Lewis made a reference to it in his excellent TOS article, William Tecumseh Sherman and the Moral Impetus for Victory, so I'm curious how Hart viewed the man.

OK, that's it for my random musings on Scipio and his historian. If you've made it this far, hopefully you've learned something, or at least been prompted to look into some of these historical works. After finishing this book, I intend to dig back into "Miracle at Philadelphia," and hope to post more interesting quotations from it.

The President's Delusional History Lesson

President Obama's speech in Cairo contained a little history lesson... one that may surprise those who actually know their history. He said:

As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to Islam. It was Islam... that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. ...

Islam? Islam carried the light of learning through centuries? The same "religion of peace" that violently persecuted those thinkers in the years prior to 1000AD who tried to adopt and teach Aristotelian philosophy? It was Islam, not a few Arabs drawing upon Greek philosophy, that is responsible for birthing the Enlightenment?

I strongly recommend that you head over to The Charlotte Capitalist blog and read an excellent and detailed historical account, drawn from multiple sources, that rips apart the President's despicable distortion of history. I'm sure his words played well with his target audience, stroking their fragile egos as they try to evade the fact that the only intellectual progress their culture made in all of history was due to ancient Greek philosophy. But he performs a grave disservice, and as The Charlotte Capitalist said, "It is a disgrace because it attacks not only the true tool of human progress (reason), but it attacks the philosophical and historical roots of the country of which he is president."

A Brass Top

In the last year, basically since I started blogging, I have been prone to reading at least two books at the same time. I was never like this before. I didn't notice the phenomenon until I read a post by LB, in which she noted that her husband always did it, but it was a new thing for her. She said, and I agree completely:

Rather than confusing me, as I thought it most definitely would, the multiple book strategy gives me two distinct advantages to my previously one-book-to-finish paradigm: 1) I can prioritize my reading time, and 2) I always have something I want to read on hand.

With that, I've been reading a history book about the framers of the Constitution, but at the same time I've started up the Sparrowhawk series again. I already finished Book One: Jack Frake, and just started on Book Two: Hugh Kenrick.

Over the past year, I have struck up a friendship with Ed Cline, the author of these amazing works, and if there is one value I have gained from starting this blog, this friendship is it. It's an interesting experience to read a work of literature written by someone you know. My favorite authors have traditionally been distant, and inaccessible either by death or by immense fame. I would have thought that reading a book by someone I know would be strange, in that I wouldn't be able to take it seriously.

Perhaps it's all in the quality of the art, but I don't think it will matter how many times I read Sparrowhawk. I'm immediately transported to the world just a few decades before the Revolution as soon as I crack open one of the volumes.

Book Two: Hugh Kenrick tells of the beginning of one of the two heroes of the series, a young noble who rises above the fawning pettiness and toxic arrogance of class so typical of aristocracy, and eventually becomes one worthy of title of Independent Man. It opens with Hugh, six years old, delighting in the workings of an exquisite brass top given him by his father, and how he fights an older noble's son who tries to take it from him by "right." The book follows as he grows and matures.  At the age of nine, Hugh prepares to meet the son of the king, the Duke of Cumberland, hero of many battles, as he comes to tour the Kenrick's estate.

Hugh and everyone else is schooled in the ways of expected niceties and protocol, and Hugh looks forward to meeting someone worthy of the title "hero." But he sees the vacant eyes, easy cruelty, and fatness of the Duke as he walks up the steps, and in his disgust and disappointment, forgets to bow. His evil uncle, the Earl of Danvers, gives him an ultimatim: apologize to "restore the family honor" or be whipped until bloodied and exiled for a year. 9-year-old Hugh chooses to be whipped and exiled rather than betray his principles.

Months later, when the family has individual portraits commissioned, the painter is taken aback by a quality in Hugh he can't define and that makes him uncomfortable. Hugh chooses a specific setting with a particular composition for the portrait, and Westcott, the artist, asks of the significance of the brass top Hugh wants included:

"Why do you wish to include the top, milord?" He paused. "I ask this so that I may better understand its place in the portrait."

"Because, when it is set in motion, it stands by its own rules. Then it is not an inert thing, like a tree or a rock."

Westcott had smiled. "Ah! But your hand must set it in motion, milord. So it cannot be as independent as you say."

"It is the symbol of a soul, Mr. Westcott. Or of a mind. Every man has one, and it is like a top, fashioned by himself. He must keep it upright, by his own hand. He must exert the effort. Otherwise it will topple, and lay inert and useless within himself, not a living thing at all. Or another hand may set it in motion, and then he will have no say in its motion or course." [bold added]

May we all mind our tops, keeping them upright, by our own hand.

Miracle at Philadelphia: QOTD 3

Part 3 in a series of quotations from "Miracle At Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention May - September 1787" by Catherine Drinker Bowen.

In my last post on the topic, I alluded to the fact that the members of the Convention relied on popularly held ideas that were simply accepted as obvious and thus needed no explicit statement. Of such concepts as life, liberty, and property, and their nature as inextricably tied together, Bowen said "such declarations were already cemented with their blood."

Later, on page 71, she relates the following:

The Continental Congress, composing its first Declaration and Resolves (1774), had said the colonists were entitled to "life, liberty and property." In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson altered it to read, "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." If nobody knew exactly what that meant, they did not need to know. They felt it, breathed it in the Revolutionary air. To pursue happiness signified that a man could rise in the world according to his abilities and his industry. [bold added]

Recognizing the vagueness of "the pursuit of happiness," Bowen basically says that it didn't matter much at the time because it was obvious to all thinking men what was intended. In the next paragraphs, however, she hints at what was to come because of this opening -- I'd call it a weak spot in the armor caused by a contradiction never rooted out -- left by the Founding Fathers.

Here was no quarrel, as today, between human rights and property rights. Madison said that "a man has property in his opinions and the free communication of them, he has property in the free use of his faculties, in the safety and liberty of his person." ...

The Federal Convention was not interested in the redistribution of property, nor did it meet for such a purpose. Threatened with anarchy, the founders desired order, and to blame the Convention as "conservative" is to look on 1787 with the eyes of today. [bold added]

Bowen correctly identifies that there is a philosophical difference between 1787 and today, and leaves no indication of her thoughts on which is correct -- a fine course of action for a historian. However, she doesn't go further to identify exactly what the difference is.

With the benefit of Ayn Rand's insights, we can now see that the chink in the armor of the founders was the moral code of altruism. Because they had not identified that a consistent defense of the political principles of individual rights rests upon the moral code of rational egoism, they did not predict that failing to consistently and explicitly defend property rights would eventually leave us with the statist shell of a Constitution and country we see around us.

The founders took for granted that "the pursuit of happiness" implied property rights, but 200 years of philosophical assault left us with the possibility that there could be a conflict between human rights and property rights. I have previously described what I call the anti-concept of human rights, a muddled term that serves to destroy the concept of individual rights by confusing it with "positive" rights to legally loot from productive individuals. "Human rights," as a commonly held concept, means the sacrifice-by-right of the haves to the have-nots, i.e. altruism.

What the founders saw as obvious and "in the Revolutionary air" -- that liberty and property are inseparable ideas -- has been all but wiped from the public consciousness by altruism. It will certainly be an uphill battle, but what we can take away from this example is that now, armed with the knowledge we need to fully defend life, liberty, and property, we have a tremendous opportunity to pick up where the founders left off.

Two-bit Robespierres

Head on over to The New Clarion for Myrhaf's latest.  I only wish that the average American would even understand the reference when he says "...we have two-bit Robespierres like Barbara Boxer, Barney Frank and Barack Obama consuming our wealth in order to buy reelection and maintain their grasp on power."  I suppose if they did—and understood both how apt and profoundly negative that evaluation is—we might not be in the situtation we're in now.

Miracle at Philadelphia: QOTD 2

Continuing my ongoing (does the second of two count as "ongoing?") series of quotations from "Miracle At Philadelphia: The Story of the Constitutional Convention May - September 1787," today I have a passage that is quite different in tone than the last one.

My last post discussed "the quality of the men who founded the country, their passion and the sharpness of their intellects, and the profound seriousness with which they took their mission," and was, I thought, rather inspirational.

Today's post is somewhat cautionary. It should become clear why I say that.

Context: As the delegates to the Convention got down to work, the Virginians set the tone of the entire affair by proposing what became known as the Virginia Resolves. They consisted of 15 resolves that essentially outlined a new national government. Today's quote picks up the day after the Resolves were proposed, as they got down to business:

Characteristically, the Convention never stayed long upon theory. Its business was not to defend "freedom" or to vindicate a revolution. That had been done long ago, in July of 1776 and later, when colony after colony created its state constitution, flinging out its particular preamble of political and religious freedom. The Convention of 1787 would debate the rights of states, but not the rights of man in general. The records show nothing grandly declaratory or defiant, as in the French constituent assembly of 1789. America had passed that phase; had anyone challenged members, they would have said such declarations were already cemented with their blood. In 1787 the states sat not to justify the term United States but to institute a working government for those United States. One finds no quotations from Rousseau, John Locke, Burlamaqui or the French philosophes, and if Montesquieu is invoked it is to defend the practical organization of a tripartite government. When the Federal Convention discussed political power, governmental authority, they discussed it in terms of what was likely to happen to Delaware or Pennsylvania, New Jersey or Georgia.

Most members of the Philadelphia Convention, in short, were old hands, politicians to the bone. That some of them happened also to be men of vision, educated in law and the science of government, did not distract them from the matters impending. There was a minimum of oratory or showing off. Each time a member seemed about to soar into the empyrean of social theory -- the eighteenth century called it "reason" -- somebody brought him round, and shortly. "Experience must be our only guide," said John Dickinson of Delaware. "Reason may mislead us." [bold added, italics in original]

The Convention had a very specific mission: to craft a national government that was grounded in rights -- this meant state's rights, though individual rights were assumed -- and to get it to work, because they saw real threats to the Union in the way things were going. And of course, the rights of man were eventually addressed in the Bill of Rights.

But one wishes that this Convention had not relied on "declarations [that] were cemented in the blood" so much, and instead, allowed for quotations from John Locke to inform the proceedings explicitly.

The author, Catherine Drinker Bowen, was careful at the end to state that Dickinson and others used the word "reason" in a different sense than we do, but there is an inherent problem with using experience and the only guide when you are proposing something that has never been done in the history of the world.

None of this should cast a pallor on their achievement, but it does give one pause as an example of focusing only on practical considerations, without also concerning oneself with moral ones.