Coals to Newcastle

287 – 272 million years ago

It seems like Gaia really went on a bender in the late Carboniferous, getting drunk on oxygen. By some estimates, the atmosphere was over 30% oxygen back then, compared to 21% today. Living things took advantage of the opportunity. Insects apparently face an upper limit in size because they rely on diffusion through tracheas instead of forced respiration through lungs to get oxygen into their bodies. With more oxygen in the air, this limit was raised. The Carboniferous saw dragonflies with a wingspan up to 70 centimeters, and body lengths up to 30 centimeters, comparable to a seagull.

This happened because plants were turning carbon dioxide into organic matter and free oxygen, and the organic matter was accumulating. With carbon dioxide being removed from the atmosphere, the late Carboniferous and subsequent early Permian saw a reduced greenhouse effect, and global cooling. This was another Ice Age, with ice caps around the southern pole.

A lot of organic carbon ended up being buried. Much of the world’s coal, especially high quality anthracite, has its origin in Carboniferous tropical forests. Western Europe and eastern North America lay in the tropics at the time, and got a particularly generous allotment of coal. Three hundred million years later this bounty would fuel the early Industrial Revolution. (Thanks partly to some of my Welsh ancestors, who helped dig it up back in the day.)

Slava Ukraini

February 24, 2022, and after.

Russia’s attempted seizure of Ukraine this year, and the ensuing ongoing war, crystalized a new international division. This division runs deeper than the machinations and miscalculations of one autocrat. A recent report, A World Divided: Russia, China and the West, summarizes the current global divide in political attitudes. Some major findings:

Compare positive versus negative attitudes to Russia …

to China …

and to the US.

The last map is a near mirror image of the first two. Together the maps depict a world split in two, a Western / maritime rimland and an Old World heartland. 

And the division reflects a deeper divide in politics …

and social attitudes …

The division in attitudes between the West and the two Eurasian powers has developed only recently, but it has roots that go back for centuries. At least this is consistent with the thesis of a recent book, The Deep Roots of Modern Democracy: Geography and the Diffusion of Political Institutions. The authors present a modern data-driven version of an old argument, that maritime trade and naval power foster liberal, constitutional, and democratic government. Where access to the sea and trade was limited, autocracy was (and is) more likely to prevail. Also, maritime zones tend to smaller political units – city states and nation states (albeit sometimes with overseas colonies) – while more land-based zones, riverine and steppe, tend to sprawling multinational empires. Here is a map (from an earlier article by the authors) of one set of underlying geographic determinants: natural harbors. 

And here is their causal model:

Natural harbors, plus other factors in European history (here are a few from this blog), have fostered democratic development in some parts of Europe, and Europeans have brought democratic institutions with them as they have moved overseas (albeit sometimes democracy for whites only).

The appeal of a particular set of Western, and specifically Anglo-American, ideals – individualism, constitutional government, national self-determination – is broad but not universal. They developed in a particular geographic and historical context. A large portion of the world does not (pace the American Declaration of Independence) hold these ideals as self-evident truths, and even regards them (not always entirely without reason) as a mask for cynical power politics. 

And so The End of History is unfinished work.

Europe of nations

September 1992 – April 1995

The 1991 disintegration of the Soviet Union was not widely anticipated. Academic Sovietologists were probably less likely than knowledgeable non-academics to anticipate that the Union was not going to last. One of the small number of people who got it right was public intellectual (and long-time Senator from New York) Daniel Patrick Moynihan. He argued a decade earlier that the Soviet system faced serious economic problems and that ethnic divisions were likely to lead to a collapse of the Union, as they had to earlier colonial empires like the British.

Being of Irish ancestry helped Moynihan to appreciate the continuing importance of ethnicity and nationalism under the cover of universalist ideologies. As warfare diminished in importance over the later twentieth century, the earlier Orwellian nightmare of a world divided into a few warring super-states receded, and an older vision of a Europe of nations revived. In 1900, neither Ireland, nor Poland, nor the Czech Republic was an independent country; by 2000 they were all running their own affairs – not because they built unstoppable military machines, but because they mobilized feelings of imagined community.

However there is a dark side to the return to nationalism. The newly independent nations of Eastern Europe were successful in resolving older border conflicts partly owing to a wave of mass killing and mass expulsions during and after the Second World War that tidied up the ethnic map. In Yugoslavia, where different nationalities were still heavily intermingled, the return to nationalism resulted in a civil war that killed about 130,000 people, and introduced the phrase “ethnic cleansing” to the language.

At the time, the fall of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw pact, and of communism is Eastern Europe, was widely seen as the decisive victory of one ideology – liberal capitalist democracy – over another. As it has turned out however, the fall of communism in Eastern Europe did not represent The End of History, even European history. Nationalism helped finish off the Soviet Empire; now it inspires both the defenders of Ukraine and Russian invaders.

On a scholarly note: Is ethnic nationalism an expression in the modern world of an evolved human psychology, a psychology shaped by the process of kin selection, as some scholars have argued? I considered the matter in an article, Kin selection and ethnic group selection (and here’s a blog post). The short answer: it’s complicated. Here’s my conclusion to the paper

Both the study of prehistory and political psychology are changing rapidly in the face of new evidence from biology, especially genetics. It would be intellectually satisfying if we could integrate these findings under the heading of an already existing theory, by equating ethnicity with kinship and applying kin selection theory. But we’ve seen that this won’t work. Ethnicity, like kinship, may have to do with shared genes. There may even be such a thing as ethnic nepotism. But an evolutionary theory of ethnicity – even the barebones theory presented here – has to be something more than the theory of kin selection, because of the way ethnicity is entangled with some of the most complicated aspects of human sociality: norms, rules, and political ideals, and their connection with large-scale population processes.

When the Berlin Wall fell

9 November 1989

I’m not sure of the age range of readers here, but I’m old enough to have been in Berlin, and East Germany, just months after the Berlin Wall fell. I’ve still got an expired passport with a DDR (German Democratic Republic = East Germany) stamp in it. I visited with my wife, who knows Germany, East and West, better than I do. West and East Germans mingled throughout the streets of Berlin, but you could easily tell the latter by their shabby clothing. We ate in a Cuban restaurant in East Berlin – the tacky socialist bloc version of tacky Polynesian restaurants in the United States. Most of the people we talked to were still in a state of euphoria about the Wende (the change) – I still remember the beatific smile our waitress gave us when we asked her – although we also ran into those who had had modest security under communism, and who worried about how they would fare under capitalism.

According to one story, Schiller’s Ode to Joy, set by Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony, was originally an Ode to Freedom; Prussian censors forced Schiller to change the words. Leonard Bernstein turned it back it an Ode to Freedom in a concert in Berlin in December, 1989.

Germans took a long time to go from writing music about freedom and cherishing their inner freedom, to being politically free. Here’s a student song going back to the nineteenth century

Die Gedanken sind frei, wer kann sie erraten, sie fliegen vorbei wie nächtliche Schatten. Kein Mensch kann sie wissen, kein Jäger erschießen mit Pulver und Blei: Die Gedanken sind frei!  Ich denke was ich will und was mich beglücket, doch alles in der Still’, und wie es sich schicket. Mein Wunsch, mein Begehren kann niemand verwehren, es bleibet dabei: Die Gedanken sind frei!  Ich liebe den Wein, mein Mädchen vor allen, sie tut mir allein am besten gefallen. Ich sitz nicht alleine bei meinem Glas Weine, mein Mädchen dabei: Die Gedanken sind frei!Und sperrt man mich ein im finsteren Kerker, das alles sind rein vergebliche Werke. Denn meine Gedanken zerreißen die Schranken und Mauern entzwei. Die Gedanken sind frei!

Thoughts are free, who can guess them? They fly by like nocturnal shadows. No man can know them, no hunter can shoot them with powder and lead: Thoughts are free!  I think what I want, and what pleases me, all in silence, and as it should be. My wish and desire, no one can deny me and so it will always be: Thoughts are free!  I love wine, and my girl above all, Only her I like best of all. I’m not alone with my glass of wine, my girl is with me: Thoughts are free! And if I am thrown into the darkest dungeon, all these are futile works, because my thoughts tear all gates and walls in two. Thoughts are free!

Die Gedanken sind frei – Thoughts are free

1931

In 1928, Hitler’s National Socialist Party won just 2.6% of the votes in the elections to the German Reichstag. In 1930, the party won 18.3%, and in July 1932 37.3%. 

Clearly the world financial crisis beginning with the American stock market crash played a central role in turning the Nazis from a fringe party to the largest single party in the Reichstag. But why? Hitler didn’t run on a platform of starting another world war and wiping out European Jewry (although that’s pretty much what he intended). The formula “people turn to a radical leader in desperate times” though true, is also vague.

A recent book, 1931: Debt, Crisis, and the Rise of Hitler, by the Swiss economist Tobias Straumann, lays out some more concrete factors. At the end of the First World War, Germany was saddled with a large bill for reparations. The payments mostly went to Britain, France, Belgium, and Italy. These countries in turn paid back loans they had taken out from the United States to cover war expenses. For most of the 1920s, Germany was able to make its payments, and the government even went on a borrowing binge. But with the crash of 1929, making payments became much more difficult – almost impossible politically. German leaders like Bruning (Chancellor 1930-1932) did their best to negotiate and bargain in the face of foreign fiscal demands and domestic anger over reparations. But many Germans, persuaded that Germany was being bled dry by foreign plutocrats with the complicity of established politicians, gave their votes to the harshest critics of the reparations regime, the National Socialists (and the Communists). 

Commerce and coalitions

1875-1883

The theory of comparative advantage is one of the really great theories in the behavioral sciences. It implies that even if country E has an absolute disadvantage at producing every kind of good compared to country P, it can still gain by finding goods for which it has a comparative advantage, and specialize in producing those, and trading for other goods with P.

But the theory of comparative advantage (like another great theory,  the theory of kin selection) needs to be handled with care. Even if a country benefits in the aggregate from international trade, there may be losers as well as winners. As the world came to be increasingly tied together by international trade, conflicts over free trade and protectionism moved to the fore of politics. In nineteenth century England, the free traders, representing industrialists and urban workers, took control, opening the country to cheap imported food. But in the 1870s, both Germany and the United States arrived at political settlements that favored protectionism over free trade.

Germany was unified in 1871. The densely populated country had a comparative advantage in labor and a comparative disadvantage in capital and land. Free trade for Germany would have meant specializing in labor intensive goods, and importing capital intensive goods from more industrialized countries like England, and cheap food from the more thinly populated Americas and Eastern Europe. Instead, Germany put up high tariff barriers to protect her industrialists and landowners – a “marriage of iron and rye.” Germany’s industrial working class was pro-free trade (so was Karl Marx), but their main political vehicle, the Social Democratic Party, was excluded from the government. This political settlement lasted right up to the First World War; on some accounts, the fraying of the protectionist ruling coalition was a factor pushing Germany toward war.

The United States had a different protectionist coalition. In the 1870s the country had an abundance of land, but it was short of labor and still in the early stages of industrialization. Protectionism, supported by Republicans, promoted national industry, and kept high-wage American workers from having to compete with low-wage workers overseas. The agricultural South and West were the big losers under this scheme, but there was a compensating advantage for the South. The compromise of 1876 put the Republican, Hayes, in the White House in exchange for ending Reconstruction in the South. White Southerners then had a free hand to set up a one party state under the Democrats, committed to black disenfranchisement and white rule. When the upstart Populists started winning support in the South and West on a free trade platform, they were beaten back by Southern Democrats playing the race card. The condominium between Republicans and Democrats lasted until the Great Depression of the 1930s. 

In Latin America at the same time period, the free traders were largely in the ascendant. In Brazil, for example, the ruling coalition stood for café com leite – coffee with milk – São Paulo coffee planters and Minas Gerais cattle ranchers committed to an export oriented economy. Brazil had a lot of vacant land that could be opened up for coffee production, and was able to attract European immigrants to help with the harvest.

In Guatemala by contrast, free trade took a more sinister turn. From 1871, a “liberal” government facilitated the expropriation of Indian lands to promote coffee production, all in the name of progress. Indians were recruited to work on the plantations by a combination of forced labor and debt peonage. The country came to resemble a penal colony under the control of a large standing army.

Joseph Conrad spent his early life as a sailor, and had plenty of chance to see the dark underside of globalization, most famously the Congo rubber trade as depicted in Heart of Darkness. In Nostromo, set in a fictional Latin American republic, he wrote

Liberals! The words one knows so well have a nightmarish meaning in this country. Liberty, democracy, patriotism, government – all of them have a flavor of folly and murder.

Debt and democracy

1753 – 1768

General rule: one can raise higher taxes, in proportion to the liberty of the subjects; and one is forced to moderate them to the degree that servitude increases. This has always been, and will always remain so. It is a rule drawn from nature, which does not vary at all; one finds it in all countries, in England, in Holland, and in all states in which liberty becomes degraded, right down to Turkey.

Montesquieu

The Seven Years War (1756-1763) was a bunch of major powers (Austria, France, Russia) ganging up to cut Prussia down to size. The English joined in on the Prussian side, on the theory that an enemy of France was a friend of theirs. The war was also a world war, long before World War One, involving fighting as far afield as North America and India. In this respect, it was a win for England, and a loss for France, with the French losing Quebec and India.

The war brought home an important advantage of a constitutional state over an absolutist one. England was able to raise higher taxes per capita on its subjects because they were voting for the taxes themselves, through Parliament. And England was able to borrow money for the war on easier terms than France, because English lenders were more confident that Parliament wouldn’t default on its debts: many of those who bought English war bonds either stood in Parliament, or voted for those who did. In spite of the “absolutist” label, French kings had a harder time squeezing money out of their subjects, and resorted to a lot of dubious expedients. For example, the government raised money by selling life annuities to investors: pay a lump sum for the annuity, and the government would pay back a fixed amount for every year the beneficiary was alive (sort of reverse life insurance). This led, among other things, to syndicates of investors buying annuities on behalf of groups of young girls (such as The Thirty Geneva Maidens), judged the best bet, actuarially, for long life expectancies.

Generally they had to have reached the age of seven so as to be beyond the risk of smallpox. These maidens received the finest medical care, and Geneva’s wealthy bourgeoisie followed their health in the newspapers – not surprising given the huge investments that rested on their shoulders.

But the government was in such financial straits that it eventually started paying only a fraction of the promised annuities. The military weakness of the French state, stemming from its fiscal weakness, was the major cause of the French Revolution.

It would be nice to follow Montesquieu, and draw an improving moral lesson from this: constitutional liberty beats absolutism. But things played out differently in Eastern Europe, where there was less of a commercial sector to tap, and governments depended more on coercion – serfs serving their lords, lords serving the state – to keep up as great powers. There, the great constitutional state – the elective monarchy of Poland – was reduced to a second rank power, and eventually eliminated entirely. The most impressive military power, relative to its size, was Prussia, “not a country with an army, but an army with a country.” This was not the last time that military exigencies would push social evolution in very different directions in Western and Eastern Europe.

See A Free Nation Deep in Debt: The Financial Roots of Democracy

Inbreeding depression

“Let others wage war. Thou, happy Austria, marry” (a description of Habsburg marriage policy). And here’s what “30 Rock” had to say about the Habsburgs, marriage and inbreeding. (Note: if Jenna Moroni, the blonde character in the clip, had managed to procreate with the miserably inbred last Habsburg heir, their kids would have turned out fine, not inbred at all.)

Human inbreeding has a genetic side, which favors outbreeding, at least within the species. Here’s a recent article showing that inbreeding is associated with a wide range of deleterious consequences, including reductions in stature, fertility, and mental ability. But inbreeding also has a political side, which may favor a balance between outmarriage (to make new alliances), and in-marriage (to conserve old alliances, and keep land and honor within the family).

The Habsburgs played the political game adroitly, putting together an enormous empire, partly by war, but partly by astute dynastic marriages. The Habsburg domains were so unwieldy that after the death of Charles V in 1558, they were divided between two branches of the family. Both sections were huge. The map below doesn’t even show the Habsburg possessions outside Europe, in Spanish America and the Far East.

By 1700, however, genetics caught up with the Habsburgs. The Spanish Habsburg line ended with Charles II, who was grossly disabled, physically and mentally. He was also impotent, and left no heirs. A recent calculation shows that, as a result of generation of in-marriage, Charles II had a coefficient of inbreeding of .254. For comparison, a child of full sibling incest will have a coefficient of inbreeding of .25!

Cavaliers and Roundheads

Wrong but Wromantic Right and Repulsive

With the ascension of Charles I to the throne we come at last to the Central Period of English History (not to be confused with the Middle Ages, of course), consisting in the utterly memorable Struggle between the Cavaliers (Wrong but Wromantic) and the Roundheads (Right and Repulsive).

Charles I was a Cavalier King and therefore had a small pointed beard, long flowing curls, a large, flat, flowing hat, and gay attire. The Roundheads, on the other hand, were clean-shaven and wore tall, conical hats, white ties, and sombre garments. Under these circumstances a Civil War was inevitable.

1066 and all that: A Memorable History of England, comprising all the parts you can remember, including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates. W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman

The struggles between Cavaliers (supporters of the Stuart king Charles I) and Puritan Roundheads, and the successors of each, would shape a large part of English history. And some of these struggles would carry on across the Atlantic, as Puritans settled New England and left their imprint across the American Midwest, while Cavalier-leaning planters settled Virginia and shaped the culture of the American South.

Kevin Phillips calls the English Civil War, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War “The Cousins’ Wars.” Across these wars, old struggles played out in new ways. Given the international clout of England and the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the outcomes of these conflicts mattered not just for the countries involved, but for the world.

James Hawes recent The Shortest History of England: Empire and Division from the Anglo-Saxons to Brexit sees the English Civil War as one act in a millennium-long conflict between an outward-looking Southeast Britain/London and outer Britain that has carried on right up to Brexit.

Witches

1564 – 1589

It is putting a very high price on one’s conjectures to have a man roasted alive because of them.

Montaigne, “Of Cripples”

Among the Gebusi, a small tribal society on the edge of the New Guinea highlands, all the deaths that we would call natural were attributed to witchcraft. Most natural deaths led to an inquest to determine who the witch was. Children and young women were pretty safe from accusation; others were fair game. Witchcraft was a capital crime, and one third of all deaths of adults in the immediate pre-contact period were killings of suspected witches! The Gebusi are an extreme case, not typical of New Guinea, or of tribal societies in general. But witchcraft beliefs, and punishment of accused witches, have been widespread across cultures, including Europe in past centuries.

Some common notion about European witchcraft accusations and executions is that they’re “medieval,” both in the literal sense of happening in the Middle Ages, and in the figurative sense of expressing the spirit of a dim and barbarous age. Monty Python gave comic expression to both ideas. But neither idea is true. For much of the Middle Ages, the Church condemned the idea that people could fly through air on broomsticks, and similar beliefs, as pagan superstitions, unbefitting good Christians. It is only toward the end of the Middle Ages that the fear of witches starts to take off. And it is at the beginning of the Modern Age – the Age of Discovery, the time of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the early Scientific Revolution – that the witch craze reaches its height. Most witchcraft trials and executions in the West happen between 1550 and 1700. The total number executed is probably in the high tens of thousands, with additional tens of thousands persecuted but not killed. About 80% of the victims are women.

And some of the most educated men in Europe contribute to the witch craze (although some are skeptics, like Montaigne). In the 1570s, Henri Bouget, a respected French jurist, calculates that there are 1,800,00 witches active in Europe. Slightly later, Jean Bodin, a major figure in early modern political theory, argues that witches are so dangerous and devious that normal judicial safeguards should be suspended: there can be no presumption of innocence for accused witches. King James VI of Scotland (=James I of England) writes a whole book on witches, Daemonologie, and organizes witchcraft persecutions in Scotland; the witches in Macbeth are Shakespeare’s nod to James.

A new information technology, the printing press, doesn’t just foster the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution. It also helps the witch craze go viral. The Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of the Witches), a 400 page witchcraft treatise originally published in 1486, goes on to become a best seller, through multiple editions. (Here’s a book review.) It is just one of a number of treatises and tracts on witchcraft pouring out of the printing presses.

And the witch craze is also tied up with the religious struggles of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Witchcraft persecutions are strongly associated, both in time and space, with confessional battles between Protestants and Catholics. Where Protestants and Catholics are in competition with one another – especially southern and western Germany and neighboring areas – they try to outdo one another in their zeal for persecuting witches. Where one denomination or the other is securely in power – Catholics in Spain and Italy, Lutherans in Scandinavia – witchcraft persecutions are mild. Although the persecutors wouldn’t have admitted it, witches are innocent collateral damage in the great religious struggles of the age.