Systems in the Past: Arrangements in Former Times

One prominent textbook is titled World History: Patterns of Interaction, and with two good reasons. First, the actual events of history manifest certain deep structures which recur: archetypes. Second, the human mind and the structure of its consciousness is designed to find patterns.

The study of history will inevitably include the comparison and contrast of one situation to another. Generations of students and teachers alike have labored under the burden of essays written in response to a prompt to “compare and contrast.”

Writing about these patterns, scholar George Will gives several examples, including

Mancur Olson’s seminal The Rise and Decline of Nations, which explains how free societies become sclerotic. Their governments become encrusted with interest groups that preserve, like a fly in amber, an increasingly stultifying status quo. This impedes dynamism by protecting arrangements that have worked well for those powerful enough to put the arrangements in place. This blocks upward mobility for those less wired to power.

One pattern, then, combines the accumulation of ossified bureaucracies with class of individuals who make ambitious careers, not by creating things of value, but rather by skillful navigation of bureaucracy: an essentially parasitic arrangement.

This pattern, in which a small but increasing percentage of society gets a paycheck and social advancements, not by contributing something to the community, but rather by exploiting the system, can be seen in the later phases of the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, and the British Empire.

A second pattern in history emerges when the reader becomes acquainted

with public choice theory. It demystifies and de-romanticizes politics by applying economic analysis — how incentives influence behavior — to government. It shows how elected officials and bureaucrats pursue personal aggrandizement as much as people do in the private sector. In the public sector’s profit motive, profit is measured by power rather than money.

In a nation governed by freely-elected representatives, i.e., a ‘republic’ in the strict sense of the word, there is a consistent temptation for those in power to represent themselves instead of the voters. Societies hope to avoid succumbing to this temptation, in part by hoping for representatives of good character, and in part by imposing mechanisms like term limits and the separation of powers.

This is, of course, a corollary to Lord Acton’s famous principle about how power corrupts.

An example is seen in the etymology of the word ‘administrator,’ which originally meant one who supplied assistance and materials to another. Yet in modern bureaucracies, an administrator often denotes a supervisor rather than an assistant. The origin of the verb to ‘administer’ means to ‘help.’

A third pattern deals with the government’s “ever-deeper penetration into society.” One might justify increasing governmental domination by arguing that it

serves equality. Actually, big government inevitably drives an upward distribution of wealth to those whose wealth, confidence and sophistication enable them to manipulate government.

So, even in those instances in which governmental intervention into society is done with the best and most altruistic of motives, it serves only to create a sort of aristocracy.

Consider governmental anti-poverty measures. Not only do they fail to end poverty, but rather, they end up increasing poverty. Along the way, they also create an elite of bureaucrats and politicians who manage the ineffective anti-poverty measures, and who make entire careers out of doing so.

A fourth pattern emerges in situations in which the government is seen as the dispenser of favors. Instead of competing in the free market to see who can offer good work for a good wage, citizens compete for government benefits.

Citizens form groups which lobby for legislation which favors their profession or their geographical region of the country; demographic segments hope to influence policymakers and enjoy the benefits of government funding or loopholes in regulations.

Instead of working together to contribute to their civilization, citizens are pitted against each other by the notion that the government is a provider:

Of course Americans distrust one another more as more and more factions fight one another for preferential treatment by government. Of course government becomes drained of dignity, and becomes corrosive of social cohesion, as it becomes a bigger dispenser of inequality through benefits to those sufficiently clever and connected to work its levers.

When citizens compete with each other, hoping to nudge the government’s policies into one direction or another - directions, naturally, which favor them - cynicism abounds. Governments and their leaders are no longer trusted, but rather, citizens hope to manipulate governments, even as the citizens are aware that the government is attempting to manipulate them.

Trusting the government less, and competing with each other, the citizens finally trust each other less.

Not only do we “tend to trust our institutions less,” we also “tend to trust each other less.” Of course there are parallel increases in distrust: Government’s dignity diminishes as government grows to serve factions of those sophisticated at manipulating its allocation of preferences. Social solidarity is a casualty of government grown big because it recognizes no limits to its dispensing of favors.

Given the consistent manifestation of the law of unintended consequences, the increase of governmental action yields only harm. Anti-poverty measures increase poverty; anti-crime programs increase crime; peace programs lead to violence; educational programs lead to illiteracy.

The only way forward is to limit or trim government, as George Will notes:

Suppose there were not 16 government agencies “to help businesses, large and small, in all kinds of ways.” Suppose there were none. Such barnacles on big government institutionalize the scramble for government favors; these agencies are a standing incitement to bend public power for private advantage. Hence they increase distrust of government, diminish social solidarity and aggravate the most indefensible inequality — that driven by government dispensations.

These patterns recur on all six inhabited continents, over the last 6,000 years of recorded history, uniformly across different languages, religions, and cultures. These are the ‘patterns of interaction,’ seen in the reign of Gaozu, also known as Liu Bang, who founded the Han Dynasty in China, and in the reign of Wang Mang, who overthrew Gaozu’s descendants several generations later.

These patterns are seen in the Merovingian Dynasty’s ascent, when it unified and energized the Franks in the former Roman colony of Gaul, and in the Merovingian Dynasty’s decline, when it became complacent and allowed Charles “the Hammer” Martel to do the royal work, and therefore gain the royal title.

Santayana’s all-too-often quoted epigram might give rise to yet another variant. Even if one does remember the past, one might still have to repeat it.

Imposing Misery, Jailing Dissidents: Venezuela Repeats Standard Socialist Patterns

In February 2014, a article in The Michigan Daily carried the headline, ‘Venezuelan opposition head waits to hear about charges.’ This was merely episode in a long protracted struggle between Venezuela's socialist dictatorship and its freedom-oriented dissidents.

The story, from an AP wire item, explained that an opposition leader was being ‘held at a military jail’ for his opposition to ‘15 years of socialist rule.’

This particular leader was named Leopoldo Lopez, and the dictator who put him in jail was Nicolas Maduro, but the general pattern of a liberty-seeking dissident being jailed by a socialist dictator has been the pattern for several decades in Venezuela.

The net impact of socialism in Venezuela follows a standard pattern which was clear in the various Soviet-bloc countries until 1990. The planned economy with high taxes and extreme regulation of all aspects of business, along with state ownership of almost all assets, leads to declining standards of living and brutal repression of civil rights and human rights.

These symptoms lingered and intensified both during the decade of rule by dictator Hugo Chavez, and during the reign of his successor, Nicolas Maduro.

The declining standards of living led to outright poverty, with shortages in basic goods, like food and toilet paper. Medical care deteriorated, and the average lifespan among Venezuela citizens’s shortened considerably.

By 2018, the condition of the nation was desperate, with many citizens near starvation. These sad developments were, however, reliably predictable twenty years earlier: such is the pattern of socialist governments.

Toward a New Global Balance of Power: China and Russia Pose Threats to Small Independent Nations

The world’s geopolitical equilibrium during the first two decades of the twenty-first century was shaped by several factors. Russia discovered or invented its post-Soviet identity. China relapsed into autocracy after its flirtation with a less personality-driven power structures. Condoleezza Rice’s firm hand on Putin was replaced by Hillary Clinton’s and John Kerry’s ambiguous and indecisive approach to Russia. The world in general moved away from its now irrelevant Cold War configurations and wondered how to respond to Islamic terrorism.

By 2018, it had become clear that the new, post-Soviet Russia was not a clear friend or ally to Europe, to NATO, or to the United States. Robert Maginnis writes:

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin seems immune if not somewhat irritated by Western sanctions over his seizure of Crimea in 2014 and his ongoing misadventure in eastern Ukraine, which some label a civil war. Putin responded to Western sanctions with disinformation campaigns against Western elections, significant saber-rattling along Russia’s Western border with former satellite states, and increased harassment of NATO and US military vessels and aircraft across the world.

Parallel to Putin is China’s leader, Xi Jinping. While Russia had a readymade substantial military establishment leftover from the Cold War, China was still in a phase of military ascendancy. While China had nuclear weapons since 1964, it lacked an army, navy, and air force of global stature.

In the early twenty-first century, China, in contrast to both Russia and the United States, has gone on a diligent and focused building spree, developing world-class capabilities to strike anywhere.

China’s ability to intimidate militarily works in conjunction with its financial and political influence. It has been able to advance toward its goal of controlling shipping in and around the South China Sea, marginalizing the other nation-states in the area - Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, etc. - and having at its mercy a disproportionately large percentage of the world’s shipping.

Chinese President Xi Jinping is an autocrat as well with a great vision for a modern, global armed forces and an economic arm reaching broadly, thus pushing China’s influence abroad seeking to dominate the globe’s democratic regions, a view shared by China experts in testimony before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. “The Chinese Communist Party is engaged in a total, protracted struggle for regional and global supremacy,” said retired Navy Captain Jim Fanell, a former Pacific Fleet intelligence chief who testified in May 2018. “This supremacy is the heart of the ‘China Dream.’ China’s arsenal in this campaign for supremacy includes economic, informational, political and military warfare.” Rick Fisher, a China expert with the International Assessment and Strategy Center, testified that this poses “grave challenges” for American security and warned the US has “about a decade” to take action to counter the threat.

The Chinese Navy’s hold on the South China Sea, as well as the construction, arming, and weaponizing of artificial islands there, is one early step in a larger plan.

Although China and Russia do not have, at this time, an explicit alliance, observers like Robert Maginnis see some form of cooperation as both likely and dangerous. Militarily, Putin could continue bullying eastern Europe, and Xi Jinping would bully the Pacific. Economically, Russia exerts its influence by means of energy supplied to Europe, while China is poised to have even more economic influence than Russia by means of its manufacturing and cyber-technology assets.

A global balance of power dominated by China and Russia would not bode well for smaller nations hoping to retain their sovereignty and enjoy some measure of personal freedom and political liberty. If the United States fails to strengthen itself to the degree at which it represents a credible counterbalance to China and Russia, the notion of a free society governed by freely-elected representatives could become a rare thing on the planet.

The Textual Basis of Islam: Historic Consensus

When Muhammad died in 632 A.D., he left behind a powerful organization, but no authoritative written texts. The Qur’an (Koran) would not be written until decades later.

In the absence of an official text, various traditions about what Muhammad might have said about different topics emerged: vacuums attract filling.

Collections, both written and spoken, appeared, presenting themselves as the words of Muhammad. These collections were not always mutually compatible. When the contradictions became evident, crisis and conflict arose.

If Islam were to continue as a viable social and political order, some harmony would be needed.

In legal matters, e.g., some foundational core of unchanging doctrines was necessary for establishing sharia. There would be some flexibility for interpretation and competing regional precedents, but there would also be fixed set of axiomatic laws.

A non-negotiable axiom within sharia is called a hadd (the plural form is hudud). The collected hudud constitute the basis of sharia and of the broader Islamic social worldview.

To formulate hudud and other invariable Islamic doctrines, early Muslim scholars began to sift through the competing collections of sayings. These collections were called hadith. In the meantime, the Qur’an was beginning to emerge in written form. The need to harmonize the hadith with each other, and with the Qur’an, was growing.

These scholars worked to form a consensus about which hadith would be regarded as authoritative, as Timothy Furnish writes:

Two aspects of individual hadiths became the focus of scholarly criticism within the early Islamic world: the matn (plural mutun or mitan), or “text,” and the isnad (plural sanad), or “chain of transmission.” A matn might well be rejected on the grounds that it seemed to contradict the Qur’an. But the focus of hadith criticism was channeled into investigating the isnads rather than the matns. The number, credibility, and seamless­ness of the transmitters became more important than what the tradition actually said. And so as long as a hadith text did not actually contradict the Qur’an, it had a shot at being accepted by at least some segment of the early Islamic community, especially if what it said proved useful in some manner, usually political. Hadiths were ranked into three categories based on the trustworthiness of their chains of transmission going back to the Prophet: sahih, “sound”; hasan, “good”; and da'if, or “weak.”

So it was that Qur’an began to accumulate out of various fragments which were circulating at the time. Simultaneously, some hadith were gaining recognition as authoritative while others were being relegated to a questionable status.

Two processes were happening, and they overlapped somewhat in time: the process of composing the final edition of the Qur’an, and the process of sorting out various hadith. These two processes most probably influenced each other.

Together, the two processes formed the finished social and political order which is Islam.

This categorization was largely worked out by Muhammad b. Idris al-Shafï i (d. 820 CE), who had been disturbed by the proliferation of questionable, even down­right false, traditions in his time and developed the gauge of isnad legiti­macy as a means of differentiating spurious hadith from acceptable ones. If a consensus of scholars agreed a particular hadith was acceptable, then it was deemed so for the entire Islamic world.

This scholarly consensus shaped the history of Islam permanently. Not only were the Hudud fixed, but more significantly, the nature of Islam as political and social movement was determined.

The fact that modern Islam is less about the agency and personhood of the deity, and more about public and communal paradigms which humans should institute and maintain, can be traced to the formative stage of development in which the texts of Islam were accreted and given their relative degrees of authority.

African Physical Geography: Unnavigable Rivers and Absent Ports

The landscape of Africa is a significant obstacle to its inhabitants.

Africa has thousands of miles of coastline, but sub-Saharan Africa has few or no usable deep-water ports. This has historically limited imports and exports and the accompanying exchanges of ideas with other cultures.

LIkewise, the Sahara Desert is an effective obstacle to land transportation between the southern part of the continent and the northern part.

It is the land itself which has kept the cultures of sub-Saharan Africa isolated from contact with the outside world.

This geography has also kept these cultures isolated from each other. The rivers of Africa are, on average, measurably less navigable than rivers on other continents. This has led, in turn, to less contact between the various nations of sub-Saharan Africa, as Tim Marshall writes:

Africa, being a huge continent, has always consisted of different regions, climates and cultures, but what they all had in common was their isolation from each other and the outside world. That is less the case now, but the legacy remains.

A glance at a map of Africa can be misleading. One might think that it would be a straightforward overland journey from, e.g., Libya to Angola. But it is not. Likewise, one might imagine that Namibia (German South-West Africa) or Mozambique would be situated to engage in large-scale international trade by means of cargo ships. This, however, is not the case.

The map fails to reveal the impediments to travel within the continent, and the barriers to shipping from and to other continents, as Tim Marshall notes:

The world’s idea of African geography is flawed.

For cultural, social, political, and economic purposes, Africa could be considered as two continents, with the impassible Sahara between the two.

The geography of this immense continent can be explained in several ways, but the most basic is to think of Africa in terms of the top third and bottom two-thirds.

Understanding the physical geography of Africa will help the reader to understand why the continent is filled with ‘developing nations’ that don’t develop. All manner of aid from other parts of the world, and all types of schemes to encourage development - formulated both by native Africans and by outsiders - cannot change the shape and structure of the land itself.

Hinduism’s Treatment of Women: The Practice of Sati

One of the most gripping concepts in history is the Hindu practice of suttee or sati - the practice of expecting, or even requiring, that a widow, upon the death of her husband, commit suicide. This was often carried out in the form of self-immolation: the widow threw herself onto her husband’s funeral pyre.

This is the most jarring example of Hinduism’s view of women, but there are many other more mundane examples.

Hinduism lays a conceptual foundation for cultural and social practices which ascribe a secondary status to women, as scholar Richard Cavendish notes:

Orthodox Hindus believe that women cannot attain salvation as women, but only through being reborn as men. Women are evil and unclean, and the virtuous Hindu woman, who must treat her husband as if he was a god, is considered inferior to the worst of men.

Cavendish goes on to note that “the tirade in the Indian epic, the Mahabharata” is a “condemnation of woman” which says that women are “a curse. In her body the evil cycle of life begins afresh.” Male children are born “fouled with the impurities of woman. A wise man will avoid the contaminating society of women.”

In comparison, Cavendish says that the Judeo-Christian tradition within European culture is “by no means as hostile to women as orthodox Hinduism.” Western civilization is not “appalled by sex.”

British authorities began legislating to end suttee in the early 1800s. After India achieved political independence in the late 1940s, the Indian government continued to combat suttee, but instances of the practice have been recorded as late as 2008.

Improving Standards of Living: Industrialization Makes Life Better for Lower and Middle Classes

Historians use the term ‘Industrial Revolution’ to refer to an era which began in the early 1700s in England. Like most constructs, this era does not have specific and clear starting and ending points in time, but is general concept rather than a specific and concrete one. Although the concept is not precise or definite, there are certainly specific and concrete events which form the historical data underlying the construct.

Much later, a wave of industrialization spread across the United States. Historians sometimes refer to this as the ‘Second Industrial Revolution’ or the ‘Technological Revolution.’ Prior to this era, more than 90% of the population was engaged in agriculture and lived in rural settings.

Industrialization changed various aspects of society. Increasing percentages of the population lived in cities: urbanization. Transportation and food-preserving techniques reduced the ability of a poor harvest to cause starvation. Standards of living, especially for the lower and middle classes, improved, as mass-produced goods fell in price.

Modern sewage and drinking-water systems improved public health. Specialization of the labor force made both skilled and unskilled labor more productive, which in turn improved wages.

Although the original Industrial Revolution included instances of child labor, the Second Industrial Revolution decreased child labor and replaced it with more years of childhood education.

The middle class expanded as upward mobility created opportunities for the lower class to increase their wages and join the middle class. As historian Tanya Lee Stone writes,

In the late 1800s, millions of Americans left small towns and farming areas to move to cities, where workers were needed more than ever before. Of course, they had to have places to life.

People were drawn to factory towns because they could earn better wages than they had earned on farms. Industrialization created opportunities.

The technological revolution meant that even the lower classes would obtain benefits like telephones and electric lights. Even the working classes could travel by train instead of long, uncomfortable trips on horseback or on a horse-drawn wagon.

A small number of wealthy people began to buy as much land as they could and build houses and apartments buildings. They charged people fees, or rent, to live there.

The real benefit of industrialization was the increase of wealth. The landowners received more money in the form of rent paid to them. The workers received increasing wages and could buy consumer goods at decreasing prices. The remaining farmers earned more because, as some people the farms to move to factory towns, the other farmers could farm larger areas of land and get more money when they sold their harvests.

As machinery for agriculture developed, one individual farmer could farm more land.

All the people in society can benefit when wealth is increased. If the system is a free-market system, then not only the rich, but also the middle class and lower class people have chances to earn better wages.

Not everyone was happy about this prosperity. Some people hoped to create unrest and conflict, so they began calling the rich people of this era ‘robber barons.’ They said that these factory owners were inflicting misery on the poor.

But the working class didn’t believe that the factory owners were so bad. The workers were experiencing rising wages and increasing standards of living, and they were paying lower prices for the products they wanted. So the factory workers didn’t want to organize a rebellion against the factory owners.

In the years between approximately 1870 and 1920, all social classes in the United States experienced rising standards of living. The economic foundation created during these decades helped the United States face the challenges of the 20th century.