Euripides' Trousers

Brief thoughts on Gordon's Discourses on Tacitus

2011-08-01T19:38:00.000-07:00

Thanks to The Liberty Fund and my Sony Reader (thanks again, honey!), I've recently had the privilege to read the following passages:

An absolute Prince is of all others the most insecure; as he proceeds by no rule of Law, he can have no rule of Safety. He acts by violence, and violence is the only remedy against him. (p. 145)

It is indeed apparent from our History, that those of our Princes who thirsted most violently after arbitrary rule, were chiefly those as were remarkable for poor spirit, and small genius, Pedants, Bigots, the timorous and effeminate. (p.148)

When men are once above fear of punishment, they soon grow to be above shame. Besides, the genius and abilities of men are limited, but their passions and vanity boundless; hence so few can be perfectly good, and so many are transcendently evil. They mistake good fortune for good merit, and are apt to rise in their own conceit as high at least as fortune can take them. (p.162)

Would a Prince live in security, ease, and credit? let him live and rule by a standard certain and fixed, that of Laws, nor grasp at more than is given him. Many by seeking too much have lost all, and forfeited their Crown through the wantonness and folly of loading it with false and invidious ornaments. While nothing would serve them but lawless Power, even their legitimate Authority grew odious, and was rent from them. (p.168)

The lessons set forth here apply equally well whether one considers the example of (in the realm of drama) Macbeth, or (in the realm of history) the Cæsars, or...more recent exemplars.

A few thoughts on Wedgwood's The Thirty Years War

2011-04-28T07:45:00.000-07:00

I'm reading C.V. Wedgwood's The Thirty Years War (among other things, as time permits), and I was struck by the (potential, at least) timeliness of the following passages (pages 164 and 165 of the 1961 Doubleday Anchor edition):

"In Prague the gravity of the situation was increased by the necessities of the government. Frederick had begun the trouble by slightly debasing the currency during his year of rule; Ferdinand's nominee, Liechtenstein, continued the process, reduced the amount of silver in the coinage by more than seventy-five percent and attempted to fill the imperial coffers -- and his own -- with the profit which he made on the mint. In January 1622 Ferdinand, in hope of further gain, made a contract with a group of speculators for the establishment of a privately controlled mint in Prague. The currency was drastically debased while prices were forcibly stabilized; the plan failed utterly, for the people became suspicious and hoarded what good money they had, while in spite of the provision of the government, food alone rose to twelve times its normal price. External trade stopped altogether and for the ordinary exchanges of everyday life the people took to barter. To add to the damage done by this crazy scheme, the chief object of the contractors was rather their own enrichment than the payment of Ferdinand's debts.

"At this moment Ferdinand was besieged with demands to buy the confiscated lands. The local nobility and many wealthy merchants offered him what had once been fair prices in the Prague money, prices which he could not now refuse to take without repudiating his own currency. It was one thing to sell the lands and another to make use of the money; Ferdinand had accepted his own coin, but his soldiers threw it back in their officers' faces, because the local peasants would not take it in exchange for the necessities of life. Throughout Bohemia trade came almost to a standstill, the peasants would not provide the towns with food, the army was mutinous, the civil population starving, and certain contractors, of whom Liechtenstein was not least, were among the richest men in Europe. At Christmas 1623, Ferdinand devaluated the money and broke the contract. By that time the greater part of the confiscated land had been sold for an average price of less than a third its normal value. His first move towards financial security had been catastrophic, for nor only had he lost the advantage of the confiscation, but he had completed the economic ruin of Bohemia. Wealth, which had been widely distributed among an industrious peasantry and an active urban population, had become, through political persecution and the disastrous effects of the inflation, concentrated in a few unscrupulous hands. As a source of imperial revenue Bohemia had become useless."

Wedgwood here is writing of the brief tenure of Frederick, the Elector Palatine, as King of Bohemia. Ferdinand was Archduke, erstwhile King of Bohemia himself, and Holy Roman Emperor. The next thing (more or less) that happened -- at least in Wedgwood's recounting -- was Wallenstein. Oh, joy.

Smoke on the breeze

2011-04-19T07:48:00.000-07:00

And today, I offer this:

The Concord Hymn
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1837)

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
     Their flag to April's breeze unfurled;
Here once the embattled farmers stood;
     And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
     Alike the conqueror silent sleeps,
     And Time the ruined bridge has swept
     Down the dark stream that seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
     We place with joy a votive stone,
That memory may their deeds redeem,
     When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

O Thou who made those heroes dare
     To die, and leave their children free, --
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
     The shaft we raised to them and Thee.

Found here...which is sort of ironic, don't you think?

Hoofbeats

2011-04-18T14:36:00.000-07:00

Sheila is busy these days (and less hidebound a blogger than I am), and so I cheerfully offer this, to honor the day:

Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend, "If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,--
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm."

Then he said "Good-night!" and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man-of-war;
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon like a prison bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.

Meanwhile, his friend through alley and street
Wanders and watches, with eager ears,
Till in the silence around him he hears
The muster of men at the barrack door,
The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet,
And the measured tread of the grenadiers,
Marching down to their boats on the shore.

Then he climbed the tower of the Old North Church,
By the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,
To the belfry chamber overhead,
And startled the pigeons from their perch
On the sombre rafters, that round him made
Masses and moving shapes of shade,--
By the trembling ladder, steep and tall,
To the highest window in the wall,
Where he paused to listen and look down
A moment on the roofs of the town
And the moonlight flowing over all.

Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead,
In their night encampment on the hill,
Wrapped in silence so deep and still
That he could hear, like a sentinel's tread,
The watchful night-wind, as it went
Creeping along from tent to tent,
And seeming to whisper, "All is well!"
A moment only he feels the spell
Of the place and the hour, and the secret dread
Of the lonely belfry and the dead;
For suddenly all his thoughts are bent
On a shadowy something far away,
Where the river widens to meet the bay,--
A line of black that bends and floats
On the rising tide like a bridge of boats.

Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,
Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride
On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere.
Now he patted his horse's side,
Now he gazed at the landscape far and near,
Then, impetuous, stamped the earth,
And turned and tightened his saddle girth;
But mostly he watched with eager search
The belfry tower of the Old North Church,
As it rose above the graves on the hill,
Lonely and spectral and sombre and still.
And lo! as he looks, on the belfry's height
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight
A second lamp in the belfry burns.

A hurry of hoofs in a village street,
A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,
And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark
Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet;
That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.
He has left the village and mounted the steep,
And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep,
Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides;
And under the alders that skirt its edge,
Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge,
Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides.

It was twelve by the village clock
When he crossed the bridge into Medford town.
He heard the crowing of the cock,
And the barking of the farmer's dog,
And felt the damp of the river fog,
That rises after the sun goes down.

It was one by the village clock,
When he galloped into Lexington.
He saw the gilded weathercock
Swim in the moonlight as he passed,
And the meeting-house windows, black and bare,
Gaze at him with a spectral glare,
As if they already stood aghast
At the bloody work they would look upon.
It was two by the village clock,
When he came to the bridge in Concord town.
He heard the bleating of the flock,
And the twitter of birds among the trees,
And felt the breath of the morning breeze
Blowing over the meadow brown.
And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket ball.

You know the rest. In the books you have read
How the British Regulars fired and fled,---
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
From behind each fence and farmyard wall,
Chasing the redcoats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load.

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,---
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo for evermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Mark me down for a sap if ye maun, but this is still one of my favorite poems.

The weakest link in the supply chain

2011-04-06T08:23:00.000-07:00

It appears that Toyota will be forced to shut its U.S. plants this month as they run out of parts. The quake has disrupted (to say the very least) Toyota's ability to deliver parts to supply the U.S. plants.

I mention this because it points up an unintended consequence of just-in-time (JIT) inventory management. In the normal course, and managed well, JIT is highly efficient and allows firms to avoid having lots of capital tied up in (particularly) raw materials or work-in-progress inventory. In the event of a supply shock (earthquake, major storm, Teamsters strike, etc.), however, JIT practices can impose component shortages/stock-outs very quickly.

It's a no-win for companies in the developed world, though: run lean and be vulnerable to the next Black Swan that augers in somewhere along the supply chain, or sink capital into higher levels of raw-material or WIP inventory and have the extra added bonus of paying taxes on it.

Brief clarification to the previous brief thoughts

2011-02-22T09:22:00.000-08:00

I must beg your pardon (all two of you); I was not entirely clear as to what I had in mind with regard to Cato. It is not that it is better to weep for a lost loved one or friend than to weep for lost virtue or liberty; rather, it is that imbuing a place, whether Rome or...anywhere else (bigger than one's own homestead), with the status of "immutable symbol of virtue and liberty" is merely setting one's self up for severe disappointment.

I also confess that having read Cato: A Tragedy after reading Caesar's Commentaries (courtesy of Caesar's team of traveling PR agents, as someone admirably said on some forum), I found myself wanting in knowledge of the Roman Civil War (that one, at any rate). Cato himself appears to have been all that reputation makes him, but I must (subject to further research as time allows) question whether throwing in with Pompey was really the way to defend republican ideals. At first blush, I find little to choose between Caesar and Pompey. I can say that my younger son's second grade history curriculum, while not bad, does implicitly back Caesar against Pompey...which may be no more than the instinctive collectivist love of centralizing power that Hayek notes in discussing Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and George Bernard Shaw in The Road to Serfdom (about which I shall have somewhat to say, one of these days).

As additional evidence of the preceding, I'll note that the curriculum explicitly waxes rhapsodic about the centralizing tendency of Byzantium. I'm sure it was just that the right people weren't in charge, and not anything inherent to the centralizing tendency, that made it end as it did. :)

Brief thoughts on Addison's Cato

2011-02-21T11:46:00.000-08:00

Just finished reading Cato on my Sony Reader, and for all that people -- including many lovers of liberty -- lionize this play, I think Addison got it exactly wrong in at least one spot. When the soldiers bring the broken body of Cato's son Marcus before Cato in Act IV, relating Marcus's heroic last battle (including the slaying of the traitor Syphax), he said only. "I'm satisfied."

Contrast this with David's "O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee , O Absalom, my son, my son!"

The argument given by Addison is that Cato's (and by extension, everyone else's) tears were better saved for Rome:

Cato. Alas, my friends,
Why mourn you thus? let not a private loss
Afflict your hearts. 'Tis Rome requires our tears,
The mistress of the world, the seat of empire,
The nurse of heroes, the delight of gods,
That humbled the proud tyrants of the earth,
And set the nations free; Rome is no more.
Oh, liberty! Oh, virtue! Oh, my country!

Weep less for things, I say, than for people. For even where things -- places, countries -- are held to be the embodiment of high ideals, they do so at best imperfectly, and there is no promise they will not cease to embody those ideas altogether. One ought save one's tears for people worthy of them.

David had less cause to weep for Absalom than Cato for Marcus, yet wept the more...and I think better of him for it.

A few thoughts on War and Peace

2010-09-12T20:11:00.000-07:00

So having got a Sony Reader Touch for Father's Day (thanks, honey!), I finally got to read all of War and Peace (thanks, Project Gutenberg!).

I thought I would record a couple of observations. First, Tolstoy doesn't have an overly high opinion of Napoleon (to say the least). Following are two of my favorite passages:

With regard to legal matters, immediately after the fires he gave orders to find and execute the incendiaries. And the scoundrel Rostopchin was punished by an order to burn down his houses. (p.993)

With regard to legal matters, after the execution of the supposed incendiaries the rest of Moscow burned down. (p.996)

Heh.

Tolstoy also accords the lion's share of the credit for defeating Napoleon (to the extent that any individual can be accorded credit for "historical movements of peoples from west to east and east back to west") to Czar Alexander. He is, of course, free to do so, but in order to do so Tolstoy has to engage in a bit of historical legerdemain. He somewhat dismissively addresses the performance of the Royal Navy, sniffing that Napoleon managed to elude the Navy twice during the Egyptian expedition. This begs the issue that Napoleon had to skedaddle back to the Continent without his army after Nelson destroyed the army's lifeline and ride home at Aboukir Bay.

Tolstoy also sort of forgets to note that the reason Napoleon didn't knock England out of the war was because he couldn't...because he couldn't move his army across the English Channel, a "mere" 20 or so miles as the crow flies. The Spanish ulcer may not have cost the French as much blood and treasure as the invasion of Russia (I'll have to look that up, and perhaps update this post), but it was sufficient unto the day. So it says here that Horatio Nelson and Arthur Wellesley had as much to do as Aleksandr Romanov with marooning Napoleon on St. Helena.

None of that detracts from Tolstoy's achievement, though. Now I've read War and Peace and Dostoevky's The Brothers Karamazov, and I see why people rhapsodize about Russian novels.

A few thoughts on Dreadnought

2010-07-16T06:22:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Robert Massie's Dreadnought lately. Wonderful book, and if you've ever looked back at that era and thought to yourself, "Who the hell did those people think they were?" Massie will explain it to you. Here's a brief excerpt (p. 700 in the hardcover edition, sitting in front of me courtesy of my university library):

...After lunch at Kronberg, (British Foreign Office Undersecretary Sir Charles -- ed.) Hardinge's conversation with the Kaiser turned to naval limitation. Because, up to that point, the Kaiser had been so amiable, Hardinge forgot himself and said, "But you must build slower." Instantly, William drew himself up, and announced that no one could use the term 'must' to a German Emperor. If England insisted on German limitation, he said, "then we shall fight. It is a question of national honor and dignity."

Which is to say, of course, a question of the Hohenzollern popinjay's ego (I can just imagine what would have happened had a French prisoner of war said, "Hey, Corporal!" to William, as Christopher Duffy records happened to Frederick the Great). The book is replete with examples of matters of personal pique suddenly becoming matters of the national interest and/or national honor. The Fashoda affair is a pretty good example.

...As an aside, my limited research in the subject suggests Dugout Doug had more than a bit of that, which makes me realize just how big a bullet the Republic may have dodged there. American Caesar, you betcha (and that one's gonna have to go on the reading list).

In any case, anyone who invokes the "national honor" ought to get the same degree of stink-eye as one who invokes "collective responsibility" (or any other appeal to group-identity in the pursuit of one's life, liberty, and property via Oppenheimer's political means). Both type seek to reify (confer independent existence upon) collectives: perniciously so, in my view, because it always ends up coming at the expense of the individual. "Citizen! It's your lucky day! You too can contribute blood and treasure to restore the national honor!"

I decided it would be timely to mention this, after getting involved in a discussion going on at Perfidy, Intellectual Detox, and Aretae.

Observations while gazpaching

2010-07-07T09:20:00.000-07:00

I am neither physicist nor engineer (probably shoulda been the latter, and still kick myself periodically), but I today observed that the two biggest problems with the typical Osterizer-type kitchen blender are:

1. Surface tension (or maybe it should be viscosity?): to wit, the stuff wants to stick to the sides of the jar rather than going meekly to its fate 'midst the blades; and

2. Speaking of said blades...cavitation. When the stuff at the surface stops moving and the motor is howling, you know your blades are slicing mostly air. Shut it down and burp it.

I have a sort of hazy mental image of a triple-bladed blender setup, in which the center set of blades would rotate much more slowly, to break up (okay, maybe) the cavitation bubbles as they form while the upper and lower sets make with the chopping, pureeing, or what have you. I can only imagine how complex the gearing would have to be, and what such a blender would cost to make.

In other news, if that gazpacho recipe had been any bigger Elder Son and I wouldn't have anything to put it in.

A Few Thoughts on Brave New War

2010-05-17T19:01:00.000-07:00

I recently finished John Robb's Brave New War. Robb does a fine job laying out the asymmetric/4th generation warfare theme. It makes interesting reading in a number of respects, one or two of which may have been unintentional. First, Robb's discussion of Iraq is pre-surge (the book was published in 2007 and presumably written in 2006 and before), so his take on Iraq will undoubtedly be colored by one's view of the effectiveness of the surge.

On the other hand, much of what Robb says about Iraq is echoed to some degree in what Michael Yon is saying right now about Afghanistan.

On the other other hand, some of what Robb writes about is, in my view, very old wine in shiny new high-tech bottles. Although the analogies are not perfect, asymmetric warfare is not new: Bedford Forrest did a lot more damage and tied up far more Union resources chasing his forces around the landscape than he used himself. What is new is the increasing ability of non-state actors to play, but even this is not entirely new. After all, the Ujedinjenje ili Smrt (Union or Death, also known as the Black Hand) was not a state organization, and the FN 1910 pistol Gavrilo Princip used to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Duchess Sophie of Hohnenberg sold for $64.95 in contemporary U.S. dollars.

And what did Princip accomplish with his $65 gun and two rounds? Why, the 20th Century, which saw state-organized murder on a scale to make even S.M. Stirling's Tchernobog burp and say, "No thanks, I'm driving." Pretty good return on investment...for given values of pretty good.

All that said, though, Brave New War definitely repaid the time I spent reading it, and Robb's blog is well worth perusing. He spends a lot of time discussing -- and attracts good comments further discussing -- the hollowing of the nation-state, resilient communities, and other interesting topics.

Done Lit Out for the Territories

2010-04-27T08:14:00.000-07:00

I've been reading James C. Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of South Asia lately. The professor's argument, boiled down, is this: The idea of viewing certain groups of people as "primitive" or "barbarian" is a state-centric view, applied to people who have chosen ways of living that keep them out of the ambit of the State. Most of his evidence is drawn from his analysis Zomia, an upland massif of South Asia spanning parts of China, Burma, and several other countries.

To be sure, there's something to the argument; at any rate, something can be made of it. Even in a Lockean system (and Professor Scott nods toward Lockeanism, but that is not, I believe, where he is coming from philosophically -- he appears to be making more of a "commons"-based anarchist argument), the role of the State is to secure the liberty of its citizens (protection against invaders from without and criminals within). If one were so inclined, one could characterize it this way:

"Just over those hills there are the Bad Guys. They dress funny, act funny, worship funny, and all they say is 'bar bar bar.' And they're looking this way, and they're coming to burn your crops, steal your livestock, jostle your womenfolk, carry off your children, and extract tribute from you.

"In the name of the King, I am here to offer you sturdy farmers protection from the Bad Guys Over the Hills. All you have to do is, uh, well, pay taxes, render a few days of corvée labor working on the King's Road and the King's Wall we'll be building, uh, well, right through your pasture there, I guess, according to the Royal Surveyor, and, uh...say, is that your daughter? Wow, she's cute! About sixteen, is she? I might be able to find her a place at Court. Fine strapping sons, too, I see. The King's army can use likely lads like those."

Having said so, have I disposed of the question in a manner acceptable to anarcho-capitalists like myself? I have not. That will take more doing, and once in a while those Bad Guys Over the Hills are every bit that bad and then some.

But what Scott is proposing isn't really new, or limited to Zomia. The state periphery is always the province of those for whom life in the State doesn't sit well. "Lighting out for the Territories" is a significant part of U.S. history, and various bits of badland and hill country even now form a sort of refuge where the king's writ does not run, at least not as efficiently as it does in the settled valleys and flatlands.

People were not only smaller and lived closer to water: they were more broadly and deeply educated

2010-04-20T08:04:00.000-07:00

By way of relaunching my blogging career, such as it is, I wish now to share with you a pair of passages I recently read. Here's the first:

No man stands out a grand and solitary figure; mental pictures are constantly painted of what the people think and as to what the people will or may do: when the bulk of the people do not think at all; for as Henry Ford long ago discovered, to most minds thought is 'absolutely appalling,' and what very naturally the masses want to do is enjoy themselves thoroughly and cheaply.

And here's the second:

To-day slavery consists in binding ourselves to the myth that nations are economically independent and that prosperity can be cultivated by trade barriers and protective tariffs. Were it possible to-morrow to establish universal free trade throughout the world, then within a generation would nations be so completely de-capitalized, for wealth would become so distributed, that international war would be deprived of its reason and become inane.

The first passage -- to me, at any rate -- could have come from one of today's behavioral economists, although I doubt many behavioral economists would quote Henry Ford with approval. Alternatively, one supposes it could have come from that branch of libertarian/anti-statist thought that refers dismissively to "the sheeple" (not without evidence, one must admit, and one must also concede that among those expressing such views is Albert Jay Nock).

The second could have come from just about anyone at the Mises Institute.

In fact, both these passages are from the same author, in the same work, within two pages of each other. The author is the British general and military theorist J.F.C. Fuller, writing in The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant; the first passage can be found on pages 410-411, and the second on pages 411-412.

It's an interesting juxtaposition, says I, and the more so for having been written in the late 1920s, by a career officer in the Royal Army. Even more interesting is the fact that Fuller elsewhere in the book writes approvingly of Frederick W. Taylor; principles of scientific management (in the context of industrial-scale endeavors) and individual liberty appear on the surface to be little related, although one may suppose that liberty of contract remains the guarantor of the individual's liberty. Of course, when the political means has been employed to interfere with the ability of competitive enterprises to enter a market, and the state has eliminated the individual's ability to work unclaimed land (Nock writes on this in Our Enemy, the State: note that the preceding link goes direct to a PDF of the book), the exercise of liberty of contract increasingly resembles an academic exercise.

What do I make of it all? I don't know, although I am inclined to agree with Fuller's second passage. I have long believed, though, that most of those making up "the masses" are capable of far more than they know or have been taught to believe. One must be careful with such formulations, though: as a rule, I do not believe in false consciousness as advanced by collectivists. Finally, I am impressed with the apparent scope and depth of General Fuller's scholarship and education as expressed in his ideas (whether or not I agree with all of them) and writing ability. In addition to the work cited, I recently read Fuller's Grant and Lee: A Study in Personality and Generalship, and it too is well written and a fine piece of scholarship; I think one would agree, whether or not one agrees with Fuller's rather boats-against-the-current assessment of Grant as a general.