Invisible Causes of Death

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

As a strong proponent of division of labor, Adam Smith favored standing armies over militias:

Among his arguments in favour of standing armies in modern times, Adam Smith enumerates the greater difficulty of preserving any considerable degree of order and prompt obedience from the noise of firearms, the smoke, and the invisible death to which every man feels himself every moment exposed, as soon as he comes within cannon-shot, and frequently a long time before the battle can be well said to be engaged. “In an ancient battle,” he says,” there was no noise but what arose from the human voice; there was no smoke, there was no invisible cause of wounds or death. Every man, till some mortal weapon actually did approach him, saw clearly that no such weapon was near him.”

It is not unworthy of remark that Hobbes endeavours to account for the courage of the London apprentices in the civil wars, on a principle the reverse of this — namely, the invisible nature of the death. “Among theirs” — that is, the parliament’s soldiers — “there were,” he says, “a great many London apprentices, who, for want of experience in the war, would have been fearful enough of death and wounds approaching visibly in glistening swords; but for want of judgment, scarce thought of such death as comes invisibly in a bullet, and, therefore, were very hardly to be driven out of the field.”

Posted in Andrew Bisset, Economics, War | No Comments »

Transonic Combustion

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

Transonic Combustion has put its new fuel-injection technology into a test car, with weight and aerodynamics similar to a Toyota Prius, and the test car got 64 miles per gallon in highway driving — far more than a Prius, which gets 48 miler per gallon on the highway:

The key is heating and pressurizing gasoline before injecting it into the combustion chamber, says Mike Rocke, Transonic’s vice president of business development. This puts it into a supercritical state that allows for very fast and clean combustion, which in turn decreases the amount of fuel needed to propel a vehicle. The company also treats the gasoline with a catalyst that “activates” it, partially oxidizing it to enhance combustion.

We used to add a catalyst to gasoline, a few decades ago: lead.

The fuel-injection system also reduces throttling losses:

Ordinarily, the air intake to an engine is partially closed during cruising, and this makes the engine work harder. Transonic’s system can operate with the air intake open, creating a lean mixture in the combustion chamber (with a lot of air, but just a little gasoline). Rocke says that at a steady cruising speed of 50 miles per hour, the test car gets 98 miles per gallon.

Posted in Technology | No Comments »

Pedersen Device

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

The Pedersen device is a fascinating footnote in the history of the modern assault rifle. In World War I, both sides used main battle rifles that resembled modern hunting rifles more than modern assault rifles — big, long rifles, shooting big, powerful rounds, very accurately, but very slowly. This would not do for storming enemy trenches:

John Pedersen, a long time employee of Remington Arms, was aware that the US would be entering the war at some point. Concerned about the inability for troops to effectively fire on the run while attempting to cross “No Man’s Land”, he decided to start studying the problem of semi-automatic fire that would allow them to fire from the hip without stopping. However, he also realized that there would be no way the Army would accept a totally new rifle design, as they were already struggling to produce enough Springfields, contracting to produce millions of M1917 “American Enfield” rifle with Remington and Winchester and were importing Ross rifles from Canada for training purposes.

This led him to the final design, which replaced the bolt of the standard Springfield with a device consisting of a complete firing mechanism and a small barrel for the small round. In effect, the device was essentially a complete blow-back pistol minus a receiver/grip using the short barrel of the device to fit into the longer chamber of the M1903 Springfield. The mechanism was fed by a long 40-round magazine sticking out of the rifle to the top right, and could be reloaded by inserting a new magazine. New sights were provided at the rear of the device. The system did require one modification to the rifle however, a hole had to be cut in the side of the bolt area to allow the ejection of spent rounds.

By 1917 his solution was perfected, and he traveled to Washington, DC to demonstrate it. After firing several rounds from what appeared to be an unmodified Springfield, he removed the standard bolt, inserted the device, and fired several magazines at a very high rate of fire. The evaluation team was astounded, and an immediate secret classification was applied. To deceive the enemy, the Ordnance Department decided to call it The US Automatic Pistol, Caliber .30, Model of 1918. Plans were put into place to start production of modified Springfields, which became the US Rifle, Cal. .30, Model of M1903, Mark I. Promises were made to have 500,000 ready for the 1919 Spring Offensive. The use of the Pedersen Device in the 1919 Spring offensive was to be in conjunction with the full combat introduction of the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR).

After the war, Pederson designed a semi-auto rifle using a smaller .276 (7 mm) cartridge, but John C. Garand’s design — re-chambered for Pederson’s .276 cartridge — won the Army contract:

After the .276 Garand rifle was selected over the Pedersen rifle, General Douglas MacArthur came out against changing rifle cartridges since the .30-06 would have to be retained for machine gun use and one cartridge simplified wartime logistics. Garand reverted his design back to the standard .30-06 Springfield cartridge in 1932; the result became the M1 Garand.

The M1 Garand was the first semi-automatic rifle to be generally issued to the infantry of any nation and, in the words of Patton, “the greatest implement of battle ever devised.”

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

The Opium of the Intellectual

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

Modern Marxism, Lee Harris explains, is a fantasy ideology dressed up to look like Marxism:

Marx and Engels’s wholesale condemnation of all previous socialism as utopian fantasy is the fundamental innovation of their own work. It is the basis of their claim to be taken seriously, not merely by Hoffmanesque daydreamers, but by men of practical judgment and shrewd common sense. To fail to make this distinction, or to fail to stay on the right side of this distinction once it has been made, is to cease to be a Marxist and to fall back into mere Träumerei.

This demarcation line arose because Marx believed that he had grasped something that no previous utopian socialist had even suspected. He believed that he had shown that socialism was inevitable and that it would come about through certain ironclad laws of history — laws that Marx believed were revealed through the study of the very nature of capitalism. Socialism, in short, would not come about because a handful of daydreamers had wished for it, or because pious moralists had urged it, but because the unavoidable breakdown of the capitalist system would force the turn to socialism upon those societies that, prior to this breakdown, had been organized along capitalist lines.

Schematically the scenario went something like this:

  • The capitalists would begin to suffer from a falling rate of profit.

  • The workers would therefore be “immiserized”; they would become poorer as the capitalists struggled to keep their own heads above water.

  • The poverty of the workers would drive them to overthrow the capitalist system — their poverty, not their ideals.

What is interesting here is that, once you accept the initial premise about the falling rate of profit, the rest does indeed follow realistically. Now, this does not mean that it follows necessarily or according to an ironclad scientific law; but it certainly conveys what any reasonable person would take as the most probable outcome of a hypothetical failure of capitalism.

For Marx it is absolutely essential that revolutionary activities be justifiable on realistic premises. If they cannot be, then they are actions that cannot possibly have a real political objective — and therefore, their only value can be the private emotional or spiritual satisfaction of the people carrying out this pseudo-political action.

So in order for revolutionary activity to have a chance of succeeding, there is an unavoidable precondition: The workers must have become much poorer over time. Furthermore, there had to be not merely an increase of poverty, but a conviction on the part of the workers that their material circumstances would only get worse, and not better — and this would require genuine misery.

This is the immiserization thesis of Marx. And it is central to revolutionary Marxism, since if capitalism produces no widespread misery, then it also produces no fatal internal contradiction: If everyone is getting better off through capitalism, who will dream of struggling to overthrow it? Only genuine misery on the part of the workers would be sufficient to overturn the whole apparatus of the capitalist state, simply because, as Marx insisted, the capitalist class could not be realistically expected to relinquish control of the state apparatus and, with it, the monopoly of force. In this, Marx was absolutely correct. No capitalist society has ever willingly liquidated itself, and it is utopian to think that any ever will. Therefore, in order to achieve the goal of socialism, nothing short of a complete revolution would do; and this means, in point of fact, a full-fledged civil war not just within one society, but across the globe. Without this catastrophic upheaval, capitalism would remain completely in control of the social order and all socialist schemes would be reduced to pipe dreams.

When Communism took hold in agrarian Russia and then China, while the workers in America and Britain grew prosperous, it should have been clear that Marx’s “scientific” predictions were in no sense coming true — but socialists did not admit their non-scientific shift into utopianism:

There might be several reasons advanced for this, but certainly one of them is Paul Baran. A Polish born American economist and a Marxist, Baran is the author of (Monthly Review Press, 1957). In it, for the first time in Marxist literature, Baran propounded a causal connection between the prosperity of the advanced capitalist countries and the impoverishment of the Third World. It was no longer the case, as it was for Marx, that poverty — as well as idiocy — was the natural condition of man living in an agricultural mode of production. Rather, poverty had been introduced into the Third World by the capitalist system. The colonies no longer served the purpose of consuming overstocked inventories, but were now the positive victims of capitalism.

What needs to be stressed here is that, prior to Baran, no Marxist had ever suspected that capitalism was the cause of the poverty of the rest of the world. Not only had Marx and Engels failed to notice this momentous fact, but neither had any of their followers. Yet this omission was certainly not due to Marx’s lack of knowledge about, or interest in, the question of European colonies. In his writing on India, Marx shows himself under no illusions concerning the brutal and mercenary nature of British rule. He is also aware of the “misery and degradation” effected by the impact of British industry’s “devastating effects” on India. Yet all of this is considered by Marx to be a dialectical necessity; that is to say, these effects were the unavoidable precondition of India’s progress and advance — an example of the “creative destruction” that Schumpeter spoke of as the essence of capitalist dynamics. Or, as Marx put it in On Colonialism: “[T]he English bourgeoisie… will neither emancipate nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the [Indian] people… but… what they will not fail to do is to lay down the material premises for both” the emancipation and the mending of this social condition.

The radical nature of Baran’s reformulation of Marxist doctrine is obscured by an understandable tendency to confuse Baran’s theory with Lenin’s earlier theory of imperialism. In fact, the two have nothing in common. Lenin’s theory had evolved in order to explain the continuing survival of capitalism into the early twentieth century, and hence the delay of the coming of socialism. In Lenin’s view, imperialism is not the cause of Third World immiserization, but rather a stopgap means of postponing immiserization in the capitalist countries themselves. It is the capitalist countries’ way of keeping their own work force relatively prosperous — and hence politically placid — by selling surplus goods into captive colonial markets. It is not a way of exploiting, much less impoverishing, these colonies. It was rather a way “to bribe the upper strata of the proletariat, and… to… strengthen opportunism,” as Lenin put it in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (International Publishers, 1933).

This gives us the proper perspective from which to judge the revolutionary quality of Baran’s reformulation. For, in essence, what Baran has done is to globalize the traditional doctrine of immiserization so that, instead of applying to the workers of the advanced capitalist countries, it now came to apply to the entire population of those countries that have not achieved advanced capitalism: It was the rest of the world that was being impoverished by capitalism, not the workers of the advanced countries.

Baran’s global immiserization thesis, after its initial launch, was taken up by other Marxists, but it was nowhere given a more elaborate intellectual foundation than in Immanuel Wallerstein’s monumental study The Modern World-System (Academic Press, 1974), which was essentially a fleshing out in greater historical and statistical detail of Baran’s thesis. Hence, for the sake of convenience, I will call the global immiserization thesis the Baran-Wallerstein revision.

This Baran-Wallerstein revision helped explain a lot:

For example, there was no longer any difficulty in accepting the astonishingly high level of prosperity achieved by the work force of the advanced capitalist countries — indeed, it was now even possible to arraign the workers of these countries alongside of the capitalists for whom they labored — or, rather, more precisely, with whom they collaborated in order to exploit both the material resources and the cheap labor of the Third World. In the new configuration, both the workers and the capitalists of the advanced countries became the oppressor class, while it was the general population of the less advanced countries that became the oppressed — including, curiously enough, even the rulers of these countries, who often, to the untutored eye, seemed remarkably like oppressors themselves.

With this demystification of the capitalist working class came an end to even a feigned enthusiasm among Marxists for solidarity with the hopelessly middle-class aspirations of the American blue-collar work force. The Baran-Wallerstein revision offered an exotic new object of sympathy — namely, the comfortably distant and abstract Third World victims of the capitalist world system.

Perhaps most important, the Baran-Wallerstein revision also neatly solved the most pressing dilemma that worker prosperity in advanced capitalist countries bequeathed to classical Marxism: the absolute lack of revolutionary spirit among these workers — the very workers, it must be remembered, who were originally cast in the critical role of world revolutionaries. In the new theoretical configuration, this problem no longer mattered simply because the workers of the capitalist countries no longer mattered.

Hence the appeal of the global immiserization thesis: The Baran-Wallerstein revision neatly obviates all the most outstanding objections to the classical Marxist theory.

On the other hand the Baran-Wallerstein revision doesn’t explain how the revolution could succeed:

This is because the original immiserization thesis was set within the context of a class war within a society — an actual civil war between different classes of one and the same society, and not between different nations on different continents. This makes an enormous difference, for it is not at all unreasonable to think that a revolutionary movement could succeed, by means of a violent and bloody civil war, in gaining the monopoly of force within a capitalist society, and thus be able to dictate terms to the routed capitalists, if any survived.

But this is an utterly different scenario from one in which the most advanced capitalist societies have a monopoly of force — and brutally effective force — at their disposal. For in this case it is absurd to think that the exploited Third World countries could possibly be able to alter the world order by even a hair, provided the advanced capitalist societies were intent on not being altered.

What could they do to us?

The answer to this question, according to many of those who accept the global immiserization thesis, came on 9-11. Noam Chomsky, perhaps America’s most celebrated proponent of the Baran-Wallerstein thesis, expressed this idea in the immediate aftermath. Here, for the first time, the world had witnessed the oppressed finally striking a blow against the oppressor — a politically immature blow, perhaps, comparable to the taking of the Bastille by the Parisian mob in its furious disregard of all laws of humanity, but still an act equally world-historical in its significance: the dawn of a new revolutionary era.

It’s still not enough though:

For those who are persuaded by the Baran-Wallerstein thesis, 9-11 represents a classic temptation. It is the temptation that every fantasy ideology offers to those who become caught up in it — the temptation to replace serious thought and analysis, fidelity to the facts and scrupulous objectivity, with the worst kind of wishful thinking. The attempt to cast 9-11 as a second taking of the Bastille simply overlooks what is most critical about both of these events, namely, that the Bastille was a symbol of oppression to the masses of French men and women who first overthrew it and then tore it down, brick by brick. And while it is true that the Bastille had become the stuff of fantasy, thanks to the pre-1789 “horrors of the Bastille” literature, it was still a fantasy that worked potently on the minds of the Parisian mob and hence provided the objective political conditions necessary to undermine the Bourbon state. But the fantasy embodied in 9-11, far from weakening the American political order, strengthened it immeasurably, while the only mobs that were motivated by the enactment of this fantasy were those inhabiting the Arab streets — a population pathetically unable to control even the most elementary aspects of its own political destiny, and hence scarcely the material out of which a realistically minded revolutionary could hope to fashion an instrument of world-historical transformation. These people are badly miscast in the role of the vanguard of the world revolution. And what can we say about those in the West, allegedly acting within the tradition of Marxist thought, who encourage such spectacularly utopian flights of fantasy?

There is nothing Marxist about the Baran-Wallerstein thesis:

On the contrary, according to Marx, it was the duty of the non-utopian socialist, prior to the advent of genuine socialism, to support whatever state happened to represent the most fully developed and consistently carried out form of capitalism; and, indeed, it was his duty to defend it against the irrational onslaughts of those reactionary and backward forces that tried to thwart its development. In fact, this was a duty that Marx took upon himself, and nowhere more clearly than in his defense of the United States against the Confederacy in the Civil War. Only in this case he was defending capitalism against a fantasy ideology that, unlike that of radical Islam, wished to roll back the clock a mere handful of centuries, not several millennia.

Posted in Economics, Lee Harris, Policy | No Comments »

Unto Caesar

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

F.A. Voigt argued that both Communism and National Socialism were revolutionary secular religions that sought to render unto Caesar that which is God’s — that is, to transform religious promises into worldly reality — and that Britain had to act, within realistic constraints, to save the Commonwealth:

The greatest extension of international, social, and religious peace ever achieved has been achieved within the British Commonwealth. Throughout a quarter of the world the satanic forces that engender war and revolution are curbed, thanks to the Pax Britannica, with which a benevolent Providence has associated the Pax Americana and the Pax Gallica.

The Pax Europaica is one of these ideals that transcend practical statesmanship, which is necessarily short-sighted and bent on the fulfillment of immediate tasks. Excessively far-sighted statesmanship may be very dangerous, and to pursue an international ideal by political means is to invite a general catastrophe.

The Pax Europaica would certainly be in the interest of the British Commonwealth, but to enforce it is beyond the power of the Commonwealth (we often forget that the greatest power — even the power of the Commonwealth — is limited). England is under the absolute necessity of defending western Europe because that defense is self-defense. That necessity imposes a terrible burden and is attended by fearful dangers. The burden and the dangers must be borne, but to augment them in the pursuit of an ideal that is, in any case, unattainable in so short a time as one generation, would be madness. The Pax Britannica would be shaken and, perhaps, fall to pieces, British vital interests would suffer profound and perhaps irretrievable injury, and the ideal would certainly not be achieved but would, in all likelihood, be buried forever in the irretrievable ruin.

This passage, in Mencius Moldbus’s opinion, approaches greatness:

The true lover of peace will be more concerned with peace in the concrete than peace in the abstract; with defending his and his country’s peace, rather than with chimerical schemes for extending peace beyond the limits of the possible. He will always reflect whether its extension beyond the frontiers of his own country will be an extension not of peace, but of war. Even a seemingly small extension of peace may be dangerous, as the extension of the Pax Britannica to western Europe is. Inherent in universal peace is the menace of universal war — “indivisible peace” is “indivisible war.”
[...]
The modern effort to establish universal peace is perhaps for this reason mainly an English effort. After the armistice, the English experienced a prodigious revulsion against war. But they also felt an island security which could no longer be menaced, seeing that the German fleet had been destroyed. Their pacifism acquired a messianic character — they were less concerned with saving their fellow-countrymen than with saving all mankind from war. Their own security made them more accessible than any other nations to utopian dreams of universal peace — and blinder to the danger inherent in such utopian dreams.
[...]
Monstrous proposals, like the proposal to create an international air force that would emerge — from some Alpine stronghold, presumably — and bomb the cities of the alleged aggressor, found a considerable following in the post-war years. Such inhuman phantasmagoria had an affinity with the secular religions of the European continent. Indeed, English militant pacifism had something in common with the Marxian dreams of a universal realm of peace, justice and well-being. As we have seen, the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth is inseparable from its own opposite. It can only come about by violence.The threat of universal war as a means of establishing universal peace is a peculiarly English conception that has crystallized in the doctrine of “sanctions.” This doctrine is analogous to the doctrine of the proletarian dictatorship which would establish social peace by making class-war permanent and universal. “Sanctions” are the counterpart of the revolutionary terror — the purpose of either is peace, but the effect of both is the consolidation, through war or the threat of war (whether between classes or nations), of power in the hands of those hold it.
[...]
To erect the “punishment of the aggressor” into a general system would be to concentrate immense power into a few hands and establish an abominable and universal tyranny. In nothing is the evil inherent in universal systems of enforced morality more evident than in the doctrine of “sanctions.”
[...]
There is no reason to suppose that a universal system of “sanctions” would abolish war even for a time. One evil would be replaced by a greater evil. Private wars would be abolished — only world wars would be allowed.

England, Voigt emphasizes, is the only Great Power exposed to the permanent danger of total and permanent defeat in war:

The United States have absolute security. They are exposed neither to blockade, nor invasion, nor attack from the air. Not one of their vital interests can be menaced. Unless their whole fleet engages in some rash enterprise far from its bases, they are safe from major defeat. And even major defeat would not expose them to conquest by a foreign foe. The United States can never be less than a Great Power.
[...]
Of all the Great Powers, England is the most vulnerable. On her armed strength depends her own existence — and the existence of others. She can never share the enviable state of the small countries on the north-western fringe of Europe. Without her, these countries would be threatened with extinction. If it were not for the British command of the sea, Holland would be absorbed by Germany, and her colonial empire would be at the mercy of Japan. It is very doubtful whether Denmark would exist at all if she were not situated on the fringe of the Pax Britannica. Norway and Sweden have a certain security in their remoteness — but the security of Norway, at least, is made doubly secure because England could not tolerate an alien conquest or penetration that would give a foreign navy the use of the Norwegian coast.

Belgium cannot exist as an independent nation without Britain and France. It is not even sure that Swiss independence would survive if the Swiss had not the French for neighbors and the French had not the English for allies.
[...]
England’s general interest is in the national independence of existing States within their present frontiers and therefore, in the European status quo. But that interest is not so vital that she can make every change in that status a casus belli. Indeed no change in the territorial status anywhere in Europe, except in the west and in the Mediterranean area, can be a casus belli for England. But so delicate is the European equilibrium and so far-reaching may the consequences be if it is upset, that any territorial change anywhere in Europe may, by involving other Powers (especially France), lead to a situation so full of danger that she must always reserve to herself the possibility of intervening in defense of her vital interests.

Nor is the question purely political. The triumph of the militant, imperialistic Powers would promote the spread of protection and of tied economies. German expansion in central and eastern Europe would extend the area of German “self-sufficiency.” Whether Germany achieves political domination, or even a decisive political and commercial influence, tariffs and systems of quotas, subsidies and import and export licenses are promoted to the advantage of Germany and to the exclusion of other countries.

Loss of trade in an area so extensive as the prospective Pan-German Empire and the zones of German ascendancy beyond the borders of that Empire would be a very serious matter for England.
[...]
While avoiding direct intervention in the affairs of central and eastern Europe, [England] must always be able to impinge on the central and eastern European situation, using her influences and her good offices to preserve the status quo. A general anti-German policy would be excessively dangerous and costly. Any general coercive system would be fatal to England if it were to dominate her policy. Isolation would be no less fatal. Her path must run clear of a utopian universalism and an equally utopian isolationism.

This passage, Moldbug says, demonstrates the tragedy of Voigt’s liberal realism:

The principal antithesis in the world today is not between Berlin and Moscow, London or Rome, but between London and Berlin. Without this antithesis, a Pax Europaica or a United Europe would be possible.

The greatest — and perhaps unattainable — political need of Europe today is that a relationship, such as exists between London and Washington, should also exist between London, Paris and Berlin. If England, France and Germany are united, not in any federation or any centrally directed system, or indeed any system of any kind, but by virtue of a certain fundamental identity of outlook and by a common civilization (no other unity can be real), then Europe is united, and the dream of all “good Europeans,” the Pax Europaica, will have come true.

The Pax Europaica cannot be achieved by protocols or treaties, by pacts, by alliances, by mutual assistance or by the League of Nations. It can only come about through a spiritual change — in Germany, but also in France and England.

Moldbug’s reaction:

Here we see the tragedy of the British “appeasers” of the late ’30s. Between the Congress of Vienna and the rise of Germany, Britain had enjoyed effective world supremacy, as the US does now. Liberal Imperialism foundered on this rock; it could not let Germany become a world power equal to the British, for Germany was not liberal.

Yet, by opposing Germany and denying it Westphalian parity, Britain made Germany hateful and paranoid, for Germans saw themselves being treated as an inferior in a world system in which it was not just formally an equal, but economically and militarily an equal. Thus the harder Britain worked to deny Germany equality, the less deserving of that equality Germany became.

The appeasers of the ’30s inherited the final dilemma of this epic conflict. From the perspective of British interests, the right decision was clearly to abandon the Little Entente-type states created after World War I, whose adherence to democratic principles was anyway quite a bit less than stellar, and allow Germany to create her empire in the East. Yet this decision was both a release of power, which is always difficult for the powerful, and an empowerment of dangerous and illiberal forces beyond the control of Britain or anyone. Unlimited national sovereignty!

Another decision, of course, would have been to support Poland and Czechoslovakia to the hilt. This might not have restrained all future Hitlers; it probably would have restrained Hitler. But ultimately, it would have been necessary to back this bluff with actual war. Hence the course of universal peace, later followed.

But, through the natural tensions in her political system, Britain wound up following a course between these two poles, and one which was clearly worse than both. Seeking to avoid war and preserve her Empire — excuse me, “Commonwealth” — she got war, and lost her Empire. And lo, did Edgar Mowrer inherit the earth. Along with Moscow, for a time.

Here, again, is the tragedy of Voigt’s liberal realism. He dabbles with actual, real realism — and rejects it. He ends up, with Mowrer, trying to convert Germany to “good thinking.” That this can only be done with bombs, and that it can only end in the death of the British Empire, he at some level knows; but he cannot reject his geopolitics, his commercial advantage, his trade routes, all the cant of late Imperialism. Hence the war sucks him and his country in.

Posted in Mencius Moldbug, Policy, War | No Comments »

Cromwell Attended Cambridge

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

Before rising to power, Oliver Cromwell attended Cambridge — and his head is now buried beneath Sidney Sussex College‘s chapel:

It may be added here, with regard to athletic exercises, that Cromwell, when at Cambridge, distinguished himself far more at football and cudgels than at the exercises of the schools; and that he, like Marlborough, Clive, and many other great men, would never have risen to the command of armies, if such rise had depended upon a competitive examination, in which prigs and pedants will generally beat men of great force of character or genius for the arts of war or peace.

Posted in Andrew Bisset, Education, War | No Comments »

Western markets are like Western medicine

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

What suffered most in the Great Depression, John Nye says, was trust — impersonal social trust:

The idea of impersonal social trust was the most dramatic accomplishment of industrial civilization’s rise from the 18th to the early 20th century. The greatest achievement of early modern economic growth was not the Industrial Revolution itself, but the way in which the leading Western economies began to move away from highly parochial, narrow networks of personal exchange and came to rest instead on increasingly complex national and international commercial networks of impersonal exchange. The networks were mediated by competition, but also by an Adam Smithian understanding that strangers’ seeking their own gain amongst each other could lead to universal benefit. Praxis and theory reinforced each other.
[...]
In some ways, FDR did not so much break from normalcy as return to it. It helps to recall that large-scale systems based on anonymous exchange were a recent phenomenon. The system of orderly, global trade developed in the 19th century under the financial and political leadership of the United Kingdom, and backed by the gold standard, produced growth and prosperity. But it also produced plenty of social disruption and downward as well as upward mobility. It certainly never inspired the kind of devotion that nationalist and communal ideology more readily induce, as suggested by the rise of fascism during the interwar period. The world’s experience with democracy and market capitalism was limited. The more common experience by far consisted of political systems that allowed limited access to property rights and trade, reserving the most exalted benefits for elites who treated control of the political economy as their reward for preserving peace.

This older, more organic order, which even today represents the default for most nations, has the advantage of being both stable and intuitively natural. So thoroughly has the West taken for granted the triumph of the more abstract liberal nation-state that its denizens must remind themselves how fragile its origins were and how little emotional loyalty it has commanded. Indeed, the evidence suggests that few people trust large-scale systems of commerce. It is much easier to focus on political economy as a system of extended associations in which successes or failures can be attributed to individuals or groups for whom we feel either loyalty or loathing. Despite the prevalence of market behavior throughout history, it has rarely trumped communal corporate identity, especially in hard or frightening times. Abstractions do not generally prevail over concrete social relations because personal trust is more readily attained and maintained than impersonal trust.
[...]
Seen as a reversion to older habits, the odd mix of regulation, make-work, intervention, protectionism, nationalism and (as in Germany and elsewhere) anti-Semitism that characterized the Western policy response to the Depression suddenly seems less like an incoherent flaying in all directions and more like elements of a uniform retrenchment in social relations. What all these habits had in common, in all the countries in which they loomed large, was their role in spurning the system of abstract, anonymous and international exchange for more parochial, inward-looking responses to danger. So afraid of the new were they that some national elites followed this path of retrenchment to the point of utter self-destruction. Indeed, the severity with which people rose to tear up or overturn that still new system, despite the unprecedented prosperity it had wrought, seems indisputable testimony to how paper thin support for liberal trading regimes truly was.
[...]
In a sense, Western markets are like Western medicine: Just as an outbreak of incurable plague would lead to both a renewed search for sound cures and an atavistic appeal to folk remedies, so the Depression stimulated both productive thinking about the sources of business instability as well as destructive appeals to extreme nationalism, protectionism and military aggression.

As Arnold Kling adds, it is more natural to live in a world of Mafia Godfathers than one with fair, open, competitive markets.

Posted in Arnold Kling, Economics, Policy | No Comments »

Solar Thermal Paired with Natural Gas

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

Across 500 acres just north of West Palm Beach, the FPL Group is building the world’s second-largest solar thermal plant, with 190,000 mirrors:

But that is not its real novelty. The solar array is being grafted onto the back of the nation’s largest fossil-fuel power plant, fired by natural gas. It is an experiment in whether conventional power generation can be married with renewable power in a way that lowers costs and spares the environment.

This is (almost) exactly what I was discussing with respect to wind power recently. An intermittent alternative-energy plant can produce energy at near-zero marginal cost, but it can’t guarantee energy when it’s needed, while a natural gas plant can’t produce free energy, but it can produce energy right when it’s needed. (At least solar-thermal generation is naturally correlated with when people demand energy to run their air conditioners.)

Under the same ownership, I suspect we’ll see that a kW of “backup” natural gas capacity combined with a kW of seasonal solar capacity has very high capital costs for its sometimes-low, sometimes-high variable costs — so only questionable subsidies and mandates will make solar appear economical, as in Spain, where they agreed to buy solar power for $0.58/kWh.

Posted in Business, Policy, Technology | No Comments »

Akrasia and the Greatest Drug Worker in History

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

Don’t blame drugs for drug addiction, says Theodore Dalrymple, in Romancing Opiates. Richard DeGrandpre makes the same point in The Cult of Pharmacology. Lee Harris offers his own perspective:

If the drug induced the moral weakness, then shouldn’t we blame the drug, as the addict asks us to? If the moral weakness was already there, before the drug use began, and if it explains the addict’s inability to control his drug use, then what sense does it make to hold the addict responsible for his moral weakness? If a person has been trained to believe that he is helpless to control his own behavior, can you alter this fact by stigmatizing him or by making him face the adverse consequences of what Dalrymple calls his “conscious choices”? It is his very moral weakness that makes him impossible to help, because that moral weakness has long convinced him that he cannot help himself.

To accept the addict’s account at face value does not require a bleeding heart. The problem of moral weakness was frankly recognized and brilliantly analyzed by the tough-minded Aristotle who put great emphasis in both his ethical and political theories on a psychological phenomenon he called akrasia. This Greek term literally means “without power,” and it refers to a lack of mastery over the self — a state of helplessness in respect to one’s appetites, passions, and impulses. It is defined in contrast to the concept of enkrateia, which represents the exact opposite kind of character — the person who has obtained mastery over himself, and who can control and regulate his passions and impulses. The dieter, for example, who follows his self-imposed regimen strictly and faithfully, is displaying enkrateia, while the dieter who goes off his diet because he cannot resist the lure of a strawberry milkshake is an example of akrasia.

According to Aristotle, not all akrasia is the same. There is weakness (astheneia) and impetuosity (propeteia). Our lapsed dieter is an example of weakness. He has thought out a plan of action that he thinks is the right thing for him to do, namely, to lose weight; he has even established a dietary routine to achieve his end. Yet he simply cannot resist the impulse to have a strawberry milkshake, in violation of the rules that he had set out for himself. He knows better, but this rational knowledge makes no difference to his actual conduct. He is too weak to control his appetites and his passions. He exists in a state of internal conflict: part of him wants to do the right thing, but that part is not strong enough to conquer the part of him that wants to do the wrong thing.

On the other hand, the impetuous person makes no attempt to curb and control his impulses and appetites. He simply acts, and does so without any internal agonizing over what choice to make, and indeed without any reflection or deliberation at all. Yet, for Aristotle, the impetuous person is capable of regretting his impulsive actions once he has committed them, though perhaps only in the way that the impulsive shoplifter regrets the fact that he has been caught red-handed. This regret, by itself, cannot bring about a change in the behavior of the impetuous person; he will continue to give in to his impulses and to be punished for them — like the criminal who, as soon as he is released from jail, returns to committing the same crimes that put him there in the first place. The impetuous person never learns.

Aristotle’s analysis is helpful in seeing where Dalrymple’s treatment of the addict falls short, since the concept of akrasia allows us to recognize that there will inevitably be large groups of human beings who will be unable to control their own lives — a group that will naturally exhibit all the signs of the impetuous personality. Large doses of testosterone coursing through the veins of young males will invariably lead to impetuous behavior, unless these boys have been subjected from a young age to a rigorous program aimed at habituating them to self-control, or enkrateia — and even then the success may be hit or miss. Kids who have been allowed to grow up feral cannot be expected to display self-control; self-mastery is a technique no one has taught them, so how could they have learned it? They will in fact lack the strength of mind to rise even to the level of Aristotle’s weak man, since they will be ignorant of what constitutes right conduct.

In Aristotle’s political theory, such human beings are classified as “natural slaves” who must be governed by others because they are completely unable to govern themselves. Today we find Aristotle’s theory objectionable, despite the fact that in even the most advanced societies many people are “enslaved” to drugs, to alcohol, to gambling, and to sex. Indeed, Aristotle could rightly point out that no society has ever existed that achieved the complete elimination of the weak-willed and the impetuous, if only because each rising generation will consist of children who, by nature, lack the self-mastery that can only be achieved by the right upbringing — if even then.

Civilizing the young is one of the first duties of any society, though it is a duty that certain cultures have discharged with vastly more success than others. If there are many people in the society whose behavior is characterized by akrasia, or moral weakness, then the society, for its own good, has a right and an obligation to keep them from dangers to which they, by nature, are especially vulnerable. The sociological motive behind such puritanism is not a hatred of pleasure as such, but only of those pleasures that weaken the will and undermine self-control. Some pleasures are wholesome and acceptable, and should be encouraged. Other pleasures challenge not just individual self-control but the collective self-control of the whole community, threatening the ethical foundation of the society; such pleasures must be curbed. Lead us not into temptation, both for our own good and the welfare of the general society.

There are, of course, people who live perfectly productive lives while addicted to drugs:

To begin with, let us examine the case of two remarkable individuals, one cited by DeGrandpre, the other by Dalrymple.

William Halsted was an American doctor whom DeGrandpre calls “one of the greatest of surgeons in American history, perhaps even the father of modern surgery.” In 1892, Halsted became the first professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital; he later introduced the use of rubber gloves when operating on patients, and went on to organize “new fields of medicine, including orthopaedics, otolaryngology, and urology.” Yet Halsted had been using morphine from the age of twenty-two, and remained a morphine user for well over the next half-century. A study made of him in 1942 reported that Halsted “found that his addiction caused him little inconvenience…. Sometimes he went for a few days, or even weeks, without the drug, but then ‘suddenly the overpowering desire would come.’”

William Wilberforce, an Englishman who lived a century before Halsted, played a pivotal role in bringing about one of the world’s greatest ethical achievements: he worked tirelessly for the emancipation of slaves, not just in British colonies, but around the world, and he was instrumental in ending the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade. His contemporaries admired his eloquence; Boswell famously described watching the diminutive Wilberforce give a speech: “I saw what seemed a mere shrimp mount upon the table; but as I listened, he grew, and grew, until the shrimp became a whale.” Thanks to his patience and persistence, the abolitionist cause eventually won out in Parliament. Yet, as Dalrymple notes, Wilberforce died an opium addict.

Halsted and Wilberforce certainly do not fit into the categories of the weak-willed or impetuous man. Can their addictions be summarily dismissed as mere self-indulgence, or do they offer evidence that certain substances possess an occult hold over even the strongest of us? When Halsted spoke of the times when he tried to quit morphine, but found himself seized by “the overpowering desire” for the drug, was he simply propagating more pharmacological lies, as De Quincey is supposed to have done, or was he genuinely possessed by a desire over which he had no control?

Earlier we discussed the case of the weak-willed fellow who set out to follow a rigorous diet plan, but found himself seduced by the temptation of a strawberry milkshake. When dealing with our lapsed dieter and his strawberry milkshake, our common sense tells us that it would be silly to blame some sinister power in the milkshake. Instead, it makes more sense to say that he lacked the strength of will; or, as Aristotle would say, that he was weak. But can the same thing be said about other substances, like opium, cocaine, or alcohol? It was the immensely strong-willed Samuel Johnson who, when asked why he never touched wine, replied: “Abstinence is as easy for me, as temperance would be difficult.” But why would temperance have been so difficult for Johnson to achieve? It makes no sense to blame it on his lack of willpower, since he was strong enough to abstain from wine completely, and, as he said, quite easily.

Johnson’s quip about abstinence and temperance makes sense when it is a question of spirituous beverages, but what about strawberry milkshakes? We can understand a man who abstains from drinking strawberry milkshakes — but what about a man who cannot drink strawberry milkshakes in moderation, and who goes on a weekend-long strawberry milkshake binge? Is such a man even imaginable? If one finds pleasure in a strawberry milkshake at all, one can find it only in moderation: drink three of them in a row as an experiment if you doubt the truth of this observation.

But the same thing cannot be said about the pleasures of alcohol, and by extension, the pleasures of opium, cocaine, crack, and methamphetamine. While it is true that some people can use these drugs moderately, the way many of Johnson’s contemporaries could drink wine moderately, the fact remains that there are many otherwise strong-willed people who begin taking alcohol and drugs and discover, too late, that they cannot control their desire to take more and more — a problem which, as we have seen, does not afflict even the most self-indulgent lover of strawberry milkshakes. In short, the chemical nature of the temptation does matter.

Harris argues in favor of useful myths:

Is it possible that one of the causes of the modern drug epidemic is that more and more people have ceased to subscribe to the idea that certain substances are inherently destructive of our strength of will, and have therefore been tempted to taste the erstwhile forbidden fruit? If scientific knowledge leads us to abandon such myths as that of Demon Rum, Demon Heroin, and Demon Cocaine, is it altogether clear that our increased sophistication will be advantageous to the welfare of both present and future generations? Some irrational fears are obviously bad; others may serve an immensely useful social purpose. Carrie Nation’s crusade against Demon Rum may raise smiles on our faces today, but have we developed a more effective technique at getting people to resist the temptation of forbidden fruit than scaring the hell out of them?

The libertarian position seems inevitable, Harris says, once we have decided that drugs are not the cause of drug addiction:

If opiate users can be divided into those who would be criminals anyway and those who end up brilliant surgeons like Halsted and eminent humanitarians like Wilberforce, then it obviously makes far more sense to lock up the criminals for their criminal behavior, and not for their heroin use. But this argument can be turned on its head: If strong and confident men like Halsted and Wilberforce can become hopelessly addicted to a drug, then might this not be an argument for doing everything possible to keep it out of the hands of adolescent boys, slum addicts, the weak-willed, the impetuous, the self-indulgent, the depressed — in short, to treat it in the same way you would treat a dangerous strain of plague that threatened to sweep through entire populations? Yes, some people will be immune to the plague, but it remains a plague all the same. The obvious fact that some people can use these substances without undermining the foundation of the open society does not mean that their widespread promiscuous use among the general population will prove equally innocuous.

Mill argued that the prohibition of opium imports into China was an “objectionable … infringement of liberty … of the buyer.” This was a straightforward, if unappetizing, application of his “simple universal principle.” But would Mill have stood by his simple principle if he had foreseen the consequences of its application in this case? By the time the Communist Party came to power in 1949, there were approximately 20 million opium addicts in China. Chairman Mao, no student of Mill, decided that the only answer to the problem was ruthlessness. As Dalrymple writes, Mao gave the Chinese opium addicts “a strong motive to give up and the rest of the population a strong motive not to start. He shot the dealers out of hand, and any such addicts who did not give up their habit. The carrot for addicts was life and the stick was death. It would not be going too far to say that, within a mere three years, Mao produced more cures than all the drug clinics in the world before or since, or indeed to come. He was the greatest drug worker in history.”

Immediately after making this observation, Dalrymple writes that “the point of this story is not to advocate a repetition of Mao’s methods on our soil, but to demonstrate that, when a motive is sufficiently strong, not merely some, but many, indeed millions, of addicted people can abandon their addiction, without the whole paraphernalia of the help that is necessary on the standard view of the problem.” But what kind of substitute for mass executions is available to the open societies of the West in dealing with our drug problems? Out of our limited box of tricks, how do we devise motives that are “sufficiently strong” to get addicts to kick their habit, but which fall short of lining them up against a wall and shooting them?

Open societies cannot be open to everything, Harris claims.

I think Harris makes an error in logic when he asks, If the moral weakness was already there, before the drug use began, and if it explains the addict’s inability to control his drug use, then what sense does it make to hold the addict responsible for his moral weakness? As Mao’s answer to the drug problem demonstrated, moral weakness is not simply present or absent; when threatened with execution, addicts quickly found the moral strength to drop their bad habit.

That’s the totalitarian answer — Communist or Fascist. The liberal answer — modern progressive or classical liberal — is to let drug-users use drugs. More specifically, the progressive answer is to let drug-users use drugs, and to effectively subsidize their bad habit through “harm reduction” measures — clean needles, free clinics, methadone and buprenorphine treatment, etc. The libertarian answer is to let drug-users use drugs, and to assume that the only damage done is to the drug-users themselves — and to emphasize how much damage is done by drug prohibition.

What rarely seems to come up is the notion of treating self-destructive drug addicts, who live off of petty crime, as distinct from productive members of society who have a vice. In Beggars & Thieves, street ethnographer Mark Fleisher emphasizes that the members of this criminal underclass don’t get better. They come from broken homes. They become addicted to illegal drugs and legal alcohol. They commit petty crimes and beg on the streets. And when they do time in a “correctional facility”, it’s a big step up in living standard for them — except that they can’t wait to get back to their booze and drugs. They never join productive society. But they do get let out of jail.

These beggars and thieves are Aristotle’s “natural slaves” — unable to govern themselves. And giving them warm blankets and clean needles doesn’t solve their problems — or our problems with them.

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Nations of Shepherds

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

Some of the most extensive conquests in the history of the world have been made by nations of shepherds:

An army of hunters, as Adam Smith has observed, and as we have seen exemplified in the case of the North American Indians, “can seldom exceed two or three hundred men. The precarious subsistence which the chase affords could seldom allow a greater number to keep together for any considerable time. An army of shepherds, on the contrary, may sometimes amount to two or three hundred thousand…. A nation of hunters can never be formidable to the civilized nations in their neighbourhood; a nation of shepherds may. Nothing can be more contemptible than an Indian war in North America; nothing, on the contrary, can be more dreadful than a Tartar invasion has frequently been in Asia.”

Adam Smith then proceeds to observe that the judgment of Thucydides, that no nation, either of Europe or Asia, could resist the Scythians united, has been verified by the experience of all ages. “The inhabitants,” he adds, “of the extensive but defenceless plains of Scythia and Tartary, have been frequently united under the dominion of the chief of some conquering horde or clan; and the havoc and devastation of Asia have always signalized their union. The inhabitants of the inhospitable deserts of Arabia, the other great nation of shepherds, have never been united but once — under Mahomet and his immediate successors. Their union, which was more the effort of religious enthusiasm than of conquest, was signalized in the same manner.”

Posted in Andrew Bisset, War | No Comments »

Drake Shooting

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

The Selous Scouts of Rhodesia developed something called Drake shooting for fighting in bush country:

This useful technique is based on the fact that in a close-quarters firefight, 99 percent of combatants seek to hide from incoming fire by hitting the ground and rolling into the nearest cover. Accepting this fact, the Drake/cover shoot concept requires that two rounds be fired into positions of likely cover until all positions are neutralized.

Each man of the patrol would concentrate on his assigned arc of responsibility to his immediate front and systematically analyzed it.


While the scout analyzed his arc he would think ‘if I was the enemy, which position within my arc would I chosen for cover?’ The scout would look at the base of large trees, rocks and thickets, and “double-tap” two controlled shots into each side of the suspected location close to ground level. By placing the shots low into the position, dirt and stones will spray up into the face of anyone hiding there, causing them to take rapid evasive movements and thus exposing them to aimed fire. The trick is to try to place the bullets just above the ground, because a man lying down is no more than 12 inches high. To shoot any higher will result in the bullet winging harmlessly overhead.

A four-man tracking team of scouts could quickly and effectively clear 40 potential firing positions, assuming that each man uses a 20-round magazine on a semiautomatic weapon. In the case of trees, the scout was trained to fire right into them at almost ground level, as bullets fired from modern high-velocity weapons can easily and completely penetrate most trees. As the scout observed his arc he would start close up, then systematically progress further and further back, widening the arc of fire, until all likely and suspected positions have been engaged. This technique is effective in flushing hidden adversaries and is economical in ammunition expenditure.

For training, areas were chosen at random by the instructors for these purposes and small targets concealed in all likely positions in which an enemy might take cover. After some practice and coaching, it was quite remarkable at how many targets were successfully engaged without the firer ever having sight of the target.

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Foreign Correspondents

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

A foreign correspondent — like Edgar Mowrer in Germany in the 1930s — occupies a peculiar place in the life of a country:

Because he and his friends in the foreign press lead American opinion on Germany, and America is a democracy, they lead American policy toward Germany. And, naturally, they have friends in Germany, and enemies in Germany; and they feel that American policy should result in their friends running Germany, and their enemies… not running Germany.

So, in a sense, when Germany moves to the right, it is rebelling against the nascent international community — and against Edgar Mowrer. And thus his anger. Later expressed in tons of TNT.

Posted in Mencius Moldbug, Policy | No Comments »

The Evil that Men Do

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

Richard Fernandez looks at The Evil that Men Do:

News that one of two children who killed a two year old toddler 17 years ago has been reincarcerated has shocked advocates of rehabilitation in Britain. James Venables, now 27, has been sent back to jail for unspecified violations of his conditions of release. The BBC reported that “one of James Bulger’s killers has been returned to prison after he breached the terms of his release. Jon Venables, 27, is back in jail after being released on life licence in 2001, when he was given a new identity. In 1993 he was detained with his friend Robert Thompson for the horrific murder of the two-year-old toddler in Bootle, Liverpool.”

The news was received with great bitterness in the Guardian, which campaigned to give Venable a second chance. Alan Travis wrote “the recall of Jon Venables to prison is a big setback for the cause of reform and rehabilitation of child killers popularly branded as evil and beyond help. Venables and Robert Thompson have been held up as model case studies of the potential of the criminal justice system to turn around lives, even in the most difficult cases.” Travis quoted the hopeful worlds of Lord Chief Justice said on that occasion.

“We ought not to forget that, although they committed those very serious crimes, they were first of all human beings, and secondly they were children. Children can do things when they are children that they would never do in later life when they had matured and appreciated,” said Woolf when he cut the length of their sentence to eight years in 2000.

And now, after having been “detained” instead of arrested, and after having being “recalled” instead of re-arrested, the perp is back in stir, now a man and no longer a boy. But it’s not the specifics of the case nor even sympathy for the individuals or victims that is at issue. The problem is one of theology. Are some people evil or can they always be fixed, given enough social work and counseling?

The Guardian in 1993 argued it would accept censorship before conceding the principle that the two child perpetrators should ever be identified. They needed a second chance. If criminalizing their identification was the price of giving them another go then so be it. Now that the paper has to say that Venables is back in custody and “it is unlikely to be just a technical breach of his life licence”, it’s a blow to their world view. The Guardian described its position.

In its leader the next day Guardian set out its reasons for declining to join the four newspapers that asked the high court to lift the injunction protecting the anonymity of the killers. The paper noted: “Free speech is important but so is the protection of life.… Rehabilitating the two remains the best public protection.”

One commenter points out the purpose of the system:

One of the statements that surprised me the most when I was in law school was when our crim law professor told us bluntly that all working professionals in the US had given up on the idea of rehabilitation about 30 years ago, and that currently in professional circles it is seen as having no usefulness whatsoever in the administration of justice.

And by professionals I mean cops, prosecutors, defense lawyers, parole officers, and all the others who have day to day contact with the legal system. For those outside, it may be a surprise to know that all of these people are on the same “team”, even the defense lawyers, and they all know it. Their job is to process the “product” that gets fed through the system, ie. the perps, and everyone has a role to play.

That “rehab” stuff is just for academics and a few soft minded politicians — and I guess the Brits. No one serious buys that anymore, not even as a theory.

The #1 objective of the modern american legal system is to keep the machinery moving. That may sound cynical, but ask anyone who works in it, and they’ll agree. And here’s another thing that everyone who works in the system takes for granted, even the defense lawyers: every perp who offends will reoffend pretty soon after he’s released unless he’s over 50, when the re-offense rates go down. (but even then they’re still high) No one expects anything different, and it doesn’t matter how you treat them. Good, bad, sympathetic, harsh — doesn’t matter, as soon as they’re out, they’re going to run right back to doing what they were doing before. So there’s no point in trying to change them, this is just about crowd control.

So why let them go, ever? Because it’s expensive to keep that many people in prison that long, and voters don’t want to vote the funds for that many prisons. (and they’re too squeamish to accept a high execution rate, even if it would work) Leaving too many people in prison too long gums up the machinery, and like I said the prime goal of everyone is to keep the machinery humming, keep the product moving, in and out, in and out. That way everyone has a job to do and the work never ends. Outside of the few big public cases it’s all pretty choreographed.

Good or bad, that’s Justice, American Style.

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The Effectiveness of Early Firearms

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

For a long time, the effectiveness of firearms was greatly exaggerated — but not by every fighting force:

The Turkish infantry—the Janissaries—were permanently embodied: they appear in their manner of fighting to have somewhat resembled the Scottish Highlanders; their custom being, after firing their muskets, to draw their sabres, and rush upon the enemy, Montecuculi bears testimony to the desperate bravery of the Turks. He says he has repeatedly seen them swim rivers in the face of an enemy, with their sabres between their teeth.

The chief strength of the Turk lay in his use of the arme blanche, which, with his infantry as well as cavalry, was the sabre.

What may be the effect of the recent improvements in fire-arms, both in respect to longer range and greater precision, time will show; but it appears certain that hitherto the effect of the invention of firearms upon war has been greatly exaggerated and misunderstood. For example, Adam Smith says: ” In modern war, the great expense of fire-arms gives an evident advantage to the nation which can best afford that expense; and, consequently, to an opulent and civilized over a poor and barbarous nation.”

This assertion is disproved by what the Highlanders accomplished in the seventeenth century under the Marquis of Montrose, and in the Rebellion of 1745, and by the whole history of the Turks for 200 years after the introduction of fire-arms. The Highlanders did their work principally with the broadsword, and the Turks with the sabre; and the result sufficiently showed the unsoundness of the conclusion, that making a noise by the explosion of gunpowder would form an efficient substitute for the neglect of the cultivation of the qualities of bodily strength and activity, and skill and dexterity in the use of arms. It is no answer to this to say that Cromwell’s troops ultimately beating the Highlanders is in favour of fire-arms; for Cromwell did nearly all his work by the superior excellence of his cavalry and the bodily strength and enthusiastic spirit of his pikemen. More of the work, too, both of Cromwell and Gustavus Adolphus, was done by the butt than by the muzzle of the musket, the bayonet not being rendered effective till long after. It might be shown also that Frederick II. of Prussia owed much of his success to the excellence of his cavalry, commanded as they were by the best cavalry officer in the world, Seidelitz.

Where the Turks were weak was where, as has been shown, the Spartans were weak — in their cultivation of bodily strength to the total exclusion of intellectual power. With them, as with the Spartans, this rendered it impossible, or next to impossible, to possess a first-rate general. Consequently, the Spartans and the Turks, though they might, from their excellence as soldiers, be almost sure of defeating troops of inferior excellence led by ordinary generals, when they came to contend with the strategical genius of such commanders as Epaminondas and Eugene, were defeated; the great superiority of the general making up for the inferiority of his army.

Marshal Saxe’s theory (which, however, must have been much modified if the rifle had then been in use) is that musketry is of very little service, unless at such close quarters as to be pretty nearly equivalent to the use of the “arme blanche.” He speaks of “l’abus de la tirerie, qui fait plus de bruit que de mal, et qui fait toujours battre ceux qui s’en servent.” He says, further, “La poudre n’est pas si terrible qu’on le croit. Peu de gens dans les affaires sont tués de bonne guerre et par devant; j’ai vu des salves entières ne pas tuer quatre hommes, et je n’en ai jamais vu, ni personne, je pense, qui ait causé un dommage assez considérable pour empêcher d’aller en avant, et de s’en venger à grands coups de bayonettes et de fusils tirés a brûle-pourpoint. C’est là où il se tue du monde, et c’est le.victorieux qui tue.”

Marshal Saxe supports his theory by various facts; one of which was, the total and rapid destruction of two battalions of German infantry by a body of Turks: cavalry, it would seem; though that point is not quite clear in the Marshal’s account; but, either way, the sabre was the weapon of destruction. He thus describes the action: “At the battle of Belgrade I saw two battalions cut in pieces in an instant: it happened thus. Two battalions, one of Lorraine, and one of Neuperg, were on a height which we called the battery; and at the moment when a blast of wind dispersed a fog which prevented us from distinguishing anything, I saw these troops on the crest of the height separated from the rest of our army. Prince Eugene asked me if I had a good sight; and what was that troop of horsemen which was making the circuit of the mountain. I replied, that it was thirty or forty Turks. He said to me, ‘Those men are destroyed,’ meaning the two battalions. I did not, however, see that they were attacked, or were likely to be, because I could not see what was on the other side of the mountain. I proceeded thither as fast as I could. At the moment I arrived behind the colours of Neuperg, I saw the two battalions present arms, take aim, and fire a general volley at thirty paces on a body of Turks who were advancing upon them. The fire and the melee were simultaneous; and the two battalions had no time for flight; for they were all instantly sabred on the spot where they stood. There escaped only M. de Neuperg, who, luckily for him, was on horseback ; an ensign, with his colours, who threw himself on my horse’s mane, and hampered me very much; together with two or three soldiers. At this moment Prince Eugene rode up almost alone; that is to say, with only his staff; and the Turks retired, I don’t know why. It was there that he received a shot through the sleeve. Some troops of cavalry and some infantry now came up, and M. de Neuperg asked for a detachment to secure the clothes. Sentinels were posted on the ground occupied by those dead battalions; and piles of coats, hats, shoes, &c. were collected. While this was going on, I amused myself with counting the dead, and I found only thirty-two Turks killed by the volley of those two battalions; which has not raised my opinion of the value of fire-arms.”

Posted in Andrew Bisset, War, Weapons | No Comments »

After Armageddon

Monday, March 8th, 2010

The History Channel’s recent After Armageddon looked at what might happen after a truly devastating pandemic flu crippled basic services, like water and power. Robin Hanson makes a brief appearance about eight minutes into the fifth segment (of nine) on YouTube:

I can only imagine what wisdom he shared with the producers of the show — but it didn’t make the cut.

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