A Sense of Responsibility and a Will to Provide Leadership

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

John Derbyshire notes that there is an odd conservatism in the common perceptions of life in other lands:

I grew up among English people who still thought of France — a rather stuffy and puritanical country in the 1960s — in terms of the “Gay Paree” of seventy years earlier, a place of unbridled license and monocled boulevardiers swilling champagne at the Folies Bergère.

In the same way, many Americans carry in their minds an image of England as a polite and civilized land, where impeccably courteous David Niven types sit around at their clubs in antique leather armchairs sipping port, while, at the other end of society, stoic cockneys converse in rhyming slang and cheer each up other with cups of tea in the parlor.

In fact today’s England is a rather coarse and violent place, whose crime statistics now surpass the U.S.A.’s in most categories (homicide being the principal exception). The nation’s everyday culture is dominated by the most brutish of proletarian values: politicians like Tony Blair from perfectly sound bourgeois families affect the dropped aitches and glottal stops of the slums, while the old codes of chivalry, patriotism and restraint have been shoved aside in a snarling, clawing assertion of “rights.”

American jaws drop when I say, in response to inquiries, how much I enjoy the comparative tranquillity, security and civility of life in the U.S.A. and the exquisite manners of Americans — especially in the South, the best-mannered large region in the English-speaking world.

This is from Derbyshire’s review of Theodore Dalrymple’s Life at the Bottom, which examines the “values” of today’s (nominally) English underclass:

[T]he hedonism of the postwar middle classes has also been a large factor in the collapse of morality over at the left-hand tail of the bell curve. It is a bad thing, but not an irremediable one, if the daughter of an architect has an illegitimate baby or acquires a minor drug habit. If the daughter of a janitor does these things, she has taken a headlong leap over the precipice into a lifetime of destitution. If any of the people who make social policy in England are aware of this simple fact, they probably regard it as another form of unfairness, to be resolved by lavishing money and attention on the janitor’s daughter.

A better remedy would be for the middle classes to behave themselves, and to give a good example to those beneath them, and to stop feeling so all-fired guilty about everything under the sun. That, of course, would be “elitist”: but if there is a lesson to be drawn from Life at the Bottom, it is that a society’s choice is never between having an elite and not having one, it is always between having an elite with a sense of responsibility and a will to provide leadership, and having an elite with neither.

Posted in John Derbyshire, Policy, Theodore Dalrymple | No Comments »

Security and Freedom

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

John Derbyshire discusses the trade-off between security and freedom:

The invention of the personal computer brought in one of those brief periods of explosive creativity when twenty-year-olds with no paper qualifications could make fortunes by inventing useful goods. Being a software developer in 1980 was like being a steam locomotive engineer in 1820, or an aircraft designer ninety years later. Nowadays, of course, you need four graduate degrees and a king’s ransom of liability insurance before anyone will let you design a plane. This has good and bad results. Good: planes are much safer than they were in 1910. Bad: nobody with the least flicker of imagination or creativity makes a career designing planes — which is why planes look just the same now as they did thirty years ago. Soon, no doubt, you will need a Commerce Department license to write computer programs.

There you have the trade-off between security and freedom, which every parent of small children wrestles with daily on a more intimate scale.

Posted in Business, John Derbyshire, Policy, Technology | No Comments »

Alfred Duggan’s Past

Sunday, October 4th, 2009

There are actually two quite distinct kinds of historical novel, John Derbyshire explains — hard and soft:

On the one hand the writer of historical fiction may attempt to capture the inner life and motivations of some real and well-documented historical figure. Robert Graves’s Claudius novels offer outstanding examples of this “hard” sub-genre. Our author might, on the other hand, center his story on some invented person, who is then let loose amidst historical scenery: think of Gone With the Wind or Patrick O’Brian’s sea stories. (As a slight variant of this “soft” sub-genre, the same thing can be done with a historical figure sufficiently obscure he might as well be an invention.)

The “hard” sub-genre is less often attempted because it is much more difficult to pull off. To give a convincing account of the thoughts and emotions of, say, Charlemagne, you need to do a great deal of research into the man, his family, friends and colleagues. You also need a good understanding of human types, an imaginative appreciation of people who may be quite unlike yourself. This combination of diligence and insight is not often found among fiction writers, who tend if anything to be more lazy and self-obsessed than the human average. “Soft” historical fiction, on the other hand, can be tackled by anybody, including the kind of novelist whose central characters are really nothing more than self-impersonations. It is, in fact, rather amusing to imagine oneself wandering around in old Carthage or fighting at Manzikert. Probably anyone who has contemplated fiction writing at all has had the urge to write a book of this sort; and it is plain from the proliferation of low-grade “bodice-rippers” that lots of people want to read such books.

The parallel to science fiction is clear:

Science fiction fans like to speak of the “sense of wonder.” Kingsley Amis, for instance, said that the purpose of science fiction is “to arouse wonder, terror and excitement.” Some similar sense is stimulated by good historical fiction. To think that this person actually lived! (Or, in the case of the “soft” style: To think that some such person probably lived!) Everyone who has reached middle age has a sense of the remoteness and strangeness of life even a scant few decades ago. Children in iron lungs; drama on the radio; having your feet X-rayed in the shoe store; people smoking cigarettes all the time, everywhere. How much odder things were a century before that! And a millennium? Two millennia? Even to try to imagine such worlds one needs help. The writer of historical fiction supplies that help.

Yet ultimately historical fiction is, like all art, an illusion. Here are people just like us: same facial features, same limbs, their desires and hates arising from the same springs as ours. And yet their actions were often bizarrely, fathomlessly inexplicable to us. When the clergy of Seez filled an episcopal vacancy by election without consulting Geoffrey of Anjou, their lay lord, Geoffrey had the lot of them castrated, and the bishop-elect, too. An earlier Count of Anjou, Fulk the Black, in penance for his sins, voluntarily shuffled to Jerusalem and back three times — total 15,000 miles, much of it trackless mountain and forest — while shackled in irons. What on earth were they thinking? We cannot know. By the narration of such things, though, a skilful writer can rouse us to wonder and awe.

I have not read Lord Geoffrey’s Fancy, by Alfred Duggan, which describes 13th-century Greece under the rule of Frankish knights, but I was just making the point to a friend that a modern audience would never recognize, say, the Old Testament, with the names changed — and that the original Battlestar Galactica was a thinly veiled retelling of Mormon mythology:

All the geography and ethnography of that place is refracted through the language and sensibility of these knights. Athens is “Satines”; Corinth is “Chorinte”; the natives are “Grifons” (Greeks) or “Esclavons” (South Slavs). The effect is to render the whole story as taking place in a completely imagined world, a Tolkeinian fantasy without the magic; yet the history is sound and well researched.

Posted in John Derbyshire, Media | No Comments »

Racing the engine of the brain without engaging the gears

Saturday, October 3rd, 2009

Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique argues that Jews created or contributed significantly to various destructive pseudosciences and ideologies. (He does not seem interested in their positive contributions.) John Derbyshire reviews the book and notes some similarities between Mandarins and Talmudic scholars:

For instance: I happen to be fairly well acquainted with the culture and history of China, a nation which, like the diaspora Jews, awarded high social status and enhanced mating opportunities to young men who had shown mastery of great masses of content-free written material.

Anyone who has read stories from the premodern period of China’s history knows that the guy who gets the girl — who ends up, in fact, with a bevy of “secondary wives” who are thereby denied to less intellectual males — is the one who has aced the Imperial examinations and been rewarded with a District Magistrate position.

This went on for two thousand years. Today’s Chinese even, like Ashkenazi Jews, display an average intelligence higher by several points than the white-Gentile mean.

Naturally, some found this insulting:

It is insulting, and borderline antisemitic, of you to describe traditional Talmudic scholarship as “content-free” and “meaningless esoterica.” The Talmud is chock full of content and very meaningful.

Is it? Then I can only say that I am surprised how little actual good has come out of all those centuries of intensive study. A person who has devoted his life to the study of Judaic texts ought, if those texts have meaningful content, to be wiser, better equipped to live in the world, better, than a person who hasn’t. Is this actually the case?

Possibly it is. I didn’t mean to insult anyone, and in fact I confess to a slight regret over this remark. By way of excusing myself, let me say that my own early training — my first degree, in fact — was in mathematics. Now, studying math at the higher levels makes you a terrible intellectual snob. No other discipline has the standards of rigor required in mathematics. Of course, none really can have, so this is a very unfair point of view. It is, though, one that mathematicians find hard to avoid. “When you’ve worked on a farm, nothing else ever seems like work,” said J.K. Galbraith. Similarly, when you’ve studied higher math, nothing else really seems like study. For this reason, I approach all the human sciences with an opening attitude of deep skepticism — though I am always willing to be convinced. I guess this attitude shows in my review.

Now, pure mathematics is a very peculiar thing. Consider the man I have just written a book about, for example, the 19th-century German mathematician Bernhard Riemann. On June 10, 1854, Riemann delivered a paper to the faculty of Göttingen University. In that paper he laid out the fundamental ideas of Riemannian geometry, a challenging and very beautiful branch of pure mathematics which he thought up entirely out of his own head. Riemann’s ideas were pure intellection, rooted in some philosophical ideas about the nature of space. They had no conceivable practical application. It was sixty years before Albert Einstein picked them up and used them as the basis for the General Theory of Relativity.

The kind of pure intellection that Talmudic scholars immerse themselves in is as abstract and, from a worldly point of view, useless as Riemannian geometry … but there is never an Einstein. Talmudic concepts never have any real fruit in the world of men. Talmudic scholarship consists (it seems to me) of racing the engine of the brain without engaging the gears.

Another influence on the way I think about this is my own studies of Chinese history and culture. Candidates for the Imperial examinations in old China had to engage in the same kind of years-long concentrated study of huge masses of accumulated written material that Talmudic scholars have to master. At the end of their studies, for the Imperial examinations, the Chinese scholars had to write an “eight-legged essay” — that is, one conforming to certain traditional patterns of style and presentation. You can find translations of prize-winning “eight-legged essays” in books about Chinese culture. I have one here. It is gibberish. It is content-free. However, if you passed the exam, you got a lifetime job as a Mandarin, a guaranteed income, and a choice of breeding partners.

The attitude of the Chinese themselves to the material these scholars had to master is encapsulated in the old proverb: “Learning is like a brick, which you can use to break down a door. When you have broken down the door, you can throw away the brick!”

Posted in Education, John Derbyshire, Science | No Comments »

Globalization and Democracy at Loggerheads

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

John Derbyshire’s review reminds me that I’ve been meaning to read Amy Chua’s World on Fire:

Well, here comes Amy Chua to explain that over a large part of the Earth’s surface, globalization and democracy are at loggerheads, and may actually be incompatible. Ms. Chua, who is a professor at Yale Law School, knows whereof she speaks. Her family comes from the small but wealthy Chinese minority of the Philippines. Globalization has been very good indeed for that minority, opening up great new opportunities for them to practice their entrepreneurial skills and allowing them to network more easily with the overseas-Chinese commercial classes in other countries. It has probably benefited non-Chinese Filipinos, too, but by nothing like as much. Seen from the viewpoint of that majority, globalization has permitted the Chinese to soar up into a stratosphere of stupendous wealth, leaving ordinary Filipinos further behind than ever. Now invite that sullen, resentful majority to practice democracy, and what do you think will happen? Prof. Chua tells us. Her wealthy aunt in the Philippines was murdered by her own chauffeur, and the local police — native Filipinos — have not the slightest interest in apprehending the killer. In their report on the incident, under “motive for murder,” they wrote the single word: Revenge.

The key phrase in this book is “market-dominant minority.” The Chinese of the Philippines (and of Burma, Thailand, Indonesia, and several other places) are a market-dominant minority. So, though for considerably different reasons, are the whites of southern Africa, the Indians of East Africa, the Lebanese of West Africa, and the Eritreans of Ethiopia; so are the tall, pale-skinned elites of Latin America (except for those few countries whose indigenes were completely exterminated by the European conquerors). So were the Slovenes and Croatians of Yugoslavia, the Tutsi of Rwanda, the Jews of Weimar Germany … You get the picture. For all kinds of reasons, some the consequence of blatant injustice, some arising from temporary civilizational advantage, some from mere historical or geographical accidents, some the result of factors that may not be mentioned in polite society, all over the world there are wealthy and powerful outsider minorities imbedded in large populations of native “sons of the soil.”

The problem does not afflict societies only at the national level. It can be very local, as with the Korean storekeepers in American inner cities. It can be supra-national, as with the Israelis in the Middle East. Perhaps it can even be global: Prof. Chua develops a theory of anti-Americanism based on the concept of us as a market-dominant minority in the world at large. I personally think she got carried away a little with her idea there, but her analysis of anti-Americanism is no less plausible than some others I have seen. At any rate, she makes a solid case for her thesis at the national level and gives convincing and up-to-date explanations of phenomena like the triumph of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and the seven billionaire “oligarchs” of Yeltsin’s Russia. (Six of them were Jewish.)

One possible, but non-democratic, strategy for a nation with a market-dominant minority is “crony capitalism.” A small clique, often military, of native sons goes into league with the minority, enriching themselves and their relatives, taking the edge off majority resentment by hiding minority dominance behind an ethnonationalist facade, staffing political and diplomatic positions, opening the economy to global markets while keeping democracy firmly at bay, sometimes admitting old non-entrepreneurial landed gentry classes in on the racket, as Marcos did with the Spanish-blood hacienderos in the Philippines. Suharto of Indonesia was a grand-master of the “crony capitalism” game until his overthrow in 1998, as was Daniel Arap Moi of Kenya. The outstanding current instance is the horrible SLORC dictatorship in Burma.

Suharto’s downfall was followed by anti-Chinese riots, with much destruction and killing. Hundreds of Chinese-Indonesians suffered the fate of Tutsis, Weimar Jews, Zimbabwe farmers, and other victims of democracy. This is the downside of being a market-dominant minority. It is astonishing, reading Prof. Chua’s case studies, how courageous and resilient some of these entrepreneurial minorities are. Landing in a strange country, they open little stores or set off alone into the bush as peddlers. After decades of hardship and risk, they attain wealth and, via crony capitalism or imperial patronage, some measure of power. Then comes the democratic backlash. They are killed and raped, their stores are burned, the survivors flee. Then, a year or two later, they are back — trading, peddling, dealing, bargaining, painstakingly building up again what was burned down. Speaking as a person with no commercial abilities whatsoever, I am in awe of these market-dominant minorities. And yet, of course, on the other hand, speaking as a person with no commercial abilities whatsoever, I find it all too easy to understand the resentments that build up against them among “sons of the soil.” Amy Chua gives a very telling quote from one of the latter, Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia: “If we don’t know how to work well or do business, at least we know how to fight well!”

Posted in Economics, John Derbyshire, Policy | No Comments »

The human-science equivalent of alchemy

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

In the history of the human sciences, John Derbyshire notes, false trails and dead ends abound:

Two major world-historical intellectuals, Marx and Freud, as well as numerous minor ones, convinced themselves and millions of others that they had developed workable, rigorously scientific theories of human history or psychology, when in fact they had done nothing of the sort, only dressed up some pre-scientific concepts like sympathetic magic in ingenious and seductive vocabularies — the human-science equivalent of alchemy.

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Whimperative

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

whimperative: the excessively diffident way of getting someone to do something, as in, “I was wondering if you might pass the salt.”

From John Derbyshire’s review of Steven Pinker’s The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.

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John Derbyshire and the Little Dragon

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

Conservative commentator John Derbyshire (mis)spent some of his youth in Hong Kong — where he appeared in a Bruce Lee movie:

Well, I was sitting there reading when a young Chinese guy came in. Seeing that I was the only person in the lounge, he addressed me. “Do you speak English?” I said I did. “Know any martial arts?” I said I had taken a few lessons. “Want to be in a movie?” I asked him if it paid. “Sure. Seventy bucks a day.” (Hong Kong dollars, he meant — around US$12 at that time.) I said I was game. “Good. Be outside the Miramar Hotel front entrance tomorrow morning, seven thirty.”

There were half a dozen other ghost-heads (gwai-tau, the generic Cantonese term for a non-Chinese person) outside the Miramar. We must have looked an unsavory lot — the casting director had obviously just trawled around the low-class guest-houses for unemployed foreigners of a sufficiently thuggish appearance. One was a dead ringer for Jimi Hendrix. Another was a full-blood Maori from New Zealand, a huge fellow — an obvious rugby lock — who made a meager living as a night-club singer in the colony’s low dives. A minibus arrived and drove us out to the New Territories — that is, the countryside that stretches out back of urban Hong Kong forty miles or so to the Chinese border. (Beyond which Mao Tse-tung’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was going through one of its nastier phases. Rafts of rotting corpses would occasionally float down the Pearl River past the colony.) Here there was a movie studio. We were led into a huge shed used for indoor sets, and spent the next two days filming fight scenes in that shed.

Bruce himself directed Meng Long Guo Jiang. He was on set all the time, setting up the fights, working out positions, talking to the lighting crews and the cameramen. There was, by the way, no sound crew. Chinese movies at that time were shot without sound. The sound was dubbed in later. When you watch a Bruce Lee movie, you are not hearing Lee’s voice, though I think they might have inserted his qi-ai — the intimidating yells, grunts and howls he used when fighting — into the soundtrack of Meng Long Guo Jiang. The qi-ai sound like his, anyway. In fact the first dubbing was always into Mandarin, and the on-screen lip syncing was to Mandarin words. Bruce, though fluent in English and Cantonese, could not speak Mandarin, so this was a constant vexation to him when filming, and probably the main reason he has very few speaking lines in his movies.

Bruce Lee’s presence was as striking in person as on screen. I have never seen a man who gave such an impression of concentrated energy. If he got animated when talking to you, he would make little springy skipping movements with his feet, as if warming up for a fight. When nothing much was happening, he would drop down and do one-arm finger-thumb push-ups at one side of the set, or have someone hold up a board he could practice kicks on. Just as a skilful schoolteacher knows how to get the class’s attention by speaking very softly, you were most aware of Bruce’s presence, and he was most intimidating, on the rare occasions his body was dead still. In the relaxed state, he was in constant motion. Crouching tiger, indeed.

Movie fight scenes are a devil of a thing to get right. We did everything a dozen times, levels of frustration and discomfort rising each time. This was summer in the tropics, and if the place had any air conditioning, it wasn’t adequate. There were huge electric fans everywhere, but they had to be switched off for filming, or the actors’ hair would all be streaming out horizontally from their heads. Yet through the entire two days I was on the set, I never saw Bruce lose his temper, or display any negative emotion stronger than momentary mild annoyance. He was just as I had seen him on TV: smiling, cracking jokes, smoothing out difficulties and differences, coaching, teasing, encouraging, cajoling. I have a tall, lean physique, so he addressed me as “Slim.”

“Hey, Slim, let’s try that again — and this time look mean. You hate me, remember? I’m a runty obnoxious little Chink, just stole your woman, trashed your car and pissed in your beer. Whaddya gonna do to me? Huh? Whaddya gonna do? Come on …” (He spoke perfect idiomatic American English the whole time.)

The fight scenes were all improvised out of his head. I can say this authoritatively, as I got a chance to read one of the scripts. The entire section I was involved in — two days filming, though of course less than five minutes in the finished movie — was encompassed by four Chinese characters in the script: Li da xi ren — “Lee strikes the Westerners.”

Derbyshire put his two short scenes up on YouTube.

Posted in John Derbyshire, Martial Arts, Media | No Comments »

Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics

Friday, July 11th, 2008

Robert Conquest’s Three Laws of Politics:

  1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
  2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
  3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

John Derbyshire adds this:

Of the Second Law, Conquest gave the Church of England and Amnesty International as examples. Of the Third, he noted that a bureaucracy sometimes actually is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies — e.g. the postwar British secret service.

John Moore thinks the third law is almost right; it should read “assume that it is controlled by a cabal of the enemies of the stated purpose of that bureaucracy.”

Francis W. Porretto notes that Cyril Northcote Parkinson studied the same phenomenon of bureaucratic behavior:

Parkinson promulgated a number of laws of bureaucracy that serve to explain a huge percentage of its characteristics. They’ve exhibited remarkable predictive power within their domain. The first of these is the best known:

Parkinson’s First Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

Parkinson inferred this effect from two central principles governing the behavior of bureaucrats:

  1. Officials want to multiply subordinates, not rivals.
  2. Officials make work for one another.

Like most generalizations, these are not always true…but the incentives that apply specifically to tax-funded government bureaucracies make them true much more often than not. They make a striking contrast with the almost exactly opposite behavior observable in private enterprise.
[...]
That young bureaucrat will profit from deliberate ineffectiveness to the extent that he can get himself viewed as an asset by his superiors and a non-threat by his peers. His superiors want him to produce justifications for the enlargement of their domains. His peers simply ask that he not tread on their provinces.

Miltion Friedman noted that bureaucratic resource allocation involves spending other people’s money on other people, so there are no compelling reasons to control either cost or quality — but a bureaucrat will learn, given time, how to “spend on others” in such a fashion that the primary benefit flows to himself.

To do this, bureaucrats must manage perceptions, so that their work seems both necessary and successful:

Von Clausewitz and others have termed war “a continuation of politics by other means,” but when viewed from the perspective of the State Department official, war is the declaration that his organization has failed of its purpose. He sees it as bad public relations for his entire function. Thus, even when the nation’s interests would be overwhelmingly better served by war than by the continuation of diplomacy, the State Department man will prefer diplomacy. It’s in his demesne, and enhances his prestige by enhancing the prestige of his trade.

It’s not too much to say that averting war regardless of its desirability or justifiability is near the top of every State Department functionary’s list of priorities. In this pursuit, the State Department will often find itself opposing even peacetime operations of the military designed to improve its effectiveness, such as the acquisition of new weapons or the enlargement of its ranks.

Posted in John Derbyshire, Policy | 21 Comments »

Fear of the Horizon

Thursday, October 5th, 2006

Most people, when they think of slavery, think of the race slavery of the American South. A small fraction think of ancient slavery, as in Rome. In Fear of the Horizon, John Derbyshire discusses another kind of slavery, religious slavery:

There was in fact, says Prof. Davis, something of religious revenge in the depredations of the Muslim slavers. The slave trade really got going after 1492, the year the last Muslims were expelled from Spain — what Osama bin Laden calls “the tragedy of Andalusia.” Says the author: “In Barbary, those who hunted and traded slaves certainly hoped to make a profit, but in their traffic in Christians there was also always an element of revenge, almost of jihad — for the wrongs of 1492, for the centuries of crusading violence that had preceded them, and for the ongoing religious struggle between Christian and Muslim that has continued to roil the Mediterranean world well into modern times.”

One of the most impressive parts of Prof. Davis’s book is his computation of the numbers of Europeans enslaved by these Muslim raiders. Combing through the historical sources, he concludes that there were about 35,000 enslaved Christians on the Barbary Coast at any one time. He then sets about estimating attrition rates. Slave numbers declined through four causes: death, escape, redemption (i.e. by ransom), and conversion to Islam. Davis gets annual rates from these causes of 17 percent, 1 percent, 2-3 percent, and 4 percent, respectively. This implies a total number of slaves, from the early 1500s to the late 1700s, of one to one and a quarter million. This is an astonishing number, implying that well into the 17th century, the Mediterranean slave trade was out-producing the Atlantic one. Numbers fell off thereafter, while the transatlantic trade increased; but in its time, the enslavement of European Christians by Muslim North Africans was the main kind of enslavement going on in the world.

Christians were captured by two methods. First, there was the seizing of ships by straightforward piracy. The ship itself became a prize along with its crew and passengers. Second, there were raids on the coasts of European countries. Spain, France, and Italy were worst affected, but the pirates sometimes ventured further afield. In 1627 they kidnapped 400 men and women from Iceland.

The victims in either case would be taken back to one of the Barbary ports — the main ones were Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli — and sold in a slave market, by auction. They ended up either as the domestic slaves of private persons, or as slaves owned by the state, to be put to work rowing galleys, or constructing public works. The first of these two fates was usually preferable, as there was some chance of humanity from a private owner. Prof. Davis’s account of the lives of galley slaves is hard to read, and state slaves employed on public works were not much better off. There was no large-scale private-enterprise slavery as in the plantations of the Old South. The North African states had little commercial culture.

The effect on the European coastal populations was dramatic. Entire areas were depopulated. The author even sketches out an argument that the culture of baroque Italy was determined in part by a turning inward from the terrors of coastal life — from the “fear of the horizon” that afflicted all the regions subject to slave raiding. He tells us (he is professor of Italian Social History at Ohio State University, by the way) that to this day there is an idiom in Sicilian dialect to express the general idea of being caught by surprise: pigliato dai turchi — “taken by the Turks.” The distress of those left behind, deprived of a husband of father, is painful to read about.

Wealthy Europeans were often ransomed back to their families:

A side benefit of their work, for the slavers, was the opportunity to extract a ransom from the family of a well-born captive. Many European families beggared themselves to pay ransom for a family member taken by the slavers. The novelist Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, unfortunately had a letter from the Duke of Alba on him when he was captured at sea by slavers in 1575. This caused his captors to think his family must be very rich, and they demanded a hefty ransom that Cervantes’s family could not pay. The novelist was ransomed at last, after five years’ captivity, by the Trinitarians, one of the religious orders that made the ransoming of Christian slaves a part of their mission.

You can imagine what kind of incentive those well-meaning Trinitarians provided:

There was in fact an entire Mediterranean sub-economy based around the ransoming of slaves, which Europeans felt to be their Christian duty, and a proper object of charity, and which orders like the Trinitarians and Mercedarians made their main business. This sometimes had unintended consequences. Willingness to pay ransom on the part of nations, for example, encouraged the slavers to ask higher ransom prices for citizens of those nations: “By 1700 there is the clear beginning of an inflation spiral that would lead to ransoms more than doubling by the 1760s. Moreover, nations that let it be known that they were disposed to buy back their enslaved citizens more or less promptly ran the further risk of making prime targets out of their own ships and citizens — as the United States would find to its immense cost in the 1790s.” No wonder economics is called “the dismal science.”

Posted in Economics, John Derbyshire, War | No Comments »

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