Civil Society

Whatever Hits the Fan is Never Evenly Distributed

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Consider a bullet. I had one sitting on my dresser as a kid a Civil War Minnie Ball. Toss it into the air. It tumbles. It hovers, for a split microsecond, pointing at you as it falls. Consider that same bullet in 1862 (I found it on a farm near Antietam). Consider standing in front of the line of Blue (it was clearly a Yankee bullet) with your fellow Virginians. Consider that same bullet again. Fired from a Springfield, heading your way. Take a split microsecond, same length of time as before, and focus in on only the bullet. The situations are almost indistinguishable if looked at on a short enough time scale. The 1862 bullet points at you in the same way the modern one does. In that split microsecond, an observer who happened to just drop in and observe only the bullet would be hard pressed to decide which situation he or she’d rather be in. Practically the same mass of metal. Same shape. But look closer. The 1862 bullet should be warm evidence of the kinetic energy stored in it. The present bullet should have a coat of oxidation. But there were bullets fired in 1862 that had been dropped in the crick the month before they were fired, and the modern bullet might have been sitting in the sun for a while. There’s always something for the naysayer to latch on to. But take another snapshot a couple of milliseconds later, and the difference between the two situations is instantly clear the bullet in 1862 has traveled a lot further and in a much straighter line than the arc of the falling bullet tossed from your hand. Now which situation would our hypothetical observer rather be in?

       

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Anarchy Boomtime

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In Newsweek, Silvia Spring marvels that the Iraqi economy appears to be booming even while the country remains mired in violence.

People are often surprised that economies can thrive without a high degree of politically enforced social order, but history tends to show that too much government is more likely to cause economic stagnation than too little. Most 3rd-world business people face the worst of both worlds. The government does a very poor job of providing physical security and a fair judiciary (important to enforce contracts), yet it imposes strangling taxes, jealously guards its prerogatives to decide who can and cannot engage in any particular economic activity, and individual government agents usually extort vast sums. As a result, the descent of a country into mild anarchy usually improves the situation. The actual security situation may not be that much worse, but all the parasitic government activity disappears. The situation turns into a net gain. It is quite common to read reports from 3rd-world countries during a civil war that shops and other businesses seem more full and busy than they did in time of “peace.”

The legendary economy of Hong Kong from 1945 to 1999 arose in large part due to the laissez-faire approach that the British government blundered into as a result of geopolitical concerns. The British needed to keep Hong Kong as a full colony to protect it, but that meant they could not allow a full fledged local democracy with the moral authority to impose a welfare and regulatory state. So they ended up with just a bare-bones government appointed by Britain that never tried to lay its hand too strongly on the people of Hong Kong.

Business people in Iraq find themselves in something of the same environment. The occupation government did not wish to get involved in potentially contentious economic policy, and the same lack of experience and consensus that keeps the newly elected Iraqi government from wiping out the insurgency also prevents it from implementing destructive economic policies. Left to their own devices and with huge pent up demand the Iraqi people are driving their economy strongly forward.

Discuss this post at the Chicago Boyz Forum.

Why They Hate Us

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Personal choices reveal our assumptions about human nature and how we see the great historical cycles. Or perhaps this is just how I see it, since our culture has benefited from an internalization of values & sense of personal responsibility. We see these as the mark of maturity – both in a man and in a civilization. Of course, temptations are constant from such a perspective, but this also gives us empowering choices.

Ray Fishman and Edward Miguel’s “Cultures of Corruption: Evidence from Diplomatic Parking Tickets” give us a clue to analyzing whether a nation has internalized its respect for property and the rule of law. I suspect it mainly reveals whether the world is viewed in tribal terms (us & them, those entitled & those not). Those entitled, of course, are not expected to observe the customs of other countries.

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The Allende Myth, by Vladimir Dorta

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My friend Val Dorta originally published this outstanding historical essay on his blog in 2003. With the death of Augusto Pinochet, much attention is again being given to the Allende period, the military coup and the dictatorship that followed. I wanted to link again to Val’s essay but, unfortunately, his blog is no longer online. However, Val has graciously allowed me to republish his essay here, and I am honored to do so. – Jonathan

UPDATE: Google’s cached version of Val’s original post, with comments. (Thanks to the commenter who provided this link.)

UPDATE 2 (12/28/2014): The Google-cached version has disappeared from the Web, but Val’s original post is available via archive.org here.

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The Allende Myth

Vladimir Dorta

07/21/2003

The failed and tragic attempt by Salvador Allende and the Popular Unity at creating socialism in Chile in 1970-1973 has become a myth for the world left, presented as the possibility of a peaceful and democratic transition to socialism that was destroyed only because the almighty CIA acted as master puppeteer of the Chilean reaction. The myth reinforces itself; while the Cold War context is never mentioned, neither is the fact that the CIA’s workings are well documented whereas the Cuban and Soviet interventions are still mostly unknown. The Allende myth may be good for keeping the socialist faith alive, but it evidently contradicts the historical facts.

While Augusto Pinochet’s brutal post-coup repression and terrorism cannot be justified, it is essential to explain what led him and the Chilean armed forces to the fateful coup d’état, outside of the fantasy that had him bursting onto the democratic Chilean political scene on September 11, 1973 with readymade CIA orders to stop a beautiful, pacific and liberating socialist dream. For I have no doubts that if the Chilean Marxist experiment had ended in civil war, as it appeared to most observers at the time, it would have been an even greater tragedy or, had it ended as the totalitarian society it pointed to, it would have lasted much longer and would have brought Chileans much more suffering than Pinochet’s ugly but temporary dictatorship.

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DC Trip — Claudio Veliz Lecture, Anglosphere Institute Launch

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Lex in DC

I went out to DC from Chicago for the inaugural event for Jim Bennett�s Anglosphere Institute. (The Institute�s website is currently under construction, but has some interesting things on it.)

The first event was the lecture I mentioned in this earlier post by Claudio Veliz, author of The New World of the Gothic Fox: Culture and Economy in English and Spanish America. The lecture was at the Hudson Institute.

I understand that the full text of Prof. Veliz’s talk will be online at some point, both audio and text. Prof. Veliz discussed the points raised in his book, specifically that the English and Castilian (rather than British and Spanish) cultures were the greatest exporters of culture of any of the European countries. He focused on the extraordinary fact that the English have exported their culture to the ends of the Earth to a degree unmatched by any other people. The main one is of course the Industrial Revolution, which began in England, and has in one way or another spread throughout the whole world and shows no sign of stopping or slowing down. Another is democratic government, though in most cases this is merely an aspiration or a fraud. Prof. Veliz focused in some detail on the example of soccer. Of course people have been kicking balls around for millennia. But only in England did organized teams with rules and their own buildings and groups of fans identifying with the team come into being. This phenomenon is now global. Terms like �sport� and �fair play� did not exist in other languages, they came from England.

He also answered the question �so what?� with regard to the ubiquity of English-derived, and American-derived �creatures� � i.e. cultural artifacts. He noted, following the thinking of Vico, that �what we do matters�. In other words, what we do becomes what we are, it changes us. Culture is a whole and each part carries something of the whole. The adoption of English-derived cultural forms has changed the consciousness of the world in many ways, not all of them discernible. He noted also that the spread of English-derived cultural �creatures� has occurred in large part because it was the fact that they came from a culture � the first ever � with a large, wealthy working class. It was and is the vulgarity, in the strict sense, which gives it its global appeal. I might have said demotic rather than vulgar, but Veliz was right to speak as he did. The �vulgarity� of much of our culture is the source of its appeal, but also of the hostility it provokes on the part of people who are exposed to it and don�t like it. This too is an old phenomenon. Veliz went on to say that people in other countries often want to have a sanitized version of modernization � antibiotics and indoor plumbing and computers which only contain and transmit wholesome things, without music videos or sugary soft drinks or Internet porn. But, Veliz insists, you cannot have modernization without the cultural baggage, as a practical matter, you are stuck with the whole package.

This led to his conclusion, which he left as an open question. Will the English speaking world die out? What could cause it to fade away as the prior culture-forming civilization of Greece died out, giving rise to a Hellenistic successor civilization? He seemed to believe that there is nothing in the world that is a mortal threat from outside the Anglosphere (a word he did not use). Rather, the danger is from a lack of understanding and a lack of cultural confidence within the Anglophone world. In other words, the danger is not conquest from without but suicide from within.

Please note the foregoing is my recollection, done without notes. I look forward to the actual transcript.

Following the lecture there was a dinner party for supporters of the Anglosphere Institute, which was very enjoyable. I got a chance to chat with Professor Veliz. I also got to meet one of my favorite writers, Michael Barone, and got my books autographed. In addition, prior to the lecture, I got to spend some time with Jim Bennett, who has several interesting Anglosphere-related projects in the works, which he will announce in due course.

The next day I met up with Jonathan, and we visited the Air and Space Museum, and briefly, the National Gallery. The National Gallery is clearly an extraordinary museum, and I will make a point of returning to it. An unnecessarily rude guard at the door was the only indication that it is a government-run entity.