Tag: France

Education and “The Three-Body Problem”

The brilliant math-watcher, Ian Stewart, says of this classic physics problem, the Three-Body Problem:

Newton’s Law of Gravity runs into problems with three bodies (earth, moon, sun, say).

In particular, the gravitational interaction of a mere three bodies, assumed to obey Newton’s inverse square law of gravity, stumped the mathematical world for centuries.

It still does, if what you want is a nice formula for the orbits of those bodies. In fact, we now know that three-body dynamics is chaotic–so irregular that is has elements of randomness.

There is no tidy geometric characterization of three-body orbits, not even a formula in coordinate geometry.

Until the late nineteenth century, very little was known about the motion of three celestial bodies, even if one of them were so tiny that its mass could be ignored.

(Visions of Infinity: The Great Mathematical Problems, Ian Stewart, Basic Books, 2014, page 136)

Henri Poincaré, the great mathematician, wrestled with this with tremendous intricacy and ingenuity all his life:

Jules Henri Poincaré was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as “The Last Universalist,” since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime.

Born: April 29, 1854, Nancy, France
Died: July 17, 1912, Paris, France.

We now think of applying in an evocative and not a rigorous mathematical way, the unexpected difficulties of the three-body problem to the n-body (i.e., more than three) problems of sociology or economics or history itself, and sense that social life is always multifactorial and not readily pin-downable, since “everything is causing everything else” and extracting mono-causal explanations must be elusive for all the planetary and Poincaré reasons and beyond.

This suggests to the student that novels are one attempt to say something about n-body human “orbits” based on “n-body” stances and “circumstances” with large amounts of randomness governing the untidy mess that dominates human affairs.

Words are deployed in novels and not numbers as in physics, but the “recalcitrance” of the world, social and physical, remains permanent.

Education and meta-intelligence would be more complete by seeing how the world, as someone put it, “won’t meet us halfway.” Remember Ian Stewart’s warning above:

“There is no tidy geometric characterization of three-body orbits…” and you sense that this must apply to human affairs even more deeply.

Do Disintegrating Societies “Vomit Up” Disturbed and Demonic Leaders? Durkheim’s “Anomie”

The great American social critic Chris Hedges, who has seen a lot of disintegrating political systems in his travels as a foreign correspondent, offers a very resonant or thought-provoking concept when he says that disintegrating societies often “vomit up” criminal psychopathic leaders like the Serbs Mladić, Karadžić, Milošević, et al and Trump himself.

Hedges brings back the Émile Durkheim (one of the fathers of sociology who died in 1917) usage of “anomie” which Durkheim introduces in his masterful book Suicide from 1897. Anomie refers to a level of social bewilderment and lostness where a person or people opens the door to suicide or demonic demagogues who become cult figures rather like Trump to his supporters.

The real question becomes the social rot and dislocatedness that allowed for the rise of the devilish leaders (and secondarily the leaders themselves). The anomie is the problem, the leader a symptom of the problem.

The term anomie—“a reborrowing with French spelling of anomy”—comes from Greek: anomía (ἀνομία, ‘lawlessness’), namely the privative alpha prefix (a-, ‘without’), and nomos (νόμος, ‘law’). The Greeks distinguished between nomos, and arché (ἀρχή, ‘starting rule, axiom, principle’). For example, a monarch is a single ruler but he may still be subject to, and not exempt from, the prevailing laws (i.e., nomos). In the original city state democracy, the majority rule was an aspect of arché because it was a rule-based, customary system, which may or may not make laws (i.e., nomos). Thus, the original meaning of anomie defined anything or anyone against or outside the law, or a condition where the current laws were not applied resulting in a state of illegitimacy or lawlessness.

The contemporary English understanding of the word anomie can accept greater flexibility in the word “norm,” and some have used the idea of normlessness to reflect a similar situation to the idea of anarchy. However, as used by Émile Durkheim and later theorists, anomie is a reaction against or a retreat from the regulatory social controls of society, and is a completely separate concept from anarchy, which consists of the absence of the roles of rulers and submitted.

Nineteenth-century French pioneer sociologist Émile Durkheim borrowed the term anomie from French philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau. Durkheim used it in his influential book Suicide (1897) in order to outline the social (and not individual) causes of suicide, characterized by a rapid change of the standards or values of societies (often erroneously referred to as normlessness), and an associated feeling of alienation and purposelessness. He believed that anomie is common when the surrounding society has undergone significant changes in its economic fortunes, whether for better or for worse and, more generally, when there is a significant discrepancy between the ideological theories and values commonly professed and what was actually achievable in everyday life. This was contrary to previous theories on suicide which generally maintained that suicide was precipitated by negative events in a person’s life and their subsequent depression.

In Durkheim’s view, traditional religions often provided the basis for the shared values which the anomic individual lacks. Furthermore, he argued that the division of labor that had been prevalent in economic life since the Industrial Revolution led individuals to pursue egoistic ends rather than seeking the good of a larger community. Robert King Merton also adopted the idea of anomie to develop strain theory, defining it as the discrepancy between common social goals and the legitimate means to attain those goals. In other words, an individual suffering from anomie would strive to attain the common goals of a specific society yet would not be able to reach these goals legitimately because of the structural limitations in society. As a result, the individual would exhibit deviant behavior. Friedrich Hayek notably uses the word anomie with this meaning.

(Wikipedia’s entry for “Anomie”)

Chris Hedges’ point is intriguing because it offers an unusual “flashlight” on the problem of “destructive charisma” in leadership styles where the socially diseased state of the society itself calls forth (i.e., “vomits up”) such leaders from Hitler to Trump.

While not perhaps the whole story, it does get at something crucial, the “endogeneity problem” not in economics where it is usually discussed but in politics. Endogeneity comes from endogenous (i.e., generated from within). Exogenous is the opposite.

The German literary masterpiece Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) shows a society where life and values are too topsy-turvy and dislocated to be sustainable and this creates an “ecosystem” of disorientation where Nazis begin to emerge or rather “crawl forth.” Thus the Hedges metaphor of “vomit up” is suggestive.

Essay 110: Education and Famine Analysis

The great historian Élie Halévy’s (died in 1937) History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, a multi-volume classic, gives us a sense of nineteenth century famine dynamics for the 1840s, which combines failed harvests and failed incomes and failed speculations together:

“It was a ‘dearth’ (i.e., scarcity)—a crisis belonging to the old order—the last ‘dearth,’ in fact, Europe had known up to the present day (i.e., before 1937). The unsatisfactory harvest of 1845 was followed by the disastrous autumn of 1846. The potato disease was worse than it had been the year before. The cereal harvest, moderately good in 1845, was a failure not only in the United Kingdom, but in France and throughout Western Europe. In 1845, Great Britain could still purchase corn even in Ireland, while the Irish poor were starving to death. Nothing of the kind was possible at the end of 1846.

“Britain could not obtain wheat from France or Germany. In short, it was no longer Ireland alone, but the whole of Western Europe that had to be saved from famine.

“The United Kingdom, France, and Germany must import Russian and American wheat, the only sources available to supply the deficit.

“In consequence the price of wheat rose from 50 shillings and 2d. on August 22 to 65 shillings and 7d. on November 18. The price of wheat rose once more. It exceeded 78 shillings in March.

“In Germany and France, where another ‘jacquerie’ seemed to have begun, hunger caused an outbreak of rioting. The same happened in Scotland and the south of England…but England suffered in common with Ireland and Continental Europe, and a drain on English gold began, to pay for the Russian and American wheat.

“Later there was a fall of 50% in four months. The corn factors (i.e., corn dealers) who for months had been gambling on a rise had no time to retrace their steps and were ruined at a single blow.” (“Commerical Failures in 1847,” Eclectic Review, December 1847)

(Élie Halévy, “Victorian Years (1841-1895),” Halévy’s History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, Volume 4, pages 191-193, Ernest Benn Ltd., 1970)

Note that in British usage, “corn” refers to all feed grains (primarily wheat), not corn (in the American sense) or maize. For example, see the Corn Laws.

We sense from Halévy’s description of the “food insecurity” of the nineteenth century in Europe, why the Revolutions of 1848 were to a large extent severe food riots and how food poverty and speculation interacted with risk and uncertainty prevailing.

This should be read and pondered in connection with Prof. Amartya Sen’s classic from 1981, Poverty and Famines, which highlights the famine of income and buying power, as opposed to famines based on outright crop failures. Pearl Buck’s classic novel, The Good Earth (1931), fits this topic set, as it analyzes in human terms the pattern of Chinese famines. It is interesting to note, parenthetically, that the movie of The Good Earth could not feature Chinese actors in lead roles due to racial craziness at the time. Stepping back, we see a world of food insecurity aggravated by the spectre of racism further poisoning social relations worldwide.

Halévy states: “It was a ‘dearth’ (i.e., scarcity)—a crisis belonging to the old order—the last ‘dearth,’ in fact, Europe had known up to the present day…”.

It would be instructive to ponder whether this really was “a crisis belonging to the old order” given the catastrophes and food crises that could come with climate change from 2019 on out. Will we have “global ‘dearths’”?

Essay 106: World Watching: Project Syndicate—New Commentary

from Project Syndicate:

The EU’s EV Greenwash

by Hans-Werner Sinn

EU emissions regulations that went into force earlier this year are clearly designed to push diesel and other internal-combustion-engine automobiles out of the European market to make way for electric vehicles. But are EVs really as climate-friendly and effective as their promoters claim?

MUNICH – Germany’s automobile industry is its most important industrial sector. But it is in crisis, and not only because it is suffering the effects of a recession brought on by Volkswagen’s own cheating on emissions standards, which sent consumers elsewhere. The sector is also facing the existential threat of exceedingly strict European Union emissions requirements, which are only seemingly grounded in environmental policy.

The EU clearly overstepped the mark with the carbon dioxide regulation [PDF] that went into effect on April 17, 2019. From 2030 onward, European carmakers must have achieved average vehicle emissions of just 59 grams of CO2 per kilometer, which corresponds to fuel consumption of 2.2 liters of diesel equivalent per 100 kilometers (107 miles per gallon). This simply will not be possible.

As late as 2006, average emissions for new passenger vehicles registered in the EU were around 161 g/km. As cars became smaller and lighter, that figure fell to 118 g/km in 2016. But this average crept back up, owing to an increase in the market share of gasoline engines, which emit more CO2 than diesel engines do. By 2018, the average emissions of newly registered cars had once again climbed to slightly above 120 g/km, which is twice what will be permitted in the long term.

Even the most gifted engineers will not be able to build internal combustion engines (ICEs) that meet the EU’s prescribed standards (unless they force their customers into soapbox cars). But, apparently, that is precisely the point. The EU wants to reduce fleet emissions by forcing a shift to electric vehicles. After all, in its legally binding formula for calculating fleet emissions, it simply assumes that EVs do not emit any CO2 whatsoever.

The implication is that if an auto company’s production is split evenly between EVs and ICE vehicles that conform to the present average, the 59 g/km target will be just within reach. If a company cannot produce EVs and remains at the current average emissions level, it will have to pay a fine of around €6,000 ($6,600) per car, or otherwise merge with a competitor that can build EVs.

But the EU’s formula is nothing but a huge scam. EVs also emit substantial amounts of CO2, the only difference being that the exhaust is released at a remove—that is, at the power plant. As long as coal– or gas-fired power plants are needed to ensure energy supply during the “dark doldrums” when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining, EVs, like ICE vehicles, run partly on hydrocarbons. And even when they are charged with solar– or wind-generated energy, enormous amounts of fossil fuels are used to produce EV batteries in China and elsewhere, offsetting the supposed emissions reduction. As such, the EU’s intervention is not much better than a cut-off device for an emissions control system.

Earlier this year, the physicist Christoph Buchal and I published a research paper [PDF, in German] showing that, in the context of Germany’s energy mix, an EV emits a bit more CO2 than a modern diesel car, even though its battery offers drivers barely more than half the range of a tank of diesel. And shortly thereafter, data published [PDF, in German] by Volkswagen confirmed that its e-Rabbit vehicle emits slightly more CO2 [PDF, in German] than its Rabbit Diesel within the German energy mix. (When based on the overall European energy mix, which includes a huge share of nuclear energy from France, the e-Rabbit fares slightly better than the Rabbit Diesel.)

Adding further evidence, the Austrian think tank Joanneum Research has just published a large-scale study [PDF, in German] commissioned by the Austrian automobile association, ÖAMTC, and its German counterpart, ADAC, that also confirms those findings. According to this study, a mid-sized electric passenger car in Germany must drive 219,000 kilometers before it starts outperforming the corresponding diesel car in terms of CO2 emissions. The problem, of course, is that passenger cars in Europe last for only 180,000 kilometers, on average. Worse, according to Joanneum, EV batteries don’t last long enough to achieve that distance in the first place. Unfortunately, drivers’ anxiety about the cars’ range prompts them to recharge their batteries too often, at every opportunity, and at a high speed, which is bad for durability.

As for EU lawmakers, there are now only two explanations for what is going on: either they didn’t know what they were doing, or they deliberately took Europeans for a ride. Both scenarios suggest that the EU should reverse its interventionist industrial policy, and instead rely on market-based instruments such as a comprehensive emissions trading system.

With Germany’s energy mix, the EU’s regulation on fleet fuel consumption will not do anything to protect the climate. It will, however, destroy jobs, sap growth, and increase the public’s distrust in the EU’s increasingly opaque bureaucracy.

Essay 96: Education and London’s Centrality in Global Finance: Then and Now

To understand our world, we have to go back to classics of understanding such as Lombard Street [Project Gutenberg ebook] which gives one a vivid sense of London’s rise as world’s banker, already in 1873. 

Our current world was certainly shaped by these long-term historical trends.

…But very few persons are aware how much greater the ready balance—the floating loan-fund which can be lent to any one or for any purpose—is in England than it is anywhere else in the world. A very few figures will show how large the London loan-fund is, and how much greater it is than any other. The known deposits—the deposits of banks which publish their accounts—are, in

London (31st December, 1872). . . . . . . .£120,000,000
Paris (27th February, 1873) . . . . . . . . . .13,000,000
New York (February, 1873) . . . . . . . . . .40,000,000
German Empire (31st January, 1873) . . .8,000,000

And the unknown deposits—the deposits in banks which do not publish their accounts—are in London much greater than those in any other of these cities. The bankers’ deposits of London are many times greater than those of any other city—those of Great Britain many times greater than those of any other country.

Of course the deposits of bankers are not a strictly accurate measure of the resources of a Money Market. On the contrary, much more cash exists out of banks in France and Germany, and in all non-banking countries, than could be found in England or Scotland, where banking is developed. But that cash is not, so to speak, “Money-Market money”: it is not attainable. Nothing but their immense misfortunes, nothing but a vast loan in their own securities, could have extracted the hoards of France from the custody of the French people. The offer of no other securities would have tempted them, for they had confidence in no other securities. For all other purposes the money hoarded was useless and might as well not have been hoarded. But the English money is “borrowable” money. Our people are bolder in dealing with their money than any continental nation, and even if they were not bolder, the mere fact that their money is deposited in a bank makes it far more obtainable. A million in the hands of a single banker is a great power; he can at once lend it where he will, and borrowers can come to him, because they know or believe that he has it. But the same sum scattered in tens and fifties through a whole nation is no power at all: no one knows where to find it or whom to ask for it. Concentration of money in banks, though not the sole cause, is the principal cause which has made the Money Market of England so exceedingly rich, so much beyond that of other countries.

…

…I believe that our system, though curious and peculiar, may be worked safely; but if we wish so to work it, we must study it. We must not think we have an easy task when we have a difficult task, or that we are living in a natural state when we are really living in an artificial one. Money will not manage itself, and Lombard Street has a great deal of money to manage.

Essay 73: Signs and Meanings: Education and Semiotics

One learns to function in a world of posters, postings, signs, ads, ordinances, notices and indications of “material culture” (i.e. commerce expressed in designs and slogans on walls and buses, subway cars, etc.).

Think of the 1963 movie The Great Escape. There’s a scene where James Coburn’s Australian character is sitting in an outdoor cafe on the French/Spanish border and the waiter comes over to him and pulls him toward the counter and says, “Telephon, monsieur.”

The James Coburn character has no idea why this is happening but mimics the proprietor and son when they duck down. French Resistance fighters in a car gun down the Germans at the cafe and James Coburn’s character “gets it” and asks them for help to get into Spain. As he ducks down you see posted on the wall of the cafe several ad signs for drinks. One of them is “Byrrh”:

“Byrrh is an aromatised wine-based apéritif made of red wine, mistelle, and quinine. Created in 1866 and a trademark since 1873, it was popular as a French apéritif. With its marketing and reputation as a ‘hygienic drink,’ Byrrh sold well in the early 20th century.” (from Wikipedia)

In many French movies or movies set in France, such as Belle de Jour and The Legend of the Holy Drinker from 1988 (in which a drunken homeless man [played by Rutger Hauer] in Paris is lent 200 francs by a stranger as long as he promises to repay it to a local church when he can afford to; the film depicts the man’s constant frustrations as he attempts to do so).

“Byrrh” appears routinely and a French child begins to ‘get the picture’ on what is being signified and how it differs from other notices, commercial or legal or municipal.

Set in Paris, the ad notice “Byrrh” appears in the same way you’d expect to see “Coca-Cola” and know what the sign signifies. “Coke” is a drink and not the fuel coke. How exactly you make these distinctions is unclear to linguists and other language-watchers. It’s a social phenomenon, partly, like mores and manners.

In the movie The Book Thief (a 2013 World War II war drama, starring Geoffrey Rush, Emily Watson, and Sophie Nélisse, based on the 2005 novel) there’s a moment when you see a sign advertising or reminding you of “Kolonialwaren” (i.e., colonial wares) which was the German way of pointing to a place or store that sold coffee, tea, cocoa, etc. Any German adult of the period would know what “Kolonialwaren” signifies without quite knowing how he or she knows.

A traffic sign (you have to of course realize it’s a traffic sign and not some commercial ad) tells you “Boston 20 m.” You realize or guess it means 20 miles and not 20 meters (since meters are not a typical American measure) nor would it be 20 minutes since that would assume everyone is driving at a speed that gives you 20 minutes, which is far-fetched.

How a person goes from birth to adulthood whereby they spontaneously navigate a welter of different signs and postings, ads and statutes is quite opaque.

Roland Barthes (died 1980) explored this domain of signs (not only physical signs but mythology as a system of signs) all his life:

Barthes is one of the leading theorists of semiotics, the study of signs. A sign, in this context, refers to something which conveys meaning – for example, a written or spoken word, a symbol or a myth.

Education should not ignore “material culture” (i.e., the history of things) and semiotics (i.e., the world “speaking” to you via designs and signs and words).

Essay 66: Education and the Question of Fecklessness

We propose in Meta Intelligence an education that is completely global and cosmopolitan from Day 1.

The problem with education as a confusing area of activity is revealed to us in an episode of the great Japanese novel, The Makioka Sisters.

The Makioka Sisters (細雪 [Sasameyuki], “Light Snow”) is a novel by Japanese writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki (died in 1965) that was serialized from 1943 to 1948. It follows the lives of the wealthy Makioka family of Osaka from the autumn of 1936 to April 1941, focusing on the family’s attempts to find a husband for the third sister, Yukiko.

In the novel, there’s a description of a “failed educational odyssey:”

“Mimaki was an old court family. The present viscount, the son, was well along in years. Mimaki Minoru, son by a concubine, was a graduate of the Peers School and had studied physics at the Imperial University, which he left to go to France.  In Paris he studied painting for a time, and French cooking for a time, and numerous other things, none for very long.

“Going on to America, he studied aeronautics in a not-too-famous state university, and he did finally take a degree, it seemed.

“After graduation, he continued to wander about the United States, and on to Mexico and South America. With his allowance from home cut off in the course of these wanderings, he made a living as a cook and even as a bellboy. He also returned to painting and even tried his hand at architecture.

“Following his whims and relying on his undeniable cleverness, he tried everything. He abandoned aeronautics when he left school.”

(The Makioka Sisters, Vintage Books, 1985, Seidensticker translation, page 473-474)

This person winds up dabbling in architecture after his return to Japan.

This episode in Tanizaki’s great novel gives us a “flashlight” or “searchlight” into the whole problem of educational confusion.  Is this simply a case of one person’s “fecklessness?”  Is this just a case of what’s called “failure to launch” (see the movie by this name)?

Or is it partly perhaps that education as a “lockstep system” of schools, exams, courses, semesters, quizzes and grades is very “inhospitable” to “searchers?”

If we call everyone who “stumbles around” a dilettante and a feckless failure, we might be unnecessarily “binary,” exclusionary and unaware of the problem of “cold educational ecosystems” which punish exploring for those who are not “born specialists.”  Winners and losers are too polarized as an educational judgment, perhaps.

The classic German novel about youthful confusions is Fontane’s classic Irrungen, Wirrungen (Trials and Tribulations, 1888) and perhaps an argument could be made that the coldly “binary view” of “successes” versus “the feckless” causes the loss of many young people who had various kinds of emotional resistance to education as an “Olympics” of sorts, with “winners and losers.”  This might be seen as a kind of overly narrow kind of “edu-brutality” which is intolerant of more difficult adjustment stories for young people, which are not uncommon.

Essay 53: Incomplete One-Field Analysis

Prof. Neil Shubin of the University of Chicago is an outstanding paleontologist/evolutionary theorist and has written marvelous books such as Your Inner Fish:  A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body.

“Cleverly weaving together adventures in paleontology with very accessible science, Neil Shubin reveals the many surprisingly deep connections between our anatomy and that of fish, reptiles, and other creatures.  You will never look at your body in the same way again—examine, embrace, and exalt Your Inner Fish!”

Prof. Shubin has done outstanding work in trying to understand post-dinosaur mammalian history and timelines.  (Rise of the Mammals was a recent PBS program that is relevant.)

What is inadequate about all such “bones-and-stones” approach to “how we got here” is that the human creature is ultimately downstream from culture as expressed in language (epic poems) and images (e.g., the Lascaux caves in France, say) and fossils, as wonderfully intelligent as the detective work is, are one flashlight and not the system of “searchlights” one really needs to understand anything.

The very first lines of Homer’s great epic, the Odyssey shows you this:

“Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending, the wanderer…”

(Quoted from Robert Fitzgerald’s translation.)

Here one sees the cultural soul of the human: the invocation of muses, gods, the telling of stories, the singing of songs, contending and wandering.

All evolution: cosmic, earthbound, whatever, does not capture the essence of humanity as the first words of Homer’s Odyssey where words, songs, stories take us into the human while the fossils and fossil archaeology are fascinating material infrastructure, as Prof. Shubin’s outstanding skeletal digs and “detective work” show us.

Essay 34: Arguments Without End: Are They Good or Bad?

The Dutch historian Pieter Geyl (died in 1966) coined the phrase “argument without end” to get at the constant reappearance of old arguments or viewpoints. One gets the impression that arguments are either persistent or perhaps permanent. One simplistic example could be argument about socialism: Sweden is “good,” but Venezuela (or Cuba) is bad. This book takes the view that “arguments without end” are not the end of knowledge but rather a potential beginning: it could be that some issues cannot be captured by one school of thought: the awarding of the 1974 Nobel Prize to both Hayek (“the right”) and Myrdal (“the left”) is an example of this need for hybridity. Both Hayek and Myrdal are each seeing something valid and it’s a “fool’s errand” to decide who is “eternally” correct.

Let’s apply this thinking to a deep “argument without end” within and about history.

Michel Foucault (died in 1984) following Nietzsche, argues that history seems “linear” but is more random and non-linear than the “linear” historians see or admit.

There’s an aphorism in Nietzsche, (from his The Dawn) which Foucault uses…history is made by the “iron-hand of necessity shaking the dice-box of chance.”

In other words the world we know, traveling somehow from the assassination of Kennedy (November 2, 1963) to the impeachment hearings of Trump in October 2019, must be thought of as a kind of “random walk” behind which are trends, cycles, so that one gets a fusion of structure and surprise. If you emphasize surprise you’re closer to Foucault than to those narrative historians who think they can show you the exact threads which connect “then and now.”

Here’s an example of such a historian, the celebrated G.R. Elton of England, whose classic The Tudor Revolution in Government is a masterpiece of orthodox analysis. The book centers on the administrative revolution in the 1530s in England which implied, says Elton, “As regards political and social structure, the sixteenth century produced something quite new in England—the self-contained sovereign state in which no power on earth could challenge the supremacy of statute made by the crown in parliament.”

“In this revolution, in this making of a new kind of state productive of a new kind of society, administrative reforms played their part. It is against this background of controlled upheaval that they must be seen and understood.”

(Elton, The Tudor Revolution in Government, Cambridge University press, 1966, page 426/427)

Orthodox historians see history as a “nail-down-able” system of storylines and the controlled upheavals have a direction (teleology) which allows you to use—in this case the 1530s in England—as a beginning, an origin, a “datum line,” and once you have this clear starting point you can follow the story to now and include comparative developments in France or Germany or China.

The orthodox “explain strategy” starts with an origin, a “starting gate” like a horse-race.

The Foucault–Nietzsche view is that these starting points are not entirely useless but in the end don’t help you because history is in the end governed by “the dice-box of chance” even if it is held by “the iron-hand of necessity.” History is more “upheaval” than “control” more surprise than structure. “Determinism” such as perhaps based by pinning down a starting point from which one can “build out,” is a wish-dream since history is nonlinear and nondeterministic. Even Elton’s phrase “controlled upheaval” is full of questions and problems.

Modern “complexity theory” in mathematics tries to get at these differences analytically. A “meta-intelligent” student would go from this historians’ “argument without end” to the analysis of complexity in math as a way of rounding out the exploration.

An “argument without end” can thus be useful if the student does not insist on some final “apodictic” or certain-forever answer.

Essay 33: How to Jump From a Field to a Larger Understanding: The Example of Globalization

In a university, one is trained to “inspect” fields. That produces what might be called a “monographic” intelligence.

Our purpose is to show and promote something ancillary to this, what might be called a “circum-spective” intelligence (i.e., using the specialized knowledge as one “brick” in a larger structure of understanding).

Let’s do an example:

Think of all the descriptions and analyses of something called globalization. An objective evaluation of the literature on this show two analyses that stand out and tower above the rest:

  1. Prof. Jeffrey Williamson and Kevin O’Rourke, Globalization and History, MIT, 1999 (this is a “quantitative history” or “cliometric” study and a classic).
  2. Elhanan Helpman, Understanding Global Trade, Harvard, 2011 (a masterpiece of trade-based analysis)

Both of these authors are Harvard professors in economics and deserve the high regard that such books have won them. In these two books, there are several technical disagreements of which the deepest is that Williamson focuses on the emergence of one world market price (say for wheat) and argues that this “price convergence” is the best measure of globalization. Thus at a certain point wheat of a certain kind (hard, durum, etc.) was price at the same world rate whether the wheat came from Kansas, Canada, Argentina or Ukraine. The world is then a global price-making market mechanism. This price convergence then extends to their kinds of prices as globalization processes deepen. Williamson explicitly considers other approaches to globalization such as trade share of GDP as confusing.

Helpman, on the other hand, uses export plus imports/over GDP as his measure, clearly disagreeing with the Williamson approach of prices and not trade shares.

Interestingly, both scholars conclude that something we call globalization begins to “show up in the data” in the 1820s. Thus, Marco Polo-type stories are colorful and “multinational” but have little to do with actual (i.e., data based) globalization as we see it, looking backwards from 2020.

Both of these books are classic works and show the intricacies and utility of the “cliometric” approach (i.e., explaining the past quantitatively, using data from economics).

However, there’s a deep perspectival omission in both works:

As the novels of Balzac (1799-1850) show there begins to “co-evolve” with this globalization story a parallel story of global colonization and empire-building by the European powers. Algeria is seized in 1830 and culminates in the brutal Algerian War of 1954-1962. Without de Gaulle‘s supreme prestige as the savior of France, the French would have gone to a destructive civil war and the defeat in French Indochina at Dien Ben Phu. 1954 almost lead to endless strife based on events on the other side of the world.  Balzac’s novels are often set in the 1820s and mention a deepening involvement of France with North African empire-building.

This culminates in Maupassant’s novel Bel-Ami from 1885, which centers on the inexorable rise of an unethical “manipulation machine,” who returns from North Africa as a penniless soldier and after many twists and turns makes several killings in North Africa in various shady schemes which he gets wind off via his journalism contacts.  In other words, the rise of Western industrial technology (from railroads to cars to planes) conquers the world one way while the European colonial armies conquer the world another way.

The peoples like the Vietnamese and Algerians “see” the world in colonial terms with colonialism backstopped by industrial technology. Their quest for dignity begins with this analysis and not with the analysis which says industry and science are primary and colonialism a footnote.

It is this fundamental clash of historical interpretations on a worldwide scale which bedevils the changing relationship between the West and the non-West and is more profound than the econometric differences between a Prof. Williamson and a Professor Helpman.

By seeing how these layers and stories are “entwined” gives you a deeper and wide-angle vision which one field—economics or cliometrics—can’t offer because it is one brick or building block in a larger story. Fields have to be “opened up” in this way, which is the mission of this book.