Ironic that a man named Mead doesn't understand the US Civil War

Maybe his misunderstanding comes from losing the "e" at the end of the name.  The current Mead sayeth:

An endless war of limited intensity is worse, many Americans instinctively feel, than a time-limited war of unlimited ferocity. A crushing blow that brings an end to the war—like General Sherman’s march of destruction through the Confederacy in 1864-65—is ultimately kinder even to the vanquished than an endless state of desultory war.

This Mead wants massive Israeli retaliation against Gaza regardless of civilian casualties and thinks Americans would agree with him.  He appears to be under the impression that not much happened in the US Civil war prior to Sherman's march, and that single crushing blow was all that counted.

The reality was that it took years of unlimited ferocity to win the Civil War.  The side that had better logistics won the war, and Sherman's march was a logistical success, living off the land while destroying its ability to support the enemy.  Not a lot that parallels Gaza here.

More broadly, I think there's little evidence that shock and awe achieves its psychological goals.  The British, German, and Japanese people didn't break over the bombing raids.  Psychology does have its place - the Doolittle Raid heightened American morale and convinced the Japanese to make the stupid mistake of withdrawing carriers to defend the home islands and to undertake the high-risk attack on Midway.  Brutality by itself, though, won't win wars.

Tangentially related:  Brad DeLong has been live-blogging a history of World War II.  Definitely worth checking out.

Spencer Weart and Never at War

1. Spencer Weart.

I've been interested for quite a while in the theory that democracies don't fight wars with other democracies, but only recently learned that Spencer Weart, the historian-god of climate change science, also wrote a book in 1998 called Never at War: Why Democracies Will Not Fight One Another. (I'm shamefully cribbing off of wiki rather than his book, but I'll get around to the real thing sometime I swear).

Weart makes the maximalist argument, that any country sufficiently democratic to have let at least 2/3 of male adults to vote and control the government for at least three years will not go to war with a similar democracy. He includes many classic Greek city-states in this category. The book then discusses borderline cases and his theories about why democracies don't fight each other.

Wiki has a quite good general article on the democratic peace theory - as with any other field, you can find some expert who absolutely denies the consensus position, but it seems pretty clear that well-established democracies don't fight each other, and quite likely that even immature democracies are less likely to fight democracies. No consensus on why that's the case however.

My own view: I don't know enough about classical Greece to say anything relevant. I think democracy requires at least a certain level of organization and sophistication before the democratic peace kicks in. Hunter-gatherer and small-scale agricultural societies were reasonably democratic/anarchic and very often violent toward outgroups. Weart's maximalist position may or may not work - the 1999 Kargil War between India and Pakistan that started a year after Weart's book is a contrary example. OTOH, Pakistan's elected parliament didn't really control its military which initiated that war.

That Weart could even plausibly maintain his position suggests the overall strength of the democratic peace theory.

2. Israel.

Israel's antipathy and fear of the Arab Spring is interesting in light of the fact that Israeli policymakers should know about democratic peace theory. Why Israelis thought their security was better protected by a hated 82-year old tyrant instead of a potential shot at Egyptian democratization isn't clear. I guess one response would be to look at how unpopular Israel is now with the average Egyptian, but I suspect that unpopularity itself could partially be a result of Israeli antipathy to Arab democracy.

I think the disinterest in Arab democracy in light of democratic peace theory suggests at least partially that Israel isn't all that worried about its security. It also suggests that Israel does not want democratically elected Arab leaders to be expressing grievances about West Bank and Gaza, because those leaders are much more persuasive that what Israel's had to deal with previously.

3. Labor unions.

Something of a tangent here, but one pithy statement I read somewhere about peace between democracies went to the effect of "yes it works in practice, but can you make it work in theory?" Weart isn't the only one who's tried to explain it, and no one's got a consensus theory for it.

I feel the same way about unions - the increasing inequality and declining middle class seems to be an effect of declining union power, but I don't think there's a good explanation about why unions benefit society generally, as opposed to just their members. I think the data is pretty good that they do benefit society, and there are plenty of theories why, but I'm not convinced as to why.

We'll just have to live with uncertainty.

I had no idea about the extent of slavery in Eastern Europe in the 19th Century

I'm not sure I even realized that Eastern Europe had slavery that was distinguishable from serfdom, with people that could be bought and sold. Right now I'm reading the book Bury Me Standing, about the modern Roma (Gypsy) people in Eastern Europe after the Cold War. The parallels between the Roma underclass in Europe and African-American underclass in the US were striking to me even before the book started discussing the extent of slavery in Romania and how it lasted until the mid-1850s.

I had to go to wiki to confirm it, and it's all true. At least in America, the vast majority of people with IQs above the plant life level acknowledge slavery as one of our two Original Sins, while Europeans seem pretty happy to sweep their version under a rug.

Not that we don't still have plenty of recent wishful ignorance about the cause of the Civil War - the one upside of that is learning how clearly the Southern Secessionists told the world that they seceded because of slavery. Some good history learning is possible.

NY Times' missed opportunity on "How Christian Were the Founders"?

I've been kind of curious about the whole "America began as a Christian nation therefore it must now be considered a Christian nation and it is proper to acknowledge and support Christian dominance in society and government to exclusion and detriment of secular and non-Christian beliefs" concept.  I should probably disclose that I see some possible flaws in the reasoning even if the beginning-as-Christian is true.  But what about the whole assertion without providing evidence that American was founded as a Christian nation?

Unfortunately, the extremely long NY Times Magazine article on this, won't tell you much.  It bumbles around in Texas school textbooks politics and general politics before getting to a wishy-washy claim, also without much evidence, that America was less religious than the Christian fundamentalists claim but more driven by religion than textbooks acknowledge.  The thousands of words never even got around to discussing Christianity's negative and positive effects on slavery, treatment of Native Americans and women, and on foreign policy.

Worst of all, the article failed to provide a metric to use in analyzing how Christian was America in the 18th Century.  I can give two possibilities:  what percent of Americans were Christian back then, or what (subjectively defined) ratio of the intellectual firepower behind America's founding was from Christians.  It's also necessary to define Christian.  Fundamentalists are pretty clear on what that means today:  a set of beliefs about Jesus Christ as the only son of God born of a virgin and killed by men, who rose from the dead after the third day, and whom each Christian must personally accept as his or her Savior.  The fundies get a little fuzzy in applying this definition to 18th Century Americans, but let's be consistent.

As to what percent of the population was Christian, I don't know, but I'm sure it's far less than the nearly everyone, as fundamentalists seem to think is the case.  I would guess over 50% were Christian but not more than 90%, maybe much less.  You have three significant groups to consider:  first, Native Americans east of the Mississippi.  There were still a lot of them in 1776 and many/most weren't Christian.  Second, African and African-American slaves, many of whom were forcibly brought from non-Christian Africa or were the first generation born in the New World, and many weren't Christian as the fundamentalists would define them.  I'd guess nearly none of the slaves brought from Africa were Christian, and half of their children weren't either.  Slaves formed a declining percentage of US population over time.  In 1790 they were just less than 20% of the population, so they would have been more in 1776.  What's unclear is how many were the first or second generation from Africa, although over 600,000 slaves total were brought to North America, mostly in the 18th Century.

The third group would be Jews and other whites who failed to personally accept all tenets of fundamentalist Christianity.  I think saying 5% of all whites fell in this category would be a low estimate.  The three groups together has to be over 10% of the population, maybe much more.

The other metric, looking at the specific Founding Fathers, is a lot trickier.  While all of them were influenced by and generally accepted philosophies that had Christian origins, the ones who could qualify for membership in a fudamentalist Christian church would be a much smaller percent.

It would be interesting for someone to put some time into measuring either of these metrics - say, the time that the NY Times put into writing its article.  I think its clear though that the percent that were Christian by either metric doesn't approach, say, the percent of climatologists constituting a consensus on climate change.  A large non-Christian component of American society was there from the beginning, and deserves its own place in society.

American Civil War denialism

Along with all the other forms of denialism, here in the US we have a large fraction of political conservatives who deny that our Civil War was primarily or even partially about slavery in the South. You can see it in this Krugman post that pointed out the obvious, and some of the comments that still couldn't see the obvious. Here's one by Hal Horvath:

I think I’ll stick to the well-known scenario: Lincoln started the war for the public reason: to preserve the Union, and only changed the primary reason much later, in order to justify the bloodshed and uplift the nation.

Yes, Lincoln used sneaky Jedi mind tricks to start the war by making the Confederates attack Fort Sumter.

Contrary to Horvath, both pro- and anti-slavery forces in the US prior to the Civil War believed that slavery had to expand to new states in the West in order for it and the Southern Way of Life to survive. Lincoln and the Republicans opposed expansion, and that was enough for some Southern states to secede when Lincoln won the presidency. More at wiki for those who care.

Add another denialism to the list. It would be interesting to see how many denialist beliefs can be found in a single person.

Indigenous environmental damage and environmentalism

NY Times had an interesting article a week or two ago about marine ecosystems being damaged by ancient humans in many different areas of the world due to overexploitation.

I've been interested for a while now in variations of the idea of prehistoric environmental damage and environmental management. There's no debate that island-hopping humans killed off many flightless bird species long before European sailors started doing the same thing. The evidence that humans killed off ice-age mammals in North America and that Mayan overuse of the environment caused their collapse also seems pretty strong to me.

The general concept would be that ancient humans exploited and damaged their environments to the full extent that their technology and population levels would allow - in other words, just like us. The main difference from moderns is their technology stabilized or changed slowly, limiting human populations, and a new equilibrium was reached until European peoples and technologies were introduced.

The few exceptions to this rule, where indigenous peoples could have damaged their environment but didn't, are even more interesting. The Polynesian concepts of taboos, tapu, and rahui all protected resources.

Another potential exception that I haven't seen discussed is salmon fishing. While native cultures couldn't wipe out salmon runs on rivers, they could do so on small creeks. The fact that they didn't is pretty interesting, and something I'd like to know more about. Maybe some other examples are out there, too.


And with that, I'll be traveling for a while, so no posting for ten days or so.

Bay Area local: get thee to the Computer History Museum before 2010

John Mashey was nice enough to show Inel and me around the Computer History Museum where John is a trustee and docent. Main highlight was one of two working Babbage engines in the world, and this one is only there on loan until the end of the year, so you might want to visit while it's there and they're giving demonstrations.

I also thought the Hollerith 1890 census tabulating machine was pretty amazing, which counted tabulation results by creating electrical connections through liquid mercury. And seeing John's work there was cool too.

Glad I finally got to go, and I'll have to come back and linger some time.

For your edits: new wiki article, "History of climate change science"

I've put up a new article on wiki, "History of climate change science," covering the history of scientific developments from late 1700s to 1988. What I wrote is really just an abbreviated history of the science of carbon dioxide and climate science - a lot can and should be added about water vapor and other gases. Please jump in and make improvements!

I'm hopeful this article will be less contentious than other climate articles, while still making clear that climate change wasn't something invented by hippies to advance their socialist plots.

Making presidents care about the long term consequences of their actions

Dear Democratic/Republican Presidential candidate:

I know that as president, you will care deeply about the long term consequences of your actions and make decisions on that basis rather than for short-term gain. You can prove that to the public, by creating institutions to force your administration and future administrations to think about those consequences of your actions, in the same time period that you make them.

I suggest that you advocate for two new initiatives in the Office of the White House. The first is a White House-sponsored and White House-run Presidential Assessment Conference. This conference will be held in the first year of your term and thereafter once every four years, and it will assess the long term consequences of presidential administrations that ended 25, 50, and 75 years earlier. A report presented to the public and Congress will assess whether the decisions of the three periods worked out best in the long term, and will help the present-day President and public focus on long-term consequences.

The second initiative is to create the Office of Presidential Historian-Advocate. This person will help manage the Assessment Conference, but more importantly, the Historian-Advocate will be the day-to-day reminder for the President and staff members that their administration will eventually be assessed as well. The Historian-Advocate will prepare documents archived for future Conferences that constitute the administration's argument for why it made the best long-term decision based on the information it had available. A Historian-Advocate who witnessesses the most important decisions will be able to do the best possible advocacy, so the president will have an incentive to involve the Historian-Advocate as much as possible.

The functional effect is to have an advocate for the future involved in day-to-day decision making. The President will even have the option of seeking the Historian-Advocate's advice as to which choice will be most easily defended in future Conferences (a young Historian-Advocate might even be present at the future 25 and 50 year Assessments).

Again, I am certain that you have no need for this institutional incentive for long term thinking. Your advocacy of this idea will prove exactly that, because it's an idea that improves the decision-making of presidents that will follow you, in the long term.