h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

ITIWBS

Re Holy Office and the Spanish Empire

John Ralston Saul in "Voltaire's B******ds" (c1993) makes a big thing about the rise of the courtier as of continuing influence and important in the modern era, with the link from Machiavelli who offered his services to assist "The Prince" through Ignatius Loyola, es Spanish soldier, amongst other things, who brought the military or militant approach, and when asked to confront the Pope convinced him of the need to show intransigence and refuse to give in on any of the traditional points of the Church, as the basis of a fight back which led to the Jesuit Order- one of the great pioneering and exploring orders in the beginning of globalisation- and to the Jesuit training that turned people into tools of the organization, Loyola's "Spiritual Exercises" turning them from potential human beings to the calculating instruments of "the greater cause". Cardinal Richelieu, the master of the "Grey Eminence", was Jesuit trained and schooled.

But this was very much also the age of what I call "The Versailles Effect" in which European Courts "fought shy" of the emerging power of great cities with their volatile masses of humanity and sought to keep the masses at 'arms length'. Which is the kind of "above the throng" government that philosophers like Voltaire could see as normal and imagine what they would do "If I ruled the world"..

The Humanist Dream (I believe) is in that "If I ruled the world" tradition, in which life is never a question of "Events dear boy!" and government is not largely trying to deal with one crisis after another. But it was a dream- since the British Victory in the Seven Years War based on the idea that the world was now going to be a safe, secure and stable place: Hence the decision soon enough by a group of the American Colonies that British rule and protection was more trouble than it was worth.

Cass

On Post 97,




I should have made that last line, "War, and for that matter, merely high rates of violence or hardship, stimulates population growth."

But I think that statistically population growth over recent decades (and most of the last two centuries) has come from a fall in the death rate more than a rise in the birth rate, though of course when you get tragic situations like some in Africa in the last half-century when many countries have ended up with 50% of the population under 15- it would be reasonable to expect that "Births per thousand" of the population will rocket when those under 15s become a 15-30 generation. However I believe that Aids and new forms of Malaria, plus other Malthusian horrors have also increased the Death Rate. I am not sure whether it was here or elsewhere that I saw the other day that the Arab population has doubled in recent decades fuelling the "Arab Spring", as the growing generation of young people find out the modern Malthusian truth that the chances of "earning a living" can not be increased as fast as new Human beings can be created.

Cass

I personally think that the population growth dynamics are among the most compelling of reasons to seek to prevent war and strive for reductions in rates of crime and violence and improvement in standards of living.




What I look for in politics and economics is,

1. Authoritative leadership and governance,

2. Sustained growth economics,

in that prerequisite order, to the purpose of producing,

3. a positive synergy of the secular trend.




So far as I'm concerned this is the only possible winning formula in politics and economics.

Satisfy that diagram and I'll view and treat them as respectable.

If its anything else, I'll view and treat them as cranks or criminals as appropriate.




Old saying, if everyone in the world pulls in the same direction the world will fall over.

There are people foolish enough to think that a desirable result.

ITIWBS

The trouble with "Authoritative leadership" is that it is can so easily become an excuse for lack of initiative and enterprise by people who are actually "in the fight" facing the mundane reality rather than the academic abstraction which all too often informs the "establishment":

And the trouble with "the combination of leadership and governance" is that it encourages personal abdication, irresponsibility and passing the buck.

The "I blame the government" for the state of my life mantra leads me to the question "Well what have you done to take charge of your life and lay down solid foundations for success?". As a teacher far too often the answer was very little- though this was usually not quite as evident as the girl that I helped to drag from a swimming pool in a school's swimming sports day who had gamely accepted to swim a leg in the inter-House relay. It was pretty obvious soon after she had dived into the deep- end that she was drowning and after a bit of spluttering she said that she had never swum before, but just 'kind of 'thought that it would come instinctively once she was in the water.

As was explained in the 1947 volume on "The Character of England" within England the initiative and enterprise has traditionally come from down to up, so that the Common People used their collective Sovereignty to check the policies of any would be top-down central government: and used their control of the purse strings and their ability to see their own way ahead so that they could guide the work of central government along a path that would promote "The Commonweal" because of that English tradition of grass-roots "democracy" that was already the bedrock of English Society before 1066- including at a national level the increasing and eventual primacy of the House of Commons.

Sir Thomas Munro wrote a telling minute c1824, when in the "Company" service in India, in which he said that there was little point in passing laws that gave more rights to the 'ryots' (poor Indian peasants who rented plots) as if they were "English". I suspect that this Munro may well have been connected with Hector Munro or Saki, whose upbringing was that of a "Child of the Raj", and who was very proud of his Highland Scots heritage: and perhaps also very much aware of the problems that the Highlanders had faced in standing up for their own rights during the Highland Clearances.

But the English, Sir Thomas Munro said, were accustomed to standing up for their lgeneral legal rights, in a long tradition that was already well established by the time of Magna Carta. But in contrast people like the 'ryots', who often suffered from oppressive and unjust landlords, were accustomed to the weakness of their position and would not even try to use any legal rights against their oppressors, being much more likely to run to their oppressors to beg for special favours and consideration, or to take flight and run away from their obligations.

But by 1945 I always think that the chilling remarks of Sir John Woodhead as the President of the Famine Inquiry Commission that looked into the Bengal Famine of 1943 had a much wider application in the modern world: "It has been for us a sad task to enquire into the course and causes of the Bengal Famine. We have been haunted by a deep sense of tragedy . A million and a half of the poor of Bengal fell victim to circumstances for which they themselves were not responsible. Society, together with its organs, failed to protect its weaker members. Indeed, there was a moral and social breakdown, as well as an administrative breakdown."

Cass

Cass, sorry I was long getting back to you.

Tied up caring for an elderly parent over the weekend.




'Authoritative', as I'm using the term, means one strikes a balance between authoritarian and permissive standards of conduct, strict on issues like human rights and public safety, relaxed and permissive on issues like self-expression and self-actualization.

Basically, just about anything goes, so long as its not materially harmful to anyone in the surrounding community.

'Authoritative' means 'over-controlled' rather than 'self-willed'.




Stipulated, many people need a measure of leadership and guidance, in fact anyone does outside their own area of experience and expertise.




On 'passing the buck', its often a question of not knowing what do, or a question of not wanting to take responsibility.

People in a hierarchy do need to understand the extent and limitations of their responsibilities and if they're unable to meet the needs of their position, to be removed from it to something more suitable.




On sustained growth economics, the key to it is 'sustainability'.

It makes no sense and its wasteful, for example, to produce more than there is a demand for, or for that matter, more than can be conveyed to market in a timely manner.

Its foolish also to invest beyond what one can reasonably expect in the way of returns.

Also, its a serious mistake to locate where conditions are not conducive to success in the venture.




Disaster at sea, survivor in the water whom obviously can't swim, one approaches, "Can't swim? Relax, I'll teach you!".





You get them on their backs, with their faces out of water, coach them on breathing, inhale, you rise in the water, exhale you sink.

Inhale quickly, hold as long as comfortable, exhale and inhale as quickly as possible, show them how to pat the water with their hands and flutter kick to stay stable on their backs, form the survivors up in a circle, if possible tie them together in the circle, flanking weak swimmers with stronger ones where possible, have someone count cadence on breathing in unison, keep anything you've got that floats and any casualties in the middle.

Its much easier for air - sea rescue to see a group like that than isolated individuals.




There's a close relationship between natural disaster and societal collapse.

The ninth century drought that ended the classical Maya civilization in the south was fatal to the better watered northern Maya city states, which were still in place 6 centuries later when the conquistadores arrived.

On more modern disaster relief, in the USA, Hurricane Andrew and Hurricane Katrina produced damage far beyond what the pre-existing disaster relief programs could handle.

In Florida, after Hurricane Andrew, there were gangs of hungry kids running wild in the streets.

I vividly remember watching the congressional hearings on the situation on the point that all of Florida' legislators addressing congress looked gaunt and emaciated.

Hurricane Katrina was drastically worse, occasioning mass evacuations to other states of the USA, the proportions of it having gone far beyond what the resources of the state of Louisiana could absorb.

I have a sister who lives there, and they're still suffering from the economic impact of the disaster.

The USA is one of the most disaster prone regions in the world and coming back quickly and strong in the aftermath is a part of the American tradition.

That's among the reasons for the extensions of aid by the USA in the aftermath of their recent earthquake and tsunami disasters.

In situations like this, if those who have the ready resources help those who've suffered a recent disaster, all prosper better in the long run.




Back to societal collapse models, the famines that touched off the revolutionary era were caused by volcanic disasters in what's nowadays Indonesia and in Iceland, a reduced solar constant due to volcanic haze producing conditions like 'the year without a summer'.

These days, better understanding the cause, people could compensate in part by shifting cultivation of crops to sunnier climes temporarily, to compensate for the reduced solar constant.

In those days, the cause of the problem wasn't understood and a program like I suggested would have strained their logistic carrying capability to the limit.




I expect you're probably acquainted with Jared Diamond's book on societal collapse.

ITIWBS

Thanks for that response and no I do not know Jared Diamond's book on societal colllapse..

But your observations about great disasters and the disaster-prone nature of the USA are very apposite (I think) to this discussion- which (I have suggested) is really all about this idea that after 1945 it would be possible to construct a new Humanistic world order based around the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The idea of Civilization and Natural Disaster was taken up by Albert Camus in "The Plague" who (somewhat controversially among his friends in the French Resistance) treated the Second World War and the German occupation of France as a general crisis in Civilization - an infection to which the Germans (like the rats that occupied his 'City' were the first and most disastrously affected group/population.

That quote from Sir John Woodhead about societal collapse seems to be very applicable to what happened in France in 1940 and, having now been married into French Society for more than 45 years- trying to understand French Society has become something of a life's work. Because- as in a late Forties npvel "The Snow and the Flower"- the French see themselves as something like "The Phoenix" people (with some similarities to Aztec/mid-American cultures and the end of the world scenarios, which can be followed by a resurrection).. thanks to divine intervention... But only since we have had a house in France and lived there for different periods of the year have I understood the French fascination with the weather forecasts (something that Camus said was all that interested people during "The Plague".. My own French family seem to have survived the German occupation by 'sticking together' as a family and people with whom they had personal ties. Only when Germany attacked the USSR did French Communists- out of ideological conviction of the need to defend World Communism- give up their observation of the "Non-Aggression Pact signed in 1939" and their revolutionary 'cells' became essential to the French Resistance. And by 1944 the very few (as I was reminded in a French TV documentary a few weeks ago) were proudly paraded as National Heroes for a resurgent France, with the African/Black regiments who had bourne in many ways the brunt of the Free France effort being denied the chance to march into Paris with De Gaulle. Not the right image to show either the French people or the wider world.

But this idea of Civilization just falling apart and re=assembling itself like some mythological monster is very ancient.

Since Ancient History and the earliest Civilizations (as opposed to mere cultures) the crucial elements seem to be (a) the emergence of authorities (like Chinese God-Emperors) that can coordinate the massive human effort necessary to defy Nature, but also (b) the creation of ideas and principles that can survive and endure and become the basis and foundation for rebuilding when all the best efforts of mortal men have been overcome. Hence in Ancient Mesopotamia everyone knew that Enlil, the God of the Storm, could destroy everything- (Gilgamesh/Noah myth-story) but "victory" for human beings was surviving to rebuild- and sadly in our ignorant modern world there was a general ignorance about Mesopotamian Civilization when we launched "Desert Storm" against Saddam Hussein and could not understand how he could claim to be victorious when he was still in power in Baghdad.

But what French people have often said to me when I discuss the lack of Social Cohesion (of an English and hopefully British type) in France is that the English have had the good fortune to live on an island. To which I usually point out that historians now largely agree that the Anglo-Saxons knew what they were doing in coming to to largely unihabited Lowlands of "England" where there were no "Glittering Prizes" that attracted most other tribes towards the Mediterranean. There was not much here apart from the chance to work-hard and transform the largely neglected clay lands, though there were also the warlike Celts/British neighbours that "nationalist" historians of the "Anglo-Saxon Age", when other ASs like the "Americans" and the "Germans" were busily practising genocide against indigenous peoples in North America and Africa, suggested had been massacred in England being either wiped out or driven to the mountains.

It now seems more likely that (as after 1066) while some of the former warrior elite carried on fighting in order to preserve their rank and privileges, the increasing prosperity of the Anglo-Saxon settlements (especially perhaps during harsh winters and times of starvation- as actually happened with the early French and English settlements in North America) attracted the British to come for aid, supplies, trade and then work in the AS settlements- which were largely self-governing with common law and common lands and the idea of a commonweal- and not too long after the conversion to Christianity- the idea of abiding by "The King's Peace" and giving up the duty of revenge and the blood feud that continued ( and continues) to blight other regions.

So there is a choice for the way ahead (a) an English Way of sustainable living on a human scale in which people learn how to manage their own affairs with an very small (and cheap) government- which was one of the main reasons why England was the home of the first industrial revolution, or (b) the Continental Way which grew from the 1860s, when Continental Powers starting with France, embraced "Economism" as a new form of State-based Civilization, which like all previous Civilizations since the time of Egypt and Mesopotamia would end up taking up 30-40% of all of the GDP. This was a situation that was only credible when people believed that they were getting "God on our side" for this investment, and when the High Priests/God Emperors seemed to have some competence in the face of the threats that faced the whole thing. Pharoah had no real choice when faced by the Plagues of Egypt than to let Moses take the Hebrews out of Egypt- because past that 30-40% of GDP being taken up in order to keep the system going- it seems to collapse because it weighs too heavily on the people and presses them down too hard.

Cass

It is fun reading your posts - they are a hoot. Occasionally something comes up which raises an eyebrow (or two) and you motivate me to join in.

In your rather idyllic characterisation of the Anglo-Saxon economy, working the clay et al, you paint a picture of a warrior class preserving privilege and peasants huddling in huts during harsh winters.

Keep in mind that in 991 the UK paid 3,300kg in silver as Danish tax, more payments followed in 994, 1002, 1007 and 1012 (17,900kg of silver), 1016 (26,900kg plus 3,900kg from London). The total came to about £240,500 of silver.

England does not mine silver or, at least, it didn't back then. I.e. the UK paid a mind-boggling 100,000kg of silver as tax out of the supplies it was importing over a 25 year period. The money wasn't paid out of some long buried Roman hoard but from an active economy, continuously exporting goods in return for convertible exchange.

There are good reasons to believe that the Anglo Saxon economy was centralised, controlled, significantly monetarised, export oriented and running a huge CASH surplus - this silver was paid from minted coins not bullion.



PS: I copied the weights from wikipeadia, which I have to hand, but if you want a more authoritative source, try Peter Sawyer's "The Wealth of Anglo-Saxon England", £25 Oxford University Press.

A fast history of Britain and major population migrations:




Britain becomes Roman Britain during the reign of Claudius of Rome,




Hadrian's Wall constructed, not so much as a defense against the Picts as a security measure to prevent the escape of the Britons to Pictland, the significance of being more like the Berlin wall than the Great Wall of China.

(Scotland didn't exist yet, not till about the 8th century.)




The Anglo-Saxon invasion follows rapidly on the end of the Roman occupation of Britain, the Britons driven back to the south of England and Wales, about the 6th century.




The Viking era begins, with settlements of especially the Danes and the Norwegians being established in the north of England, approximately concurrently with the Scottish invasion of Pictland from Ireland ( the Scots originally a Portuguese colony there, established under Queen Scotia of Portugal), creating Scotland.

The Anglo-Saxons hold their own best in southern England.

Scandinavian northern England established as the Danelaw, the country re-united under Alfred the Great.




The reigns of Edward the Confessor and William the Conqueror mark the end of the dark ages and the beginning of the middle ages in Britain.

Phoenician Trader

Yes. It is well-established and conventional English History that by the tenth century England was thriving-- thriving so well that it attracted increasing attentions from "Vikings" who "taxed" England, where the military elite were no longer really up to the challenge and subject to increasing levels of discontent from the people.

These invasions seem to have reached something like a peak with the Millennianism of the year 1000 AD, when quite possibly some of the four great invading forces threatening to overwhelm Europe were aware of the way that morale might have been affected by the passing of the Millennium and the predicted Second Coming. [Much as Cortes picked his moment to land at Vera Cruz because it chimed with the legends of Quetzalcoatl]

As you are no doubt very much aware Ethelred the Unready was so-called because the common people regarded him as being "ill-advised" in deploying his armies in the wrong places and believing that paying raiders to go away rather than fighting them off was what he and his military elite were supposed to do. A king who was not up to it is traditionally (in England ) accused of being ill-advised. To say anything else could be treasonable.

Things came to a head c1014 when King Swein invaded England and Ethelred called out the fyrd (the people's militia founded by Alfred the Great). When they assembled they were told that Ethelred was too ill to lead them into battle- and by this time his son Edmund Ironside was dead. So the leaders of the fyrd said that they would wait for the King to recover, and when he failed to do so, they went back home- since it was impossible for them to "do their duty" which was to support the King and his own men at arms in battle.

Around the year the AS Chronicle records the Vikings coming up the Thames to the Isle of Sheppey and landing in search of gold and such valuables, before heading off into London. Gold and valuables were the kind of wealth that never stayed with the common people but which were handed to their spiritual and temporal lords in order that they might protect them.. But the Vikings had very little joy in attacking London (a place that even William the Conqueror did not really try to capture because of the popular militia and their fortified positions) so on the way back they tried to land on the Isle of Sheppey again. But this time the people knew that the Vikings had taken the gold and valuables that the King (and his own men) and the Church would have taken as their- 'fee'/tax.[Why keep a dog and bark yourself?]-- But this time it was the people who stood to lose. e.g. Many might be taken away into slavery. So the common people repelled the Viking invasion.

Andf subsequently were prepared to see whether - in the absence of any more good descendents of the line of King Alfred- a Viking King would bring more peace- Swein being quickly followed by Cnut- with the rapid rise of Earl Godwin of Wessex who ,while being Cnut's chief minister, married into his royal family and produced a brood of half-Viking sons, with some of that new Viking blood (that seems to have come down into Mrs Thatcher)...Then after Cnut's line Godwin brought back Edward the Confessor and married him off to his daughter, though also having been implicated earlier in the murder of Arthur the Atheling. Charles Kingsley in his Hereward the Wake saw Earl Godwin as a great Englishman- perhaps greater than his hero "Herewarde the Wake". But Kingsley was part f the proto-nazi group around Thomas Carlyle- worshipper of the cult of the man of violence hero, whose great biography of Frederick the Great was one of the books that Hitler had in the bunker for his own 'last ditch stand" and suicide.

It is pretty obvious from the AS account of 1066 that Harold Godwinson was treated as a "doomed king" from a nasty family, and the actions of the fyrd basically made the campaigns of 1066 tantamount to a general election, which William of Normandy won- negotiating his way to the throne.

But of course the great Domesday Survey after 20 years of rule was undertaken by William I because he suspected that he and his Normans had been "taken for a ride" by the English, who now had a first-class military security "on the cheap".

Cass

ITIWBS

As for the "end of the Dark Ages" there are those who would argue that the "light of civilization" was kept buring in Ireland, and that the England of Alfred as described by the Venerable Bead was actually quite an enlightened place, with English and British missionaries taking Christian Civilization in their great peregrinations right across the German plains.

Cass

PS
The Romans invaded Britain among other reasons because of the mining potential especially in the South West nb Cornwall giving some credence to those who maintain that Somerset, Devon and Cornwall were the eventual realm of King Arthur, Camelot etc.. Though Wales in another candidate in both senses Casseroleon being I discovered an anagram for SOS from Caerleon: and Geoffrey of Monmouth placed in the mouth of Merlin a great prophecy in which he railed against the Britons for taking too much pleasure in their gold and treasures, and once Offa's Dyke had been built to make cross-border raiding more difficult the Welsh probably found it useful to trade with the English.

As for the existence of a "moneyed economy" it was not until c1870 that people in Great Britain (including England) obtained a legal right to be paid in money, and even then the Fiduciary Issue in which actual money could exceed the value of the gold which guaranteed it was limited to something like 14.5%, only a fraction of the "Big Money" of England's wealth.

As for "centralization" I sometimes wonder whether modern politicians should try William Rufus' solution to the inflation problem that began to arise at the end of the eleventh century. He called all those who were legally entitled to mint coinage in his name and complained that clearly there was a credibility problem do to with the quality and quantity of the silver or gold that they were using. So he threatened them that if the prices did not stop rising he would call them to his court again, and he would "cut off their right hands and their parts below". .. But such centralised power could get you "accidentally" shot.

Cass

PPS

And re the English holding on to "working their clay etc" and your proposed book on "The Wealth of Anglo-Saxon England".

Gregory King's analysis of the Hearth Tax returns for 1688 is usually regarded as the first serious attempt at any statistical analysis of English Society (which was not the business of the Domesday Book). Out of a population for England and Wales of 5.5 million Gregory King had still 4, 265, 000 living on and off the Land.

Of course it is also the case that his calculations showed that the Yearly Income of 2,825,000 was less than the yearly expense per head and that therefore he counted these people as "Decreasing the Wealth of the Kingdom". But in fact his Yearly Increase in Income per head was exactly the 4s 6d needed to cover the gap and pay their way. Thus were the bedrock of English Society who were "not in it for the money" and proud to be "freeborn Englishmen" beholden to no man. Their wealth as writers like Chaucer and Shakespeare understood was not the material wealth that so obsesses the modern world- and according to the AS Chroniclers the Anglo-Norman military and religious elite.

I did not of course count Gregory King's 30,000 vagrants, gipsies, thieves and beggars -most of whom did not invest their Labour in the soil, though in many cases only because of Thomas More's 'sheepe" ..that had become "devourers of men".

Cass