A Note on Comments or The Lack Thereof

I just wanted to make a note here regarding comments for anyone still coming across this content. I haven't received a comment here for quite some time, and I've discovered that I quite like it that way, at least in terms of this particular project. So I've disabled the commenting and hidden it away in favor of the simple delivery of posts. 

This has become a quiet place for me to come and regularly sketch out ideas and represent and consolidate my thoughts to myself, and to continue to develop an idiosyncratic craft as expression of an idiosyncratic life, for better or for worse, and anyone who wants to read that and take from it what they will is welcome to. 

A full blown blogging project complete with substantial traffic and interaction and commenting and moderation is certainly a worthwhile and vital experience, but it is not something I can currently sustain due to life circumstances. There may come a time when I decide to become more visible and audible and engage in the accompanying interactions, and if and when that time comes, the pertinent information will be available here. 

Until then, you're welcome back anytime to join me in this strange and muted-yet-searching journey. 

One Ring to Rule Them All

The tendency towards dictator in highly stratified and highly stressed societies is a pronounced one. In the oligarchic Roman Republic, there was a clear set of fixes that would navigate the ailing society through its cascade of crises - land redistribution being chief among them - but the creditor class would repeatedly veto those varying threats to their power, no matter how minor the reform, with the eventual workaround being the military reforms eventually carried out by Marius, which would accelerate the unraveling of the Republic. 

Part of the problem, as we've touched on before, is that the vetos were easier than just fixing things, as the fixes had to be spearheaded by ambitious individuals, and part of what made up that engine of expansion and innovation in Roman society was individual ambition and the driving need to outdo one's predecessors, so there was a constant and universal fear that any one individual fixing too much would concentrate too much power and become king, an old taboo established far in early Rome's past. Besides, the logic of monarchy would necessarily displace the prevailing political and economic system, which made the fortunes of many a powerful elite, and shut down those burbling pathways of political ascension in favor of a hereditary line of rulers and their chosen supporters.  

This political gridlock formed a bottleneck that would prove to be explosive, and as the assassinations, mob violence, and civil wars unfurled from that explosive and frustrated energy, it appeared that the Republic was shaking itself apart. It took the seizure of power by Julius Caesar that would set in motion a series of catastrophic civil wars and purgative proscriptions, including famously the assassination of Caesar himself, finally winding down that explosive energy and settling upon a longer term dictator who would emerge from the chaos, that of Augustus as emperor. 

Fascinatingly, Augustus himself, having learned from Julius' fate, worked carefully to conceal the nature of his reign, adopting more humble titles and allowing the Senate to continue to function as a body of figureheads, choosing instead to quietly gut the political machinery of the dead Republic and replace it with that of the Empire without arousing too much suspicion initially. Amazingly, a desire for dictator is reported to have been a popular one among a populace sick and tired of the dysfunctional fleecing of themselves, and that the Roman Empire itself would arise stable and powerful out of the ashes of the Republic, to expand to its greatest heights in territorial holdings in the coming centuries. 

It took the careful renovation of the innermost political machinery right underneath the ruling classes noses, so that they were deposited from oligarchy into figurehead aristocracy, gradually isolated from the levers of power as the emperor quietly took power. This process was aided certainly by an early emperor with the instincts to navigate such a transition, instinctually sensitive to the moving parts of the greater political system, and manipulating them with such a broader vision in mind. Later emperors would be more self-aggrandizing, bringing attention to themselves, losing sight of that greater vision and its many working parts. 

It appeared that much of the dysfunction of the earlier Republic consisted of the deterioration of a specific political and economic form over a period of time, that it was a teeming mass of frustrated people, and that violently broken apart and reconstituted in a new form, would burst forth with its existing infrastructure and labor force and enjoy a multiple centuries long resurgence in the ancient world. 

However, we should take care to notice that the process of forging emperors and cultivating and maintaining their families was a brutal and costly one, and that succeeding dynasties would progressively deteriorate under these pressures, producing increasingly dysfunctional emperors before breaking down into troubled periods of revolt and assassination before being reconstituted again with new blood. We know that the Empire eventually disintegrated more completely, with the Western half breaking apart and the Eastern half standing for another thousand years. The dynamics of this process, both within long arc of the Republic and Empire themselves, and the shifting powers of the empires outside of them, are infinitely complicated but fascinating, which we'll have to return to at another time. 

The Greats

I mean, yes the great man theory has already passed well out of fashion in historical analysis, though it is certainly seeing a comeback in some quarters. There is something to these remarkable individuals who manage to channel the turbulent forces of history through their person, forces which you do actually see concentrate in them and then disperse after they die, at varying rates and degrees depending on the social system they are a part of. 

But Alexander the Great for example. Yes he had a hell of a story. But then you look at his mother Olympia, who, holey moley, later stopped a whole opposing army after his death and the ensuing civil war by invoking his spirit in ritual, or the accomplishments of his father, Philip II, in uniting the Macedonian empire beforehand. And these are yet other individuals in which these forces are embodied and channeled, who rest atop their own supporting social resources and infrastructure.  

Considering the infrastructure and the resources and the energy built up in the incredible rise of the Macedonian empire itself: the dude - Alexander - basically had a launch pad set up for him to take off from. 

Empire and Succession

If you look at the history of a fragmented region, it appears that the social fragmentation and political disunity is very difficult to reverse or even to surmount. It could be that the very survival of the various isolated groups could depend on them becoming unified, and still they would be unable to overcome their differences despite their own collective self interest. But then at times the conditions do in fact allow for eventual unification into larger and more powerful political units to counteract rival powers and to even become great empires themselves, reacting against previous upheavals, civil wars, and rival wars for conquest, spreading out and expanding and seeking out stability and security before overreaching and falling into decline. 

My point here is that there are processes of succession going on here, like succession in a forest. As with a forest, various greater environmental stages - such as the clearing of a space after a fire - allows for certain species to flourish, and then the greater environmental conditions made possible by those flourishing species make it possible for succeeding generations of different species to take hold and so on. It can take quite some time for the right conditions to come about for the right species of trees to flourish and bring about the high top canopy which eventually stabilizes the stages of succession until the next great fire or storm. 

I'm not here to naturalize - and thus excuse - the phenomenon of empire, though unfortunately the phenomenon has been with us for thousands of years, and we should cast our weary eyes over the course of history with that realistic assessment in mind. There is a sort of tectonics at work here: a coming and going, with each rising and falling empire influencing each other as they border each other and interact with each other through global trade and war, transforming each other through the circulation and build up of tensions and the eruptions of collisions, heaving oceans of waves and troughs which beget each other. 

A couple of them crash and send out shocks, while others rise and butt up against each other. The earth as a finite sphere is eventually filled up with them, coming and going, and so it is the bounded totality that constrains itself to this oscillating fate. 

Good Samaritan

What does it do to you to pass a drowning person without reaching out to help? Worse yet, what does it do to you to exploit them as they drown? What does it mean for you for that course of action to even be possible given your constitution? 

In the times I've seen the drowning person thought experiment come up in ethics, it has usually been individualized, a common enough occurrence. But it can very easily be applied to the rhythmic rise and fall of empires given the dynamics involved in that process. 

It was the troubled lands of the decaying Songhai empire and beyond that served as virtual quarries for slave labor, indulging the voracious European demand for exploited labor in the plantations of the New World. Even the more thoughtful of the colonizers themselves would warily view the huge transplanted populations of slave labor in their growing societies as potentially explosive elements that could seriously complicate domestic social problems or even detonate them. And of course from our historical vantage point, we could see that that was a wound that never closed, and which indeed widens alongside many others as the Western world advances into its own cycle of decay. 

Consider also the Ottoman Middle East, which weakened at the joints after the first World War, was finally dismembered and partitioned out by the victorious powers, an exploitative relationship and process that would have profound effects on modern world history. 

In so many words, the sites of decaying fallen empires make for dangerous and lucrative sites of prolific resource. There are no longer stronger unified powers present to defend their interests, and the fragments can be turned against each other and manipulated to facilitate the plunder, but at the same time the turbulent forces present within dissolution are still there, still well able to influence any power that participates in it. 

That is part of the reason these sites of exploitation become both resource quarries and traps, depending on the interest involved. In countless Great Game dynamics across history, one empire would go into their preferred stomping ground of plunder while a rival would manipulate the region from the sidelines in hopes of snagging their foe in resource sinks and bad politics. 

During the first Cold War between the USSR and the US for example, the regions of the developing world would serve as both sites of intense exploitation and entrapment, with the US manipulating and grooming the regions for plunder and the USSR sending in arms and resources to strengthen their chosen allies and to stymie the US' efforts, and vice versa, the roles changing depending on who controlled a given region. 

This works because the control of a given region of exploitation requires resources and efforts in itself, which is worthwhile to the colonizer so long as the net return on investment is substantial enough. But what happens throughout history is that sustained colonial exploitation causes progressively more chaos - both within the colonies and within the colonizing powers themselves - and a declining rate of return, a dynamic that is difficult to escape for a proud imperial power refusing to walk away from its historical commitments.  

The centuries old struggle over the Middle East is a case in point. The region has a long history of outside interference, much of it lying right in the middle of important overland trade routes between the East and West, but to make a tidier point, it was not long ago that the Soviet Union was rolling through Afghanistan and getting bogged down fighting the US-backed Mujahedeen, and then not long after that, the United States would do the invading and bogging down in the region, though at this time the USSR had collapsed and Russia was a shadow of its former self. 

To address more modern forms of colonialism and imperialism, counterinsurgency is a nasty business. To be successful in it you have to regularly carry out atrocities over a longer period of time; it is an asymmetrical war of attrition. This procession of atrocities creates more and more enemies and provides grist for oppositional propaganda, and it provides domestic categories for enemies at home. It induces a military buildup which puts a drain on resources, and it engenders a political paranoia - encouraged by increasing anger abroad and at home - that encourages further militarization and the development of police states, destroying trust, requiring further costly militarization, and so on.

Getting bogged down in foreign wars is deleterious for even strong and vibrant empires, and it can be deadly for weak ones, which is part of the reason why these sites of exploitation and insurgency tend to grow and fester beyond the already grim facts of continued exploitation itself. Outside rival powers are all too happy to leverage the corrupting forces of colonization.   

Hammer and Anvil

Even confined to a narrow slice of military history, the hammer and anvil tactic is a fascinating one, thought to originally be developed by Philip II of Macedon, in a bid to make creative use of the Greek phalanx to pin and grind down the enemy, which would serve as the backing anvil to allow delivery of the smashing hammer blow with a mobile and swift cavalry, brought up against the enemy's weakened and preoccupied flank.  

The metaphor works for a great many more things, especially concerning the manipulation of hard things, which is best done up against the support of even harder things. The literal hammer and anvil in forging is obvious enough, but one useful example I have in mind is the process of splitting firewood. If you swing an axe down upon a log that is just sitting in the dirt, you may get it to split, depending on how hard the ground is, but a lot of that energy is traveling down into the soil itself and compacting it, and so you are losing a fair amount of energy from that axe blow in the process. Place that log upon a harder surface though, say a stump, and more of that energy is going to be concentrated in the log itself, and want to go laterally as opposed to straight down, making the axe blow more effective.      

With this image of the old metaphor in mind, I wanted to turn to the underlying relations in historical transformation and change. As we explored previously, any given crisis or great process of transformation necessarily takes place upon a landscape that has a certain shape, carved and shaped through previous processes of transformation and crises, and the shape of that landscape influences the direction of change that that process will take, given the pressures and forces it is subjected to.  

What is hard and solidifying and what is mushy and fragmenting influences where the energy is going and what things will do when subjected to that energy. A great crisis may make a rising empire or break a declining one, for example. 

I'm also getting to a meta point about the project here, which I've repeated ad nauseam here: none of this is easy. The analysis of anything depends on everything else related to it, and then the act of analyzing necessarily constricts one's field of view, possibly obscuring pertinent issues elsewhere. One does what one can, and then an occasional deep breath here and there and letting go for a minute could be just as useful. 

Violent Forms and Landscapes

To briefly comment again on the changing nature of human violent relations, I want to complicate that question by introducing a few additional interacting inflection points that might have some bearing on this evolution.  

As earth shattering as the World Wars were, and as much as they profoundly changed the cultures, technologies, politics, and economics of the societies pulled into them, those wars necessarily took place upon a sprawling landscape of human history that extended centuries and then millennia into the past, depending on how high of a resolution and depth of a history you want to analyze. 

And as we've explored before, behind a great transformation is a set of conditions making that transformation possible, and behind those conditions are multitudes of transformations in themselves. We're tempted to fixate on great transformations as distinct driving causes, but as one picks at all the other connecting causes, it becomes apparent that there is much more to the story. Indeed, the distinguishing of background and foreground requires perspective. But alas, as a large part of the nature of analysis is to focus, here we are, choosing yet again something to foreground. 

One inflection point I wanted to touch on is particularly fascinating because of what it revealed about the shifting sensibilities and class relations at the time, in addition to what it revealed about the changing nature of human violence in a longer arc. 

As Dan Carlin surveyed in his Hardcore History series, and as other historians have pointed out, there was a revolution in sensibilities in the 17th and 18th centuries which came with the emerging Enlightenment era and the ushering in of modernity, the implications of which were particularly pointed in the purpose, functions, and carrying out of capital punishment. 

The class dimension and the uneven development of this revolution is especially interesting. We can take a quick jog back in history a bit to get a glimpse. Though the incredibly brutal and horrific torture executions of the Middle Ages were meant to deter would-be criminals, heretics, and dissidents, the executions also had a dramatic flair and narrative which was religiously coded to show that the victims were being publicly "saved" in the eyes of observers, communicating a sort of justice as part of the overarching religious life of the society. 

The form of torture and execution would mirror the nature of the crime (eye for an eye, that sort of thing) and the terrible ordeal of the victim would absolve the sinner in the eyes of the judging crowd. These were profound spectacles that would completely engross the crowd, and it became apparent that the crowd would often bond with these victims and take part in a sort of spiritual - albeit terrible - shared experience. 

Somewhere along the way however, this greater phenomenon would decay along with the strength and legitimacy of the prevailing regime. Authorities decoupling from those spiritual and religious codings would begin to question the utility of these collective experiences, and then fear them and the ruled peoples they were increasingly becoming alienated from, gutting the theatrical flourishes of the executions in favor of teasing out their deterring effects, taking on an increasingly utilitarian function and purpose. 

The course of change was uneven. Authorities and intellectuals were becoming ever more irreligious and ideas of human nature were proliferating from an Enlightenment vision negating the religious ideal of the wicked and fallen "sinner," favoring a benevolent and good humanity, so that the witnessing mob - which itself was coarsening as the gutted executions became a more lurid and carnivalesque affair, and evermore unstable with an uneven mix of genuinely hated criminals and unjustly persecuted political martyrs - was cast in a fearful light: people shouldn't be enjoying this.

There was even a decay of the executioner class itself, with a dwindling supply of talented and competent executioners, leading to botched executions, which only fed the growing instability of the whole institution and the corresponding legitimacy of its masters. And as ruling class legitimacy waned, there grew a fear and distrust of the gathering mob.

Fascinatingly, authorities - doubting the value and purpose of worldly suffering - began to secretly mercy kill the torture execution victims before the execution was finished (subtle strangulations and pouches of gunpowder around the neck during burnings, for example), yet continuing to go through the motions of the execution to satisfy the diverging interests of the observing audience, many of which still enjoyed the spectacle, a sensibility considered coarse and lower class by the evolving intellectuals and upper crust at the time. Finally, these diminishing spectacles would begin to vanish altogether in the middle to late 1800's.

And as we noted, this change could be attributed to a multitude of political, technological, economic, and cultural changes going on in the background, all of which themselves could be endlessly analyzed, picked apart, and their interacting threads followed far into history. 

Excess and decaying ruling class legitimacy (among many other forces) would feed into yet another important inflection point: the emerging modern world's distaste for slavery, itself a large and complex question worth books upon books of analysis. And the post grows long. 

The horrors culminating in the Atlantic slave trade would bear all of the hallmarks of the process of industrialization that would ultimately unseat it as a mode of production: the labor shortages brought about in the New World due to the genocide of the indigenous populations, which were initially slated to labor over the raw material flows being fed into the rapidly industrializing West, would need to be supplanted with a substitute forced labor force, now a commodity, to be harvested from the African continent. 

The circle of that emergent ideal of universal human worth and rights would need to be squared with this peculiar institutional arrangement, and ultimately it wasn't going to happen. A ragged and unfinished collapse would take place, and along the way the contradictions would erupt in the Haitian slave revolt, culminating in the 1861 to 1865 American civil war. There's much more to say on this subject, but I'll have to set it aside for the moment. 

Would the toxic legacies of such atrocities eventually be completely reversed? Here in the quiet of sustained reflection, we certainly know better. Though the course of human history would be dramatically altered, continuing to do so today, and the consequences of our species' long record of violent domination would shape the form that course takes. 

At least the evil doesn't have a shelf life any longer than that of the good, change being the only constant. And these many transformations would form the landscape that the experiences of the great wars would take part on. Violence and subjugation - though an integral part of the human experience - would be seen radically differently by the postwar world.