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2003-12-28

Blackstone

Why we're all Hamiltonians now.

Those of a libertarian persuasion generally have nothing but disdain for Alexander Hamilton and the other early centralizers in the history of American government. Not for us the rhetoric of government privilege and central powers; no, we prefer the Jeffersonian language of individual rights and of keeping power as local as possible (Jefferson's mantra late in life was divide the counties into wards).

J.C.D. Clark's book The Language of Liberty 1660-1832 shines a strong light on the origin of American centralization. I've just finished part one of this book, but already much has been revealed. Clark situates the framing of the American constitution within older English legal and religious traditions regarding sovereignty, patriotism, and absolutism. In particular, he points to the enduring influence of Blackstone's legal theories on the absolute supremacy of the triumvirate of King, Lords, and Commons, which the American framers could not escape (and which are reflected in the American system of executive, judicial, and legislative branches of government). Despite the revolutionary language of insuperable natural rights, American state-making quickly devolved into power politics through the triumph of the Federalist (i.e., nationalist) vision:

[The Federalists] adhered to the idea of indivisible sovereignty.... The Constitution explicitly made itself and federal law 'the supreme law of the land', overriding State constitutions and legislation; otherwise, the new nation would have been 'a monster in which the head was under the direction of the members'. The President would necessarily be the commander in chief of the armed forces, just as Blackstone had recognized the same prerogative in the king. The Federalist defined law in Blackstonian terms as command; 'Government implies the power of making laws'. Each nation must contain one court with final jurisdiction. The national government must have the power to raise revenue: the Antifederalists's distinction between internal and external taxation was invalid. All these characteristics were wholly Blackstonian. The Revolution was not what it claimed to be in this key respect: Americans' use of natural law tropes as a critique of the common-law sovereign had, after all, been only skin deep.... [pp. 135-136]

... and, using the distinction between federal [national] and confederal [distributed] arrangements ...

The new nation could indeed claim, echoing The Federalist, that it possessed (to use the new vocabulary) both federal and confederal elements; but the course of events, confirmed by a second civil war in the 1860s, was to prove that the confederal element was ultimately subordinate. The division of powers between President, Congress, and Supreme Court and the States endowed the republic with a system of government which was merely cumbersome, not one in which sovereignty was effectively divided. The American Revolution had not been as carefully legalistic as its advocates had claimed. It had begun amid expressions of the most lofty ideals; but it was soon dragged back to the compromises, expediencies, and necessities of daily politics (if indeed it had ever left them). It was because the Revolution was at its ideological heart a war of religion that the federal experiment failed: the theological setting of the argument over sovereignty prevented Americans from exploiting those rival traditions, tainted as they were thought by Roman Catholicism, within which authority might have been lastingly divided. The unitary republican state, too, could now be expressed in idealistic terms. The Federalists, to secure the adoption of the Constitution, had argued, and argued indelibly, that the power of the people was 'paramount to every constitution, inalienable in its nature, indefinite in its extent'. Sovereignty in the United States therefore proved to be as transcendent and absolute, as despotic and uncontrollable as in the United Kingdom; the final irony of the American Revolution was that Sir William Blackstone's analysis prevailed in the end. [pp. 139-140]

It makes for depressing reading.

Posted on 2003-12-28 at 17:03. File under politics.

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Gear

Researching personal studio stuff.

I'm actively looking into purchasing some goodies that will enable me to record some of my music at home, starting with some pieces I've written for solo guitar. A Tascam US-428 (or maybe a US-122) is first on the list; word has it that this device works with Linux. Second on the list is a condenser microphone or two (one for mono, two for stereo ... hmm). So far my research indicates that the AKG C 2000B and Audio Technica AT4040 are good models, but there is so much learn about microphones that I've barely scratched the surface.

Posted on 2003-12-28 at 14:12. File under personal.

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What is an Entity?

Some abstruse philosophizing.

I just posted a journal entry entitled What is an Entity?. Requires quite a bit of context in order to make sense.

Posted on 2003-12-28 at 13:37. File under philosophy.

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2003-12-23

Roundup

On emerging from weeks of work.

Hi, my name is Peter, and I'm a workaholic. Forgive me if I've missed all the major stories of the last, oh, month or two. I don't watch TV or read newspapers (though over the last year I have subscribed to The Economist), and when I'm really busy I don't read weblogs either (except when I receive a Jabber message from the wonderful Mimir syndication service). So when my work is done and I take a little break, I like to drink in huge draughts of what in our post-dotcom hangover we still call "content". Here are some stories and weblog entries that have caught my eye this evening:

• Myths Open Source Developers Tell Ourselves
• Private Life, Public Happiness and the Howard Dean Connection
• Horizontally Speaking
• Citizens vs. Subjects
• 100 Years
• SpaceShipOne Breaks the Sound Barrier

May you live in interesting times...

Posted on 2003-12-23 at 20:51. File under personal.

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Zamyatin Redux

An essay posted.

It seems that I never posted my essay Zamyatin and Rand, originally published in the Spring 2003 issue of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. Now I have. :-)

Posted on 2003-12-23 at 12:48. File under philosophy.

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Soapbox

Bloggers as pamphleteers.

George Orwell wrote the following in his introduction to a collection of works by British pamphleteers:

The pamphlet is a one-man show. One has complete freedom of expression, including, if one chooses, the freedom to be scurrilous, abusive, and seditious; or, on the other hand, to be more detailed, serious, and "high-brow" than is ever possible in a newspaper or in most kinds of periodicals. At the same time, since the pamphlet is always short and unbound, it can be produced much more quickly than a book, and in principle, at any rate, can reach a bigger public. Above all, the pamphlet does not have to follow any prescribed pattern. It can be in prose or in verse, it can consist largely of maps or statistics or quotations, it can take the form of a story, a fable, a letter, an essay, a dialogue, or a piece of "reportage". All that is required of it is that it shall be topical, polemical, and short.

As Bernard Bailyn showed in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, the pamphlet was the literary form of the Revolution. Not that the pamphlets were great literature, but they got the job done.

Are weblogs the literary form of the next revolution? It's too soon to tell, but their similarities to pamphlets are striking: short, topical, polemical, and characterized by total freedom of expression. The fact that the blogosphere has not produced great literature (as Camille Paglia complains) is utterly beside the point. Blogs are getting the job done because they are a product of the free marketplace of ideas, not the ivory towers of professional intellectuals.

Welcome to the agora!

Posted on 2003-12-23 at 07:08. File under society.

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2003-12-22

The Challenge

The Lord of the Rings and Western Civilization.

Probably everybody and their uncle has already pointed to this interview with John Rhys-Davies (who plays Gimli in the movie adaptation of The Lord of the Rings), but it's powerful stuff. In part:

I think that Tolkien says that some generations will be challenged. And if they do not rise to meet that challenge, they will lose their civilization....

What is unconscionable is that too many of your fellow journalists do not understand how precarious Western civilization is and what a jewel it is....

I mean... the abolition of slavery comes from Western democracy. True democracy comes form our Greco-Judeo-Christian-Western experience. If we lose these things, then this is a catastrophe for the world....

Read it yourself.

Posted on 2003-12-22 at 22:09. File under society.

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Only

A grammar nit.

I'm a stickler when it comes to grammar. Of late, I've found it particularly irksome when writers commit the all-too-common misplacement of the word 'only'. Here's an example:

You will only keep your job if you work hard.

As an adverb or conjunction, 'only' is synonymous both with 'merely' and with 'exclusively'; but, as the OED notes, the term is best placed directly preceding or following the word or phrase it limits -- placing it away from that word or phrase "is now avoided by perspicuous writers". The inherent ambiguity of the sentence quoted above comes into relief when we move the clauses around:

If you work hard, you will only keep your job (as opposed to getting a promotion, perhaps).

vs.

Only if you work hard will you keep your job (you're on notice, Shlinker -- shape up or ship out!).

It's easy to move 'only' so that it limits (in this example) the conditional "if" rather than the verb "keep". So be perspicuous and put 'only' in its place!

Posted on 2003-12-22 at 21:52. File under language.

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Saying Yes

My latest semi-scholarly essay.

The current issue of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies has hit the streets, including a short contribution by yours truly to a roundtable discussion of philosophical thinking on progressive rock (entitled "Saying Yes to Rand and Rock"). Come back in three or four months and I will have posted it online. (Isn't the future perfect just the greatest tense?) This issue also includes an essay by Dave Jilk on the nature of entities, which I'm looking forward to reading.

Posted on 2003-12-22 at 21:28. File under philosophy.

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Experiences

Giving and living.

Tyler Cowan links to a scholarly paper on the relative pschological merits of material purchases (stuff) vs. experiential purchases (activities, or stuff that enables you to engage in activities). Lo and behold, experiences are superior to material things in bringing about happiness. For the last few years, I've been giving tickets to plays, concerts, and gallery shows to some members of my family. They seem to be a big hit, and now I know why.

Posted on 2003-12-22 at 21:24. File under personal.

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The Totalitarian Delusion

On totalist ideologies.

In War and the Rise of the State, Bruce Porter lists several distinguishing features of twentieth-century totalitarian states:

• a hierarchical-organized mass political party led by a charismatic leader who was usually considered to be infallible and the repository of infinite wisdom
• a utopian ideology that claimed an absolute monopoly on truth
• the destruction of all organized opposition through terror
• the fostering of ceaseless political activity and of what Trotsky called "permanent revolution"
• the multiplication of bureaucratic hierarchies (but which all report to the one leader so as to avoid the formation of alternative centers of power)
• the total politicization of all spheres of life, wherein neutrality was made impossible

Call me paranoid, but I see here ominous parallels to the culture of Ayn Rand's Objectivist movement. This may not be surprising, given that Rand's formative years were spent in Soviet Russia. But replace "politics" with "philosophy" and one begins to see what I mean. Objectivism was a hierarchically-organized philosophical movement that was centered on the charismatic person of novelist Ayn Rand, whom her followers considered to be infallible and all-wise (I call this the "Fallacy of Immaculate Conceptualization"). It was driven by a libertarian ideology that veered dangerously close to utopianism. The methods used in Rand's movement did not stoop to physical terror, but psychological bullying and ostracism were all too common. The movement was deeply hierarchical, with the masses ("students of Objectivism") at the bottom and a carefully-selected inner circle at the top. Rand's followers were encouraged to engage in ceaseless philosophical activity and to see all of life as a stage for the great philosophical battle of modernity between Objectivism (which alone had achieved truth) and everyone else -- a battle in which neutrality was impossible. Rand herself often used martial imagery, such as her statement that "a political battle is merely a skirmish fought with muskets; a philosophical battle is a nuclear war".

Indeed, I think there are even parallels between the insanity of someone like Goebbels and Rand in her more apocalyptic moments; consider this:

Under the debris of our shattered cities the last so-called achievement of the middle-class nineteenth century have been finally buried.... Now that everything is in ruins, we are forced to rebuild Europe.

If you change "Europe" to "America" and "middle-class nineteenth century" to, say, "irrationalist twentieth century", the result is a frighteningly accurate characterization of the conclusion of Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged. <shudder/>.

Posted on 2003-12-22 at 20:26. File under society.

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War and the Rise of the State

The military foundations of modern politics.

Whence the state? Big or small, nation-states are the dominant form of political organization on the planet today. But it wasn't always that way. Even in Europe, original breeding ground of the nation-state, the political order was once much more polycentric: principalities, towns, the Church, the Holy Roman Empire, merchant leagues, guilds, and other centers of power vied for influence, made their own rules and laws, and kept each other in check. That all began to change in the later Middle Ages and early Renaissance, as the polycentric order gave way to a monocentric order driven by the birth of powerful nation-states. In War and the Rise of the State, Bruce D. Porter argues that the trend toward centralization was driven in large measure by matters military. As wars became more expensive and complex, only the most powerful princes could afford to wage it, leading to greater consolidation of power. Eventually, that process of consolidation led to the formation of states -- France, Spain, eventually even Germany and Italy -- in Europe. But consolidation and centralization did not stop with the creation of nation-states. The same military trends generated a spiral of increasing bureaucratization and centralization within states, in response to both international conflicts and civil wars alike. Thus Europe witnessed the rise of absolutist states such as those of France and Spain. Certain states, especially those with more or less natural borders (such as England behind the Channel and Switzerland in the Alps), resisted absolutism for longer than others and maintained the kind of balance of powers (including constitutionalism and local control) that we associate more with medieval times. But other states, particularly those whose geography left them open to frequent invasion, turned toward ever-greater centralization, eventually resulting in totalitarian states such as Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

One fascinating insight from Porter's book is the push given to cradle-to-grave welfare programs by the mass, industrialized warfare waged by the modern nation-state. Even the United States, heir to the most radical distrust of centralizing state-formation in the European tradition, has not been able to resist the welfare-warfare dynamic. Consider (as Porter points out) that most Cabinet-level federal agencies and sub-departments in the USA were created in wartime:

• Revolutionary War: Departments of War and the Navy (consolidated into the Department of Defense during World War II); Department of State; Department of Finance (now Treasury); Postal Service; Attorney General (expanded to Department of Justice right after Civil War); Customs Service
• Mexican War: Department of the Interior
• Civil War: Department of Agriculture; Comptroller of the Currency; Internal Revenue Service; Bureau of Engraving and Printing
• World War I: Coast Guard; Department of Veterans Affairs; Food and Drug Administration
• World War II: Central Intelligence Agency; General Services Administration; National Science Foundation; Nuclear Regulatory Commission; United States Information Agency
• Korean War: Small Business Administration
• Vietnam War: Department of Housing and Urban Development; Department of Transportation; Federal Highway Administration; Federal Railroad Administration; Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
• War on Terror: Department of Homeland Security

So-called conservatives celebrate America's warmaking prowess but might tout it less if they realized that historically it has led inevitably to greatly expanded government. So-called liberals celebrate the welfare state but might hesitate to do so if they realized that its origins were stained in blood.

The lesson of history is clear: if you want freedom, work for peace. (The converse is also true, but that's a topic for another blog entry.)

Posted on 2003-12-22 at 19:47. File under politics.

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Does (National) Size Matter?

Prosperity and the size of nations.

A new book from MIT Press (The Size of Nations by Alberto Alesina and Enrico Spolaore) explores a question as old Aristotle: what is the ideal size of a nation? Consider this: of the ten most prosperous nation-states (measured by per-capita gross domestic product), six have a population of less than one million people, Singapore has three million, Norway has four million, and Switzerland has seven million. Thus, altogether, nine of these richest nations have a combined population of less than 20 million people. The tenth nation is the true outlier: the USA, with 260+ million people. How is it that America has been able to sustain the kind of economic performance that other large nations have not? Federalism has something to do with it, but I doubt that a relative lack of centralization is the only factor (economic freedom probably looms large as well); I'll have to read the book to get the full story.

Posted on 2003-12-22 at 07:27. File under society.

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2003-12-17

XFN Redux

The conversation continues...

Folks are talking about XFN. The interlocutors include:

• Tantek Çelik
• Richard Tallent
• Eric Meyer
• Matthew Mullenweg
• Leigh Dodds

And a cast of thousands!

It's entertaining to hear FOAFers and XFNers talk at cross-purposes. Such different world views motivate each effort. <sigh/> Can't we just all get along?

Posted on 2003-12-17 at 22:03. File under technology.

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2003-12-16

Friendly

FOAF and XFN and Jabber, oh my!

I've delved a little more into XFN.

<a href='http://www.dizzyd.com/' rel='friend met'>Dizzy</a>

The snippet shown above says "here is a link to Dizzy -- he's a friend of mine and I've met him in person". (The space-separated thing threw me for a loop, but it's in the XHTML spec, so what can I say? Naturally the FOAFers are aghast!)

There are obvious similarities to (and differences from) FOAF here. XFN is, as mentioned, dirt-simple. FOAF (with its RDF baggage) is complicated. But they both define relationships of one person to another. The FOAF relationship module defines ten relationships:

1. friendOf
2. acquaintanceOf
3. parentOf
4. siblingOf
5. childOf
6. grandchildOf
7. spouseOf
8. enemyOf
9. antagonistOf
10. ambivalentOf

XFN excludes negative relationships (sorry, no enemies!) and defines fifteen relationships:

1. acquaintance
2. friend
3. met
4. co-worker
5. colleague
6. co-resident
7. neighbor
8. child
9. parent
10. sibling
11. spouse
12. muse
13. crush
14. date
15. sweetheart

As usual with metadata, there's a bit of a mish-mash ("ambivalentOf"??) and I wonder why the taxonomy is limited in certain directions (we have "grandchildOf" but not "cousinOf" or "nephewOf" -- they're trying to be gender-neutral so perhaps that last one is verboten). Certainly much of this is cultural, but it seems better to err on the side of inclusivity.

XFN allows you to include any combination of attribute values (as long as they're space-separated, naturally). So I could define a link to someone who is simultaneously a friend, co-worker, co-resident, and date (a POSSLQ perhaps?). Other combinations are downright kinky or illegal (sibling and sweetheart, anyone?). But that's the beauty of space-separated values -- anything goes, I suppose.

I think we can build on these suggestions to do something better on the Jabber network. One of these days I'll write it up. But I need to figure out some niceties of Service Discovery first....

Posted on 2003-12-16 at 22:02. File under technology.

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Quick Update

Moving news and such.

Happy Beethoven's Birthday!

Much happening these days -- I've been quite busy with the IETF's XMPP WG, defining new metadata formats (JEPs 120, 121, 125) for the Jabber community ("vCard delenda est" is what I say -- speaking of which, the XHTML Friends Network looks relevant), helping out with Internet2, and generally going back to my workaholic ways. I am reading a few more history books right now, but it's slow going since I'm working nights and weekends of late.

Both of my domains will soon be hosted by the friendly folks at DreamHost, so you may experience a glitch or two during the transfer of service. Forewarned is forearmed!

Posted on 2003-12-16 at 11:18. File under technology.

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2003-12-02

The Cousins' War

Religion, politics, and the triumph of Anglo-America.

Herewith is my last report on books recommended by James C. Bennett in his essay the Anglosphere. The subject this time is The Cousins' Wars by Kevin Phillips. As mentioned last time, The Cousins' War picks up where Albion's Seed leaves off, at least with regard to the historical progression of Anglo-American civilization. Phillips argues that there is a common thread to be found in the English Civil War, the American Revolution, and the American Civil War. Each conflict marked a further step in the evolution of Anglo-American culture, which is the dominant culture in the world today but only by dint of the internal pressures and changes wrought by those civil conflicts "between cousins" (he pays special attention to the internecine aspects of the American Revolution, which are often glossed over by American myths about Patriots versus Redcoats). The winner of each war was the more economically dynamic, culturally modern, politically egalitarian, and religiously Protestant population. Which is not to say that the winners were perfect; far from it. But when the tectonic forces of modernization built up enough pressure that an earthquake of armed conflict became irrepressible, Anglo-American society came down on the more open, dynamic, individualistic side of history. And that is to its eternal merit.

For further reading, the following books look interesting to me:

• Bernard Bailyn -- The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
• J.C.D. Clark -- The Language of Liberty
• Eric Foner -- Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War
• Bruce Porter -- War and the Rise of the State

Denver Public Library, here I come...

Posted on 2003-12-02 at 21:07. File under society.

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Inversion

Reflections on the supermarket checkout line.

At my local Safeway the other day, I noticed the racks and racks of women's magazines, all of which trumpeted that within their covers a woman could learn the secrets of how to please her man, whereas the one men's magazine said nothing about how a man could better please his woman. As a female chauvinist, I think there is something seriously wrong with this picture.

Posted on 2003-12-02 at 20:08. File under personal.

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Crackers II

Blogging blind again.

For the second time in a month, someone has cracked the servers where my weblog is hosted. Although my friend Justin pooh-poohs the notion, personally I think it's because he hosts my website that his servers are being cracked. So I'm looking more seriously at getting a real hosting service. The good folks at JSF sponsor DreamHost are tops on my list.

Posted on 2003-12-02 at 19:58. File under personal.

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