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2005-01-31

High School

A one-two punch.

Paul Graham's essay Why Nerds are Unpopular is just about the best description I've ever read of American public high schools (from which I didn't graduate). Now he's published another essay on the same general topic, consisting of a graduation speech that he never got to deliver because the folks in charge of the school probably realized how radically seditious it was. As my friends across the pond would say: spot on.

Posted on 2005-01-31 at 21:27. File under society.

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It's the Liberty, Stupid!

Reason #268 why the Democrats are doomed.

Speaking of Wired, a while back they published an article on technology and the Democrats, which makes it plain that the Democratic Party is studiously avoiding the big reason for their lack of success: they're more interested in rearranging the technological and fundraising deck chairs than in aligning their philosophies and policies with the core American tradition of freedom and liberty. If this keeps up, don't expect Hillary to go far in '08.

Posted on 2005-01-31 at 21:23. File under politics.

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Go Nukes!

The case for nuclear energy.

Wired magazine has published a great article on why it's so important for us (specifically, the USA) to embrace nuclear power. I've been convinced of this since reading Petr Beckmann's book The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear some twenty years ago (even before I taught English at a nuclear power plant in Czechoslovakia), I've blogged about this before, and I'll say it again: nuclear power is the safest, cleanest, most sustainable form of energy production known to man. Go nukes!

Posted on 2005-01-31 at 21:17. File under society.

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Recovering

Why I've been silent of late.

OK, I can now attest from personal experience that rootkits are evil. When all is said and done, cleaning up after the rootkit that we recently discovered on hades.jabber.org will have cost about two weeks of my time (not to mention many more hours spent by pgmillard, temas, and all the developers whose code is hosted on JabberStudio). A most unpleasant experience.

Posted on 2005-01-31 at 21:07. File under jabber.

~ link ~

2005-01-20

Wordless Joy

A tune.

Finally, I have recorded some my own music. Most of the music I've written was composed ten or even fifteen years ago (!), and I've been promising people that I would record it for just about that long. Last summer I bought a Mac largely to make recording easier than it probably would have been on Linux, and for Christmas I got a basic Audio-Technica microphone. So I started messing around with GarageBand and quickly realized that my guitar skills have atrophied disastrously! After a few weeks of practicing, I got one tune in shape: a short and simple solo guitar piece entitled "Wordless Joy". It's really not much more than a semi-jazzy classical guitar ditty, but tonight I recorded a fairly clean rendition, so I've posted the mp3 file online. Enjoy!

Posted on 2005-01-20 at 21:12. File under music.

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2005-01-17

Balance and Trust

F.W. Maitland and the making of the modern world.

In the first half of his book The Making of the Modern World, Alan Macfarlane summarizes and elucidates the synthesis performed by F.W. Maitland regarding the puzzle of how the modern world we're all familiar with emerged. Although nowadays most people (at least in the West and increasingly elsewhere) take the form of our current society for granted, it is very much an historical anomaly. Macfarlane describes how Montesquieu, Smith, and Tocqueville provided important insights into the emergence of modernity: all three agreed that it happened first in England and that English society seems to have been distinctively individualistic and market-oriented (capitalistic, if you prefer Marx's terminology) as far back as the second half of the thirteenth century, or even earlier into Anglo-Saxon society (providing a tie to the Germanica of the Roman writer Tacitus). The key seems to have been a peculiar balance of independent forces that emerged in English society: the spheres of politics, religion, economics, and social interaction (mainly family life) were separate but largely equal as modernity came into being in England and, slightly later, in America and then Western Europe. But why and how did that delicate balance emerge? Maitland (followed by Macfarlane) explains that the English somehow developed forms of life that were independent of the state yet not purely individualistic, either: the whole realm of clubs, associations, trusts, leagues, cooperatives, societies, parties, unions, guilds, fraternal orders, and the like. Thus the individual or family did not face the state one-on-one, and the opposition between the individual and the state was moderated or mediated by voluntary groups that provided strength in numbers, singleness of purpose, and opportunities for the exercise of responsibility and initiative. Further, Maitland finds that the English came up with a special legal form for such groups: not state-approved corporations, but private, voluntary trusts. The affairs of such a trust were, literally, entrusted to its members, and although the members did not have to agree on everything under the sun, they did have to share a dedication to the stated aims of the trust and, through working together, also came to trust one another personally. Thus emerged the kind of high-trust civil society that was for a long time lacking in most of the rest of the world, yet grafted onto a fundamentally individualistic and capitalistic pattern of life. And these trusts -- what nowadays are called "non-governmental organizations" (NGOs) or the "third sector" (neither governments nor corporations) -- formed the basis for much of the intellectual, religious, scientific, technological, economic, social, political, and even military innovation of the early modern world. Examples include the Royal Society, the dissenting religions (Quakers, Methodists, Wesleyans, etc.), political parties, insurance funds, benevolent societies, poorhouses, volunteer police and firefighters, and technical societies (as witness, even today, voluntary, non-corporate groups such as the IETF).

So it seems that I need to delve into Maitland's works here soon (so much to read, so little time!), which include:

• The Collected Papers of Frederic William Maitland
• The Constitutional History of England
• Domesday Book and Beyond
• The Forms of Action at Common Law
• History of English Law before the Time of Edward I
• Selected Historical Essays
• Township and Borough

Posted on 2005-01-17 at 19:11. File under society.

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Classy

Jabber and PHP.

Today I started to work with class.jabber.php for some tools I'm writing to make it easier (and more "secure") for people to register their Jabber servers with the JSF. It's a nice little library! Maybe I'll start playing with it more extensively to integrate some real-time features into the various websites I work on.

Posted on 2005-01-17 at 17:51. File under jabber.

~ link ~

The Bees' Knees

Fighting spam with Project Honeypot.

This article provides a good overview of Project Honeypot and why it's a good weapon in the war on spam. I'm now participating.

Posted on 2005-01-17 at 10:19. File under technology.

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2005-01-11

Liberty and Freedom

The many competing visions of American society.

Until recent times, many societies throughout the world did not have any words for liberty or freedom -- such words were created or imported on contact with Western civilization. In Europe, the Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, etc.) generally have a word derived from the Latin libertas, whereas the Germanic languages (German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, etc.) generally have a word derived from the Old Teutonic frijo. But English alone has two words: liberty and freedom.

In his new book Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History of America's Founding Ideas (which I finished reading last night), David Hackett Fischer explores the tangled and expansive history of liberty and freedom in America. Refreshingly, he explores them not as abstract, philosophical ideas, but as folkways or what Tocqueville called "habits of the heart". The result is a rich, fascinating history of America and Americans, unlike any I have ever read.

The concept at the base of the word "liberty" is "to be released from an existing bond" -- a person at liberty was, in ancient times, no longer a slave. The concept at the base of the word "free" is "to be a member of an independent tribe or nation" ("free" comes from the same Indo-European root as "friend"). Liberty is an individualistic idea; freedom is a communal idea. Liberty assumes a structure of power that grants rights and liberties; freedom assumes no such power structure, but instead assumes that a group (historically a tribe, more recently a nation) is naturally sovereign and independent, and that the individuals in that group derive their independence from the independence of the group. The fact that English has both notions -- compounded by the fact that Americans have always been close to obsessed with both liberty and freedom -- has led to a tangled, inconsistent, but ultimately inspiring national experience in America. Not that America is perfect -- far from it. But David Hackett Fischer shows that both liberty and freedom have continued to expand and grow during the sixteen generations of American society.

He also explains some of the conundrums of American politics. Why did the Federalists fail in the early 1800s, the Whigs in the mid-1800s, the Democrats in the late 1800s, the Republicans in the early to middle 1900s, the Democrats since around 1980? While William Strauss and Neil Howe in The Fourth Turning (which I read last week) would ascribe it all to generational evolution, David Hackett Fischer argues that the political party that is most successful at any given time in American history is the one that identifies most closely with liberty and freedom. Now, one could certainly quibble that New Deal Democrats and Bush Republicans are far from true friends of liberty and freedom; but one can at the same time recognize that they were more successful in claiming the mantle of liberty and freedom than their opponents (who might have focused instead on equality, which generally does not resonate with Americans).

The book is subtitled "A Visual History of America's Founding Ideas", and in that respect it does not disappoint. Although the book has plenty of words (700+ pages' worth!), it also analyzes and explains the many visions and symbols of liberty and freedom in American history: liberty trees, liberty poles, state and national flags, symbolic animals such as snakes and porcupines and the American eagle, American Indians as symbols of American freedom, the goddess Columbia, Miss Liberty, Yankee Doodle, Brother Jonathan, Uncle Sam, and iconic Americans such as George Washington, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King. He traces the meaning of liberty and freedom not only in politics but more fundamentally in society: in personal behavior, human interaction, organizations, styles of dress, art, music, literature, and much else besides.

For me personally as a recovered Randian and mellowing libertarian, perhaps the main benefit of the book was that it imparts an overwhelming sense of the American context: where we are, how we got here, and what is possible -- and not possible -- to achieve in American society and politics (hint: anarcho-capitalism is a non-starter). Many libertarians like to hearken back to some golden age in 1776 or the nineteenth century, from which height we have fallen to a modern state of tyranny. Even if that were an accurate account of the course of American freedom (which it is not), it would not especially matter, because what's important is where we stand today and realistically what can be achieved in our lifetimes. Perfection or utopia is not an option. (I'm still not ruling out meta-utopia, though... ;-)

All in all, Liberty and Freedom is a worthy sequel to Albion's Seed.

Posted on 2005-01-11 at 20:24. File under society.

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Spread Firefox

New frontiers in guerilla marketing.

NewsForge is running a cool article about the Spread Firefox website. Maybe we need a "Spread Jabber" site? ;-)

Here's what's most impressive (from the NewsForge article):

Firefox has been downloaded more than 11 million times since November 9. And those aren't the only impressive statistics surrounding the only browser that is shaping up to provide some real competition for Microsoft's Internet Explorer. According to statistics published by w3schools.com, the browser is the only one in recent years other than IE to enjoy a double-digit share of the market, increasing from 8.2% of total browser usage in January 2004 to a current high of 21.2%. Internet Explorer's share has dipped from 84.9% in December 2003 to 71.7% after a year of monthly decreases in usage.

Posted on 2005-01-11 at 11:51. File under technology.

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2005-01-05

Firefox Protocol Extensibility

Does it work?

Yesterday I claimed that it's not possible to convince Firefox that things like xmpp: URIs represent entities that can be contacted via proper protocols (e.g., by launching a helper application such as your favorite Jabber client). Both Ralph Meijer and Justin Kirby say I'm wrong. Much as I'm happy to be proved wrong, I still have not gotten this working on my PowerBook: after following Ralph's instructions and restarting Firefox, I still receive a message telling me that XMPP is "not a registered protocol". Perhaps it's a Mac thing? Guess I'll try it on my Linux box at home to make sure.

/me keeps investigating...

Posted on 2005-01-05 at 13:43. File under jabber.

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2005-01-04

A Helping Hand

Charitable giving for tsunami victims.

Everyone wants to help those affected by the tsunami in the Indian Ocean (I heard that the Red Cross in Denver received over $2 million in donations), but personally I want to make sure that every penny I give helps those in need and not some organizational bureaucrat. Thanks to a link at Claire Wolfe's blog, I've discovered a group called Direct Relief International, which is a non-profit wholesale pharmacy that buys pharmaceuticals and medical equipment from the appropriate manufacturers (or gets them to donate such materials), then sends those materials to those in need all around the world. According to Charity Navigator, Direct Relief International devotes a whopping 99% of its income to program expenses and spends a miniscule 0.8% on fundraising and administration, making it one of the most efficient charities on the planet. Plus it is quite firm and explicit about its principles and activities with regard to the tsunami relief efforts. A worthy cause.

Posted on 2005-01-04 at 21:37. File under personal.

~ link ~

xmpp:

Just looking for a little helper.

Since we're getting very close to done on the XMPP URI spec, I figured I'd explore how one might make a wonderful, standards-compliant browser like Firefox launch a helper application (insert your favorite Jabber client here) whenever it encounters an xmpp: URI in a link.

Well! It turns out you can't do it. For one, Firefox bases its behavior on MIME types, not URI schemes. So when you try to click a link containing an xmpp: URI, you get a helpful message telling you that XMPP is "not a registered protocol". And you can't register new protocols. Sure, you can install the Mozex plugin, but it doesn't support xmpp: URIs, can't be modified (as far as I can see) to handle xmpp: URIs (well, without hacking the source code), and in any case doesn't work on MacOS.

Let me tell you, this sure is leading me to think about resurrecting JEP-0081: XMPP/Jabber MIME Type.

Posted on 2005-01-04 at 18:37. File under jabber.

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Entity and Identity

Some thoughts on digital identity.

Dizzy and I had a wide-ranging conversation today about identity. We agreed that trust and identity are two quite separate issues -- trust is something that is built on top of identity. But what is identity? Something's identity is the bundle of characteristics associated with it (often, but not necessarily, its more stable, essential, or distinguishing characteristics). But notice that word "something" -- the concept of identity depends on the more basic concept of entity. Identity is not merely that bundle of characteristics, it is those characteristics bundled together or integrated by the fact that they are all related to a particular entity.

For example, the folks at my local library might know me as the guy who shaves his head, has blue eyes, and always orders such interesting books through interlibrary loan (they also might know me by the number on my library card, but that's only once I hand them my card -- I know my library card number from memory, but I doubt they do). But they don't have in their heads a random bundle of "shaved head", "blue eyes", "lots of ILL books" -- those characteristics are integrated by the fact that they all pertain to a particular person. If someone else walked in with those characteristics, they would not mis-identify that person as me (in fact they'd probably look for differences, such as the fact that this other person doesn't have a goatee).

Now, in the physical world we are all familiar with the kinds of characteristics that we focus on in identifying other people, because humans have hundreds of thousands of years of experience in doing just that (and survival often depended on correctly identifying someone else). The challenge in the digital realm is that we have only a few years of experience in figuring out what the salient characteristics are -- and that most people don't have very many characteristics. I think this last point is significant, because lots of folks don't actually do much online (or what they do does not leave public traces). Other people have more online presence, as it were. For instance, I keep a weblog, have a website with many pages of content, periodically leave comments at other people's blogs, am associated with a public organization (the Jabber Software Foundation), post to lots of public discussion lists from a well-known email address, participate in archived chatrooms using a well-known Jabber ID, there are photos of me online, I have a PGP key, and so on. There are many ways to find me or find out about me (blog, personal website, organization website, email address, Jabber address, etc.), so that results in a larger bundle of characteristics than is associated with some random Joe who sends you a message.

But it seems to me that these are still all just bundles of characteristics. How does one integrate all those web pages, addresses, posts, archived conversations (etc.) into a digital entity? A lot of people and companies talk about digital identity, but it strikes me that we haven't even figured out digital entities yet (or, perhaps, figured out how to associate all of those digital characteristics with a physical person).

Posted on 2005-01-04 at 18:15. File under identity.

~ link ~

And Now We Are Six

Happy birthday, Jabber!

It was six years ago today that Jeremie Miller announced the existence of Jabber. Many happy returns!

Posted on 2005-01-04 at 15:11. File under jabber.

~ link ~

2005-01-03

Will and Power

Carroll Quigley on Islam.

Immediately after the destruction of the World Trade Center, there was much hand-wringing and analysis regarding the nature of Islam (I did my share back in October 2001). Since then I've read a great deal on the history of civilizations and cultures. When one understands how distinctive Western civilization is in human history, one comes to see Islamic civilization in a new light. In that spirit, here are some quotes from Carroll Quigley's Weapons Systems and Political Stability on the nature and history of Islam (the quotes are a bit repetitious, most likely because Quigley did not live to finish this manuscript, but are fascinating nonetheless).

We have already indicated that the development of men's ideas on the nature of deity passed through numerous stages over two millennia, from about 1500 B.C. to about the time of Muhammad. Of these stages we have mentioned the beliefs that God was: (1) omnipotent; (2) one; (3) transcendental; (4) good; and (5) love. Of these fives stages, Allah, the God of Muhammad, had only the first two, a deficient version of the third, and little of the last two. Allah was One God, the Only God, and Muhammad was his last and final prophet. This God was omnipotent, the essence of Will and total Power. Since everything that happened was a consequence of his will and could just as easily have been otherwise, there were no rules or law, in the cosmos. Everything was totally entangled in the Will of Allah, which was Fate. The mission of man was not to exercise freedom or growth or to develop his potentialities, but to submit totally to God's will. Such submission was "Islam."

Man had free will and thus was responsible, in the sense that he could submit to God's Will or defy it. But, since the universe was a reflection of God's Will (which was totally free and unhampered), there were no rules or laws independent of God. Accordingly, there were no distinctions of good and evil. God was not under any ethical constraints and the ultimate rule of the universe was still power (even if God's power) and not law. Thus individual growth in personal freedom and responsibility under law was not possible in the Moslem system. Those who submitted to God's Will were rewarded in Paradise; those who violated His Will burned in Hell. [703-704]

And [714-717]:

The achievement of Muhammad was very great, but the whole subsequent history of Islamic civilization was marked by his errors and omissions. Most of these rest on his very backward conception of the nature of deity and of the relations between God and man. His God was not fully transcendental since He constantly interfered in the world, and indeed, had to interfere in order to keep it going, for Muhammad had no conception of natural laws. His God was a God of supreme power, but was not transcendental or good. Thus the failure to recognize the nature of law as a process of relationships which function apart from the constant personal intervention of God included the failure to recognize rules of ethics (which included God). This meant that God was not recognized as Good but only as Power. To some extent Muhammad did reach the idea of God as love but only in the rather limited form of compassion. This involved divine recognition of man's weakness and pity toward man for this reason, but did not involve the love of God in the Christian sense which includes God's wish that man should develop his potentialities toward strength.

All of these weaknesses in Muhammad's ideas of the nature of deity continued in Islam and left it a permanently flawed society. It left an idea of the nature of man as weak, with limited free will and thus a limited sense of individual personal responsibility (since freedom for man allowed only the acceptance or rejection of the Will of Allah and rejection was punished by God's retaliation in the Last Judgment by inflicting personal suffering on the sinner).

This failure to achieve any idea of law as a relationship higher than will influenced every aspect of Islamic life subsequently. Among other things it prevented any real idea of the rule of law or of a constitution. This lack was made worse by the fact that Muhammad established no rules of government or of succession to his office. His own rule was personal, reinforced by his claims to be the Messenger of divine revelation. This meant that his successors, however chosen, would have to rule personally, without his power, since revelation, according to Muhammad, ended with him. Thus Islam, unlike western civilization, never could achieve the latter's idea that "the truth unfolds in time." In Islam "the Gates of Truth" were closed and, in consequence, a very unfinished community had to be regarded as finished, just as a very unfinished idea of the nature of deity had to be regarded as finished.

This idea of truth as finished was crippling to many aspects of Islamic society (such as science, law, and politics), and became especially crippling in the extreme form it took in Islam with the establishment of the idea that the Koran, as the vehicle of revelation, was not only sufficient, complete, and finished, but was also uncreated (that is had existed with God in all eternity before it was revealed to Muhammad). This had the effect of putting Truth outside the world of space-time (the world of created things), leaving this temporal world the area of evil in an almost Zoroastrian sense. All of these beliefs served to discourage human effort to improve this temporal world or their own behavior in it. This dualistic tendency, which was one of the outstanding characteristics of the whole period covered by this chapter, was also observable in the late classical civilization, in Byzantine civilization, and in western civilization in this period, as well as in Islam.

Thus we have a very flawed heritage left by Muhammad as in Islamic civilization because of three omissions (failure to move from a universe of will or power toward a universe of rules and law; failure to establish rules of government, or at least of succession for the ruler; and insistence that his ideas of deity and human relationship with deity were the final truth, thus ending revelation and intellectual growth). But Muhammad also left a positiive decision which was more obviously and more directly fatal to the future of his community. This is his decision to support the religious community by raiding, plunder, and war.

The whole future of Islamic civilization was marked by this decision which eventually made it almost impossible to achieve a community, for the two were almost antithetical: that the community be based on religion (that is on persons who trust each other because they have the same God and the same relationship to Him) and the belief that that same relationship can support itself in this world by plundering and enslaving other persons. This cannot be done, simply because the effort to support any community by war creates a military machine which comes to dominate the community on a basis totally different from the religious basis on which it is presumed to rest. In Islam, centuries of confusion were spent in conflict over the vain effort to achieve a government which was simultaneously both military and religious. The very effort to do this gave rise to extremist religious sects who, as microscopic minorities, were determined to get control of the government. Other sects, despairing of this, tried to withdraw into a small segregated community of their own. The Kharajites were an example of the first, while the Assassins (Ismailites) were an example of the second. The final solution of the problem, which grew very slowly in the period 900-1300, was to abandon any effort to combine the umma and the militarized government in the same community. This was equivalent to permitting a government which was little more than a military machine over a community which was a structure of private relationships operated as a community under customary relationships among individuals and groups.

This solution was well adapted to the socio-economic conditions of the period, especially to the autonomous nature and stable structure of economic (especially agrarian) enterprise at that time, but it was not a system which could adapt to modern conditions because the ruling entity, under this Islamic compromise, was a government without being a state; it was in fact a military organization and little else. It was not a state because it did not control and hardly influenced justice, law, education, social life (including family life), economic affairs, or intellectual and religious life. As a largely military machine it did not have, and could hardly expect to obtain, loyalty from its subjects or their active or spontaneous cooperation.

Posted on 2005-01-03 at 20:53. File under society.

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2005-01-02

Inclusive Diversity

The outlook of Western civilization.

In Tragedy and Hope, Carroll Quigley writes as follows about what he calls "inclusive diversity" as the characteristic mind-set of Western civilization [1227-1228]:

Where rationalists insist on polarizing the continua of human experience into antithetical pairs of opposing categories, the West has constantly rejected the implied need for rejection of one or the other, by embracing "Both." This catholic attitude goes back to the earliest days of Western society when its outlook was being created in the religious controversies of the preceding Classical Civilization.... In each case, with vigorous partisans clamoring on both sides (and in many cases still clamoring), the answer, reached as a consensus built up by long discussion, was Both.

And [1228-1229]:

From this examination of the tradition of the West, we can formulate the pattern of outlook on which this tradition is based. It has six parts:

1. There is a truth, a reality. (Thus the West rejects skepticism, solipsism, and nihilism.)
2. No person, group, or organization has the whole picture of the truth. (Thus there is no absolute or final authority.)
3. Every person of goodwill has some aspect of the truth, some vision of it from the angle of his own experience. (Thus each has something to contribute.)
4. Through discussion, the aspects of the truth held by many can be pooled and arranged to form a consensus closer to the truth than any of the sources that contributed to it.
5. This consensus is a temporary approximation of the truth, which is no sooner made than new experiences and additional information make it possible for it to be reformulated in a closer approximation of the truth by continued discussion.
6. Thus Western man's picture of the truth advances, by successive approximations, closer and closer to the whole truth without ever reaching it.

This methodology of the West is basic to the success, power, and wealth of Western Civilization. It is reflected in all successful aspects of Western life, from the earliest beginnings to the present. It has been attacked and challenged by all kinds of conflicting methods and outlooks, by all kinds of alternative attitudes based on narrowness and rigidity, but it has reappeared, again and again, as the chief source of the strength of that amazing cultural growth of which we are a part....

The method of the West, even in religion, has been this: The truth unfolds in time by a cooperative process of discussion that creates a temporary consensus which we hope will form successive approximations growing closer and closer to the final truth, to be reached only in some final state of eternity.

And [1231]:

These procedures that I have identified as Western, and have illustrated from the rather unpromising field of religion, are to be found in all aspects of Western life. The most triumphant of these aspects is science, whose method is a perfect example of the Western tradition. The scientist goes eagerly to work each day because he has the humility to know that he does not have any final answers and must work to modify and improve the answers he has. He publishes his opinions and research reports, or exposes these in scientific gatherings, so that they may be subjected to the criticism of his colleagues and thus gradually play a role in formulating the constantly unfolding consensus that is science. That is what science is, "a consensus unfolding in time by a cooperative effort, in which each works diligently seeking the truth and submits his work to the discussion and critique of his fellow to make a new, slightly improved, temporary consensus."

Because this is the tradition of the West, the West is liberal. Most historians see liberalism as a political outlook and practice found in the nineteenth century. But nineteenth-century liberalism was simply a temporary organizational manifestation of what has always been the underlying Western outlook.

Contrast Quigley's description of the Western outlook with his description of the outlook of Orthodox (Russian) culture around 1500 (Weapons Systems and Political Stability, 890-891):

The reasons for [the condition of Russian society in 1500] are almost too complex to be explained here. For one thing, the relationships of the prince to his servants were personal and patrimonial, almost a family relationship, and did not take that impersonal and abstract form which became the mark of the growth of public authority in the west. In Russia like in any large and unruly family, orders were shouted and repeated, with occasional sudden blows to emphasize their reiteration, but they were constantly neglected as to obedience or enforcement by both sides, until they became a kind of constant nagging which was regarded as the normal tone of life. All relationships were based on will and not on rule. In general, the ambitions and aspirations of the rules of Russia far outstripped their means or resources. The former were limitless, almost universal, as in any providential government, while resources were both limited and disorganized. Thus fundamental dualism rested on the very structure of the Russian cognitive system which expected practice to fall far below the ideal. This attitude, based on the dregs of classical rationalism, was accompanied by a pervasive lack of rationality, logic, or firm cognitive categories and an equally extensive lack of discipline, especially self-discipline, or of internalized individual rules of personal behavior and value structures. The reasons for these lacks are twofold: (1) the Russian people remained barbarous from the lack of any established or adopted traditions of rationality and discipline; and (2) the dualistic tradition of Greek Christianity which Russia tried to adopt, placed such great emphasis on spirituality of a level which was recognized as unattainable for ordinary men (since it required renunciation of most ordinary living), that what happened in the ordinary mundane world was not important....

What began as a lack of disciplined thought resulted in a prevalence of undisciplined action. Actions, both public and private, were dominated by impulse and passion. Violence was prevalent in family, social, and political life, accompanied by an explicit verbal commitment to its opposite: submission, renunciation, spirituality, peace, poverty, humility, and, in general, the teachings of Christ in the "Sermon on the Mount." Through a process of compensation, what was lacking in action was adopted in thought.

Of the four civilizations that rose from the wreckage of Classical civilization (Byzantine, Islamic, Orthodox Russia, and the West), why has only the West survived? Quigley writes as follows (Weapons Systems and Political Stability, 815-816):

Although the three civilizations of Byzantium, Islam, and Russia are distinct cultural entities, they have all retained the basic characteristics of providential empire. Western civilization, on the contrary, has not, except, perhaps, as a dangerous heresy. This is one of the reasons that western society has continued to grow in wealth and power, while two of the others have perished as organized socio-cultural entities, the Byzantine civilization completely, with some help from western power, although Islamic Turkish power gave the final blow. Islamic civilization has also been destroyed, largely by western power, although its peoples and shattered cultural patterns still lie as wreckage on the ground. Slavic civilization still survives, although much of its existence has been passed under the threat of destruction by western power, a situation which still continues. [Quigley wrote these words in the 1970s; he did not live to see the implosion of the Russo-Soviet Empire.] Western civilization, of the four descendents of classical civilization, also continues as the most powerful and affluent society in the world today, although it must be admitted that it shows its age, along with the scars and wounds of its several lives.

The key to the unique experience of western civilization lies in the fact that it was able to shake off, almost completely, its providential monarchical influences and was, thus, forced to find a different form of social structure. This distinctive organizational pattern of western society has been much studied by ourselves and others seeking the key to its strengths and uniqueness, but without any agreement on what these characteristics are. The explanation to be offered in this book will not obtain general agreement, but I feel sure we may begin with agreement that our western civilization began to follow the same road to providential monarchy as our sibling societies, but that, in the dark age of the 9th and 10th centuries, our western society failed in its attempt to organize a providential empire and was embarked on a different course by the year 1000.

I agree with Quigley that the distinctive features of Western civilization began to emerge soon after the year 1000, as manifested for example (in the intellectual sphere) by the phenomenon of the "twelfth-century renaissance". However, I continue to hold that printing (invented and quickly adopted in the mid-1400s) was the enabling force that made it possible to fully and productively apply the Western method of iterative truth-seeking through cooperative investigation, provisional consensus, and further refinement. It is enormously difficult to asymptotically approach an accurate understanding of reality unless the society in which one lives possesses the means for recording the best approximations and then adjusting them based on the latest evidence. Printing was that means in the second and third expansion phases of Western civilization (about 1450-1690 and 1770-1915). Now we possess an even more powerful technology for the expansion of knowledge, based not printed storage of information but on electronic storage (and manipulation) of information. The digital revolution will drive the fourth expansion of Western civilization. Whether that fourth phase results in an expansion of freedom and liberty in the political realm (the original meaning of "liberalism") remains to be seen.

Posted on 2005-01-02 at 20:11. File under society.

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