Early states were pretty time-limited themselves. [In Against The Grain,] Scott addresses the collapse of early civilizations, which was ubiquitous; typical history disguises this by talking about “dynasties” or “periods” rather than “the couple of generations an early state could hold itself together without collapsing”.
Robert Adams, whose knowledge of the early Mesopotamian states is unsurpassed, expresses some astonishment at the Third Dynasty of Ur (Ur III), in which five kings succeeded one another over a hundred-year period. Though it too collapsed afterward, it represented something of a record of stability.
Scott thinks of these collapses not as disasters or mysteries but as the expected order of things. It is a minor miracle that some guy in a palace can get everyone to stay on his fields and work for him and pay him taxes, and no surprise when this situation stops holding. These collapses rarely involved great loss of life. They could just be a simple transition from “a bunch of farming towns pay taxes to the state center” to “a bunch of farming towns are no longer paying taxes to the state center”. The great world cultures of the time – Egypt, Sumeria, China, whereever – kept chugging along whether or not there was a king in the middle collecting taxes from them. Scott warns against the bias of archaeologists who – deprived of the great monuments and libraries of cuneiform tablets that only a powerful king could produce – curse the resulting interregnum as a dark age or disaster. Probably most people were better off during these times.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Against The Grain“, Slate Star Codex, 2019-10-15.
September 12, 2024
QotD: The collapse of early civilizations in Mesopotamia
September 1, 2024
Explaining everything on Canadian money
J.J. McCullough
Published May 19, 2024Who’s on it? What’s the history? How is it going to change?
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August 30, 2024
The urge to power
At Mindset Shifts, Barry Brownstein explains why the urge to gain power over other people is particularly strong in those who don’t have meaningful lives of their own:
King Louis XIV, the “Sun King”.
Portrait by Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659-1743) sometime in 1700 or 1701 from the Louvre via Wikimedia Commons.
One of my more memorable exchanges with a student came in a principles of economics class. Part of the assignment for that week was chapters from Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist. Ridley compared the living standards of an average worker today with those of The Sun King, Louis XIV, in 1700. Some of my more ahistorical students were incredulous at Ridley’s description of the grinding poverty of the average person just a few centuries ago.
The King had an opulent lifestyle compared to others. Louis had an astonishing 498 workers preparing each of his meals. Yet his standard of living was still a fraction of what we experience today.
Ridley outlined the miracles of specialization and exchange in our time — an everyday cornucopia at the supermarket, modern communications and transportation, clothing to suit every taste. If we remove our blinders and see how many individuals provide services to us, Ridley concludes we have “far more than 498 servants at [our] immediate beck and call”.
Then, the memorable exchange occurred. One student shared that he would prefer to live in 1700, if he had more money than others and power over them. My first reaction was amusement; I thought the student was practicing his deadpan humor skills. He wasn’t. For him, having power was an attribute of a meaningful life.
If only my student’s mindset were an aberration.
During the reign of Louis XIV, French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal diagnosed why some lust for power. In his Pensées, Pascal wrote, “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room”. Pascal explained that, out of the inability to sit alone, arises the human tendency to seek power as a diversion.
Pascal asks us to imagine a king with “all the blessings with which you could be endowed”. A king, Pascal told us, if he has no “diversions” from his thinking, will “ponder and reflect on what he is”. Pascal’s hypothetical king will be miserable because he “is bound to start thinking of all the threats facing him, of possible revolts, finally of inescapable death and disease”.
“What people want is not the easy peaceful life that allows us to think of our unhappy condition.” That is why “war and high office are so popular”, Pascal argued.
Pascal argues individuals seek to be “diverted from thinking of what they are”. I would argue a better choice of words is what they have made of themselves.
I’ll let the reader decide how many modern politicians Pascal’s ideas apply to. With Pascal’s insight, we understand why conflict is a feature of politics and not a bug.
Pascal spares no one’s feelings. Some “seek external diversion and occupation, and this is the result of their constant sense of wretchedness”. For them, “rest proves intolerable because of the boredom it produces. [They] must get away from it and crave excitement.”
Let that sink in. A person able to exercise coercive power can use their morally undeveloped “wretched” mind to create endless misery for others merely because exercising power distracts them from their failures as human beings.
August 20, 2024
QotD: The printing press was to the Reformation what social media is in the Current Year
The thing about Luther, then, wasn’t what he said, so much as how he said it.
Martin Luther was the world’s first spin doctor. Though he insisted for a long time that his famous 95 Theses were, and were always intended to be, a scholastic debate between clergymen, Luther mastered the use of printed propaganda. His opponents soon followed, or tried to, in an ever-increasing spiral of printed viciousness. Mutatis mutandis, the exchanges between Luther, Erasmus, Thomas More (to say nothing of a thousand lesser lights) and their opponents all sound shockingly Current Year. They’re snarky and waspish at best, grotesque ad hominem at worst. Modern flame wars have nothing on the way Thomas More and William Tyndale tore into each other, for instance, and More and Tyndale were rank amateurs compared to Luther.
As with the Current Year, where being first on social media is the only criterion that matters, so the printing press injected something very like “hot takes” into the late-Medieval intellectual atmosphere. If you tried to respond to your opponents the old-fashioned way — with closely reasoned, heavily cited arguments, on parchment, hand-copied by monks — you might win the intellectual battle … 500 years later, among historians who thank you for providing such a useful glimpse into late-Medieval mentalités, but in your own time you’d get fired at best, get burned at the stake at worst, if you didn’t respond instantly, in kind.
The printing press, in other words, represented a quantum leap in the velocity of information. Those who grasped its fundamentals prospered, while those who fell behind perished. King Henry VIII, for instance, fatally damaged his cherished intellectual reputation when he deigned to attack to Luther in person. Luther hit back with a tirade that wouldn’t be out of place on Twitter1, and Henry responded in kind, and now the king, who was hip-deep in self-inflicted shit by that point, had to drop the fight. Having been publicly abused by a mere ex-monk, he had to quit the field with his tail between his legs.
Severian, “Velocity of Information”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-10.
1. Again, mutatis mutandis. Though this sounds to modern ears like an abject apology on Luther’s part (“especially as I am the offscouring of the world, a mere worm who ought only to live in contemptuous neglect”, etc.), in context it’s a vicious attack. For one thing, what’s a great king like Henry doing responding to a “mere worm”? And Henry had to know, since Wolsey did nothing without his master’s orders … except everyone had heard the rumors that Henry was just a dimwitted playboy, and Cardinal Wolsey was really the king in all but name, so maybe he didn’t know. Either way Henry, who prided himself on being an intellectual, was a fool. That’s the kind of thing that would get you executed in the 16th century, and here’s this “mere worm” publishing it, for all the world to see, with no possibility of reprisal from a supposedly puissant monarch.
August 18, 2024
Hirohito Announces Surrender – War Continues – WW2 – Week 312 – August 17, 1945
World War Two
Published 17 Aug 2024Hirohito broadcasts Japan’s surrender to the world- despite an attempted to coup to prevent it from happening, and much of the world celebrates, but the war isn’t really over. The Soviets are busy invading Manchuria, and there’s revolution in Vietnam and Indonesia.
00:00 Intro
00:22 Recap
00:49 Attempted Coup In Japan
04:12 Hirohito Surrenders
08:54 Japanese Surrender In China
12:05 Soviets In Manchuria
17:52 Revolution In Vietnam
20:33 Summary
21:07 Conclusion
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A view of the near future – “What if calling someone stupid was illegal?”
Christopher Gage suspects that Lionel Shriver’s new book Mania didn’t require a lot of deep thinking about possible future trends, just a few glances at the headlines in British newspapers would provide all the inspiration necessary:
Lionel Shriver’s novel, Mania, asks “What if calling someone stupid was illegal?”
Set in an alternate timeline eerily flirtatious with our own, Mania depicts a world in which intelligence and competence, those oppressive agents of the modern bête noire — contrast — provoke outraged mobs.
The Mental Parity Movement demands a Khmer-Rouge-style Year Zero. To suggest the existence of differing abilities and competencies is to be “brain-vain”. In this final “great civil rights fight”, stupidity is euphemised as “alternative processing”. The mob cancels Frasier for brain vanity. After regulations prevent Pfizer from hiring qualified scientists, a toxic vaccine lays waste to millions.
The protagonist, a free-thinking academic named Pearson, cancels herself after she adds Dostoevsky’s The Idiot to her class syllabus. But the book is not the offending item. The word “idiot” is illegal. So too, is the “D-Word”. Pearson falls foul of social services after calling her seven-year-old daughter “dumb”. Her daughter grasses her up for this most heinous offence. For her crimes, Pearson endures a mandatory course entitled “Cerebral Acceptance and Semantic Sensitivity”.
Akin to our culture, mass neurosis devours that of Mania. The citizens scour the earth for evidence of the gravest offence: cognitive bigotry.
The Mental Parity Movement even renames “sage” — stripping the haughty herb of its sapiosexual swagger.
Mania imagines a world in which mediocrity is brilliance and where platitude is profundity. I suspect Shriver wasted little time on research. Turning on one’s television furnishes a commonplace book with a bottomless wealth of material.
This week, Harry and Meghan embarked on an unroyal tour of Colombia. On the agenda was a summit on misinformation and online harm. At this “responsible digital future” fandango, the former soap actress and the former royal spermatozoa relayed their fears. Essentially, hordes of toothless oiks with Wi-Fi often say nasty things online.
On stage, Harry adopted the pose of the modern soothsayer. His tieless open collar oozed Sicilian ease.
Speaking in Adverb English, Harry avoided anything as threatening or as harmful as a declarative sentence. Harry talks as if everything is a question as not to arouse predators. The Prince droned on, auditioning the Californication of his mother tongue. The same mother tongue Harry’s ancestors spread around the globe via what some may deign to be less than inclusive methods.
How can I put this in Mania-approved euphemism? Harry is minimally exceptional. Harry is to intelligent thought what lead pipes are to potable water.
July 24, 2024
Tiberius Caesar, the second emperor
In The Critic, Jaspreet Singh Boparai reviews Iron Imperator: Roman Grand Strategy Under Tiberius by Iskander Rehman:
Tiberius was 55 years old when he became the second Roman emperor. He ruled from AD 14 to 37, spending most of the second half of his reign on the island of Capri, where he never lost his grip on power despite being over 130 miles from Rome.
Like most bureaucratic administrators, he was far from popular. Tacitus (AD 56–120), the greatest of all Roman historians, presents Tiberius as paranoid, ruthlessly cruel, and pathologically unable to say what he meant. The imperial biographer Suetonius (69–122) completes the Tacitean picture of a dour, charmless pervert, miserable even in his increasingly sordid pleasures.
Not all writers are quite so hostile to Tiberius: since the Enlightenment he has won qualified praise from thinkers including Montesquieu and Voltaire, who have often been willing to overlook at least some of his vices. The great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin wrote in 1825: “The more I read Tacitus, the more I come to like Tiberius. He was one of the greatest administrative minds of antiquity.”
Of course, Pushkin could take revisionism to contrarian extremes, as when he said of a notorious assassination: “If murder can be guiltless in an autocratic state when it is for reasons of political necessity, then Tiberius was justified”.
Iskander Rehman doesn’t go quite so far as Pushkin; yet he does want us to look past all the gossip and scandals, and see what we can learn in practical terms from this controversial emperor. Tiberius was not a conqueror; his main task was to consolidate his predecessor’s achievements and establish stability throughout the empire.
He was faced with the question of how you govern a massive, unwieldy state as an absolute monarch without the benefit of personal charisma, reliable subordinates or the momentum of conquest. Rehman focuses on foreign policy, military affairs and imperial management in general, and concludes that, whatever else might have been wrong with Tiberius, at least he understood grand strategy, international relations, and how to handle the Roman economy.
I must admit that my impression of Tiberius was largely informed by my childhood encounter with Robert Graves’ excellent novels I, Claudius and Claudius The God, which definitely drew the character details of Tiberius in the novels from Tacitus and Suetonius. But Graves also pointed out that whatever personal flaws were displayed in his private life, for the vast majority of the empire he was a competent successor to the great god Augustus.
July 1, 2024
QotD: Why there’s no “first lady” equivalent in Canada
But I didn’t get earnestly annoyed until I heard an intelligent acquaintance object to the usage … while admitting that it was a “pedantic” point. Listen, I’ve made as much money out of professional pedantry as any Canadian. This isn’t pedantry. This is about the underwater nine-tenths of our constitutional iceberg. This is about what Confucius called the rectification of names.
So I ask you: what Canadian, in 2020, is still eyeing the paraphernalia of the American presidency with envy? The pedantic point to be made, although it is also a point of etiquette, is that a prime minister’s wife cannot possibly be the “first lady” of a realm currently equipped with a Queen. Not to mention a vicereine who can hire and fire prime ministers.
A “first lady” is a convenience that republics, for social and diplomatic purposes, have instead of reigning queens or consorts. The senior female member of the presidential household is recognized as First Lady of the republic when the president is widowed or single (like Buchanan, whose niece held the title).
The word “princess” is almost literally just the Latin for “first”, and some Americans must have sensed they were tempting fate when they united their social hierarchy with their political one under a title savouring of hospice-stage republicanism. The original vision was of a country that did not have princesses or anything like.
Colby Cosh, “Talk of a Canadian ‘first lady’ is a small step toward American dysfunction”, National Post, 2020-05-26.
June 28, 2024
Ruling Medieval France
In Quillette, Charlotte Allen reviews House of Lilies: The Dynasty That Made Medieval France by Justine Firnhaber-Baker, a period of history I know mainly from the English point of view:
I’m a PhD medievalist, but the history of medieval French royalty was never my specialty, and my ignorance was vast.
I’d assumed, for example, that the French kings of the Middle Ages were mostly fainéants whose writ scarcely ran past the Île-de-France region (encompassing the city of Paris and its environs). The English monarchy across the Channel had been centralised since the days of Alfred the Great (849–899); but the French kings seemed to rule in a more symbolic capacity, being perpetually at the mercy of the powerful dukes and counts of autonomous French regions such as Normandy, Burgundy, Aquitaine, Anjou, Blois, Toulouse, and Languedoc. These regional rulers were technically royal vassals. But, in actuality, they saw themselves as absolute rulers in their own right, and so had no compunction against turning on the crown when they thought it would further their interests.
My impressions had been formed by accounts of the 17-year-old Joan of Arc’s having to personally drag the Dauphin (the future King Charles VII) to Reims for his coronation in 1429, and by Shakespeare’s historical plays, which portrayed the French as fops incapable of defending their territory against the robust and brotherly English during the Hundred Years’ War. Indeed, the whole point of that war (from the English perspective) was that, by dynastic right, large portions of France’s fractured political landscape actually belonged to England.
The one medieval French royal (by marriage) I did know something about, Eleanor of Aquitaine (c. 1122–1204), dumped her French husband, King Louis VII (1120–1180) after he bungled the Second Crusade, a costly and embarrassing adventure on which Eleanor had accompanied him on horseback. (“Never take your wife on a Crusade”, a medievalist friend of mine once sensibly quipped). To top off his disastrous final loss of his Crusader army in 1148 during an ill-considered attack on Damascus — which, although Muslim-ruled, was in fact an ally of Latin-Christian Jerusalem — Louis and Eleanor had failed to produce a son. No sooner was the ink dry on their divorce in 1152 (technically an annulment, since the two were Catholics), than she married Henry Plantagenet, son and heir of the duke of Anjou, who two years later became King Henry II of England. Henry quickly procreated five sons (among fourteen surviving children) with his new bride. Thus began the dynasty that would rule England for more than three centuries.
As everyone who has seen The Lion in Winter knows, Henry II’s relationship with Eleanor was far from tranquil, but two of their sons succeeded him to the English throne: Richard the Lionheart and King John (of Magna Carta fame or infamy, depending on your perspective). Henry was, besides king of England, duke of Normandy and count of Anjou, through his great-grandfather, William the Conqueror, and his mother, Matilda, who’d married Henry’s Anjevin father, Geoffrey, after her first husband, the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, died in 1125.
Eleanor’s grounds for annulling her marriage to Louis had been that he was her fourth cousin, which violated the Catholic Church’s (selectively applied) consanguinity restrictions. But Henry was even closer kin, being her third cousin. The humiliated and (understandably) rankled Louis demanded that Henry, as his feudal vassal, explain why he’d failed to ask permission to marry (let alone marry his boss’s ex). Henry declined to reply, the feudal equivalent of declaring oneself in rebellion. Louis retaliated by invading Normandy — unsuccessfully — and trying to hold onto Eleanor’s Aquitaine on the claim that he’d become its duke by marriage (Henry II was meanwhile making the same claim) before giving up and remarrying himself in 1154.
A colour-coded political map of France during the twelfth century, indicating the early expansion of the Angevin Empire — i.e., the territorial possessions of the House of Plantagenet — from the time of Geoffrey V of Anjou (1113–1151). The Plantagenets would rule in England, and parts of France, till the demise of Richard III of England (1452–1485).
I’d assumed that French kings wouldn’t hold much in the way of real royal power until the time of King Louis XIV (1638–1715), who declared (perhaps apocryphally), L’État, c’est moi, and forced French regional nobles to reside in his over-the-top palace at Versailles (where they’d dissipate their incomes via elaborate court ceremonies instead of making trouble from their provincial power bases).
But the scales have now been knocked from my eyes, thanks to Justine Firnhaber-Baker, a professor of French medieval history at the University of St Andrews. The subtitle of her new book, House of Lilies: The Dynasty That Made Medieval France, refers to the Capetian dynasty founded by Hugh Capet (c. 940–996), who took his royal title in 987 A.D. Every French monarch, from Hugh’s reign to the French Revolution and beyond, had Capetian blood running through his veins — including the aforementioned Louis VII, who was a direct descendant of Hugh, and the bookish, dithering King Louis XVI, who was not, but who nevertheless went to the guillotine in 1793 under the derisive sobriquet “Citizen Louis Capet”.
June 16, 2024
QotD: Napoleon Bonaparte – the great man?
Remember, the real Napoleon was so impressive he literally caused a crisis in 19th century philosophy! Everybody had carefully worked out their little theories, later exemplified by Tolstoy, about how human agency doesn’t matter in history and everything is just the operation of vast impersonal forces like the grinding of tectonic plates, and then boom this guy shows up and the debate springs to life again. You know it’s real when two guys as different as Nietzsche and Dostoevsky are both grappling with what we can learn from somebody’s existence. And I think Raskolnikov’s unhealthy Napoleon fanboyism was supposed to be a bit of a satire of some very real intellectual currents among the European and Russian intelligentsia.
So what do you think? Does Napoleon vindicate the great man theory of history? I’m still working out my own answer to this, which I briefly allude to in my review of Zhuchkovsky’s book. Basically, I think we can transcend the traditional dichotomy by constructing a political/military analogue of the Schumpeter/Kirzner theory of entrepreneurship. Vast, impersonal forces (such as technological progress or structural economic changes) can create opportunities — in fact they’re pretty much the only thing that can, because the force required to reconfigure society is usually far beyond what any person or group can manage.
But once the opportunity is there, it takes a lot less raw power to act on it, assuming you can recognize it. Imagine a process of continental drift that slowly, slowly raises a mountain-sized boulder out of the ground, and every year it’s inching closer to this precipice, until finally it teeters on the edge. A human being could never have done that, it would be far too heavy, but once it’s up there, there might be a narrow window, a few precious moments, when a solid shove by somebody sufficiently perceptive and motivated can direct and harness this unimaginable force.
So the question is: what made Europe so ripe for Disruption (TM) at that moment? Obviously the French Revolution, and there were some pretty important changes in the nature of warfare too. What else?
Jane: Well, you know what I’m going to say: it’s the Enlightenment, stupid.
I was going to compare Napoleon to, say, Odoacer, but I don’t think the analogy actually holds. The Goths were conquerors from outside; their approach, their whole worldview, was very different from the Romans’.1 But Napoleon is extremely inside. The people he comes from are not actually all that different from the ancien régime — they’re feuding hill clans, but they’re aristocratic feuding hill clans — and yet he’s so thoroughly a creature of Enlightenment modernity that even when he’s engaging in the time-honored feuding hill clan pastime of resisting integration by the metropole he’s doing it by writing pamphlets. He might be a Corsican nationalist but he’s been intellectually colonized by France. Or, more accurately, by the elements of French culture that are in the process of undermining and overthrowing it.
I think you’re right about political entrepreneurship. (So here we see the Psmiths wimp out and answer the great man/impersonal force dichotomy “yes”.) It’s perhaps more neatly summed up by that famous Napoleon quip: “I saw the crown of France lying on the ground, so I picked it up with my sword”. Which: based. But also, if we’re going to continue his metaphor, he didn’t knock the crown onto the ground. Everything was already irredeemably broken before he got there. And this, I think, distinguishes him from the Germanic conquerors, who found something teetering and gave it a final push. Caesar, similarly, came up in the old order but dealt it its death blow.
But back to the Enlightenment: the crown is on the ground because the culture that held it up has fallen apart, and it’s fallen apart because gestating in its innards was an entirely different culture that’s finally burst its skin like a parasitic wasp and emerged into the light of day. A lazy reading of history sees Napoleon with a crown giving people titles and building palaces and goes “ooh, look, he’s just like the ancien régime“, but this is dumb. Napoleon is obsessed with modernizing and streamlining. He wants to wipe away the accumulated cruft of a thousand years of European history and build something smarter and cleaner and more rational. He’s just better at organization and psychology than the revolutionaries were. The French Revolution (and the total failure of the Directory) created the material conditions, but the entire intellectual milieu that made the French Revolution possible also made it possible for people to look at Napoleon and go “whoa, nice”.
Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Napoleon the Great, by Andrew Roberts”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-01-21.
1. There’s some very interesting stuff on this, and about later efforts from both cultures to bridge the gap, in Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization.
May 15, 2024
At least one of Queen Victoria’s PMs thought her “very wilful and whimsical, like a spoilt child”
In The Critic, Jonathan Parry reviews Queen Victoria and Her Prime Ministers: A Personal History by Anne Somerset:
In 1875, Queen Victoria sent Benjamin Disraeli a long and querulous letter “about vivisection, which she insists upon my stopping, as well as the theft of ladies’ jewels”. Similar heated and impracticable demands might arrive on his prime ministerial desk several times a day. He was not alone in thinking her “very wilful and whimsical, like a spoilt child”.
After the Conservative ministry’s defeat at the 1892 general election, Victoria complained it was “a defect in our much famed constitution to have to part with an admirable government like Lord Salisbury’s for no question of any importance or any reason, merely on account of the number of votes”.
Victoria’s outbursts to, and about, her ten prime ministers over the 64 years of her reign provide the meat of Anne Somerset’s book. Most of her letters were extremely forthright; some were endearing; not a few seem demented. She found disturbances to her comfort or routine particularly intolerable, such as ministerial crises which erupted in Ascot week or during one of her pregnancies.
Somerset’s approach is exhaustive and chronological. Gluttons for Victorian political history will probably enjoy it; she writes well and authoritatively, though could be more concise. Over nearly 600 pages, the effect of this torrent of royal complaint is overwhelming. It’s easy to see why a shaken Bismarck stuttered, “Mein Gott! That was a woman!” after his only audience with Victoria in 1888.
The book is presented as a “personal history” of the exchanges between her and her premiers. Most readers will sympathise with the men who had to manage her tactfully; many will wonder why they put up with it.
Yet they put up with it because of the principles at stake, which a “personal” account cannot bring out properly. Beneath the excitable phrases and endless underlining, Victoria’s correspondence doggedly promoted a coherent policy. She fought to maintain the authority of the Crown within the constitution, seeing it as essential for effective government. Her worry was that popular pressure would destabilise politics, through extra-parliamentary agitation but also through parliamentary organisation. So she was very suspicious of political parties, which she saw as factional agencies whose populist demands would disrupt the constitutional status quo.
Politically she remained a Hanoverian monarch: she believed the Crown should manage parliament through ministers chosen for their competence, loyalty and patriotism, not their commitment to popular causes. She even tried (unsuccessfully) to glean information on internal cabinet arguments so she could play her ministers off against each other, a trick used by her Georgian predecessors until the cabinet managed to assert collective responsibility in the 1820s.
May 2, 2024
Rome’s Biggest Construction Projects
toldinstone
Published Jan 26, 2024Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
3:06 Domitian’s Temple of Jupiter
4:45 Aura
5:48 The Forum of Trajan
7:16 Nero’s Golden HouseMy new book, Insane Emperors, Sunken Cities, and Earthquake Machines is now available! Check it out here: https://www.amazon.com/Insane-Emperor…
April 22, 2024
Canada’s Governor General is supposed to be above politics, not immersed in it
Colby Cosh says — quite correctly — that the issue with the Governor General indulging in partisan politics isn’t that people noticed and objected:
Mary Simon, Governor General of Canada on a visit to London in June, 2022.
Detail of a New Zealand Government official photo via Wikimedia Commons.
All week I’ve been thinking about the sheer number of people who must have known about this event and who apparently didn’t anticipate a potential constitutional problem. Hey, what could go wrong? Surely no Liberal cabinet minister would show up, press the flesh all day, head back to the office, and plunge moronically into auto-campaign mode, sharing snapshots of how “we discussed … our Online Harms Act“ at the palace over oolong and scones.
The GG’s own materials describing the event are careful to characterize it as a fundamentally sociable get-together with no relationship whatsoever to a government agenda. Attendees to the event insist that legislation now before the House of Commons wasn’t explicitly discussed by any of the speakers.
As Colleague Sarkonak pointed out in her hair-raising Tuesday column on the scandal, the symposium included a panel discussing “Emerging Solutions for a Safer Digital World”. In any other setting it would be weird and surprising to have such a discussion without involving any “solutions” that are legislative in nature. But maybe the attendees were careful to talk exclusively about technological and social solutions to online abuse: such a thing is certainly possible. Those of us whose invitations were lost in the mail are left to make maximally charitable assumptions.
It’s just that, logically, we can’t be charitable to both the Governor General and Justice Minister Arif Virani in this case. Their stories conflict, in a direct and consequential way.
Anyway, none of the excuses being made really cut much ice. It’s true that a governor general has some freedom to engage in philanthropy, oratory and social organizing that have no visible partisan aspect. It’s also true that if a GG’s social agenda coincides awkwardly with the House of Commons order paper, you’re playing Russian roulette with the Constitution. On Tuesday the government introduces a bill outlawing soda pop; by the end of the week the Gov-Gen is inviting diabetics and nutritionists to chat about their “lived experience” of Mr. Pibb addiction. And, most likely, when anyone at all objects, you get a familiar barrage of “conservatives pounce” stories.
March 29, 2024
“Constitutional monarchy, such as we have, is a gift not to be ignored”
In The Line, Graeme Menzies makes a pitch for a renewed royal presence in Canadian affairs:
The role of the Crown in Canada has been given a particularly cold shoulder by Trudeau. He’s first in line at the funerals and wedding parties, and quick to boast of his lifelong friendship with members of the royal family, but of all Canada’s 23 prime ministers Justin Trudeau is the one who has done his best to erase them from Canadian cultural identity. His record appointing governors-General suggests he’s been actively doing his best to tarnish that office.
Trudeau was the first prime minister not to approve the traditional Jubilee Medal for her late majesty Queen Elizabeth II — Canada’s loyal and beloved monarch for over 70 years. Under his watch, the anticipated Canada 150 Medal was also quashed. Later, under pressure, he agreed at the very last minute that a medal should be issued to celebrate the Coronation of King Charles III; but other than a couple lines about it in a news release last May, nothing has come of it. Not a single medal has been produced or issued.
This is where a post-Trudeau government must really seize the day. The monarchy is a great gift to Canada. It’s probably the single most important thing that distinguishes Canada from the United States. Take it away and we’re just Puerto Rico — another American protectorate, waiting for the day it gains statehood and a star on the flag.
It is foolish to think any serving prime minister will ever command the respect and affection of the majority of citizens; but Queen Elizabeth often did and there’s no reason to think King Charles cannot do so as well. The past visits to Canada by William and Kate, the future King and Queen of Canada, have been nothing short of sensational.
But the next prime minister will have to act on this. Constitutional monarchy, such as we have, is a gift not to be ignored. It is to be embraced and folded fully into a forward-looking vision of a new, proud, strong nation. To begin with, the next prime minister should ask the King, or the Prince of Wales, to visit Canada annually. The presentation of Orders of Canada should be timed to coincide with these visits. I would even go so far as to suggest Canada reinstate knighthoods. If Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney can be knighted then why can we not have Sir Randy Bachman and Dame Joni Mitchell?
The King of Canada can also play an important and useful role toward Canada’s reconciliation efforts. Trudeau and his radicals have done much to make it seem the Crown and Indigenous peoples are incompatible but a closer review of history books would suggest otherwise. It wasn’t the King who came up with the Indian Act — our elected political leaders did that. The statue of Tecumseh in Windsor is marvellous, but there should be another in Ottawa and it should be unveiled by the King. Same for Chief Maquinna who, apart from a likeness chiselled into the exterior of the British Columbia Legislative Library Building, has no statue, and I’ll bet dollars to donuts he is virtually unknown to most Canadians. That should be changed.
Most Canadians would rather see the King unveil a statue like that than the current, or the next, prime minister. When a prime minister is involved, it’s political. When the monarch does it, we can all get behind it. It’s unifying.
March 23, 2024
Bhutan
Ned Donovan recounts his recent trip to Bhutan, situated in the Himalaya mountains between India and China:
Bhutan map from the CIA World Factbook, 2010. Chinese-disputed border areas are marked with dashed lines and darker shading.
Wikimedia Commons.
Bhutan has long been a place I had wanted to visit, but it isn’t as simple as booking a ticket.
It would be remiss not to quickly situate Bhutan and its history for those unaware. It is a small kingdom east of Nepal and nestled between India and China. It has a population of around 750,000, almost all of whom are devout Buddhists. It was once a land of feuding Tibetan chieftans who were united in the 1630s by a remarkable warrior and Buddhist lama called Ngawang Namgyal. Namgyal died in 1651, but his death was kept a secret from the country for more than 50 years, with officials simply saying that the king was “on an extended retreat” and continued to keep Bhutan together by issuing decrees in his name.
While Namgyal was seen as the spiritual leader, he also established a temporal monarchy which in a slightly modified form still exists today under the leadership of the Wangchuk dynasty. The King of Bhutan’s title is the Druk Gyalpo, which literally translates to Dragon King. Over time Bhutan, being small but strategically located, faded in and out of the spheres of influence of the day from the Mughals to the British Raj. It would have been subsumed into the latter like other princely states, but in the 19th Century a British civil servant placed some files relating to Bhutan into a folder marked “External” instead of “Internal”, a small decision that ensured it remains an independent country today, albeit one “guided” on matters of defence and foreign affairs by a treaty with India.
The country only opened its borders to foreigners in 1974, to mark the coronation of the Fourth King, Jigme Singye Wangchuck. His Majesty saw the opportunity to take advantage of his accession to showcase Bhutan and its unique culture and traditions to the world, but was also aware that unrestricted tourism would put those at risk. Over time, this developed into a vision known as “High Quality, Low Volume” tourism. All visitors must have a guide and driver and also pay a daily fee — currently $100. In 1974, 287 foreigners visited Bhutan, and in 2019 more than 70,000 fee paying tourists came.
As a result of this policy, the trips are largely cultural. You take hikes in unimaginable scenery, watch local festivals where masked creatures tell villagers morality tales, and sit with locals to eat dishes made up mostly of chilis. For fun people relax with the national sport of archery, singing deliciously rude songs to put off their friends while they take shots. Tourists get to have a go but the target is brought closer and you get to use the same kind of bow young children do. Civil servants go to work in traditional dress and robe-clad monks pepper society. In the five days I spent there, much was spent talking to our compulsory guide who was a lovely man named Yarab, who had once been on the Bhutan national football team. One story Yarab told me was that of Bhutan’s transition to democracy.
The previously mentioned Fourth King oversaw Bhutan’s transition into the modern world – but with a catch. Bhutan’s development could not come at the cost of its people’s happiness. Thousands of kilometres of roads were built, free at point of use clinics quickly filled the country, and electricity and telephone hookups turned King Jigme Singye’s isolated kingdom where almost no one had access to healthcare or education into a remarkably healthy and literate little state in the space of just a few decades. Much of the money to make this possible came from selling hydroelectricity generated by dams that are powered by Himalayan glaciers. The Fourth King explained that: “water is to us what oil is to the Arabs”.
