Category — History

{Note: I wasn’t planning to post this because it’s a bit rambling and digressive. But, I realized that it sort of fits with the discussion about war and morality.}

Let me start by showing my cards: for me, The Persians doesn’t really work as theatrical drama. It is the oldest extant play (472 BCE) and the only surviving classical play based in events real as opposed to mythological. It has been successfully updated several times and is still exceptional as a war play that generates great sympathy for the “enemy”.

So, why doesn’t The Persians work as theatre? [Read more →]

By my lights, they’re in descending order of plausibility.

James Joyner shares my view of sanctions and adds another reason to mistrust them:

Sanctions almost never work, since the ruling class is the last to feel the pain and there are always state and non-state actors willing to circumvent the sanctions regime for a price. As a general rule, sanctions make those enacting them feel like they’re doing something but wind up hurting the very people we’re ostensibly trying to help, the ordinary citizens suffering under repressive regimes.

What’s less widely understood, as Damon Wilson, the Atlantic Council vice president and International Security Program director, noted in introducing the panel, is how incredibly hard sanctions are to undo. Years after we toppled Saddam Hussein and replaced his regime with one friendlier to the United States, a myriad of sanctions remain in place.

James Hanley doubts the doubters of charter schools. I’m sympathetic, but the school choice debate here at the League is one I’ve chosen to stay out of. There are only so many hours I can spend on blogging:

There is a persistent tendency among educators, and left-leaning folks in general, to claim that education is a distinct type of good, so that unlike other goods, a competitive market is an inferior way to produce it. I once had a college prof tell me that all monopolies were bad, except the state’s education monopoly. But I have yet to hear one of these folks make an argument for why education is so distinct. It’s rather remarkable how persuasive they find the words, “it’s just different,” to be.

And education is different in some ways. Quality assurance is just really damned hard (and standardized testing doesn’t do it). And it is primarily a private good, but one with substantial positive externalities. But neither of those make it peculiarly appropriate for monopoly production, or even for wholly (as opposed to partially) public production.

Ditto all that to health care.

Theodore H. Frank notes a curiosity in the Toyota recalls:

The Los Angeles Times recently did a story detailing all of the NHTSA reports of Toyota “sudden acceleration” fatalities, and, though the Times did not mention it, the ages of the drivers involved were striking.

In the 24 cases where driver age was reported or readily inferred, the drivers included those of the ages 60, 61, 63, 66, 68, 71, 72, 72, 77, 79, 83, 85, 89—and I’m leaving out the son whose age wasn’t identified, but whose 94-year-old father died as a passenger.

These “electronic defects” apparently discriminate against the elderly.

Further considerations here. Were it not for the magic of the state, which makes all action seem public and impartial, we might suspect something fishy. But I am sure our regulators only have our best interests in mind, and not the welfare of their GM subdivision.

Finally, does the advent of GPS mean we’ll no longer need signs? The answer seems “yes” to me.

In former times, buildings located on city streets didn’t have numbers. You’d just go to King’s Street and look up and down it for the sign of Saint Jerome. (Woe to you if you don’t know that Saint Jerome’s attributes include an owl, a lion, a skull, a trumpet, a cross, and a book.) There was a better way, we found it, and we used it. The same principle applies here.

Note, however, that while we may achieve a world where signs are unneeded, achieving a world where they do not exist is another question.

I’m happy to see that disenchantment with Woodrow Wilson – the most bizarre candidate for the pantheon of great American presidents – is reaching a wider audience on the American Right. But this nascent critique of Wilsonian progressivism seems to have missed one of his worst legacies. Namely, Wilson’s blatant disregard for civil liberties (from Wikipedia – emphasis mine):

On the home front in 1917, he began the United States’ first draft since the US civil war, raised billions in war funding through Liberty Bonds, set up the War Industries Board, promoted labor union growth, supervised agriculture and food production through the Lever Act, took over control of the railroads, enacted the first federal drug prohibition, and suppressed anti-war movements.

–

To counter opposition to the war at home, Wilson pushed the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 through Congress to suppress anti-British, pro-German, or anti-war opinions. He welcomed socialists who supported the war and pushed for deportation of foreign-born radicals.^[86] Citing the Espionage Act, the U.S. Post Office refused to carry any written materials that could be deemed critical of the U. S. war effort. Some sixty newspapers were deprived of their second-class mailing rights.^[87]

Wilson is usually associated with a stirring ideological defense of democratic self-determination. In practice, this amounted to little more than crude ethnic partitioning, but more importantly, Wilson’s respect for the forms of Republican governance was severely lacking.

Perhaps Wilson’s enthusiasm for curtailing civil liberties was entirely unrelated to his progressive politics. But it’s hard not to see the same impulses that animated Wilson’s domestic agenda – a desire for control, rank disregard for individual liberty, confidence that the messy business of civil society can be micromanaged from Washington – behind his horrific record on civil liberties.

So my question for newly-converted Wilson-phobes is simple: If you’re concerned about government overreach, why restrict your criticism his domestic legacy? Why do torture, indefinite detainment, and the PATRIOT ACT get a free pass? Compared to his draconian wartime crackdown, many aspects of Wilson’s progressive agenda look downright benign, or even admirable, in retrospect. Wilson’s blatant disregard for civil liberties, on the other hand, remains one of the most enduring – and bipartisan – legacies in contemporary American politics.

Via Rogue Classicism comes a truly awesome project at Leeds: The Herodotus Encoded Space-Text Image Archive (HESTIA). Using digital technologies like Google Earth, they’ve mapped out all the spatial information in Herodotus. You’ve got to see the settlement map on page 30. What a great resource!

An old joke holds that historians are gossips with footnotes. This often seems true of Herodotus, the “father of history”. Curious about everything anyone tells him, at times, he can be a bit credulous and some of the stories he relates are what we would call tall tales. Nevertheless, his methodology- taking various accounts of past events and making decisions about which are the most plausible and what resulted from those events- is indeed historiography. Besides, it’s pretty hard not to enjoy the sort of historian who can write a sentence like, “There is a place in Arabia… where I went to try to get information about the flying snakes.” [Read more →]

This is one of the posts from my other blog that disappeared into the ether with our technical difficulties. It seems to deserve reposting here for a couple of reasons. First, it fits well with “Desire and Deviance,” below, and also with our upcoming discussion of Plato’s Symposium. Second, I think it was just a really good post, one of the best I’ve done in a long time. I’ve only very lightly retouched it here.

Ahem…

There’s a very interesting essay by Mary Eberstadt in First Things this month titled “How Pedophilia Lost Its Cool.” She argues that a cultural window briefly opened for pedophilia during the 1970s and 1980s, but that it slammed shut with the advent of the Catholic Church’s sex scandals in recent years. One of her big pieces of evidence is the almost universally negative reaction to those who would shield Roman Polanksi from arrest and trial, a reaction I certainly shared. Child rape is child rape. It’s a crime, and we should throw the book at him even if he’s brilliant, and old, and in (perhaps conveniently) poor health.

Our own Jon Rowe makes an appearance in the comments section, where he casts doubt on Eberstadt’s wider thesis:

As I understand the tale, traditional moral norms have been eroded since the 1960s watershed — fornication, homosexuality, adultery, and now perhaps pedophilia (with homosexuals leading the way for pedophilia).

But there is NOTHING “chic” about almost all of the examples she raises and terms “pedophilia.”

It might be true if it were all sex between adults and prepubscent children — that I think is and has been a “marker of right and wrong in a world where other markers have been erased.”

But almost all of her examples involve post-pubescent teens and there is nothing “chic” about them being sex-able.

In fact, the opposite is true — the post 1960s world has seen an average INCREASE in “age of consent laws.”

13 or 14 historically, traditionally and legally been an acceptable age for marriage and hence sex.

And THAT hits on the reason for the change. When fornication was stigmatized, fathers and older brothers protected the chastity of their daughters and sisters. And if she got pregnant a marriage ensued (sometimes at the point of a shotgun).

With fornication no longer stigmatized (and more fatherlessness) younger teen girls became more susceptible to sexual exploitation (a shocking number of abortions that young teen girls have involve men over 18). Hence the legal and social standard for when girls are “sex-able” had to raise to closer to 18.

But the idea that a 13 year old girl having sex with someone 18 or over is “pedophilia” is what is “chic” and “novel.” I would agree that it’s wrong, but not part of some clinical sexual disorder.

Loretta Lynn’s husband and Jerry Lee Lewis were not viewed as “pedophiles” for being in marriages where one party was an adult, the other a 13-year-old girl (as both were in the conservative South in the 1950s).

I think he’s basically right, and here’s where those crazy, crazy Greeks come in.

I would submit that while classical Athenian pederasty and classical Athenian marriage were by our standards both morally appalling institutions, marriage was far worse — provided only that we hold homosexuality vs. heterosexuality morally neutral. The fate of the classical brides was way, way worse than that of the classical boy lovers. [Note: Might this have something to do with why Plato ranked homosexual love higher than heterosexual love? A question for our meta-symposium.]

Yes, I’m aware that many of you won’t want to take this step, and you won’t hold homosexuality morally neutral. This post probably isn’t for you, then.

Greek women typically married at around age 14 or 15. Greek men typically married at age 30, an enormous age difference by today’s standards (which, as Jon points out, are fairly recent). In a pederastic relationship, there was certainly an age gap, but it was also usually a smaller one. The younger member of the relationship — I hesitate to say “partner,” because it implies an equality that didn’t exist — could be anywhere from 14 to 18, and he was often above that. The older member of the pair could be married but did not have to be, and could easily have been younger than thirty. If the age difference is what creeps us out about Athenian pederasty, then we haven’t been looking very hard, because the age difference was equal or greater in marriage.

And what about the non-monogamy that this setup entails? Well, yes, the married pederast was non-monogamous. But given the cultural acceptance and integration of pederasty into Athenian society, it’s difficult to say that non-monogamy was the fault specifically of pederasty — and not the fault of marriage, where non-monogamy was likewise grudgingly allowed. Women just had to accept that sometimes their husbands took boy lovers. Sometimes they took girl lovers, too, and in both cases there wasn’t a lot that the wife could do about it. This in my book counts as a strike against the Athenian marriage norms, not against that culture’s pederasty per se.

Life as a married woman was one of near slavery. Married girls were secluded from the world. Typically they were confined to the women’s quarters in the back of the house, wholly in the thrall of husbands. They could sometimes travel to a limited number of places to buy essentials for the household, but that was all. Seclusion was the ideal. If a wife had servants, she was to send them instead.

Beloved boys, however, were allowed their freedom to move about, and the relationship between lover and beloved could be interrupted at any time by the boy’s father if he thought it in his son’s best interests to do so. While in the relationship, the boy continued his education (which women never got) and continued to exercise, to compete in games, and to prepare for life as a citizen (which women also never got… typically, they didn’t even get the exercise).

For women, initiating divorce was exceedingly rare. Of course, we all believe that divorce ought to be rare, but in Athens, woman-initiated divorce was so rare that historians have difficulty identifying any genuine historical cases of it at all. Surely this is too few divorces, given the reality of spousal abuse. Fathers did not typically watch out for the welfare of married daughters, and, unlike with their sons in pederastic relationships, the fathers were loath to take their daughters back. Judging by Athenian law, it appears that they would do so only if the dowry was also returned — with interest.

Even death didn’t end a woman’s obligations in marriage, which lasted as long as she lived. On death, and if she had no sons, she could be legally obliged to marry her husband’s closest kinsman in order to keep the property (that is, the real estate as well as her body) in the family. Marriage was even more binding than “till death do us part.” It was a sexual and property contract with an entire family.

Oh heck, let’s just let an ancient Athenian explain it. Here’s Sophocles; the voice is that of a married woman, believed to be Procne, in his only partially extant play Tereus:

But now, separated from my home, I am undone. Often, indeed, I have observed how miserable my sex is in this respect. When we are girls, our life in our father’s house is the sweetest, methinks, that can fall to mortal; for the days of thoughtless childhood are ever glad. But when we come to years of discretion, we are thrust out, and sold in marriage far away from our ancestral gods and from our parents; — some of us to other parts of Hellas, some to barbarians, some into houses where all is strange, some into places of reproach. And in all this, when once the nuptial night is past, we must acquiesce, and deem that it is well. — Sophocles, fragment 583. Cited in The Fragments of Sophocles, ed. by A. C. Pearson, MA. Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1917, vol II, p 228.

Where am I going with all of this? I do not mean to defend Athenian or any other pederasty as a good thing. I only mean to point out that the attention — and the particular odium — attached to Athenian pederasty is curious. Side by side with it, we have an institution that was even more age-disparate, a great deal more restrictive of individual freedom, and a very great deal more legally binding. And what is it that attracts our attention? Why, it would appear to be the sheer fact that pederasty is between two males. Icky!

The payoff here, with regard to Eberstadt, is that pedophilia isn’t a level playing field, and if it’s skewed in any direction, it’s very generously skewed in favor of excusing heterosexual pedophilia. Some types of pedophilia, like ancient Athenian marriage, were never “chic.” That’s because they were never problematized. They were always just considered normal. Gay men today are made to disavow Athenian pederasty as a cultural antecedent, if ever they are tempted to claim it. Why isn’t Athenian marriage similarly disavowed? I can think of no good reasons whatsoever for this distinction.

I’m currently reading Troublesome Young Men, a history of anti-fascist parliamentarians in 1930s Britain. At first blush, this has very little to do with David’s excellent post on homosexuality, pedophilia and desire. But the book’s treatment of Robert Boothby, a promiscuous Scottish MP, is worth reproducing:

Boothby loved Germany and had visited it many times. Fluent in German, he came to see his friends, talk politics and economics, and listen to opera (he was a regular at the Wagner festival at Bayreuth). He also sampled the decadent night life of Berlin, where “along the Kurfürstendamm,” in the words of Stefan Zweig, “powdered and rouged young men sauntered, and in the dimly lit bars one might see men of the world of finance courting drunken sailors.” Although Boothby’s sexual relationships were primarily with women, he was also known to engage in homosexual escapades. In Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, he recalled in his memoirs, “homosexuality was rampant; and, as I was very good looking [then], I was chased all over the place and rather enjoyed it.”

As David notes, the idea of a class of permanent homosexuals is a fairly recent cultural development, but that notion seems to have become conventional wisdom over the past several decades. Gay conversion stories are universally ridiculed in the mainstream, and if I was to tell my friends I had sex with a man the other night, they wouldn’t assume I was dabbling; they’d assume I was gay.

Just because this is conventional wisdom, however, doesn’t mean our ideas about the permanence of sexual attraction are wrong. Here’s David:

Part of this cataloging and extirpation process was the identification of homosexuals as a sub-set of the population who were like other people except with respect to this single pathology. This made its way into general opinion in odd, quasi-medical ways, but the general sentiment directed towards this newly invented population, I gather, was not unlike the way we feel about pedophiles today: a covert, unspeakable menace threatening our children in the midst of us.

Hindsight and the crudity of mid-century scientism have allowed Foucault and others to speak of our “invention” of permanent sexual preferences. Although early efforts to classify and catalog human sexuality are undoutedly rife with misunderstanding, this doesn’t mean contemporary views of same-sex attraction are wrong. Instead, I’d compare our attempts to understand human sexuality to modern medicine’s understanding of the human body. It does not follow from the problems of over-diagnosing or over-prescribing medicine that doctors or Big Pharma “invented” cancer and schizophrenia. Similarly, our limited understanding of human sexuality does not mean that permanent same-sex attraction is purely a product of modern cultural conventions.

To return to Boothby, I think it’s possible that some people are and always have been attracted to both sexes. But I also think it’s possible that the fluidity of premodern human sexuality was not, as Foucault suggests, our natural state of affairs. Instead, it’s just as likely that older ideas about “dabbling” in same-sex liaisons were misguided attempts to rationalize homosexuality as a transitory phase or youthful foible.

Patrick Deneen has written a fascinating entry on friendship, politics and civic virtue. Excerpting doesn’t do the post justice, but here’s the crux of his thesis:

The real relationships of people in their localities is to be replaced by rationalized and approved “programs” – “justice” is to replace “friendship. Much of the domestic politics of the 20th-century has been precisely motivated by this ambition, to displace local loyalties, and with them, attendant limitations upon those loyalties, with an abstract loyalty to nation (and, now, to the “international community”) in which concrete relations are replaced by fungible arrangements based in utility and justice is ensured by government mandate and policy. Justice – the inferior standard of mistrustful individuals – liberates us to pursue our interests without concern for the loyalties to places and communities; it is a wan echo of friendship, aimed above all toward the goal of individual liberation from the “bondage” of care, and further, a narrowed view toward the world and fellow creatures to one based mainly upon utility. Fellow citizens become more often viewed as competitors and even enemies than friends: as Aristotle predicted, where civic friendship wanes, lawsuits fill the emptied public space. Accordingly, our general mistrust for the public grows, and our relationship to law becomes one in which we see it as an imposition from outside – by “foreign” elites – rather than as emanating from the interaction of fellow citizens with a shared and discernible concern for commonweal. Our “liberation” from the bonds and limitations imposed by friendship in politics leads to the rise of the felt sense of political tyranny.  This analysis, of course, echoed Tocqueville’s understanding that the rise of “soft tyranny” came not from “Statism” as such, but the isolation and weakness experienced by modern democratic “individuals.”

I’m certainly sympathetic to this diagnosis, but I think it’s pretty easy to see why friendship isn’t a suitable basis for political administration beyond the local level. The central objection is scalability: what looks like harmless familiarity at a town meeting is more like cronyism on the national stage. In an intimate setting, the logic of appointing people you know and trust is pretty straightforward: disinterested, scientific expertise is harder to come by at the local level; close working relationships often produce successful results, and friends and neighbors are less likely to assume cronyism or bribery played a part in personnel decisions if they can vouch for the character of the appointee.

Without the benefits of familiarity, however, political friendship veers dangerously close to outright corruption. Detached from localities, politicians are no longer subject to close supervision from their constituents, who can prevent practices like appointing friends from lapsing into outright cronyism. I don’t think it’s any accident that Ted Stevens, Alaska’s legendarily corrupt former Senator, was also celebrated for his political loyalties:

Many of Stevens’s colleagues afford a grudging respect for him. In part that’s because, in spite of his outbursts, Stevens has a certain old-fashioned integrity: He keeps his word and is fiercely loyal to his friends. According to one Senate aide, Stevens was constantly by the side of his dear friend Democrat Daniel Inouye when the Hawaii senator’s wife died last year. (Inouye reciprocated last month by touring Alaska with Stevens in his hour of distress, telling the local press that coverage of his ethics woes is “overkill” and saying that, if it weren’t for Stevens’s earmarking, “Alaska would be in the Stone Age.”)

Having read the Porch for some time, I think I can anticipate Deneen’s response to this objection: Don’t get rid of friendship in politics, get rid of politics at the national level! Whether this is feasible or not is another question entirely. Deneen favorably mentions the Articles of Confederation earlier in his post, so why not consider the Republic’s dire condition before the Constitution was ratified? Congress couldn’t collect enough revenue to pay off its wartime debts, and if you read City Journal’s excellent article on John Jay, you’ll learn that the government’s inability to force state citizens to pay off prewar British creditors allowed England to maintain garrisons on American soil even after the Treaty of Paris was signed. To take a more recent example, I’m not sure how the civil rights movement would have fared without the benefit of a disinterested, muscular national government. Friendship and civic virtue may go hand-in-hand at the local level, but on the national stage, some pretense of objectivity is worth preserving.

Urbanophile has posted some thoughts on preserving buildings from the mid-20th century:

“Mid-century modern architecture is now in the same danger zone chronologically that late 19th-century buildings were in during the urban renewal period. These buildings are old enough to be considered dated, but not old enough to be considered ‘historic.’ The exact same was true of all those buildings that got torn down in the 60’s and are now are so lamented.”

Modernist buildings are not in the same danger now that 19th-century buildings were in 1950 because there is now an active preservationist movement in the United States, and while many preservationists may not care about modernist structures, the ones that do at least have the resources now to put up a fight when one is threatened. Nonetheless, the point is well taken. Many not-particularly-famous modernist buildings are minor masterpieces, such as this abandoned bus station in Baltimore, sufficiently obscure that I couldn’t find any photos of it online, but despite their aesthetic value the taste of the general public finds them banal at best. If a developer wanted to tear down that bus station and construct a highrise, it seems unlikely that protests would be general or vociferous. And this station is an example of Streamline Moderne, a relatively charismatic species of 20th-century architecture. Pity the Bauhaus-inflected fire station in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood (once again, no photos online), which probably reminds most passers-by of everything they hated about the 1970s.

And yet, even for those of us who find these buildings aesthetically thrilling, there is a real difference between modernist and late-19th-century structures that militates against preserving the former. Modernist styles, especially Modernism with a capital ‘M’ as incarnated in the International Style, are hostile to urban life. Modernist architects rejected the age-old practices that shaped 19th-century neighborhoods: they rejected the concept of the pedestrian-oriented streetfront, the idea of the vertical setback to let the sun shine onto the street, the idea of the small city block, the idea of non-standard floorplans, and the idea of the street as a public place. Where urban architecture prior to the mid-20th-century believed in the ideal of a city full of small shops and offices, citizens walking from place to place and occasionally encountering one another in the street, modernist design principles proposed instead a city of highways and rectilinear skyscrapers. This vision captured hearts and minds, as they say, and the rest is history. Daniel at Discovering Urbanism wrote a great post illustrating the contrast between the 19th- and 20th-century visions as it plays out in Albany. He posts photographs of the modernist Empire State Plaza and a historic street nearby:

There’s no doubt that the plaza is superior as a work of art. Among its many admirable qualities, perhaps the most skillful is how it rebuffs attempts to grasp its scale. The buildings on the right are not really all that tall (about twenty floors, it looks like, or 300 ft), but the strong vertical lines and the relative absence of lines telling you where the floors are, plus the vaguely geological extrusions, make the buildings appear as if they could be any size. They could be a mile tall and a mile away or they could be 300 ft tall and 300 ft away. The result is a kind of desituation, an ambiguity about physical location, which is of course part of the philosophical articulation of the International Style. But you’d never want to go looking in that plaza for a cafe to stumble into by chance.

Not all modernist structures are so miserably anti-urban (Mies van der Rohe’s complex of federal buildings in Chicago is a notable, if qualified exception), but as a rule they present hostile faces to the street and slow the reemergence of non-pathological street life in American cities. No one is threatening to tear down the Empire State Plaza, but if the wreckers came for the fire station in Cincinnati, despite my appreciation of its aesthetic merits, I can’t say that I would object.

Ages, places, and nations sometimes have characteristic architectural forms. Sometimes these forms, like vinyl-clad McMansions, or the decrepit and vaguely totalitarian National Mall, tell you things about a culture that its members would rather not know, and surely most places and times have an architecture of that kind. Other forms are characteristic not only of some virtue or vice in a society, however, but its self-understanding. The greatest of these forms was probably the cathedral in the high and late Middle Ages, which was simultaneously an expression of the aesthetic, economic, and political aspirations of a community as well as an act of humility before G-d, echoing the incarnation by uniting G-d and man. Nowadays we capitalist Westerners have our own entrant, which is of course the skyscraper.

Skyscapers are like cathedrals in another way: they contain a place within the building that is natural to treat as sacred. In the cathedral this space was the center of the cross formed by the nave and the transept, and in the skyscraper it is the highest floor of the building. What we use this space for can tell us about ourselves, I think. Observation decks are therefore a symbol of modernity, and an important one. They are open to the public and serve no purpose other than to gratify the mind and the eye with the sight of the city spread out below. This gratification, I suggest, is one of the many ways in which modernity is actually more Christian than the Middle Ages.

Nothing like the scientific method was found in antiquity, and what glimmers of it appeared in the Middle Ages were feeble. The systematic use of the method, institutionalized in journals and laboratories, is characteristically modern, but the psychology of the scientists who employ it represents a Christian ideal. Many scientists seem to feel a passionate, personal joy at the ordered reasonableness of the universe, or more specifically, that it is reasonable, but its reasons are never exhausted. This joy is a species of the joy in being qua being that Aquinas, speaking for the Christian tradition, claimed to be the proper disposition of all Christians toward the created order.  You have to know some scientists personally, I think, to realize that scientists are like this, because scientists themselves are not encouraged to articulate it, though sometimes you do hear statements in the press about how a new finding is “really darn cool.”

Being happy merely to see and to understand, as scientists are, is the feeling responsible for observation decks, whose most intellectually incurious and aesthetically stolid visitors thrill with joy as they marvel at the works of Man and discover how familiar neighborhoods tessellate. Though surmise about the psychology of ages past is hazardous, I’ll venture to guess that the civilization of the modern West has privileged and encouraged joy in the way the universe works more than any civilization in history.

I write all of this by way of introduction, since this is my first post at the League and much of my blogging will be characterized by choleric and occasionally intemperate hostility towards liberal democracy and industrial capitalism, such that you might mistake me for a Front Porcher in an ordinary gentleman’s clothing. So, while I am interested in the alienation of man from himself that is peculiar to modernity, I don’t forget that modernity has created new possibilities of experience we would do wrong to abandon. I also believe that the joy I described above animates the best bloggers on the internet, and I hope it will characterize my own blogging here.

A few months ago, I recommended Jason Kuznicki’s excellent article on America’s history of state-sanctioned racial discrimination. In it, Kuznicki discusses the relationship between government regulations and social prejudice (emphasis mine):

In a mobile and egalitarian commercial republic influenced by Christianity, practicing racism ought to be difficult. It becomes much easier, however, when there are legally established definitions of race and when outcomes and opportunities are clearly bound to racial identity. Laws to this effect work to fix definitions of race in the public mind, even if these definitions don’t map well onto physiological reality.

Law reifies race. Racialized laws are likely to be enacted by lawmakers who were racists to begin with, but their continued existence also makes racism easier to practice in the future, whether in the public sector, the private sector, or even the confines of one’s own mind.

In a new article from Southern Spaces, we see this dynamic at work in turn-of-the-century Atlanta, where white residents sought to exclude blacks from a desirable neighborhood in the Fourth Ward:

White home-owning residents of the Fourth Ward went to considerable lengths to push through the relocation of Morris Brown, a major African American institution in the hopes that the black populace would follow. They organized meetings between white political leadership and school and African Methodist Episcopal Church officials. They offered cash. They offered land. And black Fourth Warders declined each.

Faced with effective black resistance, Jackson Hill’s white home-owning residents met in October 1910 to delineate a fourteen block area in the neighborhood with a racial boundary line and, as the Atlanta Constitution reported, “put the public and all real estate developers on notice that the sale or renting of property within the white territory [specified] would be considered a reprehensible and unfriendly act.”

Brow-beating realtors and bribing black residents to leave didn’t work, so the neighborhood turned to government-enforced housing discrimination to get rid of the undesirables:

When black families continued renting and purchasing homes within Jackson Hill, whites adopted tactics common throughout the urban South and increasingly utilized in the urban North; in 1913 they proposed a city ordinance outlining racial residential segregation procedures.

At the risk of over-generalizing, I think this scenario raises a few interesting questions about libertarian and conservative thinking on race and discrimination. To a cosmopolitan libertarian, the idea that racism in the United States is the product of state-sanctioned discrimination is no doubt an attractive one: it puts the onus of Jim Crow on the state instead of civil society. In turn-of-the-century Atlanta, however, the chain of causation starts with individuals and private homeowner associations: the 1913 city ordinance segregating residential neighborhoods was preceded by private efforts to eject black residents and was the result of what, in retrospect, could plausibly be described as grassroots pressure. Kuznicki acknowledges that state discrimination doesn’t spring fully-formed from some deracinated political vacuum, but I was surprised by the intensity of racial animosity exhibited by white homeowners before the state officially endorsed housing segregation.

A few further questions: First, what if cash bribes and social pressures had been enough to segregate the Fourth Ward? Does a turn-of-the-century conservative/libertarian simply look the other way, perhaps frowning on Atlantans’ retrograde social habits but nonetheless allowing that they have the right to create lily-white neighborhoods through non-coercive means?

On the other hand, the Southern Spaces article suggests that integrated neighborhoods held up surprisingly well despite (or perhaps because of) social pressures. Black families wouldn’t be bribed into leaving their homes.  “Reprehensible and unfriendly” or not, Atlanta’s real estate developers continued to sell property to black families. You often hear that economic logic trumps the psychology of discrimination – perhaps there’s some truth to this after all.

(cross-posted from the United States of Jamerica)

This is a little ridiculous (via Dara’s Google Reader feed):

Boss Creations, a new holiday decor company, has introduced the new “CHRIST-mas” Tree, featuring the unique trait of a trunk in the shape of a wooden cross. Company owner Marsha Boggs says the tree was specifically designed to counter the “war on Christmas.”

“When I became a Christian a few years ago,” says Boggs, “I was appalled by the secularization of the Christmas holiday. When retail stores started substituting ‘Happy Holidays’ for ‘Merry Christmas,’ and schools began calling their Christmas programs ‘Winter Plays,’ it all seemed ridiculous to me. That’s why we have created products that remind people what the Christmas season is really all about – the birth of Christ.”

It’s hilariously ironic that Boggs would use a Christmas tree as a means of combating the “war on Christmas.”  After all, the Christmas tree has distinctly pagan roots and stands mostly outside of Christian tradition.  Indeed, there was a time when Christmas itself was a controversial subject among Christians, many of whom wanted nothing to do with a celebration that hearkened back to the pagan festivals of old (if we’re going for accuracy, the Persian god “Mithras” is the real reason for the season).   If anything, Ms. Bogg’s Christmas tree has the opposite effect: it reminds me that early Christians were a fairly opportunistic bunch, and would happily co-opt pagan celebrations if it meant that they could save a few souls (see: Easter).

That aside, the yearly outrage over the “war on Christmas” reminds me of one of the things that really bothers me about contemporary conservative evangelicalism, namely, it’s tremendous hostility to religious pluralism.  “Happy Holidays” is a fundamentally inclusive greeting.  It’s a way of respecting non-Christian Americans and acknowledging the fact Christmas coincides with other religious holidays equally worthy of respect (like Hanukkah, for instance).  When someone wishes you “Happy Holidays,” they are saying something roughly the same as this: “I’m not sure what your religious beliefs are, but whatever they are, I hope you enjoy the holiday season as much as possible.”

This is the furthest thing from “offensive” that I can imagine, and yet, there are many Christians who are apoplectic about the change.  From what I can gather, the offense comes from the fact that they have to share the holiday.  It’s not enough that Christmas and Christianity are in every other way privileged above other religious celebrations, no, we have to actively avoid acknowledging the existence of other religions.  “Religious freedom” for them isn’t the right to practice as they see fit, it’s the “right” to banish every other religion from the public square, or something to that effect.  It probably isn’t my place to say this (since I’m not the ultimate arbiter of right belief, or something), but the stunning lack of charity and understanding inherent in this approach to other religions and other people strikes me as a pretty clear-cut example of what Jesus specifically asked us not to do.