Around this time every year, I generally post a pile of summer reading I’m trying to stuff into my pack. I’ll probably do that in a few days, but in the meantime, what books are you stuffing into your pack or eBook reader this summer?
And what books would you recommend to others?
More snippets from some of my summer reading, this time from Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto’s 2003 classic The Mystery of Capital, the work that brought home to all those who read it that what the have-nots have not is at root property rights, without which they will forever remain without.
“The major stumbling block that keeps the rest of the world from benefiting from capitalism is its inability to produce capital. Capital is the force that raises the productivity of labour and creates the wealth of nations. It is the lifeblood of the capitalist system, the foundation of progress, and the one thing that the poor countries of the world cannot seem to produce for themselves, no matter how eagerly their peoples engage in all the other activities that characterize a capitalist economy.”
“Even in the poorest countries the poor save. The value of savings among the poor is, in fact, immense: forty times all the foreign aid received throughout the world since 1945. In Egypt, for instance, the wealth that the poor have accumulated is worth fifty-five times as much as the sum of all direct foreign investment ever recorded there, including the Suez Canal and the Aswan Dam.
“In Haiti, the poorest nation in Latin America, the total assets of the poor are more than 150 times greater than all the foreign investment received since the country’s independence from France in 1804. If the United States were to hike its foreign-aid budget to the level recommended by the United Nations – 0.7 per cent of national income – it would take the richest country on earth more than 150 years to transfer to the world’s poor resources equal to those that they already possess.
“But they hold these resources in defective forms: houses built on land whose ownership rights are not adequately recorded, unincorporated businesses with undefined liability, industries located where financiers and investors cannot see them. Because the rights to these possessions are not adequately documented, these assets cannot readily be turned into capital, cannot be traded outside of narrow local circles where people know and trust each other, cannot be used as collateral for a loan and cannot be used as a share against an investment. In the West, by contrast, every parcel of land, every building, every piece of equipment or store of inventories is represented in a property document that is the visible sign of a vast hidden process that connects all these assets to the rest of the economy.”“One of the greatest challenges to the human mind is to comprehend and gain access to those things we know exist but cannot see. Not everything that is real and useful is tangible and visible. Time, for example, is real, but it can only be efficiently managed when it is represented by a clock or a calendar. Throughout history, human beings have invented representational systems – writing, musical notation, double-entry bookkeeping – to grasp with the mind what human hands could never touch. In the same way the great practitioners of capitalism, from the creators of integrated title systems and corporate stock to Michael Milken, were able to reveal and extract capital where others saw just junk by devising new ways to represent the invisible potential that is locked into the assets we accumulate.”
“The proof that property is pure concept comes when a house changes hands; nothing physically changes. Looking at a house will not tell you who owns it. A house that is yours today looks exactly as it did yesterday when it was mine. It looks the same whether I own it, rent it or sell it to you. Property is not the house itself but an economic concept about the house, embodied in a legal representation. This means that a formal property representation is something separate from the asset itself.”
“For [Adam] Smith, economic specialization – the division of labour and the subsequent exchange of products in the market – was the source of increasing productivity and therefore ‘the wealth of nations’. What made this specialization and exchange possible was capital, which Smith defined as the stock of assets accumulated for productive purposes. Entrepreneurs could use their accumulated resources to support specialized enterprises until they could exchange their products for the other things they needed. The more capital was accumulated, the more specialization became possible, and the higher society’s productivity would be. Marx agreed; for him, the wealth capitalism produces presents itself as an immense pile of commodities…
“It is, as it were, a certain quantity of labour stocked and stored up to be employed, if necessary, upon some other occasion.’
… “What I take from [Smith] is that capital is not the accumulated stock of assets but the potential it holds to deploy new production. This potential is, of course, abstract. It must be processed and fixed into a tangible form before we can release it – just like the potential nuclear energy in Einstein’s brick. Without a conversion process – one that draws out and fixes the potential energy contained in the brick – there is no explosion; a brick is just a brick. Creating capital also requires a conversion process.
“This notion – that capital is first an abstract concept and must be given a fixed, tangible form to be useful – was familiar to other classical economists. Simonde de Sismondi, the nineteenth-century Swiss economist, wrote that capital was ‘a permanent value, that multiplies and does not perish . . . Now this value detaches itself from the product that creates it, it becomes a metaphysical and insubstantial quantity always in the possession of whoever produced it, for whom this value could [be fixed in] different forms.’ The great French economist Jean Baptiste Say believed that ‘capital is always immaterial by nature since it is not matter which makes capital but the value of that matter, value has nothing corporeal about it’.
“This essential meaning of capital has been lost to history. Capital is now confused with money, which is only one of the many forms in which it travels…”“As Aristotle discovered 2,300 years ago, what you can do with things increases infinitely when you focus your thinking on their potential. By learning to fix the economic potential of their assets through property records, Westerners created a fast track to explore the most productive aspects of their possessions. Formal property became the staircase to the conceptual realm where the economic meaning of things can be discovered and where capital is born.”
“The genius of the West was to have created a system that allowed people to grasp with the mind values that human eyes could never see and to manipulate things that hands could never touch.”
“Formal property is more than a system for titling, recording and mapping assets – it is an instrument of thought, representing assets in such a way that people’s minds can work on them to generate surplus value. That is why formal property must be universally accessible: to bring everyone into one social contract where they can cooperate to raise society’s productivity.”
“A good legal property system is a medium that allows us to understand each other, make connections and synthesize knowledge about our assets to enhance our productivity. It is a way to represent reality that lets us transcend the limitations of our senses. Well-crafted property representations enable us to pinpoint the economic potential of resources so as to enhance what we can do with them. They are not ‘mere paper’: they are mediating devices that give us useful knowledge about things that are not manifestly present.”
“The capacity of property to reveal the capital that is latent in the assets we accumulate is borne out of the best intellectual tradition of controlling our environment in order to prosper.”
“The philosopher John Searle has noted that by human agreement we can assign ‘a new status to some phenomenon, where that status has an accompanying function that cannot be performed solely in virtue of the intrinsic physical features of the phenomenon in question’. This seems to me very close to what legal property does: it assigns to assets, by social contract, in a conceptual universe, a status that allows them to perform functions that generate capital.”
“Throughout history people have confused the efficiency of the representational tools they have inherited to create surplus value with the inherent values of their culture. They forget that often what gives an edge to a particular group of people is the innovative use they make of a representational system developed by another culture. For example, Northerners had to copy the legal institutions of ancient Rome to organize themselves, and learn the Greek alphabet and Arabic number symbols and systems to convey information and calculate. And so, today, few are aware of the tremendous edge that formal property systems have given Western societies. As a result, many Westerners have been led to believe that what underpins their successful capitalism is the work ethic they have inherited, or the existential anguish created by their religions – in spite of the fact that people all over the world all work hard when they can, and that existential angst or overbearing mothers are not Calvinist or Jewish monopolies… Therefore, a great part of the research agenda needed to explain why capitalism fails outside the West remains mired in a mass of unexamined and largely untestable assumptions labelled ‘culture’, whose main effect is to allow too many of those who live in the privileged enclaves of this world to enjoy feeling superior…
“This is not to say that culture does not count. All people in the world have specific preferences, skills and patterns of behaviour that can be regarded as cultural. The challenge is fathoming which of these traits are really the ingrained, unchangeable identity of a people and which are determined by economic and legal constraints. Is illegal squatting on real estate in Egypt and Peru the result of ancient, ineradicable nomadic traditions among the Arabs and the Quechuas’ back-and-forth custom of cultivating crops at different vertical levels of the Andes? Or does it happen because in both Egypt and Peru it takes more than fifteen years to obtain legal property rights to desert land? In my experience squatting is mainly due to the latter. When people have access to an orderly mechanism to settle land that reflects the social contract, they will take the legal route and only a minority, like anywhere else, will insist on extra-legal appropriation. Much behaviour that is today attributed to cultural heritage is not the inevitable result of people’s ethnic or idiosyncratic traits but of their rational evaluation of the relative costs and benefits of entering the legal property system.
“Legal property empowers individuals in any culture, and I doubt that property per se directly contradicts any major culture. Vietnamese, Cuban and Indian migrants have clearly had few problems adapting to US property law. If correctly conceived, property law can reach beyond cultures to increase trust between them and, at the same time, reduce the costs of bringing things and thoughts together. Legal property sets the exchange rates between different cultures and thus gives them a bedrock of economic commonalities from which to do business with each other.”“And so formal property is this extraordinary thing, much bigger than simple ownership. Unlike tigers and wolves, who bare their teeth to protect their territory, man, physically a much weaker animal, has used his mind to create a legal environment – property – to protect his territory. Without anyone fully realizing it, the representational systems the West created to settle territorial claims took on lives of their own, providing the knowledge base and rules necessary to fix and realize capital.”
More snippets clipped from my summer reading, this time from William Patterson’s 2010 biography of the SF master.
“Heinlein’s hard-core un-common sense, dosed out mostly as entertainment, had given the parentless generations of the mid-twentieth century something of what previous generations had gotten, in quiet moments, one-one-one with their fathers and their tribe’s wise men: their portion, all they could take, of life wisdom. They counted Heinlein their “intellectual father,” as an earlier generation regarded Mark Twain… They had needed, sometimes desperately, to hear what he had to say—not slogans, but tools:
‘What are the facts? Again and again and again—what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore
divine revelation, forget ‘what the stars foretell,’ avoid opinion, care not what the neighbours think, never
mind, the un-guessable ‘verdict of history’—what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You
pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue.’”
“[The film from Heinlein’s screenplay] Destination Moon was released in 1950 and caused a national sensation by visualising for the people of the world the first trip to the Moon… Now, in 1969, he was a celebrity again, his big satire on hypocrisy Stranger in a Strange Land still picking up steam, though almost nobody seemed to understand it was not a book of answers, but a book of questions.”
“[It was July 20, 1969, and as Neil Armstrong took that small step onto the moon’s surface for first time,] Heinlein sat in a makeshift studio in Downey California … with Walter Cronkite and Arthur C. Clarke … they wanted him for commentary, when he was too excited, almost, to talk at all. Heinlein had yearned for the moon most of his life, and had done what he could to make it happen—in aeronautical engineering in the Navy, then writing about it, making real to readers … [as he] got on with his real work of teaching people who to live in the future…
“This is a great day,” Heinlein told Cronkite: ‘This is the greatest event in all the history of the human race, up
to this time. This is—today is New Year’s Day of the Year One. If
we don’t change the calendar, historians will do so. The human race—
this is our change, our puberty rite, bar mitzvah, confirmation, from
the change from infancy into adulthood for the human race. And we
are going to go on out, not only to the Moon, to the stars: we’re going
to spread. I don’t know that the United States is going to do it; I hope
so. I have—I’m an American myself; I want it to be done by us. But
in any case, the human race is going to do it, it’s utterly inevitable:
we're going to spread through the entire universe.’”
“So successful was his writerly mission that Heinlein was increasingly sought out as a guru—a position he rejected. At almost the same time Stranger in a Strange Land was speaking to the spiritual life of a new generation, so too The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was galvanising another movement of young people coming together. The movement has suffered many ups and downs, but well into the twenty-first century libertarianism is still with us … stile holding out Heinlein’s vision of what an untrammelled society might look like.”
In his first naval placement, Heinlein was impressed that his hard-pressing ship’s commander on the USS Lexington Captain, later Admiral, King “always looked unhurried and unworried, but he worked very hard anticipating anything that could go wrong and paying attention to every detail—even the ones he seemed not to notice at the time… King expected performance from his subordinates—and got it: ‘I find a boss who consistently requires high performance much easier to work for than one who blows both hot and cold. As for the third sort, who are always satisfied with poor performance—I quit!’”
As a fan of his science fiction writing, Heinlein was initially sympathetic to H.G. Wells’s brand of socialism, which muckraking journalist and 1930 Socialist Party candidate for California governor Upton Sinclair described as having been killed by Communism:
‘Socialism [like Wells’ which was creative is stunned, and Communism, which is the sabotage of civilisation by the disappointed, has usurped its name and inheritance … The new Marxist Socialism, therefore, with its confident dogmas, its finality and hardness, its vindictive will, developed an intensity and energy that drowned and almost silenced the broader, more tentative, and scientific [sic] initiatives of the older, the legitimate Socialism. Communism, with its class-war obsession, ate up Socialism.’ "
“The socialism of Sinclair and Wells was ‘progressive’—the term means social change by progressive stages of education and gradual political conversion, as opposed to the violent revolutionary change should by Marxist theory. Progressivism fit very comfortably with the liberal orientation of the Democratic Party platform; Sinclair switched his party affiliation on September 1, 1933, changing his techniques, he said, but not his principles: ‘I found I was not getting anywhere as a Socialist,’ he explained… , ‘ and so I decided to make progress with one of the two old parties.’ ”
“In July 1935, the Seventh World Congress of the [Communist International] announced the Popular Front against fascism throughout the world, bizarrely holding up the Nazi government of Germany as ‘the highest form of capitalism.’ The success of this peculiar ‘big lie’ would crippled the ability of traditional liberals to resist the growth of totalitarian ideology. They would have to be antifascist, anticommunist and anticapitalist all at the same time. Liberals didn’t realise it yet, but traditional—‘classical’—liberalism began to collapse as an intellectual movement … from that moment.”
“[In 1936] Robert and [his wife] Leslyn started hosting informal breakfasts Sunday mid-mornings for [electioneering Democrat] workers in their district, to provide a neutral ground where all the [party’s] different factions could come face-to-face… Leslyn Heinlein recorded some thoughts about this process:
‘…one of the most useful functions Bob and I performed in
our political activities was that of getting people together who were in basic agreement and didn’t know it. It
is amazing how quickly methods of accomplishing a desired end can be worked out, once two people who
have been busy hating each other’s guts get the idea they want to accomplish the same end and have
been fighting over how.’ ”
“Pragmatically, Robert and Leslyn knew that the Democratic Party was rotten with communists… [and] were very much in the way insofar as the success of the Democratic Party was concerned… For his efforts, he got on the Communist Party’s ‘better dead’ list… The dislike was mutual. Individual communist may not be villains, but Heinlein had then then common liberal’s abhorrence of communism as an active force in the world:
‘Let me go on record that I regard communism as expressed by the U.S.S.R and its friends here and
elsewhere as a grisly horror, a tyranny maintained by force and terror, utterly subversive of human
liberty, freedom of thought, and dignity. I regard it as Red fascism, distinguishable from black and
brown fascism by differences of no importance to me nor to its victims.’ ”
In April 1939, “flat broke following a disastrous political campaign … and with a heavily-mortgaged house” Heinlein submitted his first short story “Life-Line” to Astounding Science Fiction and was rewarded with a cheque for $75, then a fairly princely sum. “ ‘How long has this racket been going on?” he demanded rhetorically. “And why didn’t someone tell me about it sooner?’ ”
“Germany … rejected Great Britain's ultimatum to return to its borders after the invasion of Poland, and the suddenly revealed Hitler-Stalin pact had American communists spluttering. England declared war on Germany, and the French were mobilising. On September 3, 1939, Heinlein composed a memorandum/prediction for his own files: ‘A note from Robert A. Heinlein of this date to R.A.H. of some later date, just to keep the record straight’:
‘Great Britain has just declared war on Germany. France joins them.
‘Germany has not attacked Britain nor France… I do not justify Germany’s attack, but let’s keep the
record straight. Britain is not entering this war to save democracy (Poland is a dictatorship), nor because of
the "holiness" of her treaty obligations (remember both Ethiopia and Czechoslovakia—a democracy,
incidentally—and Spain).
‘So far as I can see, Britain is entering this war because Germany is getting stronger than she likes. She
has decided to fight Germany because she thinks she can lick her now, and isn’t sure she can later-let’s not
be sanctimonious about it.
‘This war isn’t being fought for Thomas Mann, nor Albert Einstein, nor for other persecuted Jews. Nor is
it being fought for "democracy." It’s being fought to preserve the worst and most unjust features of the
Versailles Treaty. Let's get that straight. And stop Hitlerism makes as much sense as Hang the Kaiser.
‘Hitler is a symptom of Versailles—we caused him. The insanity he typifies we caused.
‘This is where we came in—want to sit through another show?’
“He added a handwritten postscript:
‘I’ll bet two bits that from here on anyone who is not pro-British will be called un-American.’ ”
“Toward the end of 1940, … Heinlein [was persuaded to] take up photography as a hobby. ‘I am completely nuts on the subject of cameras,’ he told [a friend]. ‘This produces a vicious cycle: I have to write stories to support my camera, darkroom, buy gear etc., but I really haven't got time to write stories because photography is a full time occupation.’ Nude photography was what he spent most of his free time and spare cash on. Heinlein never had any difficulty getting women to pose for him—which astonished his friends and acquaintances. To him, it was simply a numbers game: ‘If you approach a woman right, one out of two will post nude for you… Leslyns’s chaperonage is the main reason I can get anyone to pose for me I want for the purpose.’ The Heinleins also belonged for several years to a camera co-op that hired live models at group rates. In 1941, the co-op brought him the perfect model, Sunrise Lee. ‘She could not fall into an ungrateful pose,’ [he said]. A nude study hung in his house for the rest of his life.”
“With the money [from writing] coming in … making a studio for himself [went to] the top of his list… He didn’t bother getting a permit for the work, but sneaked materials in under cover of night, and even cut the windows and outside door at night so that the neighbours could not catch on and complain. When the structure was completed, he posted a sign … on the outside door, to discourage random visitors and door-to-door salesmen:
‘ENDOSTROPHIC THERAPY ROOM. KEEP OUT!
DO NOT KNOCK!!!
Use upper door—it works quite well’
“The ‘upper door’ was the main house … where Leslyn had posted her own sign:
‘Anyone knocking on this door before eleven a.m.
will be buried free of charge.’”
“There is a certain type of personality … unfortunately common in science-fiction fandom, for which adoration [of SF writers] is a red flag. A dozen or so of these boys … followed him around [at conventions] and made a ‘steady and malicious effort’ to whittle him down to size. This irritation loomed large in his mind. ‘They were so rude that I did not enjoy [the guest-of-honour experience].’ He wondered for years why the more socially adept fans didn’t rein them in.”
“I haven’t anything which could properly be termed a religion [he wrote to a friend when asked about the subject]. My thoughts on religious subjects are matters of intellectual rather than emotional conviction. The nearest thing to a religious feeling I have, and, I believe, strong enough to justify calling it religious feeling, has to do with the United States of America. It is not a reasoned evaluation but an overpowering emotion. The land itself as well as the people, its culture in the broadest most vulgar sense, its history and its customs … I have no God. The only think which inspires in me a feeling of something much bigger and more important than myself … is this country of ours. I know it is not logical—I presume that a mature man’s attachments should be for a set of principles rather than for a particular group or a certain stretch of soil. But I don’t feel that way … every rolling word of the Constitution, and the bright sharp brave phrases of the Bill of Rights—they get me where I live. Our own music, whether it’s Yankee Doodle, or the Missouri Waltz, or our own bugle calls—it gets me.”
“Not even overwork to the point of exhaustion put a serious crimp in Heinlein’s omnivorous reading… Robert particularly enjoyed C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters [written] from the perspective of a senior demon giving infernal advice to his nephew, a tyro imp, on how best to corrupt human souls. The conceit ticked Heinlein's fancy.
“Vincent McHugh, whose 1936 Caleb Catlum’s America Heinlein was still using as a touchstone by which to measure the compatibility of potential friends (along with Charles G. Finney’s The Circus of Dr Lao and an odd little French graphic novel Private Memoirs of a Profiteer by Marcel Arnac) published his fourth book, I Am Thinking of My Darling—a response to H.G. Wells’s In the Days of the Comet....
“But Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers so exactly said things Heinlein believed desperately needed I to be said that Heinlein’s enthusiasm ran away with him and he gushed for an hour about the book to e very uninterested fan … who came to visit one day in 1943.”
“Heinlein had come to despise his [wartime] job [at the Naval Aeronautics Lab]—the waste, the inefficiency, the absolute rigidity of the bureaucratic read tape that tied everything up in knots and made it nearly impossible to get anything useful done…
‘I found here my conception of the navy had been incorrect or at least incomplete … and I began to be
ashamed of being a naval officer (yes, ashamed). Presently the heroic exploits of the fleet compensated in
part and gradually I began to understand the mechanism which produced, automatically, [the place he and
his co-workers had dubbed] Snafu Manor. It does not produce bastards, but it gives them scope…”
“ ‘It was Ian Hay, I believe, who first discovered that any military administration is divided into three departments: the Fairy Godmother Department, the Practical Joke Department, and the Surprise Party Department. By preparing for Come-What-May I may circumvent and discourage the latter two and be turned over to the benevolence of the first. But I am not optimistic; the resourcefulness of the two larger departments can hardly be measured.’ – Letter to a friend, 1944.”
“Early in July 1945 the imperial Japanese government had approached the Soviet government to open diplomatic discussions for a negotiated peace. By this time however, it was clear that what the Japanese wanted was a ‘breather’ to rebuild their shattered war machine, and that was not acceptable: there would be no prospect for peace so long as the military was in control of the Japanese government… Early in the morning of August 6, 1945, the specially modified bomber Enola Gay approached the industrial city of Hiroshima … and dropped its payload, the U-235 bomb code-named Little Boy… Heinlein had known about a secret War Department project involving uranium and did his best to keep talk about the subject in his presence to a minimum, preferably none at all. Now, atomics were a reality—and the future rushed in.
“Even while he struggled to grasp the enormity, his mind flashed ahead to the meaning of the event. ‘That’s the end,’ he said flatly. The end of the war, almost certainly—but also, Goodbye To All That, the end of the whole world as it was before August 6, 1945…
‘Combine the atomic bomb with the V2 and I believe it is evident o any sober-minded technical man that
the events of 6 Aug, et seq., should cause us carefully to re-examine all plans, proposals, and projects
which obtained before that time … In the broad sense we are out of business, just as thoroughly out off
business as were wooden fighting ships after the battle of the Monitor and Merrimac… It is a simple fact that
(1) we cannot afford a war ever again, (2) the atomic bomb cannot be abolished, nor can it be indefinitely
kept from other peoples. We must ride the lightning and ride it well. I conceive the atomic bomb as being
the force behind the police power for a planetary peace … such a force there must be if we are not be
ourselves destroyed.’ ”
“The Naval Air Materials Center, the research wing of the Naval Aircraft Factory, should organise ‘a major project’ with all the usual apparatus of its wartime R & D projects, to develop a man-carrying rocket out of V2 technology. The first step could be an unmanned ‘messenger rocket’ to the Mon, guided by the new radar target-seeking technology…
‘It must be noted that it is really much easier to build a successful Moon rocket than to build a proper war rocket [he wrote in a memo that went up the Naval and diplomatic channels]. Nevertheless either problem can be sued to solve the other—the choice between the two is a choice in diplomacy and politics.’
“The public, he said, is now ready for such a project, and Robert Goddard had suggested a good test in his 1920 technical paper: the Moon rocket could carry a fifty-pound payload of carbon black. An explosion just before touchdown could disperse it far enough for eth mark to be seen on Earth, even by quite low-powered amateur telescopes…. ‘The unique prestige which would accrue to the United States of America, to the U.S. Navy, and to NAMC in particular cannot be expressed.’ ”
“Heinlein set out his understanding of the current situation in a letter [to a friend]:
‘As I see it, we finally finished off the war by plunging the globe and ourselves in particular into the
greatest crisis, the most acute danger, in all history. I am not deploring it. I know that the discovery of
atomic power was inevitable and I know that you can’t turn the clock back, no turn sausage back into hog. It
is here. We’ve got to face it and deal with it. I am overwhelmingly thankful that we got it first and that it
was brought out into the open by the war. Now we have a fighting chance to save civilisation as we know it
and the very globe we stand on. If the Axis had gotten it we would have had no chance. It might have been
a thousand years before freedom and human dignity would ever again have been known.
‘But I am bitterly afraid of the way we may handle it. There are two crazy approaches … The first says
"We’ve got it … From now on they got to do what we tell them too" … The second crazy viewpoint regards
the atomic bomb as just another weapon, powerful but bound to be subjected in time to an effective
counter weapon… There is a third reaction, one of deploring the whole thing [and] of passing
resolutions expressing regret that we ever used so barbarous a weapon…
‘You might call these three types of dunderheads the bloody minded, the common or garden
unimaginative stupid, and the custard head. God deliver us from all of them.’ ”
“Magician [and Heinlein friend] Jack Parsons rented out rooms in the large house in Pasadena he had inherited, seeking odd and eccentric characters of all kinds. This suited L. Ron Hubbard’s needs [who had just finished lodging at Heinlein’s house], and he moved in. Parsons had assumed leadership of the Los Angeles chapter of Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), and he gave weekly presentations of the ‘Gnostic Mass’ in the attic of the house.
“The Gnostic Mass was a theatrical piece rather than a true religious rite, suitable for introducing newcomers to the basic concepts of Crowley’s religion of Thelema… Parsons found Hubbard [who was later to create the religion of Scientology] ‘the most Thelemic person I have ever met.’ Hubbard immediately became comfortable in Parsons’s eccentric ménage—and soon started an affair with Parson’s live-in lover and magickal assistant, Sara ‘Betty’ Northrup… It appears Parsons had little objection to make when Hubbard took over Betty’s affections; Betty’s affections were habitually strewn around pretty indiscriminately, and not just as a matter of adolescent friendliness… Instead, Parsons immediately threw himself into a magickal project to call down an elemental to take her place.”
“In January 1946, [Heinlein] wrote another of his atomics articles, ‘America’s Maginot Line’—this time pointing out how inadequate conventional weapons were to address the strategic demands of atomic weaponry… Offense had so far outrun defence that trying to rely on conventional weaponry was virtually an invitation to a pre-emptive strike with atomic weapons.
‘I believe that present plans for national ‘defence’ are not only useless and a waste of money but tend to lull
the public into thinking that ‘older and wiser’ heads have the situation under control…
‘The most expensive thing in the world is a second-best military establishment.’
“[As he began writing his novels for boys] he kept in mind his conversations with [film-maker] Fritz Lang, since the same considerations would apply to any films… Above all, he did not want [them] to be what H.G. Wells had once called the ‘artificial and meretricious fricloity forced upon the young.’
‘Before starting [Rocket Ship Galileo] I established what has continued to be my rule for writing for
youngsters; Never write down to them. Do not simplify the vocabulary nor the intellectual concepts... The
story should have lots of action and adventure … [and] plot use of difficult intellectual or scientific concepts:
the kids enjoy getting their teeth into such—much more than their parents…
“I have been writing the Horatio Lager books for this generation, always with the same strongly
moral purpose that runs through every line of the Alger books… "Honesty is the best policy"—"Hard work
is rewarded"—"There is no easy road to success”—"Courage above all"—"Studying hard pays off, in happiness
as well as money"—"Stand on your own feet"—"Don’t every be bullied"—"Take your medicine”—“The
world always has a place for a man who works, but none for a loafer." These are the things the Alger books
said to me, in the idiom suited to my generation … and I have constantly tried to say them to a
younger generation which I believe has been shamefully neglected by many of the elders responsible for
its moral training.’
[To be continued]
Snippets from my summer reading of Parallel Motion, a new biography of novelist Nevil Shute, author of A Town Like Alice, Trustee from the Toolroom, No Highway and many more novels showing the best of the human spirit.
“Shute summed up the carefree days of peace before the First Wold War with the poem Romance by Eleanor Geach… [but for the schoolboy] Shute, as for millions of others, the attitude to the War [and to life] changed as the casualties increased… His thoughts were no longer of a career on leaving school. As he later wrote, he was ‘born to one end’: to go into the army and do his best before he too was killed… The school casualties mounted almost daily with the names of older boys, whom he had known, being read out in Chapel, and realising that younger boys might one day be kneeling in remembrance of him.”
“For Shute, as for the country as whole, the war had been a costly and devastating experience. His beloved brother and many of his friends from school had been killed. Indeed, some 320 [schoolmates] were killed during the First World War. Shute had mentally prepared himself for the same fate but he had been spared; he was one of the reprieved. He had a future and began to realise there was such a thing to be got out of life as fun.”
In early 1936, his aircraft design and manufacturing company Airspeed designed their new Envoy plane around the new modern Wolseley radial engine.
“So it came as a real blow when [Wolseley’s] Lord Nuffield announced in 1936 that they would cease making the engine, which had been developed at a cost of £200,000. Nuffield’s decision arose from the system adopted by the Air Ministry. The ordering procedure used I.T.P (Instruction to Proceed) contract terms. This [heavily bureaucratic[ system specified a maximum fixed price which could, after investigation, be less. Lord Nuffield got the I.T.P. contract documents for the Wolseley radial engine and realised the implications. The terms would have required re-orientation of their offices with an army of accountants to keep track of production costs… So the aero engine project was abandoned, much to Shute’s dismay. He regarded it as a major disaster for Airspeed, and decided that he must make an effort to see if Nuffield could be persuade to change his mind… Lord Nuffield received him courteously. This was the same William Morris whom Shute, as a schoolboy, had watched building his cars in Longwall St, Oxford. Recently ennobled, he was the head of a large manufacturing business that included Wolseley. He listened carefully to what Shute had in mind and was sympathetic, but reminded Shute that he had the Air Ministry to thank for his decision to stop manufacture of the aero engines. He was angry with the Ministry and told Shute he had ‘sent that I.T.P. thing back to them and told them they could put it where the monkey puts his nuts.’
… The Wolseley episode left a sour taste in Shute’s mouth… To his mind civil servants, with their restrictive practices and small-minded attitude, had deprived the country [at at time of impending war] of an excellent aero engine.”
1949 saw Shute piloting a tw0-seater Percival Proctor nicknamed ‘Item Willie” on the then difficult journey from London to Australia, stopping only for fuel and servicing along the way.
“[From the airfield] they took the bus into Athens so they could visit the Acropolis. [His passenger] thought the Parthenon was one of the most beautiful buildings he had ever seen. Shute said he preferred the Rockefeller Plaza, holding that it was a complete work of art, whereas the Parthenon was handicapped by being a ruin.”
61 days after leaving England, they cleared customs in Darwin. After enjoying Australia climate, hospitality and friendliness for a month he landed in Sydney, at Bankstown .
“There he ran into trouble, not a good introduction to Sydney. He was told he should have flown to Mascot. He phoned the controller and said that Bankstown was his destination, that he had made forty landings in Australia and Bankstown was the forty-first: He would take the documents to the Custom House or they could come and get them, whichever they preferred. He then rang off and went to lunch.
“On his return, there was a message saying that unless he flew to Mascot immediately, police action would be taken… Customs [there] insisted on opening all his luggage and searching it—God knew what for, since he had been in Australia for a month… There he arranged with de Havilland for a programme of work to be carried out on Item Willie he thought would take rather more than a week… He would therefore have to stay in this unpleasant place for 10 days or so. He wished to God he had never come south in this country, but passports, visas and aircraft permits to fly home could not be secured except in Sydney or Melbourne. Sydney seemed to him to be an ugly, cheap city full of drunks.”
His impressions of Melbourne were vastly different, and he was to settle there the next year, just after the publication of A Town Like Alice.
“In mid-June 1950 Shute wrote to [long-time friend and adventurer Sir Alan] Cobham … saying he was packing up in England and going to live in Australia… His decision to leave England was prompted by several factors, not least of which was a major public row over his petrol ration. In Britain in 1950 petrol rationing was still strictly enforced [by the Attlee Labour Government], five years after the end of the War. [Shute engaged in lengthy but essentially futile correspondence with “The Ministry” proposing an alteration in his “allocation” so he might travel for research, saying after sending one letter] he would watch for their reaction to his proposal with interest since the ability of the Government to conduct itself with good sense in such matters would seriously affect the decision he took whether to stay in England or go… Nearly a fortnight went by without a reply from the Ministry, which caused Shute to send a letter rebuking them for the delay which in business circles would be “regarded as an act of studied insolence.” … By the time he won [his third victory in eighteen months] he had made up his mind to leave England… The row over petrol rationing, like the demise of the airship programme [which had been another lesson in militant bureaucracy], marked a turning point in Shute’s life…
“Bureaucracy, always Shute’s bête noir, had raised its obstructionist head and inflamed his anger, vented in his letters to the Ministry… He did not leave for the United States, as he told the Ministry, but Australia… He had been impressed with Australia during his visit there, more so with Melbourne than Sydney. In his letter to the Society [of Authors] he said he reckoned he could get three good books out of there which would probably take him five years to research and write, and five years was as far as anybody could see in those times.”
“When Shute arrived in Melbourne there was quite a crowd of reporters at the foot of the gangway waiting to question him. They wanted to know if it were true that he had ducked out of England to avoid high taxes. Shute replied that the taxes in England were unpleasant and so was the current government’s experiment in socialism. He added that he had also decided to come to Australia because everything about the country fascinated him—even the climate.”
“[In his autobiography, Slide Rule, Shute] dealt at length with the [1920s] airship programme and the rivalry between the [private] R.100 and [the government] R.101, and placed the blame for the R.101 disaster squarely on the civil servants and [Air Minister] Lord Thomson in particular. Reflecting his experiences at that time and also probably his treatment at the hands of the Ministry of Fuel and Power, he wrote that ‘a civil servant or politician is still to me an arrogant fool until he is proved otherwise.’ … Shute felt that a study of the accident could ‘provide data to rectify many of the ills that plague our democracy today.’”
“On the Beach was to feature a motor race towards the end and, early in 1956, Shute ordered a Jaguar XK140 sports car. This was so that, he claimed, he could obtain first-hand experience of racing a high performance car… As he wrote in Slide Rule, ‘it is very good for the character to engage in sports which put your life in danger from time to time. It breeds a saneness in dealing with day-to-day trivialities which cannot be got in any other way, and a habit of quick decisions.”
“From his earliest days in Australia, Shute had taken an interest in the fortunes of young Australian writers… He was on friendly terms with Robert Menzies, the Prime Minister, and also with Richard (Dick) Casey, then Minister of External Affairs… and sent off for publication … a memorandum he wrote to Menzies. The purpose of the memorandum was to set out his thoughts, not only on creative writers, but also on artists and composers in Australia…
“It was the purpose of the memorandum to show how Australian prowess in in the creative arts of peace might be nurtured and displayed to the world…
“At the outset he said he did not believe it was wise to assist writers with any form of subsidy so they could write a book. He reiterated what he said before—that is was best for the young man or woman who wanted to write to take a job in a commercial occupation and write in the evenings until the writing became more profitable. That way the writer would get to know the characters of men and women during his or her formative years. They were the raw material of stories…
“A certain degree of success was of course necessary or the young writer would stop writing, But too much encouragement from literary authorities, without corresponding support from the public, might induce in the writer an illusion that he was a superior person to the common man and a belief that, if they public would not read the pearls of wisdom he laid before them, they should be made to do so in their own interest. “Shute wrote [however] that subsidies from the [Commonwealth Literary] Fund should continue. Such magazines gave useful encouragement to writers.”
“In conclusion, Shute wrote that a person who was gifted with creative powers could usually exercise those powers in many fields of the world’s creative activities. In his early years, his work on new aircraft designs was very satisfying to the creative side of his character and those years were followed by creating a new aircraft company and working it up from zero until it employed a thousand men in time of peace. He went on to say that, compared to creative work of that magnitude, the writing of fiction stories seemed to him at the time to be ‘a pansy occupation’ and still did. If the aircraft industry had continued as it was when he was a young man, when aircraft could fly within six months of first conception, then he might still be an engineer.”
More snippets from my summer reading, this time from Thomas Sowell’s 1994 classic, Race and Culture: A World View.
“The effectiveness of particular cultures for particular things can be of the highest importance. Much—perhaps most—of human history cannot be understood without understanding such things as the conquest of ancient Britain by the Roman legions against a vastly larger military force, simply because the legions were a militarily superior organisation from a more advanced society. It is not necessary to claim that a particular people or a particular culture is superior in all things or for all time. On the contrary, world leadership in science, technology, and organisation has passed from one civilisation to another over the centuries and millennia of human history. But neither is it necessary to deny the greater effectiveness of particular cultures for particular things at particular times and places—even if other contemporary cultures may be superior for some other things.”
“Neither race nor related concepts can be used in any scientifically precise sense to refer to the people inhabiting this planet today, after centuries of genetic intermixtures. The more generic term, race, will be used here in a loose sense to refer to a social phenomenon with a biological component, rather than make a dichotomy whose precision is illusory.”
“The incidence of economically valuable skills no doubt varies from class to class, but it likewise varies from ethnic group to ethnic group and from nation to nation. The difference is that ethnic groups and nations have an existence independent of arbitrary definitions based on skills. Moreover, some immigrant groups begin at a lower socioeconomic level than that of the surrounding population and eventually rise above them, due to their skills, work habits, or other economic performance differences. They have changed class precisely because of their skills, capabilities, or performance.”
“Vast differences between the economic productivity of peoples from different cultures do not imply that these differences are permanent, much less hereditary. Early nineteenth-century Germans were clearly well behind the English in industrial technology … yet within a century had surpassed [them]. So had the United States within the same span of time. Much the same story could be said of Japan [and now China], which moved from imitator to initiator over the same span of time…
“The normal tendency of economic processes is to disseminate technology, knowledge and skills from their place of origin to where they are lacking. The law of diminishing returns means that the rewards of any factor of production tend to decline where that factor is abundant, and to be higher where it is more scarce. Like water finding its own level, abundant factors tend to flow to where their scarcity makes their productivity and reward greater. Thus capital, skills, organisation, technology, or hardworking labour tend to flow to regions and cultures where they are are especially scarce. But the very scarcity and value of these skills and traits mean that those who possess them are more likely to become more prosperous than the indigenous people of the recipient countries. Political reactions to these economic realities [on every continent and in every century] have often been very negative, and sometimes violent.”
“Formal education, especially among peoples for whom it is rare or recent, often creates feelings of entitlement to rewards and exemption from many kinds of work… Such attitudes affect both the employed and the unemployed. Even those educated as engineers have often preferred desk jobs and tended to ‘recoil form thee prospect of physical contact with machines.’ In short, education can reduce an individual’s productivity by the expectations and aversions it creates, as well as increase it by the skills and and disciplines it may (or may not) engender…
“It is understandable that Third World peoples who have been rules for generations by colonial bureaucrats sitting behind desk, wearing collar-and-tie and shuffling papers, should seek to imitate that role when they get the chance. But the wealth and power of the imperialist nation that put the colonial bureaucrat there in the first place was not created by sitting behind desks and shuffling papers…
“Both in underdeveloped countries and among many lagging groups in industrialised nations, there has developed a taste for easy, self-flattering courses such as Maori Studies in New Zealand, Malay Studies in Singapore, and a variety of ethnic studies. in the United States. The claim is often made that the morale-boosting effects of such courses will enhance the students’ academic performance in other fields, but this claim is wholly unsubstantiated. What is clear is that easier courses, whether in ethnic studies or otherwise, prove attractive to lagging groups…”
“The stunning impact of immigrants in transforming whole economies [is not peculiar] to European immigrants. In [most] parts of the world, modern economic development was largely the work of immigrants or foreign investors, with the indigenous population playing little or no role in the modernisation process. [In 1914, for example, foreigners owned, in addition to two-thirds of Argentine industry, nearly three-fourths of Argentine commerce. Nor was this pattern unique in South America.] In colonial Malaya, for [further] example, Chinese immigrants provided much of the labour that developed that country’s giant tin industry, and immigrants from India manned the rubber plantations—both financed largely by European and American capital.Similar patterns of European capital and non-European immigrant labour combining to create economic development could be found from Fiji in the South Pacific to countries on the east coast of Africa and the Middle East. Yet in these and other countries, the earlier or indigenous population has almost invariably come to resent these foreigners, whether sojourners or immigrants, who raised the economic level of their country. In a later period especially, after the actual origins of particular economic activities have faded into the mists of time, foreign groups have often been denounced for having seized control of the nation’s industries and exploited its people. It is as if businesses and wealth came into existence somehow and foreigners happened to take possession of them.”
“Housing is a very heterogeneous product, ranging from hovels to mansions, so the supply and demand for this product in a culturally heterogeneous populations offers highly varied possibilities, as does the perception of the outcomes by heterogeneous observers. Many observers have been appalled by the housing inhabited by people of a different class, race, or national origin. Sometimes this has reflected simply a difference in income between the observers and the inhabitants, the latter being unable to afford anything better. At other times, however, the hosing choices have reflected different goals, or different trade-offs among goals … [Men] living as immigrants or sojourners, for example …. saving to take money back home or to bring their families over to join them [will have a contrasting demand for housing to those who might criticise the living conditions they are prepared to accept] …
“…. In short, for these groups such as Italian men [and middleman minorities overseas, such as the Chinese in Southeast Asia, the Lebanese in West Africa, or the Indians in East Africa … or during the mass emigration of Jews that transferred the centre of world Jewry from Eastern Europe to the United States], housing choices as of a given time reflected long-run plans as well as short-run trade-offs. All this tended to be ignored by observers shocked at these groups’ housing conditions, and especially by social reformers determined to do something about it.
“Seldom have the crusades of social reformers been directed toward enlarging the set of options available to the groups whose housing the reformers disapproved. More commonly, housing reform efforts have reduced the existing options, whether by “slum clearance” programmes that destroyed “lower quality” housing, by building codes that forbade construction of housing without amenities prescribed by reformers, or by other regulations limiting the number of persons living in a given space to what reformers found acceptable. In these ways, less fortunate groups were forced to pay more for housing that they themselves chose. Their incomes could no longer be used to maximise their own satisfactions, according to their own values, but were partially diverted to making observers feel better.”
More interesting snippets I highlighted during my summer reading, this time from Hugh Kennedy’s When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World: The Rise and Fall of Islam’s Greatest Dynasty.
“Historians of the period have preserved the text of a long [and influential] letter said to have been written by Tahir [ibn Husayn, the Abbasid caliph's governor of northeastern Persia in 821, and former power-broker in the caliph’s court], giving advice to his son about how to be a good ruler… The ruler is shown to be a benevolent despot. His authority is absolute and he is responsible, not to his subjects, but to God. There is no sense of popular limitations to his power, and no mention of any sanctions his subjects can make use of should he abuse it. The ruler should behave in a benign and conscientious way because he is responsible to God and will be held to account by Him if he fails. He should also look after the welfare of his subjects because it makes sense to do so: prosperous subjects pay more taxes and cause fewer problems. To an extent the advice is worldly and eve cynical—being a just ruler makes you richer and more powerful—but it is also about the virtuous circle, an idea Muslim political theorists were to return to time and time again: a strong but gently tyranny brings benefits to ruler and subjects alike…
“The emphasis on moderation in all things is also striking. It is possible that this idea comes directly from Greek philosophy, even perhaps from [Tahir’s own] reading of philosophy…
“There are noticeable omissions in the document. Apart from a brief mention of the use of taxation to humiliate unbelievers, nothing in Tahir’s work would give any indication that a large proportion, probably the majority, of the people over whom he ruled were Christians. He is only concerned with how a Muslim ruler should relate to his Muslim subjects. There is no mention of the need to convert non-Muslims to Islam. There is also no mention of the Jihad or holy war: the Muslim community is imagined as being at peace with itself and its neighbours.”
“Along with the measures [designed to appeal to a constituency of Islamist hard-liners, new Caliph Mutawwakil (847AD) brought] measures against the dhimmis (protected people), the Christians and Jews. These did not amount to active persecution or forced conversion to Islam but rather public shaming. In 850, the caliph issued a decree that aimed to enforce discrimination in dress in a way that is unpleasantly reminiscent of the anti-Jewish legislation of Nazi Germany. All dhimmis were required to wear yellow on their clothes… He also ordered that all renovated places of worship be confiscated, turned into mosques if big enough or demolished if not. Christians and Jews had certainly suffered discrimination before in an irregular and patchy way—Christians in areas along the Byzantine frontier had been threatened because the Muslim authorities were afraid they mighty ally with the Byzantines—but Mutawwakil’s decrees were the first time a caliph had adopted these measures against dhimmis wherever they were and whatever their jobs were.”
“The original Abbasid regime that came to power in 750…set about patronising and developing a court culture that would establish their identity as the elite, the khassa. This culture would demonstrate their refinement and sophistication: shared cultural values would provide cohesion for the new ruling class. The leading figures in the civil administration of the caliphate at this period … also appear as the most important patrons of literature and learning: court and culture were intimately bound together…
“The caliphs themselves were the most important patrons. The tone was set by Mahmun, and it is clear that patronage of science of the [movement to translate Greek science and philosophy] was his own very distinctive personal contribution to the culture of the period… His successor Muhtasim was known as a military man and creator of the city of Samarra, but he does seem to have continued something of his brother’s patronage of writers and scientists. His son and successor Wathiq was more interested in intellectual debate. Mahsudi speaks of him as loving research and those who undertook it, and hating those who blindly followed tradition…
“The caliph Mutawwakil did not encourage scientific enquiry in the same way… [and] none of the short-lived caliphs who succeeded after Mutawwakil’s assassination in 861AD had much time to develop intellectual interests… It was not until the accession of Muhtadid in 892 that the Abbasid court again became a focus of scholarship…
“Without institutions [or monasteries] to offer salaries and status, scholars were largely dependent on patrons to provide them with a livelihood, and it was in the salons of the great Baghdad families that intellectual life developed…
“One of the most astonishing and impressive products of this court society was the movement to translate ancient Greek scientific and philosophical texts into Arabic Interest in the Greek intellectual heritage and patronage of the translators became one of the most fashionable forms of elite cultural activity, perhaps all the more satisfying because of the suspicions it aroused in the more hidebound traditionalists. It was also one aspect of the culture of the Abbasid court that was to have a profound influence on the culture of the wider Islamic Europe and Latin Europe, long after the end of Abbasid power. [You ain’t kidding it had a profound influence! This is a major part of the Greatest Story Hardly Ever Told].
“Immediately after the great conquests of the seventh century, the Muslims had ruled over many Greek speakers and writers. Until the end of the seventh century, Greek had remained the administrative language of Syria and Egypt, so Greek culture was well known. There were also many Greek works that had been translated into Syriac (a written dialect of Aramaic which was the liturgical and literary language of the Eastern Christian, that is Jacobite and Nestorian churches) during the Byzantine period. Many of these works were now translated a second time from Syriac to Arabic. The Muslims were interested in those products of Greek learning which they believed to be useful. These included works on philosophy, especially logic, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, and the use of plants. They were not concerned to translate poetry, history or drama. Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, Euclid, Ptolemy and Dioscorides were all popular authors, translated and retranslated to make them accessible to the Arab reading public. Herodotus, Thucydides, Euripides, and Sappho all remained entirely unknown.
“Translation of Greek texts into Arabic had begin as early as Umayyad times, and there had been sporadic examples under treh early Abbasids; Salam al-Abrash … was an early but individual example. It was the caliph Mahmun who made the translation movement fashionable in ruling circles.”
“The production of translations that were both reliable and elegant required considerable expertise, and men who proved they could deliver were well rewarded. The Banū Mūsā [brothers originally from Eastern Iran, “merchants” for whom the patronage of culture may have been a sort of money-laundering operation—shades of the Medici family’s patronage perhaps?], leading and discerning patrons of translations of scientific texts, were prepared to pay 500 dinars salary a month to top-quality workers (though it is not clear whether this was to each individual or to the group of translators who lived in their houses). This was equivalent to the salaries of senior members of the bureaucracy, and vastly more than those of an ordinary craftsman or soldier. [500 dinars represents about fifty ounces of gold!] As a result, clever and ambitious people flocked to Baghdad to offer their services… A biographer gives us an idea of the lifestyle of gentleman academic [Hunayn ibn Ishaq (d. 873) a Christian from southern Iraq who worked as a translator for the Buna Musa]:
“He went to the bath every day after his ride and had water poured on him. He would then come out
wrapped in a dressing gown and, after taking a cup of wine with a biscuit, lie down until he had
stopped perspiring. Sometimes he would fall asleep. Then he would get up, burn perfumes to fumigate his
body and have dinner brought in. This consisted of a large fattened pullet stewed in gravy with a half kilo
loaf of bread. After drinking some of the gravy and eating the chicken and the bread he would fall
asleep. On waking he would drink 4 ratls [perhaps 2 litres] of old wine. If he felt like fresh fruit, he would
have some Syrian apples and quinces. This was his habit until the end of his life.”
“When he managed to find time for work amidst this agreeable regime is not entirely clear, but he obviously did for his output was enormous and his academic standards very high…”
“The ninth century was the great age of the study of sciences, with Thabit ibn Qurrra (d. 901) in mathematics and Hunayn ibn Ishaq (d. 873) in medicine being the leading lights. The clearest example of their intellectual curiosity and practical application can be seen in their project to measure the circumference of the earth. This is described in some detail by Ibn Khallikan [d.1282]. It is perhaps worth recounting this in detail because the account seems to encapsulate the spirit of scientific enquiry typical of the age and, especially, of the circle of the Banū Mūsā.
‘Although astronomers in ancient times, before the coming of Islam, had done this, there is no evidence
that any Muslim apart from them had tried it. The caliph Mahmun took a deep interest in the sciences of
the ancients and was keen to test their accuracy. Having read in their works that the circumference of the
globe is around twenty-four thousand miles or eight-thousand farsakhs [in fact, the equatorial circumference
of the earth is 24,902 miles] … He wished to test the truth of this assertion and asked the Banū Mūsā what
they thought. They replied that this was certainly the case and the caliph then said, “I wish you to use
the methods described by the ancients so that we can see whether it is accurate or not.” They enquired
where a level plain could be found and were told that the desert of Sinjar [in north-western Iraq] was
completely flat, as was the country around Kufa. They took with them a number of people whose
opinion Ma’mun trusted and whose knowledge in this area he relied on. They set out for Sinjar and came
to the desert. They halted at a spot where they took the altitude of the Pole Star with certain instruments.
They drove a peg into the ground and attached a long cord to it. They walked due north, avoiding, as much
as possible, going off to left or right. When the cord ran out, they stuck another peg into the ground and
fastened a cord to it and carried on walking to the north as they had done before until they reached a spot
where the elevation of the pole star had risen by one degree. Then they measured the distance they had
travelled on the ground by means of the the rope. The distance was 66 2/3 miles. Then they knew that
every degree of the heavens was 66 2/3 miles on earth. Then they returned to the place where they had
stuck in the first peg, continued to teh south, just as they had previously to the north, sticking in pegs and
fastening ropes. When they had finished all the rope they had used when going north, they took the elevation
of the Pole Star and found it was one degree lower than the first observation. This proved that their
calculations were correct and that they had achieved what they had set out to do.
‘ ‘Anyone who knows astronomy will see that this is true… They then multiplied the number of degrees of
the heavens [i.e., 360] by 66 2/3, that is, the length of one degree, and the total was twenty-four thousand
miles or eight-thousand farsakhs. This is certain and there is no doubt about it.
‘Then the Banū Mūsā returned to al-Ma’mun and told him what they had done and that this agreed with
what he had seen in ancient books. He wished to confirm this in another location so he sent them to the
Kufa area where they repeated the experiment they had conducted in Sinjar. They found that the two
calculations agreed and Ma’mun acknowledged the truth of what the ancients had written on the subject.’
“The account is revealing of many aspects of eth intellectual environment of the time. The first is the respect shown for ancient science. People of this era were well aware they had much to learn from the achievements of the classical era (much more aware, of course, than their contemporaries in Byzantium or western Europe). But the story also shows that this respect for the ancients was not an uncritical acceptance of everything they said: Mahmun and the Banū Mūsā wished to test the figures for the circumference for themselves. Finally, we must be struck by the commitment to practical scientific experiment, the establishment of a hypothesis, the use of experimental evidence to prove it, and perhaps the most impressive, the care shown to make sure that the experiment could be replicated… All this demonstrates a truly scientific approach that has few parallels in the post-classical pre-modern age.”
“Like the Italy of the Italian Renaissance, the intellectual world of the ninth-century Baghdad was a world where private patrons [sometimes with wealth of dubious origins] funded intellectual life and, to an extent, competed against each other for intellectual prestige. This may account for something of the variety and originality of the scholarly life that was one of the great achievements of the Abbasid period. Much of this freshness and vitality was lost with the development of the more formal structures of the madrasa (theological school) from the eleventh century onwards [a direct consequence of the Closing of the Muslim Mind].
More interesting snippets I highlighted during my summer reading, this time from Thomas Sowell’s Migration & Cultures, part of his Race & Culture trilogy. (Send a copy to Tariana Turia.)
“Cultures are not merely customs which people have a sentimental attachment, or badges of “identity” which permit them to engage in breast-beating. Cultures are particular ways of accomplishing the things that make life possible—the perpetuation of the species, the transmission of knowledge, and the absorption of the shocks of change and death, among other things. Cultures differ in the relative significance they attach to time, noise, safety, cleanliness, violence, thrift, intellect, sex and art. These differences in turn imply differences in social choices, economic efficiency. and political stability. Though cutures transcend race, particular cultures are obviously often associated particular racial or ethnic groups. Australians are Europeans, regardless of what geography may say…”
“There is no reason to doubt that individual mental capacity was as great as ever, or that as many potential geniuses were born during the Dark Ages in Europe as during its eras of the most shining achievements. What was lacking was an ability to “avail themselves of the great bank and capital of nations and ages,” as Burke phrased it in a different context. The institutions of such cultural transmission were simply gone with the collapse of Roman society.”
“It may sound noble to say that cultures are merely different, not better or worse in any way, and that it is all a matter of perceptions and preferences. But this argument contradicts itself by saying that one way of looking at cultural difference is better—the way of cultural relativism preferred by a fringe of of contemporary intellectuals, rather than the way preferred by the vast majority of other human beings around the world and down through the centuries.
“These cultural differences do not matter only if cause and effect do not matter…”
More interesting snippets from another of the books on my summer reading list—this time from The Origins of the Common Law by Arthur Hogue, one of the few books on what, to me, is a fascinating story on the origins of our modern civiilisation.
“[Common law in the Middle Ages was] simply the body of rules prescribing social conduct and justiciable in the royal courts of England … in competition with concurrent rules enforced in other courts. Save when a matter of freehold was at issue, Englishmen were not compelled to present their causes before the king’s courts … [however] by the end of the thirteenth century the common law had absorbed the business of its competitors [being primarily the local courts of the counties or boroughs, church courts, and baronial overlords’ courts] and may have borrowed heavily from them in the process of aggrandizement.”
“In the time before there was much parliamentary legislation, where would royal judges find the common law? An answer to this question leads directly to the writ system and the Register of Writs… George Spence has defined the original or originating, writ as ‘an order from the king under the Great Seal … commanding [the defendant] to appear in the king’s court at a certain day to answer the complaint. Every writ was founded no some principle of law … which gave the right on which the action was founded and the facts were stated with so much detail only as to bring the case within such principle of law. Each order, or writ, acquired a name…”
“The entire formula of the writ Praecip quod reddat [the principal writ for the recovery of land in the King's court] can serve as an illustration of an original royal writ… Elements essential for any trial are either plainly stated or clearly implied… [The aggrieved man] actively seeks the aid of eth royal courts in the recovery of his property … he states the facts of the case … the defendant is ordered to obey the king’s command. If he refuses, a trial is set… By implication, this writ reveals concern on the part of the king that men throughout the realm shall enjoy undisturbed possession of property to which they have a right and that to accomplish this purpose the royal authority will act, when called upon, through the royal Chancery, the sheriff, a royal agent, and the courts of justice.”
“During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the tendency was in England to create an appropriate write for the protection of every private right or interest recognized by the royal courts… [T]he writ system hardened and set in the fourteenth century. Thereafter a plaintiff might brood on the maxim, ‘No writ, no remedy.’”
“[There was] an extremely rapid increase in the number of writs during the thirteenth century—from thirty-nine writs in the treatise called Glanvill to four hundred and seventy-one about a hundred years later…”
“In England, the old forms of action have largely been abolished as the result of nineteenth-century legislation. And in most of the United States, there is usually but one action, called an action at law and equity. A knowledge of the old writs is still useful, however, for understanding common law principles… ‘The forms of action we have buried,’ write Maitland, ‘but they still rule us from their graves.’”
“Litigants were not compelled to seek the king’s justice [but defendants were compelled to meet it]; only in matters touching freehold did the Crown enjoy a monopoly over judicial business. But because English subjects gave then their business, gradually the medieval royal courts starved out, rather than crushed out, their competitors [so] by the end of the thirteenth century the royal courts were rapidly becoming courts of first instance for free men of the realm.”
“They provided the best justice available, for several reasons. First, the medieval jury … was preferable to older modes of trial such as ordeal … Second … royal jurists were superior to feudal lords and manorial bailiffs… Third, the incontestable validity of royal records was preferable to the records and fallible memories of suitors of local courts. Finally, decisions of the royal courts were enforced by an authority with wealth and power not to be challenged by any English subject…”
“Legal concepts now lusted about the phrases ‘rule of law’ and ‘due process’ trace back to [the Magna Carta and] the quarrel of King John with his baronage.”
“From the beginning the Great Charter [i.e., the Magna Carta] was an expression of the law which the king and his judges and other officials were not permitted to ignore.”
“The opinion expressed in the slogan, ‘No taxation without representation,’ has been read into Chapter 12 [of the Charter], which says, ‘No scutage or aid shall be imposed in our kingdom except by the common council of the kingdom…”
“If one had to choose a chapter from al the Magna Carta to express the spirit and the principal idea embodied in all the Charter, it would be Chapter 39 of the 1215 version: ‘No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed, or outlawed, or banished, or in any way destroyed, now will we go upon him, nor send upon him, except by the legal judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.’ …
“In effect, each confirmation of the Charter became a solemn assurance to the realm that the king would act with a regard for eth welfare of all subjects. It was an assurance, moreover, that the king would act according to established procedure: in short, the king, like all his subjects, was under the law.”
“In 1258 the barons … went much further in their demands than the baronial faction that forced Magna Carta from King John … [insisting] upon an elective council of fifteen men, a standing council who would meet three times a year with another group of twelve elected barons. In these three annual “parliaments” [the word 'Parliament' came from the 'parley' or talks which the King had with larger groups of advisers] the twelve elected representatives of the commonality and the fifteen elected councillors were ‘to treat the wants of the king and his kingdom.’”
“[T]he principle of Magna Carta was [further] confirmed in 1298, 1299, 1300 and 1301. And every confirmation reinforced the view that the Great Charter of Liberties was part of the common law of England.”
“The growth of the common law in the thirteenth century represents in large part the definition of established customs. In the form of writs, judicial decisions, treatises, royal ordinances, and parliamentary statutes, the common law emerged into explicit written form and formal procedure… Controversies occasionally forced a definition of the law and frequently resulted in written statement on well-kept records…”
“The basic elements in any civil action [in the courts of Angevin England to 1307 were these.] First, the aggrieved person must take the initiative… [he] must do more than grumble… Second, the court must act through appropriate officers to bring [the accused] before the court to answer the charges of … the plaintiff. Next … the plaintiff and the defendant must be encouraged to formulate precisely the issues between them… Then follows the trial … [in which] the judge or judges apply the appropriate rules of law to the facts and reach a judgement… Finally, there must be the execution, or enforcement …
“The purpose of the verbal, combative procedure outlined here is the settlement of a dispute which might explode into violence if it were not channelled through a court [c.f. the continuing grievances and utu that plagued Maori inter-tribal life in later centuries].
“The law of medieval England was not much influenced by Christian doctrines of the duty of forgiveness and turning the other cheek. It assumed that a deliberate wrong would be resented … it assumed the desire for vengeance was natural and proper… [and from Anglo-Saxon times on, the system] was expected to quench vengeance and prevent a long chain of killing, woundings and injuries.”
“In his coronation oath the medieval king assumed a three-fold responsibility: 1) the protection of the Church, 20 the preservation of the peace, and 3) the administration of justice. Preservation of the peace was both a duty and a right of the king.”
“The king in medieval England accepted a general responsibility to maintain the laws of the realm and to render the justice impartially to rich a poor alike… The sovereignty, or supremacy, of law was recognised not only in England but throughout the Latin Christendom during the Middle Ages. The German scholar Fritz Kern has observed, ‘Not only the law of the realm but laws of property were considered laws which the king could not curtail on his own initiative alone.’ A political theory supporting absolute monarchy did not emerge in the Middle Ages…”
“Blackstone in the eighteenth century makes the royal judges of the common-law courts the depositaries of the laws. Presumably their long experience and studies enable them to determine the validity of general customs known throughout the realm, and their decisions consequently are the most authoritative evidence about customs included in the common law. These decisions, having been recorded and preserved, are available for consultation in difficult cases…
“On all matters of general custom the royal judges assumed the power to recognise what was good custom … Blackstone provided in his Commentaries on the laws of England a clear account of tests which customs should meet before they were admitted to have the force of law… Above all, he makes clear that not all customs are good customs and that the courts will permit litigants to rely on customs only when those customs meet certain criteria such as antiquity and continuity.
“Professor Theodore Plucknet reminds us [in 1949] that for Azo, the civilian jurist, ten or twenty years was ‘a long custom,’ thirty years a ‘very long’ custom, and forty years an ‘age-old’ custom. But in any period good custom is spoken of as ancient.’”
“[In conclusion], it is important to note the persistence and force in the modern world of some ideas which men of the Middle Ages incorporated in the common law of England.
“Foremost among these if the idea of the supremacy of law … This idea implies that there are limits to the power of ruling. The rule of law was difficult to apply against medieval kings with absolutist policies … The rule of law is difficult to apply now in the face of modern ideas of sovereignty which admit no limitation on the power of ruling… What is required in the twentieth [and twenty-first] century is a much wider understanding of legal rights, how they have been gained, how they may be lost.
“A second idea … touches … the doctrine of judicial precedents… [Common law] demanded justices learned in the law of the realm[[and decisions of prior courts]. In the Middle Ages common-law court decisions were recorded, and on special occasions the record was consulted, but for several centuries the common law lived more in the minds of its judges and practitioners than in plea rolls and reports. The law of the Middle Ages was largely judge-made, and whenever it was changed by deliberate action of the king’s council or by Parliament, judges participated in the change. It is an essential part of the common-law system that its principles are derived from decisions in actual cases in which, of course, judges play the principal part.
“A third important legacy of the medieval law to the modern law is the writ system… English lawyers could afford the luxury of throwing away the old forms of action only after the principles within those forms had become embedded in the law [only to be thrown away all too often by subsequent Attorneys General]. After men have learned what constitutes a debt recoverable in the court [for example], a writ of Debt is unnecessary … Modern courts [too] now recognise a leaseholder is entitled to enjoy the full term of the lease and to recover the both the lease and damages if he is ejected from the leased property. But the leaseholder’s remedies were not taken for granted in the Middle Ages. They were acquired slowly in the form of actions associated with writs. The full catalogue of writs known as the Register of Writs was the framework of common law. When in the present, a lawyer decides that his client has a good cause of action which the courts will recognise, he is drawing, more often that he may realise, on the medieval definition of that cause of action in one of the many form writs.”
“The rule of law, the development of law by means of judicial precedents, the use of the jury to determine the material facts of the case, and the definition of numerous causes of action [based on right]—these form the principal and valuable legacy of the medieval law to the modern law.”