Waxing and Waning Republics and Their Citizens

The democracy of ancient Athens managed, in effect, to vote itself out of existence via military misjudgments during the Peloponnesian War.  The Roman Republic had a mostly unwritten tradition (constitution) of limitations upon its democratic assemblies; but the Gracchi brothers, while serving as tribunes, undermined those limitations by imposing various costly policies: Land redistribution in the country, cheap grain in the cities, shovel-ready infrastructure jobs for the unemployed, and overseas colonies for the landless.  Opposition to these policies initiated a new tradition of political violence culminating in the collapse of the Roman Republic and the institution of the Roman Empire.

In the subsequent Western tradition, there is a history of kings, oligarchs, tyrants, or democratic assemblies presiding over populations of subjects, clients, persons of indefinite servitude, or citizens, etc.  (This listing is not meant to be exhaustive.)  To the extent that democracies and republics have track records of fairly miraculous creation and ultimate collapse, one expects any given population occasionally to transition between a more-democratic status and a less-democratic status.  Indeed, an analytic industry for ranking democracies has sprung up online.  In other words, democracies and republics wax and wane.

Kings, oligarchs, and tyrants typically seize power and assign populations to subordinate status.  Successful democratic uprisings or constitutional conventions are relatively rare and assign populations to the status of citizen.  It would seem that a relatively leisured class - - of independent means, if not of wealth - - must first exist and take the lead in forming a republic before an entire population can assume its role as citizens.  Theorists typically assume that a republic is maintained in existence by all its citizens.

If, as Benjamin Franklin said, the U.S. Constitutional Convention “gave you a Republic, if you can keep it”; and if a class of independent U.S. citizens is necessary for the maintenance of the U.S. as a republic; then any factors that degrade and depopulate the class of independent U.S. citizens also undermines the Republic established among them. This is the current writer’s formulation of the concern expressed by the author Victor Davis Hanson in his excellent book, The Dying Citizen (Basic Books, 2021).  In the Introduction to his book, Hanson mentions the theory of democracy as expounded by Kant in Teil I of his Die Metaphysik der Sitten.  (This Part I is also known in English as The Metaphysical Elements of Justice.)  This blog posting summarizes Kant’s work in this regard.

We note at once that the U.S. Constitutional Convention occurred in 1787, whereas Kant’s analyses of “perpetual peace” and “metaphysical elements of justice” appeared in 1795 and 1797, respectively.  These political developments seem to have developed in parallel from a common Zeitgeist.

In Section 44 of his Metaphysical Elements, Kant states that the necessity of public lawful coercion is not empirical but rests on an a priori idea of reason, namely, that even if we imagine mankind before the institution of government to be entirely congenial and good-natured; individual men, nations, and states can never be certain of being free from future violence, because each man in a state of nature has a right to do what seems to him to be just.  (Note that a nation is a group of people with some commonality of language, history, socio-economic traditions, culture, religion, place of origin, etc.; whereas a state is a group of people under a common, lawful government with coercive power.)  If one wants a system of justice, then one must quit the state of nature and join in a civil society (societas civilis), i.e., a state that recognizes some things (external goods and intrinsic dignity) as one’s own.  Acquisition of things and of rights are only provisional as long as there is no sanction of public law.

In Section 45 of his Metaphysical Elements, Kant further describes the state (civitas, sometimes rendered in English as civil state) as the union of a multitude of people under laws of justice.  Every state contains three authorities: The sovereign authority resides in the person of the legislator; the executive authority resides in the person of the ruler (who conforms to the law); and the judicial authority resides in the person of the judge (who decides who is due what in particular cases).

In Section 46 of his Metaphysical Elements, Kant discusses the legislative authority and the citizen.  The members of civil society who are united for the purpose of making laws are called citizens (cives).  The citizen has three juridical attributes: First, he has the lawful freedom to obey no other law than that to which he has given his consent.  Second, he is equal to all others before the law.  Third, he is civilly independent, owing his existence and support, not to someone else’s arbitrary will but rather to his own rights and industry as a member of the commonwealth.

Kant thinks that “fitness for voting is a prerequisite of being a citizen.”  Apprentices, servants, minors, and women - - on Kant’s view in 1797 - - are examples of dependent persons who are not themselves citizens and who do not have a right to vote, because they are not materially invested in the success of the state.  People without the right to vote may be designated as “fellow comrades of the state,” but not as citizens.  The presupposition seems to be that a citizen must be sufficiently muscular in order to wield the tools or war and commerce.  Hence, even the most enlightened, Kantian thought endorsed the concept of “material investment” as a prerequisite for voting and citizenship.

In Section 47 of his Metaphysical Elements, Kant introduces the notion that the act by means of which the people constitute themselves as a state is the original contract.  The people give up their external freedom and take it back immediately as members of a commonwealth.  An individual abandons his wild, lawless freedom in order to find freedom within lawful dependency.

In the next blog posting we will summarize V. D. Hanson’s discussion of the contemporary waning of a U.S. citizenry overwhelmed by population groups once thought to be inimical to a republic: peasants, residents (as in “mere residents”), and tribes.

Pentecost, Holy Spirit, and Zeitgeist

Shavuot (“Weeks”) is the second of three Jewish Pilgrim Festivals, occurring fifty days after the first day of Passover and marking the end of the wheat harvest in Israel.  In the earliest Christian documents, there are also two holidays counted as being fifty days apart: If Easter counts as Day1, then Pentecost (“fiftieth,” in Greek) counts as Day 50.  Today, we would be more inclined to say that the latter is 49 days after the former.  Pentecost marks the arrival of the Holy Spirit, the presence of God, among believers who subsequently came to be called Christians in Acts 11:26.  It is desired in this essay to distinguish the Holy Spirit from what is known in philosophy as the Zeitgeist, or spirit of the age.

At Pentecost, the apostle Peter addressed the crowd as recorded in a Biblical passage [Acts 2:14 – 41 (typically estimated as occurring circa 30 A.D.)].  Peter used a quotation from the prophet Joel that links the pouring out of the Spirit of God with the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord, when all who call upon the name of the Lord will be saved.  Speaking to that day’s relatively large pilgrim crowd, Peter said that you (crowd members), with the help of wicked men, put him (Jesus) to death, despite his being accredited to you by God via miracles, wonders, and signs.  Upon hearing Peter’s address, the people (crowd members) were cut to the heart and asked one another “Brothers, what shall we do [in view of this despicable crime]?” 

The formulation and clarification of existential questions such as “What shall we do?” can be described (e.g., by Hegel) as the work of the Zeitgeist, or “spirit of the age.”  The Zeitgeist catalogues the historical stages in the unfolding of reason into theses and antitheses, the resolving of apparent contradictions, the synthesis of higher modes of thought, and the approach towards Absolute Knowing.  Many contemporaneous finite spirits (human beings) contribute to the overall spirit of an age: For example, the spirit of Voltaire and the spirits of his contemporaries led to the Zeitgeist of the Enlightenment.  In other words, it is the work of the Zeitgeist to create a “rational buzz” among the opinion leaders of a society.  This “buzz” allows existential questions, ultimate concerns, and proposed answers to become widely known.  Over time, the import of the existential question “What shall we do?” became known to an increasingly large subpopulation of the Roman world in the Near East and beyond.  Some fraction of that subpopulation became Christian believers.

In Acts 2:38, Peter responded to the “What shall we do?” question, saying “Repent and be baptized … for the forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit.”  One observes that the Zeitgeist played its role by creating a “buzz” (existential question), while the Holy Spirit played its role by inspiring Peter to state the correct answer.  Hence, anyone living in the ancient society generating this “buzz” could take a position on the existential question, whether or not he or she was aware of the explicit concepts of Zeitgeist or Holy Spirit.

After Pentecost, Peter spoke to onlookers at the temple in Acts 3:11-26, again criticizing the people for handing over Jesus of Nazareth for execution and calling on them to “Repent and be converted so that sins may be washed away and that times of refreshment may ensue.”  This second response of Peter, occurring in Acts 3:19, was a reformulation of his initial response (Acts 2:38), as appropriate for that day’s communication in the temple. 

Perhaps 20 years later, during Paul’s second missionary journey (typically estimated as occurring during a three-year subset of the interval from 49 to 55 A.D.), Paul and Silas were imprisoned at Philippi, as recounted in Acts 16:16-40.  A prison-destroying earthquake ensued, placing the jailer’s life in jeopardy because of the apparent escape of the incarcerated due to the failure of the infrastructure.  The jailer asked Paul and Silas “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”  In Acts 16:31 Paul and Silas gave a third response to the existential question first posed at Pentecost: “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved - - you and your household.”  [The speed with which the jailer’s household converted might be taken as evidence of a Zeitgeist already at work in Philippi even before the earthquake (see Acts 16:11-15).] 

In summary, the three “existential responses” presented above are (#1) Repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit, (#2) Repent and be converted (turn again) so that sins may be washed away and that times of refreshment may ensue, and (#3) Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you and your household will be saved.

Relying on the Greek-language resources embedded in the biblehub.com website, we see that each of the three existential responses begins with either (a) repent (metanoesate) or (b) believe on (pisteuson epi) the Lord Jesus.  (The second response, today, would be idiomatically rendered as believing in, or on the basis of, the Lord Jesus.)  Metanoesate means next to or beyond what is thought, implying a thinking differently.  Pisteuson epi implies mentally endorsing the truth of some proposition on some adequate basis.  After or beyond this rearrangement of thinking on the basis of perceived reality (against subjective natural inclinations), the benefits mentioned in responses #1 - #3 ensue.

In responses #1 - #3 there seems to be a presupposition that thinking and acting against natural inclinations and in favor of Christian doctrines and precepts will lead the spiritually engaged person to ingrafting into the body of Christ, to forgiveness, to the gift of the Holy Spirit, and to salvation.  Inclinations that are founded merely on the Zeitgeist and that contradict Biblical exegesis are referred to as heretical or immoral inclinations.  Over the course of millennia many varieties of heresies, immoralities, and perversions have been identified.

The Philippian jailer’s question “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” can be recast as “Against what natural inclinations must I think and act?”  The answer must surely include opposing heretical thoughts and repudiating immoral actions, thereby avoiding any acquiescence in thoughts and actions proceeding from a defective Zeitgeist.

The distinction between the Holy Spirit, proceeding from God (or from the Father and the Son), and the Zeitgeist, proceeding from the best current efforts of rational thought among finite spirits, seems to be reasonably clear.  But yet some individuals in some churches on some occasions today are revealing a deep-seated confusion between the Holy Spirit and the Zeitgeist: Bold proclamations are heard from some individuals who are pleased to announce that they are “proud to be who they are,” i.e., agents who do not think and act against natural inclination, at least on the really big issues.  But if, say, 5% of a population engages in perversion X, while 0.5% partakes of perversion Y, etc.; then one is left wondering why the vast majority of that population should be compelled to listen to recitations of alleged “existential authenticity” by those afflicted with X or Y.  Is therapeutic utility the decisive factor justifying these public proclamations?  If so, does therapeutic utility entail toleration, normalization, or encouragement of similar behavior?

The author notes in passing that the concept of “therapeutic utility,” popularized in the 1960’s by Philip Rieff, characterizes a transition phase between the Mainline Protestantism of the mid-twentieth century and [what Ross Douthat has recently called (in First Things, June-July 2022)] the Post-Protestant Gnosticism of the twenty-first century.

Perhaps therapeutic utility ought not to be a foundational religious principle: On December 14, 2021 the Pew Research Center released a social-survey report stating that self-identified Christians made up 63% of the U.S. population in 2021, down from 78% in 2007.  One might interpret this data by saying that identity politics, therapeutic utility, etc. are increasingly seen by the U.S. population as tangential to true religion.  One thinks also of the Indulgence Crisis of 1517: At some point the people rejected such advertising jingles as “when a coin in the coffer rings, a soul up from purgatory springs” and ceased buying indulgences.  As another example of moral intuitionism, consider the rebelling cowboys confronting the arbitrary disciplinary actions ordered, under duress, by the cattle baron Thomas Dunson (John Wayne) in the 1948 movie Red River: The rebels exclaimed “You were just wrong, Tom!” before hijaaking the cattle drive from Missouri to Kansas.  In summary, the moral intuitionism of the people cannot be ignored forever, despite the allure of therapeutic utility.

The modern, therapeutic question for the Philippian jailer to have posed might have been: “Sirs, what must I do to receive an imperial pardon and a check for infrastructure repair?”  But in the event, the Philippian jailer, and the Zeitgeist of the Greco-Roman-Jewish-Christian world in the mid-first century A.D., got the existential question right by asking: “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”  Today, it would seem that rational agents have plenty of work to do in repairing the Zeitgeist before it can ever possibly converge upon Absolute Knowing.

Coronavirus: Review of Public-Health Issues

What has the battle against Covid-19 looked like from the perspective of a public-health policy expert?  Scott W. Atlas, M.D. has written the book, “A Plague Upon Our House,” regarding his fight at the White House to stop Covid from destroying America.  This book is an imprint of Post Hill Press and has ISBN 978-1-63758-551-1 (paperback).  The following discussion is based on Chapter 20 and the Coda appearing in that book.

Atlas quotes (on his page 272) Professor Sunetra Gupta, who wrote that assumptions rapidly accumulate in mathematical models of epidemiology, often leading to very large errors in predicted numbers of deaths.  Some models’ results for coronavirus deaths were sometimes too high by a factor of 4.5, leading to a harmful clamor for economic lockdowns despite their inevitable side-effects: other medical treatments missed, education-years foregone, mental-health problems incurred, and alarmist health-policy groupthink rationalized.  

Were children especially at risk?  Atlas reports (on his page 276) that as of June 9, 2021 there were 62,538 Covid deaths in California, and exactly ZERO of them were children under 18.  The European Center for Disease Prevention surveyed seventeen countries and found that open schools were not associated with accelerating community transmission.  On his page 282, Atlas states that his home state of California, having less than 17% of its students in fully in-person schools as of June 2021, compared unfavorably with Florida, which had 100% of its students in fully in-person schools at that time.

Atlas finds that the attachment of the general public and of government leaders to face-masking is unfounded.  On his page 296, Atlas mentions a study published in May 2021 by University of Louisville researchers, who found that mask mandates and use are not associated with lower SARS-Cov-2 spread in the U.S.  Atlas finds that the public’s refusal to accept that masks are not needed after vaccination is evidence for the existence of deeply damaged psyches and of invincible groupthink among many Americans.

On his page 299, Atlas notes that decades of research on lives lost from unemployment and missed medical care indicate that the pandemic lockdowns were very harmful.  Through May 2020, 1.5 million years of life had been lost due to lockdowns, which was almost double the 800,000 years of life that had been lost due to Covid-19.  Atlas also mentions the harmful ideas of the bureaucrat Redfield (see page 287 for the idea that universal masking would defeat the pandemic in eight to twelve weeks) and of the bureaucrats Fauci and Birx (see page 307 for Fauci-Birx lockdowns as the antitheses of the Florida approach).  In the opinion of Atlas, these bureaucrats caused a great deal of unnecessary carnage among the American people.  On pages 307 – 310, Atlas affirms the superior anti-pandemic performance by the state of Florida, led by its Governor DeSantis, who opposed masking mandates and prolonged lockdowns.  Instead, Florida maintained open schools and, among the ten largest states, had the lowest age-adjusted mortality rate for all ages.

On his pages 315 - 330, Atlas relates how, immediately after being introduced by the U.S. President at his August 10, 2020 press briefing, he (Atlas) was attacked by totalitarians posing as mainstream media.  YouTube pulled down some of his video interviews.  Twitter blocked his account.  In February 2021, JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) published a defamatory attack on him.  The totalitarians’ first Orwellian lie to the public was that anything said against lockdowns was a choice of money over lives.  This was not true: The issue is number of life-years lost in various scenarios when accounting for all risks.  The totalitarians’ second Orwellian lie to the public was that the anti-lockdown position advocated letting the infection spread freely until herd immunity would be achieved.  This was not true: The issue is the relative merit of universal lockdowns versus the focused protection of the most vulnerable, especially of those in nursing homes.  Atlas’ viewpoint was encapsulated in the Great Barrington Declaration, which has been co-signed by 14,794 public-health officials and medical scientists, as well as 43,575 medical practitioners as of June 27, 2021.

There are other negative aspects of U.S. public-health policy as well.  In the print edition of the Wall Street Journal on January 27, 2022, Dr. Marty Makary described the ruin of many lives by public-health officials who have insisted that workers with natural immunity be fired unless they were also vaccinated.  In contradiction to that approach, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) last week released data showing that natural immunity (the immunity acquired by an unvaccinated person who recovers form Covid-19) is 2.8 times more effective in preventing hospitalization, compared with vaccination.  Moreover, natural immunity is between 3.3 and 4.7 times more effective in preventing Covid-19 infection, compared with vaccination.  

Makary notes that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has always disdained natural immunity as having unknown longevity, even while refusing to study the matter.  Hence, Makary and some colleagues at Johns Hopkins University did the required study themselves: Among 295 unvaccinated people who recovered from Covid-19, 99% of them had Covid-19 antibodies up to nearly two years after infection.  This result should be unsurprising, because other severe coronaviruses such as SARS and MERS also confer lasting immunity.

In Makary’s opinion, public-health officials have a lot of explaining to do.  Even CDC director Walensky signed the “John Snow memorandum” of October 2020 declaring that there is no evidence for natural immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection.  In view of the clinical fact that no one ever sees reinfected patients on ventilators, something must be causing that observed absence - - and that something is natural immunity!  Nevertheless, public-health officials recklessly destroyed the careers of some pilots, truck drivers, teachers, soldiers, and others who had recovered form Covid-19 and who chose not to be vaccinated.  

Adverse effects of this irrational public-health policy (ignoring natural immunity) have also invaded hospitals.  The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services decreed that all facilities under its jurisdiction must require vaccination of staff.  [The U.S. Supreme Court disallowed such a mandate in the case of OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Agency).]  One understaffed hospital in Washington state, having lost 55 staff due to non-vaccination, ran so short of workers that it “summoned staff who were Covid-positive to return to work even if they were sick,” but with only mild to moderate illness.

By way of summary of the critiques of public-health policy offered by Makary and Atlas: Makary concludes that many politicians and public-health officials owe apologies to American workers and that fired workers with natural immunity should be rehired.  Atlas goes further by comparing “the Party” in George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, to today’s coterie of leading public-health officials.  Atlas (on his page 317) quotes Orwell: “If all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed - - if all records told the same tale - - then the lie passed into history and became truth.”

Coronavirus and Inflation: 2020 - 2021

In a blog post appearing on this website on May 19, 2020, some statistics and predictions were presented for the coronavirus SARS CoV-2, which causes the Covid-19 disease.  This coronavirus can be aerosolized by normal breathing and spread to others, expressing itself in hyperactive immune response, pneumonia, stroke, excessive blood clotting, and the failure of lungs or other organs.

By way of contrast, the European plague (Black Death) of 1347 - 1351 C.E. was most likely an expression of bubonic plague, which is typically estimated to have killed between one-third and one-half of the European population during that interval.  Black Death is an infectious fever caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis and spread by fleas.  That long-ago European plague, as well as today’s global pandemic, caught their contemporary societies completely by surprise.

The origin of SARS CoV-2 is controversial: No pangolins, bats, or other non-human animals were ever found to have had the disease before its massive human outbreak centered on Wuhan, China in late 2019 or early 2020.  On June 24, 2021, Ewen Callaway published a news article (“Deleted coronavirus genome triggers scientific intrigue”) on nature.com.  There, Callaway stated that some SARS-CoV-2 genome sequencing of the early outbreak in Wuhan was removed in May 2020 from a U.S. government database by the scientists who had done the work.  The missing sequences, once recovered, were not dispositive of the origin of SARS-CoV-2.  Nevertheless, one wonders why those data files were temporarily withdrawn; why there was, apparently, U.S. government funding for coronavirus research at a Wuhan lab under Communist military auspices; whether that Wuhan research fell under the category of “gain of function” (the tweaking of the genetics of one virus in order to produce an even deadlier virus); and whether “gain of function” research is ever justified apart from the fact that “research makes money flow.”  These issues are not pursued here.

It should be noted that controversy also exists on the significance of asymptomatic cases (infected individuals without signs of disease) and on the distinction between “deaths due to Covid” and “deaths with Covid.”  How many co-morbidities are necessary before a death due to Covid-19 is relegated to a death with Covid-19?

It now seems appropriate to compare some of the early Covid-19 predictions from the May 19, 2020 blog post on this website with some of the actual results since then (as of the last half of January 2022).  (Here, all SARS-CoV-2 variants are considered together, including Delta and Omicron.)  As of May 1, 2020 the coronavirus pandemic had resulted in 3,334,416 reported cases and 237,943 officially attributable deaths world-wide; while the corresponding U.S. data were 1,098,565 cases and 64,577 deaths.  According to initial U.S. federal reports as of May 1, 2020 the estimated upper bound on the number of U.S. deaths in 2020 due to this outbreak of Covid-19 was 2.2 million.  Starting with these numbers and a total U.S. population of approximately 330,000,000, the implied upper bound on the U.S. Covid-19 mortality rate in 2020 was 0.67% (2.2 / 330).  

In contrast, the plague of 1347 to 1351 could be associated with four consecutive years with an annual mortality rate of 12%, which would account for the death of 40% of the population.  (Note that 1 - 0.88^4 = 0.4, which is in a mid-range between the historical estimates of 0.33 and 0.50.)  Thus, the implied upper bound on the U.S. mortality rate due to Covid-19 in 2020 was about 18 times smaller than the historically estimated annual European mortality rate due to bubonic plague during the mid-fourteenth century (0.67% ≈ 12% / 18).  On this metric, the bleakest U.S. outlook for 2020 would have had to be multiplied by a “horror-factor” of 18 in order to capture the reality of the earlier bubonic plague.  

Fortunately, the actual number of U.S. deaths attributed to Covid-19 as of January 21, 2022, as reported by the New York Times, is “only” about 860,000.  Of these, worldometer.info states that there were 370,781 such deaths in 2020 and 478,405 in 2021.  Using the number for 2021, the actual U.S. Covid-19 mortality rate in 2021 was 0.14% (0.478 / 330); and the corresponding “horror factor” was approximately 86 (0.14% ≈ 12% / 86).  On this metric, the actual U.S. Covid-19 mortality for 2021 would need to be multiplied by a “horror-factor” of 86 in order to capture the reality of the earlier bubonic plague.  

It was, and continues to be, a widespread presupposition that public health measures could have been (or still can be) instituted that will swiftly eliminate coronavirus deaths without regard to economic consequences.  This presupposition has proven to be false: So-called lockdowns of travel, trade, and commerce have led to world-wide economic recessions; portending ruinous taxation, hyper-inflation, and expropriation of rental properties; and auguring famine, civil chaos, and stark authoritarianism.  The U.S. Department of Labor’s March-to-April 2020 grocery inflation rate was 2.6%, the highest monthly increase since the mid-1970’s.  The year-over-year Consumer Price Index (CPI) for December 2021 (comparing December 2021 to December 2020) saw a 7.0% increase, which was the highest inflation rate since 1981.

One notes in passing that the CPI, a venerable economic index of long standing, was set up to ignore what its creators considered to be noisy data (food and fuel) and capital investment (housing).  Consequently, the CPI grossly underestimates the “real” inflation rate by ignoring some key inflation drivers.  Hence, it is fair to say both that inflation is at its worst since 1981 based on the CPI and its “market basket” of what people actually buy, apart from fuel, food, and housing; and that a more realistic inflation rate, as experienced by most individuals today, greatly exceeds 7%.

One also notes that the Roman Empire flourished economically from its inception in 27 B.C. until the reign of Marcus Aurelius (the Antonine dynast who reigned from 161 - 180 A.D.).  The earlier Roman Empire had relatively low taxes and a money supply that grew approximately in proportion to the size of the economy.  According to some historians, the so-called “Antonine plague” (smallpox or measles), imported into the Roman Empire by legionaries returning from battles in Mesopotamia, decimated society; drove up wages so as to create too many denarii chasing too few goods; made public administration and military preparedness impossible to finance; and caused inflation amounting to a factor of 100 or more from 200 A.D. to 300 A.D.  Diocletian and other exemplary military leaders extended the life of the Roman Empire, but inflation was ever present; and by 476 A.D. the last nominal Roman Emperor in the West was sent into exile by the barbarian Odoacer.

  The root cause of inflation in the late Roman Empire seems to have been the Antonine plague (imported by Roman legionaries), which in turn caused depopulation, economic disruption (high wages and low output), debasement of the currency via creative metallurgy, and ruinous levels of taxation imposed by desperate emperors simultaneously confronting foreign invasion.  (For example, in 251 A.D. a Goth army killed the Emperor Decius in battle in what is today northeastern Bulgaria.) 

  The root cause of post-2020 inflation in the United States is the coronavirus pandemic (imported by infected airline passengers), which in turn caused unacceptable mortality, economic disruption (trillions of dollars printed for welfare, lack of incentive to work, and supply-chain impediments), and debasement of the currency via printing press and spreadsheet.  Still looming are the ruinous levels of taxation to be imposed by a desperate governing class simultaneously confronting massive illegal immigration and declining real wages.

Comparing the root causes of inflation in each case, one might well expect increasing societal instability in the U.S. analogous to that in the late Roman Empire.

Exacerbating its modern-day economic crisis, the U.S. governing class has superimposed internecine sociological warfare based on a very recent neo-Marxist theory in which one fixed class of high-incarceration-rate individuals is oppressed by a second fixed class of low-incarceration-rate individuals.  Old Marxist theory never succeeded because inter-class mobility left no fixed class to vilify.  In contrast, the neo-Marxist theory holds that incarceration-rate status may be identified by racial group, which is a fixed characteristic.  Hence, there are well-defined, static groups of oppressors and victims awaiting Marxist redress of grievances and establishment of societal stability.  (How well are these oppressors defined?  What is the assigned racial group for high-incarceration-rate individuals guilty of loan fraud involving billion-dollar real estate?)  Dogmatically assuming the existence of fixed classes of oppressors and victims, the neo-Marxist theory holds that laws serve only the “privilege” of the oppressors until such time as a Marxist ruling class will re-issue superior laws.

Rescuing American History: Essay Reviews (3)

In this blog posting, we continue (from the September 6, 2021 and November 1, 2021 postings) a review of some essays on the topic of American-history education in the U.S.  These essays were recently published in the book “Red, White, and Black,” which includes critiques of the revisionist history published as the “1619 Project” by the New York Times.  The editor of “Red, White, and Black” is Robert L. Woodson, Sr.  Bibliographic data is included in Essay Reviews (1) appearing as the September 6, 2021 blog posting.  (There was a typographical error in that 9/6/21 posting: The correct name is Robert L. Woodson, Sr.)  Today’s blog posting will review another essay in “Red, White, and Black.”   

The essay appearing on pages 143 - 150 in Woodson’s book is titled “Critical Race Theory’s Destructive Impact on America.”  Its author, Carol M. Swain, currently a political commentator on nationally well-known news outlets, is a former university professor of political science and law at Princeton and Vanderbilt universities.  Swain finds that the 1619 Project is a revisionist history of race in America that invokes newfangled and morally repugnant claims in order to justify its thesis that racism is an American way of life that is irremediable - - unless the 1619 Project’s teaching materials are universally adopted.  The basis of this project is to assign 1619, the year that Africans first appeared in Virginia, as the founding year of the United States.  The 1619 Project holds that all of U.S. history revolves around the practice of slavery. (One notes in passing that 17th century Englishmen would have been astonished to learn that what they had considered as a North American seaboard ripe for colonization was instead a land destined to become a republic by virtue of what was, for them, an isolated sequence of transactions starting in 1619.)  

Swain mentions that this revisionist history has been put into the form of classroom materials for K-12 education without the normal, lengthy peer-review process.  As of February, 2020 these materials were in 3,500 classrooms.   However, a “small detail” seems to have been overlooked by the purveyors of the 1619 Project: Swain finds that during the forty-two years from 1619 to 1661, there was a mix of slavery and indentured servitude in North America.  The result was that some blacks became free.  Free blacks, American Indians, and whites all competed in buying slaves, which were legally imported after 1661.  “Early Negroes imported into Virginia held the status of indentured servants … [and received] ‘freedom dues’ in the form of land at the end of their term of service.”  There are documented cases of free black individuals who were able to pay for the import of additional indentured servants and to receive 50 acres of land for each indentured servant imported.

The picture of colonial individuals who maintained some measure of mobility among slave, indentured, and free classes “differs substantially from the narrative advanced by the 1619 Project contributors.”  There is the appearance, Swain thinks, that the 1619 Project is a stalking horse for the larger project of extracting and administering reparations for slavery.  Reparations would flow from sufficiently non-black individuals to sufficiently black individuals.  Reparations would be theoretically justified by the assumed existence of torts and malfeasance by some remote ancestors against other remote ancestors.  

Swain maintains that reparations are wrong, first, on utilitarian grounds: The real problems of some black citizens would not be addressed by reparations, and the real progress shown by other black citizens would not be recognized.  Second, reparations are wrong on moral grounds: Today’s white Americans are not responsible for great-great-great grandparents who might have been insufficiently zealous in abolishing slavery (or who might have been residing in Slovakia or Lithuania).  Moreover, free blacks, American Indians, and whites all bought slaves.  Finally, one notes in passing the problem that, for the purposes of reparations, it would be impossible for any individual, of any race, to prove that some remote ancestor had not held slaves at some time in the remote past.  What should one say about African Americans whose near ancestors were slaves in North America, but whose remote ancestors held slaves in Africa?  Proving a negative is no more likely of success in reparations theory than in any other endeavor.

Swain goes on to define “critical race theory” (CRT) as an analytic framework to analyze institutions and culture, dividing the world into white oppressors and non-white victims.  CRT uses anecdotes and “personal narratives” in place of traditional historical data.  The goal is to create a new ruling class.  Such a class would be available for administrating reparations.  Although left unsaid by Swain in her essay, one notes in passing that any new ruling class will owe homage and fealty to the theorists of the 1619 Project and to sufficiently “woke” individuals of any race - - or so those theorists and “woke” individuals hope.  (An individual is said to be “woke” if he or she is a connoisseur of life’s inequities, being adept in their detection and elimination.)

In the world of the 1619 Project, Swain states, “education is now about white privilege indoctrination.”  Even poor Appalachians (and one thinks also of the descendants of the Okies who fled the dust bowl) are guilty of incorrect skin color.  Swain maintains that “The 1619 Project is a misguided effort to keep open historical wounds while telling only half the story … Blaming today’s families for the mistakes of our ancestors is not a prescription for unifying the country or empowering racial and ethnic minorities.”  Swain is able to perceive this misguided effort, because “I [Swain] reached my formative years before critical race theory and cultural Marxism gained a dominant foothold.”