The Breaking Time

From drunk to ruler: Liu Pang survives a Breaking Time

Despite his badassery, Liu Pang never slew a dragon. But Washington never killed a tiger either

Here's a story, and it's worth taking a moment to tell.

A very, very long time ago, Liu Pang (or Bang, depending on the translation), was born in a small village in China, a peasant. Generally regarded as a lazy drunk in his youth, Liu Pang was still charismatic enough that bartenders would pour him free drinks just to keep him around. Occupying various village positions from cop to headman, Pang eventually married relatively well and, as a leader of his town, ended up picked to lead a group of draftees to work on the emperor's tomb.

Yes, that Emperor's tomb

In was a dubious honor. China, at the time, suffered under the rule of Qin Shi Huang, who had a love for massive building projects that, whatever their uses, also happened to work large portions of the laborers to death. In fact, he loved these projects almost as much as he adored utterly crushing anything that might contradict him. Life expectancy either way was not good. So, one by one, Pang's drafted labor force slipped away. Heavily influenced by Legalism, perhaps the most cold-blooded political philosophy ever developed by humans, the emperor's laws were heavy on death penalty. Rebellion? Death. Late for duty? Death. Swimming in a thunderstorm? Death. Conscripts escape? Death.

Well hell, at least a death on the run might be quick. Driven by the same combination of insightful ambition and selfishness that had preoccupied his life, Pang ditched the rest of his band and went off to get drunk in the swamp. Some of them followed, and soon Pang was a genuine bandit lord.

When the old tyrant died, his machinery fractured, and the state quickly fell apart. Pang emerged from brigandage and became a minor warlord (same job, better title). Charismatic as ever, he picked capable subordinates, winning cities and former enemies over by the innovative tactic of not looting and burning them to the ground. A Taoist, he simplified laws where he want, reducing taxes on farmers and shaking off the mechanistic oppression of the Qin era. Later historians would marvel at his ability to draw loyalty (and repeated reinforcements) from the peasantry, but a large part of his appeal stemmed from simply not being a raging asshole when everyone else was.

Poems for Friday: Ulysses

I must apologize, readers, for the fact that I've let the last few Fridays go by without a poem here. Alfred Tennyson's Ulysses is an old favorite, to the extent I can't believe that I haven't posted this here before. It's old-school: long and word-rich in that way that leaves the reader stuffed, almost too much. But, hell, they're incredible words.

July's simmered over the landscape, from D.C. to Asheville. One might be forgiven for the bits of this poem that drift up, complete with a sense that younger days are long past, and the sword rusted more than any want to admit.

It little profits that an idle king, 

By this still hearth, among these barren crags, 

Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole 

Unequal laws unto a savage race, 

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. 

I cannot rest from travel; I will drink 

Life to the lees. All times I have enjoy'd 

Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those 

That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when 

Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades 

Vext the dim sea. I am become a name; 

For always roaming with a hungry heart 

Much have I seen and known,-- cities of men 

And manners, climates, councils, governments, 

Myself not least, but honor'd of them all,-- 

And drunk delight of battle with my peers, 

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy. 

I am a part of all that I have met; 

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro' 

Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades 

For ever and for ever when I move. 

How dull it is to pause, to make an end, 

To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use! 

As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life 

Were all too little, and of one to me 

Little remains; but every hour is saved 

>From that eternal silence, something more, 

A bringer of new things; and vile it were 

For some three suns to store and hoard myself, 

And this gray spirit yearning in desire 

To follow knowledge like a sinking star, 

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. 

This is my son, mine own Telemachus, 

to whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,-- 

Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill 

This labor, by slow prudence to make mild 

A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees 

Subdue them to the useful and the good. 

Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere 

Of common duties, decent not to fail 

In offices of tenderness, and pay 

Meet adoration to my household gods, 

When I am gone. He works his work, I mine. 

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail; 

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners, 

Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me,-- 

That ever with a frolic welcome took 

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed 

Free hearts, free foreheads,-- you and I are old; 

Old age hath yet his honor and his toil. 

Death closes all; but something ere the end, 

Some work of noble note, may yet be done, 

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. 

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks; 

The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep 

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends. 

'T is not too late to seek a newer world. 

Push off, and sitting well in order smite 

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds 

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths 

Of all the western stars, until I die. 

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; 

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, 

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. 

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' 

We are not now that strength which in old days 

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,-- 

One equal temper of heroic hearts, 

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will 

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. 

 

Defanged metropoli

London! Culturally vibrant! Economically mighty! Politically impotent! Photo by Jason Hawkes

Cities! Over half of humanity now lives in the damn things. Naturally, the futurists are f'ing beside themselves over the wonders this portends. Why, here's prosperity prophet Richard Florida, writing in The Atlantic about how "giant city-states" will own your future: 

Gradually, our great complexes of cities and suburbs are being knit into mega-regions -- giant city-states that are home to millions upon millions of people and generate billions and in some cases trillions of dollars of economic activity. Driving this is not just our individual choices and preferences but the very logic of economic development. Geographic concentration and clustering speeds the transmission of new ideas, increases the underlying productivity of people and firms, and generates powerful economies of scale.

He's got a point, of course, though for additional perspective you should read Nicholas Lemann's (paywalled, sadly) piece on the fight over urban identity. But there's one problem with dubbing this the new age of city-states, namely, the "state" part: most metropoli don't have a huge amount of say in government, often even in their own.

Why, for all their economic and cultural importance, are cities still politically impotent?

The Age of Splinters: More and more countries...

Thousands celebrate South Sudan's independence in Juba. Photo by Roberto Schmidt, AFP

On Saturday, South Sudan, after a long struggle, became the world's 193rd nation. While the country has a challenging path ahead, it's certainly an improvement after years of struggle against an oppressive regime.

Their break with Sudan also marks the latest in a decades long trend: nations splintering instead of forming.

Parag Khanna, writing in Foreign Policy, hails the trend:

Because of this wave of self-determination culminating in sovereignty, there are today more autonomous political units in the world than at any time since the Middle Ages of a millennium ago. Within a few decades, we could easily have 300 states in the world. Moreover, we are gradually returning to the medieval world of thousands of multilayered communities ranging from the supranational European Union to the magnetic city-states of the Persian Gulf to the indigenous communities of the Inuit of Canada and Greenland.

---

The coming partitions must be performed with a combination of scalpel and ax, soft and hard power. Above all, the world must recognize that these partitions are inevitable. Our reflex is to fear changes on the map out of concern for violence or having to learn the names of new countries. But in an age when any group can acquire the tools of violent resistance, the only alternative to self-determination is perpetual conflict.

Khanna mostly focuses on post-colonial states, admittedly a major part of the trend. In their haste to hack up the world, would-be overlords often drew boundaries with a complete disregard for local factors. So you get Iraq, Sudan, the Congo and plenty of others.

The medieval era ended with momentum moving in the opposite direction: nations encompassed broader identities, then took on colonies to become empires. For awhile, it looked like the whole world would end up under a handful of governments. The zenith — just after World War II — saw a rudimentary international structure in place.

Ironically, even the empires' opponents got in on the act. Communism sought to be the international replacement for nation-states, superseding their own identities into a grander ideology.

Even after it was clear that the UN would never govern the world, the competing power blocs still seemed a trend towards centralization, especially as the European Union started to knit a continent together.

But post-colonial states kept splitting up and the USSR acted like an old-school empire before promptly collapsing like one. It's not confined to the developing world either: the EU doesn't look so hot, nor does Italy.

When did we stop looking at the stars?

Into the wild blue yonder

Last Friday, the space shuttle Atlantis broke Earth's gravity, headed for the international space station. It marked the last space shuttle launch.

While this is not the end of the space program, Atlantis' final journey marks a major point on a long, downward trajectory, not least for the 25,000 workers who will suffer directly from the program's end. These days, the government spends more on air conditioning in Iraq and Afghanistan than on NASA.

Appropriately, today is the 42nd anniversary of David Bowie's "Space Oddity," the classic lament of a doomed astronaut:

Let's not get too altruistic here, either. The space program's heyday came about in large part because Americans and their government viewed it as part of a greater war against the USSR.

Still, NASA's zenith proved something: we can go to space. We can send people to space. The resources exist. The technology is there. Hell, at this point the technology is old.

The only remaining question is: do we want to? When people look out at their society and think "what do I want us to do?" is "go to space, and keep going" on the list?

Not for a long time. People can talk efficiency all they wish, but governments have proven perfectly capable of spending larger sums on far more questionable things (remember all that air conditioning?). The program's death marked a deeper turn.

Partly, the shift came from space travel's birth, tied to the Cold War and '50s hubris. By the era's end, people were, rightly, tired of the damn struggle, and anything associated with it. "Space Oddity" was one early marker, the increasing skepticism of science fiction another.

"Fighting the commies" was never the whole reason, of course. Space exploration had real popular appeal for a long time, tapping into a primal grandeur, combined with humanity's explorational urge. But, forever tied to far-off dividends and the conflict that created it, the whole enterprise proved vulnerable to accusations that the only thing all that money created was "garbage floating in the sky," as Ursula LeGuin's infamously dismissed.

Defenders could even point to more immediate benefits, like the ridiculous amount of more down-to-earth devices spawned by space research. It didn't help. This is the kind of popular argument won in the heart, not the head.

The fact is, the populace at large decided space travel wasn't a priority. It lost its glamour, its war, its money and its support. There were other fears, other dangers. Everything that's followed, from the lack of cutting edge spacecraft to the shuttle's end, is all part of that downward spiral.

So here's the question: we decided to give up on space travel. What did we get instead?

Was it worth it?

"Your kids are no stupider than their grandparents"

Clio rolls her eyes at your historical ignorance. Painting by Pierre Mignard.

A column from Nick Paumgarten in The New Yorker on America's lack of historical knowledge drops some essential wisdom:

The federal government has spent nearly a billion dollars in the past ten years to teach history to history teachers, but the money is no match for countervailing initiatives and trends—No Child Left Behind, and its emphasis on reading and math; the rise of social studies; the tyranny of the unobjectionable textbook; widespread faintheartedness in the face of cultural and political discord; and stronger pot.

And yet it may be that, while kids aren’t getting better, they’re not getting worse. The history of history-education evaluation is littered with voguish pedagogy, statistical funny business, ideological arm wrestling, a disproportionate emphasis on trivia, and a protocol that insures that each generation of kids looks dim to its elders. “We haven’t ever known our past,” Sam Wineburg, a professor of education and history at Stanford, said last week. “Your kids are no stupider than their grandparents.” He pointed out that the first large-scale proficiency study—of Texas students, in 1915-16—demonstrated that many couldn’t tell Thomas Jefferson from Jefferson Davis or 1492 from 1776. A 1943 survey of seven thousand college freshmen found that, among other things, only six per cent of them could name the original thirteen colonies. “Appallingly ignorant,” the Times harrumphed, as it would again in the face of another dismal showing, in 1976. (And it’s not just Americans: an infamous 2004 survey revealed that a small percentage of Britons aged sixteen to twenty-four believed that the Spanish Armada was vanquished by Gandalf.)

Admittedly, Gandalf vs. Armada is pretty awesome. It's particularly ironic that the perpetual scare over the next generation's lack of historical knowledge is itself ignorant of history. For at least a decade I've seen an e-mail purporting to show the decline in educational standards compared to an 1895 eighth-grade test (Snopes has a debunking). Of course, the reason the history part of the test is partly indecipherable is because it relies on ways of grouping epochs that were the voguish pedagogy of the 1890s. That even the historically educated don't remember those is no particular loss.

I lucked up on history. I had a natural talent and interest furthered by some incredible teachers. In retrospect, I think I got just about the best historical education available in public schools. I ended up with the highest possible score on my AP US History exam, and a year's worth of college history credit (my struggles with math are a contrasting story).

Paumgarten's column is dead-on on a number of fronts. History remains contentious (if you doubt this, go look at the YouTube comments for any video relating to the Civil War or Ireland). Parents want some control over their school systems and, in America, they have it through school boards.

So the really juicy, interesting parts all too often get left out in favor of bare-bones facts with little context. If my teachers hadn't had tenure, I don't like to think about what would have happened to them after some of their lessons. I wrote my final AP exam, for example, on labor struggles in the late 19th/early 20th centuries, including the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Can you imagine the outcry in some quarters against any teacher that honestly addressed that topic?

With its competing interpretations and ambiguities, history makes for a tougher sell than the clearer nuts-and-bolts answers of hard science education. Its benefits, while quite real, don't measure easily in terms of the economic development that obsesses many reformers.

Beyond that, is the fact that better historical education is essential to deal with the rapidly changing world we inhabit. But that's not commonly a hallmark of most educational systems, and the way tests are geared ensures a steady supply of statistical talking points to bolster the Woe-is-Us industry, just as it did in the last century. Improving that doesn't involve going back to some bygone era, but an actual evolution forward, in the teeth of those who would rip out of education everything that doesn't fit on a damn balance sheet.

Revenge of the commons

The original gang territory? The medieval center of Siena.

The commons has received much praise as a powerful model for our own era, but mostly forgotten is how those extolled structures were actually run, and what they did to their rivals.

Some fascinating information in this article on medieval communes:

Because much of medieval Europe lacked central authority to provide protection, each city had to provide its own protection for citizens both inside the city walls, and outside. Thus towns formed communes, a legal basis for turning the cities into self-governing corporations. Although in most cases the development of communes was connected with that of the cities, there were rural communes, notably in France and England, that were formed to protect the common interests of villagers.

Every town had its own commune and no two communes were alike, but at their heart, communes were sworn allegiances of mutual defense. When a commune was formed, all participating members gathered and swore an oath in a public ceremony, promising to defend each other in times of trouble, and to maintain the peace within the city proper.

What did it mean for a commune member to defend another? If a commune member was attacked outside the city, it was too late to call for help, as it was unlikely anyone would arrive in time. Instead, the commune would promise to exact revenge on the attacker, the threat of revenge being a form of defense. However, if the attacker was a noble, safely ensconced in a castle (as was often the case), the town commune could not muster the forces to attack him directly. Instead they might attack the noble's family, burn his crops, kill his serfs, or destroy his orchards in retribution.

"How do you govern a community?" is an old question. The rise of towns and cities as a counterbalance to aristocratic authority was a major factor behind the Renaissance and, by extension, the modern world. In some ways, the urban rise hasn't stopped; most of humanity now lives in a city.

The medieval commune busts the stereotypical version of medieval history that, if it considers the peasantry at all, considers them mostly as oppressed masses, focusing instead on the culture and fights of the nobility. Turns out that peasants were plenty active in trying to develop ways to make their own lives less dangerous and hurt those that hurt them. Furthermore, they began independently adapting this basic structure once it proved successful elsewhere.

The medieval commune began by addressing the most basic need: physical protection. It then follows to the most basic way of deterrence: revenge. It is revealing that, in such an anarchic environment, peasants and artisans had an extremely no-bullshit idea of what would protect their own independence, and on what principles their rivals operated.

Interesting too to compare the way the word "commune" has changed over the centuries, from a revenge-based structure of expedience to a byword for egalitarian experimentation. 

In function, the medieval commune was more like a gang than a utopian social movement, not striving for any higher ideal than "don't fuck with us and let us run our own affairs." Which, for a medieval peasant, was a big deal. Notice that this relied on organized banditry — including the slaughter of serfs — to protect its own independence.

Like a gang or tribe, anything outside its orbit was expendable, and it focused on striking where its enemy was weak.

Of course, the communes didn't stay that communal, because ad-hoc organization is usually a precursor to more formal hierarchy. The Siena commune, one of the most successful, was ruled by an oligarchy of nine local leaders by the late 1200s. In Italy and Switzerland, where communes had the greatest success, they formed the foundation for more structured city-state republics.

Widespread disorder was a major reason for their existence in the first place, and the formation of centralized states both reduced that issue and created standing forces capable of subjugating the more rebellious communes.

Nonetheless, an interesting wrinkle here: contra the modern narrative, the communes were cooperative and competitive, with the threatened destruction of their foes (or their lands) a major reason for their existence. At the same time, their example shows that the most enduring structures start with an effective structure for a basic need and build from there.

Poems for Friday: With god on our side

This is definitely an intermission-tastic poem day, due to the pace of the work week. Bob Dylan's birthday was this Tuesday, and WNCW marked the occasion by playing covers of his work. Like Leonard Cohen, Dylan's poetic style has proved wonderfully infectious, with some of the covers exceeding the originals.

The one below, "With god on our side," by the Neville Brothers, is one of the best Dylan covers I've heard. The video is mediocre, the song superb. Happy Friday, everyone.

Heaven can wait, we're only watching the skies

In case you were wondering, here's a chart. Larger version here.

According to some calculations, most seeming to stem from the fundamentalist preacher Harold Camping, this Saturday, May 21 is the Rapture. Among those who do not hold with this, the typical reaction seems to be "party!"

While predictions of imminent apocalypse have a long pedigree, and one not just confined to Christianity, the Rapture is a recent and mostly American invention, arising out of 18th century Puritanism.

Growing up in the rural part of the Bible Belt, where mainstream and open-minded denominations rubbed shoulders with the more esoteric fundamentalists, this idea in particular always struck me as among the strangest. I remember a particular religious bookstore with a bargain bin of apocalypses, containing predictions that Gorbachev, hippies, AIDS and computers, among others, were signs of an imminent end.

At one point, around 4th grade, I acquired the sort of fascination with the concept that only a child can muster. After taking down a Bible and skipping forward to Revelation, I decided that the world would end the next week, around 10:40 in the morning, during the language arts portion of class. I waited quietly at my desk, inwardly relieved when the appointed time arrived and my teacher was not devoured by serpent beasts. Or harlots, for that matter, who I assumed were some type of badass female supervillain.

Later, I understood the roots. Poverty and upheaval are key to the American story, creating fertile soil for visions — not just religious or Christian — of sudden triumph. It is a hard world, and those who endure long enough would dearly love for the sky to open in their favor, just once.

In best secular fashion, more and more people are getting in on the celebration, and NPR is even asking for a soundtrack. After all, in my lifetime, we've had the Bomb, homegrown terrorists, Y2K, foreign terrorists and economic strife. As long as I can remember, things far more real than Rapture have loomed.

But here we are, still alive, throwing a party. Heaven can wait, we're only watching the skies.

Want to help spur a dark age? Close a library

My hometown library, thankfully not shuttered yet.

I woke up this morning to this heartbreaking post by Charles Simic:

All across the United States, large and small cities are closing public libraries or curtailing their hours of operations. Detroit, I read a few days ago, may close all of its branches and Denver half of its own: decisions that will undoubtedly put hundreds of its employees out of work. When you count the families all over this country who don’t have computers or can’t afford Internet connections and rely on the ones in libraries to look for jobs, the consequences will be even more dire. People everywhere are unhappy about these closings, and so are mayors making the hard decisions. But with roads and streets left in disrepair, teachers, policemen and firemen being laid off, and politicians in both parties pledging never to raise taxes, no matter what happens to our quality of life, the outlook is bleak.

---

I don’t know of anything more disheartening than the sight of a shut down library. No matter how modest its building or its holdings, in many parts of this country a municipal library is often the only place where books in large number on every imaginable subject can be found, where both grownups and children are welcome to sit and read in peace, free of whatever distractions and aggravations await them outside.

I've written here before about the decay of public infrastructure for some similar reasons, though it focused on nuts and bolts like roads and street lamps. Libraries are just as vital a piece of infrastructure.

This one hits home for me. The main family heirloom, passed down by my great-grandfather, is a set of 1912 Harvard classics. My mother, a schoolteacher, found ways to make sure that what ever else went on in our lives, whatever lack of money we were struggling with, there were always books around. Frequently, that was possible because of a public library.

For the short-sighted, it's an easy target. Books, after all, will still exist and, besides, goes the dismissal, there's the internet.

Yeah, no shit. Undoubtedly even the occasional Victorian street urchin had some access to books and outside knowledge, but that misses the damn point.

Libraries' greatest service isn't for the well-off, who can get education and information relatively easily in any era. Instead, its crowning achievement is opening up knowledge to those large parts of society — the unfashionable neighborhoods, the rural swaths — that the tastemakers and futurists usually ignore.

Ignored doesn't mean nonexistent, of course, and for those populations, libraries are a major resource. One, that unlike a lot of other services, doesn't lecture. We're open, read what you want. 

It is the best kind of egalitarianism: available to everyone, relatively cheap, and rewarding initiative. Libraries don't require the upfront cash or monthly bills that internet access does, and are open to non-tech savvy parts of the population. Often, they include local collections or obscure texts that the internet has, for the large part, ignored. Hell, they even open access to that same new media to those who can't afford it.

As if all that wasn't enough, libraries complement the education systems in place, because even if those are magically reformed, tomorrow, there's inevitably things their curriculums will leave out.

Even at points in my childhood when public education was lacking, access to a library took up some of the slack. Thanks to them, I first learned about dueling political theories, Alexander the Great, Chinese history and evolution, to name just a few.

If you think I'm drawing too much from my personal past, consider that there are millions out there who owe the same debt.

The presence of a library, even in the smallest community, is a reminder that the world is more than what's right in front of you, and that ideas aren't just the province of the rich.

History, from one view, can mark catastrophes by the destruction of libraries. For the power-hungry and zealous, the rooms full of books were a threat, or expendable.

Today, we don't need invaders. Just a smug belief in our own advancement, and a blind refusal to pay the bill.