The Breaking Time

Breaking Sparta

Epaminondas kicking ass. Illustration by W. Rainey.

Back in Greece, there was one city state, a militaristic slave society, hated and feared above all others. At the start of the 4th century B.C., Sparta ran the neighborhood, setting up and toppling governments, generally acting like bastards to everyone else.

Their main rival broken, they seemed invincible. The newly democratic Thebes, one of the only cities left standing with a chance of stopping them, especially hated them.

Despite the torrent of crap about their merits in recent years, especially all fictions about the stand of the 300, the Spartans were hands-down the villains of this era. In Thebes' case they'd once been allies, but the Spartans betrayed them, took over their capital and put in a government they despised, propped up by occupying soldiers.

A few years later, the Thebans took back their city and reasserted their rights. Sure enough, the second they start gaining serious power again, the Spartans send out an army to remind them who's boss.

So in 371 B.C., the Thebans turned to Epaminondas, a now nigh-forgotten leader who had some experience as a soldier but more of a reputation for philosophy and integrity. But sometimes the best people for war aren't warriors; this was one of those times.

Forget Thermopylae for a moment, because this story is way more relevant, and more interesting. Epaminondas was about to do the impossible: break Sparta.

JFK: people see what they want to see

American Tabula Rasa

Fifty years ago yesterday, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was killed, a brutal tragedy that threw the country into mourning and spawned a heap of conspiracy theories, along with speculation that continues to the present.

Predictably, there was live-tweeting of the events, memorials, appreciations and, of course, the procession of the devotees of the above conspiracies and the counter-demonstrations of the debunkers.

But what interests me, and what might be one of Kennedy's most enduring legacies is his role as American politics' tabula rasa; people see in him exactly what they want to see. Not just Americans, either. Kennedy had the charisma and luck to pull off some of that whole "leader of the free world" schtick at a time when people still believed it (the above picture is from Ireland). Even for detractors of the current American state, Kennedy's end makes for an appealing might-have-been; the point where America could have actually lived up to its ideals, tragically cut short.

The reality is, as always, more complicated. JFK was a relatively mainstream, even belligerent, Cold War politician. He was great on space, decent on labor, tepid on civil rights, ruthlessly ambitious, a hawk who talked pretty to doves, and "operating a damn Murder Incorporated in the Caribbean."

Ironically LBJ, in many conspiracies the reactionary benefactor of a Dallas coup d'etat, was farther left than Kennedy domestically with the Civil Rights Act and the Great Society, and even took a warier approach in places like Cuba.

But the vicissitudes of the 60s and 70s make more sense to the national pysche with a slain golden boy. It fits some powerful myths about America: for once, we were on the right track, and a noble leader was going to lay bare the darkness at the heart of the republic.

Then he's slain by nefarious forces (a shabby maniac simply won't do). So people invent quotes or turn political dodges into evidence that a brighter day was snatched from us.

They're helped by the fact that most people don't understand the grab-bag nature of the Democratic Party of the time. During Kennedy's day the coalition ostensibly included everyone from social democrats to segregationists. By 1968 it would fall apart, but in the early '60s it still held in its rickety way; JFK was partly in Texas to mediate disputes between liberal and conservative Democratic factions.

Kennedy did what any politician does; he tried to give each faction what they wanted to hear, including the ones represented in his inner circle. That's made it easy even for people who actually knew the man to make sweeping predictions about what he might have done, many of them tied to avoiding mistakes like Vietnam. The natural appeal of the myth carries things the rest of the way. Believe in a political creed that got short shrift? On Nov. 21, 1963, JFK agreed with you and was about to do something about it. Really.

Which beliefs would he have actually followed? We don't know, because he died.

In 1963, Kennedy probably didn't know either. Our savior/villain b.s. with presidents runs deep, but they're plenty susceptible to pressure and circumstance. War or peace from JFK might have depended on something as banal as which Democratic faction fared best in the 1964 elections or how South Vietnamese intrigue shook out that week.

In another world, it's possible to imagine a graying Kennedy cracking down on protesters shouting about a Latin American quagmire or a Civil Rights Act he never gets around to.

But instead we're in this world, where it comforts the afflicted to think that at some point, we actually had the leader we deserved.

What's expendable?

"The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices." - C.S. Lewis

Yesterday morning, I was annoying my Twitter followers by exposing them to a concentrated dose of the Every Gentrifier account. It's hilarious stuff, and Asheville in particular can use a good, hard shot of it occasionally. 

On a completely separate note, I just finished reading Simon Schama's superb Citizens, a history of the French Revolution. It's one of the best explanations of the post-Revolution fratricide that ended up with blood literally running in the streets. I've seen this portrayed as a tragedy of division; a singular will of the people sadly falling apart in petty factionalism.

But Schama shows that the division happened because other than some very general matters, the revolutionaries didn't agree from the start. Refomers wanted a British-style neutered monarchy, radicals a popular republic (with a dead king), liberals craved a free market, the sans-cullotes economic protections. When things got an inch past statements of "liberty, equality, fraternity" and a vague agreement to curb the king, those differences mattered a whole hell of a lot.

Both tweets and Schama's tome point to something that I often feel is worth a bit of explanation. It's easy to imagine that politics is a showdown between different worldviews, with malevolence in one corner. Certainly the "this is a movie with a climax and ending" view helps indulge the illusion that everything can be reconciled for everyone if only the bad guys would get out of the way.

From my perspective however, I've seen the most damage done by blithe, well-meaning people who simply view large swaths of their society as expendable. It's not (usually) conscious. But when they think of "community" they just happen to leave out most of the people with less money or power than themselves. When they imagine where something must be built (or stopped) or where tax dollars should go, it's their own cloistered world reflected back at them. This feat of mental fortification accomplished, it's easier to dump the inconvenient sharp edges of a given decision elsewhere, where they won't see it too often.

And this is really where the rubber meets the road. Forget rhetoric: people will say they support all kinds of things in theory, often simultaneously. Politicians are known for being two-faced partly because at some point they drop one of the goals they once said they supported

But here's the thing, their supporters do the same. It's easy for people to say they like low taxes and well-funded schools, density and perfectly-preserved "neighborhood character." Since politics requires numbers, who wouldn't tell them they share their concerns?

Sure, hybrid idea are great and sometimes possible in political situations, but the fact is not everyone is going to get what they want. So eventually, something happens to change the equation.

When someone proposes that an affordable housing complex goes in next door that blocks a local's view or offends their sense of place, which priority gets ditched? The proof of what really matters in someone's politics isn't what they support, but what they'll sacrifice. Or, more importantly, whom.

This is why much prejudice doesn't manifest blatantly. While that remains a real issue, the more devastating racist isn't the idiot at the Klan rally, it's the planner who doesn't think twice about plowing an overpass through an already-reeling black neighborhood. Unequal pay for women is more harshly enforced by managers who just simply don't think of them as leadership material than any '50s throwback.

To reverse it, anyone who wants to change the world for the better needs to have a clear view of the consequences. Every possible social arrangement has its costs. As everyone's not going to get what they want, what constituencies are you ok with paying more of the bill? Why? What division of power (and it is always about power) do you want to see?

Who gets told "deal with it" and "you'll live"? What's expendable?

Why revolutions crush rebellions

The revolutionaries already look like Cossacks.

On an unusually cold March morning 92 years ago, thousands of Red Army soldiers left solid ground and charged across five miles of heavy ice to the fortress city of Kronstadt. 

The citadel was held by the rebellious sailors of the Baltic Fleet, formerly the shock troop zealots of the revolution. During the 1917 uprisings, they'd executed their officers en masse and remained one of the Bolshevik's most reliable military forces.

But as Lenin and his crew centralized their power and became increasingly repressive, the sailors turned against them. They seized the fleet and issued their own manifestoes, declaring that "the hammer and sickle – has been replaced by the bayonet and the barred window."

The sailors were experienced fighters in a formidable position: they cut the Red Army down. Over 10,000 soldiers died during 10 days of fighting. But in the end, the government crushed the uprising. They finished devastating Kronstadt just in time to mark the 50th anniversary of the Paris Commune, destroyed by the troops of the fledgling French Third Republic.

In 1794, the leaders of the American Revolution called up their forces once again, this time to end a guerilla rebellion rather than start one. Western farmers had taken up arms rather than pay the whiskey tax that was part of Alexander Hamilton's plan to get the nascent national economy up and running without pissing off his mercantile allies too much. So President George Washington marched west at the head of 13,000 soldiers. There was no major bloodshed, but the message was completely clear: rise up and we'll destroy you.

Then there's the Irish Civil War, 13 Vendémiaire, the Satsuma Rebellion, the Hyderabad campaign, the Cultural Revolution, the 1993 shelling of Russia's parliament. It's a long, bloody list. Hell, in 1848 even Victor Hugo enthusiastically led troops to put down the same riotous Parisians who were his allies a few months before.

There's a mythology around popular revolution, one that informs what kind of politics we revere, that even determines what we consider possible in our wildest dreams.

This is its uncomfortable catalogue of heresies, an alternate timeline running parallel to the shinier canon of July 4, the storming of the Bastille, the Fall of the Iron Curtain. The same process happens across cultures, after violent revolutions and peaceful ones, perpetrated by regimes both tyrannical and democratic. Every time the troops crest the barricades, it poses a dirty little question: why do revolutions, based on the principle that rebellion is justified, end up ruthlessly ending rebellions?

Hierarchy has its place

Sometimes, this is actually the right way to go

Megan Erickson has a great Jacobin piece defending the concept of public education against the "unschooling" fads. While it's full of great points, it also has some interesting bits on hierarchy, like this:

Why shouldn’t kids be asked to put away their crayons and go to lunch at the same time? Why do we assume that clear boundaries, a schedule, and a sense of hierarchy are so threatening to students? Why must the individual’s vision be so carefully and serenely sheltered from other people, who are experienced in this framework as interruptions? There is value in being pulled out of a daydream. There is value in learning to cope with a little coercion, in knowing what it means to cooperate on a daily basis with someone who doesn’t love you, someone who’s not your family member.

Yes, yes, and yes. This doesn't get said nearly enough, and along with her point about the difference between privilege and authority, it takes this from a good essay to a great one.

While Erickson's piece is focused on education, the same assumptions behind "unschooling" — extreme suspicion of any power structure — underlie a whole slew of other movements, from open source to consensus protest groups.

Sometimes, in some arenas, this approach works just fine (with information especially) but in many it doesn't. Sometimes hierarchy is exactly what's needed.

"There's a meeting:" MLK mixes the grand with the practical

There will be many good tributes to Martin Luther King, Jr. today, and in previous years here I've noted his forgotten side and quest for balance. 

But there's something else worth highlighting, and the speech above is a really good example. It's the end of "We Shall Overcome," an incredibly powerful few minutes. Almost lost in the applause, you can hear King giving the rapturous crowd instructions.

He's telling them to attend a meeting. After the heights of this speech, it seems an absolutely mundane thing to do. "That's why we're fighting for a more moral universe against all odds. Meet me in the fellowship hall in 10 minutes." Not a call to find themselves, not pulling them towards vague evolution, King wanted a concrete, immediate action. The rhetoric's important, but it's that combination that made the civil rights movement work.

Idea Scavenge: have a stranger run your government

A gilded cage for an invited ruler. The square of Sienna's Palazzo Pubblico.

I stumbled upon an interesting idea recently while researching medieval social organization. While the topic may sound dry, it's actually fascinating stuff. A welter of communal, democratic and mercantile structures all co-existed. These are essentially the building blocks of the modern nation-state and corporation, along with many alternatives to those options.

I've already written about the peasant revenge gang that was the commune. The idea of a podesta is also pretty fascinating. While they started simply as foreign governors, they became much more interesting. From chronicler Leander Albertus:

The citizens, seeing that there often arose among them quarrels and altercations, whether from favoritism or friendship, from envy or hatred that one had against another, by which their republic suffered great harm, loss and detriment; therefore, they decided, after much deliberation, to provide against these disorders. And thus they began to create a man of foreign birth their chief magistrate, giving him every power, authority and jurisdiction over the city, as well over criminal as over civil causes, and in times of war as well as in times of peace, calling him praetor as being above the others, or podestà., as having every authority and power over the city."

There's a lot of factional strife in the modern era, after all, and some of the reasons for a figure like a podesta are still there. A capable outsider, mutually respected by most of the factions, might be a really good way to run a really fractious place and mediate disputes. Notably, the podesta's powers were later scaled back to mostly judicial functions, and they were intentionally isolated within their palaces to prevent any one group from having control

This idea seems like it could be really useful right now, especially for areas with a lot of distrust and political divisions. I could easily see something like a podesta being great for running a city-state or particular enclave. Outside perspective has its advantages, especially in dispute resolution. Local councils or military leaders still had plenty of power in cities with a podesta, but the respected stranger offered some check on local ambitions and provided a handy long-term perspective.

Importantly, in its most successful days, the podesta was chosen by locals, not imposed from the outside. Otherwise, they would end up terrible at settling disputes and would likely get thrown out by rebellion in the process.

Someday this will all be yours

by Damien Williams, a follow-up to Life in the so-called space age

The Last Judgment, Heironymous Bosch

Come close and I'll tell you a secret.

The Breaking Time is really just the continual state of the post-Lapsarian condition. Everything we are and everything we do is a result of the Fall of Man, and that Fall makes itself evident in everything we ourselves create. All decay, all rot, all moral failures and lawlessness, all attempts by mad to trespass into God's domain with works like artificial intelligence, artificial life, and genetic manipulation are just the side-effects of humanity's experience and expression of evil; today is God's Judgment.

This is what I would tell you if I were a fundamentalist Christian-- that we are all sinful in some basic fashion (because of some basic action), and that nature has infected everything we do. But I'm not a fundamentalist Christian, so let's try something else.

The Breaking Time is just the precursor to the coming of the Messiah, and the fulfilling of YHVH's ultimate covenant with Man. We must strive through, as best we can but also spur on progress toward the time when this Messiah will make itself known. As such, we tolerate lawlessness, immorality, and decay, as we know that it will bring us closer to the time of Messianic Fruition.

 No? Okay, how about this:

That which we call "evil" is really just the effect of the workings of evolutionary biological processes, selfishness, procreative need, tribalism, and the insular nature of the preferred size of human social groups. The only thing that exists which can rightly be called "evil" are those forces of ignorance which lead us away from inquiry and scientific understanding, and those forces must, indeed, be stamped out and shown as false, broken, harmful, and dangerous, at all costs. Only then will the true nature of the universe be able to be known, free of antiquated moralising and repression.

What about this: The return of Maitreya has meant that there will be a world-wide awakening of consciousness, and His work must be helped along by those willing to make the world over in fire, and who are willing to do whatever it takes to survive these end times.

If you don't see your particular flavor of armageddon above I could go on, if you'd like.

Institutional infection

These guys used to be liberal. Then things changed.

It's 1979, and the Southern Baptist Convention isn't that terribly different from most mainstream Christian denominations: since the '50s, it's become increasingly liberal, embracing modern scholarship and social stances while moving away from Biblical inerrancy.

That summer, in Houston, everything changes. Fundamentalists, angered by what they see as repeated betrayals of the church's founding principles, bus in supporters. Instead of a genteel administrative process, they've treated the SBC apparatus the way a political machine does; organizing relentlessly with an eye to seizing as much power as possible.

It works. The moderates and liberals are routed in an "orchestration from the sky boxes." With their victory, the fundamentalists gain access to thousands of churches to spread their views, along with control over universities, media, built-in loyalty and a budget to use for whatever else they want to do. The SBC has remained conservative to this day, and the 1979 takeover played a major role in making the religious right-wing a political force. With the SBC in their grasp, fundamentalists had a foundation to back the efforts of previously scattered fringe groups.

It's 1896, and the Democratic Party is largely a conservative organization, dominated by the "Bourbon" wing and Southern aristocrats; there hasn't really been a major liberal faction of the party since the 1830s. President Grover Cleveland is such a perfect Gilded Age fat cat that Ayn Rand will later swoon over him. 

But things are changing. The Populists have made gains throughout the Midwest, including voting friendlier Democrats into office on fusion tickets. While much of the rest of the party is divided, a young congressman, William Jennings Bryan, spends the year-and-a-half leading up to the convention getting to know the delegates and leading the populists to control the endless ground-level meetings that the party's elite assume will turn out in their favor. Instead, Bryan and his allies aimed, in his blunt words, to "organize and take charge of and control the policy" of the party. That summer, hundreds of new delegates pour into Chicago. "They are assembled now," Bryan thundered. "Not to discuss, not to debate, but to enter up the judgment rendered by the plain people of this country."

He rallies them with a hell of a speech and the left wing takes control of the Democratic institutions. The Dems don't take the presidency, but the populists still remake a major political party. While its power has waxed and waned, since 1896 the Democrats have always had to deal with a progressive faction in their midst. The Bourbons were furious — they considered the populists an illness — but the virus had already taken hold.

Then there's the NRA in 1977, the Texas Board of Education, or the founding of the Republican Party. The list goes on.

An institution is, at heart, just a name and a structure attached to resources. That's it, and it means that determined groups of people can infect them until they turn into something very different.

Why we can build the f'ing Pyramids

Not aliens, just us.

The other evening, I was visiting my friend David Gray (who designed our logo) and we stumbled upon one of those terrible documentaries on the Pyramids that channels ostensibly devoted to learning regularly churn out.

Inevitably, these documentaries bribe a good actor to lend their authoritative voice to narrating a torrent of pseudoscience, coincidence and insinuated bullshit that basically boils down to "humans with such simple tools couldn't possibly have built such wonders! It must be aliens!"

I've always found these documentaries particularly loathsome because of how badly they underrate human capability. At their heart is the same insulting assumption as the "nobles must have written Shakespeare" tripe: poor or primitive people can't possibly create amazing things.

David, who expected a more historical look at the topic, grumbled and turned it off. Within minutes, he found this:

That's Kelvin Doe, a 15-year-old from Sierra Leone who's built his own batteries and transmitters from pieces he salvaged from the trash. He's even founded his own damn radio station. 

Awed, we watched for a while, before David finally spoke.

"And that," he said. "is why we can build the f'ing pyramids."

Amen.