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.

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?

Building a phyle

Though, let's face it, the Neo-Victorians wouldn't cut it.

This blog (when I can post) frequently focuses on social organization and the ways people are trying to adapt to changing times, especially as the nation-state and other traditional institutions lose their old sway. 

So I'm overdue to delve into one that's stuck with me for some time: the phyles from Neil Stephenson's fascinating (though massively flawed on several levels) novel The Diamond Age. Phyles are cultural groupings powerful enough to largely replace nation-states. Despite being in an ostensibly post-national era, the Phyles largely break down on old lines (China, India, Japan), with some throwbacks like Maoists or Stephenson's BFFs, the Neo-Victorians.

Naturally enough, the actual workings of the phyles are largely in the background (this is a novel, after all, not a social treatise, and is usually awful when it stumbles in that direction), but as shorthand for "socioeconomic group that could supplant aspects of nations" it's useful for the following thought exercise.

How would a phyle actually work?

Hating someone else's Congress

In every district but yours...

Interesting poll from Gallup last week confirmed something I'd suspected for awhile. Congress is unpopular. Really unpopular. Communism, lice, root canals, and Genghis Khan are more popular.

That's not news. So why aren't people actually throwing the bums out instead of talking about it?

Because people hate "Congress," the abstract legislative body, instead of their particular Congresscritter. On average 46 percent like their particular representative. That's hardly overwhelming support, but it's at least getting close to electable territory. 

Gerrymandering plays a big role in this, certainly, but this is also a classic bell the cat problem: people want great upheaval, as long as it's starting somewhere else.

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?

The drones will wait until the stars are right

Photo by Kirsty Wigglesworth, Associated Press

So this is real:

Yes, the Argus is the world's highest resolution camera, and the system is capable of monitoring and coordinating the information it receives more effectively than ever before. If this trajectory continues, one day you'll be standing at a street corner, texting a friend, and someone in a facility will be able to read your message from orbit.

Notice the ending discussion about UAVs that will stay aloft for years at a time, paired with blithe acceptance that people will be constantly monitored. Coincidentally, I saw this video a year to the day after Tim Maly coined "argus" as the collective noun for a group of drones.

As if the skies weren't already turning into something out of an early '80s sci-fi novel, DARPA is also proposing military robots in the ocean, using the seas as a "vast area for concealment and storage" until the stars time is right.

Together, this puts some strange tools in the arsenal of an established government, any established government. Imagine a crumbling regime's leaders stockpiling hundreds of machines, sleeping in the air or the ocean, ready to avenge their masters if someone ever ousts them.

Oh well. We can always hide in our drone-proof cities.

Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz at an anti-SOPA protest. Photo by Daniel J. Sieradski/Creative Commons.

By now, I have no doubt my readers know about the tragic suicide of online pioneer and activist Aaron Swartz. The news felt like a punch in the gut; Swartz embodied so many of the finest strengths of our generation. There have been personal remembrances, calls to action, and deserved condemnations. There's not much more I can say.

So I'll leave it at this:

This man was facing over three fucking decades in prison for downloading academic articles. Articles paid for with the public's money but, like a huge chunk of legal cases, aren't available to the public. I have dealt with the justice system for years, and I have seen rapists, murderers, and corrupt public officials who didn't get the book thrown at them half that damn much.

This witch hunt was perpetrated in defense of a body of law that primarily protects those who do nothing, make nothing, contribute nothing, improve nothing, and are, in the end, nothing. The worst part was that it ruined someone who was the living opposite of that, before he even had the chance to defend himself in a trial.

That's wrong. It is the essence of wrong. Some things deserve to be broken, and everything that made this possible should be destined for the goddamn scrap heap.

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.

How radicals took over the mainstream, 1860s style

                                          

A fascinating piece in the leftist Jacobin magazine details how the formation of the Free Soil and original Republican parties were one of the more aggressively radical projects in American political history, and has some big points about basic political effectiveness:

At each stage of their project, from the Liberty Party to the Free Soil Party and finally the Republican Party, progressively broader coalitions were formed around an emerging ideology of free labor that merged antislavery principles with the economic interests of ordinary Northern whites.

The outer layers of these coalitions attracted voters and politicians who lacked the hard 
abolitionist principles of the militants, and in a racist society it was inevitable that many of 
the converts to Free Soil would vaunt theirs as the “true white man’s party.”

But the original nucleus of radicals – despite their own time-bound attitudes – lent the 
project an inner egalitarian spirit, visible in party campaigns for black suffrage and civil 
rights across the North. And when the moment of mass radicalization finally arrived in the 
wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, these abolitionists stood triumphantly at the heart of the networks that became the new Republican Party. “Our position is now rather enviable,” wrote Giddings in 1854. “We lead the hosts of freedom.”

Today on the radical left, there is a widespread allergy to political strategy as such. There is far more communion with the countercultural legacy of Garrison than with the political acumen of Frederick Douglass, who by 1852 had become secretary of the Free Soil Party, commenting that “what is morally right is not at all times politically possible.”

The common narrative of the pre-Civil War era focuses on the tension between Northern and Southern states over slavery, but abolition was still an unwelcome idea throughout many parts of the country. In 1844, a mob beat abolitionist John Murray Spear and left him for dead, in Maine.

But in roughly two decades, people like Douglass, Charles Sumner and Abraham Lincoln took that idea from radical to a viable part of the country's political mainstream.

They did it by wading into the muck. The 1860 Republican platform is full of planks (mail! infrastructure! tariffs! homesteading!) that don't have a huge amount to do with the radicals' original goal. Some of these were good ideas in their own right, others were sops to one constituency or another or compromises (framing anti-slavery efforts in Kansas as a belief in state's rights) intended to bring their more sweeping goals a bit closer. There's no reason radicals can't use the boil the frog approach too.

One can only imagine the frustration Douglass felt during all this. He had broken free from torture and slavery only to have to put up with the crap required to get those "outer layer" groups — many of them quite racist — on board. But he did it anyway because it built towards the day when slavery would be wiped out entirely.

So instead of leaving en masse, the radicals stayed in the coalition, and their influence is visible in things like this 1860 campaign song:

They knew exactly where they were heading.

"Incrementalism" gets a lot of flak but unless you can conjure armies or "shut down society" levels of popular support, every approach is going to be incremental.

The abolitionists in the 1840s simply didn't have the numbers or the power to end slavery, and no amount of moral protest or personal righteousness was going to change that. Reversing that situation required getting a bunch of people they didn't exactly agree with into a coalition that wasn't particularly coherent. It worked.