The Rise and Fall of Empires, Peter Turchin 2006

Turchin’s ‘radical new theory of world history’ is as bold as the various encomiums on its covers – although that from the THES: – “Turchin’s view…promises a great deal..“- or from Anatol Lieven who the author quotes at some length – “Excellent” – in their terseness perhaps suggest that the publishers were somewhat desperate in finding kind things to say.

For my part “[e]loquently argued, W&P&W is a rich pageant of crucial historical stories ..” sort of captures it, minus the crucial

So what is this new perspective? Again end cover remarks claim this is from the author’s expertise in evolutionary biology.  This is not true; it is much more likely to be found in the author’s ‘technical’ book, Historical Dynamics: Why States Rise and Fall, from 2003, which has the equations this volume eschews. Indeed, sprinkled through are terms like psychohistory: “the branch of mathematics which deals with reactions of human conglomerates to fixed social and economic stimuli” ; Cliodynamics; imperiogenesis and imperiopathosis, the last three seeming to have been coined by the author to clothe his rather interesting hypotheses. I am not sure how this relates to evolutionary biology. Jared Diamond’s rival tome Guns, Germs and Steel is more closely rooted in biology. The two perspectives are not compatible, as Turchin admits.

If anything, Turchin’s work follows that of economic historians – Kondratiev’s long waves come to mind. His book is enlivened with statistical constructs showing extremes of wealth in the ruling classes sustained over the course of empires, and the role of capital in funding wars of conquest or absorption. The key element he brings to the table is the centrality of social capital – or asabiya – a term he borrows from Ibn Khaldun from the 12th century, an astute commentator on world affairs.

Turchin argues that asabiya determines the tide of imperial success and downfall measured by relative equality in wealth distribution on the one hand, and on the other by tribalism in the face of existential threat. As evidence, for instance, he cites the defeat of a large force of Romans in the Danube valley through guile and cooperation among the otherwise warring Gaulish locals. This is attractive writing and, for those not familiar with the late Roman era beyond the marches, fascinating and informative.

The other hypothesis he employs with effect concerns where old empires are challenged and where new empires arise. This he attributes to the vitality of a barbarian frontier, where world views clash. This is appealing to enthusiasts for geography of the ancient worlds before the congealing of nations around fixed borders. Rapine aside these frontiers – visible as river highways or in the extreme by monumental fortifications crossing the countryside, mark the barrier between protection by the hegemon, and the ungodly beyond the pale.  

What they disguise though is the great drifts and lightning advances of peoples moving through Europe in these early times, taking advantage of the low asabiya of countries under sway of large empires. Caesar’s conquest of the Gauls was never complete, the Gauls remained a present danger throughout the Roman period; but it was their sacking of Rome that created the martial empire of the early Christian era, drawn together finally by this shock of confronting an enemy with no respect for the Roman arts and sciences of war, that had served them until then so well against their local rivals and the Greeks.

Peace gets short shrift in this account of world history: asabiya is good if you are fighting for your survival; or in the stratified societies that produced the generals and the mercenaries. It may be applied to small communities sustaining a life outside the benefits and costs of the protection of imperial rule. Indeed it may be amplified in societies built around the belief in the dignity of ordinary people and their aspiration for the good life. But at the end of the day these isolated stands of social capital are easy pickings for a well-organised empire builder who can count on the disaffection of people on the frontiers, without attachments, whose cultural identity congeals around the memorilessness of imperial largess. 

Turchin has assembled an impressive array of economic statistics to back his theory, not just (we are assured) for the cases he presents in this book as illustrations. This leaves the reader adrift on the wider ocean of his expansive thesis.  Basing history on fluctuations and differentials of social capital begs measurement questions of its own. 

The ordinary currency of history is in documents, places, beliefs, symbols, timelines and memory of the participants. Social capital is incorporeal, observed in its fracturing or its potency in contests of will or survival. It is attractive to the psycho-historians as it strips history of its cultural clothes in favour of more primal biologically referenced impulses. It makes of history a blank surface with rises and falls, colour and light, and of all human endeavour something complete, and very dark in its implications. Whatever our aspiration we will be brought down by our incoherence. Peace is an interval of little consequence; only the contest of wills as groups compete for space, influence and power ultimately matters.

This is Social Darwinism with a twist: the good parts of human nature – our inclination to cooperate and to act selflessly on behalf of others in our sphere of comprehension – crystalise into a tradeable substance that can be harvested by outsiders for purposes external to our humanity. Our lives become submersed in this supra human medium; our endeavours condemned to the tides of a monstrous counter history. 

Eternal peace or eternal war: both have been used to explain the march of history, and both states have adherents among the thought leaders of our time. Both seem to relate to the wider conceptual space of human evolutionary psychology, and how we can conceive history to justify the present, to excuse, or ignore, or glorify in, the past, and to prepare for the future. 

But this must be a case where morality trumps metaphysics. War is never inevitable; empires are not the only model of tolerant coexistence; social stability can rest on more natural harmonic principles than fear or dread or ignorance. While we are indeed slaves to our evolutionary natures and whatever super-narrative this imposes, the austere truths of scholarship, with counterparts in public life, exemplify our common humanity, free of the mirage of domination and control.

References

Peter Turchin, The Rise and Fall and Rise of Empires, 2010

Abbe de St. Pierre, Eternal Peace, 1660

Jarrod Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel

Other Reading

Barbara Tuchman, The March of Time

A.J.P. Taylor, Course of German History

E.H. Carr, What is History

Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: political arguments for capitalism before its triumph, 1977    

Leonard Woolf, Quack, Quack! London: Hogarth Press, 1935.

My copy of this book was a hand-me-down at one remove from Rose Dornbush, who had arrived in Australia from Germany in 1889 at the age of six. She had been a concert pianist and later a music critic writing for the newspapers. As an adult she had lived at times in England and on the continent. She was at least acquainted with Olaf Stapledon, a prolific author in various modes of what might be called philosophical science fiction – the book is inscribed as swapped with Stapledon for another book. This may place her in the Bloomsbury set presided over by the Woolfs (Leonard and Virginia) trading as the Hogarth Press Tavistock Square, or at least moving in literary circles in London may have provoked her interest in this polemic, or there was indeed no thread of connection beyond that of author and reader. For the purposes of this essay, I connect (one time) book owner with its contemporaneous author.

Music education seems to have been Rose Dornbush’s central avocation: she had been a music teacher in leading girls’ schools, and gave numerous lectures on her educational theories, which she published in 1947 under the title “The Art of Listening to Music”).

In conversation, she was stricter than her pedagogical writings might suggest. She defended the classical tradition, which she believed had been undermined by syncopation, notably at the hands of Beethoven. She was one of the “lame ducks” – typically single women of high intelligence cut loose from professional life – who were welcomed in our suburban home. She was handicapped by poverty, old age, and a shortage of social support. Her domestic arrangements were shambolic. She had an aura of serious cultural intellect, or perhaps just strong opinion, out of sorts with Sydney in the 1950s.

As to Quack, Quack!, it is unlikely to have had a large run, with its target audience probably not extending far beyond Tavistock Square. Hogarth Press was an outlet for Woolf’s literary work: (auto) biography, poetry and tracts, to begin with a cottage affair, but grew into a commercial publishing house under Woolf’s control. Quack quack! appeared while Woolf was writing a major trilogy ‘After the Deluge’, on the back of writings from 1917 on war and empire, economics and politics, The last published in this line is ‘War for Peace’ (1940). His contribution to English letters appears overshadowed by writing by and about his wife, and particularly surrounding her mental illness and suicide in 1941, yet he kept writing into late old age with a succession of autobiographical works, the last appearing in 1969, the year of his death. His memory is kept alive in Sri Lanka – where he served as a judge in the 1920s, and in North America, where his papers, notably extensive correspondence with public figures in England, can be consulted

Quack, quack! is an entirely serious diatribe, mixing anthropology, psychoanalysis, polemics, and modern history. Its centrepiece, for those not prepared to navigate its limpid prose, is 2 pairs of juxtaposed photographs showing a sober, uniformed and belt-tugging Herr Hitler, and a capped Mussolini in full oratorical flight each with a mimicking image of the Hawaiian War-God Kūkaʻilimoku, the one reproducing the famous scowl, the other a full set of teeth and a crest.

While a polemic, the book – in 1935 when war was seen as increasingly likely – builds a case around the nefarious use of language to justify war, to motivate an otherwise peaceable and indifferent population to support the total destruction of others; in effect the betrayal of public discourse by forces that saw war as a rational and desirable end.

This intellectual atmosphere had allowed the rise of totemic movements to power, and justified the crushing of humanistic values in the name of higher beliefs, and for Woolf not a far removed historical remnant, but an emerging danger for self-consciously civilised or liberal societies.

He builds this argument around archetypes – and labels. There is quack quack history and metaphysical quack quack. This percussive invention captures the nonsensical or fraudulent nature of underlying concepts and stretched beliefs. When translated to mass audiences, and with skilful and entirely ruthless operators these same ideas and diction become dangerous.

What is striking is how fertile this framework is when applied to current events. A state of being at war sustains a permanently dislocated system of government that will resist settlement of claims and the forward movement of society. This was as true for Bismarkian Germany as it is now with the leadership of the West challenged by shadows out of imperial pasts; as it was in 1935 as imperial plates shifted and power began to leak through to ordinary folk. Woolf is chiefly interested in what is driving events in Germany at that time, and sheets home blame for its descent into totalitarian war lust to 19th century influential thinkers, in fact to just one:

Spengler… may justly claim the honour of being taken as the archetype of this new European breed of intellectuals who, betraying the traditions of two thousand years, place their learning, their minds and their souls at the service of the political quacks, magicians, witch-smellers, persecutors and scapegoat hunters. He has an international reputation as the most considerable historian and philosopher now providing a theoretical basis for political magic and policies of war, violence, intolerance, persecution, mass fear, and mass hatreds… [pp159-160]

German historiography post war, through the influence of Fischer, has paid close attention to the same line of intellectual descent from Spengler. Woolf elaborates on this argument, 25 years ahead of such agonised repositioning.

Woolf then moves on to the character of those beliefs: “by metaphysical quackery I mean the abandonment of and contempt for reason as a means to truth in non-political speculation and the substitution for it of so-called intuition, magic and mysticism.” And furthermore, “the more difficult the truth is to supply, the more passionately have people insisted that it should be supplied in the most absolute and indisputable form” [p161].

For his demolition of quackism of the metaphysical kind, Woolf undertakes to unpick the magical thinking in their respective repertoires of three arch-quacks of his day: Hermann von Keyserling, Henri Bergson and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. He does not dismiss intuition or magical thinking, or religious belief per se, but aims at the wielders of false certainties who exploit, or refrain from questioning, the seductive destructiveness and falseness of the resultant programmes.

He is careful to point out that systems of knowledge based on science could be as dangerous and backward looking as systems of belief focused on absolute truths. Modern quackery did not offer room for scepticism or doubt; it is as hard edged and miraculous as cosmologies of the past that explained the place of people in the world, who they should marry, what they should look like, what was important and not to know. The caricatured indoctrination through symbols, shapes, mass orchestrated events, chants and so on, translate to more familiar manipulative language of present times. We have not left such charlatanery behind.

Metaphysicians of the past – he cites Socrates, Plato and Jesus – gave people reasons to believe in the merely imaginable. They argued from what people understood of their immediate worlds of which they were the master, to another world beyond their power, whose awfulness could crush the spirit otherwise, substituting for panic, despair, rage, violence or confusion a potent imaginary order, infused with benevolence, grace and reason.

The realities offered up in scientific advances: in fantastic cosmological narratives; in the existence of unrepresentable atoms and the dawning knowledge of their properties, in the dispersion of doubt in the triumph of the fittest offered by neo-Darwinism: gave platform for a new metaphysics, a belief in destiny around securing transformational sources of power – at the head of armies; harnessing properties of materials; securing access to mass consciousness through emerging media, inventing and deploying weapons of mass destruction, operating systems of mass and targeted surveillance, controlling the flow of trade.

The intellectual backing for this project relies on quack quack metaphysics, just as political quack quack clothes its delusional justification, and defends against detected dissent. While Keyserling’s systems will collapse under their own weight, and Radhakrishnan sold rubbish mysticism in a revival of academic philosophy for the man in the street, Woolf traces a more subtle thread in dismissing Bergson. It is, nevertheless, the latter, ‘a civilised man’ of whom he warns:

In a time like the present, when there is a struggle in the very heart of a civilisation and a savage reaction towards savagery, when a wave of superstition and unreason sweeps through men’s minds, victory and defeat depend ultimately ..not on the savages in our midst but upon the civilised. If the civilised stand firm for reason, tolerance, scepticism, the savage and his superstitions and his absolute truths is powerless. It is only when the civilised men begin to yield often unconsciously to the wave of unreason that the end is near. … Civilisations are not destroyed by the … Herr Hitlers; they are destroyed when the M. Bergsons have to be numbered among intellectual quacks. [p193]

The book, in its tatty brown paper wrapping is a reminder of the delights and traps of the life of the mind, and an example of economical prose wielded with accuracy. Its incisiveness is echoed in James Meek’s review of How Civil Wars Start – and How to Stop Them, by Barbara Walter (London Review of Books, vol44 Number 10, 26 May 2022). There is indeed these days much humbug around, much of it originating in universities – in this case the University of Chicago, but really almost anywhere.

1 June 2022

Dornbush, Rose.  (1947).  The art of listening to music.  Sydney :  Les Editions du Courrier Australien

http://www.pianola.co.nz/public/index.php/web/dornbush

Woolf, Leonard. (1935). Quack, Quack!, London: Hogarth Press

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Woolf

Complementing the work of the so-called “house” artists, G.H.Horton & Co Ltd. also engaged the services of a wide variety of local and visiting celebrities. By the time Mastertouch took over the QRS label in Australia the list of eminent recording artists was a most impressive one – Lindley Evans, Frank Hutchens, Alexander Hmelnitsky, Paul Vinogradoff, Henry Penn, Ernest Truman, Rose Dornbush Victor Arden, Frank La Forge, and Howard Brockway are but a few names selected from the original recording schedules. Frank Hutchens and Lindley Evans, duo-pianists, are best remembered now in association with the New South Wales Conservatorium of Music and the famous ABC Community Singing Concerts held at the Sydney Town Hall. Lindley Evans also endeared himself to many children as the Musical Director for the Argonauts on ABC Radio. Ernest Truman was the second and the longest serving City of Sydney Town Hall organist. His rendition of “The Storm” on the mighty Town Hall organ used to rattle the pressed metal ceilings and rumble the windows throughout the entire building, much to the delight of the packed audiences who attended his “Pleasant Sunday Afternoon Concerts”! Rose Dornbush was an expatriate Australian who had spent a considerable time in Germany before the First World War. She was employed by the company because she became the victim of the “anti-German” feeling prevalent in Australia after the war, and so could not get any work at all, despite her great talent.

from https://mastertouch.bookproduction.org/the-artists-of-mastertouch.htm

a letter to the editor, with added comments from my brothers

From: srthorn@effect.net.au <srthorn@effect.net.au>
Sent: Wednesday, August 25, 2021 6:05 PM
To: letters.editor@canberratimes.com.au
Subject: The Taliban in charge

  Sahema Saberi writes (“I don’t accept the Taliban have changed”,CT Wednesday 25, p24) movingly of the plight of Afghan Hazaris under Taliban rule, prior to 2001 and now with Taliban rule resumed. She pleads for the Australian government to go beyond  their current commitment accepting 3,000 refugees. I concur.

I too am reminded that prior to the US lead invasion the UN sponsored a gathering of all parties to discuss a peaceful settlement of the unstable conditions following the collapse of the Soviet backed government. This gathering on neutral ground over a week agreed on terms required for stable government. These guaranteed rights and protections for women, yet reserved a place in civil life for the Taliban, seen then as a fringe group, but not foreign, only one of the competing forces with substantial support in the community.

The formula of a lasting peace in the declaration from that commission remains valid. Logically its terms should have guided any outside intervention – be it civilian or military – that had the interests of the country and its people at its centre. The terms of settlement – worked out among Afghans for Afghans over the course of 5 days – were comprehensively ignored or reversed in the course of the military intervention that followed.

No one wanted the Taliban in charge, yet equally removing the Taliban by overwhelming force and replacing with a client government was no solution. If all the centres of power in a country can come together on basic rights guarantees, not least to life, twenty years ago, the people from whom they derive their power can find their way to such guarantees again, now freed of an intervention that was never going to serve the long term interests of the country.

Australians are implicated in this quest. It does not reflect well on us that we cannot see through the shallow justifications for our involvement in 2001-2021, and the shallow response to the consequences of its failure. We can afford to be generous, whether expressed through refugee policy,or in conspicuously rejecting colonial reflexiveness in our foreign and defence policies.

Stephen Horn

1 Scarlett St, Melba ACT 2615

mob. 0406 375160

Subject: FW: The Taliban in charge
From: Mark Horn <mark.e.t.horn@bigpond.com>
To: Stephen Horn <srthorn@effect.net.au>
Cc: Nick Horn <robynick@homemail.com.au>
Date: Wednesday, 25/08/2021 9:09 PM

Yes I agree with quite a lot of what you say. Yes, the American, NATO and Australian govts did a lot of harm. Terrible waste and bloodshed, probably achieving nothing.

I do wonder whether a better result might have been obtained if the Western countries were more wholehearted – as for instance they were in WW2 — determined to achieve both a military victory and to initiate a lasting political reconstruction. Who knows? The obvious counter to this is that the Allies never not have the sort of political or cultural affinity with the people of Afghanistan that they had with (say) Germany.

I was not aware of a UN-sponsored gathering of “all parties” in 2001. The way you describe it, I’d be sceptical that it would have pushed the Taliban to the margins. And in the light of the negotiations of the past two years, I’d be sceptical also about the stability of a “settlement – worked out among Afghans for Afghans over the course of 5 days”.

I believe also that the statement that the Taliban was “seen then [in 2001] as a fringe group” is incorrect. Of course to right-thinking people they are a fringe group (i.e. “extremists”) but I believe that in 2001 they were the dominant power in Afghanistan, no matter how rackety their mode of government or how small their popular support may have been.

I also wonder about this statement of yours. ”If all the centres of power in a country [could] come together on basic rights guarantees…  twenty years ago, the people from whom they derive their power can find their way to such guarantees again…” To say that the ��centres of power” derive their power from “the people” surely is a constitutional fiction in line with those rather obscure “theories of sovereignty” some book reviewers talk about in the LRB. Surely in Afghanistan, where the “centres of power” are more pungently known as warlords, power grows out of the barrel of a gun?

Best from

Mark

From: srthorn@effect.net.au <srthorn@effect.net.au>
Sent: Wednesday, August 25, 2021 10:52 PM
To: mark.e.t.horn@bigpond.com
Cc: Nick Horn <robynick@homemail.com.au>
Subject: Re: FW: The Taliban in charge

re political reconstruction… your response is interesting, but I must take issue on this point 

How wholehearted do you want to get? They did this in Iraq against a more tangible enemy who was not particularly popular. They (NATO) did this in the Balkans, where it may have made sense narrowly speaking in stopping the destruction of Sarajevo, ‘liberating’ Kosovo, and pinning the blame on the Serbs, bringing the ringleaders (justly) to book, but applying this to the tribal politics of Afghanistan, as if the external meddling had had no bearing on the emergence of an absolutist religious party, whose origins come from madrasses in Pakistan and whose rise to power was through being armed and trained to harass the russians.

Eventually and most of the time people finds ways to govern themselves if they do not become prey to geostrategic power plays over their territory. that leads to perpetual internecine wars. This applies to Afghans, and to Australians.

The government that the soviets backed survived for another two years after the russians withdrew, and were a modernising force to the country – no doubt creating the tension with traditonalists and seedbed for the rise of a nationalist/fundamentalist/reactionary resurgence built on anathematising the west, in fact the modern world. Before the Taliban the war lords managed a suspended stability in the countryside, descending down the road to Kabul each season, then withdrawing for the winter. Massoud had the charisma to govern the whole country, not just the large swathe of territory he commanded, and the skill to play off patrons. His death was a disaster for the country and a green light for Taliban takeover. Taliban will remain strong as long as the country is occupied; thereafter who knows?

 I heard Massoud’s son may be stepping into his shoes. But do people want a civil war? The place is awash with military gear. I would think it is time to talk. 

From: Mark Horn <mark.e.t.horn@bigpond.com>
Sent: Wednesday, 25 August 2021 11:49 PM
To: srthorn@effect.net.au
Cc: ‘Nick Horn’ <robynick@homemail.com.au>
Subject: RE: FW: The Taliban in charge

You say “Eventually and most of the time people finds ways to govern themselves if they do not become prey to geostrategic power plays …” I think what you mean in Afghanistan is that the country people (at least the men) just want to get on with their time-honoured way of life, they do not care too much about newfangled stuff like the nation-state. Could you specify it like that? When you put it as baldly as you do it becomes a very big assertion. For instance, just when did it start to be true? 50 years ago? 500 years ago?

“But do people want a civil war?” I think if you asked the Taliban or any warlord such as Ahmed Massoud they might not admit it but their actions would say Yes, war is our element.

So you see I am  not so much the optimist.

Regards

Mark

Subject: RE: FW: The Taliban in charge
From: Nick Horn <robynick@homemail.com.au>
To: <mark.e.t.horn@bigpond.com>, <srthorn@effect.net.au>
Date: Friday, 27/08/2021 8:46 AM

Dear Mark and Stephen,

I sit somewhere in the middle. The mainstream reporting reflects a certain disingenuous surprise at the Taliban takeover – it’s been inevitable for years, just accelerated with the official policy of Western disengagement. There have been a pretty steady annual death toll (I think around 40,000) in fighting for some years. It may be a heavily qualified relief for many if the Taliban succeed in forming a civilian government.  As Mark says, however, maybe continued civil war is inevitable (it never let up over the last 20 years anyway).  It can’t be denied that the Taliban culture is devastating for women unprepared to adopt conservative values. It can’t be denied that the Taliban treated women brutally in their rise to power. But this is also a failure of traditional tribal and communal interests to resist

The blind spot of Western liberal values is a devaluation of what Stephen highlights as a traditional way of life and the obsession with nationhood at odds with communal and tribal forms of organisation (however martial these traditional forms may be, warlords and such, the failure of the Afghan national army to replace their influence is palpable).

A couple of remarks.

1. Stephen’s reference to the terms of settlement over 5 days was – I think! – to a loya jirga, (literally “grand assembly”) in June-July 2002, a traditional meeting of the tribes (more than a parliament, hosted by Hamid Karzai after the Taliban were ousted (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loya_jirga). An inspiring reference point, but (as Scott Stephens points out in the podcast below) perhaps sowed the seeds of the current situation by excluding the Taliban itself.  [We see a pale vestige of this structure in Constitutional Conventions, Bob Hawke’s National Economic Summit, Kevin Rudd’s Australia 2020 Summit, and perhaps a complete travesty of it in the National Cabinet]
2. As usual Radio National has been a conduit for some clarity & nuance. The conversation between Walid Ali, Scott Stephens and their guest Stephen Wurtheim on the latest episode of The Minefield is a case in point: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/theminefield/was-us-failure-in-afghanistan-inevitable/13513814  

Walid Ali perhaps echoes Stephen’s views in noting that the mainstream reporting downplays or even gaslights anecdotal reports of relief (at least) by Afghans in the Taliban’s success. The Taliban promises (for many, if not most) perhaps not a conservative way of life that they (“ordinary” Afghans, but what makes them “ordinary”?) are ideologically committed, but simply a more ordered life in general.  Stephen Wurtheim makes the perhaps obvious but telling point very simply right at the end of the podcast that there are two aspects to “Western” human rights (I am elaborating here of course):

1. the sword – the combative championing of human rights principles (us vs them, good vs bad) – the Light on the Hill that US propaganda used to justify its imperial adventures in both Afghan and Iraq. This is anathema to fundamentally different cultures and societies such as the Afghans considered generally (not as a confected nation-state) and China (a very model of a modern nation-state!). “Western liberals” so-called do themselves no favours in donning the armour of principles such as the rule of law.
2. the shield – respect for the other as our neighbour, the helping hand, refugee resettlement. On this topic the ABC TV Australian Story this week did stirling work reminding us of one of the great refugee rescues of the modern era, HMAS Melbourne’s saving 90 Vietnamese from drowning and the Australian Government’s willingness (pre-Tampa) to grant them permanent protection. I caught a glimpse from a promo of another show – the 20^th anniversary of Tampa – John Howard’s weasely words about “we will decide who comes here” etc.. The complete anathema of this aspect of rights. I have to say that it sickens me that this virus has so taken over Australian policy. It is perhaps naïve of me, but I see this as contingent, not necessary – if Labour & Kim Beazley had had the nerve to take a stand on the Tampa they might have won that election and marginalised the policy of offshore detention.

Nick

Dear Nick,

What you say does add to understanding how we have come to think as we do about these otherwise repelling themes. I don’t pretend to a deep understanding of Afghan society, but I am more curious now. I was addressing really the absence of any coherence or depth in Australia’s diplomatic (warring) responses. 

We have been saturated with the minutiae of US & UK political theatre where we could and should be closer to understanding the region. Central Asia will be important to Australia’s future one way or the other, and not as a free fire zone. We should ditch the civilising mission, as you say, it is a fantasy: we have done much more constructively by an unobtrusive presence, and comfortable co-existence in the region, where our advantages – a highly developed engineering and scientific culture; abundant resources, deep cultural roots if we were to respect them, traditions in law and democratic practice are appreciated, and reciprocated; but as well we are exposed through the weaknesses – cut off from mother load of anglophone centres a legacy of colonial deference over reliance on extraction – mineral and agricultural – producing an artificial prosperity, and a fractured sense of cultural plurality with large migrant contribution. We can benefit from associating with societies with great depth of identity – be it ethnic, cultural .or geographic.

Concerning the ‘commission’ I was in fact referring to something much more obscure – although it had something of the character of a loya jirga^. In the course of Johan Galtung’s Sydney conflict resolution workshop he gave examples from what he calls his ‘conflict work’, including the involvement of his Transcend team on commission from one of the UN agencies with then civil conflict ion Afghanistan: the major conflicts were intertribal, aka the war lords, with Taliban seen as a dangerous nuisance, rather than a serious contender..(I dont remember exactly how it was put, and I don’t have a date! but must have been sometime in the 90s). 

Mum had heard about the workshop and thought to invite Galtung s a former colleague of Dad’s to LC during his stay in Sydney. This was not going to be possible but he did make time to see me before the workshop (He had been invited to Australia by a Buddhist community who hosted the workshop and managed his itinerary). I registered, and he did make time to talk to me privately at the start of the day. It must have been not long after Dad died.[1994] 

This commission must have come after the collapse of the Kalq party government – undermined by the same muhjahideen that had been engaged to harass the soviet occupiers, easily motivated to drive out a modernising, liberal regime that educated women and allowed them a place in society outside the home, the country reverted to ‘;war lords’ competing over territory and making centralised government unworkable. Transcendence (5 people I think involved) went in with their conflict transformation skills. 

Galtung is a showman, the workshop was a remarkable affair in itself – he commanded attenion of maybe 80 people for an entire day, then in his 70s. I recently ordered up the course book that goes with a one week version of conflict transformation training*. What had excited my interest, and which I raised in my brief private talk, was the reliance on dynamic systems to understand conflict (at all levels) rather than for instance, basic psychological insights of (psychiatrist) Marshall Rosenberg – a comparable charismatic figure whose non violent communication movement is similar in scope, and has now a large following.

Afghanistan was only one of world conflicts he referred to: some he had a hand in resolving, some, like the Middle East, he offered solutions to. I think it requires a foundation in mathematics to produce this degree of intellectual confidence (vanity?), completely free of ‘scientific’ reference. By its nature we don’t hear about the successes. Ah I hear your skepticism levels rising…

Anyway he received me warmly as coming from Robert and Audrey’s family, and was interested in my excursion into the genre (Mass Psychosis as a Total Phenomenon, my contribution to the 50th anniversary meeting of the Society for General Systems Research c 1979). I can’t imagine anyone else taking this seriously. I must hunt out a reference to the Afghanistan case study. . 

Stephen

^ I had the impression that the Kharzai loya jurga had failed , and may have been from the beginning window dressing for the fragile hold that Kharzai had on power but happy to be corrected.

* Johan Galtung,Transcend Transform, an Introduction to Conflict Work, Pluto Press, 2004

Pragmatics

Oguntede, The Dialectic Interpretation of Cybernetics, 4/1/1989

Science of regulation in real life

What then is the contribution of cybernetic thinking to science or philosophy?

The most obvious characteristic of all cybernetic writing, be it Wiener or Beer, or any of their acolytes and successors, is its inherent struggle: a self conscious disciplining of highly abstract powerful symbolics into a heavy encompassing psuedo-worldview. Very little is elegant, very little is indeed readable.The struggle is to tie down those elusively fecund concepts, which exist only in cybernetics and are otherwise without weight, to the turbulent ‘real world’.

The message of cybernetics is still, as it was for its originators: if you are going to sensibly understand the totality of controllable existence – not just the controlled microsystems of categorical science, nor even the harmonised synthesis of general science, but the waring totality of all that goes on, and of which we are part, then you need to investigate the phenomena and laws of complexity and of control; in and of themselves. You need to believe that these are worthy objects; and as fully real as their physical [manifestations] components

A corollary is that attempting to understand by [the medium of ] extension of particulate knowledge is [ineffective] inappropriate, inefficient if not classically false.

Cybernetics must then be understood outside the pervasive, scientific ideography assigning a gross social value to the accumulation of scientific knowledge, and the externally-to-that-knowledge dominance of instrumental human control.

It is a thin strand surviving from the march of the more reserved discrete scientific philosophies flowering in the afterglow of the Encyclopediasts and the Naturalists of the Enlightenment .

Nature was not a (romantic) object of wonder, still less was it a subject for control. Rather there exists a necessary incompleteness to any Natural subjectivism; which is the key to a relativistic principle in all knowledge. Furthermore this [is] a discovered principle, the product of a non-categoric phenomenalistic study.

Knowing that knowledge is relative – relative to the engendering process – we avoid the drift into closed systems of thought; we may observe the subjectivism of the observer, and the subjective quality to the universe of observation.

It is this frightening specificity to experience [that] science has been retreating from, controlling the enclosed spaces of particulate systems, but not taking responsibility for general understanding: in short instrumentalism.

Why cybernetic writing is so struggle prone is through the containing influence of instrumentalism, a science of control – [  ] never emerged, but it was certainly attempted; systems theory applied for [totalising] military purposes – leading to grotesque misrepresentations of some political situations: artificial intelligence, aimless model building.

The absurdity of instrumentalism has been recognised by more persipient contributors who have refused to indulge it; and by those who have taken it with irony to its whimsical conclusions {Stafford Beer comes to mind]. 

Science as an instrument of humanity

It is fashionable to see science thus, in these days where we are lead by ‘the science’ to accept constraints never dreamt of in more ordinary times. As we edge to the realisation that the constraints of experts reach beyond the circumstances of a natural disaster, or catastrophic accident, into constraint on freedom of action in the world – by individuals affecting the material economy of everyday life, we are challenged as to our primitive beliefs. The core of our religious faith is stripped or exposed or reinterpreted by a universality in scientifically anchored knowledge ‘about everything’. Only science in this broad sense can give us the cohesion to face existential crises crossing all systems of belief.

A book of this title is to appear next year. Its author professor Douglas Newton of Newcastle University gave a talk on the underlying story to the Canberra branch of ISAA last month; the story is worth marking in this blog, or – as it happens – by a statue in Ryan’s hometown of Broken Hill.

In short Ted Ryan, brought up in the strenuous trade unionism of that town in its first phase of mining expansion, went to war following his two younger brothers’ enlistment in 1916. His experience was in many ways no different to many of Australian volunteers – physically injured (within days of joining the front line in France), a short recovery in England then rejoining his regiment (51st);  again back to England with shell shock; time in camps there sufficient to reflect and be informed; then unusually commencement of a concerted campaign to draw attention to the failure of politicians to honour the ‘defence of empire call’ and perhaps more importantly the army terms of employment.

Opportunities to end hostilities from 1916 onwards were blocked by Westminster to allow new imperial ambitions time to be put in place – notably in the Middle East – Palestine, Persia and Mesopotamia – in Africa and the Pacific. Ryan in the course of serial desertions appealed to Ramsay Macdonald to take up the openings for a negotiated settlement that would have saved millions of casualties from the industrial carnage being experienced in the trenches of northern France, and avoid the consequences of the swingeing terms imposed on Germany at Versailles.

His appeal, as indeed his other actions that lead to him being among the small number of deserters receiving a  death sentence (commuted in the case of Australians – the condition the Australian Government extracted from the British at commencement to guarantee volunteer numbers from this ex-colony) were a reflection of Ryan’s early immersion in the militant politics of the Broken Hill miners. He viewed the direction of the war as outside the terms in which he had enlisted; and he insisted on his pay and conditions entitlements, to the point of refusing to embark until these had been restored*.

In consequence of his actions he received the full force of military retribution, was repeatedly returned to his regiment in France, and was not discharged until one year after hostilities had finished. 

This unusual story however highlights the preoccupied courts martial, with cases (of the order of 200,000) rivaling all army casualties for the War. The end of hostilities did not end desertions; certainly in Ryan’s case it is not easy to reconcile the easy association of desertion with cowardice.

One can reasonably conclude from the bare chronology of Ryan’s war record, circulated at the talk, that Ryan used desertion as a platform for a full-throated – and informed – attack on bad faith in the British Government’s prosecution of the war, as seen by one of those tasked to carry it out. The extract below is from Ryan’s statement to his Court Martial, 12 September 1917 [where he received the capital sentence]: 

“Previous to enlisting as a soldier in the Australian Army [I believed] that Germany intended to crush her European enemies and by so doing had accepted the policy of might-is-right which is opposed to the ideals of Humanity and Civilisation.

“About eleven months ago, England to my mind adopted the same policy [these words underlined in blue by his prosecutors] towards Germany. England’s policy at that time consist[ed] of no peace conferences until Germany was crushed so as to teach them a lesson of virtue. When the war had reached this stage, it was no longer a war of resistance….

“I enlisted to fight for a Peace without conquerors or conquered, as a Peace under those conditions as [does?] nothing to justify another war, either as a war of revenge by the Conquered, or a war of Glory and Patriotic land-grabbing by Conquerors.”

Private E. J. Ryan’s Statement to his Court Martial, 12 September 1917, as circulated to those attending Professor Newton’s talk,  National Library of Australia, 14 November 2018. The original document is held by National Archives of Australia.

I trust this gives enough encouragement to read the full account to appear in 2019. For further in depth reading I can recommend John Moses’ related scholarly account on the events in the ruling circles in Germany leading up to the war that has just appeared, bringing together a lifetime of scholarly attention.

For the final isaa talk of the year one of John’s eminent German colleagues Helmut Bley spoke about August Bebel,  who lead the Social Democrats through 40 years  the democratic revival that marked Wilhelmine Germany of the second half of the 19th century, up to the War. The possibility of  Social Democracy emerging as dominant German power in the aftermath of an early conclusion to the war may well have been as much on the mind of Lloyd George as crushing the Hohen Zollerns. 

Who knows what isaa will dish up in Canberra in 2019? 

*Ned Twynam, career Major in the Australian Army, in a short note to his brother before embarking for France from Egypt in 1916, instructs Henry, in the event of his being killed, to insist on full pay entitlements from the Army. The other things on his mind was disposal of his horse (to be shot, rather than left in less scrupulous hands), and his mother’s carved chair, sharing space in the cow shed.

** More specific context is in another blog post referencing work by Newton: https://www.johnmenadue.com/douglas-newton-for-armistice-day-lest-we-forget-the-realities-of-the-armistice/

*** For a more complete coverage of the implications in marking this centenary see http://www.gcpc2015.org.au/event/saving-private-ryan-talk-douglas-newton/

In preparing Richlands for its 10th open day I am mindful of it happening to fall on the centenary of Armistice Day now tricked up as Remembrance Day, remembering the sacrifices in war etc. celebrated officially with much patriotic effusiveness, in marked contrast with the neglect of R Days in the immediate past.

It has been appropriated, reconfigured, re-burnished, or turned inside out by each of the belligerants to the original conflagration. In Australia we have transferred allegiance to such marks of collective reflection entirely to our own day – the One Day of the Year – in April.

But never let an opportunity pass us by. The guns fall silent and the commemorations recommence. Blasted into our living rooms, mystifying yet again our young population, whose experience of war is much fresher, much less to be celebrated, more a lurid perpetual image on screen, the line of endless doco-esque dramas or a ghastly gap in parents accounts of their former lives, instrumental in some unspoken way in bringing them to this country, whose primary quality was that here there was no war to speak of.

Now guns falling silent is an anachronism, for the Western World for ever looking for somewhere to deploy more of them, and another excuse for their exercise.

We had our freshly former prime minister yesterday on live television saying in a bunch of different tones and ways, that the only explanation for why his colleagues sacked him was that they had gone mad. I feel that this apothegm is equally appropriate for nations whose only way of acting normally is to build and promote ever more sophisticated methods of subduing others to their idea of civilisation, bringing ultimately all civilisations down.

With that off my chest, I will return to thinking about the part our family played in the War, what that did to them; and what they sacrificed on behalf of an impulse to empire. The soldiering profession was an outlet for people like my forebears where they had a chance of achieving status in a changing modernising world; of exercising the opportunities of new freedoms – of education, for men and women, of movement, and from early death.

There are studio photos of men in uniform – typically career officers; in the case of one branch combining civilian professions with military – as engineers, or medicos. Wars came and went, yet these people served wherever they happened to be sent – for the nineteenth century this meant mostly the subcontinent, but towards the end it also meant South Africa and the West Indies.

This is the opposite of madness. It was a natural duty of provincials not locked into political careers, but otherwise contained within a caste system that required connections and standing. Assortative mating was unheard of – you married who best served in the game of title inheritance. Yes, for our vigorous, adventurous, sober, level headed, quietly proud, forbears, a uniform counted as currency, as much as a plate on the door or rooms in Lincoln Inns Fields; or title to parcels of land in the centuries preceding.

They played honourable but not very colourful roles in wars; mostly they came back, and resumed peaceful lives in the counties, with whatever the army or navy could afford in the way of pension. If they had not already chosen marriage partners from the cultural or economic circles of their familiars, if not by preference suitably distant cousins, then from what passed as such in the outposts to which they were sent.

Their military exploits seem incidental. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that wherever they were in the world, their task was to cruel the chances of rival empire building states, notably the French, the Dutch and then the Germans. At one stage the Russians loomed, and before them the Americans; notwithstanding that the ruling circles in each of these aspirant imperial powers were hopelessly interwoven themselves, by marriage or interest, or tradition and history.

This insight came to me in a remarkable way on Monday, reading a self published memoir of the field diary of Captain Robert Parker that is a family relic in my care. Parker at 14 years forewent his further education to join a regiment of foot – swayed as he said by their smart dress while marching through town, and encouraged by the officer in charge. The army in Ireland had not a lot of fighting to do, although Louis 14th’ flowering autocracy, and increasing religious intolerance, was a source of rising anxiety in the Kingdom, acutely so in Ireland with the ascension of James II in 1680.

Married to an Italian, James was to all intents a papist, and his intentions became clear as he purged all high army and church posts of people loyal to the established church. Command of the army In Ireland was James proxy, a single minded man loyal to the one true religion who could rely on imperial French reinforcements.

Robert was inspired by the defiance to Louis’ designs on Europe by William of  Orange, and decided to join him in Holland to find if there was not a more congenial career fighting under his flag.

Events however took charge; by the time he reached London, the Revolution was already in train. William arrived as James, his brother-in-law, fled. Young Robert found his way to his old regiment, and commander who was in process of loudly pledging allegiance to the new protestant King. The Irish army however as reconstituted under James held out against William.  James was by then living under the protection of Louis in Paris.

So Robert Parker’s first active duty was fighting for William against the army of James in his own country, events now ossified in the rituals of the Orange order. Robert’s account though is clear eyed, noting the details of action, the long periods of ennuie endured by soldiers everywhere; the brief moments of high drama and chaos, and the adventitious nature of outcomes.

In the course of these battles both the great Huguenot General Schomberg, and the Irish Army commander were killed; William, only months from seizing power,  leading his army into battle was hit in the shoulder by musket ball but treated in the field. That French soldiers were fighting on each side, allowed for infiltration and treachery. The Irish in James army scattered with the loss of their commander. Evidently they had little appetite for the raging battles between Protestant and Catholic Europe fought over their country.

Robert’s first hand accounts were published some 50 years or more after the events they describe by his son somewhat apologetically on account of Robert’s English lacking the flourish regarded as a mark of a properly educated man of the time.

In generations that followed Parkers and D’Esterres intermarried; the latter arriving in the south of Ireland in the 17th century fleeing religious persecution. Their status as minor aristocracy meant it was an easy fit into the protestant landholder class of southern Ireland.

A hundred years on another Parker commanding a naval vessel, in a squadron stationed off Irish waters chasing French ships, drowned with the rest of the crew as a result of a storm, perhaps Louis’ revenge. A cousin, John Parker, a General in one of the armies of the British East India Company, in a footnote to this thesis, had lost his life a few years earlier in the 2nd Rohinya war being fought between rival princes in the northwest of India.

Add a further hundred years or so and more descendants were answering the call to the flag: of my grandmother’s three brothers one was a professional soldier serving in Africa; a second a Medico trained in England joining the Australian Ambulance Corps on the Gallipoli peninsular, a third served as Surgeon Commander in the Royal Navy. The very flag to which they were called has turned up among family things in a suitcase.

Military life was likewise not foreign on the other, English county, side of my mother’s family, although in their case at more obvious cost in time of war. One branch lost five sons on the western Front; another who had over generations been in colonial service in the subcontinent, conspicuously in the army. In our time a great uncle, Edward (Ned) Twynam started life as a  professional soldier in the nascent Australian army before the war broke out, served as a major in mounted infantry in Egypt, Gallipoli and France. Ned’s younger sister Joan was among the first group of army nurses to reach the Middle East, and nursed with distinction there and over four of what must have been gruelling years in the 2nd Australian General Hospital in the north of France.

The family of their elder sister Mary grew up in the shadow of Duntroon; furnishing brides for three officers in training (two marrying in haste in Egypt), a son, Andy, who was shot narrowly escaping death on Gallipoli, received the military medal for exploits in the Palestine campaign and was court martialled for reckless behaviour while on leave in Cairo.

The youngest son of this large family was called Alexander, but universally known as Pax  as born at the cessation of the Boer Wars. Mary herself, conscious of the increasing likelihood that her eldest son, and heir to her father-in-law’s pastoral empire, whose appetite for fighting seemed to know no bounds, would not survive the war unless overstretched volunteers were relieved, campaigned publicly, and conspicuously for the introduction of conscription. Her sister Phoebe, married to the chief executive of the P&O line in Australia, threw her grand society self into the tasks of organising civilian support – the VAD in Sydney and later working with Red Cross in London.

The shadow of the war did not leave the family at the Armistice: Andy drove trucks in highly risky and adventurous circumstances between Burma and China in the second war. Ned reapplied for service, after commanding the 7th Light Horse militia through the interim peace, was knocked back on age, and died soon after on his rough scrabble soldier settler block, and by his own hand (although his intention was not clear). Joan applied for matronships in veteran rehab hospitals, was unsuccessful and left to work in hospitals in the Northern Territory, before returning to genteel poverty, taking in shell shocked veterans in a boarding arrangement for which she may have received some income (or not).

And then it all started again a generation later. My uncle Ted Twynam and his cousin Jim Nimmo both joined the airforce after the outbreak of war but at different times, and both were killed in action: shot down, Jim over Denmark early in the war; Ted towards its end in a mass raid on the Ruhr.

Jim’s sister Anne was contacted by a representative of a small country museum near the crash site that housed relics from the young allied servicemen who had defended their country. In a moving gesture Jim’s watch, recovered from the wreckage 50 years before, was returned to Anne in person by one of its local guardians. Their father, however pursued a military career in a new direction, arguably away from war: as General Nimmo he was the longest serving chief of UN Peacekeeping forces, serving for 17 years in Kashmir, and dying ‘in harness’ respected by all sides.

Ted’s sister, Dorcas, like other cousins inspired by their aunt Joan, had trained as a nurse, and enlisted early in the second war; serving in the Middle East before being recalled, along with Australian army units that had been sent to support the British in North Africa, but now left Australia’s defence dangerously exposed, in a dash to bolster thin defence of New Guinea against the rapidly advancing the Japanese imperial army. For this Curtin brought down the wrath of Churchill, and established for the first time a clear break from past subservience to the empirial interest. An attitude incidentally that was shared by the Japanese themselves. Dorcas was to spend the rest of the war in field stations in New Guinea, demobbed only in 1946.

Ted and Dorcas were to meet, in uniform, by hazard in transit in Brisbane – we have a photo of this occasion. Ted was heading for the Empire Air Training School in Canada and thence to Kestern in Lincolnshire and Bomber Command; Dorcas entrained to Port Moresby, and later forward hospitals. Ted was piloting a Lancaster heavy bomber in a mass bombing raid on the Ruhr in the German industrial heartland, at the nd of his tour, 5 months before German surrender, and well after the end of land hostilities in Europe, when the plane was destroyed by defending fighter aircraft.

My mother called on her brother’s grave in the imperial, now Commonwealth war cemetery at Kleve, close to the border with Holland  while visiting Europe in 1953 to meet my father’s family for the first time. My father grew up in Cologne in a villa by the Rhine that had been sequestered as quarters for British officers after the first war, and was completely destroyed by British bombs early in the next war.

The family however were forced out of Germany by the race laws just prior to its commencement, My father, Robert Victor Horn, born on the 1st of August 1914. the day the war commenced, christened with the expressed desire by his parents in an (early) German victory – on completing university studies made his way in Australia, at first as ‘stateless’ gaining citizenship and joining the Australian army at the first opportunity.

RVs call up for overseas posting came a week after his marriage to my mother – in fact via telegram at the Streampacket Hotel on the Clyde during their bicycle honeymoon trip down the highway from Goulburn to Nowra, and a month after her brother had been notified as missing in action. Robert (RV) was to spend 12 months on Bougainville in a back water of the war; my mother’s family receiving confirmation through the Red Cross of Ted’s death in the meantime.

In this time and across this war torn space my two grandmothers exchanged cordial greetings, and homely parcels; my mother was received warmly from the beginning; as was my father despite the family having lost their only son in hostilities.

My father would brush off the everyday hostility he, and other ‘new citizens’, experienced. He like most migrants, not from ‘home’ could hardly attach themselves to empire and race loyalties; but he did have an immediate identification with Australia as a new country, building new traditions and capable of thinking for itself.

In his career interest in the denominators of wellbeing in his various roles as banker, economist, statistician, he explored the everyday dignities and diversities of people, not only in our world but all over the world where we can exchange fellow feeling.

His insights are not unusual, in fact are those of ordinary soldiers in war although in that case in heightened form, able to sense and mock absurdities of the powerful. A good general is one who cares that that his decisions are biased to the fighting performance, and survival, of his troups. His loyalties lie there.

My father’s start in the army, in an employment company mixing with a motley of aliens and refugees, left him with permanent disc injury, and empathy for assimilation efforts of others into Australian life and aspiration.

We treasure the issues of Tropic Spread, he edited while passing the time in an army barracks in Rabaul, and in particular the remarkably identifiable ink caricature of  ‘the Ed’ by the resident cartoonist in the unit. Not being trusted with a gun, he could nevertheless wield a pen, or rather the keys of a hard worked remington portable, that continued to see service well into our growing up years.

Of the few souvenirs he brought back from New Britain, the most important, apart from an anguished samurai print, were artefacts of village life, a core of his subsequent collecting. In this is an echo of Ned’s first experience of action in the First War, sailing on a schooner up the Fly River to take surrender of the small German planter colony. His prize souvenir was a horn German drinking cup.

The courage to fight on, so apotheosised in our representation of wars, comes with the reserve that war is in itself an anathema. We need the courage to stop wars, to build peace. The two minutes on the 11th of the 11th will be (for me) dedicated to this thought and these people. You will have your own thoughts.