RedStateEclectic

A Modern Story - Politics and the State in Ancient Greece

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The ancient Greek efflorescence was exceptional in premodern world history for its duration, intensity and long-term impact on world culture. It took place in a social ecology of hundreds of city-states. While wealth and incomes remained unequal in those communities — there were many slaves in the most prosperous of the Greek states — a substantial part of the Greek population experienced prosperity. The growth of the Greek economy was driven by an extensive middle class, by many people who consumed goods and services at a level far above subsistence.

[...]

The historically distinctive Greek approach to citizenship and political order was the key differentiator that made the Greek efflorescence distinctive in pre-modern history. It drove specialization and continuous innovation through the establishment of civic rights, aligned the interests of a large class of people who ruled and were ruled over in turn and encouraged the free exchange of information. The emergence of a new approach to politics is what propelled Hellas to the heights of accomplishment celebrated by Lord Byron.

The source. (Hat tip to Arnold Kling)

I like the author’s stance as it shows the vital intertwining of politics and the economy, an important aspect of understanding society that libertarians prefer to ignore, at the cost of a distorted notion of freedom.

Though an amateur as for Ancient Greece, the literature that I have read on the subject matter leaves me somewhat sceptical as to the extent and continuity of wealth in Ancient Greece that Ober seems to insinuate. To tell from the rather short article, his story strikes me as a bit too smooth and idealising.

But the basic story line is fascinating and may well represent an important scholarly advance.

Ober’s approach may help libertarians overcome their unwillingness to extend the idea of spontaneous order from its “economistic ghetto” to social life in general, including the spontaneous order of politics and the state and its interaction with the narrower Hayekian spontaneous order.

Also, and perhaps of particular interest, it appears advisable to think through the concepts of division of labour and specialisation as naturally comprising politics and the state. Highly populous and productive societies are predicated on a fairly efficient political and governmental division of labour making possible and supporting (the beginnings of and later more fully developed) civil society.

No modern markets, no modern economy without a division of labour that encloses politics and the state.

For more on Greece:

The Invention of the Modern Public and Freedom and Ancient Greece.

On the Spontaneous Order of Politics and the State:

Forgotten Emergence - The Spontaneous Order of Politics, and Spontaneous Order of Politics and the State (SO2).

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Happiness - To Be Dissolved into Something Complete and Great

As Image credit. As a child, complete underwater immersion, three-dimensional movement, in warm sun-drenched water was pure bliss for me.

When I was six and younger, I used to enjoy those moments of happiness described below by Willa Cather. Today, for me, a sense of happiness is to be found mostly in trance-like states, such as when working - especially when I write - with intense concentration.

Also, I think, happiness can be both a matter of conscious and semi-conscious perception - some sort of awareness, I think, must be involved if it is to have anything to do with one's human mode of being. I surmise, the clearer the perception of happiness the briefer the time extension of it, longer periods of feeling happy come with more diverted forms of consciousness of it.

Moreover, I think, we tend to lump rather distinct modes of being into that one magic word: happiness. A happy person runs the copiously packed continuum of forms and degrees of happiness up and down: even ambition and strong desire, even painful effort can be found on that continuum, if only they, in turn, do not predominate, i.e. if they are part of balanced mix.

As I write this, I have not reread the respective posts on happiness published here and here, but I seem to remember to have argued and continue to believe that happiness is neither best captured by evoking certain forms of extreme bliss or the concept of extreme bliss (whatever such experiences from one's own life one chooses to subsume under that category). A more meaningful, more long-term- and more real-life-adjusted measure of happiness I would tend to seek in the idea of being unmolested, unhampered by (physical and social) circumstances that constrain natural human initiative. In that respect, freedom is a major contributor to human happiness.

And in that sense, I am convinced that there is human progress; and in that sense, cultural relativism is in principle refutable. While I may not know how happy the Neanderthal-man or the average citizen of communist East Germany were, I am sure had they had the chance to do it (and the East Germans did have that chance, and have reacted as predicted by me), they would have opted for the tools and means of the freest societies in human history. Naturally. To be happier.

(The nostalgia for the good old Communist days is cheap talk and not in the slightest borne out by real action - never in history have citizens been freer to (re-)establish socialism than today.)

Of course, given the richness of her oeuvre, we should beware of reducing Willa Cather to just one facet of happiness; but it is edifying to be reminded by her of that particularly beautiful facet, which, I am sure, all of us have known as kids, and still encounter at times later in life.

The history of recorded thought is strewn with evidence that happiness lives in the most ordinary of moments. And yet no matter how universal a human aspiration it may be, articulating happiness in those rare moments when it is perfectly attained remains an elusive art. For Albert Camus, it was a moral obligation; for Mary Oliver, a kind of seizure; for Kurt Vonnegut, a sense of enoughness. But nowhere have I encountered an account of happiness more soulful and deeply alive than in a passage from Willa Cather’s first masterwork, the 1918 novel My Ántonia (public library) — the story of a spirited pioneer named Ántonia Shimerda, who settles as in Nebraska as a child and grows with the land, told through the loving and wakeful eyes of her childhood friend Jim Burden.

In this passage, Cather’s narrator is lying in his grandmother’s garden, drowsy and drunk with life under the warm autumn sun:

The earth was warm under me, and warm as I crumbled it through my fingers. Queer little red bugs came out and moved in slow squadrons around me. Their backs were polished vermilion, with black spots. I kept as still as I could. Nothing happened. I did not expect anything to happen. I was something that lay under the sun and felt it, like the pumpkins, and I did not want to be anything more. I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep.

The truth and beauty of this vignette never left the soul from which it sprang. Cather requested that her grave site, which she shared with her partner, bear the inscription: “…that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”

 The source.

 See also Willa Cather of Nebraska, Happiness and Freedom,  Happiness - Once Again, The Universal Grin - A Farewell to Alms.

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String Quartet in F (Maurice Ravel) - Assez vif. Très rythmé

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More on the String Quartet in F here.

Enjoy.

 

“Every Day Is April Fool’s In Nutrition.”

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I got a call in December last year from a German television reporter named Peter Onneken. He and his collaborator Diana Löbl were working on a documentary film about the junk-science diet industry. They wanted me to help demonstrate just how easy it is to turn bad science into the big headlines behind diet fads. And Onneken wanted to do it gonzo style: Reveal the corruption of the diet research-media complex by taking part.

Testing bitter chocolate as a dietary supplement was his idea. When I asked him why, Frank said it was a favorite of the “whole food” fanatics. “Bitter chocolate tastes bad, therefore it must be good for you,” he said. “It’s like a religion.”

“Slim by Chocolate!” the headlines blared. A team of German researchers had found that people on a low-carb diet lost weight 10 percent faster if they ate a chocolate bar every day. It made the front page of Bild, Europe’s largest daily newspaper, just beneath their update about the Germanwings crash. From there, it ricocheted around the internet and beyond, making news in more than 20 countries and half a dozen languages. It was discussed on television news shows. It appeared in glossy print, most recently in the June issue of Shape magazine (“Why You Must Eat Chocolate Daily,” page 128). Not only does chocolate accelerate weight loss, the study found, but it leads to healthier cholesterol levels and overall increased well-being. The Bild story quotes the study’s lead author, Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D., research director of the Institute of Diet and Health: “The best part is you can buy chocolate everywhere.”

I am Johannes Bohannon, Ph.D. Well, actually my name is John, and I’m a journalist. I do have a Ph.D., but it’s in the molecular biology of bacteria, not humans. The Institute of Diet and Health? That’s nothing more than a website.

Other than those fibs, the study was 100 percent authentic. My colleagues and I recruited actual human subjects in Germany. We ran an actual clinical trial, with subjects randomly assigned to different diet regimes. And the statistically significant benefits of chocolate that we reported are based on the actual data. It was, in fact, a fairly typical study for the field of diet research. Which is to say: It was terrible science. The results are meaningless, and the health claims that the media blasted out to millions of people around the world are utterly unfounded.

Here’s how we did it.

Read the rest.

Our Office Is with Moments

Well worth pondering:

We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them… To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom. [...] Since our office is with moments, let us husband them. Five minutes of today are worth as much to me as five minutes in the next millennium. Let us be poised, and wise, and our own, today. Let us treat the men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are… Without any shadow of doubt, amidst this vertigo of shows and politics, I settle myself ever the firmer in the creed that we should not postpone and refer and wish, but do broad justice where we are, by whomsoever we deal with, accepting our actual companions and circumstances, however humble or odious as the mystic officials to whom the universe has delegated its whole pleasure for us.

Make sure to go to the source.

Relax with Barbie

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With all that heavy stuff in this blog, let's relax a wee bit with "Barbie Girl".

 

Mondo Cane - Clever Raja

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How I love dogs.

 

Freedom and the Environment

Did you know, Nebraska's official name used to be "The Tree Planter's State?"

Explains Senator Laura Ebke in her fun fact of the day: "Nebraska has had two official state names: the "Tree Planters' State" and the "Cornhusker State" Nebraska was designated the "Tree Planters' State" by legislative action in 1895. Nebraska's claim to tree-planting fame includes the founding of Arbor Day in 1872 by J. Sterling Morton of Nebraska City, the Timber Culture Act of U.S. Sen. Phineas W. Hitchcock in 1873 and the millions of trees planted by early settlers as windbreaks, woodlots and orchards. The 1945 Legislature changed the official state name to the "Cornhusker State.""

Freedom means progress, thus freedom means an environment more adequate to humankind - and there cannot be any other standard for judging environmental quality.

Pierre Desrochers reminds us:

Last month [written in November, 2006] our southern neighbours welcomed the arrival (or birth) of their three-hundredth million citizen. While the news should have been welcomed, a number of environmental activists and journalists viewed it as cause for concern. They had no reasons to, because a rising population in a prosperous economy is entirely consistent with a higher quality of life and improved environmental amenities. As Dan Griswold of the Cato Institute pointed out, even though the U.S. population is today four times larger than it was a century ago, during this time period "life expectancy at birth has grown from 48 to 78 years, infant mortality rates have plunged, a host of deadly diseases have been conquered, and the air we breathe and the water we drink are far cleaner than when we were a less populous country."

The idea that economic growth generates pollution problems, but simultaneously provides the means to clean up most of them and even to improve on earlier conditions, is probably too counterintuitive to be readily accepted by most people. It is nonetheless backed up by much historical evidence. A brief discussion of the causes underlying forest regrowth and improvements in air and water quality in advanced economies can be illustrative in this respect.

Take, for instance, the case of forest cover:

It is a common misconception that deforestation is a recent occurrence, with the bulk of it taking place in the tropical regions of the world in the last five decades. As Williams (2002) points out, possibly as much as nine-tenths of all deforestation occurred before 1950, as people cleared forests for shelter, food, warmth and to create a multitude of implements. Beginning in some European countries in the middle of the nineteenth century, however, these trends have long been reversed in virtually all advanced economies and in some developing economies (including China and India). Among other factors explaining this rebirth of forests in over fifty countries is the fact that farmers and foresters became increasingly efficient in their capacity to grow more food and fiber on ever-decreasing areas, with the resulting abandonment of pasture and cropland paving the way to afforestation and reforestation.

Meanwhile, wood users became increasingly adept at extracting more value out of their input, while development of substitute products, ranging from electricity to plastics and metals, reduced the demand for wood (Ausubel, 2000; Williams, 1989). Rudel et al. (2004) also point out that economic development and urbanization has created better paying non-farming jobs in urban areas, causing a number of agricultural workers to abandon their land. In places with stable or growing populations and little ability to import forest products, continued declines in forest cover spur increases in prices of forest products, causing landowners to plant trees instead of crops or pasture grasses. Disastrous floods in deforested watersheds have also motivated government officials in developing, but now prosperous, countries to implement reforestation programs.

Make sure to read the entire short piece.

See also Desrochers' Free Market Ways to Solve Environmental Problems, Millions from Waste - How Capitalism Saves the Environment, and Liberty's Vacant Preserve - the Environment, When Economists Were Still Economists.

Flat Tyre and A Good Day

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Back home in my cosy house after a long day. Lots of problems, lots of quick solutions. A good day.

For days I had felt something is wrong with my car's steering; the cause turned out to be a tyre that was gradually losing pressure. Just when passing my auto repair shop, I noticed I had a flat tyre. About to close, the owner of the garage gave me a replacement vehicle, so I could do all the evening shopping I needed to get done - imagine: no more beer in the house -, plus an overdue haircut.

 

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A Little Perspective

Libertango

The resourceful and dynamic Anderson & Roe duo, known to our readers from A Kiss?, have an amazing new piece:

 

See also The Classical Liberal Constitution (1/2).