The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXIV: Believing Because It Is Absurd

 

I did the Axial Age five years ago from the perspective of the relationship between religion and technological change. Let's come at the issue of learning, literature, scripts, and the problem of finding the "there," there. 

Wikipedia's article on the individual it designates as Siddharta Guatama is entitled "The Buddha."  in Buddhist theology, Prince Siddharta is one of a number of soteriological figures designated as "Bodhisattvas." I hesitate to refer to him as the first among equals, but that's the sense of the concept that I am going with, and one of the most important things that distinguish him from other Buddhist saviour figures is that he is considered to be a historical figure, "a wandering ascetic and religious teacher who lived in the eastern Indo-Gangetic Plains during the 6th or 5th century BCE." One of the odder things about this conversation is that their is a tradition that places his life a century before Ashoka, who is fairly firmly dated to c. 250. Given that archaeologists have suggested that the picture of the state of civilisation in this region in the biographical stories of the Buddha more nearly fits 350BC than 550BC, you would think that the conversation would take this tradition more seriously. The introduction goes on to point out that the Buddha is first attested in c. 250, but this turns out to depend on the Ashokan attribution of the Lumbini Pillar, which refers to the Emperor in the third person and past tense, undermining the dating claim. It was also a discovery of  notorious fraud Anton Fuhrer. As a practical matter, the Buddha's existence is first affirmatively asserted in Greco-Roman literature by Clement of Alexandria. One would think that he would be a fascinating figure in early Christian Alexandria, well worth discussion.  

If, however, the Buddha lived in "the 6th or 5th century BCE," he was contemporary with . . . well, here's another level of difficulty. Per no less an authority than Plato, this was the age of Zoroaster, but Wikipedia, intending to present the consensus of scholarship, or as close to such as can be achieved, puts Zoroaster at 1500BC. The argument is that the Avestas (not attested before c.1200AD) have linguistic parallels with Vedic literature, and on the argument that the Indo-European languages arrived in India about 1500BC, this must be Zoroaster's flourit, not withstanding the authority of Plato and various etymological problems, of which the historian of technology must insist on the claim that "Zarathustra" means "Manager of Camels," and that camels were domesticated once and for all during the Iron Age. To this (non-)contemporary we add Laozi, almost certainly a fictional character and unlikely at best to have been a pre-Confucian figure if real, but certainly claimed as such in the Daoist tradition, and the Seven Sages of Ancient Greece, and let's not even get started on them! 

It seems as though arguing about the historicity and dates of the Buddha, Zoroaster, and Laozi in the same breath is a bad thing to do. It is weird that the traditional historical dates of the spread of Indo-European should be on the same level, but they are, and at the end of the day we launch into yet another realm of mystery by noting that these contested claims of contemporaneity (and more besides, as the Wikipedia account shoehorns in Jainism and "Second Temple Judaism") are in service of Karl Jasper's axial age, which cannot be better summarised than as this . . . 

But in the Iron Age. 

Postblogging Technology, October 1954, I: Brain Child in Long Pants

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

It seems as though I will be writing a fairly short note this week with very little to say about exciting family news or world events. I would like to blame the press of very important business, but in fact everything has screeched to a halt as we wait for the results of the Congressional elections. If Knowland isn't the Senate Majority Leader this time next month, we can start winding things down. If he is, you probably need to buy a bomb shelter and a Geiger counter. (Or just move house to Nakusp or Campbell River. That works, too!)

Oh? My excuse! I was doing very important things that didn't involve dandling around the house, sleeping in and then playing with my children. Very important things indeed! 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, September 1954, I: A Theory of Capital Goods Might Be Just The Thing!

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

So let this be a lesson to everyone. If you're ever tempted to make friends with a nice admiral that nobody loves, you might just live to regret it if he gets promoted after all. Considering that Felix is Ray Spruance's man through and through, I guess it's no surprise that he doesn't get along with Radford. Unfortunately, Wild Bill is in Washington, and Felix is out here managing the Straits, as far as Chiang will let him. There are rumours of a split between Radford and the President, but he still has Dulles' ear, and what they're talking about is a preventive nuclear war against China. Churchill has been able to impress on Ike just how crazy this is, but there's no talking to the Dulles brothers. (I'm told there was a long lecture about Marlborough, Queen Anne, and the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in general, to the effect of not letting ideology get in the way of diplomacy --the sort of thing that Churchill would never dare say in public, which is unfortunate because Tony seems to have taken the public Churchill to heart, but now I'm just passing on the rumours I hear to make myself look important.) 

So the gist of it is that Chiang, and many of his subordinates, are ready to start a war in a hot minute if he gets the chance. That's the reason he sent those troops to Quemoy in the first place --that and to get their officers out of his nonexistent hair. If Felix doesn't stop them from crossing over to the mainland, he completely undermines the United States' argument for being in the Strait to start with. If he does, he has to shoot at Nationalists. The obvious way out of this is to let the Reds shoot the Nationalists --Oopsie doopsie, silly me, must have been looking in the wrong direction. The problem is that this has to be made clear not to Chiang, but all the rambunctious types underneath of him, especially the ones unhappy with the Koumintang, and it sure as heck can't go through State because the leak will be on Knowland's deck before it even clears the cable office.

So who can do that? How about a fluent American naval aviator with inside connections and his incredibly beautiful young wife? Which is why this letter is coming to you from Taipei and why I had to give my notice. Your country calls, and all of that. James hasn't been formally transferred because that would raise all sorts of red flags. So James is here on leave to do something because something, and unless someone backs down soon, he will continue to be on leave here in Taipei through the end of next summer, and hopefully not longer than that, because I will be off to take the bar in San Francisco. 

Unless we're fighting giant ants in the radioactive rubble of civilisation, I mean. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

PS: Lots of talk about "capital goods" in the press this time around. I honestly had no idea that economic theory could be so sophisticated and nuanced, and in spite of my education, this is the first time I've heard the field discussed in such a way that I feel like I need to understand WHY Karl Marx thought he had to write Das Kapital. I don't think I did the Fortune article on the subject justice, never mind the field, but it is definitely something that I will be turning over in my head as I burble on about "technology" here.

Genocide with weapons of mass destruction is the only answer to Comm ---Ants. Ants.

Gathering the Bones, XXXI: Raven And The First Men

 

This morning I am thinking about Raven the trickster, creator and king. but I also travelled on the weekend and visited my world-travelling doctor brother and his wife, who in conversation chanced to mention how much better the Pacific Northwest art held at the British Museum is than that shown here in its homeland.

"After the great flood had at long last receded, Raven had gorged himself on the delicacies left by the receding water, so for once, perhaps the first time in his life, he wasn't hungry. but his other appetites, his curiosity and the unquenchable itch to meddle and provoke things, to play tricks on the world and its creatures, these remained unsatisfied.

Raven gazed up and down the beach. It was pretty, but lifeless. There was no one about to upset, or play tricks upon. Raven sighed. He crossed his wings behind him and strutted up and down the sand, his shiny head cocked, his sharp eyes and ears alert for any unusual sight or sound. The mountains and sea, the sky now ablaze with the sun by day and the moon and stars he had placed there, it was all pretty, but lifeless. Finally Raven cried out to the empty sky with a loud exasperated cry.

And before the echoes of his cry faded from the shore, he heard a muffled squeak. He looked up and down the beach for its source and saw nothing. He strutted back and and forth, once, twice, three times and still saw nothing. Then he spied a flash of white in the sand.

There, half buried in the sand was a giant clamshell. As his shadow fell upon it, he heard another muffled squeak. Peering down into the opening between the halves of the shell, he saw it was full of tiny creatures, cowering in fear at his shadow.

Raven was delighted. Here was a break in the monotony of the day. But how was he to get the creatures to come out of their shell and play with him? Nothing would happen as long as they stayed inside the giant clamshell.

They were not going to come out as long as they were so afraid of him. So Raven leaned over his head, close to the shell, and with all the cunning and skill of that smooth trickster's tongue, that had so often gotten him in and out of so many misadventures during his troubled and troublesome existence, he coaxed and cajoled and coerced the little creatures to come out and play in his wonderful shiny new world."

"Raven and the First Men" is a Haida creation myth, here truncated. The second image is a rattle, used in shaman and healing dances. The specific meaning belongs to the owner who commissioned it, but the general theme is the transfer of power, which is another way to understand the creation myth. Deprived of its context by the decision to sell it to an outsider, it remains an eerie symbol of the relationship between Raven and one man, no doubt privileged.  I would be stretching nonexistent wings in a ludicrous play at exegesis to go any further (Raven would approve!), but we can reasonably ask how it was made around here.

A Technological (With Some Real Science and Hardball Politics) Appendix to Postblogging Technology, November 1952: Ivy Mike

 

In what I was brought up to call the "Bethe Cycle," but which now requires a whole Wikipedia article to describe the various branchings, a presumed homogenous substrate of deuterium (hydrogen atoms with an atomic mass of 2 due to being composed of one neutron and one proton), combined with two electrons, is fused, after multiple intermediate states and the production of "catalysts" of atomic weight up to oxygen, into an atomic weight 4 helium atoms plus 2 electron neutrons and 7 gamma ray photons, with 26.7 MeV free energy.

The CNO cycle occurs in stars, particularly larger ones. It requires less energy to initiate than the naked fusion of two monoatomic hydrogen atoms (in other words, protons), but is also less efficient. Proton-proton fusions dominate stellar processes in smaller stars, but occur at statistically lower rates, causing these stars to burn less hot than larger stars, where the CNO process predominates. By the late 1930s, these facts were understood in vague outline, although given the fact that the neutrino was still at this point a theoretical particle, and its fundamental properties still obscure, physical science's understanding of the process was obviously still incomplete. Note that this not a question of pure scientific curiosity. Neutrinos can, like neutrons, collide with uranium and plutonium nucleii and initiate atomic fission. This happens at a small fraction of the rate of fission events due to free neutrons in atomic explosions, but given that chain reactions are exponential processes, it is something that a responsible weapon designer might want to keep in mind. Ha ha who are we kidding. 

In the IVY MIKE test explosion of  1 November, 1952, the American Atomic Energy Commission released 10.4 MT of free energy and a whole lot of radioactive fallout, plus a lot of politics. Considering that the explosion occurred  three days before the 1952 Presidential Election, we might on the one  hand say that the explosion occurred in a period of great political uncertainty, on the other hand note that while the media was invested in the idea of the election outcome being open, everyone expected Eisenhower to win; and on the third acknowledge that in fact the composition of the Senate was very much in question, and that while the GOP took a two seat majority in the voting, the defection of Oregon Senator Wayne Morse to sit as an independent, reduced that majority to a potential single vote, with Vice-President Nixon voting to break the tie.

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging, July and August 1951: The Avon State

 

Way back in the 28 July number, The Economist wrung its hands, as The Economist was wont to do, over the aero-engine problem. This is a problem that, as far as I know, no-one else has ever heard of, but which is well worth another look, once extracted from my historicised postblogging voice and given the longer perspective that history of technology has denied it. It seems especially pressing when I am preparing to postblog September. We have a new month's worth of handwringing to deal with, this time over "the inflation state," Attlee calling the election, and the annual Farnborough show. I can't help but think that the last two are linked, that one reason The Economist is banging on about airplanes so much is that the Farnborough show has turned into a very exciting demonstration that the Attlee government is doing something right. It would, as usual, blow The Economist's cover to be too down on Farnborough and planes, in general, but one can get there by a short detour if the flesh is willing. 

Postblogging Technology, September 1950, I: "This Calls for Champagne All Around"

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver, Canada

Dear Father:

Here's  your friendly letter from the frontlines of the war-to-come, the land of camphor and oolong tea! If Mao builds a navy, that is. Or needs one, because the Koumintang stops surrendering to the first Red soldier they see. You will be glad to know that we are doing our part. Reggie is pretending to atom bomb China, in hopes that the Reds . . . I don't know. What are we  hoping? That the Reds bomb us first? Meanwhile, I'm a little ahead of the news again, so I've heard of Inchon, which definitely means that America has pulled it out and managed to defeat mighty North Korea. I feel so patriotic! 

Considering some of the things said about Koreans and "Orientals" in the press these last two weeks, I wonder about whether it is some kind of cosmic coincdence that The Black Rose is out, featuring the long ago English hero who brought compasses, gunpowder, and paper to the backwards West. What goes around comes around? Or is this an even more subtle way of belittling Asia? Ronnie has her doubts!

Oh, and you're wondering what I'm doing. Besides doubting, I mean! Learning to cook on a wok and getting to the point where I actually want to see my subscription to The Economist catch up with me. As for yours, I am glad to think that you are already looking ahead to the arrangements for me to resume law school next fall. I've had rumblings from Chicago that my Dad wants to pay for our nanny, and if he wants to be involved, he should be. If not, I will gladly take you up on your offer, although it is early days yet to make plans, tempting fate and all. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, July 1950, II: Bug Out Boys of Company B

R_. C_.

Shaughnessy,

Vancouver,

Canada.

Dear Father:

This is the second installment of "Things I wrote on my Honeymoon When I Should Have Been Having Fun." Good thing Reggie is here to make sure I have fun. And I did! Now darkness is falling and in a moment the Goose is going to come in and it's back to the real world, or what passes for it in the Gitmo's Formosa and at the studio. 

Writing with a bamboo shoot (or maybe drinking through it),

Your Daughter,

 

Ronnie

The Bishops' Sea: Who Is This "Henry" Guy, Again?

The anonymous author of the Wikipedia life of Marinid Sultan Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Othman (1297--1351) seems to really like the way that this 1930 German textbook map contextualises the affairs of Ceuta and Gibraltar. Sultan Abu al-Hasan captured Gibraltar from Castile in 1319, and then tried to use it as the springboard for a more ambitious campaign against Tarifa, aiming to restore a Marinid Moroccan presence in Iberia, provoking an ambiguously enthusiastic response from the Nasrids of Granada and the last, successful defensive campaign of the Reconquista. 

My question for this week is whether it actually contextualises this:

I'm not trying to ask a profound question here. The Boas Esperanca is no Kon Tiki or Olympias. It's a pretty good reconstruction of a well-known and historically important ship type. We may not know exactly what a Fifteenth Century caravel looked like, but this is fine and it's surely close enough for counting. There's really no significant questions about the vessel itself. But this is, occasionally, a blog about the history of technology, and one of the more important current set-piece arguments about the role of technology in history is that it was invented by one Prince Henry the Navigator. 

"The caravel (Portuguese: caravela, IPA: [kɐɾɐˈvɛlɐ]) was a small, highly manoeuvrable sailing ship developed in the 15th century by the Portuguese to explore along the West African coast and into the Atlantic Ocean." Which is bullshit, in that it's just a big old fishing boat, but also pretty amazing considering that biographers of the Portuguese prince have been spending decades purging the public sphere of the idea of Prince Henry as a teacher and master of the arts of celestial navigation, teaching the sciences of the sea to a generation of young explorers at an ascetic academy on Point Sagres, opening up the world to European--- 

--So, yeah, anyway.  Point is, the moment that Nineteenth Century notion is thrown on the ash heap of history, it sneaks back in again through the back door, an obvious nod to a narrative of technological determinism in which you need the services of a great man to exogenously introduce the necessary technology to change all history. 

Why not? It's how it works in Sid Meier's Civilisation! Navigation takes a ton of Science points, but the moment you have it, you can dump 600 gold into a caravel and, if you're lucky, have enough luxury goods flowing back to your ports to bring your empire back to positive happiness in a turn or three. 

Some pushback, even if not dispositive, seems warranted. And you'll probably guess from my choice of two really, really bad reconstructions that I have an axe to grind, and that "pushback" is likely to turn out to be a hatchet job. Long time readers probably won't be surprised. Anyone else, I'm just being upfront. Though not so upfront that I can't do a driveby on the Trireme Trust!

Nimrod Was The First Of Those Who Were Mighty On the Earth: The 77mm HV, Technological Progress, And the 1940 Counterfactual

History is, as I never tire of saying, a floating referent. It's never entirely clear where to start, and, in the case of a counterfactual, it is even harder. Hypothetical questions about historical counterfactuals are happening right now, over on Quora.Com, so they are very much questions of 2017. (Just to remind you, the framing counterfactual for this occasional series is,  "What if the Commonwealth armed forces of 1940 were armed like the 21st Army Group on 11 May 1945?") (Also.)

On the other hand, the response is very much to Correlli Barnett's Audit of War, a book that came out in March of 1986, per Paul Addison's review, much linked to from here as an explanation of that book, which the reader may  have forgotten about, or never known. On the other hand again, Audit signifies around here as a programmatic manifesto of Thatcherism, and Dame Thatcher became Prime Minister in 1979, seven years before Audit was published. On the other hand again, Thatcher was famously "a research chemist before she became a barrister," while Barnett had been a military historian/media pundit since the 1960s. Although you'll have to take my word for this, since I am not going to engage the ideas behind Audit in any more detail than is necessary to trace its impact, Audit was exactly what an English research-chemist-turned-barrister born in 1924 in the Midlands would have produced had she turned into an ancestral voice prophesying war, as opposed to, say, a Prime Minister. 

 Finally, just to throw on one more guiding metaphor onto an already unwieldy mass, I have talked about the idea of "Technology Levels," as used in the classic 1977 tabletop roleplaying game, Traveller. I'll come back to "Tech Levels" at the end of this discussion. For now, suffice it to say that they were originally intended to be descriptive. Your party lands on a planet; do the natives, who know you Pappenheimers, shoot back with bows and arrows, or hand-carried fusion blasters? A single number in the planet's descriptor tells you! However, they tend to become prescriptive. A blender from a Tech Level 9 world will be 1/16th (don't ask) more effective at blending than one from a Tech Level 8 world. 

The Zhodani are alien humans (don't ask some more) who are very advanced and psionic and stuff; but they're assholes, for RPG balance. Anyway, they invade the Imperium with their high tech ships, which are just better on account of being higher tech level than Imperium ships. 

Traveller comes before Audit, but Barnett's treatment of World War II is a lot like this. Brits used to say (I take Barnett as saying) that they fought World War II at Tech Level, oh, say, 6.5, compared to Germany's 6. In reality, it was 5.5 versus 6.5, Barnett says. He then adds that, had WWII been fought in 1850, instead, it would have been Britain at Tech Level 5 versus Germany at Tech Level 4, and Britain would have won the war even more than it did. 

So, Britain has gone from a Tech Level advantage of 1, to a disadvantage of 0.5 --in my interpretation, of course. Audit purports to show that this is actually the case, while at the same time fingering the culprits. It's a very ambitious book --far too ambitious, in fact. But it does give us a way to think about technological change. My 1940 counterfactual seems, at least to me, like an elegant way to test this idea about technological change.

And by "test," I mean, stuff the demolition chamber with enough RDX to blow up a planet. (Which, by a wacky coincidence, is more-or-less what we're doing.)