miscellaneous factZ – The online home of Rufus Pollock

7/10. Cannibalism and the Common Law: The Story of the Tragic Last Voyage of the Mignonette and the Strange Legal Proceedings to Which It Gave Rise by A Simpson, University of Chicago Press, 1984. More history than legal analysis. Interesting throughout but meandering slightly towards the end. One quote I wish to memorialize, which though rather apart from the main thrust of my book, made me wonder once again about the general tension between ‘definiteness’ (assertiveness/simplicity) and ‘correctness’, especially in the arena of public policy and democratic politics. Is it always necessary, as the quote suggests, for successful campaigns to simplify and exaggerate in order to obtain an effect?

In the period immediately before the case of the Mignonette [1884], controversies over the protection of sailors and passengers had been inflamed by the activities of the radical MP for Derby (1868-80), Samuel Plimsoll, ‘the sailor’s friend’, whose approach to the problem favoured prior intervention [i.e. regulation] … He [Plimsoll] concentrated first simply on unseaworth ships as a cause fo mortality and started a campaign to amend the law with a resolution in the House of Commons in July 1870. His most effective appeal was to public opinion through the publication of Our Seamen in 1872, attacking the ship-owners of the over-insured, overloaded “coffin ships”, which caught the public imagination. Plimsoll was no doubt careless with his facts, ill-informed, and sometimes violent in his language; but perhaps successful campaigns require devils, conspiracies and simple solutions. [emph added] In reality ships were lost for a variety of reasons, and unseaworthiness was only one of them.

5/10. A detective story with pretensions to saying something profound about the late twentieth century leisure society. Unfortunately, despite the occasional epigrammatic aside, there is little here to raise this novel much beyond the average in any genre.

7.5/10. Finished a few weeks ago this is another (rather earlier) example of Hastings’ skill in writing penetrating and engaging military history, as well as his willingness to be critical of existing ’sacred cows’. Among other things Hastings:

• Argues that the famous Mulberrys were probably a waste of time and resources.
• Shows how the Air Force extreme unhelpfulness (largely driven by their own ambitions and obsession with civilian bombing) was a serious handicap to the whole campaign.
• Supplies a sharp corrective regarding Patton’s reputation, pointing out that up against reasonable German opposition Patton did little better than anyone else.
• Shows clearly how it was Hitler, almost more than anyone else, who contributed to the disastrous collapse of German forces in August-October 1944 by his insistence that no retreat of any kind be considered.
• Provides many examples of the poor quality of equipment, leadership, and men, especially among the American forces and how these deficiencies hindered the Allied campaign. In particular, Allied tanks were almost never a match for their German counterparts and on any occasion that Allied and German troops met on anything near equal footing the Germans won.[^1] In addition he details several clear cases of simple cowardice or unwillingness to fight among the Allied troops and/or extremely poor leadership stretching from the lowest levels to the highest. This is not to criticize — who can say what they would do in such circumstances — and in many reflects the fact that while the Germans were a nation that had for many years been ‘obsessed’ with soldiering the Allied troops were ‘civilians in uniform’, but it does supply a useful corrective to those rose-tinted visions supplied by films such as The Longest Day or the newsreel footage showing Allied soldiers racing past cheering French civilians.

Finally, and as an aside, while good, the book also displays the limitations of the traditional book format as a method for presenting this sort of material (i.e. military history with its strong connections between the temporal and spatial aspects of events). At least for me, the attempt to render particular troop movements, or the direction of battles, in prose never really succeeds and one finds oneself constantly flicking back to the (rather limited) maps in an attempt to connect the descriptions of events, the failures and successes of particular thrusts, with their location, both geographically and within the overall direction of the campaign. Thus, it seems to me that it is that this kind of subject is the sort thing most suited to being integrated with the kind of approach proposed by the Microfacts / Weaving History project currently in the early stages of its development at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Here one would be able to marry maps with descriptions, photos with actions, time with space to provide a much clearer insight into what was going on.

[^1]: From p. 84 ff. “The American Colonel Trevor Dupuy has conducted a detailed statistical study of German actions in the Second World War. Some of his explanations as to why Hitler’s armies performed so much more impressively than their enemies seem fanciful. But no critic has challenged his essential finding that on almost every battlefield of the war, including Normandy, the German soldier performed more impressively than his opponents:

On a man for man basis, the German ground soldier consistently inflicted casualties at about a 50% higher rate than they incurred from opposing British and American troops UNDER ALL CIRCUMSTANCES . [emphasis in original] This was true when they were attacking and when they were defending, when they had local numerical superiority and when, as was usually the case, they were outnumbered, when they had air superiority and when they did not, when they won and when they lost.

It is undoubtedly true that the Germans were much more efficient than the Americans in making use of available manpower. An American army corps staff contained 55 per cent more officers and 44 per cent fewer other ranks than its German equivalent. …

Events on the Normandy battlefield demonstrated that most British or American troops continued a given operation for as long as reasonable me could. Then – when they had fought for many hours, suffered many casualties, or were running low on fuel or ammunition – they disengaged. The story of German operations, however, is landmarked with repeated examples of what could be achieved by soldiers prepared to attempt more than reasonable men could.”

7/10 (genre: 8/10). Nemesis covers a similar period (the last year or so of the Second World War) to Hastings previous Armageddon but focuses on the Pacific theatre rather than the European one. Though not quite as good as the outstanding Armageddon — in particular Hastings clearly did not have as good access to primary Chinese and Japanese sources — this was still very good: full of the excellent narrative exposition and sharp strategic judgments expressed in pithy phrases and lapidary sentences that are Hastings’ trademark.

For me the two most significant ‘facts’ I took away from the book were:

1. The incredible PR job McArthur managed to perform which resulted in a vastly inflated reputation (both at the time and for many years afterwards). Rather than being some great military hero/genius he was in fact a paranoid strategic incompetent, wasteful of the lives of his men, foolishing dismissive of accurate intelligence (because it conflicted with what he wanted to be the case) and endlessly obsessed, in a way unbecoming a military officer, with his own news coverage.

2. That the insanity of the military-dominated Japanese leaders — as well as their indifference to the suffering of both their own and other peoples — was such that the dropping of the first Atomic bomb (if not necessarily the second) was an entirely justifiable decision given the situation in front of the US leaders at the time. Furthermore this decision is also vindicated by posterity in as much that it does seem to have been central to precipitating a Japanese surrender and avoiding the vast suffering, both for the Japanese and others, that would have been involved in further continuance of the war (both from continued conventional aerial bombing, the blockade and a land invasion of the ‘home islands’).

5/10. A passable Utopian polemic. Certainly reasonably interesting for its ideas (undoubtedly more exciting at the time of publication than today) but is rather let down on the literary side of things by the flatness of its characterisation and its unexciting prose.

Tacitus Annals, Book VI, XXII:

[Tacitus has just related how Tiberius consulted astrologers at his villa and had those whose competence or honesty was doubtful thrown off the cliffs into the sea below. He had then related how one astrologer, Thrasyllus, had avoided this fate by correctly foretelling it.]

For myself, when I listen to this and similar narratives, my judgement wavers. Is the revolution of human things governed by fate and changeless necessity, or by accident? You will find the wisest of the ancients, and their disciples attached to their tenets, at complete variance; in many of them [The Epicureans] a fixed belief that Heaven concerns itself neither with our origins, nor with our ending, nor, in fine, with mankind, and that so adversity continually assails the good, while prosperity dwells among the evil. Others [The Stoics] hold, on the contrary, that, though there is certainly a fate in harmony with events, it does not emanate from wandering stars, but must be sought in the principles and processes of natural causation. Still, they leave us free to choose our life: that choice made, however, the order of the future is certain. Nor, they maintain, are evil and good what the crowd imagines: many who appear to be the sport of adverse circumstances are happy; numbers are wholly wretched though in the midst of great possessions — provided only that former endure the strokes of fortunes with firmness, while the latter employ her favours with unwisdom. With most men, however, the faith is ineradicable that the future of an individual is ordained at the moment of his entry into life; …

Source: Tacitus, Annals Books IV-VI, XI-XII, Loeb Edition [Harvard 1937] translated by John Jackson.

8/10. Voices of the Old Sea by Norman Lewis [Carrol and Graf 2006, first published 1984] Sharply observed, and well-written — like all of Norman Lewis’ wonderful writing.

The Fishermen’s Prose Poetry

From pp. 7-8:

Ayer los chubascos me agarraron pero hoy … [a murmur of 'Sigue, sigue']
Yesterday the storms clawed at me, but today
La suerte me corrio
Luck ran at my side
Al amanacer visite la marea
At dawn I visited the tide
Y viendo que el dia no llevaba malicia –
And seeing that the day bore no malice –
Cogi la barca y me fui –
I took the boat and went out
Pa’ dentro del mar, donde las grandes olas se movian. (’Sigue, sigue’)
Into the deep sea, where the great waves moved.
Y alli en la claridad del agua, solo, aislado,
There in the clarity of water, alone, alone,
Vi tantos fantasmas vivaces,
I saw many lively ghosts,
No de los sin habla, que comen las almas,
Not of the kind without tongues, eaters of souls,
Pero de los que cantan con voces dulces del alba.
But those that sing with the sweet voices of the dawn

The reaction of the villagers to a party organized by Muga for the benefit of the newly arrived tourists

Even if there were no desperate shortages in Farol at that time, some people still went hungry, and it upset them to see large quantities of food of the kind they could never in any case afford being surrendered to scrounging cats, and even more tipped into trash cans at the end of the feast. [p. 181]

The Old-Guard resisting Muga

Don Ignacio had never forgiven Muga for insisting on rigidity in the matter of the hours set for the celebration of Mass, which deprived him of his weekend archaeological trips. He agreed, too, with Don Alberto that the foreign influence was on the whole pernicious. In a matter of weeks, as he had pointed out to me, money values had become wholly distorted, so that women scrubbing floors and washing bed-linen for Muga gained far more than skilful and dedicated fishermen who had spent their best years at an exacting trade. Don Ignacio believed that the democracy of foreigners was misunderstood by a people who had never encountered it before and were encouraged by it to presumption and lack of respect. [p.190]

8/10. Well-written, very interesting, often provocative (verging at points on the polemical) and with lots of fascinating detail this is definitely worth the read.

Complexity, Productivity and Vulnerability

From the conclusion of “The Biosphere: Eat and Be Eaten” p.227 (all emphasis added both here and in all other extracts):

The general transformation of farming after 1940, of which mechanization and the Green Revolution were parts, both shaped the twentieth century and reflected its dominant trends. It was energy- and knowledge-intensive. It replaced simpler systems with more complex ones, involving distant inputs and multiple social and economic linkages. It reduced family and regional autonomy, enmeshing farmers in a world of banks, seed banks, plant genetics, fertilizer manufacturers, extensions agents, and water bureaucrats. It transplanted what worked in the West and Japan to other societies. It sought to harness nature tightly, to make it perform to the utmost, to make it maximally subservient to humankind or at least some portion thereof. And it sharply increased output, making us dependent upon its perpetuation. As of 1996, to feed ourselves without these changes, we would have needed to find additional prime farmland equal in area to North America.

Lacking such a spare continent, the human race ended the twentieth century in an uneasy bond with modern agriculture. Our recast agroecosystems depended on social and international stability to safeguard required flows of inputs. Our social and political systems required the perpetuation of these agroecosystems.

The modern agricultural revolution was nearly as important as the new regime in human-microbial relations in shaping the twentieth century. Both fundamentally affected the well-being, health, and security of life for billions of people. Both helped govern the ongoing redistributions of power and wealth among classes and nations. Both represented a drift toward ever greater complexity — and potential vulnerability to disruption — in the systems that underpin modern life.

The fact that we are not more often food for microbes depends on the precarious balances of modern public health; that we in turn have as much to eat as we do (questions of distribution aside), depends on the no less precarious balances of modern agriculture. “Though you drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet it will always return.” So thought the Roman poet Horace. Is his wisdom now out of date? [From Epistles 10:24 Naturam expellas furca tamen usque recurret]

Whaling: More Than the Tragedy of the Commons

The Biosphere: Forests, Fish and Invasions (p. 243):

In the Southern Ocean, Svend Foyn’s legacy killed 1.5 million whales and lowered the whale biomass from about 43 million tons to about 6 million between 1904 and 1985. …

Whalers in the twentieth century, as in the centuries before, killed the goose that laid their golden eggs because it made economic sense to do so. Whales reproduce slowly, so it was uneconomic to milk the resource and preserve it. Economic rationality required killing all the whales as fast as possible and investing the proceeds in something that grew faster: stocks, bonds, even savings accounts. Even if problems of an open-access resource are solved, whales will never be far from extinction whenever pure economic logic [i.e. pure financial logic] takes precedence.

Aristotle Onassis’ Pirate Whaling (p.242)

… Among the great pirate whalers in the 1950s was Aristotle Onassis, whose ships used helicopters to find whales and who hired blacklisted Norwegian Nazi collaborators to kill them.[fn 26]

[fn 26] In the early 1950s, Onassis financed and organized whaling in the Pacific in violation of the IWC system, using flags of convenience from nations that were not IWC members.

Getting More Bang for the Buck: Production and Energy Efficiency Over the XXth Century

Fuels, Tools and Economics p. 315-316:

Like urbanization, industrialization changed the structure and pace of energy and material flows. … First, industrialization everywhere and at all times increased resource use and pollution. … The 40-fold increase in industrial output in the twentieth century implied a vast rise in raw material use and industrial pollution. Vast but not 40-fold.

Second, and less obviously, industries over time grew less dirty and less demanding. Their energy efficiency improved, and so they emitted less carbon into the atmosphere per unit of production, allowing industrial economies to “decarbonize”. Industries also learned to use less raw material per unit of output, permitting “dematerialization”. The energy intensity (ratio of energy to GDP) of the British economy peaked around 1850 to 1880; it was probably the most inefficient, energy guzzling economy in world history. Energy intensity in Canada declined after about 1910, in the United States and Germany after about 1918, in Japan after 1970, in China after 1980 and Brazil 1985. The United States used half as much energy an emitted less than half as much carbon per (constant) dollar of industrial output in 1988 as in 1958. South Korea achieved the same efficiency gains in half the time, between 1972 and 1986. In the world as a whole, energy intensity peaked around 1925 and by 1990 had fallen by nearly half. This meant far less pollution (and resource use) than would otherwise have been the case in the twentieth century. But this happy trend was masked by the strong overall expansion of the scale of industry.

Growth as Ideology (or even Religion)

Ideas and Politics pp. 335-336:

Communism aspired to become the universal creed of the twentieth century, but a more flexible and seductive religion succeeded where Communisum failed: the quest for economic growth. … Social, moral, and ecological ills were sustained in the interest of economic growth; indeed, adherents to the faith proposed that only more growth could resolve such ills. Economic growth became the indispensable ideology of the state nearly everywhere. How?

This state religion had deep roots in earlier centuries, at least in imperial China and mercantilist Europe. But it succeeded fully only after the Great Depression of the 1930s. Like an exotic intruder invading disturbed ecosystems, the growth fetish colonized ideological fields around the world after the dislocations of the Depression: it was the intellectual equivalent of the European rabbit. After the Depression, economic rationality trumped all other concerns except security. Those who promised to deliver the holy grail became high priests.

These were economists, mostly Anglo-American economists. …

As with much ‘good’ (as in good to read writing) this is something of an exaggeration (and in so being something of a distortion). Here, economic growth is equated with simple growth in material ‘output’ without accounting for resource use, pollution or non-material goods and services (leisure, beauty etc) — i.e. a very crude GDP. While this indeed a common meaning of the term, perhaps surprisingly, it is not one economists would use. In fact, it was economists who were among the earliest to consider non-renewable resources, pollution (Pigouvian taxes etc), distributional issues, etc etc.

Even more important, economists have also long been clear that utility, and hence social welfare, can be about much more than material goods as well as that it is up to individuals (and society) to determine what matters in that utility function: normative and positive questions are very different beasts! (That is, economics as discipline cannot tell you what you should want but if you know what you ‘want’ it can help decide how best to achieve it given constraints — time, money, resources etc — that exist).

Thus, while it is true that economics as a discipline does dedicate much of its effort to analyzing prices, markets, production, employment etc, in short ‘economic’ (i.e. money/market oriented) questions, this does not mean that this is (solely) what economists think is ‘valuable’. Just like Wilde’s cynic practically the first thing economic students learn is the distinction between price and value as illustrated on a standard demand curve by the distinction drawn between revenue and surplus (producer plus consumer).

Hence, if “economic rationality [meaning here concern for maximizing crude output] trumped all other concerns”, this was the choice, not of economists, but of voters and policy-makers — a choice informed no doubt by the devastating experience of the Depression and the major disruption to the ‘economic’ system (production, employment etc) associated with it.

Nuclear Weapons Pollution: Casually Irresponsible

Ideas and Politics pp. 342-343:

By far the largest environmental effect of security anxiety came via the construction of military-industrial complexes. After World War I it became clear that, aside from plenty of young men, the main ingredient of military power was heavy industry. Horses and heroism were obsolete. All of the great powers of the twentieth century adopted policies to encourage the production of munitions, ships, trucks, aircraft — and nuclear weapons.

No component of military-industrial complexes enjoyed greater subsidy, protection from public scrutiny, and latitude in its environmental impact than the nuclear weapons business. …

The American weapons complex involved some 3,000 sites in all. The United States built tens of thousands of nuclear warheads and tested more than a thousand of them. The jewel in the crown was the Hanford Engineering Works, a sprawling bomb factory on the Columbia River in the bone-dry expanse expanse of south-central Washington state. It opened during World War II and built the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki. Over the next 50 years, Hanford released billions of gallons of radioactive wastes in to the Columbia and accidentally leaked some more into groundwater. In 1949, shortly after the Soviets had exploded their first atomic bomb, the Americans conducted a secret experiment at Hanford. The fallout detected from the Soviet test had prompted questions about how quickly the Soviets were to able to process plutonium. In response, American officials decided to use “green” uranium, less than 20 days out of the reactor to test their hypotheses about Soviet activities. The Green Run, as it was known to those in on the secrete, released nearly 8,000 curies of iodine-131, dousing the downwind region with radiation at levels varying between 80 and 1,000 times the limit then thought tolerable. The local populace learned of these events in 1986, when Hanford became the first of the U.S. nuclear weapons complexes to release documents concerning the environmental effects of weapons production. The Green Run shows the environmental [ed: and civil/social!] liberties the Americans took under the influence of the Cold War security anxiety.

8.5. Another brilliant novel though not quite reaching the perfection of Middlemarch. Its only defects to my mind, were a tendency to over-idealize rural life and becoming a little sententious when putting together the `happy ending’ post Hetty’s transportation.

8/10. Reread this classic. Sparse prose and elegant treatment of an ancient theme, viz the corrupting nature of power and the fear of death, combine to make a wonderful book far above the average of this genre.