Right Reason

Comparing Rome and China: The Influences of island-geography

 

Earlier this week, I had an email on Tyler Cowen's post on the question of why Chinese civilization has been so successful in establishing a centralized hegemony over a population around the same size featured on Marginal Revolution. In that post, Rome vs. China, I look at how geographic factors, lacking in China, contributed to the unraveling of the Roman Empire: 

 

On the comparison of China and Rome, one of the factors that immediately came to my mind was a combination of (2) and (4): The Roman Empire faced a much more complex logistical problem of maintaining territorial integrity than did China and its territorial integrity could be destroyed from a sea campaign.

These two themes actually did greatly contribute to Rome’s unraveling during the Crisis of the 5th Century: One of the under-appreciated aspects of the Crisis of the 5th Century that led to the Fall of the Roman Empire was the loss of North Africa to the Vandals. Peter Heather provides a short description of how destructive the loss of North Africa was to the empire in The Fall of the Roman Empire (2006):

“No other single blow could have done the Empire so much harm. At a stroke. Geiseric had removed from Aetius’ control the richest provinces of the Roman west, with the result that financial crisis looked How was it allowed to happen? Presumably, after four and a half years of relative peace, and thinking that Geiseric was going to keep the treaty made in February 435, people took their eyes off the ball. There was, I suspect, simply too much instability in other parts of the empire for troops to be left in Carthage on a ‘what if?’ basis. The Visigothic war in particular, brought to an end just before Geiseric made his move, had probably demanded every available man. So with the Carthage garrison at minimum strength, the cunning Vandal had taken full advantage.” (p. 289)

Here, I see the theme of (4) in your blog post: “[China] has a large space of relatively flat plains.” Chinese generals did not face the same complex logistical problems that Roman ones did in deploying their military force across their nation.

When North Africa was lost, retaking it to reassert territorial integrity was not as easy as simply marching a couple of legions there. If it were that easy, I very much doubt the Vandals could have held onto North Africa. Instead, the Roman Empire needed to launch a sea campaign, which is theme (2) of your post: “when it comes to naval warfare — more common for Europe — small countries have a chance to punch above their weight, witness England and Portugal.”

In 468 both the Western and Eastern Empires launched a massive joint campaign to take back North Africa. However, the armada they had launched was smashed at the Battle of Cape Bon by a much smaller Vandal fleet that had the weather gauge to its advantage. Punching above their weight, the Vandal kingdom of North Africa was able to beat back a campaign manned and funded by both Ravenna and Constantinople—a feat that would have been close to impossible on land.

The failure of that armada to land on North Africa doomed half of the Roman world to extinction, for without the North African provinces, the Western Roman Empire could not reassert its hegemony over the centrifugal forces now at full force across Gaul and Hispania. The difficulties of maintaining optimal deployments of troops in an empire largely bifurcated (at least in scale of importance) by a sea and the hazards of warfare at sea conspired to make the problem of maintaining imperial territorial integrity too difficult for Roman politics to solve during the Crisis of the 5th Century, contributing to the total collapse of that integrity in the west. Had the Western Roman Empire not been encumbered by (2) and (4) the survival of said integrity is certainly imaginable—and within the capability its resources offered it.

Remarks On France's Totalitarian Secularism

 

From The Economist's "Muslim attire: The state and the veil":

France is different. The roots of French political secularism, known as laïcité, go back to the revolution of 1789 and to an anti-clerical campaign in the early 20th century. By 1904 some 10,000 religious schools had been shut; thousands of priests fled France. 'We have torn human conscience from the clutches of faith,' declared René Viviani, a Socialist minister.

Anti-Muslim sentiments in France is a symptom of a much more deep-total totalitarian secularism. The fact is that faith, genuine faith nourished by good deeds, cannot simply not a private matter. France's laïcité laws force a rather totalitarian view of society upon its citizens in which they have to all but renounce their faiths in order to be French.

 

France's laws against practicing Islam in public therefore isn't just a matter of Islam in particular, but a matter of how French law treats of religion in general. Laïcité forces public atheism upon French citizens who do no harm to others and is therefore, as a matter of general principle, contrary to human liberty. It's one thing for citizens or France, or any other nation for that matter, to vote for a woman who wears a veil in public, on account of such practices being against what they believe their national characteristics to be, it's quite another thing to ban such a practice. 

Scène de Juillet 1830

 

During the evenings, I have been listening to Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast, which I can wholeheartedly recommend. In particular, I've been repeatedly listening to the most recent cycle, on France's July Revolution. The podcast has brought to mind one of my favorite paintings, Léon Cogniet's Scène de Juillet 1830. With very little actual imagery, Cogniet is able to communicate the course of the July Revolution and the violent process that any revolution goes through. As a piece of art, it is breathtakingly simple and effective: 

 

Some More Thoughts on Casuistry

 

 

Human beings free will. Although it is certainly marred by concupiscence and circumstances, free will provides the human species with the ability to choose their actions and to make judgments about what ends in life are worthwhile. Perhaps a better word than ‘free will’ might be autonomy. ‘Autonomy’ derives from two Greek roots: ‘αὐτός’—’self’ and ‘νόμος’—’law’. An autonomous agent is therefore one capable of choosing his own laws, his own rules. (I can thank James Caton for making this point to me.) Across our daily lives, we can see choose different rules for themselves and, very frequently, we can infer their behavior from what kind of rules they have chosen.

Human beings are autonomous. They can therefore choose their own rules. For this reason, it is imperative that we choose them wisely and prudently. Casuistry provides a method for human reason, which like human will we must remember is marred by concupiscence and circumstances, to formulate abstract rules that can be applied to particular cases. A principle that should inform all casuistic reasoning is that rules should first be able to decide easy cases before they are applied to harder cases. The reason for this is twofold: 1) Easy cases are those scenarios that define daily life and we should first know what to do in ordinary circumstances before we can think about extraordinary cases; and 2) Moral reasoning needs the principles first decided in the easy cases in order to properly decide the hard ones. A casuistry of easy cases is therefore prior, both in terms of actual life and in terms of the difficulty of reasoning, than a casuistry of hard cases.

The moral rules derived from thinking about hard cases might be adapted to solving those hard cases (though even that much is dubious), but they will not be adapted to giving answers to the more probable issues of human life. Yes, the extraordinary cases may be more visceral and they may therefore enchant the imagination, but the ordinary cases are the problems that populate most of human life. Furthermore, those ordinary cases are more easily decidable. The rules that we formulate from thinking about them are therefore more probable than those that we formulate from thinking about hard cases. Moreover, we often need the rules derived from the former in order to test those derived from the latter. The abuse of casuistry comes from when we neglect the need of disciplining our daily lives with moral rules and instead decide to simply justify our lives with arbitrary rules. When we do not live out our rules in daily life, we are always in danger of fitting our life to a narrative rather than fitting our lives to proper and virtuous rules.

Formulating moral rules based on hard cases first is putting the donkey before the cart. A donkey cannot effectively push a cart, nor can hard cases effectively guide a moral life.

Some Thoughts About Casuistry and Healthcare Policy

 

One of the fundamental problems with talk about healthcare in politics today is casuistic: Commentators start with the hard cases and try to craft policy based on hard cases that pull at the heartstrings, rather than straightening out the easy cases of daily life first. Americans should be more concerned, say, with the fact that the word 'insurance' has lost its economic meaning in healthcare, that laws require, for instance, women to still have expensive prescriptions to purchase birth-control pills, and that a command-and-control regulatory structure stymies entrepreneurial experiments in healthcare, both in medicine and in its organization, than in Jimmy Kimmel's son.

 

The former three are problems that millions of Americas deal with in their daily lives and are the "easy cases" having to do with an efficient allocation of resources and technologies that make the most out of the scarce wealth people have. The latter case is the hard case about what happens when an individual's wealth is overwhelmed by catastrophe. However, when we start off with the hard case of when a person's wealth isn't enough, we immediately assume away matters of trade-offs and efficiency that should inform any market and therefore make ourselves entirely unequipped to grab reality with both hands.

 

How we approach policy is going to be determined by the questions we ask and the tools we use to answer them. Concerns for beneficence must follow after concerns for justice, lest we get our principles into a muddle. If we cannot count on our principles, then we are entirely lost here. The fact is is that our emotions are simply not adapted to solving the problems of achieving an efficient allocation of resources and technologies in a complex society. Instead, of first tackling issues of life and death, American healthcare policy needs to first address issues of daily convenience, lest we get policy that, despite working for no one, still achieved the goal of receiving moral approbation when it was passed.