Steppe People: Terror from the Grassy Plains of Asia

Steppe nomads are largely overlooked in the scope of history. We hear of the bow and arrow totting and horse riding Scythians or Huns or Avars or Cumans but know little about them. They are folks that inhabited the narrow band of steppe some 400 to 500 miles wide that runs 6,000 miles across  Asia from Mongolia through central Asia to the Caspian Sea and can include the Pannonian plain of Hungary and the Anatolian highlands of Turkey. These folk began to inhabit these grassy plains and domesticated the horse in the mid 5^th millennium B.C. They maintained domestic herds of sheep, cattle, camels, horses and goats and lived a nomadic life. 

From 4500 B.C. the steppe peoples of upper Caspian Sea spread over central and southern Asia and Europe. Recent DNA testing has established the fact of an extensive migration of peoples throughout these areas, spreading the Indo-European language in the process. So the NAZI’s happen to be right about one thing in their understanding of a process of an expansion of an Aryan race. A race they erroneously claimed to be some kind of superior version of mankind with claim to dominate other peoples. However, evidence shows that the expansion was not simply a transmission of Indo-European language from one people to another, as others held as more plausible. It was a people supplanting other peoples across a wide area.

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Of course NAZI race theories turned into an odious justification to exterminate a whole ethnic group. The race idea as we know, centers on an idea of a Master race or people, the Aryans. Under this thinking Folks that is peoples, through a Darwinian evolution, struggle for dominance, survival of the fittest, in this case became the Aryans. Scientific evidence shows that Aryans (Indo-Iranians/Indo-Europeans) from Caspian Steppes used the domesticated horse as a means to spread throughout a vast area of Eurasia, from India through Europe in the Mid-5^th Millennium, evidence of which is based on transmission of the Indo-European languages and genetic markers. The racial component of Indo-European migration is albeit highly controversial. There are some who discount the idea of an invasion of blond, blue eye nomads into Northern India completely or push the invasion back in time to some 50,000 years.

NAZI’s placed special emphasis on the superiority of the Nordic peoples, a supposed segment of the Aryans, so people like the Slavs were deemed inferior and were rightfully meant to be oppressed. All this thinking, being frightfully twisted and evil, can be found in the writings of Hans F. K. Gunther, a 20^th  century race thinker, several of whose books, could be found in Hitler’s library, and seen to have been well worn. The question one has to ask oneself, who’s to blame, the NAZI’s or Darwin? Today talk of the superiority of one race or group over another is rightfully forbidden but the Darwinian ideas remain. I suspect the idea of racial superiority, once advocated by Darwinists, have been besmirched by the odious application of its ideas.

The ideas bandied about today regarding evolutionary progress are nearly as fanciful, as those of the National Socialists. Socio-biology purports all manner of benign characteristics to human kind that have arisen from the bestial Evolutionary struggle for survival: including kinship, love and art. Most of the theories are based on fanciful supposition and imagination with little or no evidence to support them and neither falsifiable nor verifiable, the required characteristics of most of science endeavors. The most inexplicable to evolutionary thinking is the presence of altruism. How would anyone who gained a purported survival advantage that comes with altruism (a characteristic that promotes the welfare of the group) pass this adaptation along, since they unlike their compatriots, will willingly sacrifice their altruistic genes in lieu of another’s more selfish genes? It’s unlikely that the altruistic individual has a survival advantage to another who lacks it. The first to acquire such altruistic gene would willingly give themselves up to the wonderment of the other that lacks it and not pass it along.  I am certain something more complex and profound is operating in the world than just bare, raw survival instincts. Because if altruism generates a survival adaptation then it’s love not struggle for survival that drove evolution.

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As I am wont to do, I have digressed into a polemic that has little to do with the subject of the blog. Back to the Steppe. Steppe peoples played a huge role in history but their role is rarely recognized. For one they didn’t have written language, so they couldn’t record their history. They didn’t construct buildings and structures either, nor literature nor art. Their religion was either folk religion or borrowed from others.  So it was up to the settled civilized peoples to record their history.

The important idea to remember about the steppes peoples, when united they were the most formidable military forces in Eurasia. We in civilized cultures presume a superiority with our institutions and art and writing and architecture, so the military superiority of the steppe peoples comes as a surprise.

Since they lived in grassy plains they could raise vast numbers of horses, far more than settled peoples. The war horse was a great expense to settled peoples. A war horse eats well over 30,000 calories a day versus 3-4,000 for a man. So a cavalry troop of a 1000 horses would have at same nutrition demands as something like 10,000 soldiers would have.  Steppe armies could have several horses as backup and reserve for each warrior as well, thus a steppe army of 20,000 might have upwards 100,000 horses far surpassing the number a civilization could muster.

 Steppe people’s military prowess and tactics were far superior to settled peoples. When the civilized army, far less mobile, went out to pursue the steppe peoples, these peoples would disappear into the vast grass lands of the steppes. When the steppe peoples came to attack the civilized infantry, they would use a variety of hit and run tactics to defeat them.  Steppe nomads could stand off and assail the standing infantry with thousands of arrows and decimate them at a distance. When the standing army chose to pursue, after being harried, they would be at a disadvantage losing unit cohesion, which the steppe cavalry would then destroy them in detail. In fact,  without settled villages or cities an invading army would have little to nothing to attack and nothing to pillage or live on for that matter in contrast to invading a settled country.

One example of the futility of tracking down the steppe peoples is recorded by the Greek historian, Herodotus. The Scythians had previously invaded Persia and contributed to the death of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the vast Persian Empire in 530 B.C. Cyrus the Great is referred to as the anointed (messiah) by Isaiah in Chapter 45.  This is the same Persian Empire that the Spartan “300” fought at the battle of Thermopylae. Herodotus reports the expedition of the later Persian King, Darius in the steppe north of the Black Sea in 513 B.C. The Scythians, a nomadic steppe peoples, employed standard evasive tactics and never allowed themselves to meet the Persians in a set battle. The Persians, with an immense military force (transported by 600 ships with countless thousands of troops), attempted to bring the Scythians to battle but succeeded in only wandering around the grassy steppe, being harassed by them, running out of provisions, food and water, dying with sickness. Additionally, Scythians would have no cities to pillage.  They returned to Thrace (Northern Greece) then to cross back into Asia Minor again. Herodotus records that the Scythians weren’t any problem after this chastening.  Yet it goes without saying, a massive expedition of that nature couldn’t be carried out each year.   

Settled peoples ofttimes would employ mounted steppe peoples as auxiliaries to aid them in fighting the nomadic steppe peoples. But ultimately the settled peoples didn’t have a full proof method of fighting the stepped peoples until the appearance of the hand gun. The musket wasn’t accurate beyond 40 or 50 yards, which was less than the bow and arrow deadly, with armor piecing abilities, at distances far beyond that.  

Part of the military superiority of the Steppe peoples comes from the advantage that was the composite bow that they employed. It was made of wood, bone, sinew and glue. The bow could be small enough to shoot from horse back. It had recurves to enhance the power of the bow. This bow allowed them to stand afar and pelt the enemy with thousands of armor penetrating arrows from 100 yards or more away. This was not the English long bow, fired off by the stationary the English yeoman, but a mobile band on horseback.

The steppe peoples employed a saddle as well that allowed them to use their bow and arrows hands free, so they could remain on horseback as they shot. Latter in the first Millennium A.D. stirrups began to appear that greatly enhanced the riders’ ability to control the horse.

One of the first steppe peoples mentioned in literary sources are the Scythians. The Scythians first used mounted warfare back in the 9^th Century. The Greeks spoke of them. They contributed to the demise of the Assyrian Empire 612 B.C. The Persian King Darius led an expedition against them in 513 B.C. but never was able to force them into a set battle. The Scythians would only harass and retreat before Darius’s huge expedition into what we know to be the Russian Steppes. After suffering sufficient loss and deprivation in pursuit of the Scythians for a month to do battle, Darius set up eight forts and returned having conquered enough Scythian territory to make them respect the Persians.

The bottom line is that not many expeditions to subdue the Steppe nomads were successful. Various strategies were employed by the Chinese who fought them throughout its history. Divide and conquer diplomacy was tried, using one group of Steppe nomads to attack another. More times than not the Steppe peoples were divided. It was when they were united like the Huns or the Mongols they became a terror.

Another device,  tribute was paid to pacify them. The hope here is that the leadership of the group can be kept happy by being bought off. Of course, over time the demands became greater and greater.

Expeditions against them were very expensive, and since they were migratory livestock herders there were no cities to conquer. A civilized army could rarely engage them into battle as previously mentioned but would have to suffer hit and run raids, plus there were no cities or crops to destroy.  Interestingly, the nomad domesticated the horse, but this population of the stepped came AFTER agriculture was undertaken. Remember that the Steppe folk were a livestock herder first: sheep, goats, cattle. So the settled agriculturalist migrated to the grassy steppes to pursue animal husbandry. Then became champions of the horse, used to overshadow the settled peoples.  

The Turks and Parthians, among many others, for example came off the steppe and overwhelmed the settled society, as did the Mongols. Huns, steppe peoples said to be related to the fearsome Xiongnu (pronounced shwang-new) on the far Eastern side of great Steppe next to the Chinese, drove the so-called barbarians before them and even attacked the Rome Empire and led to its downfall in the 5^th Century A.D.  The Eastern Romans were able to deflect the Huns to the West and who wrecked it, relieving the Eastern to exist for another 1,000 in some form or another until 1453.

When the steppe peoples united they could overwhelm civilized societies. But they didn’t have ability to lay siege to cities. The exception was the Mongols, the most famous of all the steppe peoples and the most successful. They were able to acquire the siege technology from the Northern Chinese in the early 13^th Century and thus waylay fortified cities. They easily destroyed settled societies and used great brutality to do so. Cities were depopulated and whole populations either executed or marched off, heedless of any deaths resulting, to be employed at conquering other cities. The most notorious example of the brutality of the Mongols was the destruction of Bagdad in 1258. Bagdad was the location of Islam’s Caliphate, the spiritual head of Islam. Bagdad was a metropolitan city of a million people or more. After a siege that lasted from January 29 to February 10, 1258, the city was subdued. Three thousand of the cities dignitaries come out of the city to negotiate the surrender of the city. These were slaughtered. And the rest of the city was put to the sword, countless died, some sources say up to a 1 million. Bagdad didn’t recover until several centuries later.

Curiously, there have been revisionist views of the effect of the Mongol conquest, one recently being the book, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Jack Weatherford. Mr. Weatherford has quite an affection for those marauding Mongols. In fact they are meant to appear quite enlightened and tolerant, far more so than the civilizations that they slaughtered. These are not your daddy’s monstrous Mongols. In contrast they are the linchpins to the modern world that promoted exchange between the civilizations of Eurasia, which their conquest over all the vast steppe lands accomplished. Nonetheless, the Arabs of the Middle East never forgot their brutality and the Chinese rejoiced when they expelled them in 1368 A.D.

The arrival of the Mongols accompanied large scale population declines. According to one scholar they reduced carbon footprint in the atmosphere by several hundred tons of carbon di-oxide, as a result of the world’s surface reverting back to forestation; crop lands were no long being cultivated. I guess you could say they were environmentally friendly. One of the strategies of the Mongols was to turn farm land back into grass land. I presume to provide grazing for their horses.

The Mongols were the most successful killers of all time, attributed to killing 20 million people. Current revisionist historians have belittled the figure, but this brutality is a story told by the losers. Sometimes it is more accurate when the winners don’t write the history.  

Austria-Hungary: Collapse of an Instigator

Why bother learning about the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, concerning events of a century ago? An empire that collapsed at the conclusion of World War I in 1918. For me it’s like viewing an historical train wreck, the kind that you can’t look away from, a wreck involving a state. And to boot they set the spark that started the catastrophe that became World War I.  

Were they doomed to collapse? And what were they thinking invading Serbia in 1914? In one way of thinking Serbia was a terrorist sponsoring state; one that had to be dealt with. It was discovered that the group that assassinated Archduke Ferdinand had connections with Serbia military intelligence. This doesn’t negate the fact that Austria-Hungary was isolated and dependent on Germany’s support. In some circles, especially military, the attack on Serbia was required so the fragile Empire could extinguish Serbian nationalism.

The primary proponent of this wrongheaded thinking among the military was Franz Conrad von Hertzendorf, who is said to have proposed attacking Serbia some 25 times in the period leading up to WWI. Conrad, as often happens with military figures, saw only a military solution to Serbia’s perceived threat. Serbia had arisen from the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and was flexing its nationalist muscles on the border of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. 

 There were some 600,000 plus Serbian speaking people in the Empire.

Chief of Staff, Conrad Von Hertzendorf, all said, was a piece of work. He held to Social Darwinist thinking, which employed Darwinism and its idea of the survival of the fittest towards the social and political realm.  

He wrote,

“…the recognition of the struggle for existence as the basic principle of all events on this earth is the only real and rational basis for policy making”.

Thus, an attack on Serbia was imperative for Austria-Hungary to survive in the struggle of peoples and nations. In this type of thinking an aggressive foreign policy would bolster national unity. Weak peoples, folks and nations were meant to be subdued. These ideas were used to justify imperialism of the late 19^th Century. Africans, South Asian Indians, Chinese and others were deemed inferior and it was considered expedient to dominate them. Later, others took similar concepts to the extreme and arrived at idea of the Master Race, the superior Aryan peoples of whom the Germans were numbered.

He advocated excessively aggressive battle field tactics, including frontal attack as the best method to continue to maintain all important fighting moral. He would argue in doing so even a smaller army could defeat a larger one, one fighting defensively, pointing to the Prussians victory over the French in 1870. In addition he downplayed the effectiveness of artillery preparation, the weapon that caused the most casualties in WWI. Employing these aggressive attack stratagems in the first month of WWI the Empire contributed to the loss of over 40% of its fighting capacity including some 250,000 killed. That is the number of soldiers United States lost in 3 ½ years of fighting in WWII. The veteran battalion and regimental officer core were decimated along with the fighting grunts. These types of veteran loses were irreplaceable. Without the assistance of Germany, the Empire’s army was not an offensive force for the remainder of the War.

Unrealistically assuming that the Russians wouldn’t be able to mobilize in time, Conrad wanted to quickly strike Serbia first and sent most of Austrian-Hungarian army south towards the Serbs. After the troops, five corps, were being transported south to fight the Serbs, Conrad changed his mind the next day and commanded they turn around. The logistics wouldn’t permit such an impossible turn around and they had to continue on towards Serbia. As a result they were neither useful for the fight against Serbia nor any assistance in the Russian front, arriving too late to be effective. No progress was made against the small Serbian army and after initial success in Galicia (currently Southern Poland) they were driven back with great loss against the Russians.

All the while he was carrying on an adulterous love affair with a married woman with 6 children, whom he met in 1903. He was obsessed with her. He wrote 3,000 letters to his love, one 60 pages long and sometimes 3 letters in one day. Each part of his day at the command center would be spent composing these letters. Yet, he only visited the front briefly three times. But of course, he sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths and yet more inflicted with war related injury and disability. In his thinking, great battlefield victories would grant him sufficient influence and gain esteem in the eyes of his beloved to free him to openly pursue his forbidden love. She was granted a divorce eventually in 1915 and they were married.

Being in a passionate love affair with a married woman is not criminal, but sending people to their deaths, all the while, into a giant meat grinder that was WWI, was nothing less than monstrous. Of course the biggest diplomatic fustercluck: the Hapsburgs unintentionally but carelessly started World War I.  84 year old Emperor Franz Joseph ruling since 1848, acquiesced to the military thinkers and agreed to attack its smaller neighbor Serbia in July 1914 to punish them for the assassination of the Prince Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austrian-Hungarian Empire. 

The critical idea here is that the Empire pursued an independent policy of aggression toward Serbia in July 1914 with the imprimatur of Germany, absent of any diplomatic efforts to diffuse the situation. They were the spark that ignited the conflict and no one else.

Austria-Hungary’s foreign policy over the last half of the 19th Century was largely inept. They alienated a potential ally in monarchist Russia, who came to their aid suppressing the Hungarian revolt of 1848, thus preserving the Empire.  The Austrian-Hungarian Empire, a bulwark against the Ottoman Turkish Empire in the 16^th and 17^th Centuries, was a balancing act of an empire by the later decades of the 19^th Century. In fact, it was so precariously unstable it refrained from pushing the tottering Ottoman Empire into disintegration for fear it would redound to them. Thus they abstained to lend support of any kind to the Russians in the Crimean War;  later when Russia had decisively defeated the Turks in 1878, Austria-Hungary had received authority over Bosnia-Herzegovinian which they later annexed in 1908. That war saw the nation states of Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia freed from the yoke of the decaying Ottoman Empire. On the other hand Russia received very little from its victories, being on the doorstep of Constantinople, when hostilities ceased. They were forced to give up almost all of their gains.  Note British Empire, a nonparticipant, gained the Mediterranean island of Cyrus in the peace negotiations, also part of the Ottoman Empire. Yes, the sun continued to never set on jolly old British Empire.
  

The Empire was a tottering, decrepit throwback: an anachronism in the age of nationalism exemplified by countries like Germany, Italy and France, states representing national peoples. The Austrian-Hungarian Empire dis-integrated at the conclusion of World War I under the pressure of a dozen ethnic minorities: German, Hungarian, Czech, Slav, Slovene, Croat, Rumanian, Ukrainian, Pole, Italians, Ukrainian, Jews…and a couple you’ve never heard of. It was about the size of Texas with nearly 53 million people in 1914. The central cohesive political idea was loyalty to a divinely anointed Emperor.  Franz Joseph had been Emperor since 1848, attaining the throne after the first nationalist revolts swept over Europe.

The nationalistic fervor unleashed by the French Revolution terrified the monarchies; thousands of the nobility fell under the guillotine and were killed in peasant revolts. A re-instatement of the status pre-revolution was attempted in 1815, after the defeat of Napoleon. The lid blew off this effort in 1848 when Poland, Hungary, France among others overturned their governments and cried out for freedom and justice under the swell of nationalistic feeling. The demands were largely the Liberal type of the period:  freedom from the demands and constraints of feudal obligations, renunciation of the Kings right to claim sovereignty by divine right and autonomy and independence for the national peoples and such.

19^th Century Liberalism was much different than what the term entails today. The basic tenants consisted of a government with the consent of an electorate, but propertied only, elimination of support for state sponsored Church, freedom of the press and free exercise of capitalism. And it was absent the socialistic style income transfer welfare benefits, so characteristic today. There were a few Socialistic elements in some revolts but the idea of a central state dispensing welfare benefits and regulating society was far in the future.  Working conditions at the time were brutal, for factory workers, 12-15 hours a day 6 or maybe 7 days a week in sweat shop conditions. The peasant was usually monarchist in leanings, seeing little chance of change in their circumstances with so-called liberal or republican governments. Even a republican would fear universal suffrage.

For a monarchy like Austria or Germany there was a grudging acceptance of some type of popular representative Assembly or Parliament, usually weak or anemic and elected on a narrow electorate of propertied voters. This placed the Monarchy under the aspect of a restraint of rule of law but the Monarch would reserve the absolute divine right but deign to hear the people expressed in these representative assemblies. Ultimately, for the Hapsburgs the Emperor ruled supreme but with limits. In effect the God given right of the monarch to rule would be circumscribed in a ruling coalition with this Assembly. Oddly, nearby up until 1797 Venice had a representative republican government for something like a thousand years, a tiny drop of representative government in all of Europe, nonetheless ruled by the mercantile elite.

Franz Joseph at 18 years old became Emperor of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire in 1848 by the abdication of his father of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. 1848 saw a revolt of peoples energized by nationalism. In 1848 the Hapsburg family was driven out Vienna, but shortly thereafter realized they still had the support of the military who swept back into Vienna. The revolt was bloodily suppressed. But it was the Russian Emperor, Czar Nicholas I, who saved the Hapsburgs by violently suppressing the Hungarian revolt. Russia would not be repaid.

Later the Hapsburgs were out maneuvered by Prussia’s Bismarck, the Foreign Minister and Chancellor. Bismarck insured the neutrality of France, sympathetic to nationalistic yearnings in large part, thus Austria-Hungary was isolated, having failed to assist Russia in the Crimean War; they lost the support of Russia. France supported limited nationalistic aspirations in Northern Italy, Lombardy and Veneto, which since 1815 had been given to Austria-Hungary. In concert with Italian states fighting in Northern Italy, Prussia soundly defeated Austria in 1866 at Koniggratz (Sadowa) in a battle to determine who would be dominate in the union of German states. Prussia it was decided would lead a confederation of German states and Austria would be excluded from the union. Bismarck, Chancellor of Prussia, completely out maneuvered them. A Prussian led united Germany without Austria, the heavy weight in Central Europe over the course for some four Centuries, was demoted to spectator and then client state of the German Empire.

Besides loss of Northern Italy in its war in 1866, the defeat led to the arrangement of a dual monarchy of Austria and Hungary. The two states would be ruled separately under the under the sole sovereignty of Emperor Franz Joseph. Hungary would be independent except for military and foreign relations. This arrangement always restrained appropriations to the military: a military that could be used to suppress the Hungarians, making the risky invasion of Serbia all the more foolhardy. Austro-Hungarian military was a fraction of the major powers. The Empires subjects spent as much on tobacco and more on beer and wine than defense. It trained a quarter of its military age male and in contrast France 80%. It was ill prepared for the military adventure its leadership show eagerly thirsted.

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The original question was whether Austria Hungary was doomed to collapse. The collapse was a likely based on  the anachronism that was the monarchial dual sovereignty of Austria-Hungary, combined with a disconnected, aged monarch and the fact the country was composed of a host of separate, diverse nationalities. But they couldn’t have played it dumber. Let’s attack Serbia to teach it a lesson not to spread nationalism, rather than initiating any internal reforms. With a relatively small and decidedly unprepared army it was an act of complete foolishness, idiocy and stupidity. It destroyed a country and led to even more instability and war just a generation later.

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The rot did appear at the top. Indicative of the Emperor’s ossified behavior that led to the downfall of the Empire, was his attitude to his nephew’s marriage. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne, fell in love with a Czech noble women, a lady-in-waiting to the Archduchess Isabella of Teschen. Sophie Chotek, duchess of Hohenberg, had a well-bred background, but was deemed below his elevated station. Permission was grudgingly granted to allow a morganatic marriage by the Emperor on the provision that his wife would not share Franz Ferdinand’s status and the children would not be able to inherit the throne.  She was humiliatingly shunned at the court. The Emperor only met her by accident several years after they were married and was virtually ignored by Franz Joseph and the court followers.

 Archduke Franz Ferdinand due to his somewhat irascible personality and the morganatic marriage, so frowned up by the Emperor, was not in complete confidence of the Emperor. And it appears that he harbored ill will towards the Archduke. For one the security surrounding the Archduke was very light in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, a patriotic holiday that commemorates the long remembered defeat of the Serbs by the Turks in 1389: the defeat that subjugated the Serbs for half of a millennium. Only 60 police were on duty in Sarajevo, a city of 80,000 that Sunday morning. In fact the Austrians were given a hint that mischief was in the air by the Serbian ambassador to Austria, resident in Vienna, who had knowledge of possibility of an assassination plot but wasn’t at liberty to reveal the details. Warnings by the Foreign office, the Ministry of the Interior and Austrian military intelligence reported threats about the visit. The Archduke was very nervous and concerned about the visit but the visit was insisted upon by the Emperor. As a result of their visit to Sarajevo, the Archduke and his wife were both assassinated with only two shots that day.

Another indication that the Archduke was held in low esteem was the absence of an appropriate funeral. No foreign dignitaries were allowed to attend, only the royal family. Initially the three surviving children were even asked to pay for the funeral, although this was rescinded. The Emperor was said to have expressed relief that the troublesome Archduke was finally out of the way and showed little distress that he’d lost his heir. The Archduke might have been the only brake to war with Serbia.

It’s interesting to know that the Emperor Franz Joseph’s wife and son were in some profound way alienated from him, not to say they were completely absence his presence. His wife, Elizabeth, avoiding dreary court decorum, traveled extensively absent the Emperor, preferring to be away for long periods of time on tour. She was tragically stabbed to death by an anarchist in 1898. Their son Rudolf, the heir to the throne, preceded her in death in 1889 in a murder-suicide. He is said to have shot his 17 year old mistress and some hours later committed suicide at his hunting lodge Mayerling. Tragic death seems to have haunted the Emperor; ones that might have initiated reform in the Empire. Archduke Franz Ferdinand was desirous of reducing the hegemony of the Hungarians over the lesser ethnic groups in their half of the empire. Hungarians ruled unopposed over the Serbs, Croatians, Romanians, and Slovenians among others. This would have re-balanced the Empire in a tri-partite union, instead of the current one in which Hungary wouldn’t have virtual veto over reforms that might begin to incorporate the lesser minorities into the Empire.  

 Archduke Franz Ferdinand was much opposed to aggressive military action towards Serbia, but with his demise the military heads gained transcendence and persuaded the Emperor Franz Joseph to allow a military operation to take place against Serbia. They didn’t give much thought it seems to Russia who might come to Serbia’s support.

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This dilapidated, outmoded, archaic Empire contained a Vienna that was a cosmopolitan vibrant city, a source of great cultural production. Adolf Hitler, Stalin, Freud and Trotsky who lived within a few miles of each other there in 1913 sought it out. One of 20^th Century’s most famous philosophers, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the author of logical positivism had lived there until 1911. Composers Gustav Mahler, Brahms, Richard Strauss (Theme used for 2001 a Space Odyssey) among others lived there. Gustav Klimt lived there as well. How could such a vibrate civilization co-exist with a tottering Empire? It almost makes one think the civilization was worth saving.

One last thought regarding the collapse, four empires fell along with Austria-Hungary; that is Germany, Russia and the Ottomans. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that monarchy and modernized military and mass mobilization were incompatible with societies based on some idea of ordered hierarchies. These societies claimed a right to existence of a ruling class and divine ruler in which a society owed respect and fidelity based on religious principles of the rightly ordered society. For example it would be unthinkable that the officer staff be served the same food as the regular soldier as did other militaries.  The Americans, the French and increasingly the British rejected this scheme. The empires couldn’t have been more foolish in pursuing state interests through modern military means. They were blind to their own demise, especially the Dual Monarchy of Austria and Hungary.


A J P Taylor's Struggle for the Mastery of Europe explains that the Austrian-Hungarian Empire feared Serbia as a unifying agent in the Balkans. They had seen Emile Cavour, Prime Minister, leading Piedmont and the Kingdom of Savoy in Northern Italy to initiate unifying Italy in 1860. The unification culminated in depriving Austria-Hungary of the Northern Italian provinces of Lombardy and Veneto, granted to them in the Congress of Vienna in 1815. They may have feared a repeat in 1914, but were frightfully ill prepared for the total war fought in WWI. The ossified leadership of the Empire couldn't comprehend internal reform.     

Wall Street Bail Out: Crony Capitalism

In 2008 it appeared that Wall Street and associated financial institutions, huge Too Big To Fail (TFTF) banks were endanger of collapsing. A clarion call was made by Hank Paulson, U.S. Treasury Secretary and former Wall Street bank at Goldman Sachs for $800 billion rescue. To some this was absolutely required to stem the panic in Wall Street. Others like myself wonder if other solutions couldn’t have been considered besides a giant giveaway to the Wall Street Banksters. I would rather characterize it as knee jerk Crony Capitalism.

Let me provide some details about this huge corporate welfare scheme. In 2008 the highly leveraged Wall Street investment banks started to “Go South” after betting on the mortgage market. Highly leveraged means their capital was a mere fraction of their investments. Maybe 2 or 2.5% of their investments. This money making game sounds like fun until somebody gets hurt, of course. And they looked to the U.S. government to provide corporate welfare to bail them out.

To put it in perspective, it’d be similar to the average Joe or Jill who went out and bought a million dollar home on the a downpayment of say $10,000. Of course in large part that’s what the average person was doing during the housing boom. Borrowing to the hilt in anticipation that housing prices would continue to rise, and then quickly sell for a profit far greater than that little down payment, of say $10,000, [or no downpayment at all in some cases], when they “flipped” the house.

The Investment bankers were betting on the same thing in this highly leveraged way, 40 to 1 or more. These sketchy mortgage loans that Joe and Jill Q. Public were making were packaged into “investments” and sold to Wall Street and to their clients. Wall Street began to trade with its own money after a time, in addition to representing their clients.

The most famous of those banks is Goldman Sachs; it’s a beehive of money making activity working just about 365 days a year. Recruited from the best business schools, those hires that survive the 30 interviews will see themselves working 110 hours a week, 7 days a week. They are all about the money. Nothing wrong with that I suppose. Just don’t ask me to finance your lifestyle through my tax dollars.

Anyway Goldman Sachs was the first to determine that the housing boom was coming to an end and they started to bet against it. In fact they were selling these mortgage backed securities to clients AND betting against them at the same time. They were fined $500 million in spring of 2011 by the SEC (Security Exchange Commission) for this very arrangement. The SEC are the guys who are supposed to watch over Wall Street but fall asleep a lot. (Does Madoff come to mind?) (See Money and Power, by William D. Cohan about Goldman Sachs).

The $800 billion TARP in 2008 that was rammed through Congress, with dire prognostications about the economy, if it failed to pass, was just the start. This money was used to prop up banks and purportedly save “Main Street” in the process. Of course 3 years later there are some six millions fewer people unemployed than in 2008 but Wall Street has been made safe for Democracy. But as I said this bail out was just the start.

Now comes another recipient to Federal government largess. The huge insurance company AIG insured these mortgage backed securities with something called Credit Default Swaps; it’s just insurance on failure of a bond. AIG figured this was easy money: money for nothing. They just collect the premiums and would never have to pay. Something like hurricane insurance for Michigan, right? Remember these are the smartest guys in the room. But OOOOPS! When the bottom fell out of the market, they didn’t have the funding to back them up.

Outrageously, Wall Street chose collectively not to aid itself, we find out. The Federal Reserve in late 2008 asked the Wall Street banks to ante up to save AIG; these are the guys that would be most affected by this failure of AIG. Wall Street refused. Now mind you, AIG held the insurance that was backing Wall Streets mortgage related investments. They would only be helping themselves if a consortium of banks contributed to their own rescue. And thus …

JPMorgan and Goldman offered no public explanation for rejecting [U.S. Treasury official] Geithner’s proposal. The public wasn’t even told the banks were asked to do their part. Nor did Federal Reserve officials argue with the decision or try to apply persuasive pressures. [Unattributed internet quote]

With Wall Streets refusal to help themselves, the cost to U.S. taxpayer was $182 billion to prop AIG up. I figure that’s about enough to support about a half a million welfare queens for about a 20 years to my calculation. (I just saw a story of couple swindling welfare $1,200 monthly for the last 10 years living in a $1 million dollar house….lets see how many years would they have to live to have taken as much as AIG….counting fingers, toes, I still counting … ok, just 12.5 million years) Instead we’re supporting a few millionaires, who will eventually buy a few Governorships or Senate seats like Jon Corzine or a sports team or two [only if the stadiums are supplied by the public of course]. These banks had the gall or audacity to refuse to ante-up when we were told that “we” were all in the same boat together, Main Street and Wall Street, one big happy family. The fact is when it came to saving themselves they wouldn’t even pony up and left the taxpayers with the bill.

So without further adieu Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, makes taxpayer billions available to AIG. This was backdoor bailout to the Wall Street banks including Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and foreign banks like Deutsche Bank. Of course it wasn’t until a year and half that the Federal Reserve disclosed the deal that made these banks good.

Just for your information, the financial wizard said to be the most responsible for AIG’s collapse was Joseph Cassano who made $280 million in the eight years he was employed there plus he was allowed to keep the $34 million of bonus, when he walked away in 2008. It seems kind of unjust that the person most responsible for tanking AIG to the cost of $182 billion to taxpayers was made rich as Croesus in the process. I guess that’s why I got to believe in Hell; some people might think it sufficient to suffer someone like that to read my blogs for eternity….sounds fitting. (FYI: Mr. Cassano’s eventual disposition in the afterlife is only known to our Creator. I make no judgment as to his true character.)

I’m told we should feel better that AIG paid back most the bail out and they only owe $ 50 billion now. Like I say, just give me $182 billion today and I’ll gladly give it back to you tomorrow. The interest overnight would allow me to retire and all of my family, as well, for life. Meaning of course that capital is scarce and absolutely key to success of any enterprise, borrowing a few hundred billion here and there and giving it back sometime later is a fantastic gift and to a massive failure like AIG boils down to the dreaded “unjust enrichment”.

We’re not done yet with the chicanery. Big Ben (not the dope, Ben Roethlisberger, that plays quarterback for the Pittsburg Steelers and likes to mash young women and eat for free but Ben Bernanke, Fed Chairman) decides to allow Goldman Sachs to declare itself a member of the Federal Reserve banking system like a consumer bank. Voila! They have access to the Federal Reserves funding. Christmas came early and often for Goldman Sachs.

What Goldman Sachs could take advantage here was what is called the Primary Dealer Credit Facility, something only a very few financial institutions have privilege to, which is access to short term lending in the billions, at an interest rate that remains at a very low .5% interest. Goldman Sachs made use of $782 billion in loans from this “facility”.

In the same year Goldman Sachs made $13.4 billion in profit (2009) and their employees averaged a cool $500,000 a year. I suppose that “Main Street” should be breathing easy that “Wall Street” returned to profitability so quickly. But in fact the consumer sector, 70% of the economy, has been taught a very hard lesson with the Great Recession by the bail out of Wall Street. The financial elites made out but in doing so “Main Street” was largely left behind. More importantly consumer psychology had been radically changed into something like a bunker mentality with continued long term affects on economic growth.

What’s the solution? Not necessarily more Big Government. It’s Big Government that contributed to this mess in the first place. The guarantee of the banks’ “deposits” (actually payables) to begin with in 1933 put the U.S. taxpayer on the hook for bank stupidity (or rather speculative risk) since the depositor was much less concerned how the bank “invested” (lent out the deposits) and the bank had less fear to lend at dangerous risk.

And oddly many people place the blame solely on the Republican Party, the party of Business. But a Democratic administration under Clinton and a Democratic congress removed barriers to interstate banking under Riegel-Neal Act in 1994. This essentially allowed the creation of the mega-banks, TBTF’s (Too Big to Fails) , that we see today. In addition Robert Rubin, another former Chairman of Goldman Sachs, and Treasury Secretary for the Clinton administration, was instrumental in undoing the wall that Glass-Steagall of 1933 erected between commercial/consumer banking and investment banking (stocks and bonds). This added to the risk these large TBTFs could take by betting on the stock market using deposits guaranteed by the Federal Government.

Add to that Rubin, as Treasury Secretary under Clinton, deflected any oversight of the huge derivative mark in 1998. Brooksley Born, the director of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) at the time advocated oversight of this multi-trillion dollar market. Rubin, Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve Chairman and Larry Summers, the next Treasury Secretary under Clinton all opposed any oversight. See below as to the import and meaning of derivatives:

Derivatives are highly volatile financial instruments that are occasionally used to hedge risk, but mostly used for speculation. They are bets upon the value of stocks, bonds, mortgages, other loans, currencies, commodities, volatility of financial indexes, and even weather changes. Many big banks, including Bank of America, issue derivatives because, if they are not triggered, they are highly profitable to the issuer, and result in big bonus payments to the executives who administer them. [Avery Goodman, 2011]

Credit default swaps would fall under this category. AIG sold them and Wall Street bankers bought them, thinking they would insulate them from risk, much to their peril. The reliance on these gave a false sense of security to Wall Street.

Continuing on this vein of how much influence Wall Street exerts in Democratic administrations read below:

Goldman [Sachs] employees and their relatives contributed almost a million dollars to Barack Obama's presidential campaign — making it "the company from which Obama raised the most money in 2008" — and Blankfein [Chairman]has visited the White House ten times as of February 2011. (wikipedia)

Have you had a chat with the President lately? Chairman of Goldman Sach’s has had numerous talks with the President, something akin to full access. It’s amazing what $ 1 million will buy you.

Instead of substantive reform, the Democrat solution in 2009 Frank/Dodd bill relied soley on more regulation. It does little to prevent another massive bailout since it doesn’t reinstate Glass-Steagall with its separation of investment and retail banking nor does it reasonably reduce the size of the TBTFs. It leaves it up to governmental agencies to scrutinize them. One of its provisions carries the risk of increasing the chance of a bailout; FDIC is allowed to borrow from U.S. Treasury thus providing for another avenue for a bailout.

As evidence as to the efficacy of Frank/Dodd regulation we have the recent MF Global failure, run by no less than Jon Corzine, former Governor and Senator of NJ and Co-Chair of Goldman Sachs. It appears that despite the oversight of governmental agencies envisioned by Frank/Dodd, MF Global crashed and burned and ended up losing $1.2 billion dollars of their customer’s funds in what might turn out to be massive fraud. In the last few months before they declared bankruptcy their clients funds may have been used to fund the “proprietary” accounts, that is the ones that the MF Global themselves bet with. As the company was losing money this would be a ready source of cash.

Once again there’s a tale of collusion between Wall Street and government despite the enhanced regulation meant to have been provided by Frank/Dodd. CFTC, the regulatory agency designated to oversee MF Global was led by Gary Gensler, a former colleague of guess who? Jon Corzine, at Goldman Sachs. Congress will be asking Mr. Genlser how he was asleep at the wheel, while MF Global burned, while using what appears to be customer money which is supposed to be completely separate from the firms trading accounts.

And wait it gets better. Another former Goldman Sachs associate, President of the New York Federal Reserve bank grants MF Global access to that Prime Dealer Credit Facility I spoke about above, that is to be a primary lender in February, 2011. This is after MF Global had several losing quarters. Granting primary dealer status generally takes several years, I understand. As a result they can borrow from the Federal Reserve at near zero rates of interest. It might appear that Mr. Corzine’s connection may have some to do with the approval. Nonetheless it was good money after bad.

I almost forgot former President Clinton was on their payroll at $50,000 a month. What were they buying there I wonder?

I think this throws the ability of Frank/Dodd to regulate the financial markets into question. The bottom line is that regulation is ever liable to influence peddling. Somethings like MF Global or Madoff somehow just get missed.

***

I won’t run through all the sensible solutions; admittedly regulation of markets is all important to assure transparency. Using the Federal Government as a big piggy bank is NOT.

One solution that I rarely hear about is the need for adequate capital requirements. That is how much “downpayment” is required to be kept on hand. Currently, if you go try to borrow for a house the bank is going to ask you for a 20% downpayment. I was in banking for 15 years. The old bank, run by the McPherson family, since 1865, leant out only about 50% of its assets. The remainder was in U.S. Treasury bonds. That bank survived several panics and the Great Depression. It was bought out to a “hot shot” lumber guy from Bay City, Michigan. They started the New Century Bank and began to liberalize their lending requirements where the vast majority of you assets were leant out, say 90% or some such. Of course much more money can be made lending than simply buying low yield but very secure U.S. Treasury Bonds. That New Century bank didn’t make it past a couple of years and managed to lose about $ 30 million in a year or so and was bought out by another regional bank shortly after.

Lesson is that today’s banks are far too leveraged, I realize there would be screaming world wide from the financial community but capital accounts requirements of 20%, not the 5% or so that’s now typical, should be mandatory. Each time these financial institutions are trouble, the cry is that they can bring down the whole economy, if so, they should have very high capital requirements and better yet they should be rationally downsized. Former Federal Reserve President, Alan Greenspan, was the only other person I’ve heard call for increases in capital requirements. The retails banks along with the investment banks are too highly leveraged and need a much larger cushion to protect the taxpayer and the economy.

***
Just a heads up, October 21, 2011 Bank of America shifted $55 trillion dollars of derivatives from its Merrill Lynch division to its retail consumer bank, Bank of America insured by the FDIC. FDIC, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation has opposed this shifting of risk from Merrill Lynch investors to U.S. taxpayers. Another bailout?

Judicial Taliban

There are at least some laws that depend for their “authority” not on some pre-existing human convention, but on the logical relationship in which they stand to moral standards.*

The current pack of Judges, state and Federal, are self proclaimed champions and crusaders of political correctness. They reject any basis or foundation in any ethical and moral philosophical systems. They subsist solely within an American Judicial ethos of their own making. In addition these Judicial Taliban insist on granting rights that frankly aren’t for them to bestow. Judicial activism is rampant and largely unfounded.

Examples of activism abound. Recently judges demanded that California arbitrarily reduce its prison population by thousands without regard to how this will affect the public safety. Yet, there’s no law that dictates this reduction.

In another instance in Texas Federal District Judge ordered a High School graduation speech have no mention of prayer or God or some such. 1st Amendment rights aside, what business does a federal judge have adjudicating the very content of speech at something like a High School graduation? That’s simply judicial overreach which goes against a key element of our successful representative democracy, its limited nature.

Do we have a government Center for Politically Correct Language or rather a Federal government with constitutional limits insuring Free Speech? It’s especially odd considering any time an “artist” wants to portray Christ in Piss it’s deemed their right under the Constitution. I just wish he didn’t do it with taxpayer money.

These renegade rulings continue as I write. Federal judges struck down Michigan’s popular constitutional initiative banning “Affirmative” action programs, which represent reverse discrimination. Concerns for popular will aside it seems as if judges are acting like “independent voices of the infinite” that Judge Holmes mocked nearly a century ago.

An issue I hesitate to broach has been thrust upon the public square. Judges have found rights to same sex unions in constitutions which seem pulled out of thin air. These unions may seem equitable and trendy but the will of the people has been expressed numerous times against expanding the meaning of marriage. Is there something the judiciary doesn’t get about role of popular will in democracy?

In a democracy government was meant to be of the people for the people and by the people, whose will is expressed through popular elections and referendum. Judicial fiat should play little part in the public square.

Within this writing New York legislature acted on extending marriage contract to same-sex individuals. I don’t agree with this policy but nonetheless this was enacted through the popular process not judicial fiat.

The reference for this activism is the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. 14th Amendment was initially enacted to insure former slaves would not be deprived of their civil rights. After the Civil War the white Southerner was in the process of reducing the emancipated slave to a status of indentured servant by restricting their right to movement, ownership, voting rights and employment among others things. This amendment insured individual states couldn’t take away rights guaranteed by the Federal government. Good idea, right?

Well, one hundred fifty years later the Judiciary has seem fit to carry this ball out of stadium it seems. Strange and wonderful legal measures continue to be taken under “Substantive due process” doctrine said to be originated from the 14th Amendment. Basically speaking the Court wants to grant even more rights than was first realized under the Constitution. This doctrine arose in the 1930’s, during the struggle with the Supreme Court to enact the New Deal agenda.


***

The Supreme Court is a body less representative than the British House of Lords, the hundreds of the upper nobility, who were to have maintained the interests of the aristocracy.
Many on the Supreme Court over recent history seem largely interested in making over society in a manner to their liking not simply interpreting the Constitution. If that’s the true purpose of these geriatric legal giants then maybe it should be expanded by 426 some members (to 435, the same as the House of Representatives) and make it truly representative. The appointment for life might not be a good thing in this case.

It had relied on the 14th Amendment in 1954 to knock down the “separate but equal doctrine” of two unequally funded school systems, white and black. This was not the original intent of the law, but still a fitting thing, it seems. It righted a social injustice allowed in another Court ruling Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896) which failed to apply the 14th amendment to dual segregated school systems, white and black of the South.

In the 1960’s activist judges began to promote there own social views beginning with family reproductive “rights” whose rectitude were best left to the legislatures to ascertain. An issue with some popular support but initiated by judicial fiat nonetheless and not much different than the Dred Scott rulling of 1856. Both denied a segment of humanity of their civil rights.

Once again as compelling as the issue is it’s not up to the judicial clique to determine what the will of the people may be on a certain issue; that’s why we have popular elections.

Iran has its Islamic Mullahs; we have our Judicial Taliban in the courts, it seems. The Mullahs have their sharia, Islamic Law and the Judicial clique make law not interpret it, buttressed by their bed rock belief that any attempt to ground law in universal principles is anathema. And thus they’re open to make it up as they go along.

***
Let me say emphatically that Law is too important to be left up to Lawyers. Lawyers are not disposed to engage in deep thought. I can’t recall a lawyer who has ever been moral philosopher. Yet, moral philosophers have spoken on Law, such as Immanuel Kant and Thomas Aquinas, great moral philosophers.

Current crop of attorneys are largely schooled in a social relativist version of law. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes is their champion: a Civil War hero who fought at bloody Antietam battlefield, and was wounded 3 times in the Civil War and discounted any attempt to apply principles to law. He wrote:

…men make their own laws; that these laws do not flow from some mysterious omnipresence in the sky, and that judges are not independent mouthpieces of the infinite…

My response is that, for one, arguing from principles doesn’t make justices “mouthpieces of the infinite”. Once again he’s creating a straw horse, a false image to contradict. He’s quoted further to say:


The common law is not a brooding omnipresence in the sky.

I ask myself who thought common or non-statutory law WAS some “brooding omnipresence in the sky”? Then I guess him to mean to say any omnipresence is suspect and whose idea should be kept from influencing formation of Law.

Law should be viewed from the stance of the bad man.

Law here is based on no higher principle then agreeing not to harm one another, it seems. If this were true there’d be no seat belt or helmet laws I suppose.

'The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law. A judge must be aware of social facts. Only a judge or lawyer who is acquainted with the historical, social, and economic aspects of the law will be in a position to fulfill his functions properly.

The social context is all important to Holmes.

"General proposition do not decide concrete cases."

Holmes seared by his experience in the Civil War refused to see the possibility of application of general moral principles to law and adhered to the idea of law at “bad man” level. Holmes leaves much unsaid. But I can guess; for Holmes law is an agreement between brutal men, who agree to not hurt one another. I won’t harm you if you won’t harm from me kind of thinking.
Admittedly, the farther from universal principles one wanders the difficulties of applying law increase. This doesn’t negate the possibility of their application. However, Holmes refuses to make any attempt at all to argue from principles.
The ancient traditional ideas held view law was to make us better. Prevalent thinking is little can make us better and it’s best not to try. For example this thinking would concur with the idea that the habit of watching porn movies all day probably is not a good thing to do, but not much worse than watching motivational tapes, since in the end not much about us will be affected by it. Oddly enough current society does make law to improve us: restriction in smoking in public places or seat belt laws seek to change behavior.

But nonetheless it is thought that moral precepts like Ten Commandments or Buddhist Eight Fold Path are useless things to reference and instead let’s just let the judiciary make it up as they go along. It’s surprising to learn that a depiction of Moses giving the Ten Commandments is on facade of the Supreme Court House. Somebody thought at some time in American History we can be informed by general principles.
Natural law philosophy presumes law’s origins are universal. The Declaration of Independence written by the Thomas Jefferson, who would become the 3rd President of the United States, used natural law as a basis. It reads:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Please note that these truths being self evident are those that can be discerned and in addition we are “endowed” with unalienable rights by some “brooding omnipresence”…. wait …no, a CREATOR. So we know two things here: there is truth or law, if you will, that can be discovered and it’s granted by a Supreme Being. This is in sharp contrast to what we just reviewed that Holmes was saying.

***

Lawyers are rightfully held suspect since they are the inheritors of the sophistic rhetorical tradition. The Ancient Greek assembly of 500 members would try cases each day in Athens and were shown susceptible to being swayed by persuasive rhetorical flourishes. The trained rhetorician, much like our modern lawyer, was held in much esteem for his abilities to sway the assembly. Law was very much was what the assembly was feeling that day.

***


Mandatory minimum wage laws and overtime laws were first thought to violate the right of contract between employee and employer. Judges struck these down as violating the inviolate property rights imbued in the constitution though not specifically stated. This is reminiscent of the judges today who see all manner of rights within the constitution based on their particular social views.

Of course there was no specific protection of property rights in the constitution but judges made that up and began to strike down overtime laws and such. The court was “reformed” from its errors during the social legislation of the New Deal Roosevelt.

The Supreme House of Lords, I mean Court, the Dred Scott case is famous for denying the Negro slave rights as human beings. The ruling understood the Negro as people, they just didn’t have any rights under the Constitution, as such. They were deemed chattel or tangible property like a horse or cow or barn. This ruling did as much as anything to precipitate the Civil War.

So we see U.S. House of Lords, I mean Supreme Court, sorry I keep slipping up there, is not a entirely reliable. In regards to slavery and property rights as seen above. Nonetheless, it seems as if the Court is granted supremacy over other branches of government in the eyes of the public. They were on the right side of the civil rights with Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) which ruled separate was not equal but one must remember it was civil rights legislation in regards to voting and housing and employment, not judicial fiat that fully addressed this issue.

Ideal purpose of law is to build a better person. Of course the sinister aspect to building a better person is that it’s been the state, whether authoritarian, Fascist or Nazi or totalitarian, Communist that has aspired to build a better person. Any effort to advocate such is thus suspect.

* Unattributed quote.

The Ghost Behind the Mask

If you say, show me your God, I should like to answer you, show me the man who is in you Theophilus of Antioch (A.D. 180)


Science has largely dispelled, in the common mind, the notion that the hand of God rather than blind natural forces are behind observable events such as thunder and lighting, so terrifying to the pre-moderns. The Ancients most commonly attributed such things as earthquakes to God’s wrath. We now understand plate tectonics and continental drift. The question ultimately becomes just where is God acting? Science, we might gather, looks throughout the universe and provides us with empirical answers for seemingly every question.

Thus with the explanatory power of science God no longer explains the world for us. God becomes relegated to a feeling or disposition, something merely personal. God is killed as an active agent in the world so to speak. Some are content with that conclusion and see belief as a dangerous myth. Let me say I don’t think they fully understand the implications. Science is making one surprising step further.

If science can demonstrate it kills God, then most surprisingly science kills “YOU” too. When I say “YOU” this is the commonly held understanding that the “ME” or self, we sense and of which are aware, is a certain concrete reality. Virtually everyone will argue to the contrary, that the “Me” they experience does indubitably exist. Modern brain science has put that assumption to question.



***

Fundamentally, science has made great strides in understanding brain function. What science has found are interworking parts rather than a unified whole. Science has mapped out the brain and different sections have various operations. There are areas for eye movement, voluntary motor functions, sensory areas, vision, and language comprehension, as well areas for higher mental functions, of course, and for smell and coordination.

Studies of the brain show it working something like a component system. For example damage to what is called the Broca area leads to loss of ability to use words properly. Those affected can use nouns but no verbs, when asked to describe a scene. On the other hand, damage in another related area of brain, Wernicke’s, allows for use of nouns and verbs and proper grammar and intonation but they have lost understanding and when they speak, it’s gibberish. The link between thought and language is lost. The Broca area is not damaged so they can speak with proper intonation and facial expression and such but the area that translates thought to words is broken, thus the nonsense.

Speaking is a very complex process: thoughts are meant to become words, then sounds, finally to become muscle movements to produce them as ordered by the motor area of the brain. Broca’s area controls speech but Wernicke’s area maintains comprehension, where thought translates to language. Language involves the working of several areas of the brain.

Another disease of the brain puts in question how much our imagined integrated SELF can truly control. Huntington disease destroys our ability to control facial expressions, resulting in abnormal involuntary writhing movements. It’s caused by the absence of production of a protein that results in damage in specific areas of the brain. This also calls into question outside brain chemistry, what exactly is the “YOU”?

A further example, the damage of connections from Limbic area, seat of emotions, to Frontal lobe can cause debilitating indecision; we’ve lost emotional guidance.

Most profoundly science sees no center of consciousness. That is Science can find no Inner theatre; no projection screen of the brain; there’s no tiny guy (homunculus) inside our heads as some ancients speculated in the past. And this analogy of the projection screen of the brain breaks down completely when considering sound, smells and touch. All these functions seemed to take place in diverse parts of the brain.

What we experience as consciousness is a very hard thing indeed to grasp. It’s not continuous. We seem to go in an out of consciousness throughout the day. Have you ever driven down the expressway and then realized you weren’t truly conscious of driving for a few seconds? Or maybe you were daydreaming. You were on auto pilot so to speak, as you drove down the road. When you sleep walk, and are unconscious yet alive, we can be zombie like. We sleep and lose consciousness, and yet we hold ourselves to be sentient beings.

Common sense tells us we have free will and we seem to censor our urges and reflect before we act. Science tells us part of our brain, the frontal lobe, does much to monitor our behavior. A classic example is an injury to the frontal lobe of the brain. Phineas Gage in the mid-1850s was injured in a railroad accident by an iron rod through the skull; his frontal lobe was damaged. He exhibited radical personality change. Formerly a model worker, he became irreverent, fitful, profane, impatient, and obstinate; a marked change from his former conscientious self. So despite claims we have a Self that commands us, science shows us that that Self is really a contraption, intermittently present, composed of many working parts.

The argument that we are products of a function brain seems compelling. We can use an illustration. If we destroy part of the automobile, the brakes for instance, an automobile fails to function properly; it can’t stop. The question becomes, apart from the working components, is there an automobile “spirit”, apart from functioning parts, that remains? Probably not we’d guess. Under this analysis the “YOU” appears to be a production of a functioning brain, when it stops working it disappears.

Of course it’s not really that simple. Flexibility of the brain, nonetheless, belies locality of brain function, the automobile parts model. If one area is damaged then the brain can train other areas to do the work. For example the Broca area of the brain, a language area, can actually retrain itself to use another area of brain to process language.

This raises all manner of questions. Who’s doing the retraining? Which part of the brain decides to retrain the other? Since for many scientists we are fully products of evolution, which adaptive mutation of which neuron, would have made this, since evolution needs to work on specific gene mutation. This is markedly different than the component model of the brain. No automobile can reprogram itself to change the functions of other parts.

Science seems to think it might find conscious “YOU” under such devices as MRI that detects various “brain states”. Brain states are detected by such devices as MRI. A particular area of brain will “light up” denoting various brain states, operations of the brain such as speech, hearing, etc. Some scientists say they have even found “God” in these brain states. Distinct areas vividly light up in the brains of nuns and monks, during what might be reported as otherworldly episodes. But a connection between a particular thought and recorded brain activity has not been established.


Is the science on brain function and consciousness settled? No, but the underlying premise, just as is the notion that science dispels God, remains that science is the tool we use to discover ultimate answers, not observable events.

In other words, “all knowing” Science hasn’t found what is commonly known as consciousness. The presumption is that it just doesn’t exist as a separate entity.

In other words where is that integrated personal reality you commonly understand as “ YOU”? Science can’t seem to find it. Science concludes it doesn’t exist or only as an illusion. Frankly, I prefer not to draw that conclusion.

The Turing Test, named after the scientist who conceived it, aims to prove there might not be any difference between you and a computer. The effort is to make a computer sufficiently responsive to inquiries such that a normal human being couldn’t tell the difference between the computer and a human response. The conclusion that’s meant to be drawn once again is that our mental processes are no different than a machine’s.

Steve Speilberg’s movie Artificial Intelligence showed us how sophisticated robots might take on human characteristics. The obverse view is implied as well, that humans are simply electro-mechanical evolutionary generated biological robots.

The prowess of computing was demonstrated with IBM’s Big Blue defeating Kasparov, the chess master. Another that is about to challenge champions from the trivia game show, Jeopardy. And in this writing we find out that Watson, the IBM computers, indeed beat the unbeatable human champion, who had been victorious in more than 200 straight wins on the show.

What does it meant, when your SELF only exits as a mistaken illusion? One scientist puts it: just as they once believed in witches, captive to demonic spirits, who needed to be burned, we can no longer believe in a dualistic partition of the brain: a “Me” and my body. Mental processes that lead us to believe we have a SELF are as mistaken as fairies and witches and such.

And carried to its logical conclusion, just as in the case of the denial of the existence of God, if it can’t be demonstrated scientifically, then that YOU, common sense seems to tell you exits, simply doesn’t exist or exists simply as a part of a functioning apparatus like any machine like an automobile for example.

And science will tell us that we can’t always rely on what common sense tells me; the earth looks flat, but science demonstrates otherwise. Integrated consciousness is an illusion; just as there’s no evil spirits causing the schizophrenic to act crazy.

Science’s most profound challenge remains; how can immaterial, “YOU”, cause things to happen in your body, that are demonstrated to be a function of brain chemistry? For example when I, the integrated “ME”, desires to raise my arm, how does that lead to my arm raising? The YOU outside of brain states and neural electro-chemistry is scientifically very illusive.

***

Death of “YOU” does it matter? The prospect of human dignity being degraded to a zombie or computer-like status should alarm you. Ideas are powerful. The construction of the socialist utopia, in Russia and China, was based on the idea that nothing existed beyond the material world. Socialist man was a composition entirely material and whose consciousness was extinguished upon death. The demise of a few, or as it turned out countless millions, in the construction of a socialist paradise was considered expedient, in contrast to the grand socialist society that was being scientifically engineered. Enemies of the State were simply eliminated not murdered. Their suffering and death was not a crime against any innate human dignity. The shining results of a modern society would speak for themselves.

Much could be said in the same vein about the NAZI’s idea of man and his place in the Germanic Folk, and the absence of value of those outside their group. Society was defined by its people’s evolutionary struggle, not individual worthiness.

Conclusion: in regards of the heroic, the sainted, and the caregivers: science has little to offer in explanation. I believe in them.

Science ultimately can only offer questions. The singularity of the Big Bang, which is the incredible idea the entire universe, arose from an infinitesimally tiny speck spontaneously. This belies the given assumption that the cause of the effect must be greater than the effect. A whole universe can’t arise out of nothing unless we believe pink rabbits can suddenly appear on our office desk like magic. What is the ultimate cause and purpose of the universe? Science can only throw up its hands and offer silly multiple universe scenarios.

Or consider the astounding world of quantum universe, more like Alice in Wonderland with its maze of virtual particles and “spooky” action at a distance. “Action at a distance” is the fantastic circumstance where two photons or electrons, initially linked at the atomic level, will act in complementarity no matter how distant from each other, violating the “laws of physics”, if you will. This behavior has been proven by rock solid experimental science; Einstein spent the last several decades of his life trying to disprove this phenomenon without success.

Science futilely grasps at the fundamentals, the Ultimate Ground, but ground continues to move farther away with each discovery. Great effort and billions of dollars are being expended to locate the Fundamental substance. An explanation for the zoo of sub-atomic particles has been devised with quarks and such, yet there’s no end in sight to arrive at the scientific Shangri-la of this fundamental substance; the pre-Socratic philosophers, more than 2500 years ago, thought the fundamental elements were earth, fire, water and air, silly fools not having any understanding of sub-atomic particle psychics like we do. The funny thing is: Science is still looking for that fundamental substance.

I believe a Jewish Rabbi who was One with God rose from the dead two thousand years ago. Revivifying a corpse is a whole lot more plausible than believing there’s trillions of other worlds out “there” one of which just popped into existence… puff! as current science purports.

Truth is revelation. And this revealed story reconciles our fallen world with eternity. I believe in an Other World; it’s a spiritual realm ordered by God, but I don’t need science to prove it. I have the testimony of the Saints and my God given reason to convince me.

How will I be convinced to behave more humanely to my fellow man by theories that deny our fundamental value? Only when values are based on the existence of a Loving Supreme Being whose creation is deemed good, and who created an individual in His likeness, flawed but with dignity and inner worth.

Science gives us no ultimate answers as I’ve stated previously. As to what is happening in the brain, I would hazard to guess its much more like a quantum event than any digital computer would be. Under quantum physics a tree falling in the woods doesn’t make a sound unless there’s someone to hear it; only when it’s observed does the quantum wave function “collapse” and become observable.


I’m guessing that the immaterial “YOU” participates in a quantum event at the level of the brain synapse. This is no more mysterious than a universe that pops into existence or quantum’s “spooky action” at a distance: two particles inexplicably connected to each other. This is how the spirit can “move” the body.

Nonetheless, the story of faith is not meant to explain the observable universe but to provide a framework or context to explain the mystery of life and how we are to act in it and act towards others. Just because science provides many answers about the world around us doesn’t give it authority to provide the story.

Science: Ultimate Truth?

Science is a very good predictor of observable events. But it doesn't tell us why or to what purpose or how to act. All truth doesn't come from science. Science vehemently denies that; all events have material causes and can be explained by natural forces acting in the universe, Science argues: even the inner workings of the Brain. Now we know a lot about the brain. But the brain is more or less a tool for the mind; science contradicts this to argue that we are mere products of chemical processes within the brain.

Freud argued very convincingly that reason, much like the ancients thought, could be the tool to release the inner daemonsThe arguments for the Science’s claims are compelling. Technological advances are astounding in the areas of flight and computing and medicine just to mention a few. The pre-Socratics some 2,500 years ago began to postulate what was the composition of nature: earth or water or a mixture of elements: earth, wind, fire, water, in order to replace mythic explanations, such as Hesiod's stories about the supposed god's creative activity. Ever since divine activity in nature has been gradually reduced in scope. Thunder was thought the voice of god or demonstration of his power; think that Luther, the great Protestant reformer, committed himself to the monastery when caught in a thunder storm. We can guess he heard God's wrathful voice as He directed the wind, rain, and lightning. Five hundred years later we take it for granted that weather has its natural causes.

Over time natural philosophers saw the workings of God behind the natural forces sustaining and moving the universe: the forces of gravity and centrifugal force causing the planets to move in ordered patterns for example. Eventually scientists of the 19th and 20th Centuries saw all observable events as product of natural forces. The things for God to do became few indeed. And since the universe was eternal, as Aristotle surmised long ago, truly there was nothing for God to do and Nietzsche can say, God is dead.

Now science has come to dispel the spirits and ideas and the mythology within the Brain. Come to find out we're simply a product of chemical reactions within the brain and nothing "spiritual" or godly there either. Further more Darwin tells us we're products of evolutionary forces and all our mental activity arises from and is subject to them.

Socrates argued our inner essence as being more real than the changeable observable reality that passes away. And went to great lengths to prove the disabilities of relativism.

The ancients including the Psalms saw our existence after death as shadowy. Hades was a land of shadows and lesser reality. Orthodox understand that Jesus at his Death on the Cross descends into Hades releases the spirits formerly doomed to this less than real existence, spiritual existence.

Ironically, Freud, Scientist of the Mind of the prior 100 years, held differently. He dominated psychological thinking in the first 80 years of the twentieth century, at least in America. To Freud, a neurotic himself, our distress arises from improper suckling as an infant and proposed very convincingly for his contemporaries that reflection and reason could be the tool to unlock the most deep seated complexes in our minds; his project was to release the “ID” from the constraints of society. Even psychosis, universally understood as chemical imbalances today, was deemed amenable to the “couch”, the Analysis.

It was enough to dispel spiritual realities and replace them with the knowledge that natural mental forces were captive to social ones; spiritual truths were dismissed. Similarities to his method can be seen in the Ancients, who would propose to use Reason to harness the incensive powers and appetitive urges to good. Freud postulated the Id (basic urges), Ego (conventional thinking) and Super Ego (our censor); i.e. another 3 part partition of the brain with our Reasoning as arbitrator. Freud, on the other hand, wanted to liberate the Id (appetitive) not harness it.

His therapies have been superseded by chemical approaches to mood changing. Science only admits evidence from its own tools and own purview: the observable universe not moral or spiritual one. And he insists this is the entire universe of facts, unless they posit an infinite number of these universes ala Mr. Hawkins. God not seen here! they confidently proclaim. Yep, no, God there!

They don’t know who built their ideological framework. They’re like ideological Druids who claim to be heirs to a structure that was built a thousand years before they were on the scene. The Medieval Scholastic, with the belief we are images of God and free agents, was discovering the immutable Laws of God. Upon science’s ascendancy Hume, the 17th Century skeptic, dismissed the certainty of Science in the face of those bent on discovering God’s Laws; Kant demarcated science’s limits with his Categories, in the Critique of Pure Reason.

Overwhelmed with science’s manifest benefits, we concede as to the Priests of the Megalithic era, because they could determine when to plant, since they provide us comfort and pleasure and longevity. (Which seems to be the ultimate truth to them and anything questioning these being the highest values becomes a danger.)

Truth becomes that which promotes the greatest ease. Please note science always has created weapons of mass destruction that could end civilization and even life on the planet.There are several limits and problems with the “all-knowing” scientific principle. All that’s here is a product of forces, including our thought process then where is the objective truth? Isn’t the right project for the seekers of this “truth” then a transcendence of the “Maya” the illusion, the Eastern Mystical path?

The Modern Scientist is using a putative feeble instrument, the brain, a product of the same universe it’s trying to discern. Where is the grounded truth? The brain is a product of the Universe and where does it gain its insights but from that the same forces and reactions that created the same Universe. Truth becomes a bit relative. Furthermore, our moral sensibilities are simply a product of the evolutionary forces, we’re told. Let’s turn that on its head. So Religious practice may be an evolutionary adaption (I’m certainly not convinced of that of course) and those avowed atheists who have begun to crawl out the woodwork, after the fall of atheist Communism, making it safe to be an atheist again, may be an evolutionary mal-adaption doomed to extinction, despite all their efforts in Soviet Russia, Communist China, Eastern Europe, revolutionary Mexico (1911+), Republican Spain (1930’s), etc. to exterminate Christians for their faith in the last hundred years.

A religious fanatic like me could be as right as the brilliant Chris Hutchins, atheistic Crusader, being that the stated ultimate purpose is to survive and we’re simply a product of it. I’m deluded in thinking I’m going somewhere after this life. He must content himself with ephemeral pleasures of this world, thus his melancholia and dim outlook or at least undisguised hatred of the Religious, less optimistic you know.But wait there’s more.

Heisenberg’s principle of Uncertainty: either motion or charge can be discerned but not both at the same time in the subatomic world. Whatever method we choose determines what is observed. Thus we see the observer merges with the observed. The objective observer fails us, ultimately. The retort I imagine that scientific method works everywhere else it’s claimed, but we’re making absolute claims. The claim is that the scientific method explains all and is the foundation of all truth, but fails at the sub-atomic level. And so the very method touted as the gleaner of truth in each and every instance falters; the scientific method is found to have limits.

Most importantly, how can one prove the proposition that scientific method explains all, using the scientific method to prove it? We can’t of course. See Hume above, the skeptic. Note Hume was far from being a Religious. Each demonstrated hypothesis is superseded in time by another, the geo-centric universe of Ptolemy, then Kepler and Newton and now Einstein, challenged by Heisenberg principle of uncertainty in the inner workings of the atom. To the modern scientist this seems natural and right but he doesn’t think through the full conclusions of it. Eventually, the current models give way to others. There’s little ultimate or absolute about them. I suppose it’s enough to demonstrate that a divine power didn’t act to cause them. Their amoral universe continues to be supereminent and actions can have no moral restraints; all is well, I suppose.

Scientific models are limited in scope as well. Einstein’s General Relativity fails to operate within the sub-atomic world. In the Big Bang universe our psychics fail in the “singularity”. The all-encompassing scientific universe has many a gap, it appears still waiting to be filled. Faith in science, despite its failure under sub-atomic realms and elsewhere, remains supreme; the scientist will faithfully wait until an answer is formulated to explain the “Mysteries”. The tool, the method works quite well….to a point, you see.

My thrust is theological not philosophical. It’s interesting the ancients had sympathetic views to a moral and spiritual universe as well. Socrates argued our inner essence as being more real than the changeable observable reality that changes and passes away, and went to great lengths to prove the disabilities of moral relativism. Now mind you, the ancients including the writers of the Psalms saw our existence after death as shadowy. Hades (Sheol) was a land of shadows and lesser reality.

Orthodox understand that Jesus, the Redeemer at his Death on the Cross descends into Hades releases the spirits formerly doomed to this less than real shadow, to spiritual existence. Our forthcoming spiritual life is to have greater substance than in the fallen, current world.The Platonics, the Stoics and others except the Epicureans believed in the existence of a moral universe; one that we all subscribe to, poignantly demonstrated when it’s violated.

C.S. Lewis, 20th Christian Apologist expostulates that everyone is attune to their moral universe (Mere Christianity). When violated, we naturally demand justice. (Note once again this is not akin to motivations related to the struggle for survival, which evolutionists deem predominant.) If possessions are stolen or one is addressed rudely, our moral compass is disquieted. We envisage redress for these wrongs. This is our moral universe. Even scientists have one. Spiritual universe has been reported throughout human history by the most primitive peoples up to today. All manner of Christian Saints, including many desert Fathers, psychics (Swedenborg, R. Moody, Van Praagh) and others across religious traditions such as the Tibetan Book of the Dead report contact and visitation of a spirit world, including out of body experiences (St. Paul).

Unfortunately, these are most usually dismissed as simply delusions and discounted. Most recently there is clinical evidence of life after death. People, who are clinically dead, report an experience being out of body see their surroundings and at times reaching a very bright light. One recent best seller recounts this experience in 90 Minutes in Heaven. Note Socrates had what seems to be a spirit guide, daemon he called it. Note I only mention these to say there is a spiritual world that science knows nothing of. Orthodox Christian tradition, the Saints including the Desert Fathers, and others strongly caution against contact with this reality. Contact is likely to be daemonic in origin and thus very dangerous. I do not encourage or advocate contact with it.

As Christians our destiny is meant to transcend this demonic realm (the Tibetan Buddhist and Socrates would too both look beyond this realm as our true eternal destiny, despite not being in full knowledge of Christian Truth). There is a spiritual world that science can tell us nothing, although they have claims to explaining it all away one day I presume.There is a mental universe. In effect the brain is a tool for the mind and that’s why there’s a placebo effect. The results of drug tests must take into consideration. They give sugar pills to one group and the real drug to another. The real drug must out perform the other group’s mental state affecting in some part the cure of the illness. And frankly, I don’t accept my mental state is a product of determinist evolutionary forces and I don’t think must people do either. Something tells them there’s a “me", a brain whose complex calculations predicted planetary motions and more.