Charles-Louis Montesquieu and Social Anthropology #4

Meanwhile, upon the arrival from England in the spring of 1731, Montesquieu recluses himself for two years at La Brède, limiting all social interactions to a minimum, except the unavoidable landlord routines of the legal care-taking after his estates. In the summer of 1734 the Holland’s edition of the Considerations has appeared on sale in Paris, quickly followed by the Paris’ edition.

Similarly to the not quite enthusiastic welcome of the Montesquieu’s first significant work at the Academy of Bordeaux almost two decades earlier, the Dissertation on the political religion of the Romans, the first big work of Montesquieu as the Parisian academician, Considerations on the Causes of The Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, received a very moderate approval.

Montesquieu was criticized for choosing arbitrary a single authoritative Roman historian, or may be two, for each chapter. After following this author without a question, and without a cross-reference check, Montesquieu switches to another authority in the next chapter and so on. A the time historians have started to rely on archaeology, as Bernard de Montfaucon and Nicolas Fréret, who was a Montesquieu’s friend. Montesquieu himself largely ignores the archeological argument in the Considerations, opening himself for the critiques from yet another direction.

However, some of the contemporaries, such as Voltaire, recognized that the Considerations is not the book on history of Rome. The very title says it is a book about the Romans, and it is a book about their culture, its Greatness and its Decline. Montesquieu ventured there into a problem of the history causality, source of which he found not outside of the people of Rome, but as an organic part of their formation by the factors of nature, historical circumstances, habits and myths.

Montesquieu was not the first to link the natural environment with historic and cultural processes – we can see similar ideas expressed by the Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun or Aristotle, who was mentioning the freedom-promoting nature of Greece. Montesquieu’s contemporaries, Italian political thinkers Giambattista Vico and Paolo Mattia Doria were also working on the relationships between the occasions and causes of the history. However, Montesquieu was the first scholar investigating this link rigorously from the rational point of view. And, of course, Montesquieu, who is considered as a grandfather of today’s social anthropology and philosophy of history, was not the last. It is curious that the most venerated and the most outspoken in the US political philosophers were developing the same line of thought, mentions Thomas L. Pangle:

Montesquieu’s thought appears to be the beginning of a movement toward the view that actions of statesmen are determined by historical developments in economics, or religion, or art and thought. We are introduced to the possibility that nation’s “spirit” is the product not of its political history but of its economic, or cultural, or even linguistic history… Montesqieu’s teaching appears as the starting point for the emergence of the philosophy of history, which both in its universalistic version (Kant, Hegel, Marx) and in its particularistic version (the “historical school”) tends to deny… supremacy of political prudence.
It is through this new emphasis on history that Montesquieu truly appears as the precursor of sociology.

However, unlike our contemporaries who develop the line of thought of the great impact of the natural factors on historical process, which could be seen in Jarred Diamond’s famous Guns, Germs and Still, or in the works of Russian historian Lev Gumilev, Montesquieu stressed the very importance of the cultural baggage, we read in the Essay on the Causes Which Can Affect the Spirits and the Characters, the work written in 1736, but unpublished in the Montesquieu’s times, which he draw heavily upon, working on The Spirit of the Laws:

Moral causes form the general character of a nation and decide the quality of its spirit more than do physical causes. One can find a great proof of this in the Jews, who, dispersed over all the earth, raised in all ages, and born in all countries, have had numerous authors, of whom one can scarcely cite two who have had common sense… Among this crowd of rabbis who have written, there is not one who hasn’t had a petty genius. The reason for this is a natural one: the Jews who came back from Assyria were almost like those captives delivered from Algeria, that one paraded in the streets; but they were more crude, because they were born, and because their fathers were born, in slavery. Although they had an infinite respect for their sacred books, they had little understanding of them; they hardly understood the language in which they were written; they had only the tradition of the great miracles that God had carried out in favor of their fathers. Ignorance, which is the mother of traditions, that is to say of character of the spirit which produced them, and took again the tincture of all whose heads were filled with these crude traditions, collected them, and, since the first writers of all nations, bad and good, always have an infinite reputation, on account of the fact that they have always been,  for a while, superior to those who read them, it happened that these first and miserable works were regarded by the Jews as perfect models, on which they formed and have ever since always formed their taste and their genius.

To be continued…

248 AL-Qaeda aides in the US Congress passed CISPA bill

In the rush session House of Representatives has passed (by the 248-168 vote) the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) law, “would encourage companies and the federal government to share information collected on the internet to prevent electronic attacks from cybercriminals, foreign governments and terrorists.” On practice that means that whatever information you put on the Internet, it goes directly to the FBI, NSA and operatives of other interested agencies without such a nonsense as a “probable cause”, “due process of law” and the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights. All this is done in the name of protecting the state security from Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organisations and hostile foreign powers.

However, we all know that Al-Qaeda wants to destroy us because they hate our freedoms. Unlike these hypothetical threats of terrorist cyber attacks, this bill posses a grave and imminent danger to our freedoms, effectively making 248 Representatives, who voted for the CISPA bill, aides of Al-Qaeda, committing a High Treason against the People of the United States.

Facebook was made for Your revolutions, not Ours

At his speech at the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, President Obama announced that he has signed executive order to target people and organizations, which help totalitarian regimes to suppress social media. Facebook, Twitter and others have proven to be very effective in orchestrating and coordinating uprisings during the last year Arab Spring. Thus, “Technologies should be in place to empower citizens, not to oppress them” said President.

After such an inspiring speech, President Obama went to take care of some domestic Facebook-related issues. As a result the fate of the Marine sergeant Gary Stain, the nine-year veteran, who criticized Obama on Facebook, was sealed. He was demoted to lance-corporal, and less-than-honorable discharged with the loss of most benefits.

Charles-Louis Montesquieu and Social Anthropology #3

Continuation of the previous part…

Success of the Persian Letters, which were indeed “selling like a hot bread”, as predicted by Pierre-Nicolas Desmolets, the life-long mentor, friend and censor of Montesquieu, who got acquainted with Charles-Louis back in his years in school of Juilly, allowed Montesquieu to enter into the Court circles and the intellectual society of Paris.

Montesquieu spends now a lot of time in Paris, representing interests of the Parlement and the Academy of Bordeaux, but concentrating more on the new task in his career – an election to Académie française.

Social life of Paris in times of Regency of Duke d’Orléanes, comparing to the previous time of the late rule of Louis XIV, was bustling, vibrant and voluptuous. Duke d’Orléanes was a very sensual man, who found his end as a result of his passions; his curator Cardinal Dubois exhibited not much more restrained way of life; and the Court and the higher Parisian society followed the examples.

Connections of Montesquieu, some of them being quite romantic, have proven to be not only useful in terms of achieving his new career goal, but also inspired creation of some short, now less known, nevertheless interesting works.

The fable The Temple of Gnide was inspired by and written for the court of Princess Marie-Ann de Bourbon, granddaughter of Louis XIV, known as Mademoiselle de Clermont, whom the personage of the fable Themire was devoted to. The Temple was written in a form of emulation of an ancient text, targeting the audience among which the fascination with Greek-styled fables was a mere matter of fashion. However, under the cover of recreational romantic reading, its setting and conclusions connect us to the pivotal motifs of the proto-Indo-European mythology, which define, as we will discuss in the next chapter, the justice principles of that culture.

Salon of the Madame de Lambert was an attractive point of much more intellectual public. Madame de Lambert herself was very fond of the works of Cicero, and she encouraged Montesquieu to work on a more scholar, than The Temple, Treatise on Duties, building on, and developing his earlier Treatise on Cicero. This piece of work was not finished, and what was done did not live in the complete form up to our time, however, reconstructing it from the table of contents and the later descriptions of Montesquieu about the work, we can see the Treatise again discusses the nature of the justice and battles concepts of Spinoza, who, from the vulgar materialistic position saw no tangible grounds for the concept of justice, and Hobbes, whose views were less extreme, and therefore considered as much more dangerous, that the human justice is purely arbitrary.

The Parisian life is, and had been then, very expensive. The frequent visits and long stays in Paris really drained Montesquieu’s finances, how his accounting books show. He had to do something about that to start living by his means. Montesquieu’s marriage and the inheritance after his uncle made him a quite significant landowner, but selling any of his land was out of question. That would undermine his yearly income and diminish his prestige.

However, Montesquieu conveniently possesses a highly valued and liquid asset, which is, in addition, burdening him – the position of the President of Parlement de Bordeaux. He sells it in 1726, or rather leases it for life, to Jean-Baptiste d’Albessard, a member of the prominent legal family of Bordeaux. That deal triples cash flow of the President generated by this post, comparing to the stipend he was getting directly from the Parlement. Now, financially sound, and with freed hands from the everyday duties of the civic service, but still retaining, according to French habits, the salutation of the previous position he no longer holds, the President leaves La Brède for Paris for his final push to get his seat in the Académie française.

In 1727 a vacancy in Académie was opened due to the death of one of Madame de Lambert’s protégés. She offers her backing in Montesquieu’s efforts, however, the very principle merit of Montesquieu for the election – Persian Letters create the difficulties. In the Letters he ridicules the Academicians themselves and offenses King and Pope calling them magicians, jeopardizing the approval by the King and the Cardinal, even if he is elected by Academicians.

Despite these problems, with the support of his backers, and after resolving misunderstandings in a tête-à-tête meeting with the Cardinal Fleury (who was an Academician himself), Montesquieu got elected, thought not unanimously, and takes his seat among Academicians on 24 January 1728.

It was expected that Montesquieu would remain in Paris, enjoying his newly acquired status. However, having achieved one of his goals, Montesquieu does not waste his time to pursue the next one – to become a man of more than one book. Already in April he leaves France for three years to travel Italy and England, collecting materials for his next grand masterpiece Considerations on the Causes of The Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline.

Italy, as a subject of the Montesquieu’s field study in 1728-29, is a quite expected destination, considering his long-lasting enchantment by Romans and the theme of the new work, however, to better understand reasons for voyage to England in 1729-1731, we need to look not only at what was published, but also at what was not.

The Considerations on the Causes of The Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, which saw the world in 1734, it seams, was merely a half of the work originally intended for the publication, Paul A. Rahe, professor of history at Yale university, mentions. Part of the materials of Considerations Montesquieu saved for, and reused in The Spirit of the Laws, and publication of the second part, or the sequel of the Considerations – Reflections on Universal Monarchy in Europe was “suppressed” by Montesquieu “for fear that certain passages would be interpreted ill”. The Universal Monarchy was considered lost until 1821, and finally published only in 1891.

In the Universal Monarchy Montesquieu investigates the feasibility to recreate an Empire rivaling the Roman in contemporary times. He comes to a conclusion that those “causes”, which made Romans great, no longer exist in contemporary world. That is not surprising, considering Montesquieu’s sentiments toward Ancients:

This is the love of country which gives the Greek and Roman histories that nobility as ours did not. It was the constant resort of all actions, and we feel the pleasure of finding it everywhere, this virtue dear to all who have a heart … It seems that since these times, men have grown shorter…

However, in Universal Monarchy, Montesquieu goes a great length explaining in detail why: unlike Romans, how he explains in Considerations, who were super-soldiers of their world, and always had superior arms, organization and training comparing to their neighbors, European states degraded their armed forces to the lower, and the equal, denominator of skill, paradoxically inflating their size and budget; politically acceptable behavior of the victor has changed, and, instead of enriching himself by spoils of war, one ought to bankrupt oneself, by reconstructing economy of those who have being conquered; wars, being financed nowadays from the commerce, which was regarded by Romans as an occupation of slaves, destroy their own vital force, and thus inhibit themselves.

That exercise was done not for pure theoretical reasons. Montesquieu himself, though when he was still an adolescent, witnessed the rise of hopes and their demise for Louis XIV to become such a Universal Monarch and to rival if not the Roman Empire itself, but at least the Empire of Charlemagne. Later, Montesquieu recalls sentiments of those days:

That day at Blenheim, we lost the confidence that we had acquired by thirty years of victories… Whole battalions gave themselves up as prisoners of war; we regretted their being alive, as we would have regretted their death.

In seventeen century France was the leading military world power, and center of cultural, economical and scientific life of Europe. Marriage of the Louis XIV on the Infanta Maria Theresa of Spain, of the Hapsburg House, opened a prospect to unite thrones of Spain and France, as well as the German reminder of the Holy Roman Empire, under the House of Bourbon, leaving no hope for other European powers to resist it. England assembled, financed and let the opposition against France in the war of Spanish Succession. In battle of Blenheim in 1704 French troops were annihilated, and following defeats at Ramillies, Oudenarde, Lille and Malplaquet forced Louis XIV to renounce his ambitions by signing the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713.

Montesquieu has been expressing his interest to the English political constitution earlier in Persian Letters, and now he is ready to get the firsthand experience of the country that was able to derail the victorious march of the French monarchy to the world domination, and which political system, based on personal egoism of a merchant, presented an alternative to the Classical model of the political virtue of a citizen or the vanity of aristocratic honor in European monarchies.

Montesquieu started his acquaintanceship with major players of the War of Spanish Succession in 1728 at the beginning of Italian trip, where he traveled to via Austrian part of the Holy Roman Empire. At Vienna Montesquieu was presented to Prince Eugene of Savoy and Marshal Stahremberg, victorious military commanders of the War of Spanish Succession.

Their comrade by arms John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough died in 1722, however Montesquieu, during his trip to England in 1729-1731, became a friend of the family of Marlborough’s daughter. Though that friendship made Montesquieu a target for practical pranks, such as squirting guests of his garden from hidden fountains, of the husband of Duchess of Marlborough, Duke of Montagu, who was a big enthusiast of such jokes.

Montesquieu embarked at the England endeavor armed with very useful letters of recommendations from his Englishmen friends and acquaintances. The very voyage to London from Hague he made on the yacht of the Ambassador Philip Stanhope, fourth Lord Chesterfield, using recommendations of the Earl James Waldegrave, Ambassador to Vienna, whom Montesquieu shared the part of his previous travel to Italy with. Montesquieu’s arrival in London coincided with the return to England from the exile of the Henry St. John, first Viscount Bolingbroke, one more connection of Montesquieu, which he owes to his old good friend (since 1716) James Fitz-James, first Duke of Berwick, the illegitimate son of King James II of England and Arabella Churchill, sister of the first Duke of Marlborough.

When Montesquieu was presented at Court, he was not impressed by George II, however, he had more respect to Prince of Wales, who asked Montesquieu to made for him an anthology of the best French songs. Montesquieu, upon his arrival to France did assemble such a volume, however mistakenly thinking that the Prince already forgot about such insignificant request, did not sent him the song collection. That misunderstanding was resolved by his grandson, who presented the anthology to the Royal family in 1818, and the book since been kept in the Royal Library at Windsor.

From Parliamentarian circles Montesquieu got to know John Carteret, second Earl Granville and William Pulteney, first Earl of Bath. Looking through the eyes of the opposition to the first Prime Minister Robert Walpole, and tracking the debates in the Parliament of those days: outrage of the Commons on the desire of George II to maintain the standing army, which was considered a tyranny and usurpation; issue around the France fortifying port of Dunkirk against the Treaty of Utrecht; drama around the Bribery in Elections Bill, Montesquieu likely got affirmed that the right structure of the governmental institutions may provide the common good, even if personal desires of politicians are purely selfish.

Montesquieu writes “the Bill [Bribery in Elections] is miraculous, for it has passed against the wishes of King, Lords, and Commons, and the most corrupt of Parlaiments has done more than any other to ensure public liberty”. Charles Townshend, trying to channel the public outrage away from the Government, and scheming to make Commons to strike the Bill down, expected that if the Lords pass the fierce amendments, raising the penalties to ridiculous 50 or 500 pounds (with initially proposed 10), the Bill would die in Commons. However, the lower Chamber did not want to be caught in the trap, and eventually passed the Bill, and reluctant King and even more reluctant ministers signed it.

Number of people Montesquieu knew, including two of his friends, Waldegrave and Duke of Montagu, who was the Grand Master, were members of the Freemason society. No surprise we read in The British Journal on Saturday May 16^th 1730: “We hear that on Tuesday night last, at a Lodge held at the Horn Tavern in Westminster… the following foreign noblemen… Charles-Louis President de Montsquier… were admitted members of the Ancient and Honourable Society of Free Masons”.

After the return from England, Montesquieu not only did not forget the association with Freemasons, but enthusiastically participates in the Paris, and later, in Bordeaux Lodges, convincing his son, Jean-Baptiste, then eighteen years old, to join the Lodge in Paris, as we read in The Whitehall Evening Post for 5-7 September 1734: “We hear from Paris that a lodge of free and accepted masons was lately held there, at Her Grace the Duchess of Portsmouth’s house, where His Grace the Duke of Richmond, assisted by the Earl of Waldegrave, President Montesqueir… admitted several persons of distinction into that most ancient and honourable society, among whom were… the President’s son”.

However, that association caused some grief for Montesquieu later. In 1737, Claude Boucher, intendant of Bordeaux, writes to Cardinal Fleury that he had forbidden Montesquieu to associate to the rest of society because of his freemasonry. Fleury approves this step, and asked Boucher to relay to Montesquieu personally the displeasure of the King about the Freemason society. After the Bull of the Pope Clement XII, issued the following year, condemning the association with the Freemasons, there were left no direct mentions of Montesquieu’s relations with the freemasonry.

To be continued…

What Must Be Said about the Samson Option

These days an interesting, and may be a turning point social and historic event is unfolding in Germany. The most famous living German writer Günter Grass has published last week his new poem What Must Be Said, in which he protests about the Western hypocrisy when Israel is encouraged to strike first and annihilate Iran, while the Israeli nuclear threat to the world peace is played down by all means.

This publication is truly an unprecedented event. Before, the German public discourse did not allow any freedom for a respectable public figure to say anything critical about Israel. That was reserved for the marginal neo-Nazi and revanchist groups, members of which have been quickly and readily routed and jailed.

Such a prominent figure of a renowned novelist, poet, sculptor and the Nobel Prize laureate breaking the Taboo is an unheard before mutiny against the consent of the cultural life of Germany, which may manifest beginning of a new era in the German national consciousness.

Of course that poem stirred quite a reaction in Israel, tells the article in National Post German Nobel laureate accuses Israel of plotting to ‘wipe out the Iranian people’:
“What must be said is that it belongs to European tradition to accuse the Jews of ritual murder before the Passover celebration,” said Emmanuel Nahshon, Deputy Chief of Mission at the Israeli embassy in Berlin, in a statement.”

It may seam this scandal is only German, Israeli and, may be, Iranian a matter. However, there is a significant international importance in the questions brought to light by the poem.

To better understand the poem and these questions we need to look at them in the context of the, so called, “Solomon Option” – the Israeli nuclear program and its aims. The main secret about the Israeli nuclear arsenal is not its existence, or even its contents, but the reason why it exists and what cities and countries it targets.

It may seam that the “Solomon Option” is merely a very expensive toy of the Israeli ego, which does not have a realistic practical scenario of its use. Indeed, it could not be used against Palestinians, for number of reasons, but the main is that would be nuking the very territory of Israel (in all means of this word).

The nuclear arsenal of Israel could not be used against its neighbors, too. The nuclear weapon is a very poor tool of genocide (we will leave the moral considerations alone for a moment, and look only at utilitarian aspects), especially against the dispersed rural population of the surrounding Arab countries. As well, it has very limited military capabilities, and works well only against local targets of high importance and  occasional concentrations of the troops. The former threat is mitigated by the deep burying of such targets underground, and the latter – by the proper command and control.

The only real functionality of the nuclear weapons is to be a weapon of terror. Ideal targets for this are the large unprotected cities. However, the use of the nuclear arsenal against the capitals of neighboring Arab countries would be a political suicide for Israel, even if it were under attack.

More on that, the Israeli nuclear arsenal and its means of delivery are not suited to attack the regional targets. It’s estimated that Israel has from 100 to 400 nuclear warheads, most of which are installed on the strategic intercontinental ballistic missiles Jericho III with the range of 7180 miles, which capable of reaching most of the continental USA; with the rest being “nuclear suitcase” devices – literally a weapon of terrorism.

The missiles are deployed in the deep underground silos, capable of withstanding preemptive nuclear strike, or on the submarines of Dolphin class of German production, Günter Grass is talking about in his poem (actually he mentions the sixth one of the fleet). These all are the weapons of the second, or the “dead hand” strike. These weapons are destined not for the local neighbors, but for the distant Nuclear Powers.

What purpose the targeting of Nuclear Powers may have? Ron Rosenbaum in his book How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III, and Seymour Hersh, in Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal & American Foreign Policy argue that the purpose of the Israeli “Samson Option” program is the nuclear blackmail, and the best guaranty of the American “unconditional support” of Israel. If Israel feels the threat for its existence and suspects that its allies are planning to abandon it, it will “bring down the pillars of the world”, attacking world capitals.

Louisiana State University professor David Perlmutter and Israeli military historian and theorist Martin van Creveld are even more elaborative about the Samson Option:

“What would serve the Jew-hating world better in repayment for thousands of years of massacres but a Nuclear Winter. Or invite all those tut-tutting European statesmen and peace activists to join us in the ovens? For the first time in history, a people facing extermination…have the power to destroy the world. The ultimate justice?”

“We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force. Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: ‘Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.’… We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.”

That is the threat Günter Grass is talking about, and these questions he raises about the real source of that threat to the world’s peace is the reason he gets the smear campaign for.

Charles-Louis Montesquieu and Social Anthropology #2

Continuation of the previous part…

…In the first Letters, touched by nostalgia for the home the Persian travelers Uzbek and Rica left, Montesquieu introduces readers to Persian culture, sparkling further letters with references to other Persian (Zoroastrian), Hindu, and, of course, Greek and Roman customs. He uses cultural comparisons of those cultures and the cultures of the contemporary Europe as starting points to reflex on social and political themes.

In Letters we can already find ideas, though expressed yet in a brief form, which will be laid in foundation of The Spirit of the Laws. In Letter 78 Montesquieu presents the idea that the most effective government is the one that achieves its goals by the less invasive means, as well as the type of government suited for a particular society the most depends on its cultural background:

It seams to me that the most perfect government is that which fulfills its purpose at the lowest cost, and therefore, that government which controls men in the manner most appropriate to their proclivities and desires is the most perfect.

If, under a tolerant government, the people are as obedient as they are under a harsh government, then the former is preferable, since it conforms better to reason, whereas harshness is alien to it…

The imagination adapts itself automatically to the customs of the country one inhabits; a week in prison or a small fine weigh as heavily on the mind of a European raised in a moderate society, as the loss of an arm intimidates an Oriental. People associate a certain level of fear with a certain level of punishment, and everyone feels it in his own way; despair at the idea of disgrace will oppress a Frenchman sentenced to a penalty that would not deprive a Turk of a quarter of an hour’s sleep.

In the story of the Troglodytes (Letters 11-14) Montesquieu enters the discussion with Thomas Hobbes, about his idea of “natural rights” (to be an asocial being). Montesquieu’s Troglodytes is an hypothetic Arabian tribe, a direct descendant of the hairy, ugly, indistinctly speaking prehistoric men, described by ancient Greek and Roman historians, who were called Τρωγλοδύται (Troglodutai) – literally cavemen. Whom Danish biologis Carl Linnaeus, the founder of the first scientific classification system of species, classified as a separate species of Homo – Homo troglodytes.

There lived in Arabia a people known as the Troglodytes, few in number, they were the descendants of those ancient Troglodytes who, if we can believe historians, resembled animals rather than men. These men were not so ugly, nor had they fur, like bears; but they were so cruel, so savage, that they did not whistle when they spoke… but they were wholly devoid of principles of equity or justice.

The appeal to theme of the prehistoric men is not a surprise for the one who wants to question Thomas Hobbes’ thinking on social organization, because that is the point where Hobbes starts his argument. What is fascinating is the very mentioning of the whistling by Troglodytes during their speech, the peculiarity identified by the ancient Roman historian of the first century AD Pomponius Mela. That whistling, along with the close relationship with the earliest humans and the absence of principles of justice are strikingly similar to the African pygmy tribes of !Kung, mentioned in earlier chapters, with their clicking languages, asocial behavior and the oldest genotype.

In opposition to the Hobbesian (or our contemporary Libertarian) believes of the sufficiency of the Social Compact of any kind to hold society together, Montesquieu argues that such ego-centric societies won’t survive social or natural evolutionary bottle necks, and deprived of the compassion and moral virtues, will destroy themselves.

The only two families surviving due to their virtue and their descendants, who got burdened by it, and who decided to elect a king, became a blueprint for the discussion of the two types of government in The Spirit of the Laws: the republic of virtue and the limited monarchy, with the characteristic and paradoxical conclusions that the weight of the virtual republic demands is tremendously heavy and requires “modification of soul” and works not for everyone, but “mediocre” people, while in the limited monarchy the liberty feels much more at home:

“…Troglodytes; your virtue is becoming burdensome; in your present situation, without a leader, you have to be virtuous in spite of yourselves, for otherwise you could not survive… but you find this yoke too heavy to bear, you prefer to be subject to a prince and to obey his laws, which would be less strict than your own customs; you know that then you will be able to satisfy your ambition, amass riches, and live a life of ease and self-indulgent pleasure; and that, as long as you avoid serious crime, you will have no need of virtue…”

One more of the key ideas of The Spirit of the Laws, visible in the story of Troglodytes, is that the solely positive role of religion in social life is the softening of morals:

Troglodytes became aware of the gods… and the softening influence of the religion tempered those customs which still retained a certain harshness from earlier primitive times.

They instituted festivals in honor of the gods: young girls, wearing flowery garlands, and young men celebrated with dances and pastoral music; feasts would follow, where joy and moderation ruled side by side; it was at these gatherings that voice of innocent nature let itself be heart, where the young men learned to offer and to accept a heart, where the modest virgin would be surprised into a blushing admission, which the fathers’ approval would quickly ratify, while the tender-hearted mothers took pleasure in the prospect of a sweet and faithful union.

They went to the temple to beg favors of the gods, not riches or an onerous abundance, for such desires were unworthy of the happy Troglodytes, and it was only on behalf of their compatriots that they asked for these; no, they approached the foot of altars solely to beg that their fathers enjoy good health, that their brothers marry loving wives, and that their children be loving and obedient; the young girls came to the temple to offer the tender sacrifice of their heart, and asked no other blessing than they might make a Troglodyte happy.

The example of religious celebrations of the imaginary Arabian tribe of Troglodytes looks strikingly similar to the Jurjev or Kupala Day of the Slavic tribes or similar celebrations of the spring equinox and summer solstice of the other European pagan cultures.

However, religion does not only positively affects the social life by softening the morals. The zealous, intolerant religions break the social peace and have to be eradicated by the prudent lawgiver, Montesquieu argues in The Spirit of the Laws. In the Letter 59, an example of such zeal is reserved for a Christian bishop:

An emperor called Theodosius put to the sword all the inhabitants of a town, even the women and young children, and then presented himself at the entrance to a church; a bishop, Ambrose by name, ordered the doors to be shut in his face, as if before a murderer and sacrilegious man; in this, he committed a heroic deed. The emperor, having completed the penance that such a crime demanded, and being then admitted into the church, went and took his place among the priests; the same bishop made him move away, and in this he acted like a fanatic and a madman: so true is it that we must beware of our zeal. What did it matter to religion, or to the state, whether the emperor did, or did not, stand among the priests?

Continuing the debate with the Hobbesian and Lockean understanding of the “natural rights” in Letters 67 and 81, Montesquieu repeats after Cicero that a man posses an innate moral imperative; and not just a man, but by the nature of Universe God has the same imperative, too:

Men can commit injustices, because it is in their interest to do so, and they would rather satisfy themselves than others. It is always through thinking of themselves that they act unjustly; no one is gratuitously bad, there must be a reason which determines the act, and that reason is invariably one of self-interest.

But it is impossible for God ever to act unjustly; once we assume that he is aware of justice, it is necessary that he should act according to it, for since he needs nothing, and is sufficient unto himself, he would be the most evil of all beings were he evil without the motivation of self-interest.

So, even if there were no God, we should always love justice, that is, try hard to resemble that being of whom we hold so perfect an idea, and who, if he existed, would necessarily be just. Although we would be free of the bonds of religion, we ought not to be free of the bonds of justice.

Such, Rhedi, are my reasons for thinking that justice is eternal, and independent of human conventions; if it were to depend upon them, that would be a terrible truth which we would have to conceal from ourselves…

Otherwise, we would live in a state of perpetual fear; we would walk among men as among lions, and we would never know a moment’s security about our life, our possessions, or our honor.

Montesquieu comments in Letter 101 on the famous concept of John Locke that people have the right to rebel against the oppressive government. This idea has been enthusiastically taken on the shield by the Founding Fathers to justify their rebellion against the British Crown, as we read in the Declaration of Independence: “…when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government…”

Despite the noble sounding rhetoric of the Lockean thinking, Montesquieu sees in these ideas only an expression of the right of the strong:

According to the English, the crime of high treason is simply the offense the weaker party commits against the more powerful, in disobeying him, regardless of the nature of the disobedience. So the people of England, finding that they were stronger than one of their kings, declared this king guilty of high treason for having made war against his subjects. They are, therefore, entirely correct when they say that the precept in their Qur’an, exhorting them to submit to those in power, is not really difficult to obey, since it is impossible for them not to obey it, in that it is not to the most virtuous that they are obliged to submit, but to the most powerful.

This assessment has been fully confirmed by the very Founders only nine years after adoption of the Declaration. The Orwellian newspeak of the Constitution Preamble – “insure domestic Tranquility” – means nothing less than renunciation of the rights of people to rebel against the Federal government.

In Letter 87 Montesquieu comes back again to the theme of comparing two types of government: virtuous republic and limited monarchy. There he chooses the strife for glory, the readiness for self-renouncement as a measure of liberty in society. He finds a commonality between republic and monarchy in that the both are friendly to, and protect man’s strife for glory, and, hence, the man’s liberty. The nature of the desire for glory is the same in all regimes – an extension of the self-preservation instinct by the imaginations of educated and creative persons. That is the desire that forced  student of Socrates, depicted in the Plato’s Republic, to reject the first Socrates’ model of the ideal city for artisans of crafts. For ambitious people with “erotic” desires that would be boring, dismal place to live. They want grander applications for their hungry for the greatness spirit:

The desire for glory is no different from that instinct for preservation that is common to all creatures. It is as if we enhance our being if we can gain a place in the memory of others; it is a new life that we acquire, which becomes as precious to us as the one we received from Heaven.

However, just as not all men are equally attached to life, they are not equally responsive to glory. That noble passion is certainly always imprinted in their heart, but imagination and education modify it in a thousand ways.

This difference, which exists between one man and another, is even more apparent between one nation and another.

One can posit that maxim that, in every state, the desire for glory increases in proportion to the liberty of the subjects… it is never the companion of servitude.

…In many regards, one is much freer in France than in Persia; consequently, here men love glory much more. That delightful illusion induces a Frenchman to find pleasure and joy in doing things which your sultan can only obtain from subjects by constantly confronting them with punishments and rewards…

But the sanctuary of honor, fame and virtue seems to be in republics, and in countries where there is a deep sense of patriotism. In Rome, in Athens, in Sparta, honor was the sole reward for the most signal services. A garland of oak or laurel leaves, a statue, or a eulogy were an immense recompense for a battle won or a city taken.

There, a man who had performed an outstanding feat, considered himself sufficiently rewarded by the action itself.

However, we later read in The Spirit of the Laws, the form and the reason for the pursuit for glory differ in republics and monarchies: in the former a man finds pleasure in the very act of helping his fatherland, and in the later – the reason is not important, but the shear impressiveness of the act. Yet, without a guidance of wisdom and morals, both luck an end in themselves and lead to militarism and empire-building.

In the Letter 97 Montesquieu touches the theme which will be unwound into couple books of The Spirit of the Laws – the laws of Franks, their origin from the spirit and the culture of the nation, the harmful effects of the borrowing Roman and Canon laws, the way the Gaul was conquered by Franks, and consequences of that for the legality of the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV or Fronde:

Who can believe that the most ancient and powerful kingdom in Europe has been governed, for more than the last ten centuries, by laws which were not created for it? If French had been conquered this would not be hard to understand. But they are the conquerors.

They abandoned the ancient laws made by their first kings in national general assemblies; and the odd thing is that the Roman laws they adopted in their stead were, in part, made and written by emperors who were the contemporaries of their own legislators.

In order that the acquisition might be complete, and that all their good sense might come from elsewhere, they adopted all the Papal Bulls, and have based a new part of their law on them: a new kind of servitude.

In the Letter 99, Montesquieu again returns to the paradoxical idea that the limited monarchies of the Europe saved, carried through the ages, and amplified liberties of Classical republics, though there always exists a danger for the limited monarchy to degenerate into despotism, with the grave consequences for monarchs themselves:

Most European governments are monarchical, or rather bear that label; for I do not know whether such governments have ever actually existed: at any rate, it is impossible that they should last long: such states are unstable, and invariably degenerate into despotism or republicanism. Power can never be shared equally between the people and the prince; the balance is too difficult to maintain, power necessarily always diminishing on the one side while increasing on the other; as a rule, however, the advantage is to the prince, who heads the armies…

Nothing brings princes so close to the condition of their subjects as does this immense power they hold over them, for nothing makes them more vulnerable to the reversals and caprices of destiny…

European nobleman are in different situation [relative to Persian ones]: for them disgrace deprives them of nothing but goodwill and favour; they retire from court, and expect only to enjoy a peaceful life and the advantages of their birth. As they are rarely put to death except for the crime of high treason, they are wary of committing this, when they weigh what they have to lose against how little they would gain; consequently, one sees here few rebellious, and few princes who die a violent death.

In Letters 102 and 103 Montesquieu‘s personages Rhedi and Usbek debates the role of arts, pursuit of sensual and material pleasures in promoting progress and civilization. Rhedi sees in those only signs of decadence, while Usebk (and Montesquieu after him) considers the passion to acquire wealth as the engine of modernization and promotion of the liberty:

A woman has decided that she must appear at a gathering wearing a particular style of finery: consequently, from that moment, fifty artisans can no longer sleep, nor have time to eat or drink; she commands, and is obeyed, more promptly than our monarch would be, because self-interest is the greatest monarch on earth.

This passion for work, this passion to acquire wealth, affects people of every condition, from the artisan to the nobleman; nobody wants to be poorer than the man he’s just seen, whose situation is by a mere hair’s breadth inferior to his own.

Later in The Spirit of the Laws, in the last books devoted to the problem of introduction of liberty and democracy into despotic regimes of Asia, Montesquieu sees the solution of the unwinding and opening such regimes in literally subverting the rigid morals of the despotic cultures by introducing Western goods of luxury, tokens of vanity and fashion. The idea is not to attack the aboriginal culture directly, which spirit inevitably creates laws of despotism, but make locals lukewarm toward to and make them forget about their original culture while they are busy acquiring the prestigious products of the West.

The precious locomotives of such change are the women. Victoria Secret garments, even worn under burkas, are much more powerful tools of democratization than the missiles and bombs falling on the heads of their husbands from al-Qaeda.

It is interesting that effectively the ideas of Montesquieu’s “progressor’s manual” were applied to Japan in nineteenth century and now to China, in the order Montesquieu predicted these countries will be brought into the orbit of Western civilization, while the Middle East remains the hardest task by his assessment.

In series of Letters (108-118) Montesquieu discusses influence of the religion, customs, governing practices, climate and terrain on the human population. This thinking he will extend in The Spirit of the Laws on the whole theme of the human history and explanation of the outcomes of the clashes of civilizations. Here, in Letters, Montesquieu starts the discussion with the weirdly sounding, for a contemporary reader, premise:

How has it come about that the world is so sparsely populated, compared with former ages? How has it come about that Nature has lost that miraculous fecundity of earlier times? Might she already have reached old age? Could she be loosing her vitality? … There are men who claim that the city of Rome alone once contained more inhabitants than the greatest kingdom in Europe does today…

In the time of Montesquieu views of the Dutch scholar Isaak Vossius (Isaac Voss) about the decline of European populations since the Classical times were popular, until David Hume put then into questioning in 1751 in his work Of the Populousness of the Ancient Nations.

The idea of the depopulation of the Europe, which lasted until the Age of Enlightenment or even our times, might, indeed, be regarded as absurd if we talk about absolute numbers. However, if we turn our sight to the relative numbers, the numbers of the Roman Empire population comparing to the world population, the question above may become looking not so ridiculous.

Conservative estimations based on the Augustus census give the figure of 55-65 million people living under the Roman rule in the whole Empire, with about 35 million in its European part. Comparing that with the estimation of the world population at those times in about 200-300 million people, we get at least the same ratio between the today’s “Golden Billion” of the Western civilization and population of the rest of the world, or the ratio of the European and world population at times of Montesquieu (100 to 600-700 million). Recent, more liberal estimations give the Roman Empire population a figure of 80-120 million, which translates into a staggering ratio of the almost half of the world population living under the rule and culture of Roman civilization.

Among the factors promoting or inhibiting the population growth Montesquieu see the religion:

The religion of the Romans forbade polygamy, and in this enjoyed a huge advantage over the Islamic religion; divorce was permitted, which gave it another, no less significant advantage over Christianity.

If China fosters such an amazingly large population, it is due simply to a certain way of thinking; for, since children look upon their parents as gods, respect them as such in this life, and honor them after their death with sacrifices in which, they believe, their souls, annihilated in the T’ien, are reborn into a new life, everybody is induced to increase a family…

As well as the customs of the culture:

The Romans did not have fewer slaves than we do, they actually had more, but they made better use of them.

Far from forcibly preventing their slaves from multiplying, on the contrary, they actually encouraged them in every way they could; they united them as much as possible in a kind of marriage; by this means filling their houses with domestic servants of both sexes and all ages, and the state with a vast population.

…the Republic employed its slave population to infinite advantage. Every slave had his peculium [a “bank account”, formally belonging to slave’s master, because slaves were not permitted to have property by the law, but technically owned by the slave]…; with this he worked, applying himself to whatever occupation he felt suited his skills…

Those slaves who, thanks to their own conscientiousness and hard work, grew rich, bought their freedom and become citizens. The Republic renewed itself constantly, welcoming new families into its bosom as the old families brought their own annihilation.

Obviously the climate and terrain:

When a country is inhabited, that is evidence of some particular defect in the nature of its climate; when we remove people from a benign climate and transport them to such a country, we are doing the exact opposite of what we intended.

The Romans knew this from experience; they sent all criminals to Sardinia…

The great Shah Abas, intending to deprive the Turks of their ability to maintain large armies on the frontier, transported almost all the Armenians out of their country, and sent more than twenty thousand families into the province of Gilan, where practically all of them very soon perished.

However, the most important is the cultural and political habits of the people, what Montesquieu continues to stress over his later works again and again:

Tolerance in government encourages, to an astonishing degree, the propagation of species. All republics offer constant proof of this, above all Switzerland and Holland; judged by the nature of their terrain these two countries are the worst in Europe yet they have the largest populations…

The human species multiples in countries where abundance supplies the needs of the children, without in any way infringing upon the resources of the fathers.

The very equality of the citizens, which generally produces equality in their fortunes, brings to each part of the body politic abundance and vitality, disseminating these everywhere.

It is fascinating how Montesquieu identifies the emergence of republicanism in Greece as an accident in the Letter 125:

The first governments in the world were monarchies; it was only by chance, and by the passage of time, that republics were born.

Paradoxically, there were Persians who triggered that “accidental” republicanism in Greeks. From the ancient times Greeks recognized they have common roots of ancestry with Persians. The latter were believed descended from the legendary hero Perseus – the similarity of the hero’s name and the name of Iranian peoples is not an accident. That was also a noble kinship. Diodorus Siculus mentions that when Zeus was looking for the mother-to-be of his future son Heracles, the prospective High King of people, Zeus was looking for the female descendant of Perseus.

Unlike the commonly distributed opinion that Greeks despised and hated Persians, they really heavily borrowed from the Achaemenid culture in times of their close encounters (not always peaceful, or rather not peaceful at all) in V century BC, argues Margaret Christina Miller, professor of archeology at University of Sydney. This borrowing coincided with the steep rise of the wealth of Greece, and even common folks were able to afford Persian luxury goods. To distinguish themselves from the commoners, Grecian aristocracy came up with the ideas of spiritedness, self-renounce and self-restriction of the early Grecian republicanism.

Despite that “accidental” invention of the republicanism by Greeks, Montesquieu reiterates again and again that the republicanism is the unique invention of the European civilization and stems from its specific cultural background that adores the liberty, but the Asiatic culture is perfectly suited for the despotism:

When I first arrived in Europe one of the subjects that most exercised my curiosity was the history and origin of republics. As you know, most Asians have not the faintest concept of this type of government, and their imagination has not even enabled them to grasp that any form other than despotism can exist upon the earth…

It seams as if liberty is made for the spirit of the peoples of Europe, and servitude for that of the peoples of Asia. In vain did the Romans offer the Cappadocians this precious treasure: the cowardly nation refused it, and welcomed servitude with the same alacrity that other peoples show in welcoming freedom…

Meanwhile, countless unknown peoples emerged from the north, and spread like raging rivers across the Roman provinces; finding it is as easy to make conquests as to practice their piracy, they divided up those lands and turned them into kingdoms. These were free peoples, and so strictly did they limit the authority of their kings that that the latter were in fact no more than leaders or generals. These kingdoms, therefore, although created by force, never felt the yoke of the conqueror… Some of these peoples, such as the Vandals in Africa and the Goths in Spain, would even depose their king the moment he no longer suited them; and in other cases the authority of the monarch would be limited in a thousand different ways: his power would be shared among a large number of lords, whose agreement was required before a war could be undertaken; war booty was divided between leaders and soldiers; no taxes to benefit the king were permitted, and all laws were passed in national assemblies. Such were the fundamental principles of all those states which were created from the ruins of the Roman Empire.

To be continued…

JetBlue captain meltdown, American Airlines fligh attendant meltdown, what’s next?

For a short period of time we hear yet another story about psycho meltdowns of members of air crews. What is this? Are those just weird, atypical exceptions, without any lessons to be learned? Or these are the manifestations of the underlying systemic crisis? Isn’t it logical to expect anything else from the over-stressed, under-payed people as a result of the cost cutting (on one side of the pipe), and bottom-line improving, share-holders pleasing (on the other side), measures?

Should we take these indicators lightly? Probably not, as Daron Acemoglu (Killian Professor of Economics at MIT) and James A. Robinson (David Florence Professor of Government at Harvard University) say in their new book Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty.

These meltdowns may be important indications of the shift from the inclusive to extractive economy, impoverishing or prospering nation, successful of failing state…