RIP Jimmy Carter

The best ex-President since Taft.

Tanit

Tanit was the chief goddess of Carthage, but that is where agreement about her ceases. She was usually  represented in this striking geometric way. So it is easy to find thousands of images of her from all across Carthage's empire.

As to where she came from, well, just her wikipedia article says in one paragraph that the name obviously comes from Berber and is thus North African, in another that the name comes from Ugarit, and in another that it may be derived from Astarte, the Phoenician mother goddess, equivalent to Ishtar. So, yeah. 

Probably best to think of her as the local variant of the Great Goddess worshipped across the Middle East. Some online sources say that before Carthage became independent of Phoenicia in the 6th century Astarte was the main goddess, and Tanit only emerged after 500 BC. So perhaps her rise was attached to local Carthaginian pride.

In Roman times she was assimilated to various Greco-Roman deities, and started to look like this.

One of my favorite things about these great goddesses is the number of things they were associated with: fertility, virginity, civilization, farming, the moon, war, plague. And, sometimes, human sacrifice. But then I suppose there is no special reason a powerful, immortal being has to have limited interests.

How Joseph Schumpeter Imagined the End of Capitalism

My quest to understand why Americans are so grouchy despite living through what looks to me like the best fifty years in human history has led me to Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950). Schumpeter prophesied that capitalism would end, not because of its failures, but because of its success.

Schumpeter's theory had two related parts. First, he imagined that ever-rising material wealth would lead people to become more sensitive to the insecurity and constant change that capitalism inevitably causes:

Secular improvement that is taken for granted and coupled with individual insecurity that is acutely resented is of course the best recipe for breeding social unrest.

The second part of the theory has to do with the rise of a large intellectual class. Growing wealth leads to ever more education, and some fraction of people become intellectuals. By "intellectuals" Schumpeter meant what others have called the "chattering classes," the people who have lots of opinions that they constantly share with the public:

Intellectuals are people who wield the power of the spoken and the written word, and one of the touches that distinguish them from other people who do the same is the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs….

By their nature, intellectuals are a critical bunch, and Schumpeter predicted that as capitalism created more and more wealth, intellectuals would become ever more critical of it. One usually sees this argument cited against the post-World War II Left, the "cultural Marxists," all that stuff about the inauthenticity of consumer capitalism and so on. (All the discussion of Schumpeter I have found  this morning comes from conservatives.) But it seems to me that it applies equally to the nationalist right, the people who constantly complain about the decline in manufacturing jobs and the hollowing out of small towns left behind by the economy. Capitalism creates constant change; that is its essence. If you are a conservative because you want to preserve what John Boehner called "the world I grew up in," then you fit into Schumpeter's model just as well as Herbert Marcuse.

I find much about this persuasive; if our unhappiness requires a rationale, maybe this is it. I am not sure, though, that there is really anything to explain. Part of me thinks that evolution shaped human nature to be perpetually unsatisfied, and nothing else is really need to explain why the wealthiest and most free people in history think their society sucks.

Links 27 December 2024

Ceramic Dancers from Han Dynasty China 

Rebuilding the wooden roof of Notre Dame de Paris.

More about the MAGA vs. Big Tech split over Indian immigrants, from Kevin Drum and Noah Smith.

How an obscure 1915 change in immigration law led to a huge boom in Chinese restaurants in America.

Great side gig for Utahans who look like Jesus. Or how Mormons imagine Jesus.

Medieval people healing themselves by eating images of the saints.

Amazing Hellenistic tomb excavated in western Greece, lots of gold.

Jennifer Pahlka wants to "bring Elon to a knife fight;" can he reform the government where so many others have failed? Would you root for or against that? Interesting essay that won one of David Brooks Sydney Awards.

At Slate, Molly Oldstead argues that the drone/alien craze happened because people have traded old-fashioned religion for a grab-bag of random paranormal beliefs. The number of people who regularly attend religious services has plummeted, but the number of atheists is still small.

The story of the endangered Bechtel's Bat and Britain's HS-2 train; it seems that there may not have been any bats along the train's route until scientists went looking for them using hi-tech lures. I have similar issues with bat preservation in the US, where "endangered" bat species have a habit of showing up everywhere anybody looks hard for them. On Twitter/X.

Interesting 11-minute video on South Korea, which connects the low birth rate to widespread resentful misery: "People are finding it easier to opt out of the system and just get angry instead."

Since 2000, immigrants, who make up 14% of US residents, have won 40% of the Nobel Prizes granted to Americans. Some MAGA guy on Twitter yesterday said that we don't need imported scientists because "we built the bomb and got to the moon on our own," which inspired a lot of chuckling.

Kitchen efficiency in 1899: the Hoosier Cabinet.

In the cities where they have trained, Waymo driverless cars have about one tenth as many accidents as cars driven by people.

Interesting French post on an old tidal mill on the southwest coast, an area where saltworks, developed in the Middle Ages, were later turned in to fishponds, oyster nurseries, and water channels for the tide mill.

Revisiting San Francisco's recently ended experiment in "de-tracking" high school math. Like almost all discussions of the subject it fails by not asking, "What is school for"? Or, more specifically, "Why do we care if anyone learns algebra?"

The decline of stay-at home-mothers has more to do with high wages than ecomonic distress.

Interesting NY Times article on crime and homelessness in New Mexico, free for now. Includes the famous line, the killer "had been prescribed medication for schizophrenia but often refused to take it."

Video emerges of a new, large Chinese fighter jet with no tail and three engines; some people are call ing it "sixth generation." Certainly drove aviation Twitter/X into a frenzy.

Asked what transportation success story he wants to talk up in his final days on the job, Pete Buttigieg says, "fish culverts."

Wooden shoe and other well-preserved objects from a 15th-century privy.

Bronze statues and coins found at the San Casciano dei Bagni hot springs in Tuscany.

Wars get uglier the longer they last. Here is a tweet saying that of the 147 confirmed Russian executions of Ukrainian POWs, 127 have been in 2024. And here is Haaretz, Israel is Losing its Humanity in Gaza.

Soviet Cybernetics

From Tyler Cowen's interview with Stephen Kotkin:

COWEN: Why were the Soviets so obsessed with cybernetics and AI, say, in the 1960s? Is it that they understood where things were going? Or it just was a big stupid mistake?

KOTKIN: You can never rule out big stupid mistakes if we’re honest, certainly about our own lives and analogizing from them. The Soviets were interested in cybernetics because it was about more efficient ways of gathering and using information — the planned economy at core, which was a fantasy, never a reality.

In practice, the planned economy was central control over some scarce commodities, resources, products so that you could prioritize. And you could therefore supply those privileged factories in your supply chains with the scarce resources to produce predominantly military-industrial products, but not exclusively, and the rest of the stuff come what may. That was black market, including black market factory of factory.

Cybernetics was a solution whereby you could make planning work better. You could optimize the information you were getting from the localities, and then you could optimize the way that you organize things. It was a fantasy in a different light, and it’s the same one that the Chinese Communist Party has today, which is to say if your authoritarian politics and your productive economy don’t mesh very well, turn to technology, turn to technological solutions to get beyond the fact that you refuse to do the structural reforms on the institutional side to ensure that the productivity, the dynamism continues.

It’s this eternal fantasy that science and tech will enable you not to have to give up central control, power, Communist Party monopoly. From the scientific point of view, it was fascinating because that’s who they were. They were exceptional world-class mathematicians, world-class physicists, world-class computer scientists, and so for them, it was the same thing it would be for scientists anywhere.

The whole interview is very interesting, especially on life in Magnitogorsk. 

MAGA vs. Big Tech

Richard Hanania, a grouchy libertarian I read on Twitter/X sometimes, has landed in the middle of an angry internet fight that he thinks has important implications. He wrote:

The right wing civil war is going to be over Indians.

The populists hate all immigration. The Tech Right will go along with them on Latin America and Africa because of the skills issue. They'll go along with Muslims because of cultural concerns.

High-skilled Indians is the one group where racism is the only explanation for wanting to restrict numbers.

He got thousands of responses to this and other, similar tweets that generally go like this:

Why should Americans not prioritize other Americans over Indians?

I want my kin to get into American schools and companies before foreigners do. Is that irrational? Is that a problem?

I would rather the USA slide down into an economic/technological backwater than deal with this preponderance of third world genius/saints. Our native stock is only overlooked because we are too expensive for the corporate/academic world and much harder to coerce.

Hanania responded by reaching deep into his bag to throw the worst insult in his lexicon at MAGA:

Again, this is the exact same logic and worldview of the wokes. Merit, talent, and economics don't exist. Every group could succeed as well as every other. If one gets ahead, it's because it practiced racism. You can get the demographic balance you want through will power. . . . I told you nationalists had the same resentment-fueled collectivist ideology as the wokes.

White nationalists are just like the woke! Come to think of it, he has a point; Imbram X. Kendi and Steve Bannon do agree on one thing, that if their people are not getting ahead it is because they are being blocked by nefarious forces.

Hanania thinks the alliance between MAGA and right-wing types will be short-lived because the tech world needs high-skilled immigrants:

This is one of the biggest splits between MAGA and the Tech Right. MAGA doesn’t want foreigners around no matter how talented they are. Tech people know that’s crazy. They’ll try to argue to MAGA that it is about letting in people with high skills but that won’t convince them.

I loved this exchange:

Commenter - I could invite smart strangers to live in my house too, but I don't for mostly the same reasons I don't want mass meritocratic brown foreigner importation. Why would I want infinite Indians in my home country just because they can do mid-tier IT work? I care about more than GDP.

Hanania: Right, you're also driven by hate and a sense of inferiority.

As a side effect of all this, Hanania started to hear from dozens of Indian tech workers thrilled that a white conservative is standing up for them in such strong terms. Several even donated to his Patreon. He wrote to them directly:

To all Indians out there. I know it’s been a tough day. You have seen the face of racism. But know that you belong, and together we will defeat the bigots. They do not represent who we are.

I wonder if this is right. Is the "tech right" going to split from Trump and MAGA over H1-B visas and Indian immigration? If so, who will win?

Researching Some Random Images from Pinterest

I don't know what other people do on a lazy Christmas afternoon, but I like to visit my Pinterest and track down the many unidentified or misidentified objects I find there. Above is one that had no ID, which I correctly guessed was a modern Inuit work; turned out to be "Shaman with Wings" by Lucy Tikiq Tunguak, Canadian artist born 1939.

This delightful deer is a terra cotta work from Kashir in India, 4th century AD, now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. I would have guessed medieval Turkey or central Asia.

This mysterious pewter object has been identified by self-proclaimed online experts as a Renaissance amulet, a classical Roman amulet, a recent metal detector find by a guy named Dave Caplan, and a work by a contemporary artist named Dave Caplan. I checked all the artists I could find named Dave/David Caplan and could not find any work that looked remotely like this. So, still a mystery. Pewter decays faster than any other metal I know of, so if this really is classical piece it must have been deposited in weird circumstance.

Carolingian stone cross from western France, appeared in a travelling exhibit of Carolingian art in 2014.

This one intrigued me because it looks medieval, but on the other hand it is just the kind of medieval design contemporary artisans would enjoy re-using or modifying. Somebody on Facebook identified this as "Plate of the western golden gates of the Nativity Cathedral in Suzdal, 13th century." Suzdal Cathedral is a famous Russian monument constructed in the 12th century, and it seems to have a lot of gilded metal inside, so that fits.

Obviously steppes; turned out to be a Scythian work now in the Hermitage Museum.

Knotwork from Iona Abbey, photo by Martin Burns, 2005. Memo to the person who posted this on Pinterest: this is not a "spiral." Not all Celtic art is "spirals."

This one is "St. Francis by a Polish artist named Antoni Rzasa (1919-1980), dated 1960-61.

Made no headway on this one. Medieval slavic?

AI Book Recommendations

People have been asking LLMs what five books people should read to help them lead better lives. Chat GPT:

1. Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl
2. Atomic Habits - James Clear
3. The Power of Now - Eckhart Tolle
4. Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
5. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen Covey

Here is Grok:

1. Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
2. Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl
3. The Art of Loving - Ethan Fromm
4. The Power of Now - Eckhart Tolle
5. How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie

The Fairy Melusine, the House of Lusignan, and the Château de Saint-Jean-d’Angle

The Château de Saint-Jean-d’Angle is a modest castle in the west of France, surrounded by salt marshes along the Seudre River, near the mouth of the Garonne. The original castle was a plain shell keep, a type more common in England than France. The exact date of its contruction is much disputed, with various sources offering dates from the 980s to the 1280s; I lean toward the reign of Henry II of England, 1154-1189. Much of what you see today dates to a major restoration completed in 1624, as shown by a dated stone in the foundation of the hall. But anyway the castle might be quite old, which is crucial to its contemporary reputation. 

Because whenever it was built, it belonged to the Lords of Lusignan. The Lusignan family was famous for two things. First, their part in the Crusades and the Latin East in general; one branch became the Kings of Jerusalem when that title meant ruling mainly over Cyprus. Second, they are supposed to have been made great by the Fairy Melusine. One of the things Melusine is supposed to have done is built a bunch of castles for her Lusignan husband, and the propaganda of the privately owned castle proudly proclaims it the only Lusignan castle remaining from the time of Melusine.

The earliest full version of the Melusine story was The Romance of Poitou or Lusignan, alias the Tale of Melusine, composed around 1390 by Jean d'Arras. Arras said he was following "old chapbooks and spinning tales," and there is no reason to doubt him, since various elements of the story are ancient and widespread. The first historical figure in the House of Lusignan was Hugh I, who would have lived around 900 AD. In fact the first six Lords of Lusignan were all named Hugh, which creates certain difficulties for tying the legend to history, since in the Romance the Lord of Lusignan is named Raymondin. But who cares! Let's just say our castle dates to "the time of Melusine" anyway.

The story of Melusine starts like this:

One day while King Elainas was out hunting he stopped to quench his thirst at a spring, whereby he heard the voice of a woman singing. Here he met the fairy Pressine, though he questioned her he could not learn from where she came. They were married with the one condition that Elainas promise to never interrupt her while she was lying-in. Pressine gave birth to triplets, three daughters; Melusine, Meliot, and Palatine. Upon hearing the news that Pressine had given birth, Elainas could not contain his joy and burst in upon her while she was bathing her daughters. Pressine flew into a wrath of anger and promised that from then on her descendants would avenge her. She left with her daughters for the home of her sister the Queen of the Lost Island.

Medieval illustrators loved this discovery scene

The theme of broken taboos repeats twice more in the story, always leading to disasters. Melusine's personal curse, acquired by violating one of her mother's prohibitions, is that every Saturday her lower body turns into a snake. She eventually marries Raymondin of Lusignan, strictly prohibiting him from ever seeing her on Saturday, which of course he eventually does, but not until after they have had ten sons, each with a different strange deformity, and she has made the family rich and powerful. The Lusignans have lots of descendants, including both the Hapsburgs and the English royal line, so the story became quite famous across Europe.

My personal favorite story from the Romance concerns Geoffrey of the Giant Tooth, one of Melusine's sons, who went crazy and massacred a hundred monks over an incident invovling one of the monastery pigs. Incidentally Melusine didn't die at the end but only sank into a rock, and if you find her golden key you can set her free and marry her. But I'm not sure I recommend her as a spouse.

As a prominent house the Lusignans had many homes much grander than our little castle. Their main seat, Lusignan, is illustrated in the Tres Riches Heures of Jean, Duc de Berry, but nothing of it remains standing.

But back to Le Château de Saint-Jean-d’Angle. Poitou was fought over for centuries by the kings of England and France, and one assumes that the castle had some role in these wars, but neither the usual online sources nor the PowerPoint-mad local historian of Belle Saintonge has any details.

The first known fight at the castle took place in 1568, when it was besieged by Protestant forces during the Wars of Religion. This did "significant damage" to the castle, which is presumably why it needed the major restoration of 1624. The restoration was carried out by Charlotte Saint-Gelais de Lusignan, about whom I have been able to find out nothing else. At that time the castle acquired a carving showing Melusine in her bath, or so written sources say, but it must not look like much because I can't find a picture of it.

By 1990 the castle is pretty bad shape, as this image shows. Removal of the vegetation, I read, revealed "catastrophic" conditions.

In 1994 it was acquired by a businessman named Alain Rousselot. Rousselot got some grants from the French government and restored it, turning it into a "medieval theme park" with trebuchet demonstrations and the like.

Whatever it takes, I guess. And if "from the time of Melusine" helps draw people in, I'm not really going to complain about that, either.

Three-Faced Gods

Above, some Celtic three-faced gods from Roman Gaul. The obsession of our Indo-European ancestors with the number three has of course spawned a lot of speculation, much of it focusing on the quirks of our language. But I am not really convinced by any of it. There is a wonder to these triplings, a mystery, something we can almost grasp but that remains just outside our grip, a notion that things can be the same in some ways but nonetheless distinct, a basic idea that the divine world does not follow mundane laws. I would look to that sense of mystery rather than to any "explanation."

Anyway, these carvings did not disappear with Christianity, as you can see from the medieval versions below, all in French churches of the 12th to 15th centuries. Love the three-faced Pope, which hints that there used to be more of these images in now-vanished church paintings.

Again, I am reluctant to assign much meaning to these. Maybe they have something to do with the Trinity; maybe they are memories of ancient three-faced gods; maybe they are just arresting, provoking images that are really fun to carve.

Everyday Life in Greek Vase Paintings

Harvesting olives.

Fishing

Wedding Procession, Amasis Painter, 550-530 BC

Women at the water house, c. 500 BC

Weaving

Woman at a laver, c 500 BC

Weaving, Amasis painter

Washing clothes

Shoemaker

Pet bird

School

Carrying water