Siberian Shamanism and the Perm Animal Style

Reconstructions made from detailed drawings

of a now lost archaeological collection from Perm

I wrote back in 2011 about the strange Elk Men of Perm, based on the artifact descriptions at the Hermitage Museum web site.

Today, trying to trace this amazing belt buckle back to its source, I discovered a weird and wonderful Russian web site with a lot more material on what its creators call the Perm Animal Style. With the help of Google translate, which seems to have gotten a little better at Russian lately (because of the war?), we can delve more deeply into what these objects mean.

Perm Animal Style (PZS) is the name of a style of cast bronze artifacts from the 6th-12th centuries AD created by the medieval civilization of the Urals. In the center of Eurasia, three roads to Siberia from Europe and Central Asia intersected: the Byzantine, Iranian and Scandinavian routes. At the gates of Siberia, at the intersection of roads in the Upper Kama region, a civilization with a special culture arose, leaving us its pantheon of gods and spirits, embodied in metal. Scientists call this civilization the Lomatov and Nevolin culture. The pre-literate culture of hunters was combined in the Kama region with a developed religious and magical system, born of the Ural civilization in dialogue with the great cultures of the world. 

The location of the modern Perm district, from which many of these finds come.

Medieval Norse sources mention a place they call Bjarmaland. From the narrative of Ohthere (c. 890) to the sixteenth century, various sources placed Bjarmaland either near the White Sea or much farther south, somewhere beyond Novgorod. A few words of Bjarmic that appear in the sagas appear to come from Finnish; Vikings traded there for furs. Most western authorities are skeptical about this wandering Finnish kingdom and think the stories about it are either garbled or just made up. 

But Russian archaeologists have taken over the name and applied it to the Perm culture, which they sometimes call Bjarmic. (The name has also been taken over by Russian artisans who make reconstructions of Perm artifacts, and by the makers of at least one Alternate European History game, which you can play as Bjarmaland.) It seems weird to this western archaeologist to use a name from Norse literature to describe an archaeological culture in central Russia. I suppose they wanted a name for their imagined cultural construct that would be distinct from terms describing the well known archaeological finds. What they have been doing, which I find so fascinating, is using the myths of Siberian cultures documented in the 1800s and early 1900s to analyze the iconography of Perm, calling the results Bjarmic myth. 

Hundreds of artifacts in this style are known, found either in burials or ritual deposits like this one:

This artifact was found in 1957 together with three other amulets depicting the goddess and fragments of a bronze cauldron. [That seems to be the factual part. But the text goes on.]  Perhaps this treasure was the result of the Sacrifice of the Seven Cauldrons. Seven cauldrons with amulets and other gifts were buried in the ground in a circle as an offering to the Goddess of the Earth. This circle blocked the opening to the Lower World, from which illnesses and other misfortunes came. The ritual was preserved by the Khanty.

Here is an example of this interpretation, a continuation of the paragraph above, describing this object:

The goddess stands on spiders, weaving a web, along which the souls of the dead must pass over a boiling resin river. We see the waves of this river at the bottom of the composition. People pray to the goddess, they are in trouble. The goddess with wings is the first ancestor of the family (the mask on the chest) and the intercessor for people before the supreme deity. An amulet of special power, this would have been invoked only when misfortune (epidemic, invasion) threatened the whole people. 

I love this. Shamanistic lore often emphasized the peril of the bridge to the other lands, which might be described as a giant sword blade or a thin rope, but I have never seen it described as a spider web.

The motif of standing on animals represents being carried by them. Which is wonderfully shamanistic; Siberian shamans often described themselves riding on magical animals in their otherwordly journeys.

Notice the circles drawn on the foreheads of these triple goddesses. Our authors interpret this as a sun sign, because the Khanty had a sun ritual in which they drew such circles on the foreheads of the participants, using the blood of the sacrificial animal.

Then there is the figure known as "the deity surrounded by elk." (Or moose, same word in Russian.)

These are interpreted as depictions of a boy hero found in the myths of several Siberian peoples:

This god had many names. The Mansi called this deity the Bright Boy, the Khantyn Alvi, the Tarpyg, As-tyi-iki. As-tyi-iki was revered in the form of seven babies; the Khanty of the 19th century believed that his native land was somewhere beyond the Urals.

Alvi from childhood was distinguished by his extraordinary intelligence and strength, first he broke a wooden, then a copper and iron cradle. He gave smart advice to his father, the heavenly god. As soon as he got out of the cradle, he performed feats, caught up and killed a six-legged elk, cutting off a pair of its legs. He nailed the skin to the sky, creating the constellation Elk (our Big Dipper).

These family scenes are thought to depict Alvi with his parents. 

Birds are common in this art, either in natural forms or in human-bird hybrids. Many stories describe the gods transforming into birds. Which is another shamanistic thing to do.

And this is (no, seriously) the Lame Owl God.

This one they could not connect to any surviving myth, but both lameness and bird suits have been associated with shamans for thousands of years, so it must represent a god or hero on some kind of shamanistic adventure.

Discovering all of this made my weekend.

Duff Cooper, "Talleyrand"

Talleyrand as the Man with Six Heads, 1815

Back when I was in my Napoleon phase I looked up lists of the best books about Napoleon and his era, and this 1932 biography was on most of them. So I ordered a copy. It is elegantly written, judicious, and compresses an extremely eventful life into 300 pages, so if you have any interest in this era I recommend it highly.

But what is one to make of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord?

He was born (in 1754) into one of France's oldest noble families, but a childhood injury left him with a maimed foot and a pronounced limp. Since he was not fit for the army, his parents naturally assigned him to the church. Over his vociferous objections he was sent to France's top seminary and his family then arranged for him to become the Bishop of Autun. Cooper has some excellent paragraphs about the (to us) shocking lack of emotion in Ancien Regime family life, and he finds several other nobles besides Talleyrand who recorded being treated by their parents as nothing more than future agents of their families' aggrandizement. If they received any tenderness as children it was from someone other than their parents, perhaps a grandmother or a nurse.

Already in his 20s Talleyrand was causing scandal. He had no interest in the church and did not bother trying to hide it. He spent all his time in Paris, attending salons where he honed his famous conversational skills, seducing women, and gambling at the card tables and on the stock exchange.

Then came the Revolution. When the Estates General were summoned Talleyrand went back to his bishopric to campaign for a seat in the assembly of the clergy, which he did by publishing a manifesto laying out a reform plan for the French church. The manifesto was well received and between that and his family name he was elected easily. Here we see one of the themes of Talleyrand's life: his desire to always be where the action was. In 1789 the Estates General was the place to be, so he arranged to be there.

In the Estates Talleyrand quickly understood that this was a revolutionary moment. He was not by nature a revolutionary, but although he would have preferred gradual reform he sensed the direction of the wind and joined the revolutionaries by renouncing his clerical privileges in a dramatic speech. He became a leader of the liberal faction in two successive assemblies, and he presided over some of the newfangled rituals the revoutionaries dreamed up to celebrate their new "natural" calendar. But he could never take their enthusiasm seriously; the story goes that while processing across the Champ de Mars for one Revolutionary festival, dressed in red, white, and blue, he turned to the Marquis de Lafayette and said, "Please don't make me laugh."

In those early years of the Revolution Talleyrand formed a philosophy of government that guided him for the rest of his life. He wanted popular participation, but not democracy; he wanted a king to stabilize the system and provide a focus of loyalty; he thought the elite should be recognized. He often argued for a system like the British in having a monarch and two houses of Parliament, the upper house including the "natural leaders" of the realm, but like the American in having a written constituion that would enshrine key liberties such as freedom of speech and assembly. As a man who was most famous for the power of his conversation, which was often radical and scandalous, he always put freedom of speech at the center of his concerns. He was also a proponent of education, authoring a 216 page report laying out a national system which influenced the one put into place by Napoleon.

When the Terror came, Talleyrand fled into exile with many others. In London he found himself in a position he would occupy for the rest of his life: mistrusted by the royalists becaue of his part in the revolution but hated by the revolutionaries because they knew he despised their radicalism, and suspected by everyone of being a spy. He spent some time in America where his gambler's instincts led him to try his hand at land speculation.

After the Terror burned itself out France stumbled into a government called the Directory, which Cooper dismisses by saying "it had only one aim, to insure that those who had gotten rich off the Revolution could keep their profits." Talleyrand joined a group of men conspiring to overthrow it. They considered themselves capable of handling the political side, but they needed a military hero to serve as their front man. And wouldn't you know it, at just the right moment Napoleon Bonaparte returned to Paris from a string of stunning victories in Italy and a glorious defeat in Egypt, desperately eager for more power. With the help of one of his regiments, they arrested the leaders of all the other factions and proclaimed a government called the consulship, with Napoleon as First Consul. In those early days Napoleon still thought he might need advice from others, and he made Talleyrand his foreign minister.

Talleyrand held that post from 1799 to 1808. He respected Napoleon – really, it is hard not to respect Napoleon – but never liked or trusted him. Talleyrand always worked for peace, which to him meant discovering and respecting the essential interests of all the European powers. He took the lead in negotiating the Peace of Amiens in 1802, and tried his best to keep it from breaking down. But Napoleon would not accept Talleyrand's pacific advice and went on the warpath again, destroying the armies of Austria and Russia at Auschwitz (1805) and then those of Prussia at Jena and Auerstadt (1806). After each victory Talleyrand tried to persuade Napoleon to make a generous peace, but Napoleon would not listen and instead imposed punitive terms. After the "peace" imposed on Prussia Talleyrand no longer even tried to work with Napoleon but actively began conpiring against him, while still holding the post of France's foreign minister.

Thus, when the allies finally defeated Napoleon's armies and marched into Paris, Talleyrand was the one man in France they trusted to help them reach a settlement. They had no policy beyond overthrowing Napoleon, no agreement over what kind of government would replace him. Talleyrand, of course, had a plan ready, and he persuaded the allies to accept it: restore the Bourbon dynasty to the throne, but with a written constitution and a powerful assembly elected by universal male sufferage. At first the allied leaders were puzzled; would France really consent to be ruled by a fat, useless old king after the dynamic Napoleon? Yes, Talleyrand answered. And he turned out to be correct; when the first elections were held they returned a solid majority of royalists, who won almost every jurisdiction outside Paris, Marseilles, and Lyon.

Talleyrand's constitution of course included an upper house as well, but France no longer had a nobility. The king would therefore have to create one. He turned to Talleyrand, who drew up a list of sixty names, including both his leading friends and those of his enemies he thought were worth dealing with. (Now there's a great thought experiment: you, like Talleyrand, have somehow ended up having to draw up a list for a new American nobility that would replace the Senate. Who would you choose? And who would you choose from the opposition, as being the people you want to deal with?)

Meanwhile the powers were meeting in the Congress of Vienna to redraw the map of Europe. Talleyrand of course represented France. When he arrived he discovered that the four major allies (Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Britain) had set things up so they alone would negotiate the terms of the treaty, which would be presented to all the other nations for their approval. Talleyrand roused up all the smaller nations to fury over this and got the allies to admit himself and the Spanish ambassador to their inner circle. From there Talleyrand persuaded the British and Austrian ambassadors that rising Russian and Prussian power threatened their interests, so they needed a strong France to support them; those three nations actually signed a secret defense pact, and as a result France emerged with remarkably lenient terms.

Unfortunately Napoleon undid much of the goodwill Talleyrand had achieved with his return from exile and 100 Days' campaign, and after his defeat France lost Belgium and also much of the art Napoleon had looted across Europe. But Talleyrand had insured that the alliance of all the powers against France would not endure.

Talleyrand was a private citizen for the next 14 years. Toward the end of the 1820s he sensed that the French were getting tired of the increasingly reactionary Bourbon government, and he saw an opening to move France away from monarchical reaction and back toward mixed government. He funded a newspaper that took an anti-Bourbon line and was one of the leading planners of the July Revolution of 1830, which put Louis-Phillipe on the throne with a more liberal constitution.

Just from that career summary you can probably understand why Talleyrand had been so controversial. When he turned against Napoleon, wasn't it his duty to resign his office, rather than remaining in it for two years while he conspired against the government he was part of? It's just one example of the duplicity that his critics hate: he remained bishop while carrying on love affairs and helping to seize all the property of the French church for the government; he presided over Revolutionary ceremonies he thought were ridiculous; he joined governments he despised, so as to undermine them from within; he enriched himself with bribes and insider trading; he was always for peace, but that sometimes meant telling the Poles or the Italians that they would have to wait for their freedom. He put the Bourbons back on the throne and then helped overthrow them.

But from another point of view he was remarkably consistent: always for peace, always for moderation and a mixed constitution, always for free speech and a free press, and also always for his own enrichment and his own amusement.

How does one judge such a person, and such a life?

Harvest

I only grow cherry tomatoes now because when I grew big tomatoes the squirrels used to come and take a bite out of every one. This way they take about the same percentage but what remains is still edible.

Bulla Regia

Bulla Regia is the name by which we know an ancient town in northern Tunisia. 

Finds of Greek pottery show that it existed in the 300s BC; inscriptions record that in the 200s it became part of the empire of Carthage.

Street

Bulla Regia was part of the territory won for Rome by Scipio Africanus in 203 BC during the Second Punic War. The Romans seem to have put the Numidian king Masinissa in charge, since an inscription records that he "recovered the lands of his ancestors." In 156 BC he made Bulla his capital.

Baths

In 46 BC it became part of the new Roman province of Africa, and pretty much everything you can see there today dates to the Roman period.

Site plan, a big file if you want to click and read

The town declined in the Byzantine period and was destroyed by an earthquake in the late 400s.

The glory of the site today is a group of villas built with their main floors underground. Here and at the top of the post we look down into one of the two famous villas, the House of Amphitrite

Each of these villas was built around an atrium in the normal Mediterranean way, except that the atrium was 20 or so feet below the surface. This is the other famous villa, the House of the Hunt. Presumably this was done to escape from the desert heat.

Staircase entrance

Statue of Aesculapius

These villas were lavishly decorated with mosaics, which are quite well preserved. Some of them are still on the site, while others have been moved to Tunis.

Priestess of the Imperial Cult

More views of the House of Amphitrite

I was stunned by these images because we love to imagine that archaeologists might dig down into the ground and find whole buildings with their walls still standing, somehow buried nearly intact. Usually archaeology is nothing like that, but here it is. The lower floors of these houses were filled with rubble or sand and left alone until archaeologists came along to disturb them.

Amazing.

And I just couldn't resist one more image, this monument from a later Byzantine fortress on the site.

Joyce Carol Oates on Time and Loss

From an interesting interview in the NY Times:

In your book “On Boxing,” you have a line about how for fighters, life is about the fight and the rest is just waiting. Do you feel that way with writing?

That’s a good question. It points to a philosophical issue of what is essential in our lives and what is existential or incidental. Thinking of my early married life, my husband was a professor, and we talked about books all the time. Though we talked and talked for years, I don’t really remember that dialogue. I don’t remember the students I was teaching, whom I loved. It’s 2023, and I have to concede that I don’t remember those students. All I have left of all that happiness is my writing of that time. A book or two, some stories. I think that’s a profound fact. It’s a kind of devastating fact. Everything that you think is solid is actually fleeting and ephemeral. The only thing that is quasi-permanent would be a book or work of art or photographs or something. Anything you create that transcends time is in some ways more real than the actual reality of your life. If you set your hand on fire right now, it’s ephemeral. It would hurt, but Plato would say it’s not as real as something that transcends time. I am a person who was married, and was very happily married. Yet, that’s all gone now. Where is it?

Why People Fight Wars

Another essay from my old web site, this one from 2009:

Malcolm Gladwell'’s latest essay is thought-provoking but, I think, misguided. Misguided in an interesting way, though, which I have been intending to write about it since I read his piece.

It's called "How David Beats Goliath: When Underdogs Break the Rules." The thesis is that if weaker combatants use traditional strategies, they lose, but they can often win by adopting unfamiliar strategies. One of his examples is a girl's basketball team without any talent to speak of that made it far into national championship tournaments by using a full-court press on every play. Another concerns a fellow who won a naval wargaming tournament by building fleets that made no sense in real world terms but worked wonderfully under the rules of the game; one of his fleets consisted of a vast swarm of completely immobile boats, each carrying no armor and a single large gun. The most significant examples come from the history of warfare. Weaker combatants often defeat stronger enemies using guerilla tactics, but they sometimes choose to fight toe to toe and get clobbered. Why would they do that?

David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful – in terms of armed might and population – as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.

In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. “I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it,” he said (in Robert Alter’s translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”

. . . Arreguín-Toft found the same puzzling pattern. When an underdog fought like David, he usually won. But most of the time underdogs didn’t fight like David. Of the two hundred and two lopsided conflicts in Arreguín-Toft’s database, the underdog chose to go toe to toe with Goliath the conventional way a hundred and fifty-two times – and lost a hundred and nineteen times. In 1809, the Peruvians fought the Spanish straight up and lost; in 1816, the Georgians fought the Russians straight up and lost; in 1817, the Pindaris fought the British straight up and lost; in the Kandyan rebellion of 1817, the Sri Lankans fought the British straight up and lost; in 1823, the Burmese chose to fight the British straight up and lost. The list of failures was endless. In the nineteen-forties, the Communist insurgency in Vietnam bedevilled the French until, in 1951, the Viet Minh strategist Vo Nguyen Giap switched to conventional warfare – and promptly suffered a series of defeats. George Washington did the same in the American Revolution, abandoning the guerrilla tactics that had served the colonists so well in the conflict’s early stages. “As quickly as he could,” William Polk writes in “Violent Politics,” a history of unconventional warfare, Washington “devoted his energies to creating a British-type army, the Continental Line. As a result, he was defeated time after time and almost lost the war.”

Now, this is very interesting, but it begs the question of why people compete in the first place and what it means to win. Consider the example of George Washington, who comes in for a lot of mockery here and elsewhere. Washington, a conservative scion of the Virginia elite, abandoned the irregular militia tactics that overwhelmed the British at Lexington and Concorde and tried to build a European-style army. Which the British defeated again and again. Why did he do that? Was he too hide-bound to see the folly of his actions? Gladwell is not the first to question Washington’s tactics, which were controversial at the time. Future President John Adams thought Washington was making a mistake, and radicals like Thomas Paine suggested he was trying to lose the war. But I submit that Washington built the Continental Army because he was after something other than just winning the war. As far as he was concerned, the war was effectively won before it was even begun. If the goal was for Americans to rule themselves, they had already achieved that, and there was nothing the British could do about it. They simply did not have the resources to conquer and rule North America. So as long as the Americans remained committed to independence – willing to live with trade embargoes and the occasional British raid – they would be independent. So whatever Washington was doing, winning independence had little to do with it. 

Washington fought, first, to make the British and the other Europeans recognize American independence and, second, to shape the kind of America that would emerge after the war. For America to live at peace, they would have to get the British to give up trying to rule them, and the easiest way to do that was to inflict on the British the kind of defeat which they would have to recognize as one. Lexington, Concorde and Bunker Hill did not get the British to recognize the United States, and it might have taken decades of similar small losses to get them to give up. Yorktown did it at a stroke. Yorktown converted America, in the eyes of the European elite, from a bunch of rebellious farmers into a real nation with whom treaties could be signed and the like. Washington, as a would-be member of that elite, understood its rules better than Malcolm Gladwell ever will. Washington knew that beating the British at their own game would have an effect guerilla warfare never could.

Washington was also thinking, from the beginning, about the kind of America that would emerge after the war. He wanted it to be unified, and he wanted it to be led by educated, rational men, not demogogues and rabble. By building the Continental Army he created the nation's first unifying institution, and by making the nation something the elite could be proud of he ensured their participation in the government. Washington and Tom Paine did not just disagree about military tactics, they disagreed about ends. Paine wanted a decentralized, highly democratic society without a dominant elite, so militias using guerilla tactics were a perfect means to achieve it. Washington wanted a centralized, elite-dominated nation, so he built a conventional army, knowing full well that it would be hard to ever beat the British in a traditional battle.

Besides the question of goals, there is the problem of cost. When guerilla warfare succeeds, it is often at a terrible cost to the guerillas and their allies. Why did the Vietnamese communists keep trying to fight the French and then the Americans in conventional battles, which they always lost? Because the burden of fighting an unending guerilla war was terrible, and they were desperately seeking some way to bring the war to an end. They did eventually win as geurillas, but at the cost of a million lives lost and three decades of their nation's history wasted. Their tactics did, in Gladwell's terms, change the terms of the battle, from one of money and technology to one of simple staying power, but the cost they paid for their victory ought to keep anyone from blithely recommending such tactics. The Romans eventually managed to beat Hannibal’s Carthaginians by avoiding open battle with his army, but for them the cost was also extraordinary.

When Tom Paine was castigating Washington for his conservative approach to military affairs, he suggested that even if Washington marched the rest of the army away, the Pennsylvania militia could defend Philadelphia by barricading the streets and fighting house to house. It might have worked. Then again, it would more likely have caused the British to pull back, put the city under siege and lob in red hot shot until every building had burned. They may have been conventional, but they were not stupid, and their conventional playbook included means of dealing with cities that refused to do the gentlemanly thing and lay down their arms. Would loss of the city and hundreds of its citizens have been worth a year or so of "freedom" under siege?

Besides the years of misery and death that waging a guerilla war brings, it can also be very destructive of traditional social arrangements. Why didn't the Confederacy resort to guerilla warfare to fight the Union? Because the southern leadership understood that fighting on those terms would destroy their social and political dominance more surely than defeat, and they were not interested in a "victory" that would thoroughly obliterate their class. I am not well informed about the Latin American and Asian wars that Gladwell mentions, but I suspect similar concerns dictated the behavior of the losers in many of them. Gladwell’s argument seems to assume that winning a war is worth any price, but most combatants would not agree. A colonial power might prefer to hold onto its colonies, but not if it means bankrupting the country; after all, the point of colonies is to make the parent country richer and more powerful, not to drain its resources. Likewise, a colonial elite might prefer independence, but not if it means fighting until all their sons had been killed and all their plantations burned. Those parts of the world considered "ungovernable" by the great powers are those in which the traditional power structure lends itself well to guerilla fighting. The elite of Afghantistan and Somalia is strengthened, not weakened, by unending low-level conflict, so would-be conquerers lack the levers for moving elite opinion they have in other circumstances.

The question of why people are competing in the first place is even more central when it comes to basketball or naval wargaming. I don't play basketball to win. I would generally rather win than lose, but I play for the fun of it, and any strategy that won more games at the expense of the fun would defeat the purpose. For kids, part of the point is also to develop the skills you need to compete at higher levels, and the girls on Gladwell's all-pressure team don't seem to be doing that. Naval wargamers also don't just play to win. They play to imagine themselves as the admirals of past navies, and to do that they want their battles to be as much like those of history as possible. Fleets of odd contraptions that can sail only within the gaming space ruin the game for them. Why compete on those terms?

To assume that people compete to win is to miss most of the point in almost every circumstance. My friend Ted Lendon's marvelous book, Soldiers and Ghosts, lays out how the tactics chosen by ancient armies did not just reflect their technologies or their desire for victory, but the organization of their societies and, more importantly, what they saw as the purpose of fighting and winning wars. Victory, especially in low-level conflicts like those between neighboring tribes or rival city states, was often the third or fourth thing on competitors minds.

I don't mean to dismiss Gladwell's general point about underdogs needing to change the rules. In business, it is hard for new companies to break into well established businesses, but much easier for them to enter new businesses using the latest technology. Weaker armies can beat stronger forces by using guerilla tactics. Less skilled athletes can outhustle elite players.

What bothers me about Gladwell is his dismissive attitude toward underdogs who choose to play by the usual rules in the face of almost certain defeat. He seems to think they are either lazy or stupid. He fails to consider that they may have had other agendas beyond simple victory: personal glory, the honor of their nations, the reputations of their families, their fortunes, their lives. Some of them were playing long games that required them, in the short term, to be defeated. The Irish rebels of 1916 saw their mission as one of self-sacrifice, with the idea that the Irish would be inspired by their deaths to see Irish independence as a cause worth dying for. Most Americans think that the Japanese kamikaze pilots of 1945 were trying to defeat the American navy, and that, therefore, they failed. On the contrary, the commander of the kamikaze force told his pilots that the war was already lost. The point, he told them, was to set an example of such purity and sacrifice that they would give their defeated compatriots something to feel proud of during the grim days that would follow the end of the war. The outpouring of stirring kamikaze movies in the Japan of the 1950s suggests that he was right, and that their defeat was a kind of victory, giving the Japanese something more noble to remember about the war than the Bataan Death March and the Rape of Nanking.

As for George Washington, clever people have been trying to destroy his reputation since 1775. Most of them are forgotten, but he endures, not for his conservativism or his battlefield bungling, but for his honesty, his devotion to the cause of American liberty, and his vision of a future far beyond the squabbles of the day. Perhaps he underestimated the difficulty of beating the British army in a set-piece battle, but he understood quite profoundly what it would mean for American to win its independence with a clear-cut battlefield victory. He could imagine what kind of America might emerge from a thirty year guerilla struggle fought mainly from mountain redoubts, using tactics he probably thought of as Indian savagery. He also knew something about building a nation. He knew that service in the unified American army would tie officers from the South and the North together, and he knew that shared sacrifice, shared victory, and shared myths would help America become something more than thirteen separate colonies. At Long Island, at White Plains, at the Brandywine, he fought on British terms and lost. But in losing, he won something much greater than battles. Perhaps Malcolm Gladwell should reflect a little on what that might be. 

 June 13, 2009

Links July 21 2023

Uboat control room, 1918

Significant dinosaur discovery made a few miles from my house in Maryland; well, significant by East Coast standards, anyway. (NY Times, ungated)

Bonkers "history" of the US from 1860s Japan, with mountain spirits and giant snakes.

UT Austin scientists have created an enzyme that can break down PET plastic in a matter of hours.

Unusual burial of a Roman soldier found in Wales.

Nice NY Times piece on the Appleby Horse Fair, in which the Times admits that many Gypsies call themselves "Gypsies."

Until I began following some Dutch guys on my Ukraine War Twitter feed I did not understand how big a deal the shootdown of flight MH17 is in the Netherlands. People still share videos of the funeral, like this one, and the Oryx guys say this is why the Dutch have been giving so much military aid to Ukraine.

More masked characters enacting out ancient European folklore, but these guys in northern Spain have the best outfits I've seen.

An essay arguing that artists and critics are starting to turn away from moralizing and toward aesthetics.

Review of David Graeber's posthumous book, Pirate Enlightenment, or The Real Libertalia, which argues that a fusion of European pirates with local Malagasy groups led to a decentralized and very free state called the Betsimisaraka. Seems like grasping at decentralized straws to me, if the best example you can find is so obscure and badly documented.

Web site with a ton of free images, including many vintage natural history illustrations.

Fossil of what seem to be a dinosaur and a mammal locked in combat.

Geothermal startup Fervo Energy claims to have achieved profitable results from its latest test, which involved deep horizontal drilling with technology developed for fracking. They say they are going ahead with construction of a 400 MW facility in northern Nevada that they hope will be online in 2028, powering 300,000 homes. (Threadreader, CNBC, Fervo website)

Interesting short post on Japanese histories of World War II produced in the 1945 to 1960 period.

In the US, imprisonment is declining, especially for black men: "Between 1999 and 2019, the Black male incarceration rate dropped by 44%, and notable declines in Black male imprisonment were evident in all 50 states. . . . For Black men, the lifetime risk of incarceration declined by nearly half from 1999 to 2019."

Dan Wang, an important writer on China, says that political centraliziation is only increasing while the economy and especially the tech sector get worse. Overall he thinks the Chinese economy is still strong but it has lost momentum and may be in for real trouble; he notes an increase in the number of Chinese citizens apprehended at the Mexican border trying to cross into the US.

The president of Stanford resigns after allegations that he faked his way to success in biochemistry. An investigation found no proof he committed fraud but three papers have been withdrawn and I am not buying his excuse that his subordinates did it without his knowledge. (NY Times, Science)

New historical theme park in Toledo, Spain is very popular but controversial because it tells the old nationalist story of reconquest and unity, with a sidelight on Toledo as a "crossroads of cultures."  (New York Times, London Times)

A recent report estimates that in our Post-911 wars, 8,000 US service members and 7,000 military contractors have died in combat zones; during that time, 30,000 have committed suicide. The report also estimates that 177,000 allies (Afghans, Kurds, Iraqis, etc.) have died in those wars, which suddently makes me wonder what the suicide rates are for Afghan and Iraqi veterans.

In Britain, "Just Stop Oil protestors have been surrounded by “Just Stop Pissing Everyone Off” protestors - preventing them from marching in the road."

The problem with being a centrist in America is that centrist parties are so utterly lame. Consider the No Labels town hall, which showed us that No Labels is against gun violence, the national debt, the mental health crisis, and partisanship, but has no clue what to do about any of them. (NY Times, USA Today) Asked who their candidates will be and what their platform is, Joe Manchin said those questions were "putting the cart before the horse." (RollCall)

The Strangeness of the Oppenheimer/Barbie double feature, which even has a name: the Barbenheimer. (NPR)

The fungi of Ecuador's cloud forests.

What is said to  be an entrance to the Zapotec underworld found under a church in Mexico.

Besides everything else he did, Benjamin Franklin experimented with new ways of making paper money more secure.

Ukraine Links

Thread on the counter-offensive: "By and large this in an infantryman's fight at squad, platoon, and company level. . . . Ukrainian forces have not mastered combined arms operations at scale."

Russia has been attacking in the north, toward Kharkiv, making limited progress and that probably at high cost. There have been rumors that this is the first stage of a big offensive, with talk of 100,000 men and 900 armored vehicles. Others say this is all hooey.

Russian blogger says there is an intense power struggle between two power blocs within the Russian military which is currently expressed as the Southern Military District vs. the rest.

Thread on demoralized Russians reporting that they are completely out of ammunition and sometimes even guns. (Threadreader)

Igor Girkin on July 14, very pessimistic, thinks Ukraine could break through in the south, and that this would have dire implications in Russia. And here Girkin calls Putin a coward and a mediocrity. And finally, on July 21, reports that Girkin has been arrested; was that his goal?

The US is stealthily buying artillery shells from Bulgaria and sending them to Ukraine.

Six-minute video of a Ukrainian infantry assault near Bakhmut, remarkably small-scale.

If you have a 75-minute drive coming up and want to learn something about modern warfare, consider Perun's video on artillery in battle, artillery attrition, ammunition use and production, and why cluster munitions (you don't need the pictures, it's really a podcast). The conclusion is that the cluster munitions might end up making a huge difference, because they are very effective for this kind of battle and the US Army has about 3 million that our government has grown queasy about using, at a time when both sides are starved for shells.

Diving into Pentagon budget documents, Thomas Theiner gleans details about US aid to Ukraine: $5 million worth of smoke grenades, $58 million for night vision equipment, 12,450 rockets for HIMARS, $41 million for 8,000 Excalibur guided artillery rounds, and $194 million more to increase US artillery shell production, bringing to total spent on that effort to $778 million.

According to Politico, "Allies’ ‘main effort’ for Ukraine shifting from donating weapons to fixing them."

A Wagner-linked telegram channel posted these figures for the Wagner operation in Bakhmut: 

• 78,000 fighters, 49,000 of which were convicts
• 22,000 killed, 40,000 wounded
• 25,000 are now "alive and healthy"
• 10,000 of those already in or going to Belarus

If true that means 28% were killed, 40% severely wounded, and only 32% "alive and healthy" two months later. Truly brutal losses, to take a town about as big and important as Grande Prairie, Alberta. This also makes the Ukrainian MOD's claim of 240,000 total Russian losses (killed, severely wounded, captured, deserted) believable.

Some Facts about Kenya

Lots of optimism from economists about Kenya, where the economic growth has averaged around 5% per year for more than 20 years running. (Michael Power, Tyler Cowen) A few facts:

The population is about 55 million, with a growth rate of 2.1% and a total fertility of 3.17; the UN projects that the population will top out at around 95 million in the 2050s, but other recent studies show birth rates declining faster than that. 

The government is a democracy; there are tribal tensions but since the largest ethnic group makes up only 17% of a very diverse population, no group can dominate and coalitions are inevitable.

Kenya has a thriving tech sector; the most-used mobile money Ap in the world is Mpesa, developed in Kenya.

Kenya has a long history of trading with India, and there are substantial Indian and Pakistani communities in Indian cities; Cowen said the best food he ate in Kenya was at Indian restaurants.

More recently Kenya has been developing strong ties with China, which has invested in Kenyan roads and railroads; there are also Chinese communities in Nairobi and Mombasa and many Chinese restaurants.

There is much small-scale manufacture done everywhere: "On a drive into the City Centre from Nairobi Airport — now much faster thanks to a Chinese-built highway — you can see roadside manufacture of beds, buckets, furniture, tin trunks, lamps, kitchen pots, jikos (ovens), coffins… you name it."

Kenya currently generates more than 80 percent of its electricity from renewable sources and has an official goal of reaching 100% by 2030. This is a mix of solar, wind, hydroelectric, and geothermal, drawing on the volcanic area of the Rift Valley; Icelandic companies are using state-of-the-art technology to help expand Kenyan geothermal plants. Off-grid solar powers hundreds of villages, and Power notes that from the air you can see the glitter of solar panels across the Kenyan bush.

David Graeber's Anarchist Attack on the Democratic West

I just discovered a 2007 essay by David Graeber titled "There Never Was a West" that lays out his ideas in a clear and reasonably concise way. I consider Graeber to be one of the most important and interesting anarchist thinkers in the world, and I think anarchism of this sort does have an interesting critique of liberal democracy. So let's take a look at what Graeber says. I am going to group Graeber's ideas under three headings.

Against the West

Graeber hated, and I really mean hated, any insinuation that the West invented freedom and democracy. He has a good time in this essay picking apart lists of western virtues like this one from Samuel Huntington, which Huntington seems to think applies to a tradition that stretches from ancient Athens to America in the 1990s:

individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state. . . .

It takes a special way of seeing to spot human rights on the slave plantations or democracy in the Roman Empire. As Graeber says, for most of that time span "democracy" was a dirty word, and it did not really become a thing people defended or wanted to have until the nineteenth century.

Graeber does not fall into the trap of arguing that the West was uniquely bad; he can be equally scathing about the rest of the world. But he wants to undermine arguments like Huntington's because he thinks the modern, western synthesis of strong states, representative government, and capitalism is a disaster for humanity, and he hates for concepts he cares about, like human rights, to be associated with that system.

I am with Graeber in his attack on sloppy narratives of western virtue. But that's partly because I believe the Enlightenment was a truly revolutionary event, and that all our modern philosophies of government derive from Enlightenment ideas. Enlightened thinkers drew from the classical tradition but also from many other sources, because by the eighteenth century the elite of the Atlantic world knew far more about the planet and its history than anyone ever had before. Graeber recognized the Enlightenment and is quite good on its diverse sources of inspiration. But he does not want to accord it much importance because the kind of system he is looking for is closer to traditional village life than it is to anything that emerged from the American or French Revolution.

Where Freedom Comes From

Graeber thinks "freedom" is what people have living in small-scale societies where state power is effectively absent. Democracy to Graeber means that all the people in the community meet together to discuss what ought to be done. Representation, he thinks, is a sham, a lie, and nothing to do with real democracy.

Most people, he says, don't want to call those village discussions "democracy" because they don't count votes. Instead they work very hard, sometimes in repeated all-day meetings, to reach a consensus. But voting, he says, was not something that ever had to be invented, so if people did not use it that was because they did not want to. Why not?

The explanation I would propose is this: it is much easier, in a face-to-face community, to figure out what most members of that community want to do, than to figure out how to change the minds of those who don’t want to do it. Consensus decision-making is typical of societies where there would be no way to compel a minority to agree with a majority decision; either because there is no state with a monopoly of coercive force, or because the state has no interest in or does not tend to intervene in local decision-making. If there is no way to compel those who find a majority decision distasteful to go along with it, then the last thing one would want to do is to hold a vote: a public contest which someone will be seen to lose. Voting would be the most likely means to guarantee the sort of humiliations, resentments, and hatreds that ultimately lead the destruction of communities. . . . It is not that everyone has to agree. Most forms of consensus include a variety of graded forms of disagreement. The point is to ensure that no one walks away feeling that their views have been totally ignored and, therefore, that even those who think the group came to a bad decision are willing to offer their passive acquiescence.

Majority democracy, we might say, can only emerge when two factors coincide:

1. a feeling that people should have equal say in making group decisions, and
2. a coercive apparatus capable of enforcing those decisions.

For most of human history, it has been extremely unusual to have both at the same time. Where egalitarian societies exist, it is also usually considered wrong to impose systematic coercion. Where a machinery of coercion did exist, it did not even occur to those wielding it that they were enforcing any sort of popular will. 

I find this quite compelling, although incomplete. I agree that something like democracy has prevailed in many small-scale societies. But not in large ones; pre-modern states were basically all ruled by some combination of monarchy and aristocracy. No state larger than a single town was any sort of democracy until the introduction of defined constitutions, representation, and majority voting.

Where I disagree with Graeber is in seeing all consensus-seeking discussions as democratic. Among the people I have studied, such meetings were always dominated by a class of leaders. Everyone may theoretically be allowed to speak, but in practice most of the speaking was done by clan chiefs, war leaders, elders, and so on. In some American Indian groups rule by large councils was mixed with hereditary aristocracy in a way that Graeber's model does not account for.

Graeber thinks that larger experiments in democracy have mostly sprung up in what he calls "places between," situations where older orders had been demolished and groups of ethnically mixed people found ways to get along. He is fascinated by the pirates of the 17th and 18th centuries, who did indeed engage in a wide range of experiments in governance. The Zapatistas of Mexico, who launched a famous revolt in 1994, arose when people from several different Indian communities, many of them former plantation workers, mingled in a rain forest zone that had been newly opened for settlement. He thinks the United States is such an experiment, and he writes eloquently about the mixing that took place on the frontier. He has no trouble finding contemporary witnesses who said Americans had learned to love freedom from Indians.

So democracy emerges, in this model, not from any philosophical tradition, but from diverse people working together to survive.

A Stateless World

Graeber hated states, because he associated states with coercion and violence; the goal, he thought, was to live without ever practicing or endorsing coercion. Graeber believed that this was possible, that modern people could live without states. And this is where I always lose the thread of anarchist thought. Graeber and his friend James Scott have been, I think, enlightening about the many different ways humans have found to get along without states or formal markets. But only some people.

Graber quotes Walter Mignolo on why the Zapatistas had some success in establishing stateless communities:

Democracy for the Zapatistas is not conceptualized in terms of European political philosophy but in terms of Maya social organization based on reciprocity, communal (instead of individual) values, the value of wisdom rather than epistemology, and so forth...

Graeber corrects Mignolo in a passage that will give you a good taste of his style and subject matter:

In fact, Zapatismo is not simply an emanation of traditional Maya practices: its origins have to be sought in a prolonged confrontation between those practices and, among other things, the ideas of local Maya intellectuals (many, presumably, not entirely unfamiliar with the work of Kant), liberation theologists (who drew inspiration from prophetic texts written in ancient Palestine), and mestizo revolutionaries (who drew inspiration from the works of Chairman Mao, who lived in China).

Which is fair. But I think Mignolo was right to point out that Zapatismo works, to the extent that it does work (the Zapatistas are still there), because the people are peasants raised in village communities. I suspect that communal decision-making is extremely difficult for people who did not grow up with it. Evidence comes from the myriad communes that have been founded in North America and Europe since the 1960s, only a few of which are still around.

And the second thing about village-style decision-making is that it only works in villages. In a traditional village, everybody shares the common culture, which makes it much easier to agree. Also, people in villages do a very limited range of things, compared to people in cities, so their governments don't have to deal with anything like the range of problems faced by a city, let alone a state. 

The richer the community, the wider the range of problems it faces, and less the average citizen knows about them. Would you like for your neighbors to be in charge of running a subway, a sewer system or an electrical grid? Count me out. There is a grotesque mismatch between the means Graeber and other anarchists propose to fix our problems and the kind of world we actually live in. Unless we are prepared to jettison airplanes, trains, modern medicine, the internet, and a million other things –plus a few billion people – we're not going to live in a stateless society.

In some of his moods Graeber understood this. His work with the Occupy project was less about changing the rest of the world than it was about living freely in one moment and building a community to share it with. He wrote, "We are already anarchists, every time we come to understandings with one another that would not require physical threats as a means of enforcement."

But Occupy faded away, like almost all other such movements, leaving nothing behind by bitter memories and jokes. 

I am attracted to anarchism because I think many things about our world are horrible, starting with the amount of violence and the vast system of coercion we have built to control it. So I keep reading, keep trying to understand. What always stops me is thinking about the astonishing complexity of our world, which I do not think could possibly be managed without hierarchies and bureaucracies, and my desire to live in a rich and varied world rather than a peasant village.

How to Read John Le Carré

Excellent Sam Adler-Bell piece in the NY Times about how to approach John Le Carré's books. Here are his recommendations:

Where to start:  The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, 1963

Best book: A Perfect Spy, 1986

Best spying: Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy, 1974

Most Underated: The Looking Glass War, 1964

Best female character: The Little Drummer Girl, 1983

Best post-Cold War book: The Constant Gardener, 2003

Personally I like the George Smiley books, because I love Smiley, and I never liked any of the others as much. (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Honorable Schoolboy; Smiley's People) If you want a film, I liked the movie version of The Little Drummer Girl better than the book, and it includes one of my favorite action scenes.

The Zapatistas and the Fall of Mississippian America

My readers know that I have long been fascinated by the relationship between the mound cities of the Mississippian Indians, between 1050 and 1700 AD, and the Indians of the 1700s. Indians of the better-documented eighteenth century did not live in mound cities, and many had an ideological dislike of living in towns or under states. I have long wondered if there was a conflict between the kings and aristocrats who lorded over the mound cities and other Indians who resisted their authority:

But not all Indians built mounds. At some times the habit was confined to a small area, at others it was widely distributed. But in every case the habit eventually faded away, and by 1720 it had completely disappeared. It seems that Indians embarked many times on experiments in “high” civilization, with big towns, massive earthworks, elaborate celestial observatories, and workshops of professional artisans turning out fabulous regalia for a powerful elite, and then a few generations later just walked away from it. They not only didn’t seem to regret giving up civilization, they proudly embraced life in the woods. One wonders if there was a long-standing tension between the power that the elites of a mound city could amass and the desire of others to live free. When disease wiped out most of the mound cities in the late 1500s, only the freedom-loving, anti-city people remained. And not only did they hate cities and central power, they forgot about their existence as quickly as they could.

So I was very interested in this, which David Graeber wrote in his essay, "The West Does Not Exist":

In fact, if my argument is right, what these authors are doing is searching for the origins of democracy precisely where they are least likely to find it: in the proclamations of the states that largely suppressed local forms of self-governance and collective deliberation, and the literary-philosophical traditions that justified their doing so. (This, at least, would help explain why, in Italy, Greece, and India alike, sovereign assemblies appear at the beginnings of written history and disappear quickly thereafter.) The fate of the Mayas is instructive here. Sometime in the late first millennium, Classic Maya civilization collapsed. Archeologists argue about the reasons; presumably they always will; but most theories assume popular rebellions played at least some role. By the time the Spaniards arrived six hundred years later, Mayan societies were thoroughly decentralized, with an endless variety of tiny city-states, some apparently with elected leaders. Conquest took much longer than it did in Peru and Mexico, and Maya communities have proved so consistently rebellious that, over the last five hundred years, there has been virtually no point during which at least some have not been in a state of armed insurrection. Most ironic of all, the current wave of the global justice movement was largely kicked off by the EZLN, or Zapatista Army of National Liberation, a group of largely Maya-speaking rebels in Chiapas, mostly drawn from campesinos who had resettled in new communities in the Lacandon rain forest. Their insurrection in 1994 was carried out explicitly in the name of democracy, by which they meant something much more like Athenian-style direct democracy than the republican forms of government that have since appropriated the name. The Zapatistas developed an elaborate system in which communal assemblies, operating on consensus, supplemented by women and youth caucuses to counterbalance the traditional dominance of adult males, are knitted together by councils with recallable delegates. They claim it to be rooted in, but a radicalization of, the way that Maya-speaking communities have governed themselves for thousands of years. We do know that most highland Maya communities have been governed by some kind of consensus system since we have records: that is, for at least five hundred years. While it’s possible that nothing of the sort existed in rural communities during the Classic Maya heyday a little over thousand years ago, it seems rather unlikely.

Certainly, modern rebels make their own views on the Classic Maya clear enough. As a Chol-speaking Zapatista remarked to a friend of mine recently, pointing to the ruins of Palenque, “we managed to get rid of those guys. I don’t suppose the Mexican government could be all that much of a challenge in comparison.”

The Necromancers' Cave

You never know what you might find, exploring a cave in the Judaean hills. As you can see from the map above, the Te’omim Cave is a large, complex cave; the central chamber measures about 50 by 70 meters.

The first modern scholars to explore the place came in 1873, part of the Survey of Western Palestine.

It was then named Mŭghâret Umm et Tûeimîn—“the cave of the mother of twins”—by local residents, who attributed healing properties to the spring water that flowed in the cave.

Archaeologists explored the cave in the 1920s and again in the 1970s. They found a mix of objects dating to all periods form the Neolithic to the Byzantine. A number of human and animal bones were also found. One of the most interesting discoveries was a rock cut pit 2 meters across, which collected water flowing from the spring into a pool.

There is a natural shaft at the back of the cave, 23 meters deep.

All of that is just background to the latest study, carried out by a team of archaeologists and geologists from  Bar-Ilan University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the direction of Eitan Klein and Boaz Zissu. Their article is quite fascinating if you are into this sort of thing.

Their main discovery was a large number of oil lamps dating to between 135 and 400 AD. Many are well preserved because they had been shoved deep into narrow crevices in the rock; some had to be extracted with long metal rods. In these deep cracks they found three human skulls and several artifacts, including Bronze Age spear points.

They believe that the cave was used for necromancy, that is, attempts to communicate with the dead. The evidence is quite strong. For one thing there was a lot of necromancy in the ancient world; some of our oldest magical texts from both Mesopotamia and Egypt concern rites for summoning and questioning the dead. In the Odyssey, Circe summons the seer Tiresias to answer questions from Oddyseus. Shrines where one could speak with the dead were common across the Roman world.

Necromancers loved skulls. Getting a skull to speak may have been the most common kind of necromancy. We have many such spells from all across the Middle East; in fact from Assyria we have a spell that is supposed to block a skull that might know your secrets from revealing them. On Lesbos there was a shrine where you could put questions to the skull of Orpheus. The early Christian writer Hippolytus of Rome wrote a whole book on how these shrines caused voices to seem to come from the skull.

William Blake, The Ghost of Samuel Appears to Saul and the Witch of Endor

Plus, we have very little indication that skulls were ever used in Middle Eastern ritual or magic for any other purpose than communicating with the dead. So the presence of skulls in what appear to be ritual contexts is pretty good evidence for necromancy. There are also texts that describe necromancers working in caves.

The lamps are intriguing. Obviously ancient magic often involved lighting a lamp, because you could hardly see without one. But lighting effects of various kinds are commonly part of magic and religious ritual worldwide, and they do appear in classical and older magical texts. This article mentions classical shrines where thousands of lamps were found, presumably because worshippers purchased and lit them just as modern Catholics sometimes purchase and light candles. Magical texts tell us that spirits could be summoned into flames, and one either heard their voices or interpreted the flickerings of the flame to learn their messages.

Plus, somebody seems to have done quite a bit of work to place these lamps in unusual places. These archaeologists think they were intended to do something other than illuminate the caverns – attract spirits from the deep? – but it strikes me that they might also have created weird effects in the main chamber.

I think there is a very good chance that these authors are right, and the cave was used for necromantic rites in late Roman times. As to what that means, I refer back to my recent post on Greek and Roman magic. People believed that hidden powers governed much of what happens in the world, whether that was gods, spirits, dead souls, or simply fate, and they were always looking for ways to influence those powers or employ them for their own ends. The ways they chose to do this are rarely surprising: to contact the dead you went to graveyards, or down into the earth. To speak to the dead you used a skulll, the speaking part of the body. You lured spirits to you with fire, because the underworld was dark and dead souls might come toward light and warmth. 

One point worth mentioning is that people sometimes summoned the dead for their power, but more often they sought their wisdom. After one summoned a dead soul, you asked it questions. You asked it questions about things the soul knew in life, like, where did you bury the family silver? Who is my real mother? You were a great warrior; how should I fight this battle? Other times one trusted that the dead, who were somehow closer to fate and the gods than the living, might know things no living human could. Who can I trust? Who are my enemies? What does the future hold for me? Will I be happy or sad, rich or poor?

People have long sought guidance in a world they cannot understand, full of random disaster and sudden death, riches for some and ruin for others, and there has always been an economic niche for people who trade in underworldly explanations of the mystery that is our world.

Policies Can Change

For a long time it seemed that exclusionary zoning in the American suburbs was just a fact of life. Suburbanites, people said, were so committed to defending their property values that nothing could ever be done to increase density and create more housing. But as Ezra Klein reports, that turned out not to be true:

Berkeley, Calif., was the first locality to mandate single-family zoning. In 2021, the Berkeley City Council voted to end single-family zoning, as the liberals who call it home came to see that it was a tool of exclusion. California followed suit, passing a bill that functionally outlawed single-family zoning across the entire state. In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed recently proposed reforms to the way housing is built in the city that delighted even the most hardened of YIMBYs. In Los Angeles, voters raised taxes on themselves to address homelessness and Mayor Karen Bass and the City Council just exempted affordable housing from a lengthy step in the planning process.

Statewide, Gov. Gavin Newsom has now signed more pro-housing bills than I can reasonably describe here, and he just passed a package of permitting and procurement reforms over the initial protests of environmental groups. And it’s not just California: Oregon and Maine also outlawed single-family zoning, and Connecticut and Massachusetts have taken steps in the same direction.

This is happening in the way major political changes usually happen, because a broad range of interest groups have pushed it for decades: young people afraid they could never afford a home, businesses worried about worker shortages, advocates for the homeless, property developers, immigrants, anti-racists, socialists who just like apartment buildings. Note that this list includes groups that lean toward both parties. It probably helps that the spread of homelessness has created an atmosphere of crisis in some places, like Los Angeles and the Bay Area.

Whenever you think that something just can't change, glance at history and ask yourself what has not changed over the past 200 years. The list is not long, and I don't think anything about land use is on it.