JustARandomPanda

Just for fun. So this thead is for a Buddhist Giveaway. I'll let this run until 12 pm PST (2400 hrs) Sept. 5. There's also a Taoist Giveaway so check that out too if you're interested. I'm going to have Amazon ship a brand new copy of the following book to whomever wins. I'll even have it shipped internationally should someone outside the U.S. be the winner. The only exception being if that person lives somewhere that Amazon doesn't deliver. The Diamond Sutra Explained by Master Nan Huai-Chin Think of a number between 0 and 200. The person closest to the number I'm thinking of will win the book. Post your guess. The winner can PM me once it's over for his/her shipping address.

I'm happy to announce the winner of the Buddhist Giveaway is Steve. He hit the bullseye! The number I had chosen was 88. I've sent a PM to request his shipping info (plus phone number and gate access code: Amazon wants to know all that stuff) and will be placing the order with Amazon today. Congrats to Steve and thank you to everyone who participated. May everyone have a wonderful weekend.

I am pleased to announce Zanshin is the winner. She was off by a single digit. The number I picked was 168. I'll be contacting her via PM and placing the order today. Congrats to Zanshin and thank you to everyone who participated. Have a great day everyone.

I've decided to speed up the awarding process. Close date is Sept 5 and the winners will be posted Sept 6. Everything else is the same.

I've decided to speed up the awarding process. Close date is Sept 5 and the winners will be posted Sept 6. Everything else is the same.

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Can someone give an explanation of what the differences between these two are?

Wanted to give everyone a head's up. I just discovered today that the book Changing Destiny: Liao Fan's 4 Lessons - with commentary by Venerable Master Chin Kung is available for Amazon's Kindle for only 99 cents. Unfortunately B&N doesn't offer it. Only ebook version I've found so far is the one for Kindle. You can however get a different translation (no commentary) as used copies at both B&N and Amazon as a paperback (I own it also). Four Essays on Karma by Yuen Liao Fan

Starting a new thread (maybe 3rd time's the charm?) because I'm interested in seeing what other people think. I am outright asking the Mods/Stewards to be the Coaches/Referees in the sense that I want this thread to stay in Off-Topic and if any Mod/Steward see anything that starts spinning out of control move in swiftly and split and pit. That's what was agreed upon by the old Mod Teams with Sean himself and what he himself preferred be done to just pitting the whole thing. ********************* I, for the moment at least, am not quite certain the West are true Fascist countries yet. I do think at the very least they're Oligarchic/Plutocratic. My thinking has changed a lot over the years from when I was young and in college. Back then I was a typical "liberal". What I now think of as more correctly known as an Egalitarianist. Although lately modern liberals are reclaiming the term Progressive. Most likely because the Right has successfully transformed the term "liberal" into a moniker for scorn. While I do not like the scorn and ridicule the Neocon Right often uses when talking about or at "liberals" I'm glad to see the term Progressive come to the fore again. If only because I'd rather see the term "Liberal" return to what it once meant in the very early 19th century. BTW - the current "Right" is something I do not agree with either. That is I don't agree that they are "rightwing" nor do I see them as Conservative. I've only come to this conclusion after years spent studying it and looking at the origins of many strands of political thought and historical events. To me the current US Right are actually left-leaning. They tend to support ideals that had their origin in the French Revolution rather than strictly British traditions of Liberalism such as John Locke. Hence the support for a strong military, using military and corporate power to "bring the Rights of Man" (aka nation-building) to all the other nations of the world, etc. You can find that same ideology and enthusiasm in the rhetoric of supporters of the French Revolution. 2. Another reason which I might post about later is much of the above is greased by the Managerialisation of developed-countries' society. The Management class/staffs of middle and large businesses whose interests do not coincide with what's good for nations as a whole. To ask if the West has become Fascist ignores that whole other aspect. But from what I've been studying it's a huge part of why the US and Europe are "systems stupid" (check out the following book for a good intro) when it comes to government and markets. 3. Money. The domination of money and credit in nearly all aspects of modern societies arrangements introduces systemic weaknesses. Basically it makes society a 'monoculture' of money. Back when Western societies had multiple competing methods of getting things done - 'gift economies', trading services for services (no I'm not talking only about barter), etc it meant that financial booms and busts and speculation were limited to devastating a smaller segment of the population. Now that everything has been given over to the 'marketization' of exchanges between humans it can bring down entire societies. The spread of money has increased certain kinds of efficiency for decision-making but at the cost of resiliency. There was a time when I thought under-developed nations's people were greatly disadvantaged by living on less than a dollar a day. Now I see it as a strength. Were these 3rd world societies to take on the sole method of exchange that the developed world does it would also be taking on the developed world's prone-ness to systemic financial risk and ruin that was not of their own making. 4. The above has occurred in government as well. Centralizing power in money and governing has increased the systemic risk to society as a whole. Just witness how two factions - the Tea Party Republicans and Obama democrats - are able to hold an entire nation hostage over arguments about how to treat debt and repayment of financial obligations. If there were serious multiple centers of power in the U.S. besides the duopoly of Wash. D.C. and Wall Street it would be much harder to pull shenanigans like this off. Those are just a few of my current thoughts on the subject. I'm not convinced just yet that the West is fascist. For one thing I'm not sure the West will be able to pay for what it takes to maintain a Fascist regime for the long haul. Heck...it may not even be able to pay for it much longer in the short run either. Curious to see what other people think. I might repost my short blurb on this subject I put in my PPF simply to open it up for others comments. Cheers.

Thought I'd post this again. Apech did a really good job summing some of this up.

From JMG's ArchDruid blog The recent round of gridlock in Washington DC may seem worlds away from the mythological visions and spiritual perspectives that have been central to this blog over the last few months. Still, there’s a direct connection. The forces that have driven American politicians into their current collection of blind alleys are also the forces that will make religious institutions very nearly the only structures capable of getting anything done in the difficult years to come, as industrial civilization accelerates along the time-honored trajectory of decline and fall. To make sense of the connection, it’s necessary to start with certain facts, rarely mentioned in current media coverage, that put the last few weeks of government shutdown and potential Federal default in their proper context. These days the US government spends about twice as much each year as it takes in from taxes, user fees, and all other revenue sources, and makes up the difference by borrowing money. Despite a great deal of handwaving, that’s a recipe for disaster. If you, dear reader, earned US$50,000 a year and spent US$100,000 a year, and made up the difference by taking out loans and running up your credit cards, you could count on a few years of very comfortable living, followed by bankruptcy and a sharply reduced standard of living; the same rule applies on the level of nations. Were you to pursue so dubious a project, in turn, one way to postpone the day of reckoning for a while would be to find some way to keep the interest rates you paid on your loans as low as possible. This is exactly what the US government has done in recent years. A variety of gimmicks, culminating in the current frenzy of “quantitative easing”—that is to say, printing money at a frantic pace—has forced interest rates down to historically low levels, in order to keep the federal government’s debt payments down to an annual sum that we can pretend to afford. Even a fairly modest increase in interest rates would be enough to push the US government into crisis; an increase on the same scale as those that have clobbered debt-burdened European countries in recent years would force an inevitable default. Sooner or later, that latter is going to happen. That’s the unmentioned context of the last few cycles of intractable financial stalemates in Washington. For more than a decade now, increasingly frantic attempts to kick the can further and further down the road have thus been the order of the day. In order to prevent a steep economic contraction in the wake of the 2000 tech-stock crash, the US government and the Federal Reserve Board—its theoretically independent central bank—flooded the economy with cheap credit and turned a blind eye to what became the biggest speculative delusion in history, the global real estate bubble of 2004-2008. When that popped, in turn, the US government and the Fed used even more drastic measures to stave off the normal consequences of a huge speculative bust. None of those measures has a long shelf life. They’re all basically stopgaps, and it’s probably safe to assume that the people who decided to put them into place believed that before the last of the stopgaps stopped working, the US economy would resume its normal trajectory of growth and bail everyone out. That hasn’t happened, and there are good reasons to think that it’s not going to happen—not this year, not this decade, not in our lifetimes. We’ll get to those reasons shortly; the point that needs attention here is what this implies for the federal government here and now. At some point in the years ahead, the US government is going to have to shut down at least half its current activities, in order to bring its expenditures back in line with its income. At some point in the years ahead, equally, the US government is going to have to default on its $8 trillion dollars of unpayable debt, plus however much more gets added as we proceed. The shutdown and default that have absorbed so much attention in recent weeks, in other words, define the shape of things to come. This time, as I write these words, a temporary compromise seems to have been slapped together, but we’ll be back here again, and again, and again, until finally the shutdown becomes permanent, the default happens, and we move on into a harsh new economic reality. It’s probably necessary at this point to remind my readers again that this doesn’t mean we will face the kind of imaginary full stop beloved by a certain class of apocalyptic theorists. Over the last twenty years or so, quite a few countries have slashed their government expenditures and defaulted on their debts. The results have included a great deal of turmoil and human suffering, but the overnight implosion of the global economy so often predicted has failed to occur, and for good reason. Glance back over economic history and you’ll find plenty of cases in which nations had to deal with crises of the same sort the US will soon face. All of them passed through hard times and massive changes, but none of them ceased to exist as organized societies; it’s only the widespread fixation on fantasies of apocalypse that leads some people to insist that for one reason or another, it’s different this time. I plan on devoting several upcoming posts to what we can realistically expect when the US government has to slash its expenditures and default on its debts, the way that Russia, Argentina, and other nations have done in recent decades. For the moment, though, I want to focus on a different point: why has the US government backed itself into this mess? Yes, I’m aware of the theorists who argue that it’s all a part of some nefarious plan, but let’s please be real: to judge by previous examples, the political and financial leaders who’ve done this are going to have their careers terminated with extreme prejudice, and it’s by no means impossible that a significant number of them will end up dangling from lampposts. It’s safe to assume that the people who have made these decisions are aware of these possibilities. Why, then, their pursuit of the self-defeating policies just surveyed? That pursuit makes sense only if the people responsible for the policies assumed they were temporary expedients, meant to keep business as usual afloat until a temporary crisis was over. From within the worldview of contemporary mainstream economics, it’s hard to see any other assumption they could have made. It’s axiomatic in today’s economic thought that economic growth is the normal state of affairs, and any interruption in growth is simply a temporary problem that will inevitably give way to renewed growth sooner or later. When an economic crisis happens, then, the first thought of political and financial leaders alike these days is to figure out how to keep business as usual running until the economy returns to its normal condition of growth. The rising spiral of economic troubles around the world in the last decade or so, I suggest, has caught political and financial officials flatfooted, precisely because that “normal condition of growth” is no longer normal. After the tech-stock bubble imploded in 2000, central banks in the US and elsewhere forced down interest rates and flooded the global economy with a torrent of cheap credit. Under normal conditions, this would have driven an investment boom in productive capital of various kinds: new factories would have been built, new technologies brought to the market, and so on, resulting in a surge in employment, tax revenues, and so on. While a modest amount of productive capital did come out of the process, the primary result was a speculative bubble even more gargantuan than the tech boom. That was a warning sign too few people heeded. Speculative bubbles are a routine reality in market economies, but under ordinary circumstances they’re self-limiting in scale, because there are so many other less risky places to earn a decent return on investment. It’s only when an economy has run out of other profitable investment opportunities that speculative bubbles grow to gargantuan size. In the late 1920s, the mismatch between vast investment in industrial capital and a wildly unbalanced distribution of income meant that American citizens could not afford to buy all the products of American industry, and this pushed the country into a classic overproduction crisis. Further investment in productive capital no longer brought in the expected rate of return, and so money flooded into speculative vehicles, driving the huge 1929 bubble and bust. The parallel bubble-and-bust economy that we’ve seen since 2000 or so followed similar patterns on an even more extreme scale. Once again, income distribution in the United States got skewed drastically in favor of the well-to-do, so that a growing fraction of Americans could no longer support the consumer economy with their purchases. Once again, returns on productive investment sank to embarrassing lows, leaving speculative paper of various kinds as the only option in town. It wasn’t overproduction that made productive capital a waste of investment funds, though—it was something considerably more dangerous, and also less easy for political and financial elites to recognize. The dogma that holds that growth is the normal state of economic affairs, after all, did not come about by accident. It was the result of three centuries of experience in the economies of Europe and the more successful nations of the European diaspora. Those three centuries, of course, happened to take place during the most colossal economic boom in all of recorded history. Two factors discussed in earlier posts drove that boom: first, the global expansion of European empires in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries and the systematic looting of overseas colonies that resulted; second, the exploitation of half a billion years of stored sunlight in the form of coal, petroleum, and natural gas. Both those driving forces remained in place through the twentieth century; the European empires gave way to a network of US client states that were plundered just as thoroughly as old-fashioned imperial colonies once were, while the exploitation of the world’s fossil fuel reserves went on at ever-increasing rates. The peaking of US petroleum production in 1972 threw a good-sized monkey wrench into the gears of the system and brought a decade of crisis, but a variety of short-term gimmicks postponed the crisis temporarily and opened the way to the final extravagant blowoff of the age of cheap energy. The peaking of conventional petroleum production in 2005 marked the end of that era, and the coming of a new economic reality that no one in politics or business is yet prepared to grasp. Claims that the peak would be promptly followed by plunging production, mass panic, and apocalyptic social collapse proved to be just as inaccurate as such claims always are. What happened instead was that a growing fraction of the world’s total energy supply has had to be diverted, directly or indirectly, to the task of maintaining fossil fuel production. Not all that long ago, all things considered, a few thousand dollars was enough to drill an oil well that can still be producing hundreds of barrels a day decades later; these days, a fracked well in oil-bearing shale can cost $5 to 10 million to drill and hydrofracture, and three years down the road it’ll be yielding less than 10 barrels of oil a day. These increased costs and diminished returns don’t take place in a vacuum. The energy and products of energy that have to be put into the task of maintaining energy production, after all, aren’t available for other economic uses. In monetary terms—money, remember, is the system of tokens we use to keep track of the value and manage the distribution of goods and services—oil prices upwards of $100 a barrel, and comparable prices for petroleum products, provide some measure of the tax on all economic activity that’s being imposed by the diversion of energy, resources, and other goods and services into petroleum production. Meanwhile fewer businesses are hiring, less new productive capital gets built, new technologies languish on the shelves: the traditional drivers of growth aren’t coming into play, because the surplus of real wealth needed to make them function isn’t there any more, having had to be diverted to keep drilling more and more short-lived wells in the Bakken Shale. The broader pattern behind all these shifts is easy to state, though people raised in a growth economy often find it almost impossible to grasp. Sustained economic growth is made possible by sustained increases in the availability of energy and other resources for purposes other than their own production. The only reason economic growth seems normal to us is that we’ve just passed through an era three hundred years long in which, for the fraction of humanity living in western Europe, North America, and a few other corners of the world, the supply of energy and other resources soared well past any increases in the cost of production. That era is now over, and so is sustained economic growth. The end of growth, though, has implications of its own, and some of these conflict sharply with expectations nurtured by the era of growth economics. It’s only when economic growth is normal, for example, that the average investment can be counted on to earn a profit. An investment is a microcosm of the whole economy; it’s because the total economy can be expected to gain value that investments, which represent ownership of a minute portion of the whole economy, can be expected to do the same thing. On paper, at least, investment in a growing economy is a positive-sum game; everyone can profit to one degree or another, and the goal of competition is to profit more than the other guy. In a steady-state economy, by contrast, investment is a zero-sum game; since the economy neither grows nor contracts from year to year, the average investment breaks even, and for one investment to make a profit, another must suffer a loss. In a contracting economy, by the same logic, investment is a negative-sum game, the average investment loses money, and an investment that merely succeeds in breaking even can do so only if steeper losses are inflicted on other investments. It’s precisely because the conditions for economic growth are over, and have been over for some time now, that the US political and financial establishment finds itself clinging to the ragged end of a bridge to nowhere, with an assortment of alligators gazing up hungrily from the waters below. The stopgap policies that were meant to keep business as usual running until growth resumed have done their job, but economic growth has gone missing in action, and the supply of gimmicks is running very short. I don’t claim to know exactly when we’ll see the federal government default on its debt and begin mass layoffs and program cutbacks, but I see no way that these things can be avoided at this point. Nor is this the only consequence of the end of growth. In a contracting economy, again, the average investment loses money. That doesn’t simply apply to financial paper; if a business owner in such an economy invests in capital improvements, on average, those improvements will not bring a return sufficient to pay for the investment; if a bank makes a loan, on average, the loan will not be paid back in full, and so on. Every one of the mechanisms that a modern industrial economy uses to encourage people to direct surplus wealth back into the production of goods and services depends on the idea that investments normally make a profit. Lacking those, the process of economic contraction becomes self-reinforcing because disinvestment and hoarding becomes the best available strategy, the sole effective way to cling to as much as possible of your wealth for as long as possible. This isn’t merely a theoretical possibility, by the way. It occurs reliably in the twilight years of other civilizations. The late Roman world is a case in point: by the beginning of the fifth century CE, it was so hard for Roman businessmen to make money that the Roman government had laws requiring sons to go into their fathers’ professions, whether they could earn a living that way or not, and there were businessmen who fled across the borders and went to work as scribes, accountants, and translators for barbarian warlords, because the alternative was economic ruin in a collapsing Roman economy. Meanwhile rich landowners converted their available wealth into gold and silver and buried it, rather than cycling it back into the economy, and moneylending became so reliable a source of social ills that lending at interest was a mortal sin in medieval Christianity and remains so in Islam right down to the present. When Dante’s Inferno consigned people who lend money at interest to the lowest part of the seventh circle of Hell, several notches below mass murderers, heretics, and fallen angels, he was reflecting a common belief of his time, and one that had real justification in the not so distant past. Left to itself, the negative-sum game of economics in a contracting economy has no necessary endpoint short of the complete collapse of all systems of economic exchange. In the real world, it rarely goes quite that far, though it can come uncomfortably close. In the aftermath of the Roman collapse, for example, it wasn’t just lending at interest that went away. Money itself dropped out of use in most of post-Roman Europe—as late as the twelfth century, it was normal for most people to go from one year to the next without ever handling a coin—and market-based economic exchange, which thrived in the Roman world, was replaced by feudal economies in which most goods were produced by those who consumed them, customary payments in kind took care of nearly all the rest, and a man could expect to hold land from his overlord on the same terms his great-grandfather had known. All through the Long Descent that terminated the bustling centralized economy of the Roman world and replaced it with the decentralized feudal economies of post-Roman Europe, though, there was one reliable source of investment in necessary infrastructure and other social goods. It thrived when all other economic and political institutions failed, because it did not care in the least about the profit motive, and had different ways to motivate and direct human energies to constructive ends. It had precise equivalents in certain other dark age and medieval societies, too, and it’s worth noting that those dark ages that had some such institution in place were considerably less dark, and preserved a substantially larger fraction of the cultural and technological heritage of the previous society, than those in which no institution of the same kind existed. In late Roman and post-Roman Europe, that institution was the Christian church. In other dark ages, other religious organizations have filled similar roles—Buddhism, for example, in the dark ages that followed the collapse of Heian Japan, or the Egyptian priesthoods in the several dark ages experienced by ancient Egyptian society. When every other institution fails, in other words, religion is the one option left that provides a framework for organized collective activity. The revival of religion in the twilight of an age of rationalism, and its rise to a position of cultural predominance in the broader twilight of a civilization, thus has a potent economic rationale in addition to any other factors that may support it. How this works in practice will be central to a number of the posts to come.

Found something far more interesting than my insignificant musings on the prior topic. The Fed Can Only Fail And we'll all lose by Chris Martenson Friday, October 25, 2013, 12:34 AM The basic predicament we are in is that the current crop of leaders in the halls of monetary and political power does not appear to understand the dimensions of our situation. The mind-boggling part about all this is that it's not really all that hard to grasp. Our collective predicament is simply this: Nothing can grow forever. Sooner or later, everything must cease growing, or it will exhaust its environs and thereby destroy itself. The Fed is busy doing everything in its considerable power to get credit (that is, debt) growing again so that we can get back to what it considers to be "normal." But the problem is – or the predicament, I should more accurately say – is that the recent past was not normal. You've probably all seen this next chart. It shows total debt in the U.S. as a percent of GDP: Somewhere right around 1980, things really changed, and debt began climbing far faster than GDP. And that, right there, is the long and the short of why any attempt to continue the behavior that got us to this point is certain to fail. It is simply not possible to grow your debts faster than your income forever. However, that's been the practice since 1980, and every current politician and Federal Reserve official developed their opinions about 'how the world works' during the 33-year period between 1980 and 2013. Put bluntly, they want to get us back on that same track, and as soon as possible. The reason? Because every major power center, be that in D.C. or on Wall Street, tuned their thinking, systems, and sense of entitlement during that period. And, frankly, a huge number of financial firms and political careers will melt away if/when that credit expansion finally stops. And stop it will; that's just a mathematical certainty. It's now extremely doubtful that the Fed or D.C. will willingly cease the current Herculean efforts towards reviving this flawed practice of borrowing too much, too fast. So we have to expect that it will be some form of financial accident that finally breaks the stranglehold of failed thinking that infects current leadership. The Math As a thought experiment, let's explore the math a little bit to see where it leads us. After all, I did just say that a poor end to all of this is a "mathematical certainty," so let's test that theory a bit. I think you'll find this both interesting and useful. To begin, Total Credit Market Debt (TCMD) is a measure of all the various forms of debt in the U.S. That includes corporate, state, federal, and household borrowing. So student loans are in there, as are auto loans, mortgages, and municipal and federal debt. It's pretty much everything debt-related. What it does not include, though, are any unfunded obligations, entitlements, or other types of liabilities. So the Social Security shortfalls are not in there, nor are the underfunded pensions at the state or corporate levels. TCMD is just debt, plain and simple. As you can see in this next chart, since 1970, TCMD has been growing exponentially and almost perfectly, too. (The R2 is over 0.99, for you science types): I've pointed out the tiny little wiggle that happened in 2008-2009, which apparently nearly brought down the entire global financial system. That little deviation was practically too much all on its own. Now debts are climbing again at a quite nice pace. That's mainly due to the Fed monetizing U.S. federal debt just to keep things patched together. As an aside, based on this chart, we'd expect the Fed to not end their QE efforts until and unless households and corporations once more engage in robust borrowing. The system apparently 'needs' this chart to keep growing exponentially, or it risks collapse. Okay, one could ask: Why can't credit just keep growing? Here's where things get a little wonky. But if you'll bear with me, you'll see why I'm nearly 100% certain that the future will not resemble the past. Let's start in 1980, when credit growth really took off. This period also happens to be the happy time that the Fed is trying to (desperately) recreate. Between 1980 and 2013, total credit grew by an astonishing 8% per year, compounded. I say 'astonishing' because anything growing by 8% per year will fully double every 9 years. So let's run the math experiment as ask what will happen if the Fed is successful and total credit grows for the next 30 years at exactly the same rate it did over the prior 30. That's all. Nothing fancy, simply the same rate of growth that everybody got accustomed to while they were figuring out 'how the world works. What happens to the current $57 trillion in TCMD as it advances by 8% per year for 30 years? It mushrooms into a silly number: $573 trillion. That is, an 8% growth paradigm gives us a tenfold increase in total credit in just thirty years: Again, What might we borrow (only) $128 trillion for, over the next 30 years? When I run these numbers, I am entirely confident that the rate of growth in debt between 1980 and 2013 will not be recreated between 2013 and 2043. With just one caveat: I've been assuming that dollars remain valuable. If dollars were to lose 90% or more of their value (say, perhaps due to our central bank creating too many of them?), then it's entirely possible to achieve any sorts of fantastical numbers one wishes to see. Think it could never happen? Conclusion (to Part I) This is the critical takeaway from all of the math above: For the Fed to achieve anything even close to the historical rate of credit growth, the dollar will have to lose a lot of value. I truly believe this is the Fed's grand plan, if we may call it that, and it has nothing to do with what's best for the people of this land. Instead, it's entirely about keeping the financial system primed with sufficient new credit to prevent it from imploding. That is, the Fed is beholden to a broken system; not anything noble. .... Amidst the ensuing unpleasantness will be an awakening within today's hyper-financialized markets to the huge imbalance now existing between paper claims and ownership of real things. A massive wealth transfer from those with 'paper wealth' (stocks, bonds, dollars) to those owning tangible assets (the productive value of which can't easily be inflated away) will occur – and quickly, too.

Check this out. Necrometrics.com

Here's 2 interesting essays by NT Times blogger Douthat. He critiques Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined. BTW - his points have also been the subject of study by some people in U.S. Military academies (at least according to an Atlantic Monthly article published about 10 years ago). The military is aware of the very things Douthat points out in his critique of Pinker's book. I know it's going off on a tangent from the topic but I found it interesting enough to share here. Enjoy: This also relates to the point I made in Sunday’s column, which is that Pinker underestimates the extent to which yesterday’s state-sponsored violence may be the cause of today’s state-sponsored peace. That is, while the gradual consolidation of the modern state may eventually tend toward the relative pacific conditions that currently prevail in Europe, that consolidation tends to be so bloody in and of itself — thick with persecutions and genocides and “cleansings” of various sorts — that one could reasonably doubt whether the ends were worth the means. (If you look at Europe’s settler states, for instance, from the United States and Latin America to South Africa and Australia, there’s often a plausible correlation between how completely the native population was wiped out during the age of colonization and how stable and prosperous they are today.) When Pinker talks about the benefits of “the civilizing process,” in other words, he doesn’t give enough weight to the interests of the peoples who were “civilized” out of existence. 2) Pinker dismisses the “nuclear peace” theory of the world’s post-1945 stability, arguing that it can’t explain “why countries without nuclear weapons also forbore war,” and pointing out that non-nuclear powers like North Vietnam were still willing to go to war with nuclear powers like the United States. But one can tell a plausible story that incorporates those data points, by focusing on the role of nuclear arsenals in 1) consolidating the developed world into two armed camps, whose members were naturally less likely to pick fights with one another, and 2) preventing great power conflicts from escalating to total war, as they had frequently in the preceding centuries. In this theory, nuclear arms don’t prevent war entirely, but they limit conflicts between nuclear-armed powers (note that India and Pakistan fought three bloody wars before both went nuclear, and none since), while providing a strong incentive for keeping war aims limited and avoiding potentially existential conflicts. Pinker cites many examples of non-nuclear powers “defying” nuclear powers, but it’s telling that few if any of them are cases where a non-nuclear power tried to conquer a nuclear-armed state. That’s the kind of war — a total war, aimed at total victory — that nuclear weapons have really driven out of fashion. 3) Pinker is similarly dismissive of what you might call the “benevolent hegemon” theory of global peace, writing that there were “never any signs of a Pax Americana or the Pax Britannica: the years when one of these countries was the world’s dominant military power were no more peaceful than the years in which it was just one power among many.” But his own chart showing the decline of great power conflict seems to track pretty well with the rise of first Great Britain and then the United States: It depicts a gradual decline in warfare that’s broken by irruptions of violence when first France and then Germany challenges the Anglosphere’s hegemony. (Here I wish that he had addressed William C. Wohlforth’s late-1990s argument about the unique stability of a unipolar world.) 4) For a book whose title (and cover art) evokes the narratives of Western monotheism, the treatment of religion in “The Better Angels of Our Nature” is astonishingly glib. Pinker is under no obligation to credit Judaism or Christianity with any particular role in the story he’s telling, but a book that essentially portrays European civilization as a kind of moral vanguard for humanity should at least address the possibility that this distinctive turn away from violence was influenced by the West’s distinctive religious heritage. Instead, Pinker delivers a Hitchens-esque summary of the Old Testament’s endorsements of holy war, quotes Jesus’s line about bringing peace rather than a sword in order to dismiss the New Testament’s pretensions to pacifism, and then blames the violent imagery of the crucifixion for inuring Christians to state-sponsored violence and torture. (It’s a straight line from the choice of the crucifix as the symbol of Christianity, he suggests, to the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition.) There are some cursory nods to Isaiah and turning the other cheek, and late in the book (p. 677, to be precise) Pinker grudgingly acknowledges that while “little good has come from ancient tribal dogmas … particular religious movements at particular times in history have worked against violence.” But this is a doorstop of a book about the progress of non-violence and humanitarianism in Western civilization whose index contains no references to Francis of Assisi, Bartolome De Las Casas, or William Wilberforce, and whose author betrays not even the slightest interest in the various sympathetic and provocative accounts of religion’s role in the development of the modern West and modern world. Pinker has written a Whig’s interpretation of history, and he is never more Whiggish than in his assumption that we owe almost everything to the Enlightenment, and all that came before was a long medieval dark.

People may dispute if the West has become Fascist, Oligarchic, Plutocratic or some other kind of society. The reason I'm interested in hearing about this topic is that I believe there's a lot of truth to the saying: History may not repeat itself but it often rhymes. Which is why I don't expect any kind of 'fascism' of today in the West to look like the Fascism of Mussolini or the 3rd Reich.

Here's one more JMG blog-post. I think Marblehead will find it particularly interesting - especially since Nietzsche is part of JMG's subject. Also ties into some of the themes of this thread. And it'd likely be the one I'd point to in my disagreement with Yulaw in his asserting there are too many countries and cultures for examining any trends in "the West". But then...he announced in his first post he isn't convinced about the topic under discussion anyway - not much left to say when one explains why one disagrees with the topic being discussed. Anyhoo... Cheers! In Westeros lingo: Winter is coming.

Interesting comment. I've never read Camus unfortunately although I know he was influential in Europe and I think the U.S. during the late 50s and 60s. I thought you might like the following blog post from John Michael Greer. Especially since it's talking about religion. BTW - it's JMG's position that the true "religion" of the West whether "right" or "left", progressive, socialist or conservative, mercantilist, atheist, christian, etc - all bow down to the almighty civil religion of Progress. In more ways than one I'm inclined to agree he may be right. Anyway...enjoy!