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I'm not defending the Spanish conquest - it would definitely be cool if the Incas and Aztecs had been left alone. Not that the Incas and Aztecs were exactly pa

by moldbug 14y ago

I'm not defending the Spanish conquest - it would definitely be cool if the Incas and Aztecs had been left alone. Not that the Incas and Aztecs were exactly paragons of respect for human rights, you know. (Or do you know?) I'm simply observing that the quality of government by the late pre-revolutionary period, ie, the 18th century, is a lot higher than the quality of government in the 19th and 20th centuries - by almost any sane metric. For instance, it's my belief (maybe not yours) that the main purpose of government is suppression of civil violence. If your government fails at this, nothing it succeeds at much matters. Now, imagine the progress of Mexico over the last two centuries, absent pervasive political and civil violence. Don't forget - the first university in the Americas was founded in Mexico City in 1551, almost 100 years before Harvard. You appear to have been inculcated with a lot of very complex explanations of the tragedy of post-colonial Latin America, whereas my views, obviously, are quite simple. This is no accident. I'm a big believer in Occam's razor. I don't feel it's necessary to construct any intricate explanations of why the Flying Spaghetti Monster doesn't exist. It's not at all unusual for people living in a historical period to misunderstand it completely, generally as a consequence of political corruption. This is as true of the late Roman Empire as of the late Soviet Union. My feeling is that historians of later eras will understand our world much better, and much more simply, than we understand it ourselves. I'd strongly recommend reading at least one anti-liberal history of this period into which you've put so much study. It'd be a shame to come away with such strong conclusions when you've only heard from the prosecution. Elsewhere on the thread I've recommended Waugh's Robbery Under Law (1939) - not hard to find and very easy to read.

jacobolus 14y ago
Okay. I don’t claim to know what the proper “purpose” of civil government is, or to have visions of a perfectly just society, but in practice government is a set of systems set up by people living near each-other for mediating disputes, defending the group from common threats, and regulating behavior in a formal way (that is, there is some explicit process involved, unlike with informal norms). Citizens seem to be generally happier when their basic physiological needs are met, when they feel valued and respected by the community, when they aren’t treated violently for their thoughts and private practices and associations, when they have meaningful work to do, and meaningful goals and aspirations and especially some common purposes with others in the society with whom they can cooperate, when their frustrations and desires are considered & acted upon by their fellow citizens. When they can provide some feedback to the system itself, and thereby improve both it and their own lives and the lives of their neighbors and children. Now of course, there’s all manner of difficulty with this, because different people have different ideas of what the society should look like and what their roles should be in it, because human societies are very complex games which involve competitive as well as cooperative aspects, and because frequently military, economic, technological, social shocks lead some groups to starvation, disempowerment, etc., in which position they become either depressed or pissed off. Prevention of civil violence is certainly crucial to government (Hobbes’s Leviathan). But that government isn’t working when its information-sharing systems are broken and it fails to respond to citizens’ grievances, to the extent that they are willing to take up arms against it. Civil wars are horrible and destructive and terrible, and often fail to fix anything, or even make matters worse. On the other hand, colonial society in places like Honduras (or Chiapas, where I spent half my childhood) was terribly oppressive and violent. It was mostly a kind of constant low-level violence of forced labor, routine rape and torture and murder, political and economic disempowerment through control of every local institution, theft or destruction of any capital accumulation and suppression or subversion of any attempts to form independent institutions. Occasionally dissatisfaction flared up into larger-scale violence, always brutally suppressed. I don’t know whether this was “higher [...] quality [...] by any sane metric” than the 19th and 20th century governments. I didn’t personally live through it. I do know that nearly the whole history makes me cry to think about.
- moldbug 14y ago
  Thanks for the interesting conversation, jacobolus - but I'm pretty confident that you didn't spend your childhood in colonial society. I think what you mean is that you spent your childhood in a society whose class disparities were vaguely comparable, at least in an ideologically stereotypical way, to colonial society. (Note that in all Latin American countries, including frickin' Cuba, the governing caste looks like Gael Garcia Bernal and the governed caste is black, brown or both. See under: "Subcomandante Marcos." After the 20th century it should be difficult for any ideology to claim it has some magic solution to this particular problem.) Without of course disputing the actual reality you've experienced, I would suggest two ways of interpreting this perspective. One is that the constant low-level violence in these postcolonial societies is not a consequence of how similar to actual colonial societies they are, but how different they are. You don't see constant low-level violence when formal power is identical to informal power. When the patron is actually an encomendero, there's no reason for forced labor (the distinction between "forced" and "unforced" labor is pretty academic to an unskilled agricultural laborer - either way, he has to work or he doesn't eat) to involve violence, because he has the formal right to command and can call on the lawful arm of the state to assist him. Whether or not he should have this right, or rather power, is a separate question. But note what happens when you try to eradicate these feudal structures, which of course did not arrive with the Europeans but predate them: you're driving Nature out with a pitchfork. When the patron is just a big man, not an actual government official, his power is not in the form of policemen and soldiers, but thugs and more thugs. Second, reinforcing this argument, consider the fact that everything you know about the colonial period comes from the enemies of colonialism. Imagine if everything you knew about Jews came from people who hated Jews. Every time a Jew committed some crime or abuse, this would be played up at maximum volume and associated with the entire Jewish race. Exactly how the Goebbels press worked. In other words, the 20th century image of colonialism is just an extension of the good old Leyenda Negra tradition. I don't have to explain this to you, but for others: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Legend http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Legend I agree - the story is very sad. I hope Mexico can find its way to a new Porfiriato sometime soon. The first step would definitely be expelling the US Embassy - and taking every other possible measure to pretend there's nothing but ocean north of the Rio Grande. Mexico is blessed with energy and food security, so it really does have the physical strength to tell Washington where it can put all its fatherly advice. And we're certainly in no political condition to invade you! So the main thing that's missing is cultural self-confidence. Perhaps it's not too late to reinvent some kind of Franquista Hispanidad, Falangism, sinarquismo, etc: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_synarchism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_synarchism Until that point, I'm quite confident, the beheadings etc. will continue. Political order is something you take for granted until you find you don't have it, and then it's quite difficult to restore without applying a level of force comparable to that at the disposal of the disorderly. Or to put it differently, after its century of revolution, Mexico needs martial law the way a camel that's just walked across the Sahara needs a drink of water. It's not alone in this. A friend of my wife's recently spent nine months in Guatemala City on a State Department journalism fellowship. She left as impeccable a progressive as you'd ever see. She came back with the most amazing good words for dictators and dictatorship. If you know Guatemala City, you know why... Erna Fergusson, an American no less progressive, visited Guatemala in the '30s and wrote this book: http://books.google.com/books/about/Guatemala.html?id=fv5kAAAAMAAJ http://books.google.com/books/about/Guatemala.html?id=fv5kAA... She describes Guatemala as "like Mexico before the Revolution." Politically this is certainly the truth. And the capital, for instance, is described as impeccably clean and crime-free. This did not fit the author's agenda, but was just what she saw. Again, compare!
itmag 14y ago
Are you Mencius Moldbug the blogger by any chance?
- winestock 14y ago
  Yes, he is.

by moldbug 14y ago

jacobolus 14y ago

Okay. I don’t claim to know what the proper “purpose” of civil government is, or to have visions of a perfectly just society, but in practice government is a set of systems set up by people living near each-other for mediating disputes, defending the group from common threats, and regulating behavior in a formal way (that is, there is some explicit process involved, unlike with informal norms). Citizens seem to be generally happier when their basic physiological needs are met, when they feel valued and respected by the community, when they aren’t treated violently for their thoughts and private practices and associations, when they have meaningful work to do, and meaningful goals and aspirations and especially some common purposes with others in the society with whom they can cooperate, when their frustrations and desires are considered & acted upon by their fellow citizens. When they can provide some feedback to the system itself, and thereby improve both it and their own lives and the lives of their neighbors and children. Now of course, there’s all manner of difficulty with this, because different people have different ideas of what the society should look like and what their roles should be in it, because human societies are very complex games which involve competitive as well as cooperative aspects, and because frequently military, economic, technological, social shocks lead some groups to starvation, disempowerment, etc., in which position they become either depressed or pissed off. Prevention of civil violence is certainly crucial to government (Hobbes’s Leviathan). But that government isn’t working when its information-sharing systems are broken and it fails to respond to citizens’ grievances, to the extent that they are willing to take up arms against it. Civil wars are horrible and destructive and terrible, and often fail to fix anything, or even make matters worse. On the other hand, colonial society in places like Honduras (or Chiapas, where I spent half my childhood) was terribly oppressive and violent. It was mostly a kind of constant low-level violence of forced labor, routine rape and torture and murder, political and economic disempowerment through control of every local institution, theft or destruction of any capital accumulation and suppression or subversion of any attempts to form independent institutions. Occasionally dissatisfaction flared up into larger-scale violence, always brutally suppressed. I don’t know whether this was “higher [...] quality [...] by any sane metric” than the 19th and 20th century governments. I didn’t personally live through it. I do know that nearly the whole history makes me cry to think about.

moldbug 14y ago
Thanks for the interesting conversation, jacobolus - but I'm pretty confident that you didn't spend your childhood in colonial society. I think what you mean is that you spent your childhood in a society whose class disparities were vaguely comparable, at least in an ideologically stereotypical way, to colonial society. (Note that in all Latin American countries, including frickin' Cuba, the governing caste looks like Gael Garcia Bernal and the governed caste is black, brown or both. See under: "Subcomandante Marcos." After the 20th century it should be difficult for any ideology to claim it has some magic solution to this particular problem.) Without of course disputing the actual reality you've experienced, I would suggest two ways of interpreting this perspective. One is that the constant low-level violence in these postcolonial societies is not a consequence of how similar to actual colonial societies they are, but how different they are. You don't see constant low-level violence when formal power is identical to informal power. When the patron is actually an encomendero, there's no reason for forced labor (the distinction between "forced" and "unforced" labor is pretty academic to an unskilled agricultural laborer - either way, he has to work or he doesn't eat) to involve violence, because he has the formal right to command and can call on the lawful arm of the state to assist him. Whether or not he should have this right, or rather power, is a separate question. But note what happens when you try to eradicate these feudal structures, which of course did not arrive with the Europeans but predate them: you're driving Nature out with a pitchfork. When the patron is just a big man, not an actual government official, his power is not in the form of policemen and soldiers, but thugs and more thugs. Second, reinforcing this argument, consider the fact that everything you know about the colonial period comes from the enemies of colonialism. Imagine if everything you knew about Jews came from people who hated Jews. Every time a Jew committed some crime or abuse, this would be played up at maximum volume and associated with the entire Jewish race. Exactly how the Goebbels press worked. In other words, the 20th century image of colonialism is just an extension of the good old Leyenda Negra tradition. I don't have to explain this to you, but for others: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Legend http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Legend I agree - the story is very sad. I hope Mexico can find its way to a new Porfiriato sometime soon. The first step would definitely be expelling the US Embassy - and taking every other possible measure to pretend there's nothing but ocean north of the Rio Grande. Mexico is blessed with energy and food security, so it really does have the physical strength to tell Washington where it can put all its fatherly advice. And we're certainly in no political condition to invade you! So the main thing that's missing is cultural self-confidence. Perhaps it's not too late to reinvent some kind of Franquista Hispanidad, Falangism, sinarquismo, etc: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_synarchism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_synarchism Until that point, I'm quite confident, the beheadings etc. will continue. Political order is something you take for granted until you find you don't have it, and then it's quite difficult to restore without applying a level of force comparable to that at the disposal of the disorderly. Or to put it differently, after its century of revolution, Mexico needs martial law the way a camel that's just walked across the Sahara needs a drink of water. It's not alone in this. A friend of my wife's recently spent nine months in Guatemala City on a State Department journalism fellowship. She left as impeccable a progressive as you'd ever see. She came back with the most amazing good words for dictators and dictatorship. If you know Guatemala City, you know why... Erna Fergusson, an American no less progressive, visited Guatemala in the '30s and wrote this book: http://books.google.com/books/about/Guatemala.html?id=fv5kAAAAMAAJ http://books.google.com/books/about/Guatemala.html?id=fv5kAA... She describes Guatemala as "like Mexico before the Revolution." Politically this is certainly the truth. And the capital, for instance, is described as impeccably clean and crime-free. This did not fit the author's agenda, but was just what she saw. Again, compare!

itmag 14y ago

Are you Mencius Moldbug the blogger by any chance?

winestock 14y ago
Yes, he is.