Favorite blog posts of 2012

This is a rather haphazard selection, rather than rigorous listing of the best I was able to put together this year. I was struck that despite the fact I'm working very hard on the Middle Ages, not much of it leaked through into blogging. Also, I included far fewer Arab spring/Arab uprising posts than I might have, but I felt that only a few had lasting value on their own.

Made up stuff

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

I don't celebrate Kwanzaa. I only celebrate Christmas because of my wife and son. I generally don't like holidays. And while I come from a family of black radicals, my Dad generally derided Kwanzaa as "fake Christmas." The holiday season in the Coates house generally meant more time for work. (Sadly it's becoming that in my household too.) 

With that said, Kwanzaa-hating has always struck me as the most bougie and snobbish of holiday traditions. It's that cool that Jonathan Safran Foer thinks that "no one is quite sure what Kwanzaa is,"  but I'm not sure "what Hanukkah is." And for most of my life, no one I knew was quite sure either.  I'm only barely sure "what Christmas is." (Celebrating the birth of your savoir with an orgy of consumption?) 

It's just seems bizarre in America, of all places, to stand on vintage. Has there ever been a more mongrel, more made-up, country that this one? Have there ever been two more "made up people" then the "white race" and the "black race?" This country is a mongrel mess--and its traditions are too. That's the whole charm of the thing. No one who takes the Easter Bunny seriously should mock Kwanzaa. This is about equality. Black people have right to make shit up, just as white people have the right to make shit up. 

Tolkien's prose

In preparation for seeing the Hobbit movie -- which I have now seen -- I have reread the book. I am now reading The Children of Hurin, one of his posthumous works. This leads me to reflect on how good Tolkien could be as a writer when he wasn't trying too hard.

But first a story about beer.

Twenty years ago and more, soon after we had moved to the Near North, some friends came to visit. When I came home from work, there they were sitting in my living room. "There is something in the refrigerator for you." I looked, and there was some Creemore beer, then a new brand I had never had; and in fact this was Creemore fresh from the brewery that very day. I opened a bottle and had a drink and it was like all the bad lager I had ever drunk was stripped off my tongue and I could taste beer again.

Not too long after that I read the Hobbit to my son. He liked it so much that I ended up reading the entire Lord of the Rings aloud. And I had a similar experience. I thought I knew the book well, but reading it aloud -- the big book, not the one I knew was meant to be read that way -- was a revelation.

It was like all the bad prose I had ever spoken was stripped off my tongue and I could taste English again.

The pseudo-archaic language of the Children of Hurin does not have that effect. It is a barrier between me and the First Age, when it should be a bridge. It is Tolkien trying too hard.

A quarter of a century later, he knew better, and he used the ordinary language of the mid-20th century to work his magic.

Reflections on Crusade and Jihad, 2012

Every time I teach the Crusade and Jihad course, I have a few new insights. Here are my insights for this year’s iteration.

The main one is the realization of a pretty obvious point. Christians and Muslims alike could go for centuries not worrying about who controlled the holy city of Jerusalem. Then they would go through phases where for some people at least that was the A#1 priority for a whole community. Thinking about this, I conclude that the crusading fervor or the jihadist fervor requires a whole new understanding of the present the past and the future. Someone wakes up one day and realizes that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, that things are uniquely bad right now, and that extreme measures are necessary to correct that bad trend. Or to put it another way, there is a unique opportunity to clean up the mess that this world currently finds itself in. There is no crusade or no jihad without that realization that normal time has come to an end and that the moment we are living in is somehow special.

Of course, not everybody in a given community goes along with the fervor when it catches hold. Some very good and influential scholarship has focused on the fact that unauthorized preaching of Crusades was seen as a danger to the social order – and of course if it was going to amount to anything, it would be a danger to the social order. It is easy to find oneself taking sides in this ancient debate. We have sources that praise jihadist leaders as being good Muslims, and we are sometimes too quick to grant them that status, and see the people who oppose them, other Muslim rulers who worried more about jihadists than Christians, as being selfish. Well, yes, but they were selfish because they were looking out for their own interests in normal times, and were quite skeptical of those who claimed that normal times and normal politics had come to an end. And I think most of us in the same situation would probably be equally selfish. Similarly Shepherd’s Crusades and Children’s Crusades and Peter the Hermit’s crusade were looked at with a great deal of skepticism. The claims made in connection with these movements were so sweeping that even people who in principle were in favor of reforming the Christian community and achieving great things as a result (who could be against that?) felt threatened.

Understanding the idea that some time, now, is a special time when different standards apply, is a key factor in understanding the Crusades or for that matter jihad.

On a related matter, I noticed when students commented on Ralph of Caen’s account of the discovery of the Holy Lance at Antioch, they tended to take Ralph’s side, in other words they believed that Peter who found the Lance was a phony, just like Ralph did. But Ralph was no neutral observer, and there is no reason to think that he didn’t believe in miraculous interventions that made the crusade possible. His argument is that Peter falsely claimed powers and heavenly connections that he didn’t have. He is not arguing for skepticism in general, he’s just – many years later – rubbishing Peter’s reputation to build up to Bohemond’s claim to be the great hero of the first crusade. In case anyone had forgotten. Yes indeed, God did make possible the taking of Jerusalem. But the special moment was not that moment where Peter found the Lance. It was some other moment, and the characteristic prudence and calculation of a good leader in normal times probably had a lot to do with it. Or so I guess, not having read all of Ralph’s work.

So I conclude with the thought that in some circumstances, there is the argument going on between various interested parties as to what kind of standards apply to the questions of the present. Are we in normal time, or are we in an exceptional moment with exceptional dangers and exceptional opportunities?

"It is a bizarre fantasy, I believe of comparatively new vintage, and one that holds pretty much the entire actual history of a free people in some combination of ignorance and contempt."

A historian should have said this. But Josh Marshall at Talkingpointsmemo.com did:

There are a lot of folks who believe we’re free in the US because of guns.

It’s worth stepping back for a moment and thinking about what that means.

It is a bizarre, weirdly narcissistic notion that is totally unhinged from any of our history. It is also comparatively new. Since the close of the 18th century, there is only one time that Americans rose up in any organized fashion against the government of the United States — during the Civil War. This is obviously a significant exception and one I’ll return to. But it is not one that speaks very well about the need for guns to protect our freedoms. And in any case, since it was done by treasonous state governments that appropriated US Army forts and Navy facilities, the whole issue of private arms wasn’t a driving factor.

But back to the point — the Jacksonian drive for universal manhood suffrage, the fight against the bank of the United States, abolitionism, the women’s rights movement, progressivism, the various religious awakenings, westward expansion, industrialization, the New Deal, the Civil Rights Era. Obviously you could come up with a very different list. But we’ve been a country now for well over two centuries and we have the longest period of unbroken republican, constitutional rule of any country in the world.

We’ve expanded our freedoms, sometimes let it recede. We’ve had major blots on in our history like the post-Reconstruction era in the South or the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II. It’s a rich and complex, sometimes tragic, but generally incredibly powerful and inspiring story. And yet in really not a single one of these cases has any government — state or federal — been pushed back in some moment of overreach by armed citizens or even affected in its decision-making by the knowledge of an armed citizenry.

You could imagine a very different history in which various strong men had taken power and been deposed by violent uprisings. That just hasn’t been our history.

You could certainly make the argument that all sorts of awful things might have happened if we didn’t have hobbyists at gun shows buying military grade weapons and body armor and stuff. But that’s akin to magical thinking.

Maybe my mobile devices are keeping the government in bounds too. I might say water skiing or rock music have stemmed the tide against tyranny. But you’d probably say I was crazy.

It is a bizarre fantasy, I believe of comparatively new vintage, and one that holds pretty much the entire actual history of a free people in some combination of ignorance and contempt. It’s the crazy black helicopter nonsense from the 1990s just slightly updated.

The Second Amendment really is rooted in a worldview in which gun ownership, always in a civic, if not always a formal militia context, was seen as a bulwark of liberties. I’d like to get into in a separate post just what that history is about and how it relates to today. But for the moment let’s look not at concepts but an actual lived history. Has private gun ownership helped keep us free? We’ve had two centuries to look at this one. And the results make the very idea laughable.

And yet many people now believe this. And it imparts an aura of self-righteousness to their desire to stock up private arsenals, fire off semi-automatic weapons and blow shit up. That sort of ignorance is dangerous.

A modern take on chivalry from the Atlantic

Chivalry is seen here as entirely about relations between men and women.

A story from the life of Samuel Proctor (d. 1997) comes to mind here. Proctor was the beloved pastor of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church. Apparently, he was in the elevator one day when a young woman came in. Proctor tipped his hat at her. She was offended and said, "What is that supposed to mean?"

The pastor's response was: "Madame, by tipping my hat I was telling you several things. That I would not harm you in any way. That if someone came into this elevator and threatened you, I would defend you. That if you fell ill, I would tend to you and if necessary carry you to safety. I was telling you that even though I am a man and physically stronger than you, I will treat you with both respect and solicitude. But frankly, Madame, it would have taken too much time to tell you all of that; so, instead, I just tipped my hat."

I would welcome comment from my readers who are familiar with recent scholarship on chivalry.  Does the heroic behavior at Aurora bridge the gap between this author's definition of chivalry and historic notions of chivalry ?

Bangladesh: still waiting for the tide to raise all boats

If you follow the news at all, you heard about that factory fire in Bangladesh that killed about 100 workers in a textile plant. One of the striking details was the fact that these workers made something like thirty-five dollars a month.

Now the popular wisdom these days on development is that the market will take care of situations like this. Bangladesh is just going through an early phase where it has cheap labor as its main asset. Capital accumulation and so forth will allow Bangladesh to eventually become a more developed country, where people make maybe thirty-five dollars a day.

The problem with this popular wisdom is that it ignores history specifically the history of Bangladesh/Bengal. Back in the days of  yore, when the British East India Company was just moving in to the subcontinent,  Bengal was the first Indian province that it swallowed whole. At that time Bengal was a country three times the size of Great Britain, and was something of an economic powerhouse, based on the fact that it produced  a lot of – textiles. I don't know how much money weavers in Bengal made, I'm sure it wasn't much, but it was more when Bengal had an Indian ruler than after it got a British one. For you see, the East Indian Company used its power in Bengal  to favor British cloth over Indian cloth. That policy – and others –had such a devastating that millions of Bengalis died from starvation. Britain, on the other hand, became the workshop of the world, and had a dominant position in the cloth trade for a very long time. Back when people studied economic history, this was a classic topic on the effects of the Industrial Revolution.

You can see why people in Bangladesh might be getting a little impatient waiting for classical economics' predictions that a rising tide lifts all boats to get around to their neck of the woods.

Ship lift on the Yenisei River, Siberia

And they say everything is bigger in Texas!

(From the Big Picture; click for a good look.)

Post-election thought: not a partisan message

Byron York talks to dedicated, long-time Romney supporters right after the concession speech:

A few hours earlier, across the street at the Convention Center, the campaign’s supporters and volunteers fully expected Romney to be the nation’s next president.  Indeed, what was striking after Fox News called the race for Obama, at about 11:15 p.m., was how stunned so many of Romney’s supporters were.  Many said they were influenced by the prominent conservatives who predicted a big Romney win, and they fully expected Tuesday night to be a victory celebration.

“I am shocked, I am blown away,” said Joe Sweeney, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  “I thought I had a pretty good pulse on this stuff.  I thought there was a trend that was going on underground.”

“We were so convinced that the people of this country had more common sense than that,” said Nan Strauch, of Hilton Head, South Carolina.  “It was just a very big surprise.  We felt so confident.”

“It makes me wonder who my fellow citizens are,” said Marianne Doherty of Boston.  “I’ve got to be honest, I feel like I’ve lost touch with what the identity of America is right now.  I really do.”

Posted as an example of how cultural change happens -- often, when you aren't looking. Or looking intently somewhere else.

Eeyorism, or the Perfect as the Enemy of the Good

A very good essay by Rebecca Solnit at TomDispatch.com:

Dear Allies,

Forgive me if I briefly take my eyes off the prize to brush away some flies, but the buzzing has gone on for some time. I have a grand goal, and that is to counter the Republican right with its deep desire to annihilate everything I love and to move toward far more radical goals than the Democrats ever truly support. In the course of pursuing that, however, I’ve come up against the habits of my presumed allies again and again.

O rancid sector of the far left, please stop your grousing! Compared to you, Eeyore sounds like a Teletubby. If I gave you a pony, you would not only be furious that not everyone has a pony, but you would pick on the pony for not being radical enough until it wept big, sad, hot pony tears. Because what we’re talking about here is not an analysis, a strategy, or a cosmology, but an attitude, and one that is poisoning us. Not just me, but you, us, and our possibilities.

 ...

When you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail, but that’s not a good reason to continue to pound down anything in the vicinity. Consider what needs to be raised up as well.  Consider our powers, our victories, our possibilities; ask yourself just what you’re contributing, what kind of story you’re telling, and what kind you want to be telling.
Sitting around with the first occupiers of Zuccotti Park on the first anniversary of Occupy, I listened to one lovely young man talking about the rage his peers, particularly his gender, often have.  But, he added, fury is not a tactic or a strategy, though it might sometimes provide the necessary energy for getting things done.

There are so many ways to imagine this mindset -- or maybe its many mindsets with many origins -- in which so many are mired. Perhaps one version devolves from academic debate, which at its best is a constructive, collaborative building of an argument through testing and challenge, but at its worst represents the habitual tearing down of everything, and encourages a subculture of sourness that couldn’t be less productive.
Can you imagine how far the Civil Rights Movement would have gotten, had it been run entirely by complainers for whom nothing was ever good enough? To hell with integrating the Montgomery public transit system when the problem was so much larger! 

...

We are facing a radical right that has abandoned all interest in truth and fact. We face not only their specific policies, but a kind of cultural decay that comes from not valuing truth, not trying to understand the complexities and nuances of our situation, and not making empathy a force with which to act. To oppose them requires us to be different from them, and that begins with both empathy and intelligence, which are not as separate as we have often been told.

Being different means celebrating what you have in common with potential allies, not punishing them for often-minor differences. It means developing a more complex understanding of the matters under consideration than the cartoonish black and white that both left and the right tend to fall back on.

Dismissiveness is a way of disengaging from both the facts on the ground and the obligations those facts bring to bear on your life. As Michael Eric Dyson recently put it, “What is not good are ideals and rhetorics that don’t have the possibility of changing the condition that you analyze. Otherwise, you’re engaging in a form of rhetorical narcissism and ideological self-preoccupation that has no consequence on the material conditions of actually existing poor people.”

Read the whole thing.

Enjoying life in the future

Will McLean says it true: the real desert of Burning  Man has proved far preferable to the dystopian desert of Mad Max.

Compliments scholars savor

Getting two requests in one day to write, or at least propose, an article.

After speaking in a public venue, having a student ask what courses you teach that he might take.

Finding out that a scholar you respect has called one of your books "fundamental."

UPDATE:  And having a former fellow student write out of the blue to say that she's using an old article for teaching purposes, the same day you write this post...

Provocative films, angry riots: the downside of new media

Doug Saunders at the Globe and Mail has been writing some really good stuff on the Middle East for a while now.  See this for clear-eyed clear thinking, clearly expressed  (my emphases):

After this week’s violence in the Middle East, two things are apparent. First, a lot of Arabs in the region believe that “the United States” created a video mocking the Prophet Mohammed. And second, a lot of people in North America believe that “Egypt” and “Libya” attacked U.S. diplomatic outposts and killed an American ambassador.

Few protesters in Cairo or Benghazi believed that the video Innocence of Muslims could have been created by a largely unknown group of anti-Muslim activists in California, a group so obscure that it took U.S. reporters more than a day to identify them – or that this network of bigots could be allowed to exist simply because American laws protect freedom of speech. This could only be a direct product of Washington.
After all, this was, until recently, how things worked in their own countries. If something was allowed to exist in Egypt or Libya, the authoritarian government must have encouraged it to exist. Ergo, this wasn’t some fringe oddball in California offending them; it could only have been the United States assaulting them.

Likewise, many Americans, including prominent ones, simply could not believe that a consulate or embassy could be stormed by anti-American protesters without the active consent, and likely direct involvement, of the country’s government. These attacks prove that America has “lost Egypt” or “been betrayed by Libya,” commentators wrote, likening this week’s relatively small-scope protests to Iran’s 1979 revolution

We need to take three lessons from this week’s events.

The first is that both Arab and Western citizens – and sometimes politicians – are failing to appreciate the polyphonic nature of democratic nations. This has always been a problem for the U.S. and its neighbours: One-note nations such as Russia and Iran have never really believed that every political statement, protest march and YouTube video emerging from a diverse Western country isn’t orchestrated by the national government.
But now it’s also a problem for the new Arab democracies. Suddenly, they are large, and contain multitudes. They have become polyphonic. We should not mistake the signal from the noise, even when things become very noisy, indeed.

The second is to realize that the new freedoms – both political and electronic – allow the most obscure and marginal figures to dominate the agenda. ...

The third is to realize that, as a result of this, these fringe movements are increasingly threatening, far out of proportion of their actual numbers, not just within their small sphere of action but on a larger stage. The past decade has seen a largely unnoticed ascent of the circle of xenophobic activists behind the short film that triggered this violence, their rise into mainstream politics, and the failure of mainstream conservatives to confront and denounce them...

This is a new, wide-open world – one whose freedoms, if we aren’t careful, can easily be seized and abused.

Historical maps, their meaning and their uses

Last night's round table on the War of 1812 attracted an audience of 35, not bad for a rainy Friday night opposite a hockey game.  We had faculty, students and people from town, and they were interested enough to stick around right up to 10 pm.

One of the most interesting discussions concerned the role of Natives in the war and diplomacy of the time, and whether that role has been ignored or misrepresented, and still is.  One point at  issue was the map above, which was being used to display basic geography.  The priority of the maker was clearly to emphasize American expansion.  Notice how solid  the American states and territories look, and the lack of provincial boundaries in British territory.  Even  more remarkable is the absence of any Native settlements or territories.  This led one participant to state that the map was "false."

Yes and no, say I.  What practical meaning did the boundaries of the Mississippi Territory have in  1812?  Weren't the Creek Indian settlements attacked by Andrew Jackson a lot realer?  On the other hand the state boundaries established in the 1810s are real and practical today.

This  returns me to a point I made to my Crusade and Jihad students in our first class meeting, when I was showing them various maps depicting Christian and Muslim expansion in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.  The maps "lied" (= "were false"), I said.

It is more accurate to say that ANY map, historical or otherwise, is very much an oversimplification for analytical or propagandistic purposes.

Thus I say that the appropriate response of a historian to a historical map is not to draw a quick conclusion but to ask more questions.

Which is pretty much what we  were doing with this map last night.

A war to end war

Today in the Globe and Mail, "There was a war in 1812? Really?"
Earlier this month, Peter Jones in the Globe and Mail:

But the real legacy of the War of 1812, government claims aside, is simply that there was never a repeat. Tensions remained, small cross-border incursions took place, and fortifications continued to be built and maintained for another half-century, but the primary lesson both sides drew (and which was slowly reinforced) was not to bother again.

This may sound rather uninspiring – it is difficult to gather a group of colourfully dressed re-enactors to flail around in a field but not actually fight each other – but it probably explains much in terms of the incredible success North America’s two northern nations have enjoyed since.
For from the War of 1812, and its aftermath of avoiding another conflict, slowly emerged what might be called the North American regional consensus. It is now largely unspoken; most who live here probably couldn’t articulate it if they had to, but it has dominated the lives of both countries, and especially Canada, ever since.

Simply put, the North American regional consensus boils down to a realization that the cost of fighting for any possible treasure on the other side of the border is patently ridiculous when it is simply easier and cheaper to exchange these things by trade; that two quite different systems of government can coexist perfectly well; and (for Canadians) that maintaining stability and security in the northern half of the continent ourselves means that the United States will not feel compelled to do it for us
.
We may take all of this for granted, but we shouldn’t. It took those sophisticated Europeans another 150 years (and two of the bloodiest wars in history) to figure it out. Most regions of the world still haven’t.
Of course, the fact that the British had a growing concern for their own relations with the United States probably had something to do with the lack of fighting after 1814. We tend to forget that, after 1814, the British often sided with the U.S. in various arbitration exercises, when they probably should have acted differently if strictly Canadian interests were uppermost in their minds. The Alaska panhandle is a case in point.

Whatever the reasons, the North American regional consensus is now so deeply ingrained on both sides of the border that anyone who tried to promote the idea of fighting a war over anything would rightly be regarded in both countries as insane. Social scientists refer to such regions as “security communities” – places in the world where the idea of conflict is so remote that societies and individuals have developed, as Karl Deutsch put it many years ago, “dependable expectations of peaceful change.”
So there you have it. The real legacy of the War of 1812 is that it helped set the stage for a regional security community. Hardly stirring stuff, but, if you look around the world today, you will quickly realize just how rare a thing ours is. And it is a thing very much worth celebrating.

Breivik, coward

Breivik, the Norwegian mass murderer, deserves no better than to be classified as a malicious coward and exhibitionist.

If he was really dedicated to the cause he proclaimed, he would have shot or blown up someone important.

Instead he went for a large number of easy kills.

To dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free

Today I heard the Byrds' version of Bob Dylan's Mr. Tambourine Man played in  the background of a CBC Radio One history of the music business. I realized that it had been a very long time indeed since I'd heard the original version by Bob Dylan himself. This, I thought, is how things fade into the past. To invoke the revolutionary music scene of the 1960s, the producers of the radio show thought it sufficient to play the Byrds. They perhaps thought that this would remind their audience – and CBC radio has a rather old audience – of Dylan's music. But as a matter of fact, how many listeners had ever heard the Dylan version? I don't recall it getting a lot of airplay; that's why the Byrds version was important. Dylan's unique style and voice went off like a bomb, but the initial explosion was rather a small one,and his influence was exercised through cover versions. And now nearly 50 years later even they are fading into obscurity. Some old-timers and dedicated music fans still recognize the Byrds in the background, but I am sure that lots of others only vaguely recognize the 1960s style and react as they think they should react to a discussion of music in the 1960s. And then one of these days, it will really be obscure. Maybe that day is almost here.

If you have never heard Bob Dylan do Mr. Tambourine Man, listen to this. It is really quite something.

It's too late for the pebbles to vote

Words of wisdom from Babylon 5 (which I never saw the first time around):

 "The avalanche has already begun, it's too late for the pebbles to vote."

Laying down my arms

Some of you know that I have long been a member of the SCA -- for about as long as I have been studying the real Middle Ages, 40 years and more. One of the main activities I took part it was fighting in the lists and on the  mock battlefield. I loved fighting, and once upon a time I was pretty good, back in the pioneering days of the sport.  I have been doing it a lot less recently because of health problems and the reduced energy of older age, which combined to make me less enthusiastic about being hit with sticks by large, unsympathetic men.  I just lacked  the faith that I would bounce back from an injury.

This week I found I have another health problem -- blood clots in both lungs. I was actually admitted to hospital where I was started on a course of anticoagulants, some of which I may be on for the rest of my life. So that is it for being hit, at least on purpose, by large unsympathetic men (not to mention the women).

Things could be worse. I was the least ill person in the crucial care unit of my hospital, where I was stuck because there were no beds in ordinary wards. At those times that I wasn't tied down too much by wires and IV tubes I could get around perfectly well, which is more than can be said about everybody else.

Fun times crossing the border

There haven't been a lot of fun times crossing the border in ten years, but on my way to Kalamazoo for the International Congress on Medieval Studies, I shared a light-hearted moment with a border guard.

He asked me where I was going and I replied that I was attending a conference on the Middle Ages.

He asked for more detail, and I said we studied the entire Middle ages.

"So," he said, "you're going to sit around and watch Game of Thrones."

I laughed and said, "That might be an idea, because I am an episode behind."

Straightfaced, he went on: "Because the Middle Ages were exactly like Game of Thrones."  And with a look he waved me on.