“All men are created equal.” Those words, from the Declaration of Independence, are central to the story that Americans tell about ourselves and our history. But what did those words mean to the man who actually wrote them? By John Biewen, with guest Chenjerai Kumanyika.
4 May 2018
Aeon: Envy’s hidden hand
But research conducted among the Ju/’hoansi in the 1950s and ’60s when they could still hunt and gather freely turned established views of social evolution on their head. Up until then, it was widely believed that hunter-gatherers endured a near-constant battle against starvation, and that it was only with the advent of agriculture that we began to free ourselves from the capricious tyranny of nature. When in 1964 a young Canadian anthropologist, Richard Borshay Lee, conducted a series of simple economic input/output analyses of the Ju/’hoansi as they went about their daily lives, he revealed that not only did they make a good living from hunting and gathering, but that they were also well-nourished and content. Most remarkably, his research revealed that the Ju/’hoansi managed this on the basis of little more than 15 hours’ work per week. On the strength of this finding, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins in Stone Age Economics (1972) renamed hunter-gatherers ‘the original affluent society’.
This research also revealed that the Ju/’hoansi were able to make a good living from a sparse environment because they cared little for private property and, above all, were ‘fiercely egalitarian’, as Lee put it. It showed that the Ju/’hoansi had no formalised leadership institutions, no formal hierarchies; men and women enjoyed equal decision-making powers; children played largely noncompetitive games in mixed age groups; and the elderly, while treated with great affection, were not afforded any special status or privileges. This research also demonstrated how the Ju/’hoansi’s ‘fierce egalitarianism’ underwrote their affluence. For it was their egalitarianism that ensured that no-one bothered accumulating wealth and simultaneously enabled limited resources to flow organically through communities, helping to ensure that even in times of episodic scarcity everyone got more or less enough. [...]
Insults and mockery weren’t the only tool that hunter-gatherers had in their bags to maintain egalitarianism. Another that was explicitly linked to the expression of envy was ‘demand sharing’. Where we usually consider it rude for others to ask unashamedly for something that we own or to just expect to receive it, the Ju/’hoansi considered this normal. More so, as far as they were concerned, denying someone’s request ran the risk of being sanctioned for selfishness. Demand sharing did not lead to a free-for-all that ended up undermining any sense of private ownership. Instead, demands for things were usually – though not always – carefully considered. The net result of this was that, while private property was respected – after all, if there is no private property, how could you enjoy giving or receiving a gift? – material inequalities were quickly ironed out. However, the system was challenging for relatively well-resourced outsiders such as myself, which often resulted in a month’s supply of tobacco and food for a field trip being exhausted within a very short period of time. [...]
Even so, understanding envy’s cohesive role in band societies is analytically useful. It offers some insights into why this apparently corrosive vice has survived the mill of natural selection, and it reminds us that our sense of fairness almost certainly has a strong genetic component. Perhaps most importantly, it helps us to understand why inequality has proved time and time again to be a far more potent spur for political action than absolute poverty; why gaudy displays of wealth are capable of persuading nominally content middle classes to froth with rage, and why demagogues do so well when they position themselves as the enemies of ‘elites’ – both real and imagined.
Aeon: How the crisis of the 1930s made the Catholic Church modern
Most people presume that the great transition took place in the 1960s, and specifically at the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), when the Church officially signalled its openness to secular statehood, religious freedom and human rights. This is a mistake. Historians are reluctant to issue laws of history, but here’s one that seems reasonable: massive institutions do not fundamentally transform themselves in moments of relative placidity. The process requires too much energy and too much buy-in from cautious elites. They transform in moments of crisis, destruction and fear. The early 1960s were not such a moment for the Church. The 1930s, however, were. [...]
Their goal was no longer to offer an alternative to modernity, nor to even imagine that the Church would be at the centre of some future society. The goal, instead, was to use modern language to make claims on secular states so that Catholics could protect the Church, and see at least some Catholic principles codified into law. It was in these years, and for these reasons, that Catholics accepted human rights, religious freedom and secular modernity. [...]
Catholics in the 1930s were faced with an agonising set of choices. If the holistic Catholic renewal they had long dreamed of was off the table, what should take its place? Where should the Church stake its claim? Most Catholic leaders and thinkers opted to retrench around the family. For the first time, Catholics placed sexual and reproductive ethics at the very centre of their social and political mission. They did so for two reasons. First, Catholics reasoned that control over the family, as a site of moral education and instruction, would ensure institutional survival in a world that seemed to be falling apart. Secondly, Catholics reasoned (with some justice) that Catholic family ethics would be acceptable to secular politicians, whether it be Hitler or Franklin Roosevelt. These figures, after all, had their own reasons to oppose contraception, divorce and homosexuality.
The New York Review of Books: The End of ETA’s Era
Apologies often take the form of addled justifications, an impossible quest for innocence, and so it is with ETA’s apology. Here we have, for the first time in the group’s history, some emotional language, and a clumsy attempt at empathy. ETA apologizes to the victims “not involved in the conflict,” while the others—security forces, politicians—are offered only formal “respect.” It plays with language, it asks for a reciprocal apology, it calls for some kind of moral equivalence between ETA and the Spanish state before its final disbandment. “Nobody can change the past,” read ETA’s statement, but the apology is an attempt to do just that. [...]
Odd as it may now seem, ETA was not born as an armed resistance group that turned to terrorism, but as a cultural enterprise to save the Basque language and its people’s customs (its name is an acronym of the Basque words for “Basque Homeland and Liberty”). It was founded in 1958 by a group of dangerously idealistic students, many of them connected to the Catholic Church, who were dissatisfied with the inaction of the clandestine Basque Nationalist Party. Arrests, police beatings, and fear hardened them, though their experience was probably no more extreme than what was suffered by members of other clandestine groups elsewhere in Spain who never resorted to violence. But in those days, there was a fascination with leftist insurgencies and anti-colonial struggles elsewhere in the world—in Indochina, Cuba, Algeria, and so on. The fledgling ETA began to envision an independent, socialist Basque Country. [...]
It did split. The larger and more powerful faction, ETA “political-military,” gradually abandoned violence in favor of political action, while the smaller, weaker faction, ETA “military,” carried on. This is what ETA means when its apology says that the pain “should not have been prolonged for so long.” But the truth is that the ETA that continued its campaign of terrorism after the advent of democracy was not the same ETA. The group had to be rebuilt almost from scratch. For this new ETA, Franco had been an adversary, but the real enemy was Spain itself. It was true that the group’s goal of a separate socialist republic was unattainable even in a democracy, but there was perhaps a deeper motive to stick to the gun. ETA had become enamored of the power it conferred. As other young Europeans were discovering in those years—the Red Army Faction in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Provisional Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland—violence in the name of a political cause is a powerful drug. [...]
That murder was just one among many, but its significance went beyond the unprecedented outpouring of grief it caused. It revealed something important about a group dominated by the demon of the gun. Normal people could not understand why ETA would do something like that when the group could so easily have improved, albeit minimally, its image by pardoning their hostage. Insiders understood it perfectly: ETA neither needed nor wanted sympathy or support; what it sought was unwavering loyalty beyond any possible moral qualm. If this had not been clear until then, after the death of Miguel Ángel Blanco, anyone who would still defend or justify ETA was someone ETA could count on forever. That is the secret logic of militancy: it is not rejection, but doubt, that it strives to suppress.
The Atlantic: Ukraine’s Successful Courtship of Trump
Trump has said repeatedly that “no one is tougher on Russia” than him. But his critics have accused him of challenging Putin only superficially. Shortly after the Trump administration expelled 60 Russian diplomats in March—48 of whom were actually intelligence officers, according to a State Department spokesperson—the State Department acknowledged that the Kremlin would be allowed to refill the vacated positions. The Treasury Department recently sanctioned more than three dozen Russian oligarchs, officials, and entities who “profit” from Russia’s “malign activity” and “corrupt system.” But many of the sanctioned oligarchs had four months’ notice to move their money, thanks to a list of Russia’s wealthiest individuals released by the Treasury in January. That money might already be back in Russia. “As they say, ‘a barking dog cannot hinder a caravan’s journey,’” Putin told Russia’s TASS news agency at the time. He mocked his own absence from the list. When UN Ambassador Nikki Haley announced new sanctions against Russia over its support for embattled Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, she was contradicted by the White House hours later. [...]
Trump, ever transactional, also wanted to make sure he was not giving away something for nothing. The U.S. official said it was emphasized to the president that this would be a sale, not a gift, and Poroshenko won favor with Trump by facilitating an $80 million coal deal—the first between the U.S. and Ukraine—that was politically expedient for both leaders. In February, Ukrainian Railways signed a $1 billion locomotive deal with GE Transportation. Trump had promised during the campaign to revitalize the U.S. rail industry. “The Trump administration is very much focused on jobs creation,” said Daniel Vajdich, the president of the strategic advisory firm Yorktown Solutions. “So, naturally, Ukraine has thought about its ability to help create jobs for Americans in the context of creating leverage by feeding into Trump’s policy desires.” A Ukrainian-American lobbyist who spoke to me on condition of anonymity put it more bluntly: “Poroshenko has become a hostage of Trump,” he told me. [...]
In the months following the weapons sale, Poroshenko ordered Ukraine’s top anti-corruption prosecutor tasked with probing corruption under former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych to stop cooperating with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s work in Ukraine and ties to Russia, according to two sources familiar with the request. The New York Times first reported on that order on Wednesday, indicating that Kiev had blocked the Manafort investigations just as the Trump administration was finalizing the weapons deal in an attempt to stay on Trump’s good side. Trump, according to the U.S. official, saw Manafort’s legal problems as a function of Yanukovych’s regime rather than a reflection of Poroshenko’s.
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