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I just finished Henri Francfort’s quite interesting book The Birth of Civilization in the Near East, from which I picked up some very interesting information and ideas. The discusion of Mesopotamia was quite interesting (including the short description of Urukagina’s attack on predatory behavior by the rulers of Lagash, probably the first libertarian reform movement of recorded history), the discussion of the writing system, etc. Similarly, the treatment of Egyptian civilization was helpful, although I found the following (page numbers from undated edition from Doubleday Anchor Books, New York):

“On one side, Narmer, wearing the crown of Upper Egypt, destroys a chieftain of the northern marches. On the other side, the king, now wearing the crown of Lower Egypt, inspects a number of beheaded enemies. Thus, Narmer is shown as the first ‘Lord of the Two Lands.’” (p. 91)

From a scribal text: “And now the scribe lands on the river bank and is about to register the harvest tax. The janitors carry staves and the Nubians (policemen) rods of palm, and they say, ‘Hand over the corn,’ though there is none. The cultivator is beaten all over, he is bound and thrown into the well, soused, and dipped head downwards. His wife has been bound in his presence, his children are in fetters. His neighbors abandon him and are fled.” (p. 105) (Francfort follows with “If such brutality had been the rule, it is clear that Egyptian society could not have survived,” but he does not suggest it was uncommon, either.)

“The upper register shows the deceased in his function as ‘Scribe of the fields of the Lord of the Two Lands.’ On the left are shown a group of his officials, dressed in white, pencase in hand, busy measuring the grain on the stalk; their attendants (with bare bodies) hold the measuring cord. A peasant (followed by his wife who carries a basked on her head with further gifts) offers something to the tax officials, to propitiate them. But on the right, before the kiosk of the tomb owner and near the mooring-place of the boat, which brought his subordinates to the scene, a peasant, who apparently defaulted, is beaten, while another kneels and prays for grace.” (p. 107)

“If officials abused their power and oppressed the people, the peasants had an effective weapon at their disposal: they fled.” (p. 115)

Interesting. Oddly, here is how Francfort concludes his study of Egypt:

“Whatever aspect of Egyptian society we have scrutinized, we have found Pharaoh at the centre. Yet nothing would be more misleading than to picture the Egyptians in abject submission to their absolute ruler. Their state can be described as ‘a self-directed organism held together by a common regard for their customary rights and obligations.’ [Footnote to F. M. Powicke, The Reformation in England, Oxford, 1941, p. 31] Their polity was not imposed but evolved from immemorial predilections, and was adhered to without protest, for almost three thousand years. Similar predilections have, in fact, maintained the institution of divine kingship among Africans related to the ancient Egyptians down to our own days. It was good, not evil; it gave a sense of security which the Asiatic contemporaries of the ancient Egyptians totally lacked. If a god had consented to guide the nation, society held a pledge that the unaccountable forces of nature would be well disposed and would bring prosperity and peace. Truth, justice, were ‘that by which the gods live,’ an essential element in the established order. Hence Pharaoh’s rule was not tyranny, nor his service slavery.” (pp. 119-120)

I try to be careful not to read back onto such different contexts and civilizations ideas and concepts that are more familiar to me, but may have been foreign to the people of the time, but the beheadings and beatings sound rather like coercion to me, and apparently were perceived as such by the people who tried to avoid them, and not very much like “a common regard for their customary rights and obligations.”

I’m in Beijing….hoping to get some sleep before some morning meetings and then a trip to the airport for some long flights to the US and A. In the meantime, here are a few pics from some lectures I gave on this trip. (The last three pictures are from the Northeastern University in Shanyang, China.)

Meeting at Japanese for Tax Reform, Tokyo

Alumni Meeting of International Academy of Freedom in Manila

University of the Philippines

Introducing the Ideas of the Levellers at the University of the Philippines

Over 200 former Cato interns (I think the number was 220) converged on the Cato Institute’s headquarters from all over the country (and some from Latin America, Europe, and Asia) to take part in the first reunion of Cato Institute interns. David Boaz gave an inspiring call to arms Friday evening in Cato’s winter garden, followed by a trek of attendees to a local watering hole to reminisce. Former interns from the 1980s, 1990s, and the 2000s were there, and I was there from the “Class of ’78.” I gave the opening remarks at the meeting in the F. A. Hayek Auditorium the next morning (after working until 2:20 am on projects, and getting up at 7:00 to write my remarks; old college habits never die). My remarks follow:

Greetings from the oldest former intern here

David Bernstein on the rather, um, selective history of “Progressivism” given by the “Center for American Progress”: “Whitewashing Progressivism”

One could add many, many sins to the account of so-called “Progressives,” including prohibition, victimless crime laws generally, vice squads, public morals legislation, and generally attempting to replace the rule of law by the rule of wise and moral “experts,” i.e., themselves.

Reason.com: “Up from Slavery: There’s no such thing as a golden age of lost liberty”

I am particularly struck by libertarians and conservatives who celebrate the freedom of early America, and deplore our decline from those halcyon days, without bothering to mention the existence of slavery. Take R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., longtime editor of the American Spectator. In Policy Review (Summer 1987, not online), he wrote:

Let us flee to a favored utopia. For me that would be the late 18th Century but with air conditioning….With both feet firmly planted on the soil of my American domain, and young American flag fluttering above, tobacco in the field, I would relish the freedom.

I take it Mr. Tyrrell dreams of being a slave-owner. Because as he certainly knows, most of the people in those tobacco fields were slaves.

Steve Davies in a lecture at the Mercatus Center

The ‘true story’ of how Dr. King kept Uhura on Star Trek

(I added the exclamation point because I’m not a Trekkie, although I do remember watching the show when it came on. They are among the memories I have of my father, who watched it with me.)

HT: Anastasia Uglova

“Although world population has increased by about 80% over this time (World Bank 2009), the number of people below the $1 a day poverty line has shrunk by nearly 64%, from 967 million in 1970 to 350 million in 2006. In the past 36 years, there has never been a moment with more than 1 billion people in poverty, and barring a catastrophe, there will never be such a moment in the future history of the world.”

From “Parametric estimations of the world distribution of income” by Maxim Pinkovskiy and Xavier Sala-i-Martin (Copyright Voxeu.org; © voxEU.org)

HT: Bruce Barlett

The Wilson Quarterly has an excellent short article, “Rediscovering Central Asia,” by S. Frederick Starr, that offers an overview of contributions to human culture that emerged from Central Asia and some speculation on the causes of its decline. A prime culprit, the intellectual influence of Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad ­al-­Ghazali, author of The Incoherence of the Philosophers. (Al Ghazali’s book was rebutted by Abū ‘l-Walīd Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Rushd, usully known just as “ibn Rushd” or as “Averroes,” in his The Incoherence of the Incoherence, but it seems that, however fine ibn Rushd’s philosophical responses were, his view lost out, with terrible consequences for Islamic civilization.)

The Washington Post put it well: “Russia’s Yegor Gaidar championed freedom

I heard Deirdre McCloskey make this argument recently in Berlin, where I attended two conferences on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the publication of Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. This is going to be a very interesting book: “Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Industrial Revolution“

A surprisingly interesting critique of the “Pledge of Allegiance” (to a flag…ugh!) from Michael Lind: “The Pledge of Allegiance is un-American: Shouldn’t the government pledge allegiance to the people rather than the other way around?”

I’m looking forward to the new Cambridge University Press book on Poverty and Morality (William A. Galston and Peter Hoffenberg eds., Cambridge University Press, 2010), in which I have a rather long essay on classical liberalism and poverty. All the jots and tittles have been added, graphs and charts sent, etc., etc. I consider the tradition of classical liberal thinking and work in economic and institutional history, ethical philosophy, intellectual history, economics, sociology, and other disciplines. It was enormously fun to write. (And I’m not only looking forward to seeing my own name in print, as enjoyable as that may be, but to reading the other contributions, from other ethical perspectives.)

It should be available for pre-ordering soon. (Not in time for Isaac Newton’s upcoming 367th birthday, unfortunately, but for the 368th, for sure!)

I’ve been extremely busy lately (meaning work until 4 am frequently, plus travel) and have been behind on some writing projects, but I am really, really pleased that I brought along on my trip to China James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed. It’s a remarkably interesting treatment (I’m only a bit more than 100 pages into it at present, so I’ve got more stimulating reading ahead of me) of the nature of “ungoverned” regions of the world, with a focus on various hill peoples of Asia. To put it in a nutshell, he argues that the traditional view of such ungoverned people is that they are holdovers from previous civilizations, or representatives of how people lived before states, etc., etc. Scott looks at them in a very different way: they live in ways that have enabled them to elude capture or domination by the state, and those ways of life (including agriculture, settlement patterns, kinship systems, religion, etc.) have been deeply influenced by the proximity of predatory states. They have, in effect, evolved in ways that elude being ruled by states. When you think about it for a few minutes, it certainly seems a more fruitful way of understanding such peoples and their ways of life than the dominant mode. And it should tell us something, as well, about the likely success of the Pakistani government in extending its writ throughout the Northwest Frontier Province or of the Afghan government extending its writ from border to border of the territory of Afghanistan. (That said, Scott’s thesis should not be confused with fantasies or romantic notions about how the most wonderful thing imaginable is to live without a state; some — not all — forms of statelessness, such as those that have emerged among groups that have avoided being captured by states, are remarkably brutal and savage, and there are some stateless populations [think contemporary southern Somalia] who are fare worse off by most criteria, including freedom, than people who live under relatively limited government.)

Freedom Dinner 2009 – Video from Atlas Global Initiative on Vimeo.

My colleague Austin Petersen (with some input from me) did a lot of work to produce this. (Note the flag with the bananas on it. Bananas were a symbol of freedom in the East Bloc, where they were almost impossible to obtain. In fact, westerners would sometimes try to throw bananas over such walls, as gifts to the imprisoned populations.)

Still reads well: “Why Socialism Collapsed in Eastern Europe”

(I gave it as a lecture at a Cato University summer seminar on political economy in California during the summer of 1990, after having spent a good bit of 1989 and 1990 in Central and Eastern Europe.)

An excellent piece on how a tyranny crumbled: “Filming a Revolution”

Conny Rakow on her memories of the opening of the Wall.

It’s in German, but this short film the message of this little film should be clear to all.