A Republic, If You Can Fight It

 

At the last session of a college seminar on nuclear weapons and strategic defense, my seminar leader, astronomer Mike Lecar (RIP), raised the question of how to ensure world peace without expensive and ineffective defense systems. Mike introduced those of us who didn’t know him to Immanuel Kant, a polymath who, inter alia, had been a fellow astronomer - Kant was one of the first people to speculate that nebulae were actually “island universes,” or galaxies. The Sage of Konigsburg acquired greater fame as a philosopher, in which capacity he wrote several essays on political philosophy, chief among them “Perpetual Peace” (1795) In his essay Kant argued that republicanism was a necessary precondition for world peace: citizens of republics were far less likely to start wars when their own blood and treasure were at stake, and more accustomed to relationships structured by contract than by dominion. Necessary, Kant wrote, but not sufficient: one could not fully guarantee an end to war unless those republics were bound together in a constitutional federation, akin to the social contract between individual citizens.

Eirene, by Ludwig Knaus

Kant’s speculations, recast as “democratic peace theory,” became popular with interventionist American policy-makers in the twentieth century. Woodrow Wilson justified American intervention in World War One as “making the world safe for democracy,” which in turn would prevent another global conflict. Bill Clinton argued that the promotion of democracy would make permanent the peace created by the Fall o’ Communism™. George Bush II justified the invasion of Iraq by claiming that the United States had a responsibility to establish democracies in Southwest Asia, and to support democratic “color revolutions” in nations like Georgia and Ukraine. All three of these presidents agreed with Kant that representative government was not the sole guarantor of international peace, that some form of trans-national institution had to harmonize those republics’ interests. For Wilson, the League of Nations would serve this purpose; Clinton and Bush, both skeptical about world government, assumed that free international trade under the World Trade Organization would do the job. Or that God would intervene.

In practice, the concentration of coercive power in the hands of a few sovereign states prevented either of these international systems from functioning equitably. The League of Nations became the bagman for the British and French Empires, dividing the spoils of Ottoman and German defeat among the Great War’s victors. The WTO and the International Monetary Fund became the servants of multi-national corporations, helping them strip-mine the public assets of the old Communist bloc and the global South. Both of these would-be world governments destroyed their own legitimacy within half a generation. 

Their fatal flaw was a misconception that dated back to Kant himself: individuals in a republic are not analogous to nation-states in an international system. States are defined by Max Weber as entities enjoying “a monopoly on the legitimate use of force” within a given geographical era. Individuals within a social contract, on the other hand, cannot legitimately use force except in self-defense, and then only if the state is unable immediately to defend them. Nations one may define as political communities with shared sets of historical grievances. Citizens aren’t supposed to go around with chips on their shoulder, even if many do; nations, on the other hand, almost always have someone or something they want to fight. What is anti-social in an individual is acceptable, even laudable, in a nation-state. National leaders we are accustomed to regard as responsible if they are willing, often eager, to break, burn, and kill on their country’s behalf. One cannot fashion any sort of international order out of such antisocial beings, unless the order be a giant global prison run by the strongest inmates.

Nor can one assume that such a world-prison is a suitable place for the kind of intelligent beings capable of deducing the nature of galaxies. If we want to imagine a peaceful future conducive to science, culture, and human flourishing, however, we must imagine one that rejects the poison of nationalism and the concept of “legitimate violence.”

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One question, though: Do republics actually tend not to fight one another? Political scientists have not come up with a satisfactory answer to that question, because one can easily undermine any historical examples raised to support or undermine democratic peace theory with the No True Scotsman tactic. One need not adopt the absolutist posture of many political scientists, however. If we define a republic as a government featuring 1st Separation of government powers, 2nd Competitive multi-party elections, and 3rd An electorate including at least 20 percent of the population, then the number of republics - representative democracies, if you prefer - would seem to have increased worldwide since 1795. Concurrently, the number of inter-republican conflicts decreased. The United States made war on the Mexican Republic and the Confederacy, the First French Republic conquered Venice and the Netherlands, the Second French Republic destroyed the Roman Republic of 1848, Britain and Finland fought one another (somewhat half-heartedly) during the Second World War, and Iceland and Britain fought a bloodless war over cod fishing in the mid-twentieth century. There are other examples one might adduce, but they tend to conflate constitutional monarchies in which the non-elected sovereign has actual power (e.g., Wilhelmine Germany) with representative democracies. I suspect that elected officials are more adept at compromise and at gracefully chickening out of conflicts than kings and dictators, since the former skill helped them get elected and the latter helped them get along with other officials. From the skills and foibles of crooked politicians may yet come a more peaceful world order.

Volcano Wine

 

The Canary Islands, or rather the easternmost of them, were twice depopulated in the early modern era. Spanish exploitation and disease wiped out most of the islands’ indigenous Guanche population in the 15th and 16th centuries. The Earth itself drove Spanish colonists from the island of Lanzarote in the 18th century. Following a series of premonitory earthquakes, on 1 September 1730 magma began to erupt into the western region of Lanzarote. It continued to do so, from what eventually grew into ten different sites, until sometime in late 1735 or early ‘36. In some cases the eruptions formed cinder cones; in others lava simply poured onto the island’s surface, destroying fields and villages. Lava fields eventually covered a quarter of the island, and a thick layer of ash accumulated everywhere. The inhabitants stayed put through the initial eruptions, but cleared out after six new vents and cones formed in early 1731. They would not return for five years.

Upon their return, Lanzarote’s settlers realized that while the volcanic episode had destroyed their farms, it had also left them with a new resource: millions of magma pebbles, or lapilli, that could serve as an excellent inorganic mulch. Lanzarote was (and is) an arid land whose soil was unable to retain much moisture, but a thin layer of lapilli trapped water vapor from daytime onshore breezes, allowing plants to flourish. The island’s farmers began cultivating new crops, particularly grapes, raising them in sunken circular beds surrounded by low stone curbs. These beds protected crops from both excessive sunlight and wind, while ash and pumice mulch helped them retain water. By the second half of the century the island became an exporter of wine, including Malvasia Volcanica, a sherry for which it is still famous. Lanzarote's post-volcanic farms also produced vegetables, potatoes, and maize, thirsty crops for an island that sometimes gets less than 6 inches of rain per year.

 

There were limits, however, to how little rainfall the island's crops and farmers could survive. The agricultural boom on Lanzarote caused the island's population to double in thirty years, from 5,000 to 10,000 inhabitants. Then in 1768 a severe drought caused crops to fail and families to starve. Spanish officials responded by relocating settlers from Lanzarote to other parts of Spain's empire, including the colony of Texas. There Canarians became some of the first white settlers in San Antonio, exchanging the natural dangers of their old homeland for the manmade perils (like Comanche raids) of the new. Empire is not as immediately disruptive as rivers of fire and showers of ash, but in the longer term it is equally indifferent to humans’ well-being.

Sources: “The Legacy of Lanzarote,” Volcano Cafe, 23 Oct. 2021; Carol Greentree, “Lanzarote: Agriculture as Art,” Pacific Horticulture (n.d.); Fred Pearce, "How Volcanoes Launched Lanzarote's Bizarre Agricultural Revolution," Beacon Broadside, 5 June 2018; Valentin Troll et al, “Volcanic Particles in Agriculture and Gardening,” Geology Today 33 (July-August 2017: 148-54.

The Villasur Expedition

The story of Pedro Villasur’s last expedition can begin, as so many contemporary European military stories began, with a royal inheritance. More precisely, it stemmed from the War of the Quadruple Alliance (1718-20), and the determination of Elizabeth Farnese, royal consort to King Philip V of Spain, to secure a territorial legacy for her sons, who stood in the line of succession behind the children of Philip’s first marriage. The Treaty of Utrecht had obliged the Spanish Bourbons to give up most of their kingdom’s holdings in the Mediterranean. Farnese proposed to find out how vigorously the other European monarchs were prepared to defend that treaty clause. A Spanish invasion of Sardinia and Sicily followed. Britain, France, Austria, and Holland declared war; the first two of those kingdoms pursued it vigorously enough. France, in particular, sent troops into northern Spain and seized the overseas Spanish outposts of Pensacola and Los Adaes.

French expansion in North America had in previous years become a matter of some concern for officials in Madrid and Mexico. The new colony of Louisiana had driven a wedge between the older Spanish provinces of Florida and Texas, threatening Spain’s control of both. Up the Mississippi River, from their settlements in Illinois, French traders reportedly did business with the Pawnees and Apaches (Nde) on Mexico’s northern frontier. Those nations could, in turn, resell French guns and ammunition to the Comanches, a nation recently arrived in the southern Plains whose warriors had raided Spanish outposts in New Mexico. With France and Spain now at war, the possibility that French agents might directly arm and incite Comanche raiders became one that local Spanish officials could not dismiss.

In the spring of 1720 the governor of New Mexico ordered Pedro Villasur to take a body of troops into the northern Plains and arrest or expel any French traders he might find. The general set out in June, riding several hundred miles northeast of New Mexico to the Platte River in modern Nebraska. His command included a dozen Nde scouts, 40 light Spanish infantry, and sixty Pueblo warriors captained by Jose Naranjo. Villasur invited local Pawnee leaders to a parlay, but they declined. When one of his messengers failed to return, the general decided he was over his head, and began his withdrawal. Too late: early on August 14 a party of Pawnee and Oto-Missouri warriors, armed with guns and bows, attacked the Spanish camp near the Platte-Loup River confluence. Fifty of the defenders, including Villasur, were killed; a few Spaniards with horses, and most of the Puebloans (who had been in a separate camp) escaped. The northern Plains remained Native ground. 

“We are Unfond of Pedro Villasur,” unk. artist.

Survivors of the battle reported that they had seen European-style shelters on their route of march, and believed the French had been nearby when the battle began. Certainly the Pawnees and Otos had acquired their firearms from French traders. One may therefore consider this engagement to have been a late and minor battle of the War of the Quadruple Alliance. 

The Loup River battle had no impact on that larger conflict, but it did leave an unexpectedly large historical footprint. Following the Spanish defeat, an unidentified artist painted the battle, or at least New Mexicans’ memory of it, on bison hide. A generation later, Father Philipp von Segesser von Brunegg sent the painting back to Europe; art historians subsequently named the painting for the priest. The Segesser painting included white men in European dress fighting alongside the Pawnees. Apparently, the artist believed that French colonists had taken part in the battle. Native American memories of Villasur’s incursion similarly acquired, over time, an element of fiction. Four decades after Villasur’s death the English explorer Jonathan Carver, visiting a Ho-Chunk community in present-day Wisconsin, heard a story from chief Ekharrimonyk about a Spanish silver caravan his people had overwhelmed 40 years earlier. The timing of the account, and the absence of other contemporary Spanish parties in the area, indicates the “caravan” was probably Villasur and his companions. Carver added that the Ho-Chunks, not then familiar with silver, had traded the captured bullion to the French for a pittance. That part of the story may have been true, but Ekharrimonyk had misheard or misremembered an important detail: none of his countrymen had taken part in the 1720 battle. Other sources suggest the Ho-Chunks obtained the plunder as a gift or trade good from their Iowa or Oto allies, which seems the likeliest explanation. It would seem that the victorious Otos and Pawnees placed little value in silver coin and plate - certainly not compared to the glory they won defending their homeland - and that the ripple effects of this fairly isolated battle extended into the Great Lakes region and half a century into the future.

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Sources: Jeremy Black, Politics and Foreign Policy in the Age of George I (Ashgate Publishing, 2014), esp. 87, 108-12, 116-19; Thomas Chavez, “The Segesser Hide Paintings: History, Discovery, Art,” Great Plains Quarterly 10 (Spring 1990): 96-109; Alfred Thomas, ed., After Coronado: Spanish Exploration Northeast of New Mexico, 1696-1727 (Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1969); John Parker, ed., The Journals of Jonathan Carver (Minnesota Historical Society, 1976), esp. 80-81.

There's Her House Behind the Barn

 

Fans of George Orwell may recall his description, in “Such, Such Were the Joys,” of his disagreeable course of study at Crossgates (real name St. Cyprian’s), the prep school Eric Blair attended as a boy. As a scholarship student, Blair’s principal job at Crossgates was to win admission to a fancy public school like Eton, thus increasing the value of his prep school to prospective students’ parents. To this end the school masters crammed him full of essay topics and cultural “facts” likely to appear on his entrance exams. Whether this differs greatly from modern American college prep I leave as a question for my readers.

Battle of Tewkesbury, by Antony Stanley

 

Like other students, Blair/Orwell learned the value of mnemonic devices to aid recall, particularly in his dreary history classes. The most baroque of these devices, “A Black Negress Was My Aunt; There’s Her House Behind The Barn,” tracked the first letters of each of the major battles of the famously complex Wars of the Roses. (“Major battles” from the examiners’ point of view, at least.) Having recently had cause to consider the Wars of the Roses - I was reading a biography of Henry VI - and of Orwell's anecdote, I decided finally to decode this complicated aide-memoire, viz:

(Saint) Albans

Blore Heath

Northampton

Wakefield

Mortimer’s Cross

(Saint) Albans, again

Towton

Hedgeley Moor

Hexham

Barnet

Tewkesbury (see above)

Bosworth Field

This tells one nothing about the battles themselves, of course, nor does it tell one anything useful except that the reciter had enough spare time to memorize an obscure historical catechism. I use the word “catechism” advisedly. Entrance exams were probably a relic of an earlier era when elite schools were intended primarily to train young men for the clergy. For them, orthodoxy mattered far more than critical thinking. Eric Blair survived his exams but, not the sort of boy one would call “clerical,” spent most of his time at Eton lazing about and trying to forget where his aunt lived.

New Book? New Book!

 

While my esteemed readers were distracted by more pressing matters, I apparently wrote another book. Hoozay!

To Be Men of Business: The Origins of Chickasaw Capitalism has been in the works for sixteen years, and I’ve written a few blog posts (here and here, for instance) about my progress and research findings. The finished product is now on sale from the University of Nebraska Press; those interested in buying a copy can obtain a 40% discount by entering the code 6AS26 at checkout.

It’s the perfect gift for the eccentric relative whose interests are well-concealed, or the college student you’re trying, for some reason, to steer away from business school and toward ethnohistory. And more power to you in either case.

Our Overdetermined Future

There is a joke about future expectations, and how they change within a society over time, and it goes like this:

Baby Boomers often seem disappointed because they were promised a future with flying cars and cities on the Moon, and got neither.

Gen Xers often seem unsurprised, because they were promised a cyberpunk dystopia, and here we are.

As new aspects of that dystopia congeal into reality, many Americans my age can’t even manage a raised eyebrow. Case in point: I was only mildly surprised to learn that a tech company CEO had managed to convert 200,000 of his own stem cells into neurons and link them with a computer. The journalists who reported the story were equally unsurprised, because they buried the lede. They knew what would actually draw readers’ interest: Sean Cole, the son of one of the CEO’s friends, then taught the brain-on-a-slide to play Doom, the successor to chess and Space Invaders as our era’s archetypal computer game.

No, this doesn’t surprise me, either.
 

I suspect Hon Weng Chong’s investors will eventually want him to turn his attention to something more profitable, but I think he’s already done humanity a great service: he has determined that you can theoretically distract a disembodied brain, generative AI program, or other potentially self-aware and angry mechanical intelligence with computer games. Would that humans had tried this strategy in the Terminator universe.

Mormon Cocaine Pirates of the Caribbean

Everything old is new again. The United States appears to have entered an undeclared naval war with Venezuela, much as it fought an undeclared naval war with France in the late 1790s and an undeclared armed conflict with the Barbary corsairs in the early 1800s. Since the Defense Department has gone in search of eighteenth-century precedents for its policies, it perhaps should not surprise us that others in the American national government have recurred to the early-national era for innovations in war-making.

Avast.

 

This is perhaps the kindest way to refer to a bill sponsored by Senator Mike Lee of Utah, a member of the LDS Church and a staunch supporter of President Donald Trump -  indeed, he once described the 45th president as "Captain Moroni," which apart from the final syllable is perfectly accurate. The Cartel Marque and Reprisal Reauthorization Act would authorize the president to issue letters of marque to private ships seeking to join the fight in the Caribbean. The privateers could then recover their expenses by seizing and (presumably) selling the cargo of captured vessels. Until last week, the U.S. Navy has apparently limited its attacks to Venezuelan-adjacent fishing boats, which may or may not have been carrying illicit drugs - particularly cocaine, a preferred pick-me-up of the American and European oligarchies. Of late American ships have begun targeting oil tankers, which are more valuable than small drug-smuggling (or fish-smuggling) vessels but harder to capture and dispose of. There is, at any rate, money to be made in private warfare, as American and Russian mercenaries have discovered over the past thirty years, and I dare say there are even a few retiring Congressmen who might enjoy the prospect, in retirement, of hoisting the black flag.

I will close with my original title for this post: “Go home, 2025, you’re drunk.”