Bolivar and South American "Limited Success"

I continue to work my way through the Mike Duncan "Revolutions" podcast series. I recently got through his series on Simon Bolivar and the revolutions in the Spanish Americas. 

These are excellent, and I highly recommend them. In this post, I'm perhaps going to be a bit harsh on Duncan, but don't let this deter you. Duncan is an excellent storyteller, and exceptional at condensing the disparate strands into an easy-to-follow story that has an amazing amount of useful information per unit time. He has a basic liberal bias, but this is fairly easy to subtract. 

One of the ideals I got out of Moldbug (and also in Ernst Junger's Eumeswil) is that you should aspire to understand the present as a historian living in on Mars in 300 years time would understand our present situation. That is to say, everybody is dead and gone, the nations and causes evoke no immediately strong emotions. You just want to understand what happened and why, and what it teaches you about how the world works. 

It is hard to do this with much of modern history. Ancient history has this a lot more, of course - the Greeks are utterly alien, for instance. As John Dolan put it, when describing the Iliad - the Greeks enjoyed cruelty. They found cruelty hilarious. And if you don't understand this about them, you'll never get the story. But if the only way you can get the appropriate distance is to travel so far back in time and setting, it's hard to know how much any of it actually maps clearly to the present. This is why the ideal is so elusive - disinterested knowledge of something that the year and place of your birth forces you to take a very active interest in. 

For an Anglo reader, Spanish American independence is well worth studying, because it's almost as close to the Martian ideal as you're going to get in the modern world. It's not your war. Neither the monarch, the colonial power nor the colony are in any sense "your" monarch or "your" country. There is an odd tension people sometimes get from being weaned too much on moronic Manichean versions of history, where one somewhat feels the need to "pick a side" in the story, rather like a foreigner moving to America and deciding on a random NFL team to support (I know several people who did this, incidentally). And while this instinct of picking sides in history not generally useful, I think it is useful to consider the question of who acted wisely, who acted foolishly, who could have achieved a better outcome if they had acted differently, and if you were a random elite civilian at the time, who would you have chosen to support. 

Guiding you in this, of course, are your general abstract principles - in my case, things like support for central authority and skepticism of proponents of radical leftist change. But how much should that commend Ferdinand VII to you specifically? It's not totally clear. I think anyone with monarchist leanings will probably lean towards supporting the monarchy before things go to hell. But what about afterwards? As I said about the French revolution, at some point the fastest and best path back to strong central authority for France was not restoring the House of Bourbon, but rather ... elevating Napoleon. 

When evaluating the wars of Spanish American independence, it's hard not to judge things in part by the character of Simon Bolivar. He really is a singular figure in terms of his sheer force of will. He famously swore an oath on Mons Sacer, the location of the Secession of the Plebs in ancient Rome, to liberate his country of Venezuela or die trying. He was not joking. He managed to remain stalwart even in the face of repeated setbacks and failed attempts. It is a little bit unclear how to count the number of times he was exiled after failed attempts at independence, but it is at least three. 

-After he had played a large part in the military victories leading to the First Republic of Venezuela, when it collapsed after the earthquake of 1812 (not just due to that, obviously, but it doesn't help when people interpret it as God's divine wrath for declaring independence), he had to flee to Curacao, and later to Cartagena in New Granada (modern Colombia). 

-He got exiled a second time after the Second Republic of Venezuela was crushed by the Royalists, and the forces he led were massively defeated. He fled to Jamaica, narrowly avoided an assassination attempt there, and moved to Haiti

-From Haiti, he led a failed attempt to re-invade Venezuela in 1815, but was defeated again in particularly embarrassing fashion, and had to return to Haiti again in exile a third time. 

-And at the end of his life, he was about to be exiled to Europe, but managed to die before this happened. 

Suffice to say, when I reflect on his situation in 1816, after three failed attempts at this thing called independence, it's fair to say that most people might be a mite discouraged. But not Bolivar. It is impressive how much you can accomplish as an organized and brave member of the elite with an absolutely single-minded focus, and a willingness to die in the attempt. 

A lot of this is Bolivar himself, though, and perhaps not something that's easy to emulate. In one of those great admissions against interest, as the lawyers say, his sometime-ally-and-sometime-opponent Francisco de Paula Santander put it this way:

His force of personality is such that on countless occasions when I have been filled with hatred and revenge, the mere sight of him, the instant he speaks, I am disarmed, and I come away filled with nothing so much as admiration.

Bear in mind that the narrator here is no wilting flower - he was the hero of the Battle of Boyaca and later president of Gran Colombia. It's sort of like how everybody smart was blown away at how smart Von Neumann was. 

Bolivar was so magnetic in his personality that, in Duncan's retelling, his personal insistence was the driving force behind the creation of Gran Colombia, a country that was a union of modern Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and parts of other countries too. It seemed like nobody else was much interested in the idea of a grand centralized republic. Everyone else saw independence mostly as an opportunity for the circulation of (local) elites, where some group gets to become the leaders of a smaller new country, rather than being subordinated in a larger one. It's a testament to his sheer force of will that he conjured this country into existence for 12 years, despite most other elites having a very lukewarm attitude to it. But eventually he encountered a problem that he couldn't brute force through will alone.  

As a general, his track record was somewhat hit and miss, and it's not obvious from casual empiricism what his actual wins above replacement would be. He liked reckless and bold assaults, and sometimes these worked extremely well (like the Magdalena campaign) and sometimes they worked poorly, like in his assault on Ocumare de la Costa in 1816, which wikipedia, not usually one for hyperbole in these matters, describes as "a debacle". 

I think Duncan reads him correctly in the following sense. He is an impressive guy, with huge balls, a broad and far reaching vision, and an absolute willingness to sacrifice everything to achieve it. He left a very large mark forever on his country. Duncan's description at the end of the series, which we'll return to, is this:

More than any other single man (Bolivar) represents the entire process of South American independence, and without question he is now mostly remembered as a romantic hero of an adventurous age, the details of the man himself little remembered or even needed. And in this way too he is like Washington, mythologized to the point of abstraction. But I hope as we've slogged our way along with him now over the past 27 episodes, across mountains, in grasslands and through deserts and through freezing cold, in the city, in the country, through victory and defeat, aiming for glory, getting it, losing it, and then winning it again, that we can appreciate him as a man riding through difficult times, trying to take the world he inherited and turn it into a world that he dreamed of. 

He was indeed. But this much is also true of Hitler, and Stalin, and Pol Pot, and Lee Kuan Yew, and Julius Caesar, and Napoleon, and George Washington. It marks him for "greatness" in the sense of enormity, and overall impact on history. But it leaves open the other version of "greatness", of actually doing good. By their fruits shall ye know them. When you are the leader of a country, you no longer get to claim that you meant well. You no longer get to claim that you tried your best, and were mistaken. And you definitely don't get to claim that the fact that you felt you were doing the right thing is an excuse for unforeseen consequences. History's judgment is severe, and rightly so. When millions of lives and whole nations are on the line, you have to be right, and you have to succeed. You also deserve to be judged against reasonable counterfactuals. What else would have happened, absent your choices? 

Let's start with the counterfactual. The obvious counterfactual to independence is ... not independence. That is, the continuation of the Spanish rule in the Americas. Like with the Haitian revolution, the Spanish American revolutions are very hard to imagine without Napoleon overthrowing the Spanish monarchy. Also as in the Haitian revolution, a lot of the early revolutionaries establish local juntas in their cities as a way of supposedly declaring their support for Ferdinand VII, against the French monarchy of Joseph I (Napoleon's brother), whom Napoleon imposed on Spain in 1808. This makes it all very deniable, means almost everybody local will be minded to agree with some parts of what you're pushing early on, and also means that it's not clear whether allegiance to Ferdinand himself requires allegiance to the various governments claiming to rule Spain in opposition to Joseph I, such as the Supreme Central Junta or the Cortes of Cadiz. 

In terms of its relation to the martian ideal, Duncan's re-telling of Roman history was excellent, because it's very easy to have intellectual distance. Duncan's re-telling of the American revolution was mostly lame, because he can't (or doesn't want to) liberate himself from the standard propaganda. In the  American Revolution, the complaints of the patriots were ridiculous, but Duncan had to repeat them anyway. He never seriously addressed the rebuttal of those complaints by the Loyalists. As Moldbug pointed out, the strongest of these is Thomas Hutchinson's Strictures upon the Declaration of Independence. I don't know anybody that has read that document and come away with the impression that the complaints of the Revolution were anything other than a complete joke. 

In the US revolution, Duncan knows the actual complaints against the previous colonial order and leans into them as best he can to try and make the case. Whereas in Spain, it seems much more of a required formality to address briefly - it's not his background, there's nothing in there that makes for an interesting story, and he doesn't have a great deal of energy for it. There are the usual problems of enforced monopolies on trade with the mother country, and pro forma stuff about stuffy elites from Europe running the show to the chagrin of local elites. Notably, there aren't the long list of complaints about the evils and abuses of slavery that accompanied his descriptions of the causes of the Haitian revolution. It is left as an exercise for the reader to infer whether this was because a) Spanish slavery in the 18th century was much more humane than French slavery in the 18th century, or b) because, ex-post, the slaves played a pretty minor role in the Spanish American revolutions, and almost none of the action seems to easily fit a narrative of slaves as the central protagonists taking revenge on their cruel former masters.  

So there were some problems with Spanish America, but they seem pretty trivial. Even more so than Haiti, it seems that despite the occasional uprising beforehand, it's very hard to imagine anything getting off the ground without the overthrow of the Spanish monarchy. 

You can say, fine, once it got overthrown though, it's probably not possible to put things back the way they way. And this has quite a lot of truth to it. But Ferdinand VII was restored in 1813, and made a concerted attempt to re-assert Spanish control. It's not hard to imagine that it could have all been restored, even if it's hard to imagine it all continuing along uninterrupted the whole time without it coming from a counterfactual that has nothing to do with Bolivar or Spanish America at all, and everything to do with Napoleon. If the monarchy were restored, it's also easy to imagine gradual and peaceful paths to devolution of power that look more like Canada or Australia, not that this had to happen necessarily. The more important question, though, is would this restoration of the Spanish monarchy have been a good thing? 

The most astonishing fact about Bolivar is to look at the system he wanted to impose in his vision of Gran Colombia. He wanted a grand unified country, ruling over large tracts of Spanish America. The whole continent would be divided into perhaps four large countries. He wanted a strong central government, rather than a federal system that devolved power to the local regions. He wanted a strong executive, rather than dominance by an elected body like Congress. And remember, mind you, that he wanted this system so much that he tried to impose this vision against the expressed wishes of most other local elites.

What system is this describing?

It's describing the God damn Spanish monarchy! In every major respect, other than the birthplace and ruling location of the man at the top of the pyramid (and some of his local elite advisors), he is describing the system they previously had. Sure, there is a new lifelong president to capture the rents at the top, and a different process for choosing that person (once! he wanted lifelong appointments) but how much difference does this make? If you personally get to be the monarch, sure it makes a big difference to you. But Bolivar does a better than average job of indicating that he actually didn't aspire to be a peacetime president for life (though plenty of contemporaries doubted these protestations). Sure, even so, let's assume he got the top job. What's in it for everyone else? Who cares if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice?

Bolivar's ridiculous conceit, for which everyone paid very heavily, was that he could smash all the existing institutions and their history and force of inertia, and somehow expect that he could approximately impose the same conditions back up again, except with the Peninsulares, the Spaniards of Spanish birth, replaced by the Criollo, the Spaniards of America birth. But it doesn't work that way. Once the political VIX spikes up, it stays high for a very long time. All of the people you've been leading in this coalition to overthrow the existing order have very different ideas about what they're hoping to get out of the new regime. It's very far from obvious that they'll be contented to be put back into essentially the same circumstances with a new guy in charge. 

This is the first damning indictment on Bolivar. 

But this is the realm of hypotheticals - the what could have been. Let us at least stick to the factual, rather than counterfactual. What was?

I'm going to start here with Bolivar's own assessments at the end of his life, because he made two, a few months apart. On his death bed, he has this to say:

"Colombians you have witnessed my efforts launch liberty where tyranny once reigned. I have labored selflessly sacrificing my fortune and my peace of mind. When it became clear that you doubted my motives I resigned my command. My enemies have toyed with your confidence, destroyed what I hold sacred my reputation and my love of Liberty.  They have made me their victim and hounded me to my grave. I forgive them. As I depart your midst my love for you impels me to make known my last wishes. I aspire to no other glory than the consolidation of Colombia. If my death can heal and fortify the Union I go to my tomb in peace." 

Hmm, it seems to be hinting at some bad stuff going on, but there's definitely an optimistic veneer that warms the heart of anyone raised on stories of the American revolution. What else did he say though, in his letter to Juan Jose Flores, at that time President of Ecuador (Troy McLure: Hi, I'm Ecuador! You may remember me from such recent polities as the collapsed Republic of Gran Colombia).

1. America is ungovernable.

2. He who serves revolution plows the sea. 

3. All one can do in America is to leave it. 

4. The country is bound to fall into ungovernable chaos after which it will pass into the hands of  an undistinguishable string of tyrants of every color. 

5. Once we have been devoured by all manner of crime and reduced to a frenzy of violence, no one, not even the Europeans, will want a subjugate us. 

Or, as he put it elsewhere around the same time:

"There is no such thing as good faith in America. Treaties are worth little more than the paper they are printed on America. Constitutions are pamphlets, elections an excuse for war. Liberty has dissolved into anarchy, and for me life has become a torment."

Why would he give such a grim assessment?

Because the country had been through over 20 years of butchery, chaos and civil war! Duncan has a habit of throwing in one-off lines that are incredibly jarring but then never referring back to them in hours and hours of narrative. One of them (from memory) was that the process of independence killed roughly half the population (I think of Venezuela). That seems like a fact worth emphasizing more! I ran out of energy to track down exactly which line in which of the 27 episodes it was that he claimed this, or what specific region or time he has in mind, or what source. I am lazy. But the flip side here is that this is a fact that ought to be repeated every 30 minutes. "And then, the Second Republic of Venezuela was inaugurated, and by this time historians estimate the cumulated death toll of this experiment to be XXX".  Wikipedia is telling me the death toll is 600,000 for the wars of Spanish American independence, and while this applies to more than just Venezuela, it's a pretty reasonable number compared with the estimated population of Venezuela of 710,000 in 1810, with Colombia contributing maybe another 500,000, plus the other regions. So the "half" is looking dicey unless quite limited in geography. But can we agree that this cost of 600,000 corpses and decades of chaos is worse than the deadweight loss imposed by a trade monopoly and the other grab bag of abuses?

Nor was Bolivar merely an unwitting or accidental contributor to this. His hilariously named "Admirable campaign" where he led armies from New Granada against Royalist-held Venezuela involved him famously declaring a war to the death, where any Spanish-born civilian that didn't support his side was liable to be killed. This contributed mightily to the atmosphere of butchery and brutality that surrounded these campaigns. To take another reading of the atmosphere of these conflicts, consider the "Legions of Hell", the mixed-race Pardo army led by Jose Tomas Boves. Wikipedia charmingly describes their exploits thus:

Most striking to his contemporaries, however, was that he allowed his llanero soldiers to engage in a class and race war against the landed and urban classes of Venezuela, fulfilling the latter's fear, since 1810, that the revolution could devolve into another Haitian Revolution. ... Boves's army became feared for its liberal use of pillage and summary executions, which became notorious even in this period when such actions were common on both sides of the conflict.

But don't forget, the Spanish imposed trade monopolies!

And it's worth emphasizing that none of this was even what got Bolivar depressed at the end of his life. Rather, it's that once all these costs had been paid, and independence actually established, all these political projects kept collapsing into further wars, first against the remaining Royalist forces to drive them out over years and years, but then it quickly devolved into coups and wars between different generals, and wars between the newly independent countries in the region. 

It rather follows the immortal words of Brad Pitt in Se7en:

You're right. It's all fucked up. It's a fucking mess. We should all go live in a fucking log cabin.

But Duncan can't quite see it this way. He almost can. He can narrate the individual events just fine. But the sheer scale of the horror is something you need to keep reminding yourself of - that all these glorious civil wars of butchery between previously amicable groups of civilians are in fact monstrous and probably avoidable evils. Instead, the unironic use of the word "liberation" throughout the narrative, and the also unironic use of the word "treason" to describe the actions of generals who rebelled against Bolivar's rule, shows that Duncan just can't help identifying with the revolutionaries. He loves the idea of plucky natives throwing off the brutal yoke of colonial despotism, and so he can't bring himself to ever say cleanly what seems to me to be the obvious conclusion - that all of what we call "the struggle for independence" was in fact an atrocious disaster from start to finish, a horrible decades-long calamity besetting the region, whose disastrous consequences were, if not entirely predictable, then at least highly probable. This straightforward assessment is to be found nowhere in the Duncan description, and you in fact need to work quite hard as a critical listener to piece together this obvious summary.

I may have some instinctive support for the Royalist side, though I try to not let this sway my read of the story too much. But I don't know if Duncan makes the same attempt, or if he's just not very successful, or if his spin is just more jarring because it fits the modern hysterical and religious love of democracy and anti-colonialism, neither of which I share. His narrative has a strong sense that the revolutionaries are in some sense "our guys", even if they're not really our guys in any meaningful way and the only overlap is an unreciprocated sense of ideological overlap. It's rather akin to the way that Israeli conservatives are "our guys" for American conservatives - their victories don't actually get you anything concrete, but somehow you like them anyway and take vicarious enjoyment in their victories.

Bolivar, despite having a number of admirable character traits, comes across as someone so conceited with himself and his vision that he never seemed to notice that the carnage all around him was directly attributable to the schemes he was trying to implement. But it is always thus. A narcissist can feel shame, but never guilt. 

How do you reconcile these aspects of Bolivar's legacy? His force of personality, his revolutionary success, and his total failure to bring about his political vision, other than the narrowest definition of independence? One answer is just that it is easier to break things in war than to build them up. It is easier to tip over the apple cart of the existing order than it is built a nation. Credit where credit is due - it is not actually that easy to tip over the apple cart either, and Bolivar pulled off something that very few men would have been able to achieve. But more importantly, if one is actually a martian and if one actually doesn't care about any of the players involved or the causes involved, the immediate lesson is similar to the one from the French revolution - as your first order concern, all you want is to not have everything go off the rails. You do not want to be around for a revolution. 

Instead, the Duncan reading is that this is a noble endeavor that somehow worked out badly. It is not "I am a bad person". It is not even the narcissist's defensive cop-out when cornered- "I am not a bad person, but I somehow did a bad thing." No, it's even more risible - "I am a good person, and I actually did a good thing, notwithstanding that it led to very bad outcomes". The goodness, in other words, is measured only in the nobility of my convictions, and the warm, airy adjectives that get attached to the whole affair. At one point, he charitably assesses it thus:

Everything in South America always seems to be defined by those words - limited success.

Duncan is no fool though, and he's funny and perceptive in describing the outcomes. He just can't see the connection to the rest of the story. I find his summing up at the end great and revealing:

Now there is simply no way to account in any meaningful way for the subsequent 200 years of South American history. But Bolivar's final depressed vision of the future proved prophetic. 'The country is bound to fall into ungovernable chaos, after which it will pass into the hands of an undistinguishable string of tyrants of every color.' And that seems to about cover it. Ambitious warlords and treacherous politicians ensured that the nations Bolivar liberated never really enjoyed stability or unity of purpose. And the same was true across South America as for both the remainder of the 19th century and most of the 20th century, South America was racked by constant strife. Foreign wars and civil wars, annexations and counter-annexations, revolts, invasions, insurrections, repression, bankruptcy, and then let's do it all over again. In a macro way South America mirrors the course of Haiti, with its government and economy unstable, and at the mercy of European and North American merchants bankers and politicians who saw South America as a resource to be exploited not co-equal partners in the project of Western Civilization. 

If this is "limited success", I would hate to see what failure looked like.

In other words, Duncan can summarize the problems very pithily. But for him, these are problems that occur in spite of the revolution, not because of the revolution. No, they are the result of other forces - "ambitious warlords" and "treacherous politicians" and "European and North American merchant bankers and politicians". The latter being especially hilarious, because they play the most trivial of parts in this story up to now. Instead, they just sound like a cliche designed to appeal to what John Dolan called the liberal version of American exceptionalism - that America is uniquely responsible for all the evils in the world. It never seems to occur to Duncan that if this stuff happens for 200 years, maybe Bolivar himself was setting up the conditions of chaos and disorder into which it was extremely likely would step such a string of ambitious warlords and treacherous politicians and European and American merchant bankers. Maybe, indeed, we should actively fault the man who was instrumental in creating these conditions. 

In the end, Duncan ends up having the same assessment of anti-colonialism that, ironically, one of Joseph Conrad's characters in Heart of Darkness says about colonialism - that the idea alone redeems it.

At a certain point, however, when all your predictions keep being wrong, and those of all your critics keep being right, maybe your idea was just fundamentally mistaken. This is certainly true for anti-colonialism in the modern era. For the colonialists at the time, their perspectives are, if not lost to history, then certainly lost from the easy-to-find sources. There would be a great and tragic story to be written from the perspective Spanish Royalists, correctly assessing the nightmare that was coming, and watching their chances slowly slip away. But for the most part those men don't have names or stories - they are just the masses of "Spanish forces", where by the end even their leaders aren't considered important enough to describe in any detail.   

And after narrating such a dismal and grotesque tale, Duncan's final description of Bolivar is a great summary of so many of the intellectual pathologies of our time. 

I hope that... we can appreciate him as a man riding through difficult times, trying to take the world he inherited and turn it into a world that he dreamed of. Even if that project in the end only met with those fateful words, "limited success", he had done the one thing he had set out to do. He had liberated his country.  

He sure had.

Reader, you should pray, to whatever Gods you believe in, that nobody liberates yours. 

On Chesterton's Fence and the Imperfect Vision of the Past

I have always had an uneasy relationship with political labels. I find that people who enjoy self-describing as having some kind of political belief (especially if they offer such a label unprompted) usually like the idea of themselves as belonging to a group, or movement, or something larger than themselves. In this view, they are tapping into the aspects of political beliefs that are less about a set of questions about the world that one decides on case by case, and more a kind of tribal affiliation. The people interested in such affiliations are usually, in my experience, quite uninteresting. But the Scylla of not wanting to embrace too much of a dumb label must be balanced against the Charybdis of claiming that one's beliefs are so unique, special and nuanced that it would be impossible to put any kind of a label on them. This, of course, is nearly always false, even if other people might pick a label that one finds unflattering. So to balance these aspects, I find myself sometimes persisting in using these labels just as a shorthand - a kind of crude summary of the main principle components of belief-space. 

Among these labels, it has been a long time since I would have described myself as a Conservative (the capital C version, of the explicit political movement). It is hard to have much stock in that in contemporary America (and, indeed, the reasons are exactly the same as R. L. Dabney identified 150 years ago, in his hilarious skewering of Northern Conservatives). But the difference between small-c conservatism, and reaction, is more nuanced. I lean more towards the latter, but the argument for the former is difficult to dismiss. 

The shorthand way I used to describe the difference between these groups was that a conservative primarily wants to keep things as they are. A reactionary, by contrast, actively wants to move backwards. This is usually said as a joke in polite company, for whom the idea of reversing progress is almost unthinkable. Whig history has become so ingrained that the very label of "progress" blurs the "good things are happening" version with "progressivism", the leftist political movement that communists used to use as a euphemism for themselves. 

Of course, Uncle Ted aside, not many people actually want to turn their back on literally everything about the modern world. Nearly always, what it actually means is identifying the problems of modernity that are actually creations of modern institutions and beliefs, mostly by having reference to a wider set of beliefs and ideas from times long past. Among Moldbug's most powerful intellectual ideas is to contemplate what people of the past might say if they could actually talk back to you. For instance, if a progressive who loves to smear the founding fathers as all being racist had to actually have a conversation with a resurrected George Washington, how do they think it would go? Bear in mind the first thing you'll have to do is define concretely what being "a racist" actually is, since he won't know. Then you'll have to convince him that there is a moral and practical imperative that he stop being racist, when he doesn't feel any moral valence in the term at all. Are you sure you can anticipate his rebuttals and refute them? This may be harder than you imagine - both the convincing of the hypothetical Washington, and even just modeling the hypothetical Washington. You need to read a lot about the person and think a lot, especially if you actually want a faithful version of the historical person, and not just a lazy strawman ( Moldbug did a great version of several figures here).

In this respect, the point of these hypotheticals is to embrace the observation of G. K. Chesterton (one of the great defenders of conservatism). Tradition, he said, is the democracy of the dead. And his idea of deference to their views was not just an ancestor worship notion. It was based on the idea that man's understanding of things is fallible, and existing structures may well be solutions to problems we don't understand: 

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

When we phrase it this way, however, we can see that the position of a conservative is an easier one to defend in this respect than that of a reactionary. In particular, Chesterton's Fence is an argument for preserving continuous, living institutions. That is, the fence that is still there, and we just don't want it recklessly torn down. The job of a reactionary, however, in some sense the opposite problem. The fence was torn down 10, or 30, or 60, or 150 years ago. There are now cattle wandering all over the road and getting run over. Some factions say that this is actually a good thing that they get run over, or that it's cruel to fence them in, or that fences never did much to stop the problem anyway. Meanwhile, all the people who built fences or knew how to maintain them died a hundred years ago, so it's hard to ask them how it actually worked. 

Which is to say, the reactionary runs into his own version of the George Washington dialogue problem above, where "what would George Washington think" is an easy exercise to state, and a hard one to implement with certainty. That is, the reactionary is trying to reconstruct something from the lessons of the past, but he has only an imperfect understanding of what that past actually was. Even if he gets power (something we're not in great danger of at present), he risks creating a version of the fence that doesn't solve his problems, because it wasn't in important respects the same as the fence that was created in the first place. 

The extent to which this is true depends, of course, on how good the sources are in question. But sources are only ever a tiny snapshot of life - the summation of "who was doing the writing, what they thought was important enough to write down, what parts survived to this day, and which parts you actually read among the many possible sources out there". Sometimes, this will probably be good enough - for understanding major wars, for instance. But other bits you have to work harder to imagine the range of outcomes. 

For instance, consider the question of relations between the sexes. What was the distribution of day-to-day life like for married couples in, say, New York in 1880? In London in 1620? In Rome in 350 A.D.? 

Whig history supplies a ready answer for this. Women existed under "the patriarchy". This was a set of norms that meant that men had enormous power within a marriage to physically assault their wives, to rape them, to make them bear as many children as the man wanted, to prevent them from working or from leaving the home, and to force them to do house work and hard physical labor. It is never quite said that this was the state of all women, but it is usually implied that this was the lot for most of them, for most of history. 

But if this is what modern feminists believe, what do the men's rights / manosphere types believe? Well, at the risk of simplifying the matter, a lot of them seem to agree on nearly all the claims above - they merely want to add at the end "...and that was awesome!!!"

The obvious problem is that very few of them actually made a study of history themselves. Without realizing it, they just took at face value the claims of feminists. Well, do these people strike you as good historians? The first clue that something might be amiss is when all times and places before 1960s America are lumped together as being "basically the same thing". Okay, it's all the patriarchy, fine. Were there any interesting or important variations in that patriarchy across history? Bueller? As Matt Damon said - do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter?

Reader, it is worth considering the possibility, even just as a hypothetical, that even if you restored everything that feminists describe as "the patriarchy", it might make less difference in practice than most people think. 

So we may need to investigate a bit ourselves, once we realize that we can't just trust this received wisdom. You can start with the legal status, obviously. For instance, here's Blackstone's Commentaries from 1770:

By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law[l]: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing; and is therefore called in our law-french a feme-covert; is said to be covert-baron, or under the protection and influence of her husband, her baron, or lord; and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture. Upon this principle, of an union of person in husband and wife, depend almost all the legal rights, duties, and disabilities, that either of them acquire by the marriage. I speak not at present of the rights of property, but of such as are merely personal. For this reason, a man cannot grant any thing to his wife, or enter into covenant with her[m]: for the grant would be to suppose her separate existence; and to covenant with her, would be only to covenant with himself...

Okay, that sounds pretty tough. Bear in mind, though he doesn't say it explicitly, this single personhood meant, among other things, that this tended to preclude the possibility of marital rape. But even here, it's a little murky - Blackstone doesn't go into it in detail himself, and Wikipedia's description is:

Sir Matthew Hale's statement in History of the Pleas of the Crown did not cite a legal precedent for it, though it relied on earlier standards. In a case of Lord Audley's (1593–1631), for instance, Hale cite's the jurist Bracton (c. 1210 – c. 1268) support of this rule, said to have derived from laws of King Æthelstan (r. 927–939) where upon the law holds that even "were the party of no chaste life, but a whore, yet there may be ravishment: but it is a good plea to say she was his concubine".

But even in this seemingly straightforward question, when you actually look up Lord Audley's case, he in fact got executed for (among other things) rape of his wife! In this case, it was for restraining her while some other guy raped her.  (He also sodomized some men, which contributed to the execution too). But it certainly doesn't seem like "do whatever you want to your wife sexually, the law is cool with it" was actually an operating principle of the law in the way you might think. 

But surely he could just beat the hell out of her, no? Well, if you scroll further down Blackstone's commentaries, you find other things like this: 

The husband also (by the old law) might give his wife moderate correction[h]. For, as he is to answer for her misbehaviour, the law thought it reasonable to intrust him with this power of restraining her, by domestic chastisement, in the same moderation that a man is allowed to correct his servants or children; for whom the master or parent is also liable in some cases to answer. But this power of correction was confined within reasonable bounds[i]; and the husband was prohibited to use any violence to his wife, aliter quam ad virum, ex causa regiminis et castigationis uxoris suae, licite et rationabiliter pertinet[k]. The civil law gave the husband the same, or a larger, authority over his wife; allowing him, for some misdemesnors, flagellis et fustibus acriter verberare uxorem; for others, only modicam castigationem adhibere[l].-433- But, with us, in the politer reign of Charles the second, this power of correction began to be doubted[m]: and a wife may now have security of the peace against her husband[n]; or, in return, a husband against his wife[o]. Yet the lower rank of people, who were always fond of the old common law, still claim and exert their antient privilege: and the courts of law will still permit a husband to restrain a wife of her liberty, in case of any gross misbehaviour[p].

What does this mean in practice? Great question. It seems almost certain that "moderate correction" as understood in 1770 is a lot more coercive than it would be interpreted as today. But still, what exactly could you do, at what points in time? It's not as simple as it might seem. 

Bear in mind that what you are describing is a question of power. And as I've said before, in some sense, all power is informal power. People face lots of constraints on their behavior, not just being thrown in prison. 

Let's take as given that Sir Matthew Hale is right, which seems likely, and if you decided to rape your wife, the law wouldn't care. Well, were there any other constraints? 

If the average man had the option to rape his wife whenever he felt like, how many times per week, month or year, do you think he'd actually be up for this? If your model of male sexual desire is that what is sought is "penis in vagina, plus orgasm", then the answer is probably quite a bit. But this is an absurdly reductionist model of male desire, as I've argued in the case of strip clubs (where people pay more money to not bang strippers than they would to bang hookers). The alternative view, even in the case of a monarch, is still best summarized by Joseph Heller. As I said previously:

"In his novel, God Knows, Joesph Heller describes the situation of an aging King David. He has his various courtesans, but can no longer get aroused by them. The only woman who still holds his sexual interest is his wife, Bathsheba. But Bathsheba no longer desires him - her only interest is to try to get David to make her own son, Solomon, the next king in place of his elder son, Adonijah, whom he had with another woman.

Heller describes very aptly the paradoxical situation of the absolute monarch who, due to the difficulty of male desire, cannot have what he really wants

Abishag showed him the door and petted my heaving chest until she felt my exasperation abate. Then she washed and dried herself, perfumed her wrists and armpits, and removed her robe to stand before me a moment in all her wonderful virginal nakedness before raising a leg gracefully to enter my bed on one of her biscuit-brown knees to lie down with me again. Naturally, it did no good. I got no heat then, either. I wanted my wife. I want my wife now. Bathsheba does not believe this and would not let it make a difference if she did.

“I don’t do things like that anymore,” Bathsheba responds firmly each time I ask, and, if out of sorts, adds, “I am sick of love.”

She lost her lust when she found her vocations. Her first was to be a queen. Too bad that we had no queens. The next was to be a queen mother, the first in our history, the widowed mother of a reigning sovereign. I refused to trade and I refused to grovel. I could order her into my bed with a single cursory command, of course, and she certainly would be here. But it would be begging, wouldn't it? I am David the king, and I must try not to beg. But God knows that, by one means or another, I am going to lie with her at least one more time before I give up the ghost and bring my fantastic story to an end.

Worldly absolute power does not, alas, extend to making other people actually want you on the terms that you would like."

At the risk of sounding ridiculous or insensitive, it is worth considering all the boring and practical ways that marital rape might not actually be that much fun for most men. There's social aspects like that she might complain to her friends and neighbours, which would embarrass you. Okay, let's assume you can stop this with the generous "physical discipline" exemptions you were also granted by the law. But what if she were just really sad and miserable all the time? What's the plan then - beat her some more until she's happy all the time? How's that going to work? What if, once you start raping her, she's just not very horny for you any more, which is probably what you really wanted in the first place? What if, once you start raping her, rape is now the only way you can bang her at all? Was this ... what you wanted?

And this is even while treating the women as mostly passive in this equation - having no options other than just being sad. What if there's a risk she might poison you (which definitely happened)? What if she's just well experienced at manipulating you into doing what she wants? 

To put all this in stark terms - what fraction of married men in, say, 1700, above age 40 or 50 or whatever, who had been married for some extended period of time, had vaguely unsatisfied sex lives where they didn't bang their wives as much as they wanted, or didn't bang very often, or just didn't bang at all, lax marital rape laws notwithstanding?

I genuinely don't know. I suspect it was higher than most people think, though probably lower than today, but that you should probably have quite wide confidence intervals over this question. What historical sources would we turn to to answer this question? It's tough. What man is likely to commit to paper words to the effect of "Wife still won't bang me, I'm still annoyed at this fact" given the costs of publishing at the time, not to mention the embarrassment involved in the admission?

Among the many things you could read, let me point you to just one snapshot to ponder - not for this question specifically, but the related question of daily marriage dynamics. This comes from one of Australia's great poets, Henry Lawson. It's from 1897. If you prefer song form to poems, Slim Dusty wrote an excellent song from it

Written Afterwards 

So the days of my tramping are over,
And the days of my riding are done
I’m about as content as a rover
Will ever be under the sun;
I write, after reading your letter
My pipe with old memories rife
And I feel in a mood that had better
Not meet the true eyes of the wife. 

You must never admit a suggestion
That old things are good to recall;
You must never consider the question:
‘Was I happier then, after all?’
You must banish the old hope and sorrow
That make the sad pleasures of life,
You must live for To-day and To-morrow
If you want to be just to the wife. 

I have changed since the first day I kissed her.
Which is due Heaven bless her! to her;
I’m respected and trusted I’m ‘Mister,’
Addressed by the children as ‘Sir.’
And I feel the respect without feigning
But you’d laugh the great laugh of your life
If you only saw me entertaining
An old lady friend of the wife. 

By-the-way, when you’re writing, remember
That you never went drinking with me,
And forget our last night of December,
Lest our sev’ral accounts disagree.
And, for my sake, old man, you had better
Avoid the old language of strife,
For the technical terms of your letter
May be misunderstood by the wife. 

Never hint of the girls appertaining
To the past (when you’re writing again),
For they take such a lot of explaining,
And you know how I hate to explain.
There are some things, we know to our sorrow,
That cut to the heart like a knife,
And your past is To-day and To-morrow
If you want to be true to the wife. 

I believe that the creed we were chums in
Was grand, but too abstract and bold,
And the knowledge of life only comes in
When you’re married and fathered and old.
And it’s well. You may travel as few men,
You may stick to a mistress for life;
But the world, as it is, born of woman
Must be seen through the eyes of the wife. 

No doubt you are dreaming as I did
And going the careless old pace,
While my future grows dull and decided,
And the world narrows down to the Place.
Let it be. If my ‘treason’s’ resented,
You may do worse, old man, in your life;
Let me dream, too, that I am contented

For the sake of a true little wife.

I find this poem wonderful, hilarious, and above all, utterly credible. It fits the observation I remember from Ben Folds that writing about a character can be a way of writing about oneself without it being lewd. At 130 years old, it still reads as quite fresh - the main things that give away its age are technological references - they ride horses, rather than drive cars, and they write letters, rather than phone or send emails.

But count the themes that you might not have expected from Australia in the 19th century. 

-The narrator had affairs with women when he was young and single

-These sounded less like "relationships" and more like "getting boozed with your friends and picking up women" 

Parenthetically, it's also worth wondering who these women were - they might have been prostitutes, but also might just be ordinary girls. Remember, there's an adding up constraint that makes the average number of sexual partners equal at all times. So "men having sex before marriage" has to map to either "regular non-prostitute women also having sex before marriage", "married women having affairs with single men" or "a lot more prostitutes, with these being the only option for single men". For reference here, some estimates are that a third of rural New England brides in the 1780s and 1790s were pregnant at the time of marriage, and even the low estimates at that time are around 10%.

-He is now married, and while overall grateful for this fact, finds it less exciting than single life in some respects, and feels himself somewhat whipped and constrained

-He endeavors to conceal all of the above from his wife, out of consideration for her feelings. 

The last part is especially worth pondering. He wants to protect her from finding out about his past dalliances because it will make her sad, and he loves her. This is described, over and over, as a constraint on what he can say and do. It doesn't carry any force of law, but it doesn't need to. Power is messy and complicated. Does he have the power to make his wife miserable? Well, sort of, in principle, but don't we all? He's probably not worried about being divorced, but it still doesn't seem like much fun. 

Now, I'm not saying that "this is just like modernity!", or that if we could see their day-to-day lives, we'd think them the same as ours (for one small snapshot, his children refer to him as "sir"). But this is obvious - the ways in which the past was totally different in sex relations are taken for granted. The ways in which they might be basically the same are much harder to see.

To take one final example that's a good test of patriarchal authority. Let's define the minimum set of conditions that we can all agree a patriarch would want. If you love your wife, and control her sexually, and can threaten her with violence for misbehaving, what is the minimum thing you probably want to prevent?

You would want to prevent her from flagrantly banging many other men against your wishes.

Surely this would go triply so if you were a man of wealth, strength and power. Surely, surely, this would apply if you were the most powerful man in Europe, and probably the world?

Like, say, Napoleon Bonaparte?

Read this amazing twitter thread. Some especially choice parts:

In 1796 Napoleon wrote:

“You do not write me at all, you do not love your husband; you know the pleasure that your letters afford him, and you do not write him six lines of even haphazard scribble.”

Joséphine had the GALL to come visit Napoleon with the man she was cheating on him with. And when Napoleon came for her, she was nowhere to be seen:

“I arrive at Milan, I rush into your apartment, I have left everything to see you, to press you in my arms…you were not there”

How much power did Napoleon Bonaparte have over Josephine? How much did the patriarchy help him here? Lest you think this is an isolated example, King George IV was not able to divorce his wife Queen Caroline despite the long rumors of her infidelity. Which is to say, at a bare minimum he was not able to prevent her acting in ways that generated persistent rumors of her being unfaithful to him, even though this annoyed him greatly, and he was the King! You can find similar rumors (though disputed) about Marcus Aurelius' wife. Obviously, this model doesn't apply to all men either, or even most men either (the model that "all wives could cheat on their husbands with impunity" as applied to several hundred years ago is surely a worse model than "zero wives could cheat on their husbands with impunity"). But these examples are telling you that the reality was considerably more complex than either of these.  

The narrow lesson here is that we don't actually know how much the things we call "the patriarchy" actually constrained day-to-day life for most married couples. It definitely would do some things, maybe even a lot (birthrates were certainly very different, but contraception was probably also a lot less reliable. Divorce rates were enormously different). But there are reasons to think it might matter less in many day-to-day aspects than most people (certainly most feminists) imagine. Even Augustus, with all his power, was unable to substantially reform Rome's sexual morality. 

But the broader lesson is worth pondering - power is often informal, and so the officially written down rules may not always affect things on the ground in the same way. Pushing on "laws" and "policies" may not solve as many things as we think it will. Laws are nearly always buttressed by social aspects whose actual application and level of enforcement in day to day life may be hard to know. If we implement our best idea of what things used to be like long ago, they may work in different ways than we think, or may not work at all. 

Or as the great Samuel Johnson put it:

How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!
Still to ourselves in every place consign’d,
Our own felicity we make or find.

Why You Don't Hear About the Haitian Revolution

Let me ask you a question that has both nothing and everything to do with Haiti.

How many people do you think died in the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 1998 and 2003?

The most commonly cited guess of excess deaths (mostly from disease and malnutrition) is 5.4 million. Obviously there's some standard errors on that number, and other people put it at 860,000, but it's fair to say that the answer is a shit ton.

How much media coverage did you hear about that war? Either now, or at the time?

Would you say that the answer here is approximately zero?

Weird, no? What exactly is going on here?

The standard leftist narrative always used to be that the media doesn't care about black deaths. This seems, uh, shall we say, not exactly operative in the age of George Floyd, where they care about them a great deal, and sometimes seem to care about little else. But fine, this is Sub-Saharan Africans. Maybe people just don't care about black deaths there. 

But in 2012, the internet got briefly and strangely exercised about Joseph Kony, trying to get him arrested for war crimes in Uganda. It's not necessarily weird that they should care about war crimes, mind you, but by the time they cared, the crimes themselves were mostly over a decade in the past. And the press definitely got extremely concerned over the genocide in Darfur, which started around the time that the Congo War was wrapping up.

Evidently there is some capacity for caring about gruesome mass deaths in Africa. So what happened in this case?

Well, to understand it, let's start with Wikipedia's list of belligerents. 

Huh?

Let me give you the summary. It's a complete, absolute mess. It's notable that the wikipedia entry doesn't even attempt to give you a summary of what the war was about. Not only are there a ton of different nations and militias, but most of them are pretty unsympathetic characters. Seriously, read the wikipedia article and try to make sense of it. 

The overall attitude seems to just end up being the line at the end of Burn After Reading

Simple narratives get re-told, and complicated narratives do not. 

You can say people are being lazy, but that's not it. The whole war just seems to be an anti-meme. (So is the English Civil War, at least to me, although not to the same extent). No sooner do you read one bit than it's slipping through your mind like a sieve. The reality is that people just can't retain everything they read. If you remember it, it's because you remember a compressed version of events, especially one that has the important parts to update your mental models of the world. These events also tend to be remembered more easily when they fit the pattern of familiar narrative structures, stories and plotlines that are satisfying to our sense of how drama should proceed. Modernity, being addicted to fairytales and Manichaeism, likes simple stories between good and evil, and where good triumphs in the end. (If it can't have that, it sells ridiculous versions like Kony 2012 where everything that happened in Uganda is just a prologue for the real hero of the story, you, the viewer, to get justice done by posting links to social media to spread awareness). 

But if you can't have a happy ending, the closest narrative that people want to fit mass murder into is the Holocaust. Reduced to its barest symbolic components, a large group of innocent and helpless civilians gets genocided for no military reason by a group who personifies evil. It's very hard to hammer the war into this narrative, because it just seems to be everyone killing everyone else, deaths from disease and malnutrition don't have the same grisly industrial horror as mass executions, and there's no simple descriptions of who exactly was getting killed, or who was doing the killing, other than that everyone was black. So what then?

Modern readers (ha! Let's say "viewers", to be more honest) dislike simple stories between evil and evil. They have no clue whatsoever about what to do with a 20 sided war where you suspect everyone is pretty nasty, and it's hard to even make sense of what they're fighting over.

The Haitian Revolution has a fair amount of this problem. Not as much as the DRC, but a decent amount. You can condense it into a single sentence that would be very popular today. That sentence would be:

A black slave colony rose up in revolt and secured its independence....

Sounds great! As long as you ask exactly zero additional questions, this is a heart-warming tale made for modernity. But it's such a great story, we have to hear more. 

...and immediately genocided all the white French civilians on the island. 

Hmm, that doesn't sit nearly as well. Are the slaves now the bad guys? Did the women and children civilians deserve to be genocided? Avante Garde lefist activists are probably willing to flirt with this line these days, but it still sits pretty uneasily with people. But we'll soldier on regardless. 

The slave armies had fought off the French, but honestly only a small fraction as much as Yellow Fever fought the French...

This part definitely isn't fitting the glorious military victory aspect. It's hard to piece together the exact numbers from the Leclerc expedition to retake Haiti, but it seems like at least 2/3 of the French deaths were from Yellow Fever, and maybe much more. One rather suspects that without this, it would have been a pretty short war to reimpose slavery. 

Honestly, this is one of the maddest aspects of the whole French project there. The French kept turning up at this place that just killed them horribly in a short period of time. It's like nature's way of saying "go somewhere else". But they wouldn't do it. 

Power had also been greatly consolidated after the Slave leaders, principally black leader Toussaint Louverture, defeated and massacred the supporters of colored leader André Rigaud, ...

And at last, no matter how much we try to gloss over it, by about 4 sentences into any possible history of the Haitian revolution, you have to talk about the role of the free coloreds, or the mulattos. The Haitian Revolution was, even in racial terms, a three-sided war, not a two-sided war. Those who had one white parent and one black or mulatto parent, and were thus part black in racial terms, formed a very distinct social group. Their existence is a total repudiation of all of modern, US-centric theories of race. For starters, they didn't see themselves, nor were they seen by others, as straightforwardly "black". They sure weren't white either, but that's not quite the same thing. The US operates on something that's not quite the one-drop rule, but heading in that direction. There are no anguished articles written about whether Barack Obama should be considered black or not. Whereas in Haiti in 1794, there would be no question - he would be a mulatto. (In Kenya, where his father was born, he'd probably be white).

And not only do these guys not think of themselves as black, for most of the history of the revolution, they stubbornly refuse to play the part that modernity would want, of showing solidarity with the blacks. Far from it. In fact, many of the mulattos were very strong defenders of slavery. A number of them had wealthy French fathers and had been educated in France (like Alexandre Pétion, who was 1/4 black and later a president of Haiti). In fact, they were often richer than a lot of the poor whites who worked in town jobs and clerical roles (the "small whites", as opposed to the large plantation owners, the "big whites"). Many of the mulattos owned slaves themselves, and were not at all interested in abolishing slavery. What they were interested in, however, was abolishing explicitly racial distinctions, especially for free coloreds themselves, that would see them face legal impediments to citizenship. 

This leads to some hilarious scenes like when Robespierre is arguing before the Revolutionary government that we need to abolish slavery based on the fundamental rights of man, and then he's followed up by mulatto activist Julien Raimond arguing that France needed to recognize the rights of free coloreds as a way of helping shore up support for the important institution of slavery. 

The coloreds were also willing to do things like arm slaves in revolt against the big whites with promises of freedom, only to later renege on those promises in part because they didn't actually want to set too many precedents of slaves getting freed en masse.

They are a peg that stubbornly refuses to be hammered into either of the "black" or "white" holes that modernity wants. 

Not that the early black slave revolt leaders were much better, mind you. Jean-François Papillon, when attempting to negotiate with the French for an end to one of the early slave uprisings, was willing to trade the slaves in his army back into slavery as long as the terms included freedom for him and the other officers. 

If you go back to the very beginnings of the independence movement, it's actually something like a six sided conflict. In addition to slaves and free coloreds (some of whom were fully black in racial terms, but who had been granted freedom), you had different groups of whites. The big whites in Haiti, the rich plantation owners, were big supporters of independence, chafing against trade restrictions imposed by France, and fancying that they could get a better deal running the country themselves. As Mike Duncan notes, they look and act a lot like the liberal nobles in the French revolution, who also ended up getting eaten by the forces they unleashed. This is a lesson that keeps coming up. The small whites were more driven by the importance of racial distinctions, which were their main source of potential status over the free coloreds. But on top of that, you had the Royal authorities in the colony, who often played one off against the other in order to keep their authority. In the early days of the Haitian revolution, this often meant allying most strongly with the free coloreds, who they saw as the most reliable supporters of monarchy. Finally, you've got the revolutionaries back in France, where developments of political events back in Europe ended up determining a lot of the course of events in Haiti. It's only very late in the story that it sounds like the Haitians being the primary drivers of events. And despite the fact that some of the revolutionaries were often big pushers of abolishing slavery, after the French revolution you also had various slave armies originally claiming to be fighting on behalf of the deposed King! This is without even getting into the role of the Spanish, or the English, or the Americans. 

Like I said - we're not at Congo War levels of confusion, but this is a story that resists simple morality tale narratives, especially if you want these to fit in with contemporary American racial preoccupations. 

But there is one final large and embarrassing reason why you don't hear much about the Haitian revolution. 

If you want this to be a morality tale, you have to end it in 1804. Because the other question you absolutely can't ask is "So what happened after that?", because the answer is that it's a horrible depressing dysfunctional mess for the next 220 years. And this destroys so much of the mythical allure of it all. Half the people who "ended slavery" didn't even mean by that term that you were free to walk off your plantation and do some different kind of work in some other locale. Oh no, you were now part of the Louverture Labor Code, which basically reinstituted slavery in all but name, but with slightly nicer conditions and different colored owners. The plantation system only really came to an end when the country was so completely destroyed that there was no infrastructure left to sustain a plantation. Unsurprisingly, this did not lead to large welfare improvements for the Haitian in the street. And so the whig history progressive has to spend the rest of the time spinning excuses for why none of this is the Haitians' fault, because the French demanded a large debt indemnity, and the Americans lost interest in trade, and then there were all these coups that nobody could have foreseen, and then the US invaded in the early 20th century, and then there was Papa Doc Duvalier who was a complete monster, and recently they had this earthquake...

It's a mess. It's a total mess. If there is anything much optimistic to discuss in the two-odd centuries after independence, it sure doesn't come up in the Mike Duncan brief history. 

I used to actually use this as a trolling example to leftists. Suppose you have a former colony. It finally gets its independence, and it's got problems. Mostly, we attribute those problems to the legacy of colonialism. But this presumably can't last indefinitely. If the place is still a basket case in a 1000 years time, it's probably not the fault of the British. So what's the Statute of Limitations here? What's the maximum length of time you'd need before you'd be willing to say "you know, this probably isn't due to colonialism?"

They will usually start thinking of Africa. They'll estimate how long it's been, then like Sandra Day O'Conner with affirmative action, grant themselves extra breathing room to make sure they're not proven wrong any time soon. "100 years" is a common answer. Maybe 150. 

Well, Haiti (which is almost never the example they have in mind, because nobody hears about Haiti) has been independent for 220. This is quite awkward. 

And what's the latest situation?

Curtis Yarvin was hilarious and scathing in a recent substack:

As a monarchist, I can tell you that Haiti could probably use Emperor Jacques back, genocide or no genocide, since it currently has no elected officials and is under the de facto control of a gang leader known as “Barbecue”—whose Wikipedia page notes:

Chérizier has denied that his nickname “Babekyou” (or “Barbecue”) came from accusations of his setting people on fire. Instead, he says it was from his mother's having been a fried chicken street vendor.

¿Porque no los dos? 

And so, this leads to a nagging alternative worry. What if the problem isn't actually just that the Haitian revolution resists summary? What if the problem is that the one sentence summary that captures the full thrust of events doesn't fit the progressive world view at all? What if the shortest summary of all the events is actually

A nation of slaves rose up in revolt, and after a messy and nasty war, genocided the whites and led to misery and poverty essentially forever.

I do not assert that this summary is true, by the way. Even aside from the general problem that summarizing any revolution in a single sentence is a fraught exercise guaranteed to miss a lot of important detail, a great deal hinges upon how exactly you define "led to". It was certainly chronologically antecedent to it. Whether it was causal is always a much thornier issue, as with everything in history. This is without even getting into what a full range of counterfactuals would be, because there are surely options other than "Haitian revolution" and "Haitian slavery continues forever". 

But even to state such a potential summary is deeply disturbing to modern sensibilities, because reading it simplistically it makes it sound like Haitian slavery was thus a good thing. Nobody, as far as I know, is eager to reinstitute slavery. And while there are serious scholarly works arguing that American tobacco and cotton slavery had material conditions close to that of a free laborer, and likely better than a Welsh coal miner at the same time, I have never heard anyone assert the same thing about French Caribbean sugar slavery. It was hell on earth, where you got worked to death over a short number of years under absolutely brutal conditions. Nobody wants to bring it back. And when I say "nobody", I mean "levels of support seem to be minimal even among people who routinely espouse positions far outside the Overton window". 

Yet the chronological sequence is there, and undeniable. They had a successful slave revolt. They genocided the whites. It has been a complete mess ever since. What you wish to make of those facts is up to you, and there are many other facts you could choose to add to those above, but there are not many good news stories to tell out of it.

And so the glorious one sentence successful slave uprising ultimately gets ignored in favor of fictional slave uprisings that never happened. Which is a shame. Because the Haitian Revolution is a fascinating story if you have an attention span longer than a summary of three sentences. 

The Abyss

[This was my entry for this year's Passage Prize. Didn't get short listed this time, which either means my poetry is getting worse, or the competition is getting better, or both. The good news is that you now get the poem for free. The bad news is you get what you pay for.]

The Abyss

“I inform you, great king, I announce to you, great king: aging and death are rolling in on you. When aging and death are rolling in on you, great king, what should be done?”

“As aging and death are rolling in on me, venerable sir, what else should be done but to live by the Dhamma, to live righteously, and to do wholesome and meritorious deeds?”

Death, like the sun, cannot be stared at too long.

But death, also like the sun, cannot be avoided entirely,

Without ending up withered and emaciated inside.

The stunted, rickets-plagued character that results

From staying indoors, never facing the world as it is,

Subsisting on a diet of saccharine fairy tales,

Manufactured junk-food doom-scrolling distractions,

And the slippery, seed oils

Of the present-tense, oleaginous outrage-of-the-day.



Like the Strange Blind Idiot God of Evolution,

Creeping and slow, without an agreed upon plan,

Society has assumed the role of Suddhodana.

The old man and the sick man still serve some useful purpose.

The former as an important marketing demographic,

At least until his 401K dwindles,

Whereupon he gets shunted to Death’s Waiting Room in Florida

Where it’s always 75F, and the phone only rings on Thanksgiving.

The sick man is valuable, at least in the abstract,

For highlighting the importance of “dem programs”.

But the corpse, young Siddhartha,

That simply will not do.

It is for your own good, you see.

(The monk, of course, barely even exists,

So needs no concealment.)



Reader, having officially reached middle age,

I can only remember seeing a corpse once.

At a distance, on Santa Monica Beach,

A hobo having expired somehow,

Lying supine on a bed of concrete,

The lifeguard urgently performing CPR,

But the paramedics from the ambulance,

Ambling without urgency.

They knew.

Meanwhile, the hero of the play, with only the best of intentions,

Kept the show going, lest the tourists get alarmed.

He shall be taken to the hospital.

Yes, the hospital. That’s where ambulances go.



If you escape misfortune, your first introduction

Into the Society of Those With Open Eyes

Will be when your own parents die.

The happier your life is,

The later will you learn its most important lesson.

And standing over their grave,

You shall face Siddhartha’s choice.

The heavy oak door swings open a crack,

Revealing a strange light,

And murmurings that beckon from outside the palace.

Shall you walk out into the night?

Or stay in the bedchamber?

How few, how mad with truth,

Those who follow in his footsteps.



It is a trick, of course.

Everyone resolves to leave.

They even walk a few hesitating paces.

A few hours later,

Nearly all of them go back.



But modernity, like Suddhodana,

Never entirely succeeds in tossing out nature with its pitchfork.

There is a crack through which light occasionally seeps in,

When the sun is aligned just right,

The Stonehenge gap in the Machinery of Moloch,

An ancient monkey-brain relic that can’t quite be erased.



As the tarmac rises up to meet your meandering plane,

And the engines whine with a different tenor,

A chance cross-breeze lifts you up,

And for one terrible, glorious second,

As the primordial panic knots your stomach,

You are aware, acutely, incisively,

That you will die.

Not just eventually.

But maybe right now.

The moment, like death itself, is shared with no one,

No matter how close by.

But everybody knows.

And what you think, right then,

Has a clarity of vision,

Both sublime and prosaic.



(It would be very sad if my daughter grows up without a father.)

(Christ, I still haven’t gotten the life insurance sorted. That’s incredibly stupid.)

* In breath, out breath *

(I wish I’d called my parents more.)

* In breath, out breath *

(If this is it, I am happy that, broadly, I have done my duty.)


*Thud!*


The wheels touch down.

The engines roar into reverse.

The world returns.

The Forever War of Deposit Insurance

Serious question. What is the least moronic rationale you know of for why the system of deposit insurance in the US has a cap of $250,000? 

It is the nature of a lot of government policies that they start out as a proposed solution to a narrow problem. Then, they either fail to solve that problem, or they solve it so well that it threatens the viability of the jobs the program creates. But in either case, new rationales spring up, usually which the policy achieves increasingly poorly. In the end, you get a solution in search of new problems, but the solution itself never goes away. 

At first, we had to go to Afghanistan to kill those bastards who blew up our buildings. Then when we had only limited success in that, because said bastards were quite hard to find, we had to go there to blow up the Taliban, who supported the guys who blew up our buildings, and implicitly the Afghans who supported them. Then we had to stay there to fight terrorism in Afghanistan so we didn't have to fight it in New York. Then we had to stay there to liberate the poor Afghans from the Taliban, and impose women's rights and gay rights on goat herders in the mountains. At some point, nobody knew why the hell we were there, and Joe Biden's few cogent thoughts managed to steel enough resolve to finally get America out, albeit chaotically and humiliatingly.

Similarly, in the 1960s, we needed affirmative action because blacks were already as competent as whites, and only hostile, taste-based discrimination was keeping them out. Then when that didn't seem to be true on the test scores, we needed to get the first generation of black leaders in as role models for the younger generation to study hard earlier on, so they could see that they would also be able to be doctors and engineers, at which point it wouldn't be necessary. (Hilariously, Sandra Day O'Connor in Grutter v Bollinger actually committed to this principle and put a time line on it  - by 2028, it won't be necessary!) Then once that had gone on for a generation, and the test scores still weren't budging, we decided that actually having more blacks in these places was actually an end in itself. Unlike the Afghanistan War, this one shows no signs of going away. 

Deposit insurance has a similar flavor. It is still around, and bigger than ever. But the reasons why keep changing over time.

Which is to say, there is not much mystery as to why originally there was a limit on account size. The original idea was that bank runs were just a fact of life, and when they happened, we wanted to make sure that small depositors were protected and didn't lose their life savings. But since nobody was much interested in protecting fat cats with enormous amounts of cash, they weren't covered. 

Over time, instead the idea (cemented in Diamond Dybvig 1983) was that deposit insurance was actually important for preventing bank runs. At this point, you might already be starting to wonder whether the cap makes sense. Are there enough large depositors who aren't insured to cause a run? If there are, then suddenly the cap just looks counterproductive. This is especially so since the stated claim (not unreasonably) is that deposit insurance is actually much cheaper in practice than the size of the guarantee, because in equilibrium you don't actually need to pay out the guarantee if you prevent the run. Of course, the massive regulatory apparatus needed to manage the moral hazard created by the guarantee is far from free, but you're already paying that anyway, regardless of what the cap is. But we're still on the idea that the purpose here is protecting the depositors. Maybe the big guys don't get it, and we end up with some costs we didn't need to have, but too bad. We're not here to bail out fat cats. 

By 2008 in particular, the rationale had shifted again - we need to prevent bank runs not because they're bad for depositors (thought they are), but because they're bad for everyone else. Financial crises lead to reductions in the money supply (like in the depression, in the Milton Friedman description), and lead to large asset price declines, and both lead to reductions in real economic activity. We need to make sure that these don't occur - ex ante, we implement deposit insurance and regulation to prevent runs from happening, and ex post we grumblingly bail out systemically important financial institutions if they go under anyway. 

Of course, this new rationale is enormously larger and different in scope than what came before. The list of institutions where investors may have a run is basically anyone dependent on overnight financing, even if they're not a standard commercial bank. Bear Stearns. The Reserve Primary Fund. Lehman Brothers. AIG. And each one that goes down increases the likelihood of chaos elsewhere, even among places like AIG that didn't seem primarily dependent on overnight financing (but had sold credit default swaps to institutions who were). The Fed didn't seem happy about the implications of this. Are they suddenly guaranteeing everybody, everywhere? No, they said. No more bailouts. This policy was announced with Lehman's bankruptcy on the Monday. The policy lasted two days. AIG, which had written credit default swaps on Lehman, was now toast. If they'd gone down, Goldman and Citibank would have been next. So bailouts it was. 

But now you see the problem (especially for values of "you" that includes crypto institutions). Deposit insurance was brought in originally as something that was a reluctant admission to the demands of grateful depositors clamoring for protection. It eventually morphed into something you can't avoid even if you want to. If there's any chance you might have contagion to anything, anywhere, well now you're going to be regulated, notionally for your own good, perhaps for everyone else's good, but assuredly, because every bureaucracy wants to grow its power and influence. 

Parenthetically, I have a friend involved in a bank startup outside the US. I once asked him: "Do you ever think about how much easier it would be to run your entire bank using Tether or USDC, and base it in Yemen or Singapore, as long as you could just get a letter from the United States Government promising to leave you alone?"

His answer: "Every single day."

But, of course, like the schizophrenia of Afghanistan policy where we were simultaneously trying to punish and save the Afghan people, the strange carveout exception for depositors over $250K is still there, just hanging in the breeze. It's now one of the proximate causes of Silicon Valley Bank going bankrupt. Like nearly every bank run, the line between solvency and liquidity is blurry. The post mortems emphasize their unusual exposure to interest rate risk. If your risk management strategy is "assume the Fed will never meaningfully raise interest rates" ... well, actually, that was a disturbingly good bet for a very long time, until one day it wasn't. Still, don't let this distract you from the additional cause. Whatever problems this would have had, if you didn't have ~80% of depositors being above the FDIC limit, and thus uninsured, you wouldn't have had the run play out in the same way, and may not have had it at all. 

Janet Yellen couldn't make up her mind. Like the "no bailouts" policy, on the Sunday morning shows she was saying that large depositors wouldn't be protected. Whoops. That policy lasted about 8 hours. By the evening, they were. 

And even before this, you'd had these sob stories about how all these hard working startups were totally boned because they'd held their money in SVB. While it's easy to enjoy the schadenfreude of the supposedly brightest investors like Y Combinator reduced to writing petitions begging the Feds for a bailout, there is an actual point here. You can't plan to make payroll each month in any serious-sized firm while holding less than $250K in cash. You can try to minimize the size of your exposure by holding larger amounts in treasuries or money market funds or something, but still, there's going to be a fair bit of straight cash that you need to leave on hand one way or the other, for some large fraction of days. Is it desired policy that these guys just have to eat the bank run risk of wherever they end up? Apparently it is, kinda sorta, unless we change our minds ex post.

Why is all this so bizarre? 

Because bank runs are a solved problem even without deposit insurance!

Well, at least for the version of the bank run problem of "where can you safely store your money without the risk of it being lost or stolen, and not have that institution at risk of collapsing on you?"

In the modern world, your bank has an account with the Fed. You give your money to Citibank. Citibank deposits that money at the Fed. The Fed pays Citibank interest on those reserves. Citibank pays you approximately nothing. To which you might ask - can I just put my money in the Fed directly and earn that interest? No, of course you can't. And a bunch of creative finance types tried for the next best thing - they tried to create something called a narrow bank, whose only purpose is to take your money, give it to the Fed, and pass on nearly all the interest to you. What happened? The Fed repeatedly denied those licenses. 

You may think I'm exaggerating, or being conspiratorial here. But here's John Cochrane, neither a fool nor a conspiracy theorist, saying much the same thing. 

So why do they do it? Well, there's a few answers. 

One is that the Fed is effectively captured by the big banks. They like the subsidies from interest on reserves. They like too big to fail. They like the fact that you don't have anywhere else you can stick your deposits, and instead you have to give it to them if you just want the lowest chance of losing your money. You may not like it, but that's why you're nobody, and they're Goldman Sachs.

The charitable explanation, which actually overlaps with the first but gives it a more positive veneer, is that this is actually a tool of monetary policy - we want the fact that your deposits get lent out to small businesses and home buyers, because this expands the money supply, keeps interest rates low, and keeps the economy growing. We don't want you depositing your money with the Fed to just sit there going nowhere. We presumably also don't want the Fed to then have to get into the business of lending the money out directly. Although you may start to wonder why not - we regulate so much else of the lending process, but perhaps it would be a little embarrassing to go mask-off and just have the Fed lend to everyone directly. It would also hurt the shareholders of the big banks - see the previous explanation. 

Now, the first thing to question is whether we really have exhausted the range of possibilities - either a) subsidize Citibank and deny narrow banking licenses or b) money supply collapse and economic catastrophe. Are we sure that there is absolutely no other alternative? Bueller?

But hell, let's be charitable and assume that this really is the whole action space. We're crowbarring people into having their deposits be needlessly risky to keep lending flowing and the economy growing, but in return we protect them from bank runs ... unless they hold more than $250K. If they do, stiff shit! Why is that, under the current reasoning? Herp a derp, great question. 

Of course, in practice, they'll still probably bail them out ex-post, for the same reason they bailed out AIG. They'll just do it it randomly in an ex-post manner that creates lots of uncertainty, sometimes doesn't materialize (like Lehman), and sometimes creates needless bank runs (like this week). 

If you were Doug Diamond, pondering your legacy, it would be disturbing to wonder whether the deposit insurance idea, which actually isn't a terrible one, could turn into something so cumbersome and kafka-esque. But here we are.

So let's clarify the question at the start to make it more damning. What is the least moronic explanation you can come up with for why deposit insurance has a limit of $250K, and the Fed repeatedly denies licenses to narrow banks?

I'm not holding my breath for an answer.

There is a kind of reverse Gell-Mann Amnesia effect of government policy. Everyone looks at the chaos and inefficiency of government in general, and just assumes that policy is likely to be a shitshow run by clowns. But in the area where you personally have expertise, and especially if you have any conceit of being able to influence policy, you see all sorts of sophisticated rationales for why it might actually make great sense and be a clever balancing of tradeoffs. 

Now, maybe this is actually the right take, and government everywhere is more sensible than you think. But the alternative is worth pondering. If you have some expertise, and still it doesn't seem to make sense, maybe the general perspective is right. Maybe it is just a dumb, historically accidental clownshow. Even if it's the thing you study. Maybe this is true more broadly, and your expertise mostly leads to rationalization. 

The Fed, it is worth noting, is one of the less incompetent bits of the government. They still hire mostly high IQ economists with PhDs from top institutions. This doesn't mean that their assumptions about the world are right, or beneficial, but in general they aren't fools. There are some affirmative action midwits like Lisa Cook, but they are the exception, not the rule. In any case, the Fed is almost shockingly non-partisan. It would be very easy for them to massively jack up interest rates two weeks before the 2020 election to throw things into chaos to get Trump booted out. But they didn't, and they never have. However bad you think current policy is, it could be much, much worse. It probably will get much worse. 

And yet. The external position has a fair amount to recommend. We can see some part of policy that seems crazy, arbitrary, and historically anachronistic. What we are left to haggle over is how much this is tip, and how much this is iceberg.