Category Archives: History

More on the liber in Liberal

Anxious Soren

Anxious Soren

Now that I’ve reclaimed the word Liberal from the barbarian hordes in American television and politics, I thought I should expand the topic so that we are all equally confused again.

Liberal, we agreed, comes from the Latin liber, meaning free. It is a philosophy of freedom. Nuff said.

Actually, no. There are so many ways of thinking about freedom that it quickly makes your head spin.

Political, national and personal

In this course, Rufus Fears, a professor I quite like, distinguishes between political, national and personal freedom. You can have personal freedom without political and national freedom (colonial America, Hong Kong within China) and national freedom without political and personal freedom (post-colonial Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, in my opinion).

Negative and positive

Another way of thinking about it is negative versus positive freedoms. Negative freedom is about being left alone by somebody powerful, probably the government: no confiscations, intrusions, invasions of privacy, etc. Positive freedom is the opposite: an intervention by somebody, probably the government, to improve your life. Among Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “four freedoms”, the third one is a positive freedom:

  1. Freedom of speech
  2. Freedom of religion
  3. Freedom from want
  4. Freedom from fear

Existential and spiritual

Then there are the likes of Gautama Siddhartha, aka the Buddha, and Soren Kierkegaard, pictured above. They took thinking about freedom to a whole new level. The Buddha (and his contemporary, Patanjali) showed us that oppression comes from our own mind–its fears, craving, anger, and desire in general–so that freedom is about making the mind still. It is internal to every individual.

Kierkegaard and the Existentialists who followed him would agree with that but draw a different conclusion. Because we are free, we are free to screw everything up and we know it. This makes us anxious. So freedom leads to Angst (whereas the Buddha’s freedom comes after Angst has finally become quiet).

The problem of choice

Then there is the entirely new and modern problem of too much choice. Thanks to Richard, I found a TED video by Barry Schwartz, a psychologist, in which he dispels the myth that more choice equals, or leads to, freedom. Instead, it increasingly paralyzes and enslaves us.

When you are stumped

  • in your supermarket aisle by the 175 salad dressings before you;
  • in your electronics store  by the 6.5 million permutations of stereo systems on offer;
  • or with your 401(k) paperwork by the 2,000 mutual funds available,

then you are not really free. You just give up. You will regret whatever you do choose, because the other options might have been better. And you will blame yourself because now it’s your fault that life is not perfect. I think of this as Kierkegaard 2.o.

In summary, I have hereby once again proven how much fun and excitement there is to be had by hanging around… real Liberals. 😉

What Uncle Lulu would do today

Gerhard Kluth Ludwig Erhard

What would my great-uncle Lulu, better known as Ludwig Erhard, West Germany’s first and most famous economics minister and subsequent chancellor, do today if he were a policy maker in Washington?

The question comes from Cheri, and it got me thinking. So I asked my dad (pouring tea for his uncle and godfather above). Dad, who is also an economist, knows best how the gears of Lulu’s mind ground.

(Disclaimer: I am writing this not as a correspondent of The Economist, but only as a family member of Erhard’s.)

So, thirty-one years after Lulu’s death, dad had this to say:
The first question is what he would have done before all of this transpired: Would this catastrophe have happened in the first place?
I think he would have fought much earlier and more vehemently against this absurd “compensation” culture in America. (He was known as the Masshaltekanzler–ie, the chancellor who keeps things measured and reasonable.) The bonuses and salaries of some of the characters at the center of the current American crisis were obscene, and the short-term basis of their calculation counterproductive. So maybe this alone would have sufficed to prevent some of today’s excesses.
He probably also would have railed against the unrestrained consumption mania that prevailed in America during the good years (which would have made him very unpopular in America). Savings rate = 0. This is why the crisis is now hitting so many so hard.
He was always and implacably for a politically independent–completely independent!–central bank [ie, “Fed”] which was to have only one mandate: to preserve the value of the currency. (The Fed’s mission, by contrast, is to mind both the economy in general and prices in particular; but since Greenspan, economic growth seems to take precedence over prices and the currency.)
Lulu was always very well informed and interested in new trends in banking, and he almost certainly would have demanded strict controls over these exotic new breeds of securities [credit-default swaps and what not].
One question is whether he would have succeeded with these policies in America. Probably not. His style was to educate, and appeal to, the public directly. At his height, he was so popular and trusted among ordinary voters that he could cajole his own party into following his ideas in direct contravention even of the party’s platform. This style would not work today, and certainly not in America.
What would he do today? The heart attack has already occurred, so now the patient first has to be kept alive. The trick is to keep him on life support without changing the underlying structure of the economy in ways that could lead to irreversible damage in the future.
For example, Lulu would have been against giving Detroit, under the guise of life support, carte blanche to merge or form alliances that might become, in effect, cartels or quasi-monopolies. Even and especially in the banking market, he would have been concerned about creating super-institutions [“too big to fail”] that will sooner or later demand special treatment in Washington.
Above all, he would have already started campaigning, with stump speeches and such, for free trade internationally, lest anybody anywhere jump to the disastrous conclusion that protectionism, even in specific industries, might be the answer. Such a turn would actually kill the “protected” industries in the medium term and lead to a cascade into even worse disaster [as happened during the depression: see the Smoot Hawley Tariffs].
Most urgently: Re-establish confidence (perhaps Obama has the flair that Lulu once had). And get the inter-bank lending market working again.
But he would have been concerned that the Fed’s current approach of just printing money might lead to inflation before long. He would also note that America has a pretty shoddy infrastructure today. If somebody were to fix it in a big way now [as Obama appears intent on doing], à la Keynes, even Lulu would find a sympathetic word. 😉 [Ie, ordinarily he would not be a Kenesian.]


What Cleopatra might have looked like

Cleopatra: Hot or not?

I like to try to imagine what the characters in my book (the ancient ones, that is) looked like. This is, for obvious reasons, a futile task, but that has never held me back.

So I’ve already weighed in on what Hannibal, and Carthaginians in general, looked like (ie: hunky but not like Denzel); and what his Numidian cavalry looked like (ie, a bit like Zidane).

Cleopatra’s look, of course, is perhaps the most fascinating mystery in history because of her legendary sex appeal. Plutarch tells us, however, that it was not her looks per se that made Caesar and Antony fall for her, but her voice, her many languages, her wit and panache, her ability to read the psyche of a man she was seducing, and so forth.

In any case, researchers at Cambridge (the British one) have tried to reconstruct her face, and this is it.

It’s plausible, because she was said to have a dark complexion and a longish, hooked nose, which she inherited from her father, Auletes.

Let it be remembered, though, that there was not a single drop of Egyptian blood in her veins. She was pure Macedonian-Greek, descended from a relative of Alexander the Great. One of Alexander’s generals, Ptolemy, founded her dynasty, and all his heirs, including Cleo’s brothers, were named Ptolemy. (Auletes, the piper, was a nickname.)

Let it also be said that she was the product of incest. The Macedonians adopted the Egyptian custom of marrying a brother and sister as co-rulers. (These then took the additional name of Philadelphus, or sibling-lover). Several Ptolemies before Cleopatra’s generation were horrendously fat and possibly otherwise genetically compromised. Cleo, however, got lucky. And although her child with Caesar was murdered, her children with Antony were allowed to live on in obscure parts of the Roman empire, breeding merrily with outsiders.


Endurance

Ernest Shackleton

Ernest Shackleton

Earlier this month, I told you how frustrating it is when, in the course of the research for my book, I follow a trail into a dead end. Back then I had been reading about Casanova until I had to admit to myself that he didn’t fit into the chapter that I was re-writing. I swallowed and moved on.

Greg Balco

Greg Balco

Well, the opposite can happen too. Almost a year ago, my friend Greg Balco (who has since proposed that I rename this blog An Inconvenient Kluth) suggested that I look into the life of Ernest Shackleton as one of my subsidiary stories. Shackleton took a ship named Endurance to explore the Antarctic, but got stuck in the ice, lost the ship and found himself and his crew, truly, facing a Disaster. What happened next was all about character!

Anyway, I read the book that Greg recommended and loved it–in part because there is a lot of Greg in it. He is a geochronologist and his idea of fun is to camp in the Antarctic ice and drill for snow, or perhaps rocks; or perhaps they just go sledding. He would know exactly what Shackleton and his men endured when they subsisted on blubber on floes of ice for a year, with no light in the winter and no darkness in the summer.

But as my own storyline was evolving Shackleton didn’t seem to fit. Now, a year later, I am reopening the middle chapters to make them perfect. Suddenly one of them has a gaping hole that cries out for a life, a character to fill it.

This is the chapter about the least known of my three main characters: Fabius, the old Roman Senator who fought Hannibal by not fighting him, until the young and dashing Scipio came onto the scene. That doesn’t tell you about the context of the chapter, or about the hole in it that needs filling. Suffice it to say that Shackleton, suddenly, seems to be a perfect fit. Endurance hereby re-enters my bibliography.


Why August (not September) is called August

What's that fat little bugger doing to my leg?

The month of July gets its name from the birthday of Gaius Julius Caesar. Fair enough. But what about August?

This one always baffled me. Octavian, who was Caesar’s grand-nephew and adopted son (as everybody discovered to great surprise when reading Caesar’s will), and who would be the future Emperor Augustus was born in September, not August.

September was also when, in 31 BC, Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra at the sea battle of Actium, thus ending the long civil wars and, in effect, the Roman republic, and installing himself as princeps. Before long he would be “Imperator Caesar Divi Filius Augustus”, or “Commander Caesar, son of god, the Illustrious.” I have asked my wife to address me in this fashion and eagerly await her reply.

So why the month before September?

Well, I just found out, while still reading about Cleopatra, whom I have just made a minor character in one chapter of my book. As it turns out, it had everything to do with Cleopatra. It took Octavian a good year to consolidate his gains after Actium, and he only showed up at Cleo’s capital of Alexandria–you guessed it by now–on August 1 of the following year.

A few icy gestures later, and Antony had shoved a sword into his abdomen, while Cleopatra injected herself with the venom of a snake–Virgil says “two asps”–or perhaps a comb. That was not yet all, however. Cleopatra had had a son with Caesar, nicknamed Caesarion (“little Caesar”) and he was the one man alive who might compete with Octavian in claiming to be Caesar’s heir. Cleo had sent him running as soon as Octavian was approaching, but Octavian’s thugs caught up with him. No more Caesarion.

So August was a big month for Octavian, which is why, when he became Augustus, he named it after himself. Now that I know how these things work, I’m going to try to do something, oh, next November or so. Kluthy. Kluthust. Kluthember. Details to be announced.


The Parthian Shot

Parting Parthian

Parting Parthian

You’ve heard people talk about a “parting shot”, when, for example, somebody makes a miffed exit and on the way out emits a toxic word or two. Well, that’s wrong. It’s not a “parting” shot. It’s a Parthian shot. Who were the Parthians that we name a shot after them?

I bring this up because I’m still reading about Cleopatra as research for my book. And I’m now approaching the bit where Mark Antony, her second lover (after Julius Caesar, the first), is preparing to head east to conquer those Parthians, even as Cleopatra was four or five months pregnant with their third child.

Those are the same Parthians that had succeeded the mighty Persian empire, and who had only a generation before slaughtered an entire Roman army under Crassus, after presenting him his son’s head on a stake. They were utterly not to be messed with. Indeed, Mark Antony, too, would turn back in disaster, with two-fifths of his army killed. The Parthians would remain invincible for another century and a half.

Now to the point: Their most insidious and effective tactic was the retreat, real or feigned. The mounted Parthian archers would suddenly gallop away, drawing the enemy army after them in hot pursuit. But the archers, in full gallop (no reins or stirrups needed), would turn and shoot back, arrow after arrow.

In short, a great party trick, to this day.


Socratic irony

Somewhat unexpectedly, the topic of irony is becoming a subsidiary thread in the Hannibal Blog. It started here, continued here and, I’m sure, will continue even more. You recall that my definition of irony is “the savoring of contradictions in life and people (others and yourself) and of turns of phrase that are slightly and adroitly off-key and thus meaningfully surprising.” This wording found approval, at a minimum, by Cheri.

Suddenly, however, I find the plot thickening. Robert Bartlett, a professor at Emory University who teaches this course on the three greatest Greek thinkers, informs me that

Irony in its original Socratic sense, in Greek eironeia, is really pretty different. In brief, it’s the habit of concealing one’s superiority. Aristotle, in the Ethics, lists irony as a vice, though he says it’s a vice characteristic of those who are refined.

Why refined? Because if irony is a vice opposed to the virtue of truthfulness, it is a kind of deceit. It is also much better or more attractive than the vice of boasting, of claiming to be more than you are. The ironic person claims to be less than he is, and in particular to be less wise. Aristotle, by the way, gives only one example of the ironic person: Socrates.

Socrates is famous, then, for his irony, for his kind of graceful concealment of his wisdom; he’s not a boaster, in this sense. This means that Plato chose as his spokesman, or at least as the central character in almost all the dialogues, an ironist, somebody who’s not altogether frank.

This is, of course, very different than my definition of irony. Then again, as I think about it, the genealogy does show up even in the modern phenotype. Which means: For those of us today who appreciate irony, it may  be worth remembering what the Athenians did to Socrates, and what many societies would like to do to ironists. Sarah Palin might claim afterwards that she mistook me for a moose. Put differently, here is the great man as the hemlock does its lethal work:



From Casanova to Cleo

Well, this is frustrating, but it does happen when you write a book. Sometimes you go down one path in your research before discovering that it’s a dead end.

Then you have a choice: You can somehow finagle it into your book and hope that it works. Journalists do that a lot, because they don’t like admitting (to themselves) that they wasted time searching in the wrong place.

Or you cut your losses, say ‘Oh well’, and keep searching for the perfect and sublime.

That’s what I just decided to do, after much agonizing. As you know from several previous posts, I was reading into the life of Casanova as one of my characters for a particular chapter. He led a fascinating life, but it just doesn’t work in my specific context, at least not perfectly.

I considered replacing him with Mata Hari. (In general, I want more female lives in the book.) Also not a perfect fit.

Now I’m onto Cleopatra.

Con: She’s an “ancient”, as are the protagonists in the book (Hannibal, Fabius and Scipio). So there may be too much of that.

Pro: People love her, she’s fascinating, she’s female, and…. she fits!!!

If you’re trying to figure out what these people have in common and why I need one of them in my book, I’ve dropped a veiled hint here. Feel free to guess.


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Ruined by success

Syd Barret

Syd Barret

Thanks to Abhishek for pointing out a life story that fits the theme of my book, which is that success and failure can be impostors, as Kipling would say. Abhishek emailed that

The other day, I downloaded a documentary on Syd Barret [the co-founder of the band Pink Floyd] from You tube. This is a classic story of Hannibal of the 1970’s. A 22 year old Barret was at his peak as the lead singer of Pink Floyd and then he lost it all to LSD. During concerts, he stood on the stage stoned and out of sorts strumming his guitar playing all the wrong notes. His colleagues would somehow cover it up, but one fine day they had to pick up their bags and leave him behind…

Now, this actually not a “story of Hannibal,” because Hannibal’s life trajectory had more twists and turns and was more perplexing. But I do have a chapter where I explore this–ie, Barret’s–sort of life trajectory, which we might call “premature success.”

Contemplating his premature success

Contemplating his success

Contemplating Barret, I think of people like Diego Maradona, who soar to fame, success or some other kind of triumph in their field, but apparently too early in life to be able to cope with it. Then they fall apart. Drugs, alcohol, or less obvious but equally insidious lapses of personal discipline. They become wrecks.

The book in my bibliography in this regard, which I recommend, is Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage : Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West.

Meriwether Lewis, you recall, is the first half of the Lewis & Clark expedition that explored the North American continent west of the Mississippi and to the Pacific after Thomas Jefferson bought those lands from Napoleon. Lewis is, in many ways, an American Hannibal: a young, dashing hero who did what many thought was impossible.

Meriwether Lewis

Meriwether Lewis

But what came next? Whereas his friend William Clark, upon their return, married and lived happily, Lewis fell apart. He couldn’t handle the fame. No luck with women. Booze, later even morphine. He did not publish his famous Journals. Jefferson made him governor of the territory he had explored, but he failed in every respect, defaulting on his debts and drinking himself into oblivion. In his mere thirties, only a few years after his breathtaking success, he killed himself in a dingy Tennessee tavern (although the event remains a bit of a mystery).

Impostor triumph indeed. To me, this sort of tale is not the end of a story but the beginning of one. What happens to these people?


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Should Obama choose Hillary?

So everybody is wondering whether Obama will choose Hillary to be his Secretary of State.

I’ve been thinking that he might do that ever since I heard Obama speak, during the primaries, about Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln shrewdly, wisely, disarmingly followed the advice to “keep your friends close and your enemies closer”. He brought his harshest political rivals into his cabinet, where he could watch them and where their interests were aligned with his. “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”, he once said.

Naturally, Obama’s way of thinking immediately resonates with mine in at least one way: He instinctively looks to history for lessons and guidance in the here and now. I instinctively do the same. It is the premise of my book.

Taizu, the first emperor of the Song dynasty

Taizu, the first emperor of the Song dynasty

So here is another story from history that Obama might like. The first emperor of China’s Song dynasty was fighting against a rival, King Liu, to consolidate his rule. Song won and brought Liu to his court, where he offered him a glass of wine. Liu assumed that Song was about to kill him, with poisoned wine, and begged for mercy. Instead, Song laughed, took the glass and drank it himself. Then he made Liu a high-ranking adviser at his court. Liu would be one of the most loyal servants in Song’s retinue.

A while later, Song defeated another king. Song’s ministers lobbied to have this king killed or locked up, presenting reams of documentary proof that he was plotting to kill the Song emperor. The emperor had him brought before him. Then he promoted the man, appointed him to high rank, and sent him home with a package to be opened later. When the man did open it, he found all the documents proving his plot to have the emperor killed. He also became one of the emperor’s most loyal servants.

The benefits of this sort of thing are clear: If your enemies are at large (as Hillary would be in the Senate), they can cause mischief and plot revenge. Their success is your failure, your success their failure. But by bringing them close and aligning their success and failure with yours, you disarm them. Bonus: Because everybody knows that they are former enemies, they must forever work harder than the others to earn their trust.

Wild cards: None of Lincoln’s or the Song emperor’s enemies had a spouse such as Bill. And Bill would still be at large. Oh boy.


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