civil whatnow?

More historical agnorance from Tom Toles:


How ironic. To make the point that there really is a civil war taking place in Iraq, he appeals to the Establishment name for a conflict that was not a civil war by any definition that existed before 1860.

Iraqi factions are fighting for power over each other. That's a civil war.

The southern states were not trying to conquer Washington DC and rule the North.

Even if you support the Union invasion of the South, even if you think Abe Lincoln was a hero and that the good guys won, simple decency and the most basic level of intellectual honesty should force you to recognize that it was a war of secession; it was no more a civil war than was the conflict of the 1770s.

dream come true

(Bill Watterson was, of course, making the opposite point.)

man bites dog

Did anyone else have this experience in school?

I encountered the phrase "Man Bites Dog" in 2 different English classes, taught by 2 different English teachers, who used it to illustrate 2 very different points -- possibly incompatible points.

In a class on writing, it was used to make a point about "hooks":
No one will read a story called "Dog Bites Man" but most will read a "Man Bites Dog" story.

Whereas the linguistics teacher, in talking about why it's important to be able to parse and diagram sentence structure, made a point I later encountered in a psychology class as well, which is that most people can't correctly read the sentence "Man bites dog."

They turn it around in their heads to "Dog bites man," or to "Man bitten by dog."

right

Right-wing anarchist, Joseph Sobran (converted from William F. Buckley conservatism to radical libertarianism by Murray Rothbard, if I'm recalling properly), tells us:

I often ask liberals to explain what they mean by right-wing, a term they apply to everything they dislike, even principles that have nothing in common, such as anarchism (opposition to all government) and fascism (government without limits), as well as conservatism (government within carefully defined limits), not to mention monarchism, oligarchy, plutocracy, nativism, militarism, laissez-faire capitalism, theocracy, libertarianism, feudalism, neoconservatism, and a hundred mutually incompatible other things. What common denominator can they possibly share? How can they all be "right-wing"? No liberal has ever been able to tell me.

freedom from thought

New Jersey high schooler, libertarian, and occasional LRC contributor Max Raskin addresses today one of my main topics: the schooling of history (1, 2, 3, 4):

For most students, history is that easy "A" class, requiring little more than memorization to do well. For me, it is a class that has demonstrated a truth that I now know all too well -- the government is relentless in its self-gratifying publicity campaign, and will stop at nothing to promote itself, often at the expense of the truth. Its textbooks read as hagiographies, substituting thoughtful analysis for blind reverence. [I'm pretty sure he means either "substituting thoughtful analysis with blind reverence" or "substituting blind reverence for thoughtful analysis ."]

This is about as concise a statement of the thesis as I've seen:

Seeing as it has historically been the government who has taken away liberty through its expansion, historians who portray such growth in a favorable light are inserting their own anti-freedom beliefs.

And here's exactly what I (a) wish I'd suffered more of back in school, and (b) want to keep my son from having to struggle with:

Now this all sounds good in principle, but what to do when I am in class, being lectured by someone I disagree with? Do I raise my hand at misinterpretations I see? Do I speak once a class, delivering a short speech that attacks the textbook's main bias of the day (because it would take oh so long to go over them all)? Do I write essays on why the test's answer key supports fascism and the end of western civilization? Or do I quietly resign myself to a silent anguish of knowing that nothing I can say will ever mean anything to these people?

[...]

Am I wrong in pointing out the flaws with my teacher's approach to antitrust legislation? How could predatory pricing exist when under Rockefeller the price of Kerosene fell from a dollar to ten cents per gallon? Or the price of steel rails under Carnegie fell over 140 dollars per ton? Why should these "trusts" be punished if they raise the standard of living by cutting costs and raising real wages? Of course they shouldn't be.

Why should I have to subscribe to my textbook's "Whig" theory of history? What if I believe that history is not an inevitable progressive march upwards? What if I believe that capitalism and liberty [are] what made America great, not governments and interventionism?

sic tees

Stephen Carson points me to this shirt and asks,

"But would you actually wear it?"

No, but I'd wear this shirt:

proud to be misnomerian

I'm proud to be an American.

I won't try to defend that pride: it's based mostly on things I had no responsibility for and no control over, which puts the pride in the same camp as many other collectivist emotions, but I can't pretend I don't feel it just because I think it's irrational.

One of the things I'm proud about is that "American" is a contested word -- contested by another entire continent (not to mention 2 other nation-states on my own continent). There's something very fitting to me about the label being so over- and underdefined.

No one calls me a United Statesian, even though that would be a more accurate description of my official statist citizenship.

Another thing I'm proud of about the American label is that it comes from the phenomenal PR genius Amerigo Vespucci -- not because he discovered anything, but because his maps and stories promoted curiosity and fantasy about this New World back in the Old World. (And I'm proud to descend from the cultural and economic history of that Old World.)

We United Statesians somehow managed to get primary claim to the term "American" even though Amerigo's maps were of SOUTH America. The nerve of us.

Meanwhile, the people of the extended gene pool of those the Pilgrims feasted with are called Indians (unless you're politically correct enough to call them "Native Americans," which would make you a sequacious numskull, since the term literally means anyone born in America -- wherever that is (as you know, my own favorite term is Amerindividual, but that's not very helpful, since I'm a native-born Amerindividual myself)). They're called Indians because Columbus thought he found them in India. To distinguish them from the real Indians in real India, they came to be called American Indians, which still begs the where-is-America question.

Lest we let the Europeans get too smug about this absurd tangle of longstanding misnomers, let me point out that France and England are both named for German tribes (which isn't so much a misnomer as it is a little confusing), Scotland literally means "The Land of the Irish," (and Ireland does not mean the Land of Ire -- though it sure sounds like it does), and finally, the name "Spain" comes from the Phoenician word I-Shaphan, meaning "The Island of Hyraxes." Is Spain an island? No. What's a Hyrax, you might ask? Wikipedia tells us that they are any of 4 species of small, thickset, herbivorous mammals living in Africa or the Middle East -- but not in Spain. That's like naming my part of the world "the satellite of penguins."

I'd love to hear more examples of misnomerian nationalities.

obvious hypocrisy?

While I'm recanting, I want to take back something I posted just last week:

Monday, November 20, 2006

moron hypocrisy

"more on" hypocrisy (but you knew that)

From today's Doonesbury:


As with pinko tax-dodgers, it's important not to get so caught up in the obvious hypocrisy of the chickenhawks that we fail to identify which part of the hypocritical combination is the evil part.

[...]

I think I was wrong. Not only is the chickenhawk's hypocrisy not obvious, I don't think it's hypocrisy.

Gary Trudeau seems to be anti-war; so am I. Trudeau seems to dislike the chickenhawks; so do I. But while I condemn their values and their power, I think it's wrong to imply that their values are internally inconsistent.



Let me try a parallel: it would be hypocritical to support the War On Drugs while you and your trust-fund buddies have coke parties, but is it hypocritical for someone to support the War On Drugs without joining the police force?

The hypocrisy of the first case is based on an implied universal: it's wrong to do drugs (and of course on the further-implied universal that it's right to use coercion against anything that is wrong). But saying that you support a particular activity on the part of the government does not imply that you think everyone should work for the government.

Supporting a particular war does not imply that everyone should be a soldier; there's no hypocrisy in cheering on the bloodshed from the safety of home. It's evil, but it's not hypocritical.

The War On Drugs is wrong. The war in Iraq is wrong. But I was wrong to imply that those who disagree with me are automatically guilty of intellectual dishonesty.

paleologism

This week's theme at AWAD was practical words -- words you can easily use in conversation or writing.

Floccinaucinihilipilification wasn't one of them.

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Update: In case you don't read the comments, I'm going to copy part of iceberg's here:

floccinaucinihilipilification < flocci- a tuft of wool or bit of lint + nauci- a trifle + nihili- nothing + pili- a hair + fic < facere make + ation the act of: "the act of making worthless."

expensive ignorance

Another confession of my own historical ignorance (but not agnorance this time):

Charley Reese writes on LRC today about the "Expensive Ignorance" of today's college students. He starts out with the unsurprising results of a recent survey. These things have been coming out for years and the media loves it because it gives good sound bite: e.g., "Some 75 percent couldn't identify the purpose of the Monroe Doctrine," and "nearly 50 percent didn't recognize the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence."

My confession is that I had to double-check the Monroe Doctrine. My wife had a similar reaction. Manifest Destiny, wasn't it? expanding across the continent?

Well, yes and no. The result was territorial expansionism, but the doctrine is simply the claim that European activity in "the Americas" is the business of the US government. This seems to be an explicit rejection of George Washington's warnings against foreign entanglements.

Like so many other examples, the doctrine was seen as liberal because it was anti-colonial. The result of course, was the Roosevelt Corollary and the Truman Doctrine.

I wonder if my poor memory of the specifics is a product of time and laziness, or if I get to blame this one on my teachers. The fact that my wife's semi-memory was the same as mine -- "something about expanding across the continent?" -- implies to me that it's the teachers.

Charley Reese blames them explicitly:

I think this is a residue of the 1960s and 1970s. If you ever wondered where the Vietnam Era's anti-war demonstrators and hippies went, the answer is to universities and media offices. They were of a mind that it is more important to knock America than to explain it, but education should be about explanation, not polemics or politics.

I need to think about that. The thesis strikes me as right but not entirely right.

I know that the Civil Rights era of the 20th century changed how the so-called Civil War was taught. (Apparently the claim that it was "all about slavery" would have seemed cartoonish to students in the 1950s and earlier.)

But did the Baby Boomers really shift the whole emphasis of history and foreign events from complexity and explanation to taking sides and jumping to conclusions?

If American students in the 1950s perceived the war of the 1860s as complex, I don't think they had the same perspective on the war of the 1940s.

Historical Revisionism as a movement goes back to the 1920s, where its emphasis was to critique the Establishment claims of the Treaty of Versailles. You don't get much more dumbed-down black-and-white than Woodrow Wilson's version of events.

I'm not ready to dismiss Reese's thesis, but the history and economics of schooling seem like plenty to explain an ignorant mass of college students. The "Vietnam Era's anti-war demonstrators and hippies" are neither necessary nor sufficient.

agnorance

I was talking with a friend about the recent theme on this blog of arrogant ignorance.

Arrogant ignorance ... arrogant ignorance ... arrogant ignorance ... arrogant ignorance ... arrogant ignorance ... arrogant ignorance ...

Whenever I type the same combination of words over and over again, I start looking for a shorthand.

I would like to propose a neologism:

agnorance
I mean it as a portmanteau of arrogance and ignorance, but if it reads as "aggravated ignorance" I can live with that.

The opposite of agnorance is intellectual humility.

Socrates concluded that his wisdom consisted in knowing that he didn't know anything. He was ignorant, but he was not arrogant in his ignorance the way the prominent men of Athens were. The Athenians were agnorant.

If someone says, "Me and my friends went down to the Piggly Wiggly for some cold ones," then that person is speaking informally. Perhaps he's ignorant of the formal construction, but perhaps he just doesn't care. More power to him.

But if someone says, "Between you and I, whomever did it should feel badly," well, that's just egregious agnorance.

It will take years for me to correct my historical ignorance.

Agnorance, ideally, can be shed with a simple decision.

See also:

"incorrectables"

Amerindian Amerindividuals

An old buddy of mine who perhaps still suffers from an arrogant ignorance of history recently declined an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner by launching into a knee-jerk PC rant about "the European slaughter of Native Americans."

I guess he doesn't realize that different groups of European-descended Americans treated different groups of American Indians quite differently in different centuries. In short, he was confusing the peaceful relations between Indians and Puritans in the 17th century with the much more brutal Indian relations of the 19th century.

Someone needs to read Tom Woods's Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. (Which is a weird book, by the way, because it's libertarian or classical liberal up through the middle of the 20th century and then suddenly turns conservative, treating the Vietnam War and Ronald Reagan with something less than the opprobrium they deserve. The Clinton administration's attacks on state sovereignty concerning socially conservative issues such as immigration and welfare are rightly attacked, but completely unmentioned are the same administration's attacks on state rights over medical marijuana or assisted suicide. Still, the book is well worth reading and knowing.)

Or maybe this guy was putting on an act. I mean the Thanksgiving/Indian slaughter conflation is such a cartoon of buffoonish political correctness that it's a little hard to believe. On the other hand, I encounter self-righteous ignorance about Amerindians pretty consistently.

One example from a few years back came in the form of an email to BlackCrayon.com about the dangers of individualism. I'm still 90% pleased with my reply.

Unfortunately for me, I'm on record with a bit of arrogant ignorance of my own on the nature of corporations. I just have to apologize, recant, and focus on the solid points. Here is a lightly edited version of what I said:

Thank you for writing.

I will try to reply to some of your specific points this week.

For a quick preview, I'll say that your subject heading, "individualists vs. socialists", crosses logical categories. I myself am not always diligent in maintaining the distinction, but I will try to be in my replies.

When talking with someone about disagreements in anything that might loosely be called "politics", I try to

1. define terms, and
2. separate the principled from the practical,
or what might be called (a) philosophical / moral / ethical / ideological concerns from (b) strategic / pragmatic / economic / consequentialist concerns.

Strictly speaking, then, individualism is a philosophical position, whose opposite is collectivism, while socialism is an economic position, whose opposite is propertarianism, or the advocacy of private property.

There are those who argue that socialism is the necessary result of collectivism, and likewise with private property and individualism, but the logical distinction holds, even if the pairs are empirically combined.

I suspect that it would be good to start our conversation with individualism versus collectivism, rather than private property versus socialism.

In my experience and observation, most debates or disagreements fail to get off the ground, because the different "sides" aren't speaking the same language. We need to avoid being trapped by our connotations.

I define terms for their distinctions and consistency as well as their ability to communicate ideas. The problem with that is that we are most of us so mired down in associations and connotations, that the goal of distinction and logic is often at odds with the goal of clear communication. The two goals are potentially compatible, but the compatibility depends on our ability to overcome our semantic reflexes.

So. Individualism.

I have a very old friend (over 3 decades of friendship now) who I discuss all this stuff with regularly. He has been having with his family many of the same struggles and arguments that I've had with mine. One of the sticking points for his dad and my mom is the word 'individualism'.

He reports his dad saying something like, "Individualism is just that crazy Ronald Reagan crap!"

My mom reacted similarly. For both of them, it is nearly impossible to separate the concept of individualism from me-first personality types, social darwinism, political capitalism, destructive selfishness, and the Republican Party. My mom, in particular, can't seem to say the word 'individualism' by itself. It's always "rugged individualism" which triggers an alarm for me that she is going for emotional associations rather than strict definition.

So what do I mean by individualism? I'm going to quote myself from the BlackCrayon dictionary:

As a moral philosophy, individualism holds that only individual persons can be moral agents.

It holds that rights and responsibilities are only relevant to individuals.

Individualism denies that there are any collective moral agents, and therefore denies rights or responsibilities to groups (but not to the individuals within those groups).

Now is that really what "goes against every community instinct" you have?

For me, individualism is the basis of community, because the word 'community' suggests something organic and voluntary and therefore something chosen freely by the individuals who make up that community.

Alternatively, collectivism -- which is the default assumption of every form of statism -- holds that there is such a thing as "society", that it is more than a linguistic convenience for talking about a set of individuals, but that it has an existence of its own, and that its existence is in the moral universe, where it can have rights and interests and responsibilities independent of the rights and interests and responsibilities of the individuals who supposedly belong to that society.

My belief is that if something is wrong for an individual to do, it is also wrong for a group of individuals to do. There is nothing in the formation of a group or collective that changes the ethical rules. Collectivism, on the other hand, holds that if a group is large enough, it is subject to a totally different ethics. If an individual kills for revenge, it's murder, but if the collective does the same thing it's suddenly capital punishment. If an individual takes property by force, it's called theft, but not when a group does the same thing.

We can talk about the philosophy behind private property if you want to, but for me the most philosophically interesting private property is oneself. Self-ownership is at the heart of individualism. It says that I own my body and my person. The society does not own any part of me, and when it acts as if it does, it acts immorally.

Notice that self-ownership says nothing about running rampant on the resources, as you imply in your letter:

Here's the problem with individualism--one person can do a lot of damage to the resources of an area (say, whales, which a whole community may depend on for food). One person wipes out the whales to make money, while a hundred people in the community are forced to starve or move.

Where did you get the idea that philosophical individualism (aka individual self-ownership) sanctions the behavior you describe? Individualism does not condone all possible individual behavior any more than collectivism condones all possible collective behavior.

Again, I'd like to discuss private property with you from a strategic or economic perspective some other time, but for now, I want to address what I see as mistakes in your definitions:

The problem I have is that, if you have "private property" rights, it necessarily means you must either (1) use some sort of force to keep someone else from taking ownership of the property, or (as is more often used) take the property from someone else by the use of force, or (2) use some sort of "cooperative" process to negotiate ownership, which would be a form of socialist anarchism by definition.

I'm going to address this piece by piece.

(1)(a) You say that your first problem with private property is that it requires force to defend it from outsiders. This is also true of collective or communal property. If you are a pacifist, then you should object to the group's defense of property as much as an individual's. I am not a pacifist. I see a critical difference between the initiation of force and the defensive use of force. If I break into my neighbor's house and shoot him when he tries to stop me, that is morally very different from his shooting me to stop what I'm doing. I see my behavior as the intruder as reprehensible, and his behavior as the defender as justified.

(1)(b) You say that it is often the case that private property is taken by force from someone else. This is a violation of private property. You can't point to theft -- an act against private property -- as any sort of evidence against the legitimacy of property itself.

(2) You claim that a "cooperative" process of negotiation is socialist by definition. I certainly disagree.

The term 'cooperative' has different possible meanings, which I'll review, but by claiming that it is the only alternative to 1a and 1b, you are implying that you mean the term to cover all its divergent meanings.

• Cooperative sometimes means centrally planned for a group's organization or behavior. Cooperative as the opposite of competitive. (And as I assume you know from Environmental Science, the distinction is often artificial. Cooperation and competition are part of the same ecological processes.) This anti-competition definition is the one that's tied to socialism.
• But "cooperative" also means a voluntary exchange or a voluntary organization. From the individualist perspective, something is only voluntary if all individuals involved have agreed to do it. By this understanding, the free market is cooperative, as is laissez-faire capitalism.

I do not believe, as you seem to claim, that anti-competitive cooperation (e.g., strategic socialism) is the only alternative to violent conflict.

Neither is the economic concept of individually held private property somehow anti-community. It depends on community: if I claim a patch of land, post No Trespassing signs, and shoot at strangers, I have occupied a territory, but I do not have private property in the free-market sense. Private property involves holding title to that patch of land, and holding title is something that can only be negotiated with a larger community. It is the title that allows me to use my property in voluntary exchange. Where individualism comes in to all this is in the claim that only individuals can ultimately be held responsible for property titles and only individuals can be said to have property rights. State-based capitalism relies on the legal treatment of a fictional collective entity -- the corporation -- as an individual. Corporate capitalism is antithetical to philosophical individualism. (So much for the association between individualism and "that Ronald Reagan crap".) My problem with state socialism is the same as my problem with state-based, political capitalism: they both treat a collective as the relevant moral agent.

I look to the American Indians, who couldn't understand the idea of "ownership" of the land.

I think you need to do more research on Indians and property. I think all us 30-somethings grew up hearing this claim, but I don't think it turns out to be true. I'm crossing over briefly into economics here, but before doing the research, I would guess that the Indians treated land that was relatively abundant as unowned (as we still treat most of the ocean) and that they would treat any resources they perceived with more relative scarcity -- including certain types of land -- as private property (the way we treat much of the beach). Having made that prediction, I then did some very quick, very rudimentary research, and found indications that that prediction is correct. Different tribes had different amounts of private property, very much connected with their relative perceptions of abundance and scarcity of various resources. I'm not denying that many Indian tribes were collectivist. I simply don't know. But I am denying that they couldn't understand the idea of "ownership" of land.

(By the way, the first European settlers did not have private property. Their farms were communal and they almost starved to death. When the governor declared (or perhaps recognized) the settlers' rights to private property, and the product of their labor, the famines vanished. I don't know how this compares with the experience of the Indians nearby and on similar land, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that individuals claimed the right to the product of their labor.)

But I've drifted over into economics, and I want to focus on ethics. From an ethical/philosophical perspective I would judge the Indians the same way I judge anyone: who was acknowledged to have rights? To what extent was aggression tolerated or condoned? Were peaceful individuals left in peace?

Individualist libertarianism is that very position: that peaceful individuals should be left in peace.

Philosophical collectivism is the basis for claims that peaceful individuals might have obligations that they never agreed to, obligations that legitimize the initiation of force against those individuals. Collectivism is the claim that the rights of those peaceful individuals are secondary to the "rights" of "society".

To me, the only way is communal living where we all cooperate to determine who gets to use what land in what ways. If you don't like it, you have the option of staying and complaining or leaving and finding your own piece of land. The process of negotiation can take as long as needed. I have seen intentional communities that get by rather well with this philosophy.

I have no problem with intentional communities. I lived on a kibbutz for half a year, and I loved it. I have no problem with any voluntary form of socialism -- not from an ethical point of view. (I may make certain economic predictions about their viability, but that's a completely separate subject.) My brief, personal experience of voluntary socialism was overwhelmingly positive.

But you mention the individual having the option of staying and negotiating or leaving to find another piece of land. If I am that individual, and I find my own piece of land, does the community recognize my claim to private property? Or do they hold out the option of "eminent domain". In other words, am I temporarily occupying territory outside their current focus, or do they recognize that my land is outside their authority? If the former, then I see the commune as a mini-State, and I object to its coercive authority as I object to all coercive authority. If the latter, then I'm asking you to recognize that that commune is acting on the principles of philosophical individualism, not collectivism.

Strategic collectivism is not at odds with philosophical individualism. And I maintain that any strategic collective can only be called voluntary if it is consistent with philosophical individualism. The only relevant question is: whose choice is it?

The idea of "individualism" goes against every community instinct in my body, as I believe humans were meant to live in community with each other, not isolation. It doesn't have to be by force. It can be a choice.

Individualism is, as I have said, the basis for voluntary community, not its antithesis. You seem to think individualism requires isolation. Individualism has nothing to do with personal isolation, except that isolation should be recognized as a legitimate option for any individual. It's the individual right to choose that is at the heart of individualism, not which option the individual then chooses.

lupa redux

I recently blogged about the lupine wet-nurse to Romulus and Remus.

New headline: "Rome's She-Wolf Younger Than Its City."

(Thanks to LRC for pointing out this article.)

---

Update: I love the photo that went with that article:

pagans and pilgrims

On Thanksgiving, libertarians like to tell the lesser-known story of the early Pilgrims, their initial communism, their early famine, and their physical salvation through the institution of private property. I link to a few examples here.

You can read the Foundation for Economic Education's version here: www.fee.org/thanksgiving

In his chapter on the founding of Plymouth colony (which we feature today at Mises.org), Murray Rothbard tells a story I'd certainly never heard before:

In 1625, Thomas Morton, gentleman lawyer and an agent of Sir Ferdinando Gorges, organized another settlement, Merrymount, north of Plymouth at the present site of Quincy, Massachusetts. Merrymount was an Anglican settlement, and the citizens did not comport themselves in the highly ascetic fashion to which the Plymouth Separatists wished them to conform. Apparently Merrymount was merry indeed, and whiskey and interracial (white-Indian) revelry abounded, including the old Anglican (but denounced by the Pilgrims as pagan) custom of dancing around a maypole, a practice which King James I had urged in his Book of Sports (1617).

Plymouth had established friendly relations with the Indians, but Merrymount was now threatening to compete most effectively with Plymouth's highly lucrative monopoly of the beaver trade with the Indians. Merrymount was also a place where Morton set his servants free and made them partners in the fur trade, and thus it loomed as a highly attractive haven for runaway servants from Plymouth.

Plymouth Pilgrims invaded Merrymount and chopped down the "pagan" maypole.

The Pilgrims denounced Morton's colony as a "school of atheism" -- "atheism" apparently signifying the use of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the maypole, and selling rum and firearms to the Indians (and buying furs in exchange). The sale of rum and firearms was condemned even though relations with the Indians had been perfectly peaceful. Then, in 1628, Plymouth established a virtual New England tradition of persecution by dispatching Captain Standish with an armed troop to eradicate Merrymount.

Having surrendered on the promise of safe treatment to himself and the settlement, Morton was assaulted by Standish and his men and almost killed, the Plymouth forces "not regarding any agreement made with such a carnal man." Hauled into a Plymouth court -- despite Plymouth's lack of legal jurisdiction over Merrymount -- Morton was almost executed; his death was urged at great length by Miles Standish. Finally, he was deported back to England, with Standish still threatening to kill Morton personally before he could leave the colony. Before deportation, Morton was confined alone for over a month of severe winter at the Isles of Shoals without a gun, knife, or proper clothing.

So I guess the Puritan Pilgrims were leftwing (in the 20th-century sense) in their economics and rightwing (in the post-WWII sense) in their military policy.

I'm tempted to make the Maypole a part of my family's Thanksgiving tradition.

lady libertas

You know, maybe it's better not to teach kids history at all.

Perhaps honest ignorance is better than thinking we know history when the history we know is so riddled with lies.

Legend has it that Socrates's friend and admirer Chaerephon asked the Oracle at Delphi if anyone (in Athens? in Greece? In the world?) was wiser than Socrates. The Oracle said No.

Puzzled by the Oracle's answer, Socrates began questioning the prominent men of Athens and found them to combine ignorance with an ignorance of their ignorance. Thus Socrates came to the conclusion that he was wise precisely because he knew that he knew nothing.

So while I'm embarrassed by how little I know of ancient history, I am far more embarrassed by how much of what I thought I knew of American history still turns out to be wrong. This corrective self-(re)education may take a while.

Today's un-lesson:

I know she's called the Statue of Liberty and not The Statue of Immigration; nevertheless, I thought the French government gave Lady Liberty to the United States to celebrate the American government's open-immigration policy. After all, the plaque at the base of the statue says

"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Ah, yes, BUT (as I learned from listening to Ralph Raico's talk at the Imperialism conference and then checking Wikipedia for details) the statue was given in 1885 and the poem "The New Colossus," though written in 1883, was only engraved and mounted inside the Statue of Liberty in 1903.

Now before some zealous blog spammer starts citing pro-immigration arguments at me, let me emphasize that this is not an anti-immigration post! I'm opposed to any government interventions aimed at keeping people inside or outside politically defined borders.

But I do think it does a disservice to America's libertarian tradition to conflate the freedom referred to in "Liberty Enlightening the World" (the statue's official name) with a particular public policy. (And I will again give my favorite Lew Rockwell quote: "Freedom is not a public-policy option. It is the end of public policy itself.")

And I suspect the conflation is itself the deliberate result of a campaign to obscure the classical liberal history the French donors were referring to.

Here's what it says at the end of Wikipedia's page on "The New Colossus":

Impact of poem

Author John T. Cunningham wrote that "[t]he Statue of Liberty was not conceived and sculpted as a symbol of immigration, but it quickly became so as immigrant ships passed under [the statue]. However, it was [Lazarus' poem] that permanently stamped on Miss Liberty the role of unofficial greeter of incoming immigrants".

James Russell Lowell wrote that the poem gave the Statue of Liberty "a raison d'etre" and Paul Auster wrote that "Bartholdi's gigantic effigy was originally intended as a monument to the principles of international republicanism, but 'The New Colossus' reinvented the statue's purpose, turning Liberty into a welcoming mother, a symbol of hope to the outcasts and downtrodden of the world".

get 'em young

Rainbow Fish was the most beautiful fish in the sea. One day, a little blue fish asked for just one of his beautiful shining scales. "Never!" said Rainbow Fish.

After that, the other fish swam away from him. Rainbow Fish was all alone.

He went to the octopus for help. The octopus said, "Give away your shining scales. You won't be as beautiful, but you will be happy."

I can't do that!" cried Rainbow Fish.

Suddenly the little blue fish was back.

"Please," he said. "Could I have a scale?"

Well, thought Rainbow Fish, maybe just one tiny little scale. The little blue fish was so pleased, it made Rainbow Fish feel happy.

So Rainbow Fish gave each of the fish a shining scale, until he had only one left. But now he had friends, and as he swam off to play with them he was the happiest fish in the sea.

I kid you not.

I bought it because it's waterproof and has pretty pictures.

Next time I'll have to read the text first.

broken crayon

As I've said before, "BlackCrayon.com is a bit of a ghost town. I'm sorry about that. ... So the bookstore (2 , 3, 4) is broken and some of my library is still hacked. The pipes are leaking and there's the general dank smell of disuse."

I don't have the time or inclination to maintain it, and I don't have the heart to take it down. And apparently, some people still use it as a resource. This year's Broken Crayon Award goes to Jason R. Gray, who wrote me over the weekend to say:

I'm a frequent visitor to your Black Crayon web site and I've recently noticed something weird about it. Some of its hyperlinks direct me to inaccessible web sites. Others direct me to web pages that are totally different from what is described. I appreciate what you're doing for anarcho-capitalism, individualist anarchism, mutualism, etc. Below are a few that I've noticed. Hopefully this e-mail will help you out in furthering your endeavour and expressing your message effectively.

1. On your [A] Brief Introduction to Philosophical Anarchism web page, there is an asterisk hyperlink after the words "George Washington, first president of the United States" that directs me to a vandalised web page of some sort.
2. On some of your People web pages (e.g. William Godwin, Emma Goldman, Joseph Labadie, Leo Tolstoy), there are hyperlinks that direct me to web pages on your server with hyperlinks to music on Amazon.com instead of books or what have you.
3. On your Murray N. Rothbard web page, the hyperlink for his "Government in Business" article is inaccessible at its present location and currently here: http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=252.
4. On your Murray Bookchin web page, the hyperlink for his biography is inaccessible and currently here: http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20060802164601491. The hyperlink for "The Murray Bookchin Reader" is also inaccessible and currently here: http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031118091735782.

With regards,
Jason

Thanks so much, Jason. I thought I'd dug out all the vandalized pages, but apparently not. The Amazon links were broken because Amazon changed its web services protocols after I'd stopped programming. Rather than fix them, I've removed the ones you pointed out. Where you've offered updated URLs, I've fixed the broken links. For a little more on Murray Bookchin (and Murray Rothbard), see my old blog post on "liberal anarchism".

moron hypocrisy

"more on" hypocrisy (but you knew that)

From today's Doonesbury:


As with pinko tax-dodgers, it's important not to get so caught up in the obvious hypocrisy of the chickenhawks that we fail to identify which part of the hypocritical combination is the evil part. The hedge-fund patriot in the comic strip is absolutely right: he can better serve his country working at a hedge fund. Voluntary exchange benefits people. The military does not serve the country; it serves the political class while hurting everyone else in the country. Yes, I realize that we were raised to say the opposite, but we were raised to say a lot of dumb things.

Meanwhile, as so many in the left wing of the anti-war movement celebrate the return of the Democrats, incoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee Charles Rangel is advocating a return to selective slavery ("as a way to deter politicians from launching wars" of course):

Congressman Calls for Military Draft
11/20/2006
"A senior House Democrat said yesterday that he will introduce legislation to reinstate the military draft, asserting that current troop levels are insufficient to cover possible future missions in Iran, North Korea, and Iraq." (Boston Globe, Monday)

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." --Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

FEE Timely Classic
"Neither Slavery Nor Involuntary Servitude" by Aeon J. Skoble

And from Tom DiLorenzo at Lew Rockwell's blog:

Black Congressman Advocates a Return to Slavery

Posted by Thomas DiLorenzo at November 19, 2006 07:34 PM

Congressman Charles Rangel of New York has introduced a bill that would re-institute military conscription and create an army of slaves for the empire. His political pals at the liberal Brookings Institute and elsewhere are calling for making this form of slavery more "universal" by calling it "universal service." Congressman Rahm Emanuel is championing this odious venture, which would conscript every 18-year-old to perform several years of (non-military)"service" to the state. So far, no objections from the neocons.

Slavery was outlawed a long time ago, but it's apparently A-OK today as long as it "serves" the gang of crooks, conmen and clowns who run the central government. It is perfectly acceptable to the Charles Rangels of the world as long as it is done by a "democracy." Say that magic word, and the Average I.Q. of the American electorate zooms in the direction of zero. If the public goes along with this, we have truly become Borat Nation.

Finally, one of the reasons I'm grateful to the late Milton Friedman is that he spoke Truth to Power on the question of conscription:

Gen. William Westmoreland, testifying before President Nixon's Commission on an All-Volunteer [Military] Force, denounced the idea of phasing out the draft and putting only volunteers in uniform, saying that he did not want to command "an army of mercenaries."

Friedman, a member of the 15-person commission, interrupted him. "General," Friedman asked, "would you rather command an army of slaves?"

Westmoreland got angry: "I don't like to hear our patriotic draftees referred to as slaves."

And Friedman got rolling: "I don't like to hear our patriotic volunteers referred to as mercenaries." And he did not stop: "If they are mercenaries, then I, sir, am a mercenary professor, and you, sir, are a mercenary general. We are served by mercenary physicians, we use a mercenary lawyer, and we get our meat from a mercenary butcher."

[source, formatting and emphasis added]

persons of inferior social status

From The Columbia History of the World:

[S]ome major changes came about in the two centuries and more from the death of Augustus to the death of Severus Alexander. ... the spread of Stoicism and the permeation of all classes by its basic suppositions.

Connected with this last point was a far reaching change in the privileges accorded persons of inferior social status. Stoicism had long preached the brotherhood of man, and contrasted natural rights with social privileges. By the Severan period, married women had attained an independence unparalleled in antiquity, and thenceforth the liberty and large legal rights of women would be characteristic of the Western world [emphasis added]. Children and slaves, too, had been protected from arbitrary exercise of paternal authority. The position of slaves had improved for economic as well as legal and humanitarian reasons. The suppression of piracy sharply cut down the supply of new slaves; the end of civil wars and conquests reduced it yet further; the common practice of manumission diminished the supply of existing slaves. It became more economical to work estates with free tenant farmers. One consequence of this, however, was a decline in legal respect for the free man as such. The law now began to distinguish between freemen of upper and lower class -- honestiores and humiliores. The former were exempt from humiliating procedures and punishments to which the latter were subject. (p. 215)

I'm reminded of 2 important pieces of libertarian writing:

1. "The Idea of Liberty is Western," by Ludwig von Mises (a claim that seems immediately obvious if you've read enough history, but which is, of course, as politically incorrect as it gets)
   
2. Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men
   

Here's a snippet on Hummel's book from an earlier post:

To paraphrase Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, the American so-called "Civil War" emancipated slaves while enslaving free men. Was it a good thing? Even if you believe that a war was necessary for emancipation, it still seems to me that the answer is far from straight-forward. And if you don't think that a war was necessary, then the answer definitely shifts more toward the negative.

3 words

Some perspective from the southern hemisphere:

here in Latin America, when in the 80s, after the debt crisis, Friedman became something of a cult figure with his "Chicago boys", he was asked , what is his recipe for economic development and he said:"3 things; privatize, privatize, privatize!!"

and that sounded here like music to the ears of the local "politcos" and their cronies that soon went on to convert state monopolies into private monopolies resulting in price increases galore. The end result of all this is that privatization has become a "taboo" word in Latin American politics the same as "sex" in a puritan gathering.

thus the problem, Friedman forgot to finish his mantra with : liberalize, liberalize, liberalize!!!!

[source]

Here are my own comments on this distinction:

Thursday, December 09, 2004

privatization

One of the constant problems for libertarians -- or at least for paleo-liberals, like myself -- is that no one understands the language we're speaking.

What we say: liberty; what they hear: privilege.
We say: free markets; they hear: corporate welfare.
We say: capitalism; they hear: mercantilism.
We say: laissez faire; they hear: dog-eat-dog.
We say: liberalism; they hear: socialism.

I blame the Democrats for perverting the word liberal, and I blame the Republicans for perverting free market, property, privatization ...

Most people I know think the word 'privatization' means coercive redistribution from the many to the few, from those on the bottom to those on the top. But all it means is to make something private -- usually something that was originally private, but was taken by coercion. The abolition of slavery was privatization. The fall of Communism was privatization.

I had mixed feelings about publishing my last article -- The Spectrum Should Be Private Property -- because I believe most people will form their impressions from the title and the summary (and the terms used in the title and summary) rather than reading the analysis with an open mind. Rothbardian privatization doesn't look like Republican privatization.

Today, featured on both Mises.org and LRC, is Lew Rockwell's excellent breakdown of the so-called Social Security "privatization" proposals: Save or Else. (Hint: nothing is made private by these proposals!)

I suppose we should be flattered that our language -- libertarian language -- has been appropriated by both Left and Right. But I'm not flattered. I'm frustrated and angry.

posted by bkMarcus on Thursday, December 09, 2004

your immigration policy

I know the issue is more complicated than this, but I still find this a funny cartoon:
Maybe I wouldn't see the humor if I were more anti-immigration .... In fact, maybe I'd be downright insulted!

---

Update: I removed the following from the comment section because the absurdly long URLs were messing up the page. Here I've shorted them to "URL" and you choose whether or not to click through.

I don't want to be accusable of silencing my (apparent) critics so I've reproduced the comment here in the body of the post.

Here's my question: Do you think "pjgoober" bothered to read my post? Or did he or she just do a web search on "immigration" and SPAM us all with form-letter punditry?

pjgoober said...

From UC Irvine: Largest, longest study of children of immigrants reveals certain
groups are left behind
"Differences in arrest and incarceration rates are also noteworthy, particularly among second-generation, U.S.-born, males. While only 10 percent of second-generation immigrant males in the survey had been incarcerated, that figure jumped to 20 percent among West Indian and Mexican American youths."
URL

Here is pro comprehensive reform supporter Linda Chavez: Before Bashing Immigrants, Get The Facts Straight "Only .7 percent of Mexican-born males were in prison or jail, compared with 3.51 percent of all U.S.-born males, which includes 1.71 percent of non-Hispanic whites, 11.6 percent of blacks and 5.9 percent of Mexican Americans."
URL

Open Doors Don't Invite Criminals
By ROBERT J. SAMPSON (Harvard University)
Published: March 11, 2006
"Indeed, the first generation immigrants (those born outside the United States) in our study were 45 percent less likely to commit violence than were third-generation Americans, adjusting for family and neighborhood background. Second-generation immigrants were 22 percent less likely to commit violence than the third generation."
URL

Also see: Center for Disease Control National Vital Statistics Reports: Volume 52, #10: Births: Final Data for 2002 The hispanic illegitimacy rate is cited on Table 19 on page 57 at 43.5% .
URL

Milton's red enemies

Tom DiLorenzo wrote:

I once sat next to Milton and Rose Friedman for three days at a Liberty Fund Seminar. He said he was so hated by socialists that there once was an organized effort to follow him around the world to confront him at public events, even spitting on him and his wife Rose. The reason for this, Milton said, was that a few of Arnold Harberger's students at Chicago who were from Chile graduated and returned home to convince their government to cut taxes, privatize industry, and adopt freer trade. Since they became known as "the Chicago boys," and later invited Milton to speak at Chilean universities, the international communist movement designated him as Enemy Number One. He said he often had to sneak into banquet halls through the kitchen to avoid the mob of youngsters waiting to hocker on him (and his wife) as he approached the podium to speak -- in Europe, South America, anywhere.

It is truly a sad day for me. Milton was a tireless champion of freedom who set the high water mark with regard to having influence as an intellectual. It's hard to think of anyone who can hope to be as effective as he was. As a college student I studied his use of logic, rhetoric, and writing style over and over again because I thought he was by far the most persuasive economist in the world, whether you agreed with him or not. May he rest in peace.

I was surprised that I couldn't find video on YouTube of the commie thug heckling Milton Friedman at the Swedish Central Bank Prize ceremonies, so I did a few screen captures from DVD #2 of Commanding Heights:

The Chicago Boys of Chile



Friedman receives "Nobel Prize"
... and hears trouble in the audience ...



Commie heckler shouts "Milton Go Home!"
(but it sounds like "Meal-Town Go Hum!")



Milton sees red



Fellow audience members deal with rude rad ...

Milton Friedman RIP

Walter Block writes:

Milton Friedman died today at age 94. May he rest in peace.

I don't want to discuss the Reagan and Thatcher "revolutions" he supposedly inspired. Nor his "Free to Choose" series, his many years with the University of Chicago and the Hoover Institution, or his Nobel Prize in Economics. These will be covered, I expect, by others, and in great detail. Nor in this recollection do I want to touch upon his monetarism, his championing of school vouchers, the negative income tax, flexible exchange rates, anti-trust laws, his opposition to the gold standard and to privatizing roads and oceans. Libertarians have long disagreed with him on these issues, and this is not the time to delve into such longstanding controversies.

Instead, I wish to focus on the positive, and to relate a few personal experiences I have had with him. I shall end with a joke that gives a taste of the kind of embattled professional life he led.

Keep reading...

how to homeschool history

The day after the elections, I had this exchange with a friend and former colleague:

friend (9:21:07 AM): So, with all of the election mayhem, I keep hearing the phrase "All politics is local." Well, if all politics is local, then why do we need a federal government?
bk (9:21:18 AM): funny
friend (9:21:49 AM): I would argue that "politics" is *so* local, we shouldn't have any government at all.
bk (9:22:19 AM): I don't think I can help you on that one. Unless you want to know more about the history of the centralization of government.
friend (9:22:53 AM): Ideally, I should know more about the history of government in general.

Well, Gary North's article on LRC today, "Teaching American History," is really great on this issue, and I highly recommend it.

FROM REPUBLIC TO EMPIRE

I would deal with the post-1765 era in two parts: the creation of a national republic and its evolution into an empire. This of course would guarantee a commercial failure. The public school establishment will not consider the word "empire" in relation to the United States, except as something America battles internationally. The Christian school establishment agrees entirely with the public school establishment on this issue.

It is the central political issue, and both establishments get it wrong. Self-realization is the most expensive realization of all.

So, being a marketer, I would follow the example of state-history textbook author William Marina. I would use the word "centralization" in place of "empire."

It's great for me in another way, as well, because my current after-hours obsession is my son's homeschooling in history. Yes, I know we have at least another 5 years to worry about it, but my impression is that the task is monumental.

With every other subject, so far, I've gotten the sense that there's good homeschooling material already commercially available, but history seems to be uniformly bad.

Gary North recommends www.RobinsonCurriculum.com. I sent North this query:

Looking over his reading list, I started to wonder if Dr. Robinson's curriculum doesn't have a particular Hamiltonian (nationalist, imperialist) bias:

The Life of George Washington by Josephine Pollard
Our Hero General Grant by Josephine Pollard
Four Naval Heroes by Mabel H. Beebe
Boy Knight: A Tale of the Crusades by G.A. Henty (which I've begun to read and am enjoying, but Henty was a famous British imperialist)
Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant by Ulysses S Grant
Life of Washington by Washington Irving
Diaries of George Washington by George Washington
Life of Lincoln by L. P. Brockett
The Soldier in Our Civil War by Frank Leslie
The Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt
Memoirs of William Tecumseh Sherman
My African Journey by Winston Churchill
The World Crisis by Winston Churchill
Lincoln's Speeches and Letters by Abraham Lincoln
Fifty Years in the Royal Navy by Admiral Sir Percy Scott

I realize that a history student needs to know the Establishment version before he can really grasp historical revisionism, but I'm not confident that's the approach that this curriculum has in mind.

North's reply:

There is no such thing as a curriculum without this bias. There never has been. The winners write the textbooks.

I forwarded that exchange to a history professor I know who also plans to homeschool his kids. He replied:

One thing I know for sure is that no matter how good a homeschool program is, I'm not making my kids waste their time and warp their brains by reading volume after volume of TR/Churchill ideology.

A decade from now, there will be at least a few Austro-libertarians homeschooling: Bob Murphy, Stephen Carson, Tom Woods ...

(Who else?)

I'm hoping we've come up with some good materials by then.

the hoi polloi

The Monetary Economics of Thurston Howell III

By B.K. Marcus

Posted on 8/31/2004
[Subscribe at email services, tell others, or Digg this story.]

Gilligan's Island is now out on DVD, reawakening the unanswered questions of childhood: why does the Skipper let Gilligan help with anything when he knows he'll just screw it up? Why did the movie star take a day cruise in an evening gown? Why did two of the richest people in the world board a dinky boat with the hoi polloi instead of leasing a private yacht? And why do any of the other stranded castaways treat the millionaire's government money as valuable while stuck on an island where no such government can enforce its value? [...]

From: Zelaniec
Subject: Hoi polloi
Date: September 1, 2004 5:09:22 AM EDT
To: bkMarcus

Dear Mr. Marcus,

re your article on Monetary Politics of Thurston Howell III:

'the hoi polloi' means 'the the many'. 'Hoi polloi' alone would do.

Sincerely
Wojciech Zelaniec
Zielona Gora, Poland

A.Word.A.Day--hoi polloi

This week's theme: words with a built-in definite article.

hoi polloi (hoi puh-LOI) noun

The common people, the masses.

[From Greek hoi polloi (the many).]

Today's word in Visual Thesaurus.

The phrase is often mistakenly used to refer to the elite or the snobbish, quite opposite of what it really means. That usage arises probably from the first part sounding similar to "high" or from confusion with the term hoity toity.

The term often appears as "the hoi polloi". Some pedants object to that construction, claiming "the" is already part of the term. If you find such people, tell them to go study gebra and drink cohol.

-Anu Garg (garg wordsmith.org)

because the police state owns your kids

News Reports

UK, The nursery rhyme police - parents to take lessons in reading and singing
Topic: Children and Family
Source: Daily Mail
Author: Steve Doughty and James Mills

Parents could be forced to go to special classes to learn to sing their children nursery rhymes, a minister said.

Those who fail to read stories or sing to their youngsters threaten their children's future and the state must put them right, Children's Minister Beverley Hughes said.

Their children's well-being is at risk 'unless we act', she declared.

And Mrs Hughes said the state would train a new 'parenting workforce' to ensure parents who fail to do their duty with nursery rhymes are found and 'supported'.

- Wednesday 15 November 2006 - 12:57:48

[source]

worse than hypocrisy

Stephan Kinsella and I were just chatting about baby stuff, and I told him that we knew someone who ran a blackmarket daycare -- something we're both in favor of, obviously.

Kinsella said, however, that he hates it when lefties (actually he used a different L-word, but I refuse to do so) "use babysitters, nannies, yardboys, etc., and pay them under the table, the f@#&ing hypocrites." (No, he didn't really curse in comic-strip format.)

I think it's a tough call when lefties avoid taxes. Yes it's hypocrisy, but it's still better than giving more money to the state. The state uses resources to increase its coercive power. Better to keep those resources in the world of voluntary exchange where wealth is created rather than destroyed.

So what should we root for leftwing social democrats to do? (Or rightwing social democrats, for that matter.) Should they do the moral thing and cheat or should they act with integrity and do the immoral thing instead?

I think what would be ideal is if they calculate what they owe to the state, according to their own sense of socialist obligation, but then give that amount to me instead.

grotesque?

New comment on an old post:

Anonymous said...

I acidentally came by this while looking up angler fish and I love the little story!

15 years ago, I was that little girl sitting there puzzled why everyone thought that such a beautiful and facinating creature is ugly *grin* You definately brought a smile to my face!

3:24 PM

TW on JP on TR

Here are my favorite quotes from Tom Woods's latest book review:

Now you might think Publishers Weekly, in the Age of Bush, would be more inclined than usual to look with sympathy on a book that holds the executive branch, and those who contributed to its expansion, up to fresh scrutiny, but being a 21st-century liberal means attributing all government wickedness to the uniquely perverse George W. Bush. The possibility that the Source of All Iniquity may be building upon precedents set by his predecessors, including those who our intellectual class has told us belong to the ranks of our "great presidents," is to be rejected with a kind of indignant horror.

[...]

Responsible people stick to the script: the state protects you, the state fosters prosperity, the state pursues justice, and without the state every one of you would revert instantly to barbarism.

[...]

It hasn't exactly hurt TR's reputation that arguments on his behalf fit neatly into the space of a bumper sticker ("He made our food safe!" "He tamed big business!" "He protected the environment!"), while the inevitably more nuanced and accurate rendition of these historical episodes requires many pages of explanation.

[...]

...the hopeless Left, which weeps over the Bush administration's lawlessness, can be counted on to cheer the lawlessness of TR because, well, his target was big business.

[...]

(Why the Left can be withering on the official rationales given for American foreign policy but views domestic policy with an almost childlike confidence in paternal government is a good question.)

the littlest iceberg

welcome to the world, iceberg junior!

(and congratulations to iceberg senior and his missus)

material history

This is very frustrating.

I feel like I'm going a bit crazy.

Has anyone else heard of a subject called "material history" -- or something similar?

When I was applying to college, I was confident I'd major in either English or History. English was the only subject in which I'd gotten A's without effort. My dad was a professor of literature and a scholar of Shakespeare and Shaw.

History didn't interest me much in grade school, but one summer, when the old man and I spent a month camping on the side of a mountain, some question I asked inspired an afternoon-long narrative history of Henry VIII, Elizabeth I, the Spanish Armada, the Black Irish, and the Jesuits. I was hooked, and I decided to fill up my high-school schedule with history courses, including 20th-century Russia and AP European History.

(When I got to college, I discovered philosophy and computer science and never took a single literature or history course while I was there.)

My AP course was my first experience outside English class of having multiple books to read, rather than having a standard textbook. My two favorite of these books were an intellectual history and a material history. The former was about great thinkers, who wrote what when, which ideas took off in which territories, etc. It was good prep for college philosophy. The other book was about when people stopped using a common cup at the dinner table, when and where the fork was introduced as a complement to the knife, when Europeans started using different spices with their meals, what the development of the western sweet tooth had to do with the slave trade and the politics of the New World, etc. I haven't seen anything like it since.

Or rather, I've seen things that look like bits and pieces of it. There was a bestseller a few years back called Salt: A World History, and Burt Wolf has done some good half-hour shows on PBS like "The Story of Corn." (My wife reminds me that