Reality Check

I'm tired of seeing pix of people's pristine houses, so here's a reality check: my kitchen after my three-year-old threw a tantrum this morning (what instigated it is still a mystery).

Note the cheerios all over the floor.

Some days you're the dinosaur; others, you're the pirate.

Hot Day at the Office

Summer has settled on Central Texas and with it one baking day after another, with the weather forecasts and nature playing a game with each other over whether the temperature will break into three digits on any given day. Thus far, the forecasters seem less bold, predicting 98 and allowing reality to jump ahead a few degrees and score three digits unannounced.

One of the few benefits of this kind of blast furnace weather is that as the temperatures rise, the acceptable length of "business casual" skirts apparently shortens. The annoyance one might feel at having to rush to a meeting in another building through 100-degree weather can be soothed by finding oneself walking some yards behind someone who has chosen, out of generosity towards all mankind, to stride leggily through her workday in four inch heels and a skirt that ventures only halfway towards her knees. Whether this loosening of business norms during the summer months actually serves to cool the wearer much I cannot say, but for the rest of us the distraction is welcome enough.

Intensive

One of the great things about having a degree in Drama is that it's excellent life prep. Learning how to analyze a scene, discover a character's motivation, and stating an objecive for a character to pursue -- these techniques translate very well to real life, in which one has oblique conversations where one must discover what the other person wants. Heck, even buying a car is a bit less painful with a bit of dramatic training under the old belt.

So I find that when (as now, prepping for my Shakespeare class) I read books on directing, they usually contain some advice that's applicable in larger settings. For example, here's a selection from Notes on Directing: 130 Lessons in Leadership from the Director's Chair by Frank Hauser and Russell Reich:

23. Assume that everyone is in a permanent state of catatonic terror.
This will help you approach the impossible state of infinite patience and benevolence that actors and others expect from you.

I wish I'd had some advice like this under my belt not just for previous directing situations, but in any circumstance in which I've had to try to get a large group of people to participate or follow directions.

Not of general relevance, but something I thought was interesting (tender eyes may want to avert themselves now):

Meaning It

There is only one intensive in the English language: the word "f*ck" (or "f*cking").

Listen to the actor declaiming:

O! What a rogue and peasant slave I am!

Note how he strains to make the derogatory language real, as if he really means it. Get him to put in a few "f*ckings":

O! What a f*cking rogue and peasant f*cking slave I am!

Hear how it immediately hardens and sharpens the images, makes them more like real anger and real self-disgust rather than disguised self-pity. Not just impressive, but meant.

Should you keep these word substitutions in performance?
No.

I tried it myself with some Shakespeare, and true enough. Nothing intensifies like the F-bomb. For all you concerned parents reading: I do not intend to teach this in my Shakespeare class. Just sayin'.

Capitalism -- When People Sell Things I Don't Like

With the garden currently shooting up, I've found myself again disposed to read gardening and food related books. I finished reading The Omnivore's Dilemma last week, and aside from a few gripes in regards to Michael Pollan's understanding of economics, I enjoyed it quite a bit. On the last run by the library, I picked up a copy of Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. The idea of moving out onto acreage and growing much of one's own food is something that I find interesting. I enjoy gardening, I enjoy cooking gourmet food, and I think there's a cultural and psychological value to remaining in touch with the way that humans have gained food for themselves in past centuries.

However, Kingsolver is far more passionate (and less balanced) in her jeremiads against "industrial food" than Pollan, and more prone to denunciations of what "capitalism" has done to our food culture. Indeed, so much so as to crystallize for me a trend among those who denounce "capitalism" and its impact on Western Culture. Kingsolver had just reached the crescendo of a complaint in regards to large seed companies peddling hybrids and genetically modified strains, when she turned to the subject of heirloom vegetable varieties, and her joy at paging through lengthy seed catalogs full of heirloom seeds.

...Heirloom seeds are of little interest to capitalism if they can't be patented or owned. They have, however, earned a cult following among people who grow or buy and eat them. Gardeners collect them like family jewels, and Whole Foods Market can't refrain from poetry in its advertisement of heirlooms....

So you see, when large agribusiness firms sell farmers seeds for field corn which are genetically modified to repel pests,
that's capitalism. But when catalog and internet businesses build a thriving niche selling heirloom vegetable seeds, and Whole Foods ad men wax poetical over $7/lb tomatoes, that's... Well, it certainly can't be capitalism, can it? Not if it's good.

Your Wealth Makes Me Wealthy

One of the concepts in economics that people seem to have difficulty grasping at an intuitive level is how other people's income affects one's own income. Many people instinctively ascribe to the "lump theory" of money, in which one may imagine all wealth to consist of a set amount of money, like a dragon's hoard. If you capture more of it, that means that someone, somehow, has ended up with less.

In certain circumstances, this theory might describe things pretty well, but in most times and places wealth grows and shrinks with productivity. Basically, if I am able to produce more goods and services of value to othe people in the same amount of time, then my income grows.

Not only does this benefit me, it also benefits the other people near me with whom I do business -- even if their productivity has not actually increased.

So for example. It's not unusual at this time of year to have some guy come knocking on our door and offer to mow the lawn for $20-30. I always say no, partly because I take a non-monetary pride in being the sort of guy who mows his own lawn, but mostly because I don't want to pay $20-30 for something which I could easily do in 45 minutes of spare time in the evening.

Imagine, however, that I drastically increase my income, by producing goods or services that people value a great deal more than my current efforts. Now I make three times as I did before. The idea of paying $30 not to have to spend an evening mowing my lawn might sound great. Indeed, I might be willing to pay $50. So the lawn mowers would probably end up making more money, even if before going and investing their hard earned money in a 30-inch-swath self-propelled lawn mower and increasing their own productivity.

This is why one of the constants of a growing economy is that all commodities other than human labor decrease in price, while labor increases in price.

New Bishop for Austin, but who?

Amy Welborn reports that Bishop Aymond of Austin is heading back home to New Orleans. Congratulations to New Orleans, but who's next for us, I wonder?

Here's Rocco's writeup of the move.

A few weekends ago, I saw Bishop Aymond ordain on of my friends to the deaconate, one of six transitional deacons for the diocese. The next weekend, he ordained five men to the priesthood. Austin has had an upswing in vocations under Bishop Aymond, which I pray continues under his successor. I hope we can be as fortunate as Cincinnati under our new bishop.

Meme: All about books (of course)

Via Melanie Bettinelli, our favorite kind of meme: one about books.

1. What author do you own the most books by? We inherited an entire shelf full of books by Tolkien when my grandfather passed away. Given that we'd already had quite a few, Tolkien is now far and away the leader.

2. What book do you own the most copies of?
Like Melanie, I think it's the Bible (in several editions and languages) followed by Lord of the Rings.

3. Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions? What are you asking for?

4. What fictional character are you secretly in love with? Aw, sheesh, I don't know. Like Melanie (she's going to think I'm cribbing her answers) I do like Dorothy Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey.

5. What book have you read the most times in your life? Probably Lord of the Rings.

6. Favorite book as a ten year old? I remember reading Anne of Green Gables and Caddie Woodlawn.

7. What is the worst book you’ve read in the past year? No contest: Outlander, by Diana Gabaldon.

8. What is the best book you’ve read in the past year? Acedia & Me by Kathleen Norris (hi, Melanie!), though I found some of the biographical elements frustrating. But the real contender is the book I'm currently reading: Fire Within: St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and the Gospel On Prayer by Fr. Thomas Dubay, which is so rich I can only read short bits at at time.

On a different front, Stephen Potter's The Theory And Practice Of Gamesmanship Or The Art Of Winning Games Without Actually Cheating is a hysterical classic. And When Sisterhood Was in Flower by Florence King is completely and inappropriately, laugh-'til-you-fall-off-the-couch funny.

And! Mariette in Ecstasy! A Time of Gifts! Exiles!

9. If you could force everyone you know to read one book, what would it be? I would be curious to see the results if everyone I knew read Dorothy Sayers' The Mind of the Maker (which uses the concept of the Trinity to analyze an author's creative powers) and applied it to their tastes in fiction. That's a really snotty answer, and I'm sorry.

10. What book would you most like to see made into a movie? Declare, by Tim Powers.

11. What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read? The Acting Person, by Karol Wojtyla.

12. What is your favorite book? Darwin says his favorite book is Brideshead Revisited. I really can't pick one. Name of the Rose The Great Gatsby Divine Comedy Jesus of Nazareth...

UPDATE: Thinking this over, I have to answer: The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis.

13. Play? Twelfth Night. I ran lightboard my freshman year for our production and so memorized many of the lines after hearing them over and over again. The sound board tech and I had a countdown to our favorite line (based solely on the delivery of the actor): "O, that record is lively in my soul!"

14. Poem? The only one that springs to mind is The Wreck of the Deutschland by Gerard Manley Hopkins, but that might be because I read Exiles a few months back. Or, if you prefer, Sonnet 91.

15. Essay? The Night the Bed Fell on my Father, from My Life and Hard Times (Perennial Classics) by James Thurber. I don't know if it counts as an essay or a short story, but it's unparalleled as a read-aloud.

16. Who is the most overrated writer alive today? President Obama. Look, the guy writes well enough, but he's not all that.

17. What is your desert island book? The Bible. Cliche, but true.

18. And . . . what are you reading right now? Practical Approaches to Teaching Shakespeare by Peter Reynolds; Fire Within by Fr. Thomas Dubay; The Aeneid (Fitzgerald translation); Notes on Directing: 130 Lessons in Leadership from the Director's Chair by Frank Hauser; several books of children's theater games

Out loud to the girls: D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths; The Twenty-One Balloons by William Pene du Bois.

A Little Legislative Humor

If you need something to cheer your afternoon, it's almost certain that you can congratulate yourself that your workplace is more functional than the New York State Government, which seems to be having trouble adjusting to a sudden change in leadership:

Two dissident Democrats, who had been secretly strategizing with Republicans for weeks, bucked their party’s leaders and joined with 30 Republican senators to form what they said would be a bipartisan power-sharing deal. But the arrangement effectively re-establishes Republican control.

The change upends the agenda in Albany, where Democrats had assumed power in the Senate in January, with 32 seats, after more than 40 years in the minority. Democrats were pushing bills to give tenants more rights, strengthen abortion rights and legalize same-sex marriage this session. And the move underscores the continuing tumult of New York politics, where there have been three governors in less than three years and four Senate presidents since last summer.

Democratic leaders were caught off guard as the Republicans and the two Democratic dissidents, Pedro Espada Jr. of the Bronx and Hiram Monserrate of Queens, moved to topple them, and at one point became so flustered that they turned out the lights in the Senate chamber to try to prevent Republicans from installing new leaders.

Asked by a reporter what was occurring, Senator Malcolm A. Smith, leader of the Senate Democrats who was huddled in the hall with his staff, responded, “I’m trying to find out right now.”

A spokesman for Mr. Smith, who lost the titles of majority leader and Senate president in the shakeup, issued a statement later saying that Democrats would challenge the vote, but it was not clear that they had grounds to do so.

Gov. David A. Paterson, at a news conference Monday evening, called the move “an outrage” and said Albany had become a “dysfunctional wreck.”

The governor also said “I will not allow this,” but then conceded that there was nothing he could do to stop it.
...
Both Mr. Espada and Mr. Monserrate said they would remain Democrats even as they work with Republicans to run the Senate.

Both men have legal troubles. Highlighting the often elastic nature of ethical stands and alliances in Albany, Republicans who earlier this year were calling on Mr. Monserrate to resign after his indictment on felony charges that he stabbed his companion with a broken glass are now welcoming him as part of their power-sharing coalition.

Getting rid of the roach, MrsDarwin-style

I'm sitting peacefully at my breakfast, eating my egg and feeding the baby cheerios and pureed apricot, when I hear the dreaded squeal from my daughter: "A roach!" She had been sitting on the couch when the thing crawled out from underneath and toddled across the floor. (Keep in mind that when I say "roach" I mean "palmetto bug".) So I sigh and go into the living room where, sure enough, this two-inch-long roach is skirting the bookshelves. He's obviously looking for a way out. While he's on the far side of the room, I gingerly tiptoe over to the door and open it about as wide as it can go, then I hightail it back to safety behind the piano. The roach tries to make a foray up a baseboard, flexing its wings in an alarming fashion, but turns again and heads across the wall with the door.

I don't know what it's teaching my children about the value of prayer that the whole time I'm murmuring, "Oh dear sweet Jesus, please let him go out the door. Please, dear Lord, let him find the door and go out."

But -- God be praised! -- he follows the light, climbs over the jamb, and goes outside. I shut the door, carefully. If I slam it he might get startled and fly.

For the next few moments my jumpy nerves are preyed upon by the small fry who think it's funny to sight "bugs" everywhere and give shrill little shrieks. Not funny, ladies. Not funny.

The Vatican's Rifles

A good friend and long time reader sent along a link to this information several months ago, and I've been incredibly remiss in not doing the research to put up this post sooner. However, as I did the research over the last few weeks, I found it very much worth the time. I hope you will too.

It was through a friend in the Catholic blogsphere that I was introduced to the pleasures of studying, collecting and shooting military rifles. The most common and available military rifles are the bolt action rifles carried by the major powers (other than the US, which fielded the semi-automatic M1 Garand) during World War II, in most cases little modified from the versions carried thirty years before in the Great War. This was the last great age of battle rifles with wooden stocks and large cartridges, before the high tech "ugly guns" of the modern world took over.

There are, however, significantly more rare rifles to be found of an earlier vintage, the early cartridge rifles used form the 1860s through 1900, and of these one of the rarest is the M1868 Pontificio, the only modern rifle ever manufactured specifically for the Vatican.

The Pontificio was based on the 1867 Remington rolling block design, and was chambered for the 12.7 x 45 cartridge, one unique to the military of the Papal States, but based closely on the American .50-70 caliber.

It was a single shot rifle built with the very latest mid-19th-century military technology and had the Vatican crest stamped on the receiver.


In our modern world, it seems strange to think of the pope placing an order for the newest military technology. Vatican City today is an independent nation state, but modern popes use their position as heads of state to try to bring a moral voice to the world stage, not to field armies. The M1868 Pontificio comes from the last time when princes of the Church were princes in the worldly sense as well, trying to stand against the tide of secularism and nationalism sweeping across Europe.

To understand the context of the Vatican's last major arms order, one should look back to the beginning of the reign of Blessed Pope Pius IX. Giovanni Maria Mastai-Ferretti was elected pope in 1846 and was hailed throughout Europe as a liberal reformer. At the time, the papal states, of which the pope was the secular ruler, comprised a significant portion of central Italy, and Pius IX made a number of political reforms to their administration, freed all political prisoners, and began a program of modernization, building railways and having street lights installed in Rome. Many nationalists and modernizers who dreamed of a unified Italy hoped that Pius IX might to open to supporting their cause. Nationalist leader Giuseppe Garibaldi, who would eventually be key to destroying the papal states and aiding the unification of Italy under the kings of Sardinia, wrote to Pius:

If these hands, used to fighting, would be acceptable to His Holiness, we most thankfully dedicate them to the service of him who deserves so well of the Church and of the fatherland. Joyful indeed shall we and our companions in whose name we speak be, if we may be allowed to shed our blood in defence of Pio Nono's work of redemption" (October 12, 1847)

However, liberal optimism soon gave way to violent revolution as the 1848 revolutions, sparked by the Paris revolution which brought down the Orleans monarchy and resulted in the Second Republic, swept Europe. Revolutions in the northern areas of Italy brought about minor wars of revolution against Austria, the Catholic monarchy which exerted direct or indirect control over much of Northern Italy. In November 1848, revolution in Rome forced Pius IX to flee from Rome in disguise, taking refuge in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and a Republic of Rome was declared by the revolutionaries in February of 1849. French President Louis Napoleon and the Austrian monarchy sent troops to put down the revolution in Rome, and after fighting throughout the summer and fall of 1849, Pius IX was able to return in April 1850. French troops remained in Rome and the Papal States for the next twenty years, providing the pope with military protection.

However, the protection of French troops began to appear an increasingly mixed blessing in 1859, when the French (not strangers to nationalism and liberalism themselves) joined forces with the nationalist Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia to fight the Austrians in the Second War of Italian Independence. The war was brief (April to July 1859) and the armistice theoretically left the various states of north central Italy independent, but by 1860 the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia had occupied all of Northern Italy, putting a powerful, nationalist country (which was a sometime ally of the Vatican's protector, France) right on the Papal States' northern border. That same year, Garibaldi led his expedition to Sicily (without any state approval) and the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia (not wanting to leave Garibaldi unsupervised in control of Sicily, lest he declare a republic and threaten their own power) sent troops down into southern Italy through the eastern two-thirds the Papal States and annexed them in the process. (The section annexed by Piedmont-Sardinia is shown in purple in the above map.) In March 1861, the first Italian Parliament met in Turin, the capital of Piedmont, and declared Rome to be the capital of the Kingdom of Italy -- despite the fact that Rome was not under their control. The Savoy dynasty under Victor Emmanuel II, which had ruled Piedmont-Sardinia, now clearly intended to rule all Italy from Rome, and in their way stood the pope.

Pius IX, understandably, felt increasingly threatened by these developments and had reason to doubt whether his French protectors would in fact stand up to the Victor Emmanuel and the nationalist forces. In 1860 the Zuavi Pontifici or Papal Zouaves were formed as a military force of volunteers from throughout the world reporting directly to the Vatican.

Zouave refers to the style of uniform worn by the papal soldiers, one based on those of the French North African regiments which became quite popular in the mid-19th century. (One of the few histories of this force to be written in English was published last year: The Pope's Legion: The Multinational Fighting Force that Defended the Vatican)
It was for the Papal Zouaves that the Remington Pontificio was manufactured in 1868. The pictures below show Zouaves with their Pontificio rifles:


In 1868 there were just under 5,000 Papal Zouaves, with the largest contingents from the Netherlands (1,900) and France (1,300). 130 Canadians and 100 Irish were members, as were a few Americans, Scots, English and volunteers from as far away as Africa and China.Unfortunately, this small army would not be enough to hold off the tide of nationalism for long.

In June 1868, Pius IX convoked the First Vatican Council. The final vote on the topic of papal infallibility took place on July 18th. The next day, the Franco-Prussian war was declared, and the council was temporarily suspended so that the bishops could return to their home sees. In early August, Louis Napoleon (now Emperor Napoleon III) withdrew his French troops from Rome because they were needed elsewhere. (France would lose the Franco-Prussian war, and the Second Empire would be replaced by the Third Republic.) Almost immediately, the Kingdom of Italy made moves to seize Rome. On September 10th, King Victor Emmanuel II sent Count Ponza di San Martino to Pius IX with a letter offering to send troops into room to protect the pope, clearly a pretext for annexing Rome and the remainder of the Papal States. Pius IX refused, and on September 11th, the Italian army crossed the border in the Papal States. The Italian army reached Rome on September 19th, and the pope, seeing that the cause was hopeless, ordered the Zouaves to put up only a token resistance, enough to make it clear that the city was taken against its will, but brief enough to minimize loss of life. 19 Papal Zouaves died defending from, and 49 Italian soldiers and four officers were killed while attacking it. The city was captured on September 20th, and was officially annexed to the Kingdom of Italy and made its capital by popular vote in October.

Pius IX indefinitely adjourned the Vatican Council in September, after Rome was captured, and refused to recognize the Kingdom of Italy as the legitimate ruler of Rome, turning down an offer by Victor Emmanuel to grant him sovereignty over the Leonine City but Pius refused the offer because since accepting it would have suggested the the sovereignty was Victor Emmanuel's to give. He remained "the prisoner of the Vatican" until his death in 1878. Pius IX forbade Catholics from being members of the Italian parliament or voting in Italian elections, a breech that would not be wholly healed until the Lateran Treaty of 1929 when Vatican City was established as a sovereign nation and the Vatican recognized Italy's existence.

The Zouaves were disbanded and their rifles were confiscated by the Italian army, which reissued them for their own use, in many cases re-machining them to fire other cartridges. Few remain in their original condition. Many of the men who had served in the Zouaves went on to fight for the French in the remainder of the Franco-Prussian War. Others returned home.

Today, the only military associated with the Vatican is the Swiss Guard, whose standard issue weapons are the same as those of the Swiss army, though modern guns are now not carried in public (though present in the armory).

Was it Greek to him?

From my "Well, you may think you've made a point, but..." files, this paragraph from a review of the book "The Evolution of God" in yesterday's WSJ:

The closer Mr. Wright's analysis draws to the Common Era, the more forceful it becomes. The most striking contention in "The Evolution of God" concerns St. Paul, Christianity's first administrative leader. Ancient religions died off, Mr. Wright claims, because they were designed for specific ethnic groups and possessed no appeal outside them. Judaism spoke to those born into the faith, limiting its potential scope. Paul wanted Christianity to become a global faith, appealing to anyone from any land or ethnic group. So he offered something no faith had offered to that point -- universal brotherhood. Did Jesus intend to start a new, broader-based religion? That's hardly clear -- Christ never used the word "Christian" or instructed his disciples to promote a new faith. (emphasis mine)

I set down the paper and laughed out loud.

Getcher Gun

Darwin is down at the shooting range this evening, so I take this opportunity to present Donald Duck plying his gun.



This is cute, but watch for the in-joke at 2:37.

Well, Good Luck With That

I have the feeling that readers have emailed me about this site a couple times before, and I left it without comment because some topics seem like shooting fish in a barrel for a blog with the tagline "Because most philosophies that frown on reproduction don't survive." However there comes a point when fish who choose to live in barrels deserve to come under fire.

Meet the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.

VHEMT (pronounced vehement) is a movement not an organization. It's a movement advanced by people who care about life on planet Earth. We're not just a bunch of misanthropes and anti-social, Malthusian misfits, taking morbid delight whenever disaster strikes humans. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Voluntary human extinction is the humanitarian alternative to human disasters.

We don't carry on about how the human race has shown itself to be a greedy, amoral parasite on the once-healthy face of this planet. That type of negativity offers no solution to the inexorable horrors which human activity is causing.

Rather, The Movement presents an encouraging alternative to the callous exploitation and wholesale destruction of Earth's ecology.

As VHEMT Volunteers know, the hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species: Homo sapiens... us.

Each time another one of us decides to not add another one of us to the burgeoning billions already squatting on this ravaged planet, another ray of hope shines through the gloom.

When every human chooses to stop breeding, Earth's biosphere will be allowed to return to its former glory, and all remaining creatures will be free to live, die, evolve (if they believe in evolution), and will perhaps pass away, as so many of Nature's "experiments" have done throughout the eons.

Now, VHEMT does indeed answer my question of whether their ideas will just die out:

Q: Won’t VHEMT die out when all its members die off?

If an idea lacks enough merit to be passed on without being force-fed from an early age, it probably deserves to be forgotten.

Awareness isn’t passed along in our genes. Every VHEMT Volunteer or Supporter is the result of a breeding couple, and yet we have all decided to stop reproducing. Often, we arrived at this conclusion independently and without support from friends and family.

The concept of voluntary human extinction has a life of its own. It’s an idea whose time has come, though it may be a little late.

I suppose the only way to settle this matter definitively is through a very long term empirical experiment that none of us would live to see the end up, but this strikes me as being in conflict with the basic nature of the human creature. I'm going to intentionally leave any religious angle out of this discussion (from the deeply klutzy attempts on the VHEMT site to justify their position based on all major world religions, it's pretty clear they don't "get" religion to any real degree) and just speak naturalistically -- which for Catholics can be a stand-in for natural law.

Ironically, in an age in which materialism (in the sense of the belief that the physical world is "all there is") is increasingly common, people seem quite often to hold beliefs about the human person which ignore our fundamental nature as a biological species, albeit a aware and rational one. So for instance, VHEMT provides the following FAQ and response:

Q: What about the human instinct to breed?

Humans, like all creatures, have urges which lead to reproduction. Our biological urge is to have sex, not to make babies. Our "instinct to breed" is the same as a squirrel's instinct to plant trees: the urge is to store food, trees are a natural result. If sex is an urge to procreate, then hunger's an urge to defecate.

Culturally-induced desires can be so strong that they seem to be biological, but no evolutionary mechanism for an instinct to breed exists. Why do we stop breeding after we've had as many as we want? If the instinct is to reproduce, how are so many of us able to over ride it? There are too many who have never felt that urge: mutations don't occur in this high a percentage of a population.

Looking to our evolutionary roots, imagine Homo erectus feeling the urge to create a new human. He then has to understand that a cavewoman is needed, sexual intercourse must be engaged in, and they will have to wait nine months.

Um, no. Squirrels and nuts have a symbiotic relationship, but animals do not have a symbiotic relationship with themselves that happens to result in procreation. The entire purpose of a biological species is to perpetuate itself. The reason that we have sexual organs is that this is how we produce descendants. Not only to human beings have a natural urge to reproduce, that is, from a biological point of view, our sole purpose.

One of the fatal problems with this "voluntary extinction" idea from a strictly naturalistic point of view is that it asks humans to do something which no species is meant to do, something which cries out against any species' reason for being. Telling people as a group not a reproduce is like telling people to kill themselves by holding their breath -- it's something we're naturally designed not to do. The idea doesn't just violate our moral notions, it violates the several billion years of evolutions since sexual reproduction first appeared.

As rational creatures with an understanding of the long range implications of our actions, and an appreciation for the beauty of nature, it's appropriate and necessary for us to consider the impact of our civilization on the planet. While other species may have no other option than to follow nature's boom and bust cycle of eating everything available until famine hits and the population dies down to sustainable levels, we rightly seek to make use of our reason to avoid needless destruction and suffering.

However, whether one looks at us from a religious perspective as made in the image and likeness of God, from a philosophical perspective as being unique creatures on the Earth in our capacity to reason, or from a biological perspective as simply another species of large-brained vertebrates, it is the natural purpose of human being to strive to preserve our species and assure it's flourishing -- not in a way that wrecks havoc on the planet (though I think our planet is much more elastic in its ability to survive change than many of its would be protectors give it credit for), both out of an anthropomorphic desire to see other creatures flourish as we do and because we are in the end dependant on the flourishing of our planet, but nonetheless our flourishing as a species is clearly one of our central purposes as a species, and any attempt to act contrary to that is a fundamental denial of what we are. It stems, I suspect, from a tendency to treat human persons as minds, rather than as the full combination of self-aware mind and natural, biological creature. This allows people to think of humans as something which is out of step with the rest of nature -- an alien influence which should voluntarily purge itself so that things can go back to "normal". The thing is, extraordinary though we may be, we are part of Earth's "normal", the result of its history and a species seeking to assure our flourishing just like any other.

Designed for Cooling

The Darwin house was built back in 1992, and its design was built entirely with air conditioning in mind. There are only two windows facing south (one in a bathroom) and two facing north (again, one in a bathroom). This is unfortunate, given that many of the better breezes come out of the south. Few rooms have windows in more than one wall, and those that do are not well aligned for cross breeze.

This would be all very well if, like our neighbors, we were happily closed up running the AC constantly. However, the AC unit died of a sudden electrical malady on Friday night, and since all good air conditioning techs are currently off enjoying the weekend with their families, we are engaged in a living history experiment to understand why it is that the major population shift south in the US did not begin until 15-20 years ago, perhaps not so coincidentally when it became possible to assume that any house would have powerful and effective central AC.

I'm not off-grid enough in my ambitions to necessarily want a house with no AC, but I would certainly prefer one that does not become a simmering deathtrap when the condenser ceases to hum. (MrsDarwin notes with indignation that she only just had it serviced last week.)

A Matter of Choice

Some time back there was a fellow in the news named Matt Dubay, a man who was claiming that Michigan's paternity law is unconstitutional because it didn't give him any 'choice' in whether to become a father.

The interesting thing about this suit is that it points out the inherent contradiction's in the current legal understanding of sex in the United States. On the one hand, a woman must be given a 'choice' as to whether or not to be pregnant after she has already conceived, and so abortion is legally mandated. On the other hand, a man is considered to have already made himself financially liable for any children conceived from the moment that he has sex. Thus, in the man's case, US law recognizes a traditional understanding of what sex is (an act that can naturally be assumed to be fertile) while in the woman's case sex is merely considered an act which may bring on a transitional condition in which a woman has conceived yet has not yet decided whether or not she wants to actually be pregnant.

Clearly, being pregnant (and caring for a child) is a far, far greater burden for a woman than for a man, so one can see how (thinking with its heart rather than its head) our country got itself into this position. But it's still a pretty untenable position to be in. Clearly, one must say either than sex is an act which has the inherent potential to create another human person, or it is not. One of these positions, of course, has the benefit of being true, while the other might be convenient for some, but is quite provably false.

However, while I do believe that the law should protect a newly conceived human being from her mother's second thoughts just as thoroughly as it does from her father's, it does seem to be that there is a hierarchy of claims to parenthood of the child in situations where a man and woman conceive outside of wedlock. Currently (at least from what female coworkers who have dealt with these situations tell me) if a man can prove that he is the father of your child, he has (unless this is somehow considered dangerous) both financial duties to you and visitation rights to the child.

This seems to me a little off. If a woman is willing to claim a certain man as the father of her child (and if there is any question about it, if tests prove her right) then it seems fair to me that he be both required to take some financial responsibility for the child and also allowed to have visitation rights or shared custody. However, if the couple have never been married and the woman wishes to refuse to acknowledge the man as the father of her child (even if biologically speaking he is) it seems to me to be reasonable to allow him to exclude him from the child's life, assuming she also does not try to seek money from him.

This may not be 'fair' in the sense that many use the term (as in, treating everyone equally regardless of whether that makes any sense) but it does seem to me to make a certain degree of sense.

Though on the devil's advocate side (or the libertarian side -- in this case they are one and the same) there is a certain sense in which allowing any demand for child support from a man to which one has never been married weakens the importance of marriage as an institution. If a woman need not be married to a man in order to be assured that she can hold him financially responsible for any offspring she may have with him, than being married before having sex is at least somewhat less urgent.

In the words of The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy: "To summarize the summary, people are a problem."

Seven Quick Takes

Thanks as always to our hostess, Jen.

1. I'm teaching a acting/Shakespeare class for teenagers this summer. Anyone out there have good suggestions for Shakespearean monologues for this age range?

2. Everyone keep your fingers crossed for my sister: she's singing for the judges of Cincinnati Opera's Opera Idol tomorrow!

3. Speaking of music: I found a copy of The Laura Ingalls Wilder Songbook, featuring the songs that crop up here and there in the Little House series. What struck me most was the interchangeably saccharine style of most of the hit songs of the day. Sure, they were wholesome. Most of them were also wholly undistinguished. I know people like to complain that pop songs nowadays all sound the same; I guess stylistic homogenity never goes out of fashion.

4. One thing and another had me convinced that for this coming school year, we needed to go with a packaged curriculum. So I pulled up a few of the big names in boxed schooling. First I was struck by the price (oh, my aching wallet!). Then, as Darwin and I read down the book list and lesson plans of various academies, we kept saying, "You know, what if we used this book instead... This is nice, but we could do... It would really be better to go with..." What's the point of buying an expensive curriculum if we're going to revamp it all anyway? And yet, without the guideline of a firm outline, it's hard to know what kind of daily schedule we should be keeping. Experienced homeschoolers please advise.

5. The baby is officially mobile now. All bathroom doors must be shut and the cat food needs to be moved somewhere else. He's starting to pull up now, and we all know that the next step is walking. He'll be nine months in a week. He needs to STOP GETTING SO BIG SO FAST.

6. My girls start swim lessons next week, and I don't even have a swimsuit myself. I'm considering this one from Lands' End. I hate buying swimsuits, but what's the point of having the girls learn how to swim if I never take them to the pool?

7. Last weekend we had a bit of a shock -- literally: the 3-year-old stuck a pair of children's scissors into an outlet. Fortunately the handles were covered with rubber, so she wasn't hurt, but the sparks were quite impressive. The cordless phone, which was on the same circuit, was fried, so if you've tried to call our house recently and gotten no answer, it's because the only land line is this silver corded phone that looks all old-fashioned but has a broken ringer. You don't hear it unless you're standing right next to it.

Abortion, Clean and Dirty

Via Matthew Lickona, this essay by Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic, a book review of The Choices We Made, in which women tell their stories of back-alley abortions before legalization:

In the middle of a hot New York summer 60 years ago, my mother and her two roommates were invited to spend a weekend at Fire Island. The three girls, recent nursing-school graduates, worked together at Bellevue and were sharing the rent on their first apartment. When a fourth young nurse of their acquaintance overheard them talking about the trip, she asked if she and her young man, a resident at the hospital, could borrow the apartment while they were away. In those days, lovers had to seize on those kinds of opportunities to be alone together. The apartment key was given to the friend, no big deal, and my mother and her roommates left for the beach.

They returned late Sunday evening, in a commotion of kicked-off shoes and set-down carryalls and switched-on lights. One of them pulled the string on the kitchen bulb, and her cry brought the other two. At first they thought a crime had taken place. Strictly speaking, one had: The boyfriend, a kid with a year or two of medical training under his belt, had performed an abortion on his girlfriend. Literally, a kitchen-table abortion. There was blood on the table and the floor, and there were wadded-up bloody towels in the sink.

Or, consider this:

The quality of the criminal abortion that a woman received depended largely on where she lived and how wealthy she was. Reports a woman who got pregnant while a student at Barnard in the 1930s: “The actual abortion was comfortable, clean, the absolute tops.” On the other hand, here’s a description of an abortion the actress Margot Kidder had as an 18-year-old in the mid-1960s. Her boyfriend, John, made the arrangements, “all done with great secrecy and a great sense of evil and sordidness”; the couple were told to check in to a certain hotel room where the abortionist, a woman, would meet them. After gaining their assurance that they would never go to a hospital if something went wrong, she began the procedure.

I was told to undress and lie in the bathtub, which I did. John was in the other room. There was no anesthetic, of course. She jammed something through my cervix. It was incredibly painful. I was screaming and crying; I had no idea what was happening to me. Then she used what looked like a douche to shoot some sort of solution up through my cervix.

The woman had filled Kidder’s uterus with Lysol.

The horror of both these stories is compounded by the fact that in each case the woman's boyfriend, the father, was present. What did John think, what did he do, when he heard his girlfriend screaming in pain and fear? Did the young nurse continue to see the boyfriend who performed an abortion on her and left the bloody mess for her friends to find?

The raw squalor of these stories stand in stark contrast to the carefully sanitized tone of this piece from The Atlantic dating back to 1965, in which "Mrs. X" writes in chillingly clinical, impersonal language about her decision to obtain an illegal abortion.

I set out recently to find an abortionist in the large Eastern city where I live. My husband and I are in our mid-forties and have three children. When I discovered that I was pregnant for the fourth time, my husband and I considered the situation as honestly as we could. We both admitted that we lacked the physical resources to face 2 A.M. feedings, diapers, and the seemingly endless cycle of measles, mumps, and concussions of another child. Years of keeping a wary eye on expenditures (a new suit for my husband every two years and one for me every five) had allowed us to set up a fund which we felt would enable the children to attend reasonably good colleges away from home if some financial assistance in the form of grants or scholarships could be obtained. Since my husband's income has reached its zenith, it was plain that one of the four would have to forgo all or part of a chance at higher education. The part-time secretarial work which I had been doing for some years to augment our income would have to stop since the revenue it produces would not cover baby-sitting fees. We have no rich uncles likely to make our children their beneficiaries. We have also had sufficient experience living to acknowledge that while the Lord will sometimes provide, He may be busy looking after somebody else when you need Him most.

...The operation was successfully concluded as scheduled. Forty-five minutes after I entered the doctor's office for the second time, I walked out, flagged a passing cab, and went home. Admirably relaxed for the first time in two weeks, I dozed over dinner, left the children to wash the dishes, and dove into bed to sleep for twelve hours. The operation and its aftereffects were exactly as described by the physician. For some five minutes I suffered "discomfort" closely approximating the contractions of advanced labor. Within ten minutes this pain subsided, and returned in the next four or five days only as the sort of mild twinge which sometimes accompanies a normal menstrual period. Bleeding was minimal.

Did Mrs. X ever regret her decision? Did she ever lay awake at 2 AM and cry, since baby wasn't there to do it for her? Did her children ever discover the true cost of their college education, and would they have thought it worth the sacrifice? And here once again, the father of the child is involved and is complicit in the abortion.

Mrs. X waxes as eloquent as she gets about the marvels of medical technology which moves abortion from a sordid, back-alley business to a efficient, sterile procedure:

My operation at least was performed with what seemed to me incredible proficiency, speed, and deftness, with sterile instruments designed for the purpose for which they were used.

But Caitlin Flanagan finds herself struck by another, newer kind of technology, one that puts a human face on the matter:

But my sympathy for the beliefs of people who oppose abortion is enormous, and it grows almost by the day. An ultrasound image taken surprisingly early in pregnancy can stop me in my tracks. In it is much more than I want to know about the tiny creature whose destruction we have legalized: a beating heart, a human face, functioning kidneys, two waving hands that seem not too far away from being able to grasp and shake a rattle. One of the newest types of prenatal imaging, the three-dimensional sonogram—which is so fully realized that happily pregnant women spend a hundred dollars to have their babies’ first “photograph” taken—is frankly terrifying when examined in the context of the abortion debate.

This "human face", this "beating heart", these "waving hands" were on the business end of that syringe of Lysol, or the gleaming scalpel. We must never lose sight of this fact. Clean or dirty, abortion has the same outcome: a woman is bleeding and a child is dead.

Overwork in the Age of Multi-tasking

The weekend's WSJ had an interesting article about work hours -- the hours that people think they work, and the hours they actually do.

Over the past two decades of rapid technological deployment and globalization, it has become an article of faith among the professional set that we work sweatshop hours. Sociologist Juliet Schor started the rumor with her 1992 book, "The Overworked American," which featured horror stories of people checking their watches to know what day it was.

Then God created the BlackBerry and things got worse. In late 2005, Fortune's Jody Miller claimed that "the 60-hour weeks once thought to be the path to glory are now practically considered part-time." In late 2006, the Harvard Business Review followed up with an article on "the dangerous allure of the 70-hour workweek," calling jobs that required such labor the new standard for professionals. The authors featured one "Sudhir," a financial analyst who claimed to work 90-hour weeks during summertime, his "light" season. He's got nothing on a young man I met at a party recently who told me he was working 190 hours a week to launch his new company.

It was a curious declaration; I would certainly invest in a start-up that had invented a way to augment the 168 hours that a week actually contains. The young man turned out to be kidding. But he felt overworked, and so he indulged in some workweek inflation. Research shows that this is a common affliction among anyone claiming to work more than 50 hours a week. Indeed, almost no one claiming to work 70-, 80- or 190-hour weeks is actually doing so. This doesn't make Summer Fridays any less sweet. But it does raise the question of why our perceptions of work are so different from the reality.

Sociologists have been studying how Americans spend their time for decades. One camp favors a simple approach: if you want to know how many hours someone works, sleeps or vacuums, you ask him. Another camp sees a flaw in this method: People lie. We may not do so maliciously, but it's tough to remember our exact workweek or average time spent dishwashing, and in the absence of concrete memories, we're prone to lie in ways that don't disappear into the randomness of thousands of answers. They actually skew results.

That's the theory behind the American Time Use Survey, conducted annually by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The ATUS, like a handful of previous academic surveys, is a "time diary" study. For these studies, researchers either walk respondents through the previous day, asking them what they did next and reminding them of the realities of time and physics, or in some cases giving them a diary to record the next day or week.

...Back in the 1990s, using 1985 data, researchers John Robinson and his colleagues compared people's estimated workweeks with time-diary hours. They found that, on average, people claiming to work 40 to 44 hours per week were working 36.2 hours -- not far off. But then, as estimated work hours rose, reality and perception diverged more sharply. You can guess in which direction. Those claiming to work 60- to 64-hour weeks actually averaged 44.2 hours. Those claiming 65- to 74-hour workweeks logged 52.8 hours, and those claiming workweeks of 75 hours or more worked, on average, 54.9 hours. I contacted Prof. Robinson recently to ask for an update. His 2006-07 comparisons were tighter -- but, still, people claiming to work 60 to 69 hours per week clocked, on average, 52.6 hours, while those claiming 70-, 80-hour or greater weeks logged 58.8. As Mr. Robinson and co-author Geoffrey Godbey wrote in their 1997 book "Time for Life," "only rare individuals put in more than a 55-60 hour workweek."
...
There are many reasons for such discrepancies. The first is the gray definition of much white-collar labor. If you're watching "Talladega Nights" on a flight to a conference, are you working? Is reading the Taste page of The Wall Street Journal in your office work? Anyone claiming an 80-hour workweek is definitely putting both in the "yes" category -- though this mode of calculation is going to result in more generous estimates than an observer might tally.

The second reason people overestimate is that they discount exceptions that don't fit the mental pictures they create of themselves. If you work four 14-hour days, then quit after 8 hours on Fridays, you'd think a "usual" day was 14 hours, meaning that you work 70-hour weeks. But you don't. You work 64 -- maybe. ... You might have worked on weekends. But here we tend to overestimate time devoted to small, repetitive tasks. People think they spend far more time washing dishes than they do. Likewise, if you pulled out your BlackBerry 10 times over the weekend, you might give yourself credit for several hours of work, even though each incidence took five minutes. Total time? Less than one hour, even though you feel as if you're in work mode 24/7.

I think it's particularly appropriate that I'm posting these excerpts between meetings at work. An element of this overestimation which the author touches on above with the reverence to reading the taste page at work is that the modern professional work environment often makes it much easier to intersperse work and leisure in a nearly seamless fashion.

The same technology which makes it easy for me to answer questions from fellow employees in India at 11PM also makes it easy for me to pop up a web browser when my computer is taking to long to run a complex query and read an article from First Things, or to type out a blog post in the fifteen minute chunk of time I have before going to a meeting. As well as making our work more efficient, computers also give us more chances to recreate while we're working. So even in a week when I may spend 60 hours in the office building (something which is blessedly rare these days) I may well have spent five or even ten of those hours reading, going to lunch, talking to MrsDarwin on the phone and so on. "Flex time" gives us much craved freedom, while at the same time putting larger swaths of time overall in the "work" bucket.

Whether this is good or bad is probably mainly a matter of temperment. I'm probably happier with this kind of mix than I would be doing concentrated work on a factory line for seven hours a day with two half hour breaks. Others, I'm sure, would rather work intensively from 6AM to 2PM and be done.

The Abortion Issue as Pressure Without an Outlet

I have an reflexive admiration for writers who writers who actively think through questions and come to conclusions which are not necessarily indicated by their initial commitments -- even though this effect is usually achieved by the writer disagreeing with me on at least some basic elements of worldview. Megal McArdle, who blogs for The Atlantic, is often one such, and she has a very interesting set of posts dealing with the murder of abortionist George Tiller.

The War on The War on Abortion

A Really Long Post About Abortion and Reasoning By Historical Analogy That is Going to Make Virtually All of My Readers Very Angry At Me

One More Post on Abortion

There are a couple more as well, but these struck me as the most fascinating. McArdle is basically pro-choice, and an economic libertarian, though in most ways was more an Obama supporter than a McCain one. But her take on this is event is a characteristically interesting one:

if you actually think late-term abortion is murder, then the murder of Dr. Tiller makes total sense. Putting up touching anecdotes about people he's helped find adoptions, etc, doesn't change the fact that if you think late-term abortions are murder, the man was systematically butchering hundreds of human beings a year--indeed, not merely butchering them, but vivisecting them without anaesthetic. I'm sure many mass murderers have done any number of kind things over the course of their lives, to which the correct response, if you're trying to stop the murders, is "so?"

Imagine a future in which the moral consensus has changed, and our grandchildren regard abortion the way we regard slavery. Who will the hero of history be: Tiller, or his murderer? At the very least, they'll be conflicted, the way we are about John Brown.

Book Review: Empires of Trust (Part I)

It may seem like overkill to write a multi-part book review, but historian Thomas F. Madden's new Empires of Trust: How Rome Built--and America Is Building--a New World explores a thesis I've been interested in for some time, which has significant implications for our country's foreign policy and the wider question of what our country is and what its place in the world ought to be.

The US has been often accused, of late, of being an empire. Madden effectively accepts that this is the case, but argues that this is not necessarily a bad thing at all. Among his first projects is to lay out three different types of empire: empires of conquest, empires of commerce, and empires of trust.

An empire of conquest is one spread by military power, in which the conquering power rules over and extracts tribute from the conquered. Classic examples would include the empires of the Assyrians, Persians, Mongols, Turks, Alexander's Hellenistic empire, Napoleon's empire and to an extent the Third Reich, Imperial Japan and Soviet Union. Empires of conquest are spread by war, and conquered territory is ruled either by local puppet rulers or by a transplanted military elite from the conquering power.

An empire of commerce is interested only in securing enough of a political foothold in its dominions to carry on trade, and is less concerned over political control or tribute. Examples would include the British and Dutch empires; in the ancient world the Pheonicians and Athenians; and later, medieval Venice. Empires of commerce are typified by a network of far-flung colonies directly controlled by the home country, at locations which are strategic for exploiting natural resources or trading with regional powers. They are less focused on conquering large swathes of territority than with controlling enough of a foothold (and enforcing enough stability in the surrounding area) to carry on their commerce.

The book, however, is primarily concerned with a third type of empire, the empire of trust, of which Madden gives only two examples: Rome and the United States. The term "empire of trust" itself requires some unpacking. Madden explains:

By that I mean that they were not only trusted by friends and foes alike with a responsible use of power, but that their empire itself came about as a direct result of that trust. Many people have an image of the Romans as lords of a brutal Empire of Conquest, built by marching legions crushing all opposition to them. That is wrong. As numerous scholarly histories of Roman expansion have made clear, the image of the Romans as brutal conquerors does not reflect the actual dynamics at work at all. The simple fact is that the Romans acquired their empire slowly and with great reluctance. As the Roman historian Ernst Badian once remarked, conquest is history's norm and requires no explanation. "What does call for an explanation, when it appears in history, is that relatively high level of sophistication that rejects opportunities for the expansion of power." It was actually that rejection that made the Romans seem trustworthy to others, that formed the basis of their Empire of Trust. The Romans did not want an empire, which is precisely why they got one.
Empires of Trust, (page 5) [emphasis in original]

"Trust" and "empire" are not two words usually heard together, and Madden's interpretation runs contrary to most popular perceptions of the Roman Empire, so most of the first few chapters are spend on a review of Roman culture and history, and how Rome became a world power. In this project, Madden relies heavily on Roman primary sources: Livy, Polybius, Dio Cassius, Appian, Cicero, Josephus, Tacitus, etc.

Among the cultural values identified as leading to Rome's empire of trust are listed its strong (indeed, literally religious) emphasis on the household as the essential social building block, an ideal of small farmer citizen-statesman, a strong emphasis on martial skill and duty, a suspicion of kingship and absolute rule, and a basic isolationism combined with a fierce desire to secure the horizon in order to keep the homeland safe from invasion -- something which became a near obsession for Rome after the Gauls sacked it in 390BC, and their care resulted in Rome not being entered by a foreign army again for 800 years, until 410AD.

In the wake of the Gaulic invasion of 390BC, Rome was the greatest military power in central Italy (the Etruscans, who a century or two before had dominated over Rome, never really recovered from the attack). However, the Rome of 390BC was little more than a large-is city state. In an effort to provide security against future attacks, the Romans formed tight alliances with the city states surrounding them. There was much strife between neighboring city states in the wake of the Gaulic invasion, and as Rome established or re-established treaties with the surrounding city states in Latium (central Italy), it defended it's allies in a series of local wars. The end result was a Latin League of city states, tied together by all their individual treaties with Rome, and thus prevented from falling into war with each other since Rome would protect any ally that was attacked.

This Latin League fielded a strong enough joint military force that it repelled subsequent Gaulic attacks, but Rome's obvious power over the confederation (although it was theoretically composed of equal states) resulted in a rebellion/civil war in 340BC. Rome won this war with the Latin League, but rather than anexing the conquered cities it re-accepted them as allies with independant local government, though in the process Rome developed a sliding scale of alliances which bound different allies to Rome with varying levels of political unity.

The closest Latin towns would receive Roman citizenship, with full voting rights and the right to run for Roman offices. Although they maintained local state governments, the big decisions for the region were made in Rome. Others, particularly non-Latin allies, were given citizenship without voting rights. They, too, supported the common military and allowed Rome to deal with matters of warfare and foreign affairs, but they retained more local autonomy. The lowest rung were "equal allies" who were not citizens, but could do business with Romans, although not with others without Rome's approval.
(page 75)

With the rebellion of the Latin League behind it, Rome resumed it's policy of forming alliances at the frontiers, and then defending those new allies in any wars. With Rome's military prowess established, city states on the edge of its sphere of influence began to seek out Rome as an ally, thus drawing Rome into more quarrels. In 343BC, Capua formed an alliance with Rome in order to get aid against the Samnite hill peoples. In 327BC, the Greek city (Greeks had established colonies throughout southern Italy and Sicily in the centuries prior) of Neapolis (modern Naples) was in a state of civil war. One faction brought in a Samnite garrison to support them, the other sought an alliance with Rome, which the Senate granted, expelling the Samnite garrison and adding Neapolis to the growing list of Roman allies.

Pick up any history of the Roman Republic and there is one phrase that you will find over and over again: "They appealed to Rome for aid." Those six words explain the central dynamic by which the Romans expanded. A people would get into trouble. They would appeal to Rome for aid. The Romans would agree, gaining a new ally, but also a new war into the bargain.
(page 78)

In 285-275BC, Rome's alliance with the small city of Thurii in southern Italy drew them into conflict with the major Greek city of Tarentum, further south in the boot of Italy, when the Tarentines assaulted and sacked Thurii. The Tarentines employed the famous Greek general Pyrrhus, who landed with a professional army of 25,000 men and twenty war elephants. Pyrrhus won several incredibly costly victories (giving us the phrase "Pyrrhic victory") but was eventually beaten and driven from Italy by Rome and her Latin allies. This show of force soon brought all of southern Italy into alliance with Rome, but that in turn made Sicily Rome's next doorstep, and drew Rome into the ongoing war between the north African kingdom of Carthage and the Greeks inhabiting Sicily.

It should start to become obvious the sorts of similarities which Madden sees to the experiences of the United States in the 20th and 21st centuries. Take, for instance, one recent series of events. In 1990, Iraq invades Kuwait, a minor American ally (but one with a major natural resource) who in turn applied to the US for assistance, along with neighbors such as Saudi Arabia. The US leads a large coalition (which in fact consisted mainly of US troops) in liberating Kuwait, and in return is given garrisons in both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Iraq continues to flout the treaty that ended the war, and the American presence in the region is used as a pretext for terrorist attacks against the US by Al Qaeda, which is under the protection of the Taliban government of Afghanistan. The US invades both Afghanistan and Iraq (again with the help of a number of allies, though their numerical contribution is small) and attempts to turn them into independent allied governments. However, this in turn increases tensions with/in the neighboring countries of Iran and Pakistan, with the danger that the US and Iran may be drawn into a war, or that the US-ally government of Pakistan will be overthrown by an anti-US faction, resulting in war there.

As with the Romans, territory is not being conquered and then ruled by the empire of trust itself, but once a major power gains a reputation for being willing to go to war to protect allies while leaving them essentially independent, there comes to be a draw on the power which pulls its security horizon out further and further until it either meets its match or -- as in the case of the US by 1990AD and of Rome by 150BC -- becomes the world's sole superpower. In this process, what eventually creates the "pull" which drives expansion of the empire is the trust that it will defend its allies against all external threats while allowing them to retain their autonomy in all things other than hurting the empire or other allies. This, combined with a track record for turning former enemies into allies, provided every reason to work with Rome, and few reasons to fight against it.

Clearly the Romans did believe that defeated enemies should be treated with respect and dignity. More than that, as we shall see, the Romans, like Americans, were famous for making friends out of enemies, rebuilding and restoring them after militarily defeating them. As the Roman statesman Cicero once noted, "By defending our allies our people have gained the whole world." [De re publica, 3.25] Empires of Trust,(page 11)

[Two more installments of this review to come.]