Accidental Historian

A Distant, Dreadful Star, Part 11

[Author's Note: This is part eleven of the story born of this post at Slacktivist.]

They stood on the porch, scrubbed faces impossibly clean, teeth impossibly white and framed by painted-on smiles.  Painted-on smiles that did not quite reach their eyes.  This pair was not here to make friends.  They were con artists in search of marks.  They were the guy with a whiskey sour looking for a quick fuck at last call.  They were sharks on the hunt.

Well, maybe.  Things had been pretty weird since the disappearances.  It had been increasingly difficult to trust strangers.  The number of con artists who had hung out shingles and started missing people finding businesses was depressingly large.  Business was booming for people willing to look past human misery and focus on human fallibility, though.  Business always seemed to boom for heartless bastards.

They weren’t the only traffickers in misery out there.  They weren’t even the worst.

“May we come in?” the one on the left asked.  “We’d like to talk to you for just a moment.”

“No, I’d rather you don’t, actually.”

“But we have news of great importance,” the one on the right said.  “We’re sure you’d like to hear it.”

“No, thanks, I’m good.”

The one on the right reached for the handle of the screen door.  “I think you’d like to hear this,” he said.

Katie reached over and clicked on the lock.  “Go away,” she said.  “I’m not interested and if you attempt to enter my house without my permission I will call the police.”

“Very well,” said the one on the left, “But just know that if you don’t invite the Lord into your house then the Lord will not invite you into His.”  He held up the Bible in his hands.  “But the Lord still is willing to let you repent.  For a limited period of time.”

The two then spun on their heels and stepped off the porch in unison.

Katie closed the door, threw the deadbolt, and slumped back against it.  She sighed and rubbed her forehead, trying to get rid of the headache that had been plaguing her for nearly a week.  Unfortunately for her, though, she knew the reason for her headache was Joe.  The new evangelists who were circling her neighborhood like vultures weren’t helping.

She pushed off against the door and headed back to the kitchen.  Joe was sitting at the table with his laptop open.  Stacks of printed paper were scattered all over the small wooden table and haphazardly dumped on the chairs.  A pair of giant, vertical timelines were taped to the shelf on which she kept teapot and tea cup collection.  A grotesque diagram of fantastical animals and disturbingly – almost lovingly – rendered pictures of disasters and death covered most of the wall.  She did not consider it an improvement over the set of her grandmother’s china plates that they’d spent the previous summer mounting there.

Joe paused his YouTube video of some preacher or other as she walked in.  “Who was at the door?” he asked without looking up.

“No one,” Katie replied.  “Well, no one we knew.  Someone looking for family who had the wrong address.”

“Oh,” Joe replied.  “Okay.”  He grabbed a piece of paper off one of his stacks.  “Hey, look at this, I think it’s proof that that Anwar Al-Saafi guy from Iraq is the Antichrist.  Someone should do something about him.”

Katie walked over and started rubbing her husband’s shoulders.  “Honey, you know I think this stuff is a load of total bullshit, right?” she asked.

“I know that’s what you think,” he replied, “But I need you to believe me.  This shit is real.  It’s right there in the Bible.”

“I told you, Joe.  It’s not in the Bible.  It was invented by some Scottish girl with mental health problems in the 1800s.  It only went mainstream because someone figured out they could use it to sell books back in the ‘80s.”

Joe slammed the paper down.  “No, this is real,” he said.  He stood up, turned around, and grabbed Katie by the shoulders.  “If it’s not real how do you explain the fact that all of this is happening?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “Maybe it’s aliens or something.  All I know is that there was never a real Bible prophecy for any of this stuff.”

“It has to be true,” Joe said, gripping her shoulders tighter.  “It has to be.  There’s no other explanation for any of this that makes a damn bit of sense.”  He stared at her, eyes wide, nostrils flaring.  “If it is true we can use it to survive to the end of this.  We can see Eddie again.”

Katie’s shoulder muscles began to tremble under Joe’s tightening fingers.  She felt his thumbnails begin to dig into her flesh.  But she stayed fixed on his eyes.  His wild, angry, frightened eyes.

“Stop it, Joe,” she finally said.  “Please.”

“You have to believe me.”  His grip tightened.

“Please, Joe.”  She whimpered slightly.  “You’re hurting me.”

His grip relaxed.  Joe closed his eyes and his hands slipped from her shoulders.  “Oh, god, I’m sorry, Katie.  It’s just…”

“I know,” she said, “It hasn’t been easy.”

He tentatively lifted his hands back to her shoulders and rubbed them for a moment.  Then he sighed heavily and slid his arms around her.  “I just know there has to be an answer out there and I want to find it so bad,” he said.

“I know.  But you also haven’t slept for nearly a week.”

“I can’t.  I have to keep looking.  There’s not much time.”

“There’s enough time to sleep, Joe.  And things will make more sense if you’ve slept.”

“Okay.”

She reached up and pushed his arms away, then grabbed his hands with hers and backed out of the kitchen, leading him towards the bedroom.  “C’mon,” she smiled and cocked her head, “Let’s get you to bed.”

Plus 1 Internet

So back when I wrote my Being Me posts and then wandered off into the weeds with stuff that annoyed me about the internet I thought I’d wrap it all up with a post about bullying as an act of enforcing conformity.  My general, overarching point was that anyone can become a bully.  All it takes is attempting to force other people to conform to a specific notion of what it means to be a [insert group here].  The bullied sometimes become the bullies when they get power.  It’s a tic of human nature, basically.

The solution to bullying, I’ve come to believe, is to say, “I am [insert label here] and you don’t get to define that for me.”  Alternately, in the case of some bullies – such as MRAs, who compelled me to write a recent post – the solution is to say, “I don’t give a shit what you think, since your labels are stupid and don’t apply to me.  Or reality.”  It helps when people outside that specific situation then come alongside and help people see the bigger picture.  This idea was basically the genesis of Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project, to name a famous example.

The last couple days an interesting thing has been happening over at Scalzi’s place that illustrates my point way better than the post I never wrote would have.  A fellow Scalzi refers to as the Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipshit (RSHD for short, because Scalzi has no urge to use his real name or link to him) has been talking all kinds of shit about Scalzi for the last few months using fairly standard MRA bullshit.  This resulted in a lot of trolls heading over to Whatever and annoying the hell out of Scalzi.  Scalzi doesn’t seem to like being annoyed by trolls that much.  So he did something about it.

Specifically, he pledged to donate money to organizations pushing for equality every time the RSHD mentioned him, capped out at a grand.  That’s where the internet took over, specifically the bit where Scalzi is one of the true mensches of the internet and has one hell of a following.  Other people started pledging, too.  By the end of the day the pledges were over $20,000.  By now, three days later, the pledges are at over $50,000.

That’s pretty much amazing.  It’s a whole lot of people standing up and saying, “We don’t want your bullying.  But we’re going to make something good come out of it and make you look like an ass in the process.”  It won’t stop the RSHD, since he seems to get off on shit like this, but this sort of thing isn’t directed at the RSHD.  It’s directed at observers to show that there are those who are willing to stand up to the bullies.  It’s also intended to show that the bullies themselves are absurd and can be effectively ignored.

It seems to be working, too.  Scalzi got a write-up in the freaking Guardian.  And the Guardian article called the RSHD a “Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipshit.”  It also didn’t use the RSHD’s real name nor did it link to his blog(s).  It’s brilliant, really.

Scalzi also commissioned some art.  See, MRAs use the (largely discredited) notion of Alpha and Beta males to make sure everyone knows they’re the alphas and everyone who isn’t exactly like them is a beta or a gamma or whatever and, therefore, inferior.  There are also animal themes in there for some reason.  Scalzi’s solution was to say, “Hey, in your taxonomy I’m a Gamma Rabbit.  That sounds like an awesome thing to be, since I’m happy.”

That’s the only way to approach people who try to call you inferior but whose only power is with words.  Take away the power of those words and you stymie the bullying.

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I figured out who the RSHD was almost immediately.  Spend any time on the internet paying attention to MRAs and one name pops up a lot: Vox Day, aka Theodore Beale.  He’s harassed PZed and Ed Brayton over the years, who are also a couple of guys who don’t let bullies use them as chew toys.  They have a different, significantly less whimsical style, though.

I checked over at Pharyngula to see if PZed had anything to say, mostly out of curiosity.  What he had was a link to a Jim Hines post about Beale running for President of the SFWA, an organization for speculative fiction authors which has been headed by one John Scalzi for the last couple of years.  I find that notion fascinating.

If you go back to my previous MRA post about an idiot who went after Fred it occurs to me that the entire reason anyone becomes a bully, especially an internet bully, is because they’re deeply unhappy.  So they define themselves according to some scale where they can show the world (themselves, mostly) how amazing they are).  Seeing someone who doesn’t use their scale but who is also obviously content with the world must, then, be absolutely awful.

That’s basically why Scalzi keeps saying that Vox has a mancrush on him.  I’m not saying that Vox Day is a deeply self-loathing closet case (mostly because I have endeavored to know as little about him as possible).  I’m saying that Vox Day is a great example of a deeply self-loathing bully who keeps trying to find meaning by emulating the path and then destroying the happiness of others.  That must be an awful way to live.

It’s why, on some level, I feel sorry for MRAs.  They’re sad, sad people.

The State of the Blog 2013

I tend to put up some sort of State of the Blog post every year.  I usually do it in January, I think.  I also usually put up a bunch of grandiose plans that there’s no fucking way I’ll ever be able to actually carry out.

In truth, the blog isn’t really an important focus of mine.  Nobody pays me to do it.  Not that many people read it.  I just do it because I like writing and I don’t have a lot of outlets for writing these days.

So I don’t have a big State of the Blog this year.  I have five plans, such as they are:

1.  I’m going to do the After Tamerlane stuff.  Because it’s cool.

2.  I’d like to get back to the Byzantine Logic stuff.  I realized the other day that I haven’t done a proper Byzantine Logic post since before the move from Blogspot to Typepad, which is kind of crazy.

3.  1434 Fridays.  At least, I’d like to do 1434 Fridays at least three times a month.

4.  I’ve had an idea kicking around that I call “sketches.”  Basically, I get some interesting character sketches knocking about from time to time.  They’re usually short, single scenes of interaction between two or three characters.  I usually don’t have any intention of doing anything with the scene itself in a larger scheme.  I believe, though, that writing fiction is an act of empathy and sometimes a writer simply has to practice that empathy.  Sometimes it’s in the form of characters who occupy a whole series of novels.  Sometimes it’s in the form of characters who occupy a single page.

5.  I never finished A Distant, Dreadful Star.  This, I fear, is inexcusable.  Part of the problem is that I started writing it right before I bought the house.  Part of the problem is that I started writing it because I had a beginning but had no end.  It’s now sat dormant for nearly a year as far as writing is concerned.  It hasn’t been dormant in my mind, however, and I know exactly where the story has to go.

As such, feel free to read the first ten installments of A Distant, Dreadful Star.  The long lost (no, really, I wrote it back in March of 2012) 11th installment shall go up tomorrow.  For some reason I thought it would work better as the 12th installment and I needed to write another, more differenter installment first.  Looking back, I don’t think that’s the case.  With any sort of luck there will be a new installment every Wednesday until I finish.

Also, and I say this with a certain level of amazement, I’m really excited about this.  I was re-reading some bits that I haven’t looked at since I originally wrote them and there were several things that caused me to think, “Holy shit, I can actually write.”  I know that writers are supposed to hate everything that they wrote in the past because they’re never supposed to be satisfied.  I’ll admit that A Distant, Dreadful Star is far from perfect.  I’ll also admit that there are some parts that say exactly what I want them to say in exactly the way I want them to do it.

Sometimes you have to acknowledge the good is what I’m saying.

Welcome, February

So I managed to make it exactly one week on the 1434 Fridays idea.  That's...that's par for the course.

I am planning on getting back to it, don't worry.  This week was just a bit odd.  See, on Tuesday night I was here:




That's Soundgarden.  That's Soundgarden at the Riviera Theater.  That's Soundgarden at the Riviera Theater with me about, oh, fifty feet from the stage.  It was a religious experience.

The setlist was amazing.  They only played five songs off of the new album, four of which were the four actual tolerable songs from the new album: "Rowing," "By Crooked Steps," "Worse Dreams," and "Non-State Actor."  They also played "Been Away Too Long," which wasn't so great, but it was the first song and that seemed to be par for the course.

Either way, I'd trade that Soundgarden show for any five shows I've been to in my life.  It was that amazing.  I was pretty much sold halfway through when they played "Loud Love" and then followed it with "Big Dumb Sex."  This is "Big Dumb Sex," which is probably NSFW:



So, weirdly, I knew "Big Dumb Sex" from the first chord.  I didn't realize that "Rowing" wasn't "By Crooked Steps" until the song was over.  And I thought "Worse Dreams" was called "Bad Dreams." So...I guess I'm that guy, now.

Either way, since I ain't done with this, apparently, here's the setlist:

Been Away Too Long
My Wave
Worse Dreams
Room a Thousand Years Wide
Jesus Christ Pose - intro tag of Jesus Loves Me, which was a nice touch
Rhinosaur
Non-State Actor
Drawing Flies
Hunted Down
Loud Love
Big Dumb Sex
Blow Up the Outside World
Fell on Black Days
Tighter & Tighter
Burden in My Hand
Rowing
Superunknown
Fresh Tendrils
Nothing to Say
Spoonman
Black Hole Sun
4th of July
Encore Break
Outshined
Rusty Cage
By Crooked Steps
Incessant Mace

Basically, if I were to make the perfect Soundgarden setlist with the caveat that it had to have a decent number of new songs...this is pretty close.  My perfect list would cut "Been Away Too Long" and add "Like Suicide," "Slaves & Bulldozers," and "Searching with My Good Eye Closed."  If I were also expecting a pony it would involve "Ty Cobb."  If I had to take anything out to get those additions I'd remove "Spoonman" and "Blow Up the Outside World."  I would have said "Incessant Mace" before Tuesday, but it's a really cool show ender.

The show ender is an important song.  Pearl Jam famously plays "Yellow Ledbetter" to end pretty much every set.  Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers play "Nada."  The Saw Doctors play "Hey Wrap."  Some bands don't really have an ender, but for the bands that do it's an important signal that, y'know, it's time to go home.  Soundgarden played "Slaves & Bulldozers" as the ender last year on pretty much all the shows I looked up.  "Incessant Mace" works about as well.  I think "Like Suicide" would be an excellent choice, too.

Also, Chris Cornell kept referring to The Riviera as The Vic, which amused me to no end.  My favorite venue in Chicago is the Vic.  My second favorite venue is probably the Riviera (although my love of The Beat Kitchen knows no bounds and Schubas, the Double Door, and The Hideout are all very cool).[1]

Either way, Soundgarden's on the headline and all's right with the world.

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So it's February in Chicago.  February in Chicago is the absolute fucking worst.  Scott Lucas and Brian St. Clair would like to tell you about it.



I have mixed feeling about that video.  "Another February" is very much a political song in the middle of what is very much a political album.  The way they set it up looks like it's definitely commentary on the point of the song: that life is pretty much shit for people who don't have money.  It looked like a perfect setup for, "It's always February for some people."

Then it got to the bit at the end with the snow globe.

Either way, this year February is even crazier, since on Tuesday I went to the Soundgarden show wearing a hoodie over a long-sleeve t-shirt with no coat, since it was in the 50s in Chicago.  Then we got a cold snap on 1/31 and it was awful.

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So you might be asking yourself how I've managed to write a full post about Soundgarden and Local H but couldn't seem to write a 1434 post.  Basically, I came down with an awesome flu/fever (fluver?) thing.  Right now I have zero energy and my head hurts.  Tossing 1434 on top of that seems like a really bad idea.

For the record, the 1434 posts (and the 1421 posts before them and, actually, the After the Flood posts from way back in the day) are the hardest posts to write.  There's just so much awful packed into every paragraph that it's hard to know where to begin.  That takes energy.  Energy I don't have right now.

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Also, after I took a nap this afternoon/evening I watched the pilot episode of The Americans on FX.  Two of my favorite shows of the last few years are White Collar and Burn Notice.  The Americans is basically like those plus Homeland (which I do not watch, by the by).  It's definitely more Homeland in tone than either of the USA shows, though.  Either way, I am enthused.

Nothing like a show starring Felicity as a hard-ass Soviet sleeper agent during the Reagan years...

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[1]Yeah...I guess I need to list my favorite Chicago venues now.

1.  The Vic
2.  The Riviera
3.  The Beat Kitchen
4.  Double Door
5.  Schuba's
6.  The Aragon
7.  The Hideout
1,506.  House of Blues
1,507.  UIC Pavilion

I've also seen shows at the United Center and Soldier Field.  I don't like stadium shows, really.  Also, weirdly, I kinda liked the House of Blues Dallas.  My theory for all venues is that their main purpose should be to put as little in the way of the people trying to see music as possible.  The more shit, the worse the grade.  The Vic wins on accessibility and feel.  The Riviera is basically a slightly larger Vic, but the problem is that it's laid out sideways.  The back of the main floor of the Vic goes right outside.  At the Riv you have to walk down a hallway, so it can be a pain in the ass to get in or out.  The Aragon has a hallway plus a staircase.  The Beat Kitchen, Double Door, Schuba's, and the Hideout are simply too small for that to be a problem.

The HoB loses on two things: overbearing staff and a tendency towards all-ages shows.  I get that all ages = more money, but all ages also often means 16 year-olds who just got let out of the house for the first time and don't know what the fuck they're doing.

The UIC Pavilion is just awful.  It's got this single, narrow concourse that they choke with merch tables and adult beverage stands when there are shows, so it's basically impossible to get in or out if the place is full.  For the record, the place was quite full in July of 2012 when I saw Soundgarden there...

Oddly, I've never been to the Metro.  There are five legendary Chicago venues for rock shows: the Double Door, the Vic, the Riviera, the Aragon Ballroom, and the Metro.  I'm not sure why I haven't been to the Metro.

Let's Talk Dating for Some Reason

I’ve had a The Single Life and/or a ZOMG! Teh Menz post a-brewin’ for a while.  The problem is that it’s entirely based on me responding to articles, several of which I read about a month ago.  So it’s all getting a bit jumbled about in my head.  That’s fun, though, right?

What’s going to end up happening here, though, is I’m just going to put up a bunch of links.

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People love writing about online dating.  I’m no different, I suppose.  I’ve written a bunch of posts about online dating.  I haven’t written any lately, though, mostly because my ability to care about the whole thing is rather limited at the moment.  Still, I’m always interested when other people write about it online dating.  Mostly because about half of the articles end up being hilariously wrong or misguided.

Peter Ludlow wrote an article in The Atlantic as a follow-up to a different article written by Dan Slater.  I read Ludlow’s first.  That matters.

See, Ludlow’s article was all about how online dating has commoditized dating.  I actually wrote about that exact same thing many, many months ago.  One of the big problems that humans have is dealing with a situation where there are too many choices.  One of the other big problems that humans have is dealing with a situation where several of the available choices are pie-in-the-sky fantasy, at best.  Too many pie-in-the-sky fantasy choices could be the name of the next big online dating site.

I would never make a claim, however, that online dating destroys commitment, either in theory or in practice.  I think I was pretty clear in my own musings about online dating that I was going in with incorrect attitudes and presuppositions and that I was pretty damaged.  All online dating does is allow damaged people to meet other damaged people they wouldn’t otherwise meet and spread the misery farther and faster.

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I read the Dan Slater article next, pretty much in the spirit of an anecdote that Ludlow then jumped off of with a sort of detached journalism.  As such, I didn’t immediately notice that there were…shall we say, problems with the Slater article.

Amanda Marcotte and Alexis Madrigal sure did.  This is the introductory paragraph from Marcotte’s article:

Last week, Dan Slater at the Atlantic wrote what may be the worst piece on online dating I’ve ever read, which is a truly remarkable feat in such a competitive field. Slater’s theory is that because online dating sites are a magical wonderland where men can meet and fuck an endless array of women, it means men will have no desire to get married and thus will be the ruin of marriage. If I were married to Dan Slater, I would get a lawyer on retainer now, because there’s projection all over this thing. And let’s be clear: Slater means men. He claims “people”, but as Alexis Madrigal (who, if you’re rushing to disagree with him, I should point out is male, so you might want to slow your roll, trolls) points out in the same publication, Slater didn’t bother to interview any women, much less any men that have a different experience from his buddy Jacob.

This is the second paragraph from Alexis’s article:

Narratively, the story focuses on Jacob, an overgrown manchild jackass who can't figure out what it takes to have a real relationship. The problem, however, is not him, and his desire for a "low-maintenance" woman who is hot, young, interested in him, and doesn't mind that he is callow and doesn't care very much about her. No, the problem is online dating, which has shown Jacob that he can have a steady stream of mediocre dates, some of whom will have sex with him.

That pretty much sums up Dan Slater’s article in a nutshell.

One of the real big problems with anyone who writes an article about online dating that’s primarily from one person’s perspective is that that one person might be wrong about a lot of things.  I include myself in this.  I don’t offer myself as a paragon of people who have experienced online dating, since I freely admit that I was kind of being a major asshole a lot of the time.  Yeah, I might have just met some crazy people, but I probably didn’t do a damn thing to help myself, either.

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So yesterday Amanda Marcotte offered up the diametric opposite of the “guy who just wants to get laid” article with the “woman who desperately wants to get married” article.  Those are also fun.  Amanda offered her thoughts as a counterpoint to Jill over at Feministe and, for the record, I can’t be arsed to read the original article, since I really don’t care.  What I want to highlight is something Amanda points out that is a fascinating underlying assumption of all of these sorts of articles:

Now, I’m not married and don’t want to be, in no small part because the institutional nature of marriage leads directly to this kind of thinking, wherein “spouse” is a job you want filled instead of an outgrowth of your love for another person. But there’s definite ideological argument of gender underpinning these stereotypes of why women and men marry. Basically, the implication is that real love between men and women is a myth. This fits into a larger sexist belief that men and women are “opposites” who put up with each other out of necessity, but who don’t really like each other very much. Believers in this believe that women need men, who are their social superiors, to choose them and validate them. (Being unchosen is considered a fate worse than death, which is why so many conservatives think that it’s a game winner to “argue” that feminists are just unchosen women who are bitter about our lack of validation from men—validation that is our sole purpose in existing, apparently.) In exchange for validating a woman’s right to exist by choosing her, a man gets someone to look after him and his home, provide him regular sex, and have children that will be named after him.

A while back I went on several dates with a woman.  She was intelligent and accomplished.  She also seemed to be quite well prepared for the whole settling down thing and decided that I was the one to do that.

My problem there was pretty simple: I just wasn’t that into her.  I tried to convince myself to change my mind, but I couldn’t[1] bring myself to that.  One of the interesting things about the way my mind works is that I draw pretty quick and accurate conclusions and then I spend about six months ignoring those conclusions until everything shakes out.

So what happened was I walked away from the first date, which went pretty well, all things considered, with Sons of Bill’s “So Much for the Blues”[2] running through my head.  I then proceeded to not really think about her much and act like kind of a dick the next time I saw her.  In spite of that, though, she kept trying.  It eventually hit the point where every interaction we had came down to a conversation about how we couldn’t get along.

It was pretty much awful.

This particular story is a bit different from the “women planning their weddings even though they’re single and will probably be single for a long-ass time” thing in that I don’t know that she was planning to plug me into a five-year plan in a marriage binder filled with clippings from Modern Bride or whatever.  I bring it up, though, because it’s pretty obvious she had a plan, she decided that I was the ideal person to fill in that part of the plan, and she didn’t notice that I was very much not on board.  Then, even though I pretty much played the role of major dickhead, she still tried to get me to play that role.

I think this is the danger of seeing relationships as a job and the potential job applicants as being interchangeable.  You ignore the person in front of you for the person who is in your head filling the role you think they should fill.  It’s a good way to get yourself hurt and end up developing extremely negative opinions of your fellow humans.

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[1]Protip: don’t do that.  Seriously, if something isn’t right, even if you can’t figure out why, just go with that.  Life is easier that way.

[2]For those who don’t know, it’s basically a song about a guy breaking up with a girl and not giving a shit.  Because he’s a total dick.  And now he’s going to write a song about it, because breaking someone’s heart to write a song is a worthwhile trade.  It also includes some of my favorite lyrics ever:

Yeah I wish I could write a song like Townes Van Zandt
Then I could be a son of a bitch and no one would give a damn
And I just keep telling myself that no one understands

Repeating the Last Century, Part 4

I was reading The Communist Manifesto the other day, you know, as you do.  It occurred to me that Karl Marx’s historical reading of the nature of economics was spot on.  It also occurred to me that his conclusions of what had to happen as a result were somewhat less than spot on.  That should surprise no one, though.  We’re living on the back-end of the downfall of Communism as an actual, viable form of human governance, after all.

Still, there are parts of The Communist Manifesto that could have come from John Darwin’s After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405.  That’s why we’re here to talk about my reading habits.  I was actually going to play a game where I quoted Marx and claimed that it was from Darwin and then said, “Nah, I’m just fuckin’ with you.”  But Marx used the word “bourgeoisie” nearly as often as Darwin uses extraneous commas, so I decided against it.  Also, he spoke of economic trends in the present tense, which would be a dead giveaway, at least for the five people who seem to frequent this blog and aren’t looking for evidence that Coldplay sucks.  So let’s do this in a more standardized way.

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Let’s talk Marxism.  Specifically, let’s talk Marxism as a critique of history:

Modern industry has established the world-market, for which the discovery of America paved the way.  This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land.  This development has, in its time, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

That, quite literally, could have come directly from the pages of Darwin’s book.  Don’t believe me?  Let’s take a look.

By the first half of the nineteenth century a high degree of economic integration had developed between North West Europe and the British Isles and North East America.  The world economy of the later nineteenth century was partially the consequence of extending the dense commercial networks of the North Atlantic basin to new parts of the globe: South America, parts of Africa, India, South East Asia, Australasia, and East Asia.  One of its distinguishing features was that, right across the world, the price not just of luxuries but of even quite common commodities (like food grains) was decided not by local or regional factors but by market forces on a global scale.[1]

Darwin points out that the world market was a result of globalization.  Marx points out that the world market is a bad thing due to the fact that it’s a product of people who intend to profit from the market costs.  Neither Marx nor Darwin was wrong.

That’s the funny thing about Communism/Marxism/Socialism/whatever you want to call it.  The base assumptions made by Karl Marx weren’t wrong.  We’ve spent the last century in a conflict between Communism and capitalism based on the conclusions drawn by those conclusions, though.  There’s been a great deal of wrong drawn in that space.  The reason for that wrong was simple: part of the wrong was based on Marx’s own conclusion.  Part of the wrong was based on the lack of willingness on the part of the free market capitalists to acknowledge any path to economic security other than their own.  Part of the wrong was based on a belief that there is a binary response to the human condition.

In the next post I shall discuss how there isn’t a binary response to this conflict between Communism and capitalism.  I shall also discuss how, at least in the context of the United States in the late 20th and early 21st Century, we’ve given up allowing that conversation.

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[1] John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405, (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), 330.

1434 Fridays, Part 4

Welcome to my (probably) new (hopefully) weekly feature: 1434 Fridays.  That’s right.  I’m (possibly) going to knock 1434 every (most/some/at least one) Friday from here until I’m done with the book (get bored/lose my mind).  It’ll be excruciating, but also hopefully fun.  Hooray!

For those who don’t remember, I’m actually three posts into making fun of Gavin Menzies and his spectacularly historically inaccurate notion that the Chinese sent a giant, secret fleet to Italy in 1434 and kicked off the Italian Renaissance.  So far I’ve managed to write three posts that take up about twelve pages in order to deconstruct something less than two pages of 1434.  I’m doing this because there’s an important lesson: history is hard.  One idiotic and incorrect claim often requires one hundred facts to set straight.  As such, it’s usually easier to just say, “Eh, that guy’s a crank,” and leave it at that.”

For those of us who love history, though, having that opportunity to research and compile and instruct can be its own reward.  I have a fascination with the Age of Discovery and the early Renaissance and how Europeans changed the way they saw and thought of the world.  Taking on Gavin Menzies, then, is an opportunity both for snark and to do something I’d enjoy doing, anyway.  So it’s a win-win.  It’s also a really, really, long slog.  So let’s begin.

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I’m sure I’ve mentioned it on this blog before, but I have a real problem with the way history is generally taught.  We usually learn history as either a series of dates and names that have no connection or as a master narrative that makes it seems like Event A inexorably lead to Event B and then Event C was the only logical response.  Or, worse, we make it seem like Person A saw Event A and Event B and then went and intentionally caused Event C in order to get Outcome Z.  This is, for the most part, flat wrong.

We think about history in this manner because we see the historical narrative.  Certain people, places, and things are connected so we invoke a narrative to explain why they’re connected that often starts with the outcome or at least its place in history.  That narrative is wrong as often as not, but we keep telling it to ourselves because humans are addicted not to the facts but to the narrative that puts them all together.  That narrative is where conspiracy theories are born.  That narrative is why conspiracy theories often fall apart when you pick at the details.

If you go back to part 3 of the 1434 posts you’ll see that Menzies went after Martin Waldseemuller and Johannes Schoner and attempted to use their maps as proof that they’d learned about the world from Chinese maps.  Debunking that notion required a quick primer on pretty much every European map of the new world that existed at the time.  Feel free to refresh your memory, because things are about to get even more complicated.

These two rustic mapmakers were not the only Europeans with an uncanny prescience about unseen lands. In 1419, before European voyages of exploration even began, Albertin di Virga published a map of the Eastern Hemisphere that shows northern Australia. It was another 350 years before Captain Cook “discovered” that continent.

So…this is super awkward.  See, a bit of Google-fu brought me to a page on Gavin Menzies’ own site that included a description of the 1419 di Virga map and a comparison to the “1418” Liu Gang map which I shall get into shortly.  Here’s the link.  Notice anything about the di Virga map on Menzies’ own website?  If you said, “There’s nothing that looks even remotely like Australia on that map,” you’d be correct.  It’s interesting, too, since there was another, slightly different depiction of the di Virga map on Wikipedia that did actually show a landmass off to the east of the Eurasian continent.  You could make a case that the land out there is Australia, I suppose, but all the descriptions I’ve seen indicate that the inscription says “Caparu sive Java magna.”  It’s far more likely that di Virga simply penciled in a landmass to cover Java, which Marco Polo did visit, and possibly that other Pacific island that so beguiled the medieval European imagination: Cipangu, or Japan.

I should pause here and point something out.  The possibility that Chinese cartography influenced European cartography cannot and, for that matter, should not be dismissed.  The di Virga map is, in fact, a key place where it’s important to take a moment’s pause, as is the Martellus map I mentioned in part 2.  The reason it’s important to consider the possibility of Chinese influence is the Kangnido map I mentioned in part 3 as compared to the old Ptolemy map and the legacy of the Dragon’s Tail.  Europeans in the early part of the Renaissance thought that the Indian Ocean was landlocked.  Not all maps made in the early 1400s showed this, however, which was interesting considering that no European rounded the Cape of Good Hope before the very late 1400s and Vasco de Gama was the first European to sail from western Europe to India in a voyage that ran more-or-less concurrently with Columbus’s expeditions to the New World.

Toby Lester offers as good an explanation as we’ll probably get in The Fourth Part of the World:

During the early 1400s a few maps appeared in Europe that also suggested an awareness of Africa’s true shape.  A case in point is the world map of Albertin de Virga, made in Venice between 1411 and 1415.  Drawn before the Portuguese had even captured Ceuta[1], and probably incorporating knowledge obtained from Muslim or Chinese merchants, the map confidently portrays the continent as bulging out to the west in the north, and then honing itself gently to a point in the South.[2]

It stands to reason that Muslim cartographers would have some idea of what Africa looked like by the early 1400s.  That explanation is more likely than a Chinese-centered cartography, though.  Still, there was enough sharing of information between Europe, the Middle East, and China to make any explanation of mapmaking that doesn’t include some amount of sharing far more suspect than one that does.  For one, accounts of Marco Polo’s sojourn in the east had been available for nearly a century by then.  The Fra Mauro mappamundi was, for example, said to be based in part on a map brought back from Cathay by Polo himself.

The key thing to realize here, though, is that if Gavin Menzies had simply claimed that the Chinese knew more than the Europeans of the 1400s about the navigation of the Indian Ocean the appropriate response would probably be something like, “Well, duh.”  European maps from before 1300 or so weren’t exactly based on anything closely resembling reality and the ones up until about 1600 still had some weirdness.  Hell, they were still bugging anyone and everyone from Africa or Asia about the Prester John fellow until sometime around 1500 and Gog and Magog were hanging out in Siberia for most of that time, too.

When confronted with an aberration on a European map it’s actually best to work under the assumption that the cartographer was either incorrect, making a wild guess, or treating legendary lands as real places.  This, though, is where the narrative and the conspiracy theories come into play.  We know now that the Americas exist and where they are.  We know now that Australia and Antarctica exist and where they are.  Any map that contains things that look like the Americas, Australia, and Antarctica before their official discoveries, then, invite speculation.

So let’s get back to the di Virga map and the Liu Gang map that Gavin Menzies compared it to.  The Liu Gang map is supposedly a 1763 copy[3] of a 1418 map.  So Menzies calls the di Virga map a 1419 map and claims he copied it from the Liu Gang map after di Virga ran into the Chinese somewhere.  The problem here is that there is no full date on the di Virga map, just the numbers 141.  Every other source I’ve seen reads the map as created in either 1411 or 1415.  So that’s a pretty strong mark against Menzies’ interpretation.

This is how conspiracies work, though.  There are two things, one of which is a map that is most likely a forgery.  Then there’s another map that’s most likely not a forgery but that seems to match up with the forged map and also has anachronisms and a fuzzy date.  So Menzies took the most generous possible interpretation of the fuzziness of the date and turned it into proof of his own theory.

I have, however, run a marathon where a brisk walk down the block would have been enough.  Remember: Gavin Menzies’ theory is that the Chinese discovered the New World in 1421.  His book, which has a copyright of 2002, makes absolutely no mention of Liu Gang, which you’d think it would since, y’know, it would be slam-dunk evidence.  That’s because Liu Gang didn’t reveal his map until 2005 or 2006.  Whether Liu Gang is in on the hoax is debatable, but for the sake of argument let’s say his story is correct and that he’s been suckered by a fake map.

Liu Gang’s map supposedly dates to a 1418 map created by Zheng He that shows the entire world pretty much as we know it today.  Gavin Menzies originally claimed that Zheng He discovered the New World on a voyage that lasted from 1421 through 1423.  So who gave Zheng He his 1418 map before his 1421 voyage?  Was it St. Brendan?

I’m gonna go with St. Brendan.

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[1]A Muslim fortification on the opposite side of the Strait of Gibraltar from, well, Gibraltar.  The Portuguese captured it in 1415 as part of the long struggle between the Christians of the Iberian Peninsula and the Muslims of North Africa.  It’s currently a semi-autonomous Spanish possession because of things that are totally outside the scope of this project.  The Portuguese push to explore along the coast of Africa didn’t start until well after Ceuta.

[2] ] Toby Lester, The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America its Name, (New York: Free Press, 2009), 207.

[3]Purchased by a man named Liu Gang.  Liu Gang claims that it’s a copy of a 1418 map created by Zheng He as part of his voyages.  I choose to call it the Liu Gang map, though, since that’s easier and calling it the Zheng He map wouldn’t be accurate.

Repeating the Last Century, Part 3

The difference between a good history course and a bad history course is simple.  In the good history courses students learn how to take disparate bits of information, pull them together, and come to a deeper understanding of what was happening in the world.  In the bad history courses students simply learn names, dates, and places with no connection.  In the truly terrible history courses students learn names, dates, and places with an ideological bent to convince them to buy into an ideology or patently false interpretation of reality.

This, for the record, is why you hear Evangelical Christians spout off about liberal schools indoctrinating children.  Evangelical Christians of the sort who worry about evil liberals and their agendas usually do so because they have an agenda themselves and can’t see anything outside of the framework of competing ideologies and force-fed interpretations of reality.  The idea of a good education and well-rounded students is an ideology, in that it is an ideology of instruction.  A good education producing well-rounded students does not and should not be an ideology of interpretation, however.  The simple fact is, though, that a well-rounded and knowledgeable student will most likely not take the blinkered reality of the zealot, which makes it appear to that blinkered zealot that there is a nefarious goal in mind.

This interplay of notions of how reality works is what drew me to the particular bits of John Darwin’s After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire since 1405 that occasioned these posts.  It is, in fact, a tale of convergence.

In the latter third of the book I hit a section called “Global Economics” that focused mostly on the British Empire and its system in the late 1800s, since that was the height of the empire upon which the Sun never set.  British thinking about money and globalization, then, dominated much of the world’s thinking about money and globalization.  All of that came together to produce this remarkable passage:

London’s size and wealth thus grew in sympathy with the surging growth of international trade.  Among its merchants and bankers,[1] it was an article of faith that what was good for London  was good for the world.  The idea of free trade and the open economy was adopted in Britain in the 1840s and ‘50s not just as a policy but as a total world-view, an ideology promoted with crusading passion.  It imagined a world in which peoples would be freed from their bondage to rulers by the flood tide of commerce.  Individual freedom and international trade would move forward together.  Free trade was regarded as the key to British economic success, and to the economic progress of the rest of the world. (The alternative – protection – was rejected politically in Britain before 1914, and its supporters were divided over what to protect.)  Its champions insisted that letting the market decided on what it made sense to produce was the most efficient way to use economic resources.[2]

Stop me if you’ve heard any of this recently, possibly in a contemporary and immediate context.  The fascinating thing about the bit that I quoted above is that it is still an economic stand made by proponents of free market capitalism and libertarianism today.  It’s also fascinating in the way that it’s an ideology that eats its own tail.

We think now of free market capitalism and the freedom that it entails in the minds of its supporters as the downside of the legacy of the Cold War.  As such, we think of it, discuss it, and argue about I in the context of that great ideological conflict of the 20th Century: the fight between capitalism and Communism.  However, if you put Darwin’s passage above in the proper historical context something leaps out immediately.  Britain adopted free market economics in the 1840s and ‘50s and it became at fully entrenched, unassailable position over the next thirty years.

Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848.  He wrote Das Kapital two decades later.  Marxism, then, arose as a counterpoint to the increasingly entrenched capitalistic free market system.  The reasons for this are pretty obvious, especially if you follow me through my two points of convergence.  I’d already realized we seem to be repeating history in a disturbingly similar way.  What threw me off was the way other people are seeing the same thing but from different perspectives.

The day after I read the bit about economics Fred Clark put up a post about Christianity Today’s objections to employee health care and compared it to the old Gilded Age notion of the company town.  Fred’s purposes for discussing the company town were different than John Darwin’s reasons for discussing British adherence to free market capitalism and my reasons to start thinking about Marxism and Communism but they all pointed in exactly the same direction.  The system only works if the people at the very top who control the conversation do so while exploiting the people at the bottom and not allowing them to point it out.

The latter half of the paragraph from After Tamerlane should, hopefully, draw the conclusion completely together.

Countries without capital or an industrial base should concentrate their efforts on the production of “staples”: the raw materials or foodstuffs for which a world demand existed.  They should use the income that their staples earned to buy the manufactures they needed, and to pay back the interest on the capital they borrowed – since staple production could expand only if there were railways and harbours to bring the goods to market.  Any other policy – for example building up industrial production behind a wall of tariffs – was not only inefficient (because industrial goods could be bought more cheaply abroad), it was also unjust.  It meant that the consumer was taxed in favour of those who had gained the production of tariffs, a political process that (so free-traders implied) was invariably corrupt.  Enlightened colonial rule should thus enforce free trade (as the British did in India), just as wise diplomacy should always encourage it.[3]

Consider the implications of the free market system as envisioned by 19th Century British capitalists.  Those “staples” were raw materials.  In some cases it was things like food or tea.  In most cases, though, it was things like cotton and silk that would then be sent elsewhere and then turned into textiles and sold back to the producers of the raw materials.

For the British this made perfect sense.  They had all the factories, after all, and manufactured goods are more expensive than raw materials and generally have a higher profit margin.  Part of the reason that manufactured goods are more expensive than raw materials, it’s important to note, is that manufactured goods include raw materials.  So the British were buying materials from their undeveloped colonies at price X and selling them back at price X + Y.  Moreover, they were also engaging in infrastructure improvements – mostly the building of railroads – that worked to their benefit.  Infrastructure improvements allowed the colonizers to move raw materials to port and bring manufactured goods back to the producers of the raw materials and also allowed them to quickly move troops around so a smaller number of British forces could be used to hold a larger area than if large, permanent garrisons were necessary.  All of this, then, could be billed to the colonized people under the guise of paying their rightful share for all of the civilization the British had gifted to them.

It should be blatantly obvious that the things the British were paying for in this system were far lower in price than the things they were getting paid for in return.  This doesn’t make any economic sense until you realize that the world’s primary source of capital at the time was London.  The Brits were more than happy to make loans to cover the difference at a reasonable interest rate.

The goal of British free market capitalists, in short, was to turn the entire world into a company store.

This was an untenable situation.  The British proponents of free market capitalism didn’t see it that way, but they were the isolated ones at the top.  They could afford to sit around in their splendid isolation and discuss how the economic situation that was best for them was also best for everyone else.

It wasn’t, for the record.  That’s why Marxism and then Communism began to gain traction at the same time.  It’s important to note, though, that Marxism was initially supposed to be a workers’ revolt in the already industrialized world.  It wasn’t until Trotsky and the Comintern that Communism took on the agricultural workers’ revolt that we think of today in places like Vietnam and Central America.  As such, it’s useful to consider another link that I ran across that very afternoon.

Ed Kilgore at Political Animal put a link up to a Foreign Policy article with the snarky description, “Charles Emmerson makes case at Foreign Policy that world in 2013 eerily similar to world in 1913. True, the Czar and the Kaiser have been restless of late, and the Entente is irresolute.”

Emmerson offers this great summation of what I was thinking at the time: “In many ways, the world of 1913, the last year before the Great War, seems not so much the world of 100 years ago as the world of today, curiously refracted through time. It is impossible to look at it without an uncanny feeling of recognition, telescoping a century into the blink of an eye. But can peering back into the world of our great-grandparents really help us understand the world we live in today?”

Yes.  Yes it can.  And we’ve got a ways to go.

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[1]One thing that did annoy the fuck out of me whilst re-reading the book was the apparent lack of the services of a good copy editor.  Darwin apparently has some sort of written Tourettes that compels him to splatter commas all over the place.  That might be a British thing, I suppose, but I’ve read a few British historians in my day and don’t remember seeing that many egregious commas.  John Julius Norwich, for one, seemed to know where to put his commas.  Each page also seemed to have at least one or two minor but obvious grammatical errors or missing words or something similar.  It gave me a sad.

[2] John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405, (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), 335.

[3]Ibid., 335-336.

It's a Dog's Life

Today is January 23rd.  That means that yesterday was January 22nd, which is a very special day indeed.  On January 22nd, 2011 I brought Daisy home.




When I got her she was probably close to a year old by the calculations of the folks who rescued her, so I arbitrarily declared the 22nd of January her birthday as well.  By my calculations she's now lived in six places in her three years on this planet: with the people who originally mistreated her, with the lady who rescued her, with my friends who fostered her, with me in Texas, with me at my parents' house, and now with me in my house.

She's a well traveled and flexible pup, that one.

Anyway, since Chicago is really friggin' cold right now, her third birthday was more a day for quiet contemplation.




That grey toy to her right, for the record, is Teri the Triceratops, which my sister got for her for Christmas.  It's the greatest dog toy ever.  Seriously.

You also might be thinking, "Wait, did he bring his carpet from Texas with him?  Because the carpet in that first picture looks a lot like the carpet in the second."  They're very similar in color, mostly because I realized that Daisy's hair blended pretty well with my carpet in Texas.  I can assure you, though, that my current carpet is much nicer than the Texas carpet.  The stuff down there was relatively cheap rental-grade carpet.  I gots myself some nice, plush Mohawk for my house.

After her difficult day of napping and getting a special birthday treat and hanging out with my parents' dog for a couple hours Daisy took a well-deserved nap in the a safe, camouflaged location.




So, yeah, there you go.  That's Daisy at three(ish).

Also, here's this picture, since it makes me happy:

Repeating the Last Century, Part 2

[Note: I changed the name of this series, as the first name I came up with was awful.  This one isn't all that much better, but it doesn't make me cringe.  So, hey!]

There’s a reason I decided to start my exploration of John Darwin’s After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 with a comparison to Gavin Menzies’ 1421 theory.  Well, there are two.  The first is that the whole 1421 is fairly well-tread ground ‘round these here parts and John Darwin also brought China up since, y’know, it was kind of important in Eurasian history.  The second is because I truly enjoy mocking Gavin Menzies and his 1421 theory.  John Darwin actually took down both the 1421 theory and one of the main supports upon which the subsequent 1434 theory was built in the space of about three paragraphs.  This was done unintentionally, though, as Darwin’s book doesn’t mention Gavin Menzies at all.

For those who happened to stumble onto this blog recently and have no idea what the 1421 theory is, I suppose I should offer an explanation.  Basically, a retired British naval officer with no formal training in history got it into his head that the Chinese discovered America in 1421.  This theory was based on some pretty specious evidence and then supported by a great deal of research that depended on the theory being true.  At its core, though, the 1421 theory was based on one absolutely accurate bit of historical truth: in the early 1400s the Chinese emperor sent magnificent treasure fleets all the fuck over the place under a eunuch named Cheng-ho.

I mentioned in the first post on this topic that there are basically two incorrect ways of looking at the history of the last couple centuries.  The first is one of inevitable Western supremacy over the globe.  The second is to look at the West as a rapacious horde that set upon well-developed or even superior cultures in other parts of the world and attempted to destroy them.  The former type of history tends to make incorrect assertions about the quality of Western civilization.  The latter type of history tends to go too far in the opposite direction and make untenable claims about the superiority of the colonized over the colonizers in everything except technology and military might.

Gavin Menzies’ 1421 theory and its follow-on theory that China actually started the Renaissance in 1434 are near-perfect examples of fantastical histories that make untenable claims to support and anti-colonial stance.  The claims themselves are unsupportable without making the most generous possible assumptions about other, seemingly related discoveries.  They also completely ignore the standard scholarship about how the history of China, Europe, and the New World played out.  More importantly, at least as far as the 1421 theory is concerned, the claims are so much vapor.  We know that Europeans made it to the New World and began to exploit its resources from 1492 on.  Even if the Chinese did discover the New World in 1421 they did nothing with it.  Even if Cheng-ho did discover the west coast of North America this would not put him on the same level as Christopher Columbus or John Cabot.  It would put him on the level of the Vikings who planted an unsuccessful colony on Nova Scotia a couple centuries before Columbus.  It would, in short, be an interesting historical footnote.

The whole idea, though, doesn’t actually do anything to help with Menzies’ central theory that China was better than Europe.  Rather, the idea mocks that notion, since it operates under the implicit assumption that the Western notion of progress and success is the correct framing.  Ergo, Menzies makes the assumption that since the 15th Century was the Age of Exploration in Western history then China must have been exploring even more, even better, and even earlier.  Anything else, according to this formulation, is an implicit admission that Chinese culture was inferior to European culture.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The Chinese Empire at the time of Menzies’ supposed 1421 voyage was undergoing a drastic change that was well within the scope of what China had been for most of the previous millennia and would be well within the scope of what China would be for the next four centuries.

Let’s let John Darwin offer the explanation:

The early phase of Ming rule in China between 1368 (when the dynasty began) and the 1430s had seen the forceful reassertion of a distinctly Chinese political and cultural tradition after the long interlude of alien rule under the Mongol Yuan.  The early Ming emperors reinvigorated the bureaucratic state and the examination system on which it rested.  They swept away the chief ministers of the previous regime and created a personal absolutism.  They proclaimed devotion to Confucian orthodoxy, and fostered the collection and publication of Confucian texts.  In 1420 Peking was reestablished as the imperial capital, once the completion of the Grand Canal assured regular supplies from the great grain-basket of the Yangtze valley.  In all these ways the Ming were the real founders of the system of government that lasted in China until the revolution of 1911.  Their reaffirmation of Confucian cultural supremacy lasted almost as long.[1]

That’s a lot of stuff for the emperors to be working on at the same time they were supposedly sending fleets to discover the Americas and then destroying all of the records.  This also highlights the strength of the Chinese system.  China, at its core, was a stable, self-sufficient empire.  With the exception of the occasional worries over Korea, Japan, or Vietnam, China was rarely overly threatened by a neighboring external force.  The Mongols were the only conquerors that China knew for well over a millennia.

Consider the geography of China.  Once the borders of the Chinese empire were defined they were pretty much the same as what we think of today when we think of China.  On the eastern edge was the ocean.  On the southern edge was the jungle and small, not particularly threatening kingdoms of Indochina.  On the southwestern edge and the west there were formidable geographical barriers keeping China separated from the next great basin of civilization in India.  To the north was Mongolia and the doorstep to the vast, nearly empty steppes.  There was, in short, nowhere for China to go if it wanted to expand.  Since almost the whole of the known hospitable lands were already under the control of the imperial power there was also no struggle of small kingdoms to ignite the desires of would-be world conquerors.  China instead created their bureaucratic civil service and set out to make themselves into the most stable and long-running civilization in world history.  Only ancient Egypt could compete.

Western history has traditionally interpreted Chinese stability as a form of cultural stagnancy.  This could not be further from the truth, as the other Asian cultures looked to China with both envy and awe and often attempted to duplicate Chinese systems and successes in their own lands.  European travelers to China in the period before Western colonization began in earnest were similarly overawed by the greatness that was China.

Still, there was the bit about the Mongol conquest to consider.  It’s important to realize, though, that China changed the Mongols far more than the Mongols changed China.  Such was the strength of Chinese culture that the interlude under the Mongol thumb was more of an aberration and slight readjustment of society.  As such, when the Ming came to power in 1368 their goal was not to prove their awesomeness by conquering the world, but to reassert the old Chinese way of doing things.  In fact, let’s see what Darwin has to say about it.

Ming rule represented a vehement reaction against what was seen by its original supporters as the corruption, oppression and overtaxation of the Mongol Yuan.  In deference to Confucian beliefs, the Ming emperors embraced an agrarian ideology in which land was true wealth, and wealth was anchored in social obligations both upward and downward.  Social order and cultural cohesion, the vital conditions of imperial stability, were locked into the system of agrarian production on whose food payments and land taxes dynastic authority depended.[2]

China, in short, was primarily inward looking during the period of the early 1400s.  That still doesn’t explain the fact that there were, in fact, voyages of vast treasure fleets under one of the Ming emperors.  Again I shall let Darwin offer an explanation.

Ming diplomacy was intended to secure the external conditions for internal stability.  From the point of view, the famous voyages dispatched by the emperor Yung-lo around the Indian Ocean under the eunuch Cheng-ho were an aberration, prompted perhaps by fear of attack by Tamerlane and his successors.[3]

I shall pause here and point out a few things.  First, we know that there were treasure fleets under Yung-lo.  We also know that they were only really dispatched around the Indian Ocean.  Those voyages are all the records we have.  Menzies took those voyages and offered a fanciful notion that they managed to make it all around the globe and discovered the Americas over half a century before Columbus’ voyage.

Menzies’ theory makes little sense, however.  China was not an easttward-looking empire in the early 1400s.  They were looking west, south, and north.  The Ming Dynasty was still relatively fresh and looking to reassert itself.  Exploration and adventurism wasn’t the sort of thing that would cement their power in the agrarian, inward-looking Chinese system.

Darwin’s bit about Tamerlane, in fact, offers the most plausible explanation for why the Chinese treasure fleets might have existed at all and why they would necessarily focus on the Indian Ocean.  Remember that the Ming had just thrown off the Yuan.  The Yuan were alien monarchs put in place by foreign conquest under the Mongols.  The Timurids under Tamerlane appeared to be the true heirs to the Mongol legacy of Gengis and Kublai Khan would have been just as terrifying a specter to the new Chinese emperors as they were to the Middle Eastern and European rulers who had just barely beaten back the Mongol hordes.  These fears would play out in the Indian subcontinent, where Tamerlane's heirs created the Mughal Empire, which would last in one form or another for over three centuries.

It’s also important to consider the exact nature of the particular emperor who sent the treasure fleets out.  Further, we must consider the aftermath.  Again we look to John Darwin.

Yung-lo, the “second founder”, who reigned from 1403 to 1424, was an exceptionally determined and aggressive monarch.  His naval imperialism, the protracted effort to incorporate Vietnam into his empire, and his military drive against the Inner Asian nomads may all have been part of an abortive strategy to assert China’s primacy throughout East Asia.  But the strain was too great.  His successors adopted a drastic alternative.  The adventure in sea power was quickly abandoned.  Private overseas travel and trade were forbidden.  And to secure North China against invasion from the steppe, or unwelcome contact with its nomads, they preferred to rely not on military expeditions but on the Great Wall.[4]

This doesn’t completely negate the 1421 theory, but it does call the notion itself into question.  It certainly puts the kibosh on the notion of the subsequent 1434 theory, though.

As such, consider this a branching off.  I will be working on two separate sets of posts.  The former will stay in the 1400s in China so I can mock Gavin Menzies and his 1434 theory some more.  The latter will jump forward some four and a half centuries so that we can look with John Darwin into how the world we live in today is simply walking back across the same ground as the world of a century ago.

Why?  Because it’s been a while since I’ve written about history.  It’s also been a while since I’ve decided to undertake a series of posts that there’s no freaking way I could possibly complete.  Let’s see if this is any different…

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[1]John Darwin, After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405, (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), 87.

[2]Ibid.

[3]Ibid., 88.

[4]Ibid.