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You are here: Home / Politics / Politicans / David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute / Race to the bottom

Race to the bottom

by DougJ|  November 27, 201110:05 pm| 147 Comments

This post is in: David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute

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I know nothing about the study of history, so feel free to call me an anti-intellectual nihilist for saying that I can’t see the difference between Niall Ferguson’s counterfactual work and the SNL skit “What if Napoleon had a B-52 at the Battle of Waterloo?”

I’m not going to read Ferguson’s new book, but this blog post lays out a convincing case that Ferguson conflates race and culture in his new paean to the greatness of teh west.

Now Ferguson is suing another reviewer for writing that the book is essentially racist. I have to wonder if someone who was really concerned about being thought of as racist would write things like this about Obama:

Felix was not only black. He was also very, very lucky.

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147Comments

  1. 1.

    4tehlulz

    November 27, 2011 at 10:09 pm

    He might want to ask David Irving how suing critics worked out before he files the papers.

  2. 2.

    Warren Terra

    November 27, 2011 at 10:11 pm

    British libel (slander?) law is nucking futs, and anyone who’d abuse it in this way deserves to be rejected by polite society – and that’s even the case if the headline and every fifth sentence of Mishra’s review were “Niall Ferguson is a vile racist bigot”, and even if there isn’t, in fact, a single racist contention in Ferguson’s entire body of work. That sort of legal bullying just isn’t acceptable.

  3. 3.

    Bobby

    November 27, 2011 at 10:16 pm

    Among professional historians Ferguson is no longer taken very seriously. He writes books that back up his preconceived notions, not really equally weighing the historical evidence. Accordingly he only has a following for those outside the historical profession.

    If you really want to piss off a history grad student, start name dropping him and referencing his works.

  4. 4.

    gnomedad

    November 27, 2011 at 10:19 pm

    Money quote from Noah Smith (as a service for those who don’t click through, you’re welcome):

    The biggest threat facing American civilization now is not loss of work ethic – Americans still work more than the rich-world average. Nor is it insufficient consumerism (believe you me), the abandonment of modern medicine, the end of rule of law, creeping monopolies, or the abandonment of science. It is political dysfunction and distrust of our national institutions, brought on by the refusal of a large bloc of white Americans (the “Tea Party” etc.) to accept nonwhite Americans. The very denial of “Western-ness” to nonwhite Americans is what is threatening the West. Articles like Ferguson’s, in other words, are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
    __
    Here’s my idea for how to revitalize Western civilization. Widen the big tent. Recruit smart people from all over the world to be Americans. Renew the idea of America as a nation defined by principles and institutions rather than by race and tribe. Assimilate Asians and Hispanics the way we assimilated Italians and Greeks and Jews a century ago. Promote nationalism as a unifying force rather than racism, in order to rebuild trust in public institutions and improve the provision of public goods.

  5. 5.

    Cap'n Magic

    November 27, 2011 at 10:23 pm

    He thinks his marriage to

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayaan_Hirsi_Ali

    will absolve him is a reach.

  6. 6.

    Larkspur

    November 27, 2011 at 10:23 pm

    I am sorry. I could only read about a paragraph of your link to noahpinion blog (looks good!), which quotes Ferguson thusly:

    They [the Western values he describes as “killer apps] are the best explanation for what economic historians call “the great divergence”: the astonishing gap that arose between Western standards of living and those in the rest of the world…

    And so I can’t read further, because WTF, weren’t the original inhabitants of Australia (for one plain example) living quite harmoniously in their environment? God knows I would not like to have lived in London in the first half of the 19th century – if you want to talk about comparative standards of living – and would probably have chosen Aboriginal life in a heartbeat (along with, I’ll wager, more than a few other lower-class English women), and see? This is where the Ferguson discussion both confounds me and annoys me. And because I am neither a scholar nor a pundit, I say piss off, Mr. Ferguson. I will not read your book, no, I will not. I do not know if he has a blog, but if he does, and if I had been there, I would surely tell him that I shan’t be back.

  7. 7.

    Jewish Steel

    November 27, 2011 at 10:25 pm

    Oh yeah. I remember hearing this hollow nonsense about “killer apps” and Western “operating systems” on a BBC program a while back. It’s like m_c for people who read Time.

  8. 8.

    Tom Levenson

    November 27, 2011 at 10:25 pm

    Ferguson is a mystery wrapped in an enigma. Or rather, as acquaintances over at the Harvard history dept. have said to me, as a historian, he knows a lot about late nineteenth century City (of London) banking.

    The rest, not so much.

    But those who think Kipling was a documentarian and not a writer of fiction think Ferguson is da bomb.

    Fools or knaves? Or perhaps both dessert topping and floor wax.

  9. 9.

    schrodinger's cat

    November 27, 2011 at 10:26 pm

    How did this apologist for the British Empire become a VSP in the US?

  10. 10.

    Cap'n Magic

    November 27, 2011 at 10:31 pm

    @https://balloon-juice.com/2011/11/27/race-to-the-bottom-3/#comment-2902213:

    Your guess is as good as mine….

  11. 11.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    November 27, 2011 at 10:35 pm

    @schrodinger’s cat: It’s (apologist for empires, especially with an accent) quite trendy in conservative circles these days. Hence VSP to people who find he sounds like their idea of a smart person.

  12. 12.

    eric

    November 27, 2011 at 10:37 pm

    I guess he forgot about how guns and ammunition had a big part in the rise of European world dominance starting in the 1500s.

  13. 13.

    schrodinger's cat

    November 27, 2011 at 10:38 pm

    @a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): I guess you are right. BS sounds better when delivered with a British accent.

  14. 14.

    gnomedad

    November 27, 2011 at 10:39 pm

    @a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
    Also, you know the DFHs are all about blaming Western Civilization for everything, so it’s considered very daring to point out that there is something to be said for science, medicine, rule of law, and bathing.

  15. 15.

    wilfred

    November 27, 2011 at 10:44 pm

    An opinion piece doesn’t detract from Ferguson’s scholarship. As someone who detests imperialism, and its handmaiden capitalism, I feel obliged to read Ferguson, exactly because he makes rigorous, unsentimental arguments in defense of the British imperialist legacy. His work began with a simple question: “How did a small, relatively insignificant island country manage to create and govern the largest empire in the history of the world”?

    a) Magic
    b) Divine help
    c) It just, like, happened
    d) Through a complex series of technological and economic events that produced both the means and desire to pursue what at that time was still a viable political objective, viz. Empire.

    I don’t disagree with Ferguson’s conclusions. His argument is academic, even elegant. What I object to is how posterior justifications can be used to continue the project of Empire. Is that his objective? I don’t see it.
    Science begins with observing a phenomenon and wondering how it got there. Since Vico, history as science tries to do as much. See Jared Diamond, et al., for similar transdisciplinary approaches.

  16. 16.

    burnspbesq

    November 27, 2011 at 10:45 pm

    @Warren Terra:

    British libel (slander?) law is nucking futs

    Actually, that’s a minority opinion. In most of the English speaking world, it’s American defamation law, with its impossible burden of proof, that is considered wack.

  17. 17.

    jl

    November 27, 2011 at 10:50 pm

    Ferguson is an nouveau blanc, as the Frogs would say. Two hundred, a hundred and fifty, years ago these Irish (or Scots, makes no difference) lower orders were not in the club. See what happens when fine old Anglo Saxon standards are lowered?

    Ferguson don’t seem very aware of much of what goes on around the world, does he?

    Doesn’t seem to realize that many of the best national educational systems in the world are public. He certainly doesn’t seem to know much about economics, especially macroeconomics.

    But what he says, even if it is noting but trite stereotype, fantasy, and counterfactual history, has the right subtext for the ignorant boors and corporate hacks that run our incompetent corrupt media.

    I took a look at the comments, and one of the first ones said that Ferguson was not taken very seriously in the UK, and speculated that is why he came over here to the US. Well, high toned old world intellectuals with sketchy provenance are an old tradition here, at least as old as the US can manage, so I suppose we will survive.

  18. 18.

    West of the Cascades

    November 27, 2011 at 10:54 pm

    @jl:

    See what happens when fine old Anglo Saxon standards are lowered?

    I thought the English just became inbred to the point they were as stupid as Niall Ferguson and his ilk — hence it wasn’t a lowering of standards as much as letting people who had been inbreeding on Hibernia and north of Hadrian’s Wall for centuries into the club …

    and now Niall Ferguson can sue me in a UK court …

    stupid laws they have over there …

  19. 19.

    jl

    November 27, 2011 at 10:55 pm

    @wilfred: If Ferguson would appear in public as an expert on the history of the British Empire, I would have no problem with him.

    But he masquerades as an expert on economics, particularly international macrofinance and macroeconomics. And when I have heard him talk on the teevee and radio, he simply does not know what he is talking about. But he doesn’t need to know what he is talking about, or even make any sense, he is on the of VSP pundits called on to push the CW VSP view.

  20. 20.

    Chris

    November 27, 2011 at 10:55 pm

    @a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):

    It’s (apologist for empires, especially with an accent) quite trendy in conservative circles these days.

    Indeed! Say hello to Dinesh D’Souza.

    You’d never know it from all the American Exceptionalist rhetoric, but conservative elites in this country have historically been very much okay with the Old World, or at least with its elites. Back in the day of plantations and slave owners, the South was considered the “most European” part of America… and spent most of the Civil War begging for a British or French intervention. In the Gilded Age, robber barons were known to marry off their daughters to European nobility. Today, conservative “intellectuals” wax nostalgic for the British Empire and tut-tut the wild savages irresponsibly going “anti-colonial.”

  21. 21.

    The prophet Nostradumbass

    November 27, 2011 at 11:01 pm

    @jl: That is what irritates me about him as well. I acquired a real distaste for him after seeing him on Real Time a couple times.

  22. 22.

    Librarian

    November 27, 2011 at 11:02 pm

    You can tell how completely out of touch with reality Ferguson is by the extremely bad timing of his book, which proclaims the superiority of the West at the precise moment that the Western economic system is imploding and self-destructing. Great job, Niall.

  23. 23.

    MikeJ

    November 27, 2011 at 11:03 pm

    Davis X will back me up, Felix wasn’t lucky, he was happy.

  24. 24.

    Suffern ACE

    November 27, 2011 at 11:05 pm

    I wish I could see more signs that Western Civilization is declining. I suppose if I lived in certain areas of the country, I would note that the cities are being abandoned for the hinterlands. As if the Mongols themselves sacked Akron and left it mouldering like Samarkand, never to rise to it’s former glory. Or they’ve forgotten in Rotterdam how to move water around and no one else has the knowledge, like a Dutch Indus Valley.

    I’m not seeing the symptoms of civilization decline, so maybe someone can fill me in.

  25. 25.

    Nutella

    November 27, 2011 at 11:06 pm

    I like this from Krugman when he responded to Fergusan’s complaint about his comments on the Felix the Cat line:

    For the record, I don’t think that Professor Ferguson is a racist.
    __
    I think he’s a poseur.

    Why is it so common that when someone is told “That thing you said sounds racist” that they can never reply “Oops, sorry, I didn’t mean it that way” but always have to say “How dare you call me a racist!”

  26. 26.

    fasteddie9318

    November 27, 2011 at 11:06 pm

    @Bobby:

    Among professional historians Ferguson is no longer taken very seriously.

    I can’t fathom how a Very Serious Historian like Niall Ferguson, with an appointment at the Very Prestigious Institution of Harvard, could no longer be taken seriously when his most significant contribution to historical thought has been his Deep, Intellectual discussion of “killer apps” and the risk that they’re being “downloaded” into “non-Western operating systems.” Really, I can’t for the life of me figure out why anybody would think that Niall Ferguson is a clown. It’s a mystery.

  27. 27.

    Console

    November 27, 2011 at 11:08 pm

    @Chris:

    It’s what makes american conservatives actually conservative. Really conservatism is the love of hierarchy. It’s the idea that the privileged are privileged for a good reason (be that reason tradition, divine right, or some brooksian psuedo intellectual nonsense).

  28. 28.

    Villago Delenda Est

    November 27, 2011 at 11:08 pm

    @gnomedad:

    This.

    America, despite the bleatings of Obersturmbannführer Pat Buchanan, and guys like Ferguson, was never intended to be a “Blut und Boden” sort of country. Given that the Founders drew from Native American political ideas, in part, in writing the Constitution, and given that so many diverse ethnicities and religions were present in the 18th Century, and their own notions of “this is about all mankind”, it’s pretty obvious that they didn’t intend for it to be one ethnic/religious group uberalles. Now, contrast this with the popular opinion of the mob, then and now.

    This country is supposed to be about an ideal, not about any inherited advantage of any sort. You’re supposed to make your own way and enjoy your own life and liberty and pursue happiness, not have it handed to you on the basis of birth. Well, at least Jefferson bought into that, at least for white folks. But it can be inferred that as things changed, so would the inclusiveness of the ideal.

  29. 29.

    jl

    November 27, 2011 at 11:09 pm

    BTW, I wonder how old worry wort austerity loving good old solid money Ferggie will explain the evolution of the Euro crisis?

    Or, how that commenter who scolded me a week or so ago for suggesting that Krugman be taken seriously when he said the Euro crisis would soon it the hard working, thrifty, budget surplus loving Northern European core, not just the lazy shiftless, um… not all that perfectly Anglo Saxon and maybe not 100 percent white Southern Eye talians and such like.

    So, we say a failed German bond auction, Increasing risk premiums in several hard working responsible Northern European nations.

    Krugman has a NYT blog post tonight with a link to an analysis of the mysterious divergence of Swedish and Finnish bond yields. Not much difference between those two over regulated socialist hell holes, except Finland is on the Euro and Sweden is not.

    Finland is also not Scandinavian, and until this century, was therefore not altogether ‘white’ from the Anglo Saxon Norman point of view. maybe that is Ferguson’s explanation for the Fall of Finland (which since civilizations fall apart quickly, may take only Days! Days, my dear Sir!)

    But of course, if you tried to understand what people like Krugman, Stiglitz, and others say you would have seen it coming.

    If you take people like Ferguson seriously, you will not see something like the evolution of the Euro crisis coming, but afterward, you can hear him saying vague and cloudy, ominous and baleful things about how this shows we (excuse me, I meant ‘you, one of the lesser people’) are going to hell in handbasket.

  30. 30.

    jl

    November 27, 2011 at 11:11 pm

    Reposted because of s o s h u l i s m. Lets hope I caught all the s o s h u l i s t.

    BTW, I wonder how old worry wort austerity loving good old solid money Ferggie will explain the evolution of the Euro crisis?

    Or, how that commenter who scolded me a week or so ago for suggesting that Krugman be taken seriously when he said the Euro crisis would soon it the hard working, thrifty, budget surplus loving Northern European core, not just the lazy shiftless, um… not all that perfectly Anglo Saxon and maybe not 100 percent white Southern Eye talians and such like.

    So, we say a failed German bond auction, Increasing risk premiums in several hard working responsible Northern European nations.

    Krugman has a NYT blog post tonight with a link to an analysis of the mysterious divergence of Swedish and Finnish bond yields. Not much difference between those two over regulated s o s h u l i s t hell holes, except Finland is on the Euro and Sweden is not.

    Finland is also not Scandinavian, and until this century, was therefore not altogether ‘white’ from the Anglo Saxon Norman point of view. maybe that is Ferguson’s explanation for the Fall of Finland (which since civilizations fall apart quickly, may take only Days! Days, my dear Sir!)

    But of course, if you tried to understand what people like Krugman, Stiglitz, and others say you would have seen it coming.

    If you take people like Ferguson seriously, you will not see something like the evolution of the Euro crisis coming, but afterward, you can hear him saying vague and cloudy, ominous and baleful things about how this shows we (excuse me, I meant ‘you, one of the lesser people’) are going to hell in handbasket.

  31. 31.

    Violet

    November 27, 2011 at 11:12 pm

    @Chris:
    Dinesh D’Souza would have been considered one of those “wild savages” back during the time period he apparently makes conservatives so nostalgic for.

  32. 32.

    fasteddie9318

    November 27, 2011 at 11:15 pm

    @Suffern ACE:

    As if the Mongols themselves sacked Akron and left it mouldering like Samarkand, never to rise to it’s former glory.

    I don’t mean to be a history geek, but Samarqand reached the height of its power and wealth under Timur in the late 14th century, after the Mongols. It went into a stasis/slow decline after Timur died but didn’t really hit rock bottom until Nadir Shah invaded the region in the 18th century. It’s probably in my personal top 10 in terms of places I’d like to see someday.

    I apologize to everyone for having posted this.

  33. 33.

    Villago Delenda Est

    November 27, 2011 at 11:15 pm

    @Violet:

    I might point out that Pat Buchanan, 150 years or so back, would be as bad as any brown person today to the know-nothings of the time.

    Irish. Catholic. Utter scum.

  34. 34.

    gnomedad

    November 27, 2011 at 11:19 pm

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    This country is supposed to be about an ideal, not about any inherited advantage of any sort.

    This is why my head explodes when I hear people shrieking about “American Exceptionalism!” We’re supposed to have exceptional ideals, not exceptional presumption.

  35. 35.

    Nutella

    November 27, 2011 at 11:19 pm

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    For more historical perspective: How the Irish Became White

    Ferguson’s not exactly an Anglo-Saxon name, either.

  36. 36.

    jl

    November 27, 2011 at 11:24 pm

    When I have time, I will look into Ferguson’s take on British History. I find it hard to believe that he would credit the British Empire’s (Edit, or other European empires) rise to good mainly old Anglo Saxon competition and hard work ethic.

    I thought the famed British monopolies, that functioned more or less as glorified and metastasized versions of today;s military contractors, scaled up by two orders of magnitude, had something to do with it. Like the Dutch monopolies before them.

    These 17th and 18th century competitive mercantile empires sure did have a thing for monopolies. But only a communist nincompoop, dreamer, and dangerous subverter of young minds, like Adam Smith, would dream of criticizing the rise of mercantile empires. Those monopolies were true killer apps, really truly killer.

  37. 37.

    transientseeker

    November 27, 2011 at 11:27 pm

    @Wilfred

    I don’t understand why you, a self styled detester of imperialism and capitalism, feel obliged to read Ferguson. I certainly hope not for the reasons you mention–his arguments have neither rigor (Maybe you should research the word), nor unsentimentality (arrogant provocateurism is more common).

    Personally, I don’t agree with his conclusions, since I think they are sloppy and overdrawn. You wish to compare history to a science, but science is not such without precision and accuracy, which Ferguson manifestly lacks. I’d suggest reading some of the real history written today in the journals and published by the universities. I’d think you’d be surprised by its almost excessive rigor and attention to the demands of the multifarious evidence one has to work with as a historian.

    Back to your point about obligation, by the same strain of logic, I’d be compelled to read George Will, another pompous, faux erudite gasbag, which I do not. Maybe you do.

  38. 38.

    Librarian

    November 27, 2011 at 11:29 pm

    In this article:
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/20/niall-ferguson-interview-civilization
    we find this wonderful passage by Ferguson:

    I mean, I’m sure the Apache and the Navajo had all sorts of admirable traits. In the absence of literacy we don’t know what they were because they didn’t write them down. We do know they killed a hell of a lot of bison.

    A commenter points out that the people who actually killed the bison were Ferguson’s heroes, the white Americans. The man is clearly a sociopath. Moral considerations and right and wrong aren’t important to him. He thinks war and colonialism are just fine and dandy.

  39. 39.

    jl

    November 27, 2011 at 11:29 pm

    I thought Freguson was a Gaelic Scots name. Just as bad as the Irish. I know, for I have quite a bit of both of those Gaelic flavors in me.

    But, in the nineteenth century, high toned Brits decided that Scotland was a nice place for lengthy and luxurious Progresses, Tours, hunting trips and golf (Edit: corrected from ‘gold’, what a typo, golf is an idiotic game and a waste of time), so they toned up the old dirt poor crofters, local tyrant misers, bandits and outlaws that hung out up there.

    Otherwise, we would consider Edinburgh to be like Dublin, the one accomplished and cosmopolitan city stranded in a quaint old country with quaint old ways.

  40. 40.

    Nutella

    November 27, 2011 at 11:30 pm

    Much is explained by this description from Wikipedia of Ferguson’s university career:

    Whilst at Oxford he became best friends with Andrew Sullivan based on a shared love of right-wing politics and punk music. He became a Thatcherite by 1982, identifying the position with “the Sex Pistols’ position in 1977: it was a rebellion against the stuffy corporatism of the 70s.” Whilst at university “He was very much a Scot on the make…Niall was a witty, belligerent bloke who seemed to have come from an entirely different planet,” according to Simon Winder. Ferguson has stated that “I was surrounded by insufferable Etonians with fake Cockney accents who imagined themselves to be working-class heroes in solidarity with the striking miners. It wasn’t long before it became clear that the really funny and interesting people on campus were Thatcherites.”

    Why is Ferguson a VSP here? Same reason Sullivan is.

  41. 41.

    Jewish Steel

    November 27, 2011 at 11:31 pm

    @MikeJ: I liked it.

  42. 42.

    DW

    November 27, 2011 at 11:32 pm

    @burnspbesq: True. Only America would grant such protection to an uppity Jewess like Deborah Lipstadt who dared criticized a wise and brave historian like David Irving. Seriously, can anyone give me an example of British libel law giving a good result? At least in the United States it’s more difficult for the rich and powerful to shut up their critics and we just assume people are adults who can and should evaluate claims for themselves.

  43. 43.

    Scott P.

    November 27, 2011 at 11:34 pm

    @fasteddie9318:

    Don’t apologize — I was going to post it myself before I read your response.

  44. 44.

    wilfred

    November 27, 2011 at 11:35 pm

    @jl:

    Of course he doesn’t. His principal argument is that Empire was made possible by technological advantages that the colonizer had over the colonized – the forged steel of Spanish swords and armor versus the wooded swords and quilted cloth armor of the Inca, for example. In fact, Ferguson goes out of his way to debunk any ethnic or racial justifications for the success of the imperial project. The Spanish conquered the Inca because they had better weapons – not because they were racially, morally, etnically or ethically superior.

    This absurdly obvious fact is the starting point for later religous/political ideologies that came to justify imperialism. See Kipling.

  45. 45.

    jl

    November 27, 2011 at 11:37 pm

    @fasteddie9318: No, thanks for the comment. I too have been fascinated by Samarkand, and would like to see it someday.

    So, I know there is another Samarkand fan out there, and I don’t feel so… so alone and apart, anymore.

  46. 46.

    Slugger

    November 27, 2011 at 11:40 pm

    Whenever I read deep thinkers about the supremacy of the west, I wonder what would have happened if a few accidents of history would have gone the other way. For example, what if measles and smallpox would have evolved in the Americas instead of in Europe? Would we now be talking In Nahuatl the ancient wisdom of the calendar makers that led to the conquest of the world for the greater glory of Hummingbird-on-the-left?

  47. 47.

    ChrisNYC

    November 27, 2011 at 11:40 pm

    “my favorite cartoon character,” the cringy and soooo nerdy and Friedmanish apps and downloads analogy and the petulant and petty, “I trust you will print my response, SIR” to Fallows. How embarrassing! Someone at Harvard should put a leash on him until he learns how to act with some self-respect and dignity.

  48. 48.

    Schlemizel

    November 27, 2011 at 11:40 pm

    I guess I am really lucky – I have no idea who the F Niall Ferguson is or why anyone would care.

  49. 49.

    Roger Moore

    November 27, 2011 at 11:41 pm

    @Nutella:

    Why is it so common that when someone is told “That thing you said sounds racist” that they can never reply “Oops, sorry, I didn’t mean it that way” but always have to say “How dare you call me a racist!”

    Because they do mean it that way. What they’re objecting to is that the rules of civilized discourse have changed so that people who do mean it that way are criticized and their opinions are discounted. They want to change the rules so you can say that stuff again and nobody will think anything of it, and counter-attacking people who call them out on it is how they’re trying to do so.

  50. 50.

    Chris

    November 27, 2011 at 11:43 pm

    @jl:

    a quaint old country with quaint old ways.

    LOL. It’s funny because that’s kind of how a lot of us Yanks relate to Britain.

  51. 51.

    jl

    November 27, 2011 at 11:43 pm

    @wilfred: OK, I will take your word for it about his previous work, and when have time will read up to see if that is the case (maybe he should talk about history when he is on the air, rather than trying to pretend to do economic analysis?).

    But he seems to be changing his mind with this killer apps and downloading stuff.

    I do not see anything about ‘superior technology’ in the reviews of his lament about the decline of the West.

  52. 52.

    Suffern ACE

    November 27, 2011 at 11:45 pm

    @Scott P.: @fasteddie9318: Fine.

    As if the Mongols themselves sacked Akron, only to have another set of Mongols rebuild it a a century later.

  53. 53.

    Sly

    November 27, 2011 at 11:47 pm

    @Villago Delenda Est:

    I might point out that Pat Buchanan, 150 years or so back, would be as bad as any brown person today to the know-nothings of the time.

    Not simply as bad. The Irish were considered the same as any brown person. Same goes for Italians, who were convicted under the same miscegenation laws for mixing with “whites” that those of African descent faced. The Irish weren’t turned into white people until the early 20th century, mostly because the WASPs believed they were in a numbers war against Asians, Blacks, and Jews and the Irish and Italians had sufficiently assimilated to pass as white.

    The entire project of Western civilization has been to turn everyone outside Anglo-Saxon Europe into Anglo-Saxon Europeans. Coerce them into adopting as many trappings of civilization as possible and, some day, they could be white too.

    @Nutella:
    Also, too, Whiteness of a Different Color.

  54. 54.

    Constantia

    November 27, 2011 at 11:48 pm

    Every time I hear about this clown I get embarrassed all over again that he shares my name (thank heavens no relation). The idea that he as a “professional” historian –as noted here–has conveniently forgotten his own national history of British Imperial exploitation (the Highland clearances, Cromwell’s little excursions in the century before), and uses to which the Scots were put in the British armed forces, to keep them from raising hell on the island… Well, he’s clearly an idiot. A blot on the family escutcheon, as it were.

  55. 55.

    The prophet Nostradumbass

    November 27, 2011 at 11:48 pm

    @jl: Well, I suppose Belfast is in “Northern Ireland”. Of course, most people don’t know much about the place.

  56. 56.

    wilfred

    November 27, 2011 at 11:50 pm

    @37 transientseeker:

    I should have thought it obvious. At the end of his “Empire”, Ferguson argued that like it or not the United States had inherited the British role of Empire without even knowing it – an empire in denial he called it, if I recall.

    Well, I’m against that. As I said earlier, Ferguson made good scholarship – it’s what happens next that concerns me. People like him, and Fukuyama and Huntington, all in different ways, of course, contribute(d) to the current imperial role of the United States.

    Unlike you and other people here I don’t have the luxury of simply calling him a racist, or an asshole, or whatever word of power counts for ‘rigor’ on a blog. I need to refute it in a more convincing way. His argument in Empire is quite rigorous and convincing – perhaps you’d care to show how it isn’t?

    History is history. What matters is the present. Exporting democracy is precisely the idea that Ferguson advocates. Anyone want to refute it? I certainly do.

  57. 57.

    Warren Terra

    November 27, 2011 at 11:50 pm

    @DW:
    I agree with your general thrust, obviously, but it is worth pointing out that Deborah Lipstadt won her libel defense – eventually, and very, very expensively. Similarly, in the other recent world-famous abusive use of British libel law, in which a bunch of quacks tried to persecute Simon Singh and The Guardian, the defendents eventually prevailed, again very expensively and with the emphasis on “eventually”.

    But there have been cases – certainly, older cases, if none in the last decade springs to my American mind – in which wealthy people won absurd judgments against crusading truth tellers using British libel law – for example, a huge judgment Robert Maxwell won against Private Eye before he was exposed as a notorious fraudster.

  58. 58.

    Roger Moore

    November 27, 2011 at 11:53 pm

    @wilfred:

    The Spanish conquered the Inca because they had better weapons – not because they were racially, morally, etnically or ethically superior.

    And because the Inca had recently been devastated by an epidemic they had no inherited resistance to, and because they were politically divided and the Spanish were able to play the sides off against each other. The Europeans ethnic and religious solidarity when confronted with Indians was probably more significant in their success conquering the New World than their technological advantages- and a couple of orders of magnitude less important than the disease factor.

  59. 59.

    Davis X. Machina

    November 27, 2011 at 11:56 pm

    @MikeJ: There’s no difference. Felix means both ‘lucky’ and ‘happy’.

    If you’re just lucky — like Eeyore, who just hit the Powerball — you’re fortunatus.
    If you’re happy/goofy, but luck has nothing to do with it — you’re Steve Forbes, say — you’re laetus.
    Or if you’re happy regardless of what cards life has dealt you, you’re beatus — whence we get beatification, the first step towards canonization as a saint.

  60. 60.

    GregB

    November 27, 2011 at 11:57 pm

    Oh, a witty Scot on the make!

    He’s a Goddamn crumpet sucking fascist.

  61. 61.

    fasteddie9318

    November 27, 2011 at 11:59 pm

    @jl: *sniff* Just knowing there’s another one of us out there really means a lot, thanks.

  62. 62.

    wilfred

    November 28, 2011 at 12:00 am

    @Constantia:

    That’s just silly. You should read “Empire”; he clearly desribes the aggressive British colonization of Ireland, for example, as well as the extraordinary preponderance of Scots on the board of the East India company and among colonial solider-administrators. More apolegetically than anything else, I would say, given the near psychopathic racism of some of them.

    You should read his work before criticizing him. Most people here haven’t, that’s clear enough. If they had, they’d be a lot more critical of American foreign policy.

  63. 63.

    David Koch

    November 28, 2011 at 12:04 am

    Race to the bottom

    Oh. I thought this was gonna be about Kim Kardashian.

  64. 64.

    kuvasz

    November 28, 2011 at 12:05 am

    Shorter Niall Ferguson; “We didn’t treat the wogs all that bad, even if we killed them in the millions.”

  65. 65.

    pete

    November 28, 2011 at 12:09 am

    @jl: Me too, since forever, thanks to James Elroy Fletcher:

    We travel not for trafficking alone;
    By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned:
    For lust of knowing what should not be known
    We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.

  66. 66.

    burnspbesq

    November 28, 2011 at 12:10 am

    @DW:

    uppity Jewess

    That’s a quite bizarre way to refer to a fairly distinguished historian. Got some issues you’d like to tell us about?

    I’m happy to have a conversation about the pros and cons of US and English defamation law. You don’t seem interested.

  67. 67.

    wilfred

    November 28, 2011 at 12:10 am

    @Roger Moore:

    I refer specifically to the battle of Cajamarca; your point still stand but mine was that the military/technologial victory enabled the Spanish to exploit other medical/political events.

    I think it was Jared Diamond who discussed this, not Ferguson, although the latter makes similar arguments when he talks about the Maxim gun and its effects in the Sudan. There technology was the absolute deciding factor in civilizational struggle.

  68. 68.

    fasteddie9318

    November 28, 2011 at 12:11 am

    @wilfred:

    Of course he doesn’t. His principal argument is that Empire was made possible by technological advantages that the colonizer had over the colonized – the forged steel of Spanish swords and armor versus the wooded swords and quilted cloth armor of the Inca, for example. In fact, Ferguson goes out of his way to debunk any ethnic or racial justifications for the success of the imperial project. The Spanish conquered the Inca because they had better weapons – not because they were racially, morally, etnically or ethically superior.

    As you say, it’s not his history that’s bunk, it’s his attempt to prescribe policy in the here and now and, while the history isn’t racial/ethnic focused, the other crap certainly is. What the hell is a “non-western operating system”? Noah Smith’s blog entry, which DougJ linked to above, is devastating, because (as he writes) for a country like Japan that has adopted all of Ferguson’s “killer apps” yet is still, to him, fundamentally Other, the only justification for classifying it as Other is that funny yellow people live there instead of wholesome white folks. For fuck’s sake, and I’m again stealing from the blog entry, a big chunk of his argument is that western civilization is at risk because Asian-Americans in college outwork (which he offers without evidence) what I assume Ferguson would think of as American-Americans. The only possible reason that it’s a sign of the decline of the West that people who are Americans (for fuck’s sake!) are working hard in school is because he thinks those people aren’t really Americans, because they don’t look right and they have weird names and their food is different.

  69. 69.

    Constantia

    November 28, 2011 at 12:15 am

    @willard
    No, it isn’t “silly” and I doubt you’d make such a glib and condescending retort to a writer you perceived as having a masculine persona. You on the other hand revel in apologia for an imperialist wanker. I haven’t read his work, you’re right.
    I was responding to the critiques and discussions underway in this specific thread. And, my point was very specifically about what uses which the Scots were put to, in the British military–I think I said that? Still doesn’t make it right, and more to the point, what did it do to Scottish society? the effect is not limited to the Imperial project in its outward facing efforts.

    Why don’t you get off your fucking high horse anyway. If I want to be embarrassed for some right wing ideologue who sucks at the Hoover Institute and the like for loads of dough–and shares my name– that’s my prerogative. Póg Mo Thóin.

  70. 70.

    gorram

    November 28, 2011 at 12:16 am

    Also, too.

  71. 71.

    jl

    November 28, 2011 at 12:18 am

    @wilfred: The post is about what Ferguson is saying now, in current appearances and articles, and from what I have read and seen of him, there be howlers and problematic attitude therein. And most of my complaints are about Ferguson pretending expertise in economics, not history. And I have read enough of his stuff on economics to know that he does not know what he is talking about.

    This is not a graduate seminar on his previously published scholarly work on world history.

    Which I will look at, BTW. To be honest, if what you say is true, that he credits the British Empire’s (and the West’s) success to superior technology, then I do not have high hopes that it will be informative. That is an old explanation, and unless Ferguson has some new twist on it, I do not see how it can be very interesting.

    Though, I am biased, since I do not believe that the ‘superiority by technology alone’ theory is true, unless you are willing to redefine superior technology as needed to explain whoever the successful conqueror happened to be at the time.

  72. 72.

    wilfred

    November 28, 2011 at 12:22 am

    @Insubtantia:

    “No, it isn’t “silly” and I doubt you’d make such a glib and condescending retort to a writer you perceived as having a masculine persona.”

    I stand corrected:

    Go fuck yourself, asshole.

    Better?

    Actually Ferguson wrote very movingly over his own relatives’ move to the wilds of Canada, using it to summarize part of the Scots’ saga. He even includes pictures if reading is too difficult.

  73. 73.

    Constantia

    November 28, 2011 at 12:29 am

    @willfred.

    Wow you really are an arse, hey? Guess you can’t help it. I know I shouldn’t feed, but…. well.

    I’ll just paraphrase Winston Churchill here.

    In the morning I’ll be back to work, and you?–you’ll still be mean and stupid. It’s a tough way to go through life, son.

    I’m guessing you can’t resist a comeback either. Its what people like you are made of. Since you don’t have much else going on, really. So sad.

  74. 74.

    G

    November 28, 2011 at 12:30 am

    @Suffern ACE:

    when I read the local paper about people stealing grave markers for the metal to recycle, I was offended, but figured it’s always been that way.

    when I read the stories about people gutting fire hydrants to get a buck by recycling the metal, I worried for teh civilization.

    I hate to use a link that names someone – but these have made our local fishwrap every 6 months or so:

    http://www.shelbystar.com/news/millwood-59717-shelby-charged.html

    you might think stealing wire from say an elementary school was unthinkable, but one near us had a bunch of electrical switches and stuff lifted… I’ll cut and paste to avoid too many links. this kind of stuff makes me worry about the very fabric of society…
    RIVERSIDE: Thieves steal electrical breakers from school
    About $50,000 worth of electrical equipment is stolen from Fremont Elementary in Riverside
    BY DAYNA STRAEHLEY
    AND DAVID KECKSTAFF WRITERS

    Published: 06 November 2011 10:06 PM

    AText SizeThieves stole high-voltage electrical breakers from Fremont Elementary School in Riverside over the weekend, and school district officials said Sunday they were scrambling to get a $30,000 part from the East Coast to restore power.

    Riverside Unified School District planned to teach classes today using natural light in classrooms in the school at 1925 N. Orange St. Founded in 1917, the school near Main Street and Stoddard Avenue north of the 60 freeway is one of the city’s oldest.

    The main breaker switches and a number of sub-breaker switches were taken from the electrical switch gear, Deputy Superintendent Mike Fine said. He estimated the total loss at more than $50,000.

    So far Riverside police have no suspects and no witnesses, Lt. Chuck Griffitts said by phone Sunday. Detectives will start looking into the theft today, he said.

    The district got the first alarm that power to the school was out at 1:59 a.m. Saturday, Fine said in an email. A second trouble alarm was triggered shortly thereafter about back-up battery power. Staff showed up within minutes and likely scared away the thieves before they could steal anything else.
    —

    I expect to find out that people have stolen the batteries from defribulators next.

  75. 75.

    Yutsano

    November 28, 2011 at 12:32 am

    @wilfred:

    Actually Ferguson wrote very movingly over his own relatives’ move to the wilds of Canada

    So did mine, three hundred years before the Scots even dreamed of going. In fact the French founded their settlements in Newfoundland and Quebec before the British were even interested. Ferguson’s chauvinism has fuck all to do with his familial history.

  76. 76.

    scav

    November 28, 2011 at 12:37 am

    On a thread that managed to unite multiple fans of Samarkand, there does seem to be only a singleton fan of Ferguson. Just noted in passing.

  77. 77.

    wilfred

    November 28, 2011 at 12:42 am

    @Substantia:

    Do you need some tissue? Piss off.

    @jl #71:

    As I said above, it’s a bit more complicated than that. The pure technological determinist argument is Diamond’s, see his “Guns, Germs and Steel” – the title says it all. Ferguson makes some use of it but his argument is more complicated, and interesting, really.

    I’m not intereted in Ferguson’s economic opinions. He did participate with Krugman on a forum sponsored by NY Review when the crisis was starting to widen:

    http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/jun/11/the-crisis-and-how-to-deal-with-it/?pagination=false

  78. 78.

    The prophet Nostradumbass

    November 28, 2011 at 12:43 am

    @scav: I am particularly fascinated by Thirty Days In the Samarkand Desert with the Duchess of Kent by A.E.J. Elliott, O.B.E.

  79. 79.

    Yutsano

    November 28, 2011 at 12:44 am

    @scav: It looks beautiful. I wish it were in a more free country however.

  80. 80.

    The prophet Nostradumbass

    November 28, 2011 at 12:47 am

    @Yutsano: That picture of the Registan makes it look amazing.

  81. 81.

    scav

    November 28, 2011 at 12:50 am

    @The prophet Nostradumbass: I’ll admit I’m still working my way through the wikipedia as a cheap and easy place to start. I’ve just started digging into the Sassanids on a whim and am pleased to discover there’s an overlap. It might take me a while to get to a period with the possibility of OBEs but I’ll try to burn a neuron to fire about those 30 days.

  82. 82.

    fasteddie9318

    November 28, 2011 at 12:52 am

    @Yutsano: Timur built the hell out of it with architects and craftsmen that he, um, “immigrated” from the places he conquered. It lost status after he died, but Ulugh Beg built probably the greatest observatory of the time there, and the Uzbeks kept building there for a while. A lot of the major stuff is more or less standing, like the observatory, Timur’s mausoleum, the mosque he commissioned for his wife. The political situation is unfortunate, at best.

  83. 83.

    The prophet Nostradumbass

    November 28, 2011 at 12:54 am

    @scav: After you tackle that one, you may want to peruse Rarnaby Budge by Charles Dikkens, the well-known Dutch author, and Grate Expectations by Edmund Wells

  84. 84.

    scav

    November 28, 2011 at 12:58 am

    @Yutsano: What’s very weird is I remember the buildings from a period where I wandered into regional differences in mosque architecture but I somehow completely dumped the names of the exact cities involved. Everything’s mentally filed under regions.

  85. 85.

    scav

    November 28, 2011 at 1:00 am

    @The prophet Nostradumbass: Damn, I’ve already read those, does that mean I’ve missed my chance for the OBE one?

  86. 86.

    Yutsano

    November 28, 2011 at 1:08 am

    @scav: Regions in that area half the time are identified by their major population center. Also, after the massive upheavals from both the British and the Soviets going by regional names is almost useless anymore. Hell I had to look up the exact country Sanmarqand is in, and I was wrong. It’s a Tajik city in Uzbekistan.

  87. 87.

    patroclus

    November 28, 2011 at 1:12 am

    What if Eleanor Roosevelt could fly?

  88. 88.

    Roger Moore

    November 28, 2011 at 1:14 am

    @The prophet Nostradumbass:
    How about 101 Ways to Start a Fight, the expurgated version of Olsen’s Standard Book of British Birds, or Ethel the Aardvark Goes Quantity Surveying?

  89. 89.

    greylocks

    November 28, 2011 at 1:15 am

    @Larkspur: Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore is a must-read book on Australian history, and makes it pretty clear that life for pre-colonial aborigines was pretty hard. Not that it got any better after the colonists showed up.

  90. 90.

    The prophet Nostradumbass

    November 28, 2011 at 1:16 am

    @Roger Moore:

    How about 101 Ways to Start a Fight

    Who wrote that? I think it’s by an Irish gentleman, whose name eludes me for the moment.

  91. 91.

    Constantia

    November 28, 2011 at 1:24 am

    re: Samarkand.

    (At the risk of drawing down the wrath of the dreaded Willfred,and his weeping tales of Scots far and wide)

    Seriously, you might try searching the entire collection of the LOC set of images of Sergeĭ Mikhaĭlovich Prokudin-Gorskiĭ, (1863-1944) who went on an expedition for Nicholas II, and photographed what was then the extent of the Russian empire, ca. 1910. He managed to create a technique of 3 rapid succession plates that filtered for R-G-B, so that printed in composite you get color images. Coming off the glass negatives, they are exquisite. And the color is extraordinary. It’s well worth looking at more than just your beloved Samarkand… you really get the vastness of the whole country, the way you get from west to east–and in a way, the stillness just before the big guns of August.

    It’s quite incredible to spend time online just paging through the images.

    See:

    http://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?q=%22Prokudin-Gorski%C4%AD%2C%20Serge%C4%AD%20Mikha%C4%ADlovich%2C%201863-1944%22

  92. 92.

    scav

    November 28, 2011 at 1:29 am

    @Yutsano: I was working entirely at the scale of “Central Asia” (v. Sub-Saharan Africa v. China v. Indian Sub-continent) because of this book. Gorgeous stuff. Although I’m intrigued by Ethel the Aardvark and her Quantity Surveying.

  93. 93.

    DW

    November 28, 2011 at 1:33 am

    @burnspbesq: You might considered learning what sarcasm and irony are. It helps if you’re going to post here.

    Remember, David Irving once upon a time was a dashing iconoclastic self taught historian, a favorite of Christopher Hitchens and John Keegan among others. When Lipstadt – a female, American and Jewish academic came along and showed just how rotten Irving’s work was, the reaction was harsh. “Uppity Jewess” was definitely a subtext of that reaction. A more delicate term wouldn’t get the point across.

    My point was I’ve heard of cases of British libel law used to try to shut up anyone politely pointing out an emperor has no clothes. I’ve never heard of a case where it worked for the greater good.

  94. 94.

    The prophet Nostradumbass

    November 28, 2011 at 1:46 am

    @DW: The phrase “Libel Tourism”, when it comes to the UK, is instructive.

  95. 95.

    transientseeker

    November 28, 2011 at 1:46 am

    @Wilfred
    Woah there.

    When I said rigor, I meant rigor, not blog rigor, or internet rigor, or whatever else you think it means.

    I stand on my point. And refuse to be distracted by you throwing Fukuyama in from left field. He’s a completely different issue entirely.

    Ferguson doesn’t just make bad policy recommendations or have unpleasant nostalgias for oppressive regimes. He writes bad history. Now, it used to be that it was bad in an interesting sort of way: I’m, of course, thinking of The Pity of War. With his gimmicky, and sloppy book on “Civilization”, it’s bad for all the wrong reasons. It reads like the retarded bastard child of revisionism’s poor cousin.

    Since before your Vico, history has always served ends, and there is no small correlation between the ends history served and the means employed. I am not saying a bad argument can’t be made well, but Niall Ferguson does not have the measured application to his topic that this would require.

    Re: jl
    I don’t know about his economics, but if it’s as bad as his history, I can understand your annoyance. I sort of want to send him back to the economists, since that is supposed to be his area of expertise.

  96. 96.

    vanya

    November 28, 2011 at 1:48 am

    “Assimilate Asians and Hispanics the way we assimilated Italians and Greeks and Jews a century ago.”

    As a descendant of WASPS on one side, and Italians on the other, I question the extent to which Italians have ever really been “assimilated” into what used to be the dominant culture 100 years ago, nor have Greeks and Jews from what I can see. Mass immigration will change America irrevocably. Something new will be born, maybe it will be better, maybe worse, but it is naive (or just American triumphalism – “everyone wants to be like us!”) to pretend that there will not be serious consequences and cultural friction either way.

  97. 97.

    greylocks

    November 28, 2011 at 1:50 am

    @Nutella:

    Why is it so common that when someone is told “That thing you said sounds racist” that they can never reply “Oops, sorry, I didn’t mean it that way” but always have to say “How dare you call me a racist!”

    Because racists define “racist” in such a away as to exclude themselves.

  98. 98.

    Mnemosyne

    November 28, 2011 at 1:52 am

    @transientseeker:

    As I understand it, once upon a time David Irving did some fairly rigorous work about the Nazis. Then he started to think maybe they had a point and all his work after that slid rapidly downhill.

    I suspect Ferguson may be following a similar trajectory.

  99. 99.

    The prophet Nostradumbass

    November 28, 2011 at 1:54 am

    Since this appears to be the only active thread, I’ll drop this comic from the San Francisco Chronicle here. Bad Reporter is pretty much 100% awesome stuff.

  100. 100.

    transientseeker

    November 28, 2011 at 1:55 am

    @Mnemosyne
    This is the perfect analogy to what I was trying to say. Thank you for showing me the way to put what has gone with Niall Ferguson.

  101. 101.

    AxelFoley

    November 28, 2011 at 1:57 am

    @Cap’n Magic:

    He thinks his marriage to
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayaan_Hirsi_Ali
    will absolve him is a reach.

    Beat me to it. I found that interesting–as racist married to a woman who has issues with the religion she was brought up under (I came close to calling this self-hatred). And yes, folks, there have been instances of racists marrying people they tend to be bigoted agaisnt.

    Wierd, I know.

  102. 102.

    AxelFoley

    November 28, 2011 at 2:02 am

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    @a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): I guess you are right. BS sounds better when delivered with a British accent.

    ROFL, good thing I wasn’t drinking near my monitor when I read that

  103. 103.

    Keithly

    November 28, 2011 at 2:10 am

    @wilfred: someone needs a hug.

  104. 104.

    Roger Moore

    November 28, 2011 at 2:11 am

    @vanya:

    Mass immigration will change America irrevocably.

    Mass immigration has always changed America irrevocably. That’s because assimilation is not a simple matter of immigrants discarding their old culture and adopting the culture of their new country. Instead, there’s an exchange in which both sides change by adopting parts of the other side’s culture. Immigrants typically change more and the dominant culture less just by force of numbers, but there’s always some change in the dominant culture.

    Of course assimilation is never complete, so people still have traits from their ancestral cultures even many generations after immigrating. But that doesn’t mean that those people aren’t assimilating, just that the process is asymptotic, with people approaching but never completely reaching a homogeneous culture.

  105. 105.

    wilfred

    November 28, 2011 at 2:14 am

    @transientseeker:

    The only historical work of his that I know well is Empire. In, it, he posts a question (taken from Johnson) and attempts to answer it. He marshalls his sources, quotes effectively, supports his hypotheses and sticks to the point. His bibliography is extensive and pertinent.

    History as science is not mathematics. Rigor and elegance mean different things to historians and physicists. His approach is discursive, contextual and clever. Thus he can write something like this:

    “The rise of the British Empire, it might be said, had less to do with the Protestant work ethic or English individualism than with the British sweet tooth.”

    and use his historical method to justify what appears at first glance to be a silly offhand remark. Of course, that quote contradicts some of the stupid assumptions made above, but who’s counting.

    As I said, I’ve got no problems with Ferguson’s scholarship. I don’t like his politics or those of the people who use ‘history’ to justify imperialism. The point about Vico is that he was the first to point about that history is produced by people in a time and place and to understand it we have to understand them. I paraphrase but that’s the general idea.

    It’s stupid and dangerous to make flip remarks about racism. Besides being vulgar, it undermines scholarship by smearing unpopular and alternative viewpoints with the ultimate word of power.

  106. 106.

    Brachiator

    November 28, 2011 at 2:15 am

    @wilfred:

    As I said above, it’s a bit more complicated than that. The pure technological determinist argument is Diamond’s, see his “Guns, Germs and Steel” – the title says it all.

    You’re reading it wrong. Diamond writes about a combination of forces, some entirely fortuitous, that led to recent Western domination. For example, he points out that The Americas and Africa lacked animals that could be domesticated the way that horses were in Eurasia; he also notes the propitious variety of plants amenable to agriculture across a band from Europe to parts of Asia. The germs which killed millions in the Americas, or hundreds of thousands of whites in Central Africa, have nothing to do with technology, except indirectly as populations were brought together during the age of Western exploration.

    @Jewish Steel:

    Oh yeah. I remember hearing this hollow nonsense about “killer apps” and Western “operating systems” on a BBC program a while back. It’s like m_c for people who read Time.

    Excellent analogy.

    Ferguson’s idiotic little screed is consistent with the hysteria of the old overclass that they are being displaced by blacks and Latinos. The irony, of course, is that in the late 19th and early 20th century, there were fears that Italians, Eastern Europeans, and Jews would never fit in. There is a Supreme Court opinion that noted as an aside that “Mongolians” could never be accepted as citizens. And yet some of the earliest observations by Europeans to the Americas noted that white colonists were transformed by proximity to blacks and aboriginal peoples into a new kind of people.

    And so it goes.

  107. 107.

    xian

    November 28, 2011 at 2:15 am

    @greylocks: that’s why you need to know how to tell people they sound racist.

  108. 108.

    jl

    November 28, 2011 at 2:19 am

    @transientseeker: The Wiki says Ferguson’s degree was in History, and I assume that would be the UK equivalent of majoring in history. It doesn’t mention any formal training in economics. So, I thought he was a historian who picked up (or thought he picked up) enough economics while doing history to talk as if he were an economist.

    I have watched his performances, and read his stuff on contemporary economic events. I grant him detailed knowledge of historical events that accompanied economic history, and some causal tales of how history, institutions affected economic events. But that is not the same as understanding the economics itself. On economics itself, and in applying economic analysis to current events, he talks like a standard issue US pundit, like Will, Brooks, Friedman, etc. He openly apes Friedman’s one liner slogans and random unmoored punch lines.

    Edit: shorter, Ferg might be able to write a good history twenty years from now, but in terms of understanding events as the unfold, what economic factors drive them, and what might happen next, he is, to be a little harsh, not even wrong, as the physicists say.

  109. 109.

    Watership

    November 28, 2011 at 2:21 am

    Jeesh, there’s so much to pick on, but I keep coming back to the whole “killer app” conceit. I’ll leave the scholarly dissections to those more qualified than me, but “killer app” as a concept and a term flourished for about three minutes two years ago. The mere utterance reeks of corporate jargon as odious as “out of the box” and “on point.”

    In that embarrassing fluff piece/review at the Guardian, Ferguson gushes about having to get the folks at Chanel 4 (yes, there’s a miniseries coming) on board with the whole idea as though he’s proposing something fresh, lively, meaningful and clever, none of which is true.

  110. 110.

    wilfred

    November 28, 2011 at 2:30 am

    @Brachiator:

    I refer specifically to the Battle of Cajamarca, which I remembered came from Gun, Germs and Steel, although it might have been from his Collapse, or even Leo Baudry. When I said the title of Guns, Germs and Steel said it all I meant just that: it was a combination of forces. See my comment #15.

    “The irony, of course, is that in the late 19th and early 20th century, there were fears that Italians, Eastern Europeans, and Jews would never fit in.”

    Thus the Americanization movement.

  111. 111.

    transientseeker

    November 28, 2011 at 2:40 am

    @Wilfred
    And we’ll try again.

    The point about Vico is just wrong. “Firsts” are usually misleading, but Badouin and Bodin, et al, were constructing historical methods either with these ideas implicit in them or more explicitly stated a hundred years before Vico.

    Though, it’s good to see you backing away from your treatment of history as a science; I was going to point out that many historians, including myself, would object to that.

    I think the key word here is “his historical method”, which is lacking a lot, as your little excerpt demonstrates. History is not made by making outrageous statements and then constructing sophisticated arguments to support these. It’s a careful work, for careful minds, attentive to the reverberations of their thoughts, not for loud attention whores. Clever is not usually a virtue of good history, nor of good writing in general.

  112. 112.

    transientseeker

    November 28, 2011 at 2:47 am

    @jl
    Sorry to double comment, but I was misled by him posturing as an economic historian, which, I see, in hindsight, is pretty meaningless.
    Niall Ferguson: Not Even Wrong
    Good one.

  113. 113.

    Brachiator

    November 28, 2011 at 2:47 am

    @wilfred: You specifically wrote that Diamond makes “a technological determinist argument,” which is manifestly false.

    “The irony, of course, is that in the late 19th and early 20th century, there were fears that Italians, Eastern Europeans, and Jews would never fit in.” Thus the Americanization movement.

    Still wrong. America was always a polyglot nation, influenced by all the ethnic groups within it. The notion that assimilation is one way is a myth.

    And the Americanization movement was accelerated by World War I, when it was manifestly inconvenient for people to cling to European identity. You also saw this happen in Great Britain, where the manifestly Germanic royal family magically became Windsors and Mountbattens.

  114. 114.

    wilfred

    November 28, 2011 at 2:56 am

    Ok, enlighten me. I’m not a historian but I’m working on a book project that certainly entails a great deal of history – in fact, it might be called a work of new historicism, although I prefer to call it cultural poetics.

    I’ve been influenced a lot by Hayden White and, to a lesser extent, Isaiah Berlin, particularly the idea of colligation, which appeals to my own aesthetic sensibility. I prefer to think of the poetics, not the science of history, myself, but out of respect for the profession call it what I’ve heard it called.

    I stand by what I said earlier. As a work of accessible and, dare I say it, popular history, Ferguson’s Empire is scholarly and nowhere near deserving the racist, or ethno-centric accusations made in some of the comments here.

    Clever is not a virtue of good writing? What’s better – pedantic tripe posing as knowledge? I’m just now re-reading Auerbach – to me, clever equals fresh and original, no matter the essential dryness of the subject.

  115. 115.

    wilfred

    November 28, 2011 at 3:08 am

    You’re a textbook example of projection: where, exactly, did I say anything about assimilation, for example?

    Wearily, for the third time, my point about technological determinism refers specifically to the Battle of Cajamarca, where Spanish steel swords and armor bested Incan wooden swords. The conquest of the Inca depended on other things, including germs.

    The Americanization movement started in 1895, a kind of progessive nationalism; in fact, I’m currently trying to to get hold of some of Kellor’s letters which concern her own recolletions. The whole point of it was to assimilate immigrants. The movement ended, effectively, in 1924. Thus it was in place for over 20 years before US entry in WWI, a

  116. 116.

    transientseeker

    November 28, 2011 at 3:15 am

    @Wilfred
    I’ll take the clean lines of Cato or Seneca any day over anybody’s clever. Rabelais isn’t clever, but he sure is funny. By clever I mean the “look at me mommy and my brilliant idea that no one has thought of” attitude of writing. There are plenty of alternatives that are pedantic tripe.

    To be honest, your project sounds cool. It might be horrible, though. I don’t know. Good luck. The Hayden White bit sounds neat, although, personally, I’ve always felt that Isaiah Berlin is a little over rated.

    As a historian, I don’t have anything against popular history, per se, but I do resent that which I see takes shortcuts. When you get down in the nitty gritty of the source documents, especially for the period in which Ferguson works, there are so many contradictions and nuances that every truth has to be coaxed out. He doesn’t bear that attitude to his sources–whatever truth he sees is to be cavalierly dragged from its hiding places. There may be some truth left, but, pardon the metaphor, it is often bruised and broken.

    Even with his worldview, what Ferguson is trying to do is not impossible. It’s not dissimilar from what Trevor Roper was doing for the Tories or Christopher Hill was doing for the Marxists. Pick up World Turned Upside Down and you’ll get an idea of how to write an interesting popular history that has a partisan worldview but that is still respectful to its sources.

  117. 117.

    Mnemosyne

    November 28, 2011 at 3:16 am

    @wilfred:

    At least according to Wikipedia, the Battle of Cajamarca was an ambush of armed Spaniards on deliberately unarmed Inca. To say it was won because of superior technology is like claiming that the Battle of Troy was won because the Greeks’ clearly superior wooden horse-building technology overcame the Trojans’ inferior weaponry.

  118. 118.

    transientseeker

    November 28, 2011 at 3:20 am

    @Wilfred
    BTW, Everybody should just drop this Americanization argument because you are arguing past one another. Everybody is right, but you are talking about different things since you haven’t agreed on what you are arguing about.

  119. 119.

    Brachiator

    November 28, 2011 at 3:29 am

    @wilfred:

    You’re a textbook example of projection: where, exactly, did I say anything about assimilation, for example?

    My post wasn’t just to you, or about points that you made.

    Wearily, for the third time, my point about technological determinism refers specifically to the Battle of Cajamarca, where Spanish steel swords and armor bested Incan wooden swords. The conquest of the Inca depended on other things, including germs.

    This makes your assertion about Diamond’s thesis both trivial and wrong.

    The Americanization movement started in 1895, a kind of progessive nationalism; in fact, I’m currently trying to to get hold of some of Kellor’s letters which concern her own recolletions. The whole point of it was to assimilate immigrants. The movement ended, effectively, in 1924. Thus it was in place for over 20 years before US entry in WWI

    Didn’t I say that the Americanization movement was accelerated by WWI? I also said that the movement was a rationalization of what had long been a fact of America, that there has always been a cultural mixing, even when people refused to acknowledge it.

    As an analogy, I recall seeing a documentary about Brazil in which upper class Brazilians flat out denied that Afro Brazilians had any impact on Brazilian culture. When I first visited India, an astute cultural historian with my travel group pointed out that the ruling Muslim Mughals insisted that palaces and other buildings follow strict Islamic guidelines. But since the architects and workers were often Hindu, Lotus blossoms and other manifestly non-Islamic elements crept in.

  120. 120.

    Brachiator

    November 28, 2011 at 3:44 am

    By the way, one of the best, most accessible, and quickly digestible popular history series I know of is Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe and Cartoon History of the Modern World.

    Yes, cartoons. Fresh and surprisingly honest.

    Give it a try. Jump into Cartoon History of the World Part 1, which covers European expansion.

    Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part 1 covers the history of ancient Mexico, the Spanish conquests, the Portuguese empire in Asia and Brazil, national and religious upheavals in Europe and India, the colonial ventures of France, Britain, and the Netherlands in North America and elsewhere, the development of science and parliamentary government, and the foundation of the United States.

    Gonick has much less of an axe to grind than many traditional historians, and he makes a number of refreshing insights into the rise and fall of civilizations.

    Consider making it a holiday gift to yourselves.

  121. 121.

    wilfred

    November 28, 2011 at 3:56 am

    I’m used to working with people who don’t need everything single spelled out for them. So here:

    I trivialize Diamond’s argument, eh? Ok, the accounts are that about 160 Spaniards killed upwards of 6,000 Inca without losing a single man of their own. Now I know that disease decimated the Inca but there were fucking 6,000 of them to 160 Spaniards at that battle so the near wiping out of the culture due to disease was not a relevant factor at that battle. Instead it was steel and guns. Incidentally, that wikipedia account does not cite the source for the Inca being unarmed, although it mentions their leather armor.

    “I also said that the movement was a rationalization of what had long been a fact of America, that there has always been a cultural mixing, even when people refused to acknowledge it.”

    This is just non-sensical. The Americanization movement was a reaction to employers’ fear of immigrants. Hence it focused on teaching ESL to immigrants as a means of assimilating them into American culture and making their ‘Otherness’ less threatening, less obvious. How on earth is that a ‘rationalization of … cultural mixing’?

    Finally, here’s a thought experiment. Imagine an indigenous population completely inoculated against non-native disease. Give them stone clubs and send in a steel clad army with guns. Who wins?

    Principal contradictions.

  122. 122.

    Karen

    November 28, 2011 at 5:31 am

    @DW:

    Uppity Jewess? And what does that comprise of?

    Am I an uppity Jewess because I dare reply to a superior Aryan as yourself?

    What makes a Jewess uppity? Tell me!

    FUCKING TELL ME!!!

    It’s bad enough that people use the word “Zionist” as a coded way to say “dirty Jew” and you have to say “Uppity Jewess?!” I don’t throw around the word anti-Semite loosely but that’s what Nazis call Jewish women. I don’t know which you hate more, Jews or women!

    I’ve been on Balloon Juice for the past four years. I don’t always get along with everyone here, especially PUMAs, but I try to make an effort to not be spiteful and try to be mature and reasonable. I’m very pragmatic and up until now I felt like I belonged here.

    Those two words were a punch to my stomach and make me want to vomit and scream and even though you didn’t say it to me directly, DW, using that phrase made it fucking personal.

    How should a Jewish woman act? Should I be on my knees before a perfect specimen like you so I know my place?

    I don’t feel Israel is always right. I don’t think things that every Jewish person does is right. I don’t side like that.

    And instead of privately emailing DougJ and telling him how much your easy words infuriated me and hurt, I’m confronting you here.

    Just to show you my horns.

  123. 123.

    Xenos

    November 28, 2011 at 5:44 am

    @Karen: I think DW was characterizing Irving, and Irving’s supporters, but putting the term ‘jewess’ in their mouths. As DW put it, sarcasm and irony in action.

    Like other ‘fighting words’, it is best avoided, especially for purposes of sarcasm and irony. Because nobody needs to read such inflammatory terms and be expected to evaluate the degree of irony and good taste involved before feeling personally attacked.

  124. 124.

    Menzies

    November 28, 2011 at 6:21 am

    @DougJ:

    I have to agree with you, even though my “other” major was history, and part of my interests in my main field lie in classical history.

    Ferguson always struck me as Friedman-plus-accent, so I’d ignored him up until now.

  125. 125.

    WereBear

    November 28, 2011 at 7:20 am

    @Slugger: Wasn’t syphilis a New World disorder that came over to Europe? It was just… slow.

  126. 126.

    Napoleon

    November 28, 2011 at 7:32 am

    On the Spanish beating the natives, you can chalk that up 100% to the natives being decimated by disease and the Spanish having horses. Guns gave them no advantage (a native could get off several arrow shots while a Spaniard was screwing around reloading, and arrows were more accurate then).

  127. 127.

    Napoleon

    November 28, 2011 at 7:34 am

    @WereBear:

    Even if so it is hard to catch. It is hardly going to sweep through a village and kill 1/4 of the people and half the kids and old folks.

  128. 128.

    Tyro

    November 28, 2011 at 7:44 am

    Give them stone clubs and send in a steel clad army with guns. Who wins?

    The Spaniards “win”, but become a small minority ruling class over a huge native population. In this scenario, the Spanish get assimilated by the local population. Not only that, but organized resistance persists as various tribes made deals with the Spanish or other European nations to acquire modern weapons.

  129. 129.

    Cheryl from Maryland

    November 28, 2011 at 7:53 am

    My husband asked why Ferguson’s list didn’t include navigation (with kudos to the Portuguese) and printing (so navigational charts could be shared). He feels Ferguson missed the basic point because of his mania to prove Brits and culturally Brits should be top nation –why and how Western Europeans traveled oceans and arrived in one piece. Ferguson’s work is tainted with his desire to reclaim the UK’s glory.

  130. 130.

    Napoleon

    November 28, 2011 at 7:58 am

    @Cheryl from Maryland:

    Britian was not even the first European “superpower”. The Spanish and Netherlands both spent time at the top while Britian was a second rate power. You have to get into the 19th century before Britian picks up on the trail those two countries blazed.

  131. 131.

    agrippa

    November 28, 2011 at 8:05 am

    I am not a fan of Ferguson. He did write a good book about Empires. Credit where credit is due. But, other than that, not so much. He seems to know as much about economics as I do, yet he seems to think that he knows economics. Not creditable.

    His racial attitudes leads me to think that he has used the word ‘wog’.

  132. 132.

    Emma

    November 28, 2011 at 8:35 am

    @Karen: Jeebus. Get the snarkmeter adjusted before you jump in. He was parodying what some of the prevailing attitudes were towards her at the time from Irving’s supporters. And IIRC that was definitely an undertone. I will admit I wouldn’t have phrased it that way — too charged an expression.

  133. 133.

    DW

    November 28, 2011 at 8:50 am

    @Karen: OK, you didn’t see my second post. In the case of Lipstadt, what made her uppity was telling the truth. She demonstrated that Irving was rotten as a scholar and a human being and thus offended a number of Oxbridge intellectuals. For that offense she was initially attacked by some of the self styled Good and Wise of England. Her sex and religion was a clear subtext in the attacks. My basic point is that all the examples of British libel law that I see are cases of the wealthy and powerful slapping down critical outsiders. The Irving suit is a classic example. Just thought it was useful to remind everyone that a while ago Irving was as respected as Ferguson.

  134. 134.

    kd bart

    November 28, 2011 at 10:02 am

    Other SNL skits along this line were:

    “What if Spartacus had had a Piper Cub airplane?”

    “What if Superman had landed in Germany?”

  135. 135.

    lou

    November 28, 2011 at 10:53 am

    @Nutella:

    Why is it so common that when someone is told “That thing you said sounds racist” that they can never reply “Oops, sorry, I didn’t mean it that way” but always have to say “How dare you call me a racist!”

    Vlogger Jay Smooth has a wonderful explanation of how to tell people when they say something racist. If you use the word, they’ll always seize on ‘racist’ and dodge examining their actions.

  136. 136.

    ed drone

    November 28, 2011 at 10:59 am

    @Davis X. Machina:

    Or if you’re happy regardless of what cards life has dealt you, you’re beatus — whence we get beatification, the first step towards canonization as a saint John, George, Paul, and Ringo.

    Fixed

    Ed

  137. 137.

    Mnemosyne

    November 28, 2011 at 11:07 am

    @wilfred:

    Incidentally, that wikipedia account does not cite the source for the Inca being unarmed, although it mentions their leather armor.

    It cites the Spanish accounts saying that Pizarro set it all up as an ambush on the unarmed Inca emperor, who thought it was going to be another round of negotiations, as an (ultimately successful) attempt to abduct the emperor and take control that way.

    It sounds oh-so-heroic to characterize it as a “battle” between technologically advanced Spaniards and poorly-armed Incas, but the Spanish didn’t win because they fought a full-pitch battle. They won with a sneak attack. Which, frankly, is the real story of the success of European imperialism: treachery, double-dealing, and just plain luck.

  138. 138.

    wapsie

    November 28, 2011 at 11:28 am

    Samarkand is nice, but it’s no Merv.

  139. 139.

    Karen

    November 28, 2011 at 1:07 pm

    @DW:

    Okay…

    Then it wasn’t your words.

    Thanks for letting me know.

  140. 140.

    Waterballoon

    November 28, 2011 at 2:20 pm

    @burnspbesq: By English speaking world I assume you mean the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand? If so, then then the US constitutes a majority of the English speaking world, and our libel laws are the norm, and yours are the minority.

  141. 141.

    someofparts

    November 28, 2011 at 2:24 pm

    So am I being sexist to call Ferguson a dick?

  142. 142.

    aimai

    November 28, 2011 at 2:54 pm

    @wilfred:

    The sweet tooth thing is a direct rip off of Sidney Mintz’s brilliant “Sweetness and Power” which explores the role of slave sugar in creating a cheap and energizing drink for the rising factory workers. Its not that britons had a “sweet tooth” but that modern factories can’t be run with workers whose main liquid food is ale or beer or gin. Hot sugared tea, like the contemporary invention of cold sugared cereals, enabled the ownership class to force factory workers onto long, breakless, and drunkless shifts of work.

    Oh, and fuck Ferguson for the pretentious hack he is. “Marshalling his facts” is basically the least any historian–hell, any writer–is obligated to do. Its like saying “The guy’s a genius! He puts one word right next to the other until he gets to the end of these things he calls sentences!”

    aimai

  143. 143.

    aimai

    November 28, 2011 at 2:58 pm

    Also, in Re Wilfrid’s little gedankenexperiment upthread “an army with stone clubs and an army with guns…who wins??” Well, look at Afghanistan. We have all the really good weapons, up to and including nukes. But who is winning? And they aren’t winning because their weapons are as good as ours. But because entire lands and peoples aren’t won by battles but by attrition and assimilation. We are not going to outlast the Afghans in their own mountains. We attritioned the hell out of the Indians in theirs. End of story.

    aimai

  144. 144.

    jefft452

    November 28, 2011 at 4:57 pm

    @kd bart:
    “What if Superman had landed in Germany?”

    “I am Uberman, defender of lies, injustice, and the nazi way”

    Uberman: “I have X-ray vision”
    Embraced Lois Lane: “You can see through my clothes?”
    Uberman: “Jimmy Oslen’s too, He’s a jew”

  145. 145.

    jefft452

    November 28, 2011 at 5:30 pm

    @wilfred:
    “Imagine an indigenous population completely inoculated against non-native disease. Give them stone clubs and send in a steel clad army with guns. Who wins?”

    What time period?
    Pavia was the first time that an army with guns defeated an opponent with more shock power. It happened rarely after that until the widespread use of the Firelock
    And even with the Firelock, the bayonet decided the issue- 3 volleys then charge was standard
    It wasn’t until the 19th century that superior firepower could be relied upon

  146. 146.

    Larkspur

    November 28, 2011 at 9:29 pm

    @greylocks: Thanks for the rec. I am definitely interested. I just finished reading The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson, a non-fiction book about the 1854 cholera outbreak in London. Johnson describes a city in the throes of a huge transformation: unprecedented population density (greater than New York City, today, with high-rises buildings), the industrial changes, the utter lack of an effective sanitation system, and the limitations of the prevailing disease theory of the day: miasma.

    So, um, I was picturing myself in 1854 London, the crowds, the stench, all of it, and at that moment the Australian Outback seemed refreshing.

    Again, thanks for the book rec.

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  1. Ferguson Threatens to Sue | An American in Oxford says:
    November 28, 2011 at 12:58 pm

    […] weren’t veiled at all and has threatened to sue Mishra for libel. On a related note, via Balloon Juice, I recommend James Fallows’s description of a tussle he had with Ferguson about race issues […]

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