Fireside Friday, June 28, 2024

Fireside this week! My hope in terms of the upcoming schedule is to have my usual July 4th post next week (we’re discussing political philosophy in an election year, so I am sure everyone will be very chill; regardless let me repeat you will be civil) and then after that to dive into the Teaching Paradox series on Imperator (for which I’ve been doing a Carthage and a Seleucid run). I think then there’s a good chance I’ll stick a one-month hiatus after that, either in August or perhaps September, to help me finish up the book while also dealing with start of the 2024-5 academic job season.

Percy rules the streets. And the tennis court.

For this week’s musing, I actually wanted to reflect on something a bit more contemporary. One of the oddities of the way we (and the broader media) talk about society is that we, understandably, focus on problems that need to be fixed. But the result is that when things are fixed, they simply stop being discussed and I find that a lot of folks thus assume that – as they had on last report – these things have stayed broken, rather than being fixed. So this week, I want to list out a series of relatively major concerns and crises from my lifetime (with a bit of a US-slant, unavoidably) that I can remember, checking back in to see how they’re doing. Because it turns out that things have, in fact, gotten better and a lot of these problems have been either resolved or at least greatly improved. This is hardly intended to be a comprehensive list, of course.

Let’s start with something that I recall a lot of focus on when I was young: ozone depletion or as I always heard it discussed, “the hole in the ozone layer,” which was going to result in rising cancer rates. It turns out this has been largely fixed: we banned certain ozone-depleting substances (I remember a real focus on chloroflorocarbons) and beginning in the 90s, ozone levels stabilized and then began to recover. The ozone hole is now smaller than it was when it was first observed in 1982. Fixed!

The second thing I recall being a big focus when I was young (so, early 90s) was the AIDSepidemic. And the news here is, of course, mixed: we haven’t cured HIV/AIDS yet. However, thanks to better education, in the United States, the number of new infections of HIV has declined, albeit modestly. The total number of people living with HIV has increased, but this is actually the dark lining of a silver cloud: this is the result ofmassively improved treatment for HIV that results in far better outcomes, in which the progression from HIV infection to full-blown AIDS is rare. New treatments can also suppress the virus effectively enough to prevent transmission and straight up cures may soon be in reach. Meanwhile internationally, PEPFAR, an AIDS relief program started by the (W) Bush Administration in 2003 has been tremendously successful, saving more than 25 million lives globally. So this problem certainly isn’t fixed, but we’ve made tremendous progress; in 2012 Anthony Fauci and Gregory Folkers in a paper went so far as to say, “an AIDS-free generation is indeed within reach,” which is an incredible improvement from the gloomy outlook I remember in the early 1990s.

The other big concern in the early 90s when I was young in the United States was extremely high crime rates. Violent crime rates in the United States peaked in 1992 and have been falling basically ever since; while there was a brief upward surge in 2020, the falling trend has reasserted itself and crime rates in the United States are now at 50-year lows. That said, crime rates in the United States remain elevated compared to similarly rich countries and still have quite a ways to fall to reach international norms. Nevertheless, crime in the United States has never been lower in my lifetime and continues to fall. That seems like good news!

Then there were the major foreign policy issues of the 1990s. Here the record is certainly mixed, but actually mixed, rather than uniformly negative. Two conflicts that were never far from the headlines in the 1990s were The Troubles in Ireland and the spate of conflicts that resulted from the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Both, I recall, were talked about the same way people often talk about the Israel-Palestine conflict today: as some ancient conflict that had been going on ‘forever’ and as a result would never be solved (this is nonsense, by the by, the Israel-Palestine conflict isn’t ancient, it’s 76 years old). But both conflicts have been resolved! The Troubles largely ended with the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Meanwhile the last of the “Yugoslav Wars” ended in 2001 and some of the participants are now even happily ensconced in the EU (Slovenia and Croatia) and others are on the way to joining though you can still see lingering effects in the ‘hole’ in the EU and NATO in the region.

Of course the other dominating foreign policy news story of the 1990s was Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. This isn’t the place to re-litigate the decisions there given their complexity,⁵²³ but I’m not going to put this into the ‘fixed’ category: while the Hussein regime is gone and the Iraqi government that replaced it certainly poses far fewer problems in the region (for folks that were not paying attention in the 90s, you may not realize what a continuous political problem Hussein’s Iraq was, never long out of headlines), regional instabilities – some of them caused by the regime change operation – remain.

We can also look at some major issues from the aughts and 2010s as well.

One also sees fairly frequently on social media the insistence that technology and related quality-of-living questions have been stagnant for decades, which is simply not true. A lot of this is based on people gauging their notion of the median 90s family on the Simpsons or the median 70s family on the Brady Bunch and so forth, when those were not households with anything like median consumption. But more broadly the stuff in our lives is better now. Now if you point to the really obvious improvements (electronics, broadly), folks will cry foul, so let’s take a very basic, every day example – the one that occasioned this topic.

Light bulbs. Beginning in 2007, the U.S. Federal government enacted regulations which would start phasing out incandescent light bulbs beginning in 2012. People freaked out, they stockpiled old-fashioned incandescent light bulbs (do not tell me this didn’t happen, I personally knew people who stocked up). But 12 years on from the regulations taking effect light bulbs are way better now. Now on the one hand, the unit-cost per bulb went up significantly (about 5-6 times over incandescent, by my basic math) but the resulting bulbs last about twenty times longer and use something like 15% of the power. Since the cost of lighting your house is more electricity than it is the physical light bulbs, the result is a bulb that uses less energy (good for the environment) and is much cheaper (around six times cheaper). Best of all, you don’t need to replace the damn things two or three times a year. The great 2011 lightbulb freak out? Fixed.

And just more broadly, stuff now is way better. Cars are much safer now and – Cybertrucks not withstanding – getting progressively safer over time. TVs are now slim, high definition things which are somehow cheaper than the low-definition monsters we used to buy. I am raising a little one right now and the improved quality of basically everything baby-related in the USA is shocking, from the safer car seats to the better-and-safer toys to the more rigorous and research-based advice parents get. And before someone asks, “what about the maternal mortality crisis in the United States?” – maternal mortality is very bad, but it hasn’t been rising, we’ve been getting more rigorous in measuring it, which is also good.

One perennial complaint I see is that they “never fixed the water in Flint Michigan,” often in the form of quips that the United States can afford this or that thing, but “they still can’t drink the water in Flint.” This is, simply put, untrue. It is a lie. Flint made the switch to water from the Flint River in 2014 and the contamination was recognized in 2015 (albeit more slowly than it should have been). In January of 2016, a state of emergency was declared to enable federal aid to Flint and the city switched back to Detroit water and began a long process of pipe replacement. In 2017, the water tested safe to drink (below the federal limits), although concerns remained. By 2021, pipe replacement was complete, replacing the old lead pipes (whose linings had been removed by the Flint River water) with safe copper pipes. Flint now has water as good as any city in the United States; the lingering problem is instead (understandably) mistrust. However, the water in Flint is fixed and has been for years now.

Of course many issues remain unresolved. The most obvious is climate change, where the good news is that the worst-case scenarios are now largely off the table and the bad news is that so are the best-case scenarios. But progress – albeit perhaps too slow – is being made: U.S. carbon emissions are falling fairly sharply. This certainly isn’t in the ‘fixed’ category (global emissions growth is slowing, but not yet reversing), but it also isn’t the no-progress-at-all situation it is often presented as being.

But I think the constant bias towards doom, where problems make the headlines but solutions do not, is a real problem because it leads to the assumption that things are not getting better and indeed that they cannot get better, which in turn fuels more extreme political solutions – the assumption that the only way to ‘better’ is to burn everything down. It does not help that humans are primed for nostalgia: everything was the best when we were young, ignorant of the world’s problems and with fewer cares. But things are getting better, remarkably so. I hope that one effect of discussing so much pre-modern economies here – on farming, iron production, textile manufacture, military foraging and so on – is to hammer home that incremental improvements do add up and that the pace of this change is accelerating and mostly positive and also that ‘burning it all down’ means burning down a lot of those careful, incremental changes. The base-state of humanity is not abundance, but poverty – it is the things we have built that lift us above that state.

At the same time, positive change doesn’t happen automatically for no reason: it happens because we make careful, incremental, deliberate improvements.

On to recommendations!

First off, medieval historian and prodigious film-watcher (and grad school colleague) Peter Raleigh has started up a substack,The Long Library, where he plans to discuss films and other things. His first offering, “The Tell of Us All” is a look at the universe of the Mad Max films and the way they understand history, memory and progress. It’s a fascinating look at the themes as they cut across all five films, including the recent Furiosa (which I saw, at Peter’s recommendation, in theaters and heartily recommend – catch it if you can before they pull it out of the last theaters, it is great).

Meanwhile, if you want to read more from me, I wrote a piece for The Dispatch, a critique of the Heritage Foundation’s annual assessment of U.S. military strength, a 600-page document designed to justify a handful of media-friendly charts which functionally no one in the nat-sec or military studies community takes very seriously. As has always been the case for these reports, the 2024 report’s analysis is contorted to provide Heritage’s perennial recommendation (more military spending on everything), while at the same time provide Heritage a cudgel in the culture war to claim that ‘wokeness’ or some such is ruining the U.S. military. Of particular note, these are reports which, since 2018 (the oldest report I could get) have never rated threats to the United States as anything but ‘high’ or ‘elevated’ (elevated above what?) and American military strength never higher than marginal; it is the word-table equivalent of deceptively manipulating the Y-axis on a chart, creating tables whose vast, empty right space exists only to scare Fox News views (which is how it is used).

Then we have a few fun history YouTube videos. Insider brought in friend-of-the-blog Michael Taylor to review the depiction of Roman infantry tactics in film and TV and there are a lot of good infantry tactics tidbits here from the fellow who is at this point probably the leading authority on Roman infantry tactics during the Republic. Meanwhile, HistoryHitbrought on Roel Konijnendijk to answer google questions about Sparta. Most of what he says isn’t going to be a huge shock to folks who have read the Sparta series, but there’s a lot of detail here all the same and some really good nods to the general weakness of the sources. I actually think the contrast between Roel and I on Sparta is really handy because we come, I think, from different ‘camps’ of scholarship on Sparta and yet end up agreeing on 95%+ of questions, which gives a good sense both of where the scholarly debate really is these days and what sort of arguments the evidence does and doesn’t permit. And of course, Roel is well worth listening to on any topic relating to ancient Greece.

And in a bit of “ancient military history is a tiny field and we all know each other” Michael’s video occasioned this tweet by Roel noting someone in the comments wondering why I didn’t do Michael’s video:

Viewers upset that @BretDevereaux is kind enough to share the position of Roman Warfare Guy on the Internet pic.twitter.com/q893EzUsPz

— Dr Roel Konijnendijk (@Roelkonijn)

June 18, 2024

For what it is worth, I suspect the answer to the question is “Insider has a studio in New York, which is not far from where Michael Taylor teaches” but it could equally be “Insider was interested in tactics, a topic on which Michael Taylor has more expertise than I.”

Also, Liv Yarrow’s blog is always excellent, but I was particularly struck by this entry mulling over historical memory among the Romans in the context of Cicero trying to track down a historical fact: the name of the ten commissioners who settled affairs for Rome in Greece after 146.

Finally, a ‘head’s up’ so to speak, but we’ve got a new edition and translation of the Babylonian creation epic the Enuma Elish coming later this year and not only are physical copies actually kind of affordable, the book will be open access online!

And of course a book recommendation. This week, now that I’ve finally finished it, I want to recommend Adam Tooze’s The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy(2006). As the title suggests, this is a history of the economy of Nazi Germany from 1933 to its destruction in 1945, though I think the title might perhaps have been a bit clearer as the ‘making and breaking of the Nazi war economy’ but we’ll come to that. Naturally, this involves discussing some of the most horrific Nazi policies – the intentional starvation of Eastern Europe, the use of slave labor, the Holocaust and so on – though Tooze does so in a largely clinical, economic way (with the occasional digression to make clear he does, in fact, think these things are horrible).

Tooze’s approach is chronological, walking the reader through the development of the Nazi economy in a set of distinct stages: an initial period of recovery that gives way to the armaments drive beginning in 1936, then the initial phase of the war to 1941 and finally the frantic effort to mobilize to match Soviet and American economic power following 1942. The collapse of that system in 1944-5 is also covered, but more as a coda, as Tooze already concludes that the economic war for Germany was effectively lost in 1942, even if the full effects wouldn’t be felt until 1943. That said, the focus on the Nazi economy is pointed: the is a history of key economic decision-makers in government and the impact of their decisions. That has the odd effect that Tooze’s attention shifts as theirs do: as the Nazis become singularly focused on armaments production at the expense of civilian production, so to does Tooze. Nazi atrocities are noted (and suitably condemned) but in so much as they interact with economic policy, which by the 1940s means armament policy. It is striking that the economic impact of all of this on the people in the interior of Hitler’s genocidal empire largely vanishes from the book after 1936.

As you might expect for a book of this scale (the core text runs 676 pages) Tooze has a bunch of different interventions (that is, points where he wants to revise the consensus) he wants to make, both large and small. On the larger side, Tooze wants to make a point of how economic considerations shaped Nazi strategy. The first third or so of the book is dedicated to making the case that effectively the Nazis began with a domestic economic vision and an armaments vision both deeply rooted in ideology, but that when they had the resources for only one, armaments won out – nearly all of the civilian economy recovery ends up as smoke. That armaments drive, in turn both succeeds and fails: on the one hand, as Tooze notes, Nazi Germany was more mobilized than any other capitalist peacetime state, possibly ever. On the other hand, by 1938, it was clear that the Nazi economy was ‘maxed out’ in raw materials and ability to import more while the re-armament programs of the other major powers – motivated by German re-armament and aggression – would soon eclipse what the German economy could accomplish, thus motivating Hitler’s decision to have the war in 1939 in a relatively narrow window of opportunity. The next part of the book then covers the distance to Barbarossa, which Tooze argues was motivated by similar concerns: the Nazis believed that the resources of Russia were the only way to develop an economy that could resist Britain and the United States in the long term. Finally, Tooze wants to take Speer’s armaments ‘miracle’ – mostly a product of focusing even more raw material on preferred categories – down a peg and does so, while at the same time noting that Speer was not – as he portrayed himself – a non-ideological technocrat, but was, like basically all senior Nazi leaders, especially post-1942, a deeply ideological Hitler-acolyte who stayed with the failing Nazi cause because he was a true believer.

Perhaps most of all, Tooze wants to push back against the picture, which had been dominant in the scholarship, that Nazi incompetence and under-mobilization had led to an inefficiently economically organized war effort, only rationalized later by Speer, too late to make a difference. Instead, Tooze argues that the Nazis mobilized to a high degree relatively early, but simply had no real hope of competing with the combined economies of the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union. The one thing that is understandably missing, of course, is the counter-factual only briefly alluded to in Tooze’s conclusion. The Nazis went to war in order to obtain vast territories in Europe which they believed held the resources necessary to enable an autarchic (self-sufficient) economy which would enable German prosperity and security. The irony (shared by Japan) is, of course, that Germany has achieved security and prosperity within its borders, post-1990, with the world’s third largest economy. Hitler chose war instead of trade for ideological reasons, but the degree to which trade has outperformed war for Germany is staggering.

Regardless, I think Tooze’s book is a useful read to get an insight into the economic dimensions of modern war, in which steel often matters as much as manpower.