Monday, November 2, 2015

Of Fire and Fleas

This article from The Telegraph provides new evidence on the volcanic climate forcing of the 530's and 540’s. I first ran into the idea that the Plague of Justinian was tied to a volcano-induced climate crisis in William Rosen's book, Justinian's Flea.

The study published in Nature argues for a short period of cooling caused by North American volcanos erupting in 536, followed by an eruption ten-percent larger than the 1815 eruption of Tambora, somewhere in the tropics in 539-540. This would have been similar to the one-two punch of the Great Unknown Eruption of 1809/10 (documented from ice cores as somewhere in the tropics, and about half the size of the Tambora event) followed by the huge eruption of Tambora in 1815. Those led to extreme weather, famine, and epidemics lasting a few years. The evidence is that the 540’s climate event was longer lasting and was followed thirty-five years later by another massive eruption and cooling event.

The Nature article also summarizes evidence for other instances of volcanic forcing back as far as 426 BC. Historians are slowly beginning to weave climate into their understanding, so this kind of research, able to pin these events down to a year or two, and the ability to compare the effects of recent episodes of volcanic climate forcing with the fragments we have in written records, is vital. Every year our understanding get a bit better and the cumulative results are starting to become significant.

Thursday, May 14, 2015

Karen Armstrong's Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence

Karen Armstrong's Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence (Knopf, 2014).

Fields of Blood is a frustratingly good book. Karen Armstrong knows her material and has reflected on it with rare perspicuity, but it seems to me that she fails to address much that is vital.  Her thesis is that true religious violence is rare or non-existent, yet he fails to ever explain what religion is. Armstrong objects strenuously to the post-Reformation and Enlightenment tendency to place religion in a little box by itself, which was done in large part to limit what were perceived as religious wars. It seems that she knows religion when she sees it, and anything that has been tainted by politics is not religion. She also picks and choose her coverage of wars. She is able to show that the European Wars of Religion were mostly political in nature, though she also fails to explain away the extent to which they were viewed as religious in nature at the time they were fought as well as in later years. On the other hand, she skates over the two world wars, which allows her to avoid a deep discussion of how religion can abet and facilitate warfare. This was certainly the case with the First World War (see Philip Jenkins, The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade, Harper One, 2014). If it was somewhat less the case the second time around, one must still deal with the very messy question of how modern Shintoism was so deeply imbedded in every aspect of the Japanese war effort.

Having said that, Armstrong raises a lot of vital points about the history of violence and religion, as well as throwing a strong light on many points that plague us today.  Examining the Warring States period in ancient China how the military commanders and authors such as Sun-tzu "regarded themselves as sages and saw their warfare as a species of religion," while others took the same mythical and religious doctrines in completely different directions. Her point being that the same belief systems can lead away from war as easily as too it.  (Armstrong, 93.)

This is a fairly simple statement on the surface, but it is actually a fundamental principle in dealing with war and religion. It is not so much the case that religion breeds war, but that religion interacts with war. The nature of this interaction is crucial: can you truly have war without the support of myth and religion, or analogs thereof? My answer is that it cannot. While religion is not necessarily the cause of wars or violence, it usually has been used to justify violence and all too often has amplified it. One must admit though, that when religion breaks down, as it did in Russia in 1917, the results can be equally appalling. In such cases, ideologies with some aspects of religion play the same role.

Where Armstrong shines is in her discussions of the roles of ancient religion in war and of the complex relationship of fundamentalisms to war and violence. She argues persuasively that fundamentalism is a reaction to war and oppression, noting that American Protestant fundamentalism was a reaction to the Civil War and was intensified by the First World War. Its attitudes towards war and violence have changed over the decades as it perceives external threats, but it has rarely turned towards civil violence. (She fails to consider the role of the fundamentalist or evangelical religious beliefs of the neocons and how those may have shaped our recent wars and foreign policy.) In her final chapters, Armstrong traces how Islamic fundamentalism followed a trajectory from an emphasis on social justice to horrific violence in the face of failed colonial and post-colonial regimes. The book's treatment of Islam is as anuanced as its discussion of Christian fundamentalism.

We need more books of this sort, histories that challenge assumptions, grapple with complexity, and which continue to occupy and engage the mind long after the reader turns the last page. I found myself wanting to argue with almost every page in many chapters, and found something with which to take exception in almost every chapter, but Armstrong succeeded in making me revise some long-held opinions, in leaving some matters in question (always a good sign), struggling to integrate new and old insights. It is an important book for anyone interested in history, but also for anyone trying to wrap their mind around current events.



Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Adam Zamoyski's Phantom Terror

Adam Zamoyski, Phantom Terror: Political Paranoia and the Creation of the Modern State, 1789-1848 (Basic Books, 2015). 

In a previous work, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots, and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871 (Viking, 2000), Zamoyski chronicled the era and Weltanschaung of the Romantic revolutionaries. In his new book, he turns to the conservatives who governed Europe in the five decades following the storming of the Bastille. Here he traces how their reactions to real and imagined revolutions and conspiracies created the very atmosphere in which new kinds of revolutionaries, ones who would overthrow the old order completely in 1917-21, could flourish. The author also chroniles the paranoia that arose among the governing classes; how it gave rise to secret police forces, censorship, and other repressive laws and institutions; how those institutions propagated that paranoia in a vicious cycle, eventually creating a mindset and toxic political atmosphere still found throughout Western world. 

The book is a powerful indictment of viewing everything through the lens of conspiracy and refracting every fact, real or imagined, through that it. The book is at its best in discussing Alexander I and Metternich, but the whole work is readable and scholarly, filled with memorable characters while being grounded in primary sources. Highly recommended.