Mismanagement of funds is what happens when people are taxed too much. The workers steal the funds for themselves and/or managers make up idiotic ways to spend money on "pork projects", which is a waste.
Essential services are fine. Yet, Why can't the gov't put money aside for repairs and maintenance, instead of putting the job off for 20yrs and making things cost more??? I'm furious at the mismanagement of the funds my city get. Instead of paving roads, the funds go to make "Bike Boxes"... Oh, how quaint. This, while people who are in wheelchairs need curb ramps... That's a federal law. It gets ignored. "I'm sorry, that's not on the agenda for this year".
"Mismanagement of funds is what happens when people are taxed too much." Oh, it doesn't even have to be through over-taxation, though that can be a problem. Mismanagement of funds can happen regardless of how much money is involved.
There's a short description in one of the Discworld books where Captain Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork city guard describes how the rich end up spending less money than the poor. If you can spend $50 on shoes you're good for a year. If you can only afford $10 you'll end up buying a pair every month. Sometimes I think the drive toward lower government spending is a lot like that.
The answer is privatization because government should run like a business...whose prime duty is to make money...oh, wait a minute...that would be taxes...nevermind!
as for the "government should run like a business", I think Rhys Taylor being in CZ Republic may have something to say about it. Something concerning a certain huge business figure (some would say oligarch) and nowadays minister of finance. The "government running like business" has been his credo since last elections and... well... let's say it doesn't seem to be doing any good so far.
I believe Gregg Taylor had tongue firmly in cheek. :) Anyway the solution isn't to make government "more like" business, it's obviously to completely remove it and let the free market reign unhindered. That way we can choose which profit-motivated company we want to give our money to, because there are no historical examples of that EVER failing. And giving your money to a profit-motivated company is completely different to someone stealing your money and spending it however they like because... umm....
Businesses are more agile and less contrained to "mission" than governments. So, when a government implements "adjusted depreciation" or "deffered maintenance" to statutory or administrative expenditures - that's were it potentially fails. Apple can lose a bunch, decide to quit the watch business. Public right of ways, safety, health and etc. are not so optional. They are separate models.
Those services are so essential that someone else was already providing them before governments took over hem. BTW, thieves do often provide "essential services". Ever seen Vito Corleone in The Godfather providing "protection" to his clients, or making them offers they can't refuse (youtu.be/SeldwfOwuL8)? Can there be anything more essential than that?
«The Sicilian Mafia, also known as Cosa Nostra ("our thing"), is a criminal syndicate in Sicily, Italy. It is a loose association of criminal groups that share a common organisational structure and code of conduct. Each group, known as a "family", "clan", or "cosca" or "cosche" in Sicilian,[1] claims sovereignty over a territory, usually a town or village or a neighbourhood (borgata) of a larger city, in which it operates its rackets. Its members call themselves "men of honour", although the public often refers to them as "mafiosi". The Mafia's core activities are protection racketeering, the arbitration of disputes between criminals, and the organizing and oversight of illegal agreements and transactions. [2][3]» en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_Mafia
«A protection racket is a scheme whereby a group provides protection to businesses or other groups through violence outside the sanction of the law. Through the credible threat of violence, the racketeers deter people from swindling, robbing, injuring, sabotaging or otherwise harming their clients. Protection rackets tend to appear in markets where the police and judiciary cannot be counted on to provide legal protection, either because of incompetence (as in weak or failed states) or illegality (black markets).
Protection rackets are often indistinguishable in practice from extortion rackets since, for the latter, there will be an implied threat that the racketeers themselves may attack the business if it fails to pay for their protection. In an extortion racket, the racketeers agree simply to not attack a business. In a protection racket the criminals agree to defend a business from any attack. Conversely, extortion racketeers will have to defend their clients if threatened by a rival gang to avoid the client transferring their allegiance » en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_racket
Scott Elyard, is that comment supposed to be an argument or just a statement? On the other hand, what do you know about the accountability of the Mafia? Perhaps don't they abide to a code of conduct and don't call themselves "men of honour"? Perhaps don't they punish those who don't respect such code?
Cops are held (ideally) to a higher standard than themselves: the law, which citizens have a say in.
A mafia is held up to no other standard but itself and whatever arbitrary codes criminals might have in place, which are likely to be inconsistently applied and ignored when inconvenient. If ordinary citizens are wronged by the mafia, citizens have little to no recourse for rectification—especially if those responsible are members of the higher levels of the organization.
In most civilized cases, there's not much basis for comparison between the two.
Scott Elyard: "Cops are held (ideally) to a higher standard than themselves"
— Reification fallacy, standards are abstraction, they can't be compared with physical entities such as cops. Also, what do you mean by "ideally", that this is not what actually happens? Then, why do you bring it up?
Scott Elyard: "the law, which citizens have a say in."
— Your "have a say" is already a law, right? To what extent is the individual free not to abide to such "have a say" law?
Scott Elyard: "A mafia is held up to no other standard but itself and whatever arbitrary codes criminals might have in place, which are likely to be inconsistently applied and ignored when inconvenient."
— Just like governments. The only restraints of government's actions are the force of retaliation, the capacity of rebellion and evasion of their victims, and the competition with other governments, as with rival Mafia gangs.
Scott Elyard: "If ordinary citizens are wronged by the mafia, citizens have little to no recourse for rectification"
— They have the same kind or recourse as against governments.
Scott Elyard: "In most civilized cases, there's not much basis for comparison between the two."
— "Civilised" is just another term to say "under government rule". All its positive connotations have been added to make government power look benign and desirable. I wouldn't be surprised that the Mafia capos have come up with a similar term to try to dignify those who obey and who submit to their power to make them feel morally and materially superior:
(p. x) «My argument is a deconstruction of Chinese and other civilizational discourses about the “barbarian,” the “raw,” the “primitive.” On close inspection those terms, practically, mean ungoverned, not-yet-incorporated. Civilizational discourses never entertain the possibility of people voluntarily going over to the barbarians, hence such statuses are stigmatized and ethnicized. Ethnicity and “tribe” begin exactly where taxes and sovereignty end —in the Roman Empire as in the Chinese.» … (p. 2) «Behind each lament lies a particular project of rule: Han rule under the Qing, British rule within the Empire, and finally, the rule of orthodox Protestant Christianity in Appalachia. All would style themselves, unself-consciously, as bearers of order, progress, enlightenment, and civilization. All wished to extend the advantages of administrative discipline, associated with the state or organized religion, to areas previously ungoverned.» … (p. 7) «A wealthy and peaceful state center might attract a growing population that found its advantages rewarding. This, of course, fits the standard civilizational narrative of rude barbarians mesmerized by the prosperity made possible by the king’s peace and justice—a narrative shared by most of the world’s salvational religions, not to mention Thomas Hobbes.
This narrative ignores two capital facts. First, as we have noted, it appears that much, if not most, of the population of the early states was unfree; they were subjects under duress. The second fact, most inconvenient for the standard narrative of civilization, is that it was very common for state subjects to run away. Living within the state meant, virtually by definition, taxes, conscription, corvée labor, and, for most, a condition of servitude; these conditions were at the core of the state’s strategic and military advantages.» … (p. 8) «Note that this account of the periphery is sharply at odds with the official story most civilizations tell about themselves. According to that tale, a backward, naïve, and perhaps barbaric people are gradually incorporated into an advanced, superior, and more prosperous society and culture.» …
«Once we entertain the possibility that the “barbarians” are not just “there” as a residue but may well have chosen their location, their subsistence practices, and their social structure to maintain their autonomy, the standard civilizational story of social evolution collapses utterly. The temporal, civilizational series —from foraging to swiddening (or to pastoralism), to sedentary grain cultivation, to irrigated wet-rice farming —and its near-twin, the series from roving forest bands to small clearings, to hamlets, to villages, to towns, to court centers: these are the underpinning of the valley state’s sense of superiority.» … (p. 98) «The permanent settlement of populations is, along with taxes, perhaps the oldest state activity. It has always been accompanied by a civilizational discourse in which those who are settled are presumed to have raised their cultural and moral level. While the rhetoric of high imperialism could speak unself-consciously of “civilizing” and “Christianizing” the nomadic heathen, such terms strike the modern ear as outdated and provincial, or as euphemisms for all manner of brutalities. And yet if one substitutes the nouns development, progress, and modernization, it is apparent that the project, under a new flag, is very much alive and well.» … (p 99) «Given the fact that such states were created by an ingathering of various peoples living outside state structures, it is not surprising that the major elements representing a “civilized” existence happen to coincide with life in the padi state: living in permanent villages in the valleys, cultivating fixed fields, preferably wet rice, recognizing a social hierarchy with kings and clerics at its apex, and professing a major salvation religion —Buddhism, Islam, or, in the case of the Philippines, Christianity.» … (p. 104) «Thus becoming fully civilized, in the valley view, is nearly indistinguishable from becoming Han, Thai, or Burman and, in turn, by definition, being incorporated as a state subject.[22] Remaining outside the state is, as we shall see, coded “uncivilized.”» … (p. 110) «As the padi state increasingly coded itself as “Han-Chinese”—as a unique culture, a civilization—it coded those who were not incorporated, or who refused to be incorporated, as “barbarians.” Those barbarians still living within what the Chinese state saw as its frontiers were termed “inner” barbarians, and those who “detached themselves from the old matrix to become one of the components of the pastoral nomad society of the steppes” became the “outer” barbarians.» … (p. 118) «The civilizational project is alive and well in twentieth-century mainland Southeast Asia. Following a Hmong/Miao rebellion in northern Thailand in the late 1960s, General Prapas not only deployed all the counterinsurgency techniques at his disposal—including napalm and aerial bombing—but undertook to “civilize” the rebels with schools, resettlement, clinics, and sedentary agricultural techniques.» … (p. 119) « Depending on the culture of the court center, the content of what it meant to be civilized—and reciprocally, what it meant to be stigmatized as barbarian—varied. Each represented, metaphorically, a ladder of ascent, but many of the rungs were unique and particular. In Siam and Burma, Theravada Buddhism was a key marker of civilized status.[68] In Vietnam and China literacy and, beyond that, familiarity with the classics was crucial. In the Malay world, upstream populations were, much as Wang Yangming described the Yao, “unfinished Malays.” An essential rung on the way to being “finished” (the Chinese term would be cooked) was the profession of Islam.
All these ladders, however, had at least two rungs in common, despite their cultural particularities. They stipulated, as a condition of civilization, sedentary agriculture and residence within state space. » … (p. 123) «Barbarians are, then, a state effect; they are inconceivable except as a “position” vis-à-vis the state. There is much to recommend Bennet Bronson’s minimalist definition of a barbarian as “simply a member of a political unit that is in direct contact with a state but that is not itself a state.” Thus understood, barbarians can be, and often have been, quite “civilized” in the sense of literacy, technological skills, and familiarity with nearby “great traditions” —say, of the Romans or the Han-Chinese. Consider, in this light, such nonstate peoples as the Irish or, in insular Southeast Asia, the Minangkabau and Batak.» … (p. 124) «Like their Han and mainland Southeast Asian counterparts, the Romans had a barbarian chiefdom fetish. Wherever possible they created territories, promulgated more or less arbitrary ethnic distinctions, and appointed, or recognized, a single chief who was, willy nilly, the local vector of Roman authority and answerable for the good conduct of his “people.” The peoples so codified were likewise ranged along an evolutionary scale of civilization. The Celts closest to Roman power in Gaul, a stateless but culturally distinct group of peoples with fortified towns and agriculture, were comparable to cooked barbarians in the Chinese scheme. Those beyond the Rhine (the various Germanic peoples) were raw barbarians, and the mobile Huns between Rome and the Black Sea were the rawest of the raw. In the Roman province of Britain, the Picts beyond Hadrian’s Wall in the north were the rawest of the raw, or “the last of the free,” depending on one’s perspective.[87]
Once again, positionality vis-à-vis imperial rule was a crucial marker for a people’s degree of civilization. Administered (cooked) barbarians in Roman ruled provinces lost their ethnic designations as they became, like farmers, liable for taxes and conscription. All those beyond this sphere were invariably ethnicized, given chiefs, and made responsible for tribute (obsequium), as distinct from taxes, especially as they were seen as a non-grain-growing people. The link between direct Roman rule and barbarian status is obvious in those cases when such “provincials” rebelled against Roman rule. They were, in such cases, reethnicized (rebarbarianized!), demonstrating, in the process, that civilizational backsliding was possible and was very much a political category.» … (p. 128) «This view of the hills as peopled, until very recently, by a process of state-evading migration is in sharp contrast to an older view that is still part of the folk beliefs of valley people. This older view saw hill people as an aboriginal population that had failed, for one reason or another, to make the transition to a more civilized way of life: specifically, to settled, wet-rice agriculture, lowland religion, and membership (as subject or citizen) in a larger political community.» … (p. 160) «The dynastic self-portraits of precolonial padi states in Southeast Asia and of the Ming and Qing dynasties are, in the official sources, represented in rosy colors as a rather benign ingathering of peoples. Wise administrators shepherd rude peoples toward a literate, Buddhist or Confucian court center in which sedentary wet-rice cultivation and becoming a full subject of the realm stand as the marks of civilizational achievement. Like all ideological self-representations, the Hegelian ideal they depict seems, like the use of the term pacification in the Vietnam War, a cruel parody of lived experience, especially at the frontier.
Ignoring for the moment the larger question of what “civilization” might be understood to represent, the self-portrait is radically wrong in at least two respects. First, the process of ingathering was, typically, anything but a benign, voluntary journey toward civilization. Much of the population at the center was a captive population—taken en masse as prizes of war and driven back to the core or purchased, retail, as it were, from slaving expeditions selling the state what it most needed.» … (p. 172) «Since, by lowland standards, civilized people are wet-rice growing, taxpaying subjects of a state, to leave that condition, to move out of the state’s orbit and adopt new subsistence routines is, ipso facto, to place oneself beyond the pale.» … (p. 188) «As an empirical description of premodern Europe or of most poor nations until the twentieth century, and as an empirical description of the hilly areas of mainland Southeast Asia (Zomia), however, this narrative is profoundly misleading. What the schema portrays is not simply a self-satisfied normative account of progress but a gradient of successive stages of incorporation into state structures. Its stages of civilization are, at the same time, an index of diminishing autonomy and freedom.» … (p. 217) «if hill ideologies can be said to be deeply influenced by lowland states, it is equally the case that the lowland states, themselves historical aggregates of ingathered peoples, are preoccupied in explaining the superiority of their “civilization” vis-à-vis their “ruder” neighbors.» … (p. 281) «For the past half-century, however, the gradient of available identities has, as it were, been radically tilted in favor of various degrees of state control. The classical narrative of “raw” barbarian peoples being brought to civilization has been replicated by a narrative of development and nation-building. While the older narrative was, owing to the limitations of state power, more an aspiration than reality, the new narrative is more imposing.» … (p. 324) «Savagery has become their character and nature. They enjoy it, because it means freedom from authority and no subservience to leadership. Such a natural disposition is the negation and antithesis of civilization. —Ibn Khaldun on nomads» … (p. 326) « The valley state’s elites define their status as a civilization by reference to those outside their grasp, while at the same time depending on them for trade and to replenish (by capture or inducements) their subject population.» … (p. 327) «Upland societies, far from being the original, primal “stuff” from which states and “civilizations” were crafted, are, rather, largely a reflexive product of state-making designed to be as unappealing as possible as a site of appropriation. Just as nomadic pastoralism is now generally recognized as a secondary adaptation by populations wishing both to leave the sedentary agrarian state and yet take advantage of the trading and raiding opportunities it afforded, so is swiddening largely a secondary adaptation. Like pastoralism, it disperses population and lacks the “nerve centers” that a state might seize. The fugitive nature of its production frustrates appropriation.» … (p. 336)
«The padi state’s officials had, on the other hand, every incentive to discourage all form of settlement, subsistence, and social organization that represented an inappropriable landscape. They discouraged and, when they could, prohibited dispersed settlement, foraging, swiddening, and migration away from the core. If the padi fields had come to mean civilized landscape of properly organized subjects and their production, then by extension those who lived in remote places, in the hills or in the forests, who shifted their fields and often shifted themselves, who formed and re-formed small egalitarian hamlets were uncivilized. What is most striking here, of course, is how closely the ideal of a civilized landscape and demography coincides with a landscape and demography most suitable for state-making and how closely a landscape unsuitable for state appropriation, as well as the people who inhabit it, is understood as uncivilized and barbaric. The effective coordinates, from this perspective, for figuring out who is civilized and who is not, turn out to be not much more than an agro-ecological code for state appropriation.
The tight correlation is unmistakable between life at the margins of the state on the one hand and primitiveness and backwardness on the other, in the view of valley elites. One has only to list the most salient characteristics of landscapes and peoples beyond the state’s easy grasp to produce, simultaneously, a catalogue of primitiveness. Dwelling in inaccessible forests and on hilltops codes as uncivilized. Foraging, forest collecting—even for commercial gain—and swiddening also code as backward. Scattered living and small settlements are, by definition, archaic. Physical mobility and transient, negotiable identities are both primitive and dangerous. Not following the great valley religions or not being the tax- and tithe-bearing subjects of monarchs and clergy places one outside the pale of civilization. »
As for the "argument from authority", it's a perfectly logically valid argument when the authority cited is in fact an authority on the subject, in the above case, political science and anthropology-ethnography:
Due to a small but consistent influx of spam, comments will now be checked before publishing. Only egregious spam/illegal/racist crap will be disapproved, everything else will be published.
Mismanagement of funds is what happens when people are taxed too much. The workers steal the funds for themselves and/or managers make up idiotic ways to spend money on "pork projects", which is a waste.
ReplyDeleteEssential services are fine. Yet, Why can't the gov't put money aside for repairs and maintenance, instead of putting the job off for 20yrs and making things cost more??? I'm furious at the mismanagement of the funds my city get. Instead of paving roads, the funds go to make "Bike Boxes"... Oh, how quaint. This, while people who are in wheelchairs need curb ramps... That's a federal law. It gets ignored. "I'm sorry, that's not on the agenda for this year".
"Mismanagement of funds is what happens when people are taxed too much."
ReplyDeleteOh, it doesn't even have to be through over-taxation, though that can be a problem. Mismanagement of funds can happen regardless of how much money is involved.
There's a short description in one of the Discworld books where Captain Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork city guard describes how the rich end up spending less money than the poor. If you can spend $50 on shoes you're good for a year. If you can only afford $10 you'll end up buying a pair every month. Sometimes I think the drive toward lower government spending is a lot like that.
The answer is privatization because government should run like a business...whose prime duty is to make money...oh, wait a minute...that would be taxes...nevermind!
ReplyDeleteas for the "government should run like a business", I think Rhys Taylor being in CZ Republic may have something to say about it. Something concerning a certain huge business figure (some would say oligarch) and nowadays minister of finance. The "government running like business" has been his credo since last elections and... well... let's say it doesn't seem to be doing any good so far.
ReplyDeleteI believe Gregg Taylor had tongue firmly in cheek. :) Anyway the solution isn't to make government "more like" business, it's obviously to completely remove it and let the free market reign unhindered. That way we can choose which profit-motivated company we want to give our money to, because there are no historical examples of that EVER failing. And giving your money to a profit-motivated company is completely different to someone stealing your money and spending it however they like because... umm....
ReplyDeleteBusinesses are more agile and less contrained to "mission" than governments. So, when a government implements "adjusted depreciation" or "deffered maintenance" to statutory or administrative expenditures - that's were it potentially fails. Apple can lose a bunch, decide to quit the watch business. Public right of ways, safety, health and etc. are not so optional. They are separate models.
ReplyDeleteThose services are so essential that someone else was already providing them before governments took over hem.
ReplyDeleteBTW, thieves do often provide "essential services". Ever seen Vito Corleone in The Godfather providing "protection" to his clients, or making them offers they can't refuse (youtu.be/SeldwfOwuL8)? Can there be anything more essential than that?
«The Sicilian Mafia, also known as Cosa Nostra ("our thing"), is a criminal syndicate in Sicily, Italy. It is a loose association of criminal groups that share a common organisational structure and code of conduct. Each group, known as a "family", "clan", or "cosca" or "cosche" in Sicilian,[1] claims sovereignty over a territory, usually a town or village or a neighbourhood (borgata) of a larger city, in which it operates its rackets. Its members call themselves "men of honour", although the public often refers to them as "mafiosi". The Mafia's core activities are protection racketeering, the arbitration of disputes between criminals, and the organizing and oversight of illegal agreements and transactions. [2][3]»
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_Mafia
«A protection racket is a scheme whereby a group provides protection to businesses or other groups through violence outside the sanction of the law. Through the credible threat of violence, the racketeers deter people from swindling, robbing, injuring, sabotaging or otherwise harming their clients. Protection rackets tend to appear in markets where the police and judiciary cannot be counted on to provide legal protection, either because of incompetence (as in weak or failed states) or illegality (black markets).
Protection rackets are often indistinguishable in practice from extortion rackets since, for the latter, there will be an implied threat that the racketeers themselves may attack the business if it fails to pay for their protection. In an extortion racket, the racketeers agree simply to not attack a business. In a protection racket the criminals agree to defend a business from any attack. Conversely, extortion racketeers will have to defend their clients if threatened by a rival gang to avoid the client transferring their allegiance »
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_racket
Zephyr López Cervilla There's a pretty crucial difference in accountability between Mafia "protection" and police.
ReplyDeleteScott Elyard, is that comment supposed to be an argument or just a statement?
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, what do you know about the accountability of the Mafia? Perhaps don't they abide to a code of conduct and don't call themselves "men of honour"? Perhaps don't they punish those who don't respect such code?
funny, love it...
ReplyDeleteZephyr López Cervilla It's both, really.
ReplyDeleteCops are held (ideally) to a higher standard than themselves: the law, which citizens have a say in.
A mafia is held up to no other standard but itself and whatever arbitrary codes criminals might have in place, which are likely to be inconsistently applied and ignored when inconvenient. If ordinary citizens are wronged by the mafia, citizens have little to no recourse for rectification—especially if those responsible are members of the higher levels of the organization.
In most civilized cases, there's not much basis for comparison between the two.
Scott Elyard: "Cops are held (ideally) to a higher standard than themselves"
ReplyDelete— Reification fallacy, standards are abstraction, they can't be compared with physical entities such as cops.
Also, what do you mean by "ideally", that this is not what actually happens? Then, why do you bring it up?
Scott Elyard: "the law, which citizens have a say in."
— Your "have a say" is already a law, right? To what extent is the individual free not to abide to such "have a say" law?
Scott Elyard: "A mafia is held up to no other standard but itself and whatever arbitrary codes criminals might have in place, which are likely to be inconsistently applied and ignored when inconvenient."
— Just like governments. The only restraints of government's actions are the force of retaliation, the capacity of rebellion and evasion of their victims, and the competition with other governments, as with rival Mafia gangs.
Scott Elyard: "If ordinary citizens are wronged by the mafia, citizens have little to no recourse for rectification"
— They have the same kind or recourse as against governments.
Scott Elyard: "In most civilized cases, there's not much basis for comparison between the two."
— "Civilised" is just another term to say "under government rule". All its positive connotations have been added to make government power look benign and desirable. I wouldn't be surprised that the Mafia capos have come up with a similar term to try to dignify those who obey and who submit to their power to make them feel morally and materially superior:
(p. x) «My argument is a deconstruction of Chinese and other civilizational discourses about the “barbarian,” the “raw,” the “primitive.” On close inspection those terms, practically, mean ungoverned, not-yet-incorporated. Civilizational discourses never entertain the possibility of people voluntarily going over to the barbarians, hence such statuses are stigmatized and ethnicized. Ethnicity and “tribe” begin exactly where taxes and sovereignty end —in the Roman Empire as in the Chinese.»
…
(p. 2) «Behind each lament lies a particular project of rule: Han rule under the Qing, British rule within the Empire, and finally, the rule of orthodox Protestant Christianity in Appalachia. All would style themselves, unself-consciously, as bearers of order, progress, enlightenment, and civilization. All wished to extend the advantages of administrative discipline, associated with the state or organized religion, to areas previously ungoverned.»
…
(p. 7) «A wealthy and peaceful state center might attract a growing population that found its advantages rewarding. This, of course, fits the standard civilizational narrative of rude barbarians mesmerized by the prosperity made possible by the king’s peace and justice—a narrative shared by most of the world’s salvational religions, not to mention Thomas Hobbes.
This narrative ignores two capital facts. First, as we have noted, it appears that much, if not most, of the population of the early states was unfree; they were subjects under duress. The second fact, most inconvenient for the standard narrative of civilization, is that it was very common for state subjects to run away. Living within the state meant, virtually by definition, taxes, conscription, corvée labor, and, for most, a condition of servitude; these conditions were at the core of the state’s strategic and military advantages.»
…
(p. 8) «Note that this account of the periphery is sharply at odds with the official story most civilizations tell about themselves. According to that tale, a backward, naïve, and perhaps barbaric people are gradually incorporated into an advanced, superior, and more prosperous society and culture.»
…
«Once we entertain the possibility that the “barbarians” are not just “there” as a residue but may well have chosen their location, their subsistence practices, and their social structure to maintain their autonomy, the standard civilizational story of social evolution collapses utterly. The temporal, civilizational series —from foraging to swiddening (or to pastoralism), to sedentary grain cultivation, to irrigated wet-rice farming —and its near-twin, the series from roving forest bands to small clearings, to hamlets, to villages, to towns, to court centers: these are the underpinning of the valley state’s sense of superiority.»
ReplyDelete…
(p. 98) «The permanent settlement of populations is, along with taxes, perhaps the oldest state activity. It has always been accompanied by a civilizational discourse in which those who are settled are presumed to have raised their cultural and moral level. While the rhetoric of high imperialism could speak unself-consciously of “civilizing” and “Christianizing” the nomadic heathen, such terms strike the modern ear as outdated and provincial, or as euphemisms for all manner of brutalities. And yet if one substitutes the nouns development, progress, and modernization, it is apparent that the project, under a new flag, is very much alive and well.»
…
(p 99) «Given the fact that such states were created by an ingathering of various peoples living outside state structures, it is not surprising that the major elements representing a “civilized” existence happen to coincide with life in the padi state: living in permanent villages in the valleys, cultivating fixed fields, preferably wet rice, recognizing a social hierarchy with kings and clerics at its apex, and professing a major salvation religion —Buddhism, Islam, or, in the case of the Philippines, Christianity.»
…
(p. 104) «Thus becoming fully civilized, in the valley view, is nearly indistinguishable from becoming Han, Thai, or Burman and, in turn, by definition, being incorporated as a state subject.[22] Remaining outside the state is, as we shall see, coded “uncivilized.”»
…
(p. 110) «As the padi state increasingly coded itself as “Han-Chinese”—as a unique culture, a civilization—it coded those who were not incorporated, or who refused to be incorporated, as “barbarians.” Those barbarians still living within what the Chinese state saw as its frontiers were termed “inner” barbarians, and those who “detached themselves from the old matrix to become one of the components of the pastoral nomad society of the steppes” became the “outer” barbarians.»
…
(p. 118) «The civilizational project is alive and well in twentieth-century mainland Southeast Asia. Following a Hmong/Miao rebellion in northern Thailand in the late 1960s, General Prapas not only deployed all the counterinsurgency techniques at his disposal—including napalm and aerial bombing—but undertook to “civilize” the rebels with schools, resettlement, clinics, and sedentary agricultural techniques.»
…
(p. 119) « Depending on the culture of the court center, the content of what it meant to be civilized—and reciprocally, what it meant to be stigmatized as barbarian—varied. Each represented, metaphorically, a ladder of ascent, but many of the rungs were unique and particular. In Siam and Burma, Theravada Buddhism was a key marker of civilized status.[68] In Vietnam and China literacy and, beyond that, familiarity with the classics was crucial. In the Malay world, upstream populations were, much as Wang Yangming described the Yao, “unfinished Malays.” An essential rung on the way to being “finished” (the Chinese term would be cooked) was the profession of Islam.
All these ladders, however, had at least two rungs in common, despite their cultural particularities. They stipulated, as a condition of civilization, sedentary agriculture and residence within state space. »
ReplyDelete…
(p. 123) «Barbarians are, then, a state effect; they are inconceivable except as a “position” vis-à-vis the state. There is much to recommend Bennet Bronson’s minimalist definition of a barbarian as “simply a member of a political unit that is in direct contact with a state but that is not itself a state.” Thus understood, barbarians can be, and often have been, quite “civilized” in the sense of literacy, technological skills, and familiarity with nearby “great traditions” —say, of the Romans or the Han-Chinese. Consider, in this light, such nonstate peoples as the Irish or, in insular Southeast Asia, the Minangkabau and Batak.»
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(p. 124) «Like their Han and mainland Southeast Asian counterparts, the Romans had a barbarian chiefdom fetish. Wherever possible they created territories, promulgated more or less arbitrary ethnic distinctions, and appointed, or recognized, a single chief who was, willy nilly, the local vector of Roman authority and answerable for the good conduct of his “people.” The peoples so codified were likewise ranged along an evolutionary scale of civilization. The Celts closest to Roman power in Gaul, a stateless but culturally distinct group of peoples with fortified towns and agriculture, were comparable to cooked barbarians in the Chinese scheme. Those beyond the Rhine (the various Germanic peoples) were raw barbarians, and the mobile Huns between Rome and the Black Sea were the rawest of the raw. In the Roman province of Britain, the Picts beyond Hadrian’s Wall in the north were the rawest of the raw, or “the last of the free,” depending on one’s perspective.[87]
Once again, positionality vis-à-vis imperial rule was a crucial marker for a people’s degree of civilization. Administered (cooked) barbarians in Roman ruled provinces lost their ethnic designations as they became, like farmers, liable for taxes and conscription. All those beyond this sphere were invariably ethnicized, given chiefs, and made responsible for tribute (obsequium), as distinct from taxes, especially as they were seen as a non-grain-growing people. The link between direct Roman rule and barbarian status is obvious in those cases when such “provincials” rebelled against Roman rule. They were, in such cases, reethnicized (rebarbarianized!), demonstrating, in the process, that civilizational backsliding was possible and was very much a political category.»
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(p. 128) «This view of the hills as peopled, until very recently, by a process of state-evading migration is in sharp contrast to an older view that is still part of the folk beliefs of valley people. This older view saw hill people as an aboriginal population that had failed, for one reason or another, to make the transition to a more civilized way of life: specifically, to settled, wet-rice agriculture, lowland religion, and membership (as subject or citizen) in a larger political community.»
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(p. 160) «The dynastic self-portraits of precolonial padi states in Southeast Asia and of the Ming and Qing dynasties are, in the official sources, represented in rosy colors as a rather benign ingathering of peoples. Wise administrators shepherd rude peoples toward a literate, Buddhist or Confucian court center in which sedentary wet-rice cultivation and becoming a full subject of the realm stand as the marks of civilizational achievement. Like all ideological self-representations, the Hegelian ideal they depict seems, like the use of the term pacification in the Vietnam War, a cruel parody of lived experience, especially at the frontier.
Ignoring for the moment the larger question of what “civilization” might be understood to represent, the self-portrait is radically wrong in at least two respects. First, the process of ingathering was, typically, anything but a benign, voluntary journey toward civilization. Much of the population at the center was a captive population—taken en masse as prizes of war and driven back to the core or purchased, retail, as it were, from slaving expeditions selling the state what it most needed.»
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(p. 172) «Since, by lowland standards, civilized people are wet-rice growing, taxpaying subjects of a state, to leave that condition, to move out of the state’s orbit and adopt new subsistence routines is, ipso facto, to place oneself beyond the pale.»
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(p. 188) «As an empirical description of premodern Europe or of most poor nations until the twentieth century, and as an empirical description of the hilly areas of mainland Southeast Asia (Zomia), however, this narrative is profoundly misleading. What the schema portrays is not simply a self-satisfied normative account of progress but a gradient of successive stages of incorporation into state structures. Its stages of civilization are, at the same time, an index of diminishing autonomy and freedom.»
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(p. 217) «if hill ideologies can be said to be deeply influenced by lowland states, it is equally the case that the lowland states, themselves historical aggregates of ingathered peoples, are preoccupied in explaining the superiority of their “civilization” vis-à-vis their “ruder” neighbors.»
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(p. 281) «For the past half-century, however, the gradient of available identities has, as it were, been radically tilted in favor of various degrees of state control. The classical narrative of “raw” barbarian peoples being brought to civilization has been replicated by a narrative of development and nation-building. While the older narrative was, owing to the limitations of state power, more an aspiration than reality, the new narrative is more imposing.»
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(p. 324) «Savagery has become their character and nature. They enjoy it, because it means freedom from authority and no subservience to leadership. Such a natural disposition is the negation and antithesis of civilization.
—Ibn Khaldun on nomads»
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(p. 326) « The valley state’s elites define their status as a civilization by reference to those outside their grasp, while at the same time depending on them for trade and to replenish (by capture or inducements) their subject population.»
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(p. 327) «Upland societies, far from being the original, primal “stuff” from which states and “civilizations” were crafted, are, rather, largely a reflexive product of state-making designed to be as unappealing as possible as a site of appropriation. Just as nomadic pastoralism is now generally recognized as a secondary adaptation by populations wishing both to leave the sedentary agrarian state and yet take advantage of the trading and raiding opportunities it afforded, so is swiddening largely a secondary adaptation. Like pastoralism, it disperses population and lacks the “nerve centers” that a state might seize. The fugitive nature of its production frustrates appropriation.»
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(p. 336)
«The padi state’s officials had, on the other hand, every incentive to discourage all form of settlement, subsistence, and social organization that represented an inappropriable landscape. They discouraged and, when they could, prohibited dispersed settlement, foraging, swiddening, and migration away from the core. If the padi fields had come to mean civilized landscape of properly organized subjects and their production, then by extension those who lived in remote places, in the hills or in the forests, who shifted their fields and often shifted themselves, who formed and re-formed small egalitarian hamlets were uncivilized. What is most striking here, of course, is how closely the ideal of a civilized landscape and demography coincides with a landscape and demography most suitable for state-making and how closely a landscape unsuitable for state appropriation, as well as the people who inhabit it, is understood as uncivilized and barbaric. The effective coordinates, from this perspective, for figuring out who is civilized and who is not, turn out to be not much more than an agro-ecological code for state appropriation.
ReplyDeleteThe tight correlation is unmistakable between life at the margins of the state on the one hand and primitiveness and backwardness on the other, in the view of valley elites. One has only to list the most salient characteristics of landscapes and peoples beyond the state’s easy grasp to produce, simultaneously, a catalogue of primitiveness. Dwelling in inaccessible forests and on hilltops codes as uncivilized. Foraging, forest collecting—even for commercial gain—and swiddening also code as backward. Scattered living and small settlements are, by definition, archaic. Physical mobility and transient, negotiable identities are both primitive and dangerous. Not following the great valley religions or not being the tax- and tithe-bearing subjects of monarchs and clergy places one outside the pale of civilization. »
— James C Scott. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. Yale Agrarian Studies, Yale University Press (2009).
(amazon.com/dp/0300169175)
(en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Not_Being_Governed)
kickass.to/the-art-of-not-being-governed-an-anarchist-history-of-upland-southeast-asia-yale-agrarian-studies-james-c-scott-2009-pdf-t7423482.html
URL G+ post with further excerpts and references:
plus.google.com/+ZephyrLópezCervilla/posts/FxJqkmfSEuY
Zephyr López Cervilla That appears to be a lot of sophistry.
ReplyDeleteWhich I don't really have time to address. But I'll stick with civilization as being much better than the proposed alternative.
Scott Elyard, Sure, the kind of sophistry written by a Sterling Professor in Political Science at Yale University:
ReplyDeleteen.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterling_Professor#List_of_Sterling_Professors
yale.edu/opa/arc-ybc/v29.n29/story6.html
Hey, isn't that argument from authority?
ReplyDelete(Also, I tend to be very wary of possible quote mining.)
Hey, isn't "a lot of sophistry" prejudicial language ?
ReplyDeletelogicallyfallacious.com/index.php/logical-fallacies/144-prejudicial-language
As for the "argument from authority", it's a perfectly logically valid argument when the authority cited is in fact an authority on the subject, in the above case, political science and anthropology-ethnography:
«Appealing to authority is valid when the authority is actually a legitimate (debatable) authority on the facts of the argument.»
logicallyfallacious.com/index.php/logical-fallacies/21-appeal-to-authority