Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! How the Victorians gave us the vibrator

The Manipulator

The Victorians were a pretty resourceful bunch – postage stamps flushing public toilets, telephones and the world’s first underground railway were all inventions of Victorian Britain. However there is another side to them; Victorian values is a byword for repressive sexual mores. If ever we want to feel superior about ourselves, we can always have a good laugh at the expense of those prudish Victorians. We all know that they used to cover table legs because they suggested human anatomy. Therefore it was quite a surprise to discover that the prim Victorians invented the electric vibrator. Regular readers of my blog may have noticed my unhealthy obsession with sex toys. I have already posted about the notorious 17^th century libertine John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester and his classic poem, Signior Dildo. Then I did a piece on sex robots. This week I will be looking at vibrators and their rather unlikely history. If you want to know about the history of vibrators, then the leading authority is Rachel Maines, author of The Technology of Orgasm. She is my kind of historian. Don’t get me wrong – I am interested in traditional history. But I do like this kind of quirky, offbeat stuff.Maines, first got into this subject while she was researching the history of needlework. Perusing a 1906 needlepoint magazine, she was shocked to see an advertisement for a vibrator. When she realized this was virgin territory for academics she decided to write a scholarly history of the device.

How did the Victorian end up inventing the vibrator? Victorian England was awash with hysterical women. They were seen as naturally frail and at the mercy of their reproductive systems. In 1859 one physician claimed that a quarter of all women suffered from hysteria. This was a good old-fashioned health scare. I need to stop here and explain the meaning and origins of the word hysteria. There are two standard definitions:

1. Behaviour exhibiting excessive or uncontrollable emotion, such as fear or panic.

2. A mental disorder characterized by emotional excitability and sometimes by amnesia or a physical deficit, such as paralysis, or a sensory deficit, without an organic cause.

Its etymology is fascinating. For more than two millennia of European history until the late nineteenth century hysteria referred to a medical condition thought to be confined to women and caused by disturbances of the uterus. Thus the words hysterical and hysterectomy have a common etymological origin, the Greek word for uterus.

Hippocrates the father of western medicine, believed that there were women whose uteri had become too light and dry from not enough sexual intercourse. As a result the uterus would wander upward, compressing the heart, lungs, and diaphragm. These travels could have different consequences depending on where the roving uterus chose to lodge itself. But if the nomadic organ ultimately ended up next to the brain, it would cause hysteria. According to the 2^nd century anatomist Galen, hysteria was caused by the retention of female semen, which could get into the blood and corrupt it. The normal treatment in these days, and in the Middle Ages and renaissance too, was a pelvic massage.

So we come to Victorian England. Such was the demand for the treatment doctors just couldn’t cope. It appears that male doctors did not really enjoy providing pelvic massage treatment. A very time-consuming task, it could take them up to an hour to bring the treatment to a satisfactory conclusion. Many of the doctors found themselves suffering from fatigued wrists and hands.Mainesalso claims that most of them did not even realise that the climax of the treatment they were offering was an orgasm.

These struggling doctors were about to get a helping hand. The inventor would be a doctor himself, Joseph Mortimer Granville. His electromechanical vibrator was thus invented as a labour saving device. “The Manipulator”, a steam-powered vibrator, had been invented in 1869 by another doctor, the American George Taylor. It does sound rather cumbersome – the patient-interface component was about the size of a dining room table and the steam engine that provided the power was located in a separate room from the patient. On the other hand, Dr. Granville’s electromechanical vibrator was portable, although it had a wet cell battery that weighed about 18 kilos. Nevertheless, these early vibrators reduced the time it took to achieve paroxysm in female patients to around five minutes. Now that’s what I call a game-changer. There was a massive buzz in London and female patients were queuing up to be treated by Doctor Granville.

But this was the start of the process. This is the genius of capitalism. With gradual incremental improvements what once took up a whole room became more compact, easier to use, cheaper and available to more and more people. I can see certain parallels with the development of computers. From the late 1800s to the 1920s a revolution took place as the vibrator migrated out of the doctors’ surgeries and into homes. Of course doctors opposed this move, but fortunately they were unable to stem the tide. The vibrator was in fact the fifth domestic appliance to be electrified, after the sewing machine, fan, tea kettle, and toaster. But it came some ten years before the vacuum cleaner and the electric iron. The home versions soon became extremely popular and appeared in magazines and catalogues. They were advertised as benefiting health, beauty and general wellbeing. In fact in 1909 Good Housekeeping magazine road tested a number of vibrators giving them a glowing report. By 1917 there were more vibrators in American homes than toasters.

The appearance of vibrators in 1920s blue movies blew away the device’s social camouflage. Their sexual connotations could no longer be ignored and vibrators went underground for a few decades. It was the sexual revolution of the 1960s that brought them back to the fore. Women wanted to take their pleasure into their own hands. In 1968 Jon H. Tavel obtained a patent for the “Cordless Electric Vibrator for Use on the Human Body” and the modern personal vibrator was born. Since the 1980s, vibrators have become more visible in mainstream public culture. Sex and the City captured the turn-of-the century zeitgeist. Research in America in 2009 indicated  that about 53% of women and about 46% of men in the United States between the ages 18 to 60 had used a vibrator. Unless you happen to live in Alabama,Georgia and Texas, where state legislatures have banned their sale, vibrators are now widely available. The ban in these states reflects the morality of some conservative Christians who believe that the use of vibrators is immoral and prohibited by the Bible.  Dan Ireland, a Baptist preacher, has been an outspoken critic who has sought to ban them on religious and ethical grounds. According to Ireland there is just no moral way to use them:

“Sometimes you have to protect the public against themselves….These devices should be outlawed because they are conducive to promiscuity, because they promote loose morals and because they entice improper and potentially deadly behaviours”

A landmark ruling by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2008 overturned the Texas ban and the legal provisions in George are rather vague. To all intents and purposes Alabama is now the onlyU.S.jurisdiction where such toys are illegal. Alabamans who sell sex toys, even in an adult context, face up to a year in prison and a $10,000 fine. Repeat offenders risk ten years in jail.

We have come full circle. We started off with Victorian values and we have finished talking about Alabama, a state that wants to go back to that kind of morality. Anyway, I think the image of the strait-laced Victorians is too much of a caricature. Be that as it may, we do live in a very different world. Pornography has gone mainstream. While I certainly wouldn’t want to go back to Victorian morality, perhaps now everything is too in your face. However, I do want to salute Joseph Mortimer Granville, a great Victorian, whose invention has brought pleasure to millions.

Perón, Kirchner and Argentina’s lost century

Everyone remembers the horrendous, world-changing events of the morning of September 11, 2001. Everyone remembers the planes commandeered by terrorists slamming into the twin towers of the Centro Mundial de Comercio in Buenos Aires. As the richest country on earth and the modern world’s first global hyperpower, Argentina was a prime target for malcontents revolting against the might of the Western capitalist order.

Fewer recall the disaster that befell the United States of America three months later. Fewer recalls the wrenching moment when the U.S. government, crushed by the huge debts it had run up borrowing abroad in pesos, announced it was bankrupt. The economic implosion that followed, in which thousands of jobless, homeless Americans slept rough and picked through trash bins at night in New York’s Central Park, shocked only those still used to thinking of the United States as a First World country.

__________

This piece of counterfactual history comes from the opening chapter of False Economy by the Financial Times’s Alan Beattie. It may sound far-fetched, but things could have indeed turned out this way. At the turn of the twentieth century the economies of these two countries were at a similar level.Argentina, whose name means land of silver, was the seventh richest nation on earth. Just over a century later there is enormous gap US GDP per capita is around five times larger than that of Argentina. In most rankings Argentina is around #60 in the world. Some people may not like GDP as a way of measuring an economy, but I feel it tells an eloquent story – all the resources in the world cannot compensate for gross economic mismanagement.

For economists,Argentina is indeed a perplexing country. In the 1960s the Nobel Prize–winning economist Simon Kuznets stated that there were four types of countries: the developed, the underdeveloped,Japan and Argentina. Economists have been perplexed byArgentina’s economic travails A series of corrupt, incompetent governments have wrecked the economy. They have stolen the savings from their own people. And when that has not been enough, they have gone after the foreign investors too young or too foolish to remember history.

If one man could be said to epitomise Argentina’s economic policy, it must be Juan Peron.  He believed the root of Argentina’s problems was that it exported low-value commodities and imported higher-value manufactured goods. I am not completely unsympathetic to this analysis but his solution – cutting his economy off from the rest of the world – was catastrophically wrong. Argentina wanted manufacturing not to build a base to conquer export markets, like Japan and South Korea, but merely to keep out imports. And its companies were protected not only from the outside world but also from domestic competition by massive state intervention in the economy. Peron had a visceral fear of the free market, and the government was running the economy not to direct the market but to replace it. Perón regarded foreign capital as an “imperialist agent.” Alas, these populist ideas remain extremely widespread in Argentinean politics today.

Now Argentina is led by Cristina Fernandez Kirchner’s whose policies are based on price controls, protectionism, and the maintenance of inefficient, state-run companies dependent on subsidies. Inflation is one of the highest in Latin America. And the government has an imperious need for cash. Most governments requiring cash can avail themselves of the debt markets. But given its record of defaulting Argentina would have to pay punitive interest rates. As a result, it has had to look for financing internally. Four years ago the government nationalized all private pension plans. In 2010, Kirchner got hold of the central bank’s assets especially the nation’s all-important foreign currency reserves. When the head of the central bank refused to go along, he was sacked and replaced with someone more amenable. 2012 has seen the turn of YPF, Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (English: Treasury Petroleum Fields) an Argentine energy company, which was owned by Repsol  Critics of the Spanish multinational accuse it of consistently failing to invest in oil and gas production, forcing Argentina to import energy to meet internal demand. Mark Weisbrot, writing in The Guardian, is typical of Kirchner’s European cheerleaders:

There are sound reasons for this move, and the government will most likely be proved right once again. Repsol, the Spanish oil company that currently owns 57% of Argentina’s YPF, hasn’t produced enough to keep up with Argentina’s rapidly growing economy. From 2004 to 2011, Argentina’s oil production has actually declined by almost 20% and gas by 13%, with YPF accounting for much of this. And the company’s proven reserves of oil and gas have also fallen substantially over the past few years.

To be honest I have no idea about the efficacy of Repsol’s management of YPF, but this is the type of economic illiteracy the Guardian specialises in. What Weisbrot conveniently fails to mention is the imposition of price controls, which have kept domestic oil, natural gas, and electricity prices lower than international prices and sometimes even below production costs. These artificially low prices, which promote massive energy consumption while at the same time discouraging investment, have had an inevitable result. Last year there was an energy deficit of more than $3 billion, and this year it is expected to double. Between 2000 and 2010 Argentine oil production fell by 22%, while demand rose by more than 40%, according to data from the Argentine Oil and Gas Institute and the Energy Ministry.

The decision to nationalise YPF was met with applause and cheers. Spain, which has plenty of problems of its own right now, will have a difficult time seeing any compensation. Repsol is expected to take Argentina to arbitration. But such cases are very long drawn-out and Argentina has a record of not paying awards against it. But what about the effects on Argentina? Just because you seize the assets doesn’t mean that the company will suddenly become a paragon of efficiency. Protecting national interests and the ordinary people has a wonderful ring to it. I fear they will achieve neither. When YPF was privatised in the 90s, WITH THE SUPPORT OF THE KIRCHNERS, it had been a badly run, money-loss-making company for decades.Argentina has a lot of potential oil resources. To extract more oil the state will need at least $6bn more than what is currently invested. Do they have that kind of capital? Will foreign investors be willing to invest when they know that they could see their assets looted in the future?

Maybe the Kirchner government will usher in a golden era for the Argentine economy, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Personally I wouldn’t trust the Kirchners and their cronies in charge of a school tuck shop.  Achieving economic growth is a complicated business.South Koreais an example of a country that has been able to reinvent itself, ignoring many of the recipes of international organisations and the so-called Washington Consensus. The United States engaged in protectionism after it became independent and even now has some 12,000 tariffs in place. But the Argentine model is just not going to deliver the long-term growth, because it is based on the faulty analysis that all their problems stem from abroad.

The economic historian David Landes rather cynically described dependista theory as one of Latin America’s most successful exports. Dependency theory is the perfect way to blame your problems on others and not face up to what you are doing wrong.  There is no doubt that empires have extracted wealth from the conquered peoples. Last week I blogged about the case of King Leopold of Belgium. In his book Imperialism Lenin equated where investments by industrial nations in non-industrial countries with this kind of looting. As Thomas Sowell has pointed out this is fundamental misunderstanding of reality:

Tragically, however, it is in precisely those less developed countries where little or no foreign investment has taken place that poverty is at its worst. Similarly, those poor countries with less international trade as a percentage of their national economies have usually had lower economic growth rates than poor countries where international trade plays a larger economic role. Indeed, during the decade of the 1990s, the former countries had declining economies, while those more “globalized” countries had growing economies.

Sowell argues that most American international trade and investment actually goes to high-income nations like those in Western Europe or the more prosperous Asian countries, such as Japan or Singapore. Only a minute fraction of that trade or investment goes to Africa or to the poorest regions of Asia or the Middle East. Rich individuals in poor countries often invest in richer countries, particularly the United States, where their wealth is not at risk of being confiscated. In this way poorer countries are actually helping richer industrial nations become even richer.

In Japan they rue the lost decade. The tragedy for Argentina is they have experienced more than a century of decline.

The remarkable double life of a Belgian King

Listen to the yell of Leopold’s ghost,

Burning in Hell for his hand-maimed host.

Hear how the demons chuckle and yell

Cutting his hands off, down in Hell.  The Congo, a 1914 poem by Vachel Lindsay

The Horror!, the Horror!  Kurtz’s last words from  Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

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If you visit Brussels, you will see plenty of reminders of the architectural legacy of King Leopold II. Today he is fondly remembered by many Belgians as the “Builder King,” who commissioned a great number of buildings and urban projects, especially in Brussels,Ostend and Antwerp. In the capital he bequeathed the Royal Glasshouses the Cinquantenaire Park and the Royal Museum for Central Africa. In Ostend, an equestrian statue in Bronze of Leopold graces the middle of the promenade. The king is seen on his horse above the smaller figures of local fishermen on one side of its base and naked Congolese on the other side. There is a commemorative declaration from the Africans in which they express their gratitude to Leopold for liberating them from slavery under the Arabs.

Leopold II reigned as a constitutional monarch for 44 years – from 1865 to 1909. Born in 1835, he was just five years younger than the country. His reign saw the adoption of universal adult male suffrage in competitive elections, setting the country on the road to becoming a fully-fledged modern democracy. The free-trade policies that he backed helped bring about a remarkable economic transformation, with their coal production almost equalling that of mighty France. It helped Belgium become very rich. The textile industry, based on cotton and flax, employed about half of the industrial workforce.Ghentwas the premier industrial city in Belgium until the 1880s, when Liege, with its incipient steel industry, came to the fore. Primary education became compulsory, and with the 1881 School Law, girls were guaranteed access to secondary education. Key social reforms were introduced, providing greater protection for women and children. Children under twelve could not be put to work, and after they turned twelve their working day was limited to twelve hours. At this time this legislation was quite radical compared to most of Europe. So in conclusion Leopold was a great reformer at home, a founder ofBelgium’s long years of peace and plenty. What’s not to like?

But then Leopold discovered the Congo. I don’t mean literally – he never actually set foot in Africa– but he was to exert a sinister influence on the continent. For Leopold overseas colonies were the key to a country’s greatness. He worked tirelessly to acquire colonial territory for Belgium, but his enthusiasm was not shared by the Belgian people or government. In view of this indifference, Leopold set out to acquire a colony in his private capacity as an ordinary citizen. The Belgian government lent him money for this venture. In 1876 he created the International African Society, a private holding company under the guise of an international scientific and philanthropic association. There was nothing philanthropic about Leopold’s venture though. He hired the famous explorer Henry Morton Stanley, of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” fame to establish a colony in the Congo region.

At the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, at which European countries carved up Africa for themselves, Leopold was recognized as sovereign of most of the area he and Stanley had laid claim to. On 5 February 1885 the Congo Free State, with an area more than 75 times bigger than Belgium, came into being. The importation of guns and alcohol would be banned. Peace would be imposed on all of the tribes, and the slave trade would be eradicated. The three Cs – Commerce, Christianity, and Civilization – would all be able to thrive.

The Free State was not a successful operation at first. The initial economic focus had been on ivory, but when the global demand for rubber exploded, the highly labour-intensive collection of sap from rubber plants became a lucrative alternative. In 1888, Dunlop had invented the pneumatic rubber tire for bicycles, and in 1895, Michelin had done the same for cars. Suddenly, Leopold had his hands on something that everyone needed.

Through his private “police”, the Force Publique, Leopold ruled the state as a personal fiefdom. More than a police force, the Force Publique was a mercenary army. Their job was to extract wealth for him, and of course for themselves. The officers were whites and they were in charge of an ethnically-mixed African soldiery. One of their principal tasks was to make sure that rubber quotas were met. Their modus operandi was the use of slave labour, with Congolese men, women, and children all being roped in. The soldiers received low salaries, but they could earn big commissions by meeting or exceeding their rubber quotas. When the wildly overoptimistic quotas were not met, horrific punishments – beatings, mutilation and mass killings – were meted out. The most infamous example of their brutality was the chopping off of hands. These severed hands became a kind of currency – proof that the soldiers were obeying orders. If there was no rubber, the Force Publique, would go out to collect a quota of hands instead. They would mutilate anyone they could find. This is a most gruesome example of perverse incentives. When one commander complained that his men were shooting only women and children, his soldiers came back from the next raid with a basket of penises.

Leopold’s rule of the Congo Free State was in very stark contrast to the enlightened policies he promoted in Belgium. Virtually nothing was invested in improving conditions in the Congo. The only roads built were the ones to transport rubber to market. While he was interested in the security of his Belgian subjects, he had no such worries about the Congolese. Vast wealth would go to Belgium, but the only items that made the opposite journey were weapons for the Force Publique.

There was significant outrage at what Leopold was doing in Africa, led by British diplomat Roger Casement and a former shipping clerk E. D. Morel. His Congo Reform Association was the first mass human rights movement. Mark Twain provided his customary biting wit in a political satire, called King Leopold’s Soliloquy, in which the king argues that bringing Christianity to the country outweighs a little starvation.

By 1908, the evidence of atrocities reached such a level that they could no longer be denied, and after nearly a quarter of a century Leopold was forced to give up his control over the Congo to the Belgian government.

Estimates of the death toll range from two million to fifteen million Determining precisely how many people died is next to impossible since accurate records were not kept. According to the ranking by atrocitologist Matthew White the death toll was ten million, coming in at number fourteen on this chart of infamy.

How could Leopold have ruled two places at the same time in such dramatically different manners? Are we dealing with a case of multiple personality disorder? Of course hypocrisy is a typical human characteristic.Jeffersonwas able to pen the Declaration of Independence a glorious celebration of human rights. Yet at the same time he owned slaves. We could put it down to racism. And Leopold was most probably a racist. But these explanations fail to take into the account the big picture. The Congo has continued to suffer even after the Belgians surrendered their colony in 1960. Racism does not seem to explain the 30-year reign of President Mobuto, who amassed a vast personal fortune while bankrupting Zaire, the old Congo Free State. He may have been mad, but he was able to perpetuate himself in power for more than three decades.

In The Predictioneer’s Game political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita opens with the case of the Belgian king. I blogged about Bueno de Mesquita’s ideas in Gadaffi was too nice: The Dictator’s Handbook. The academic asks why Leopold II was an enlightened constitutional monarch and a ruthless despot simultaneously. For Bueno de Mesquita what unites these two facets of Leopold is the goal of preserving power. Leopold was a civilised Belgian ruler not because he liked his fellow Belgians and welcomed their influence over him. He hated it. He just did what he had to do. In the Congo he faced no such constraints and he did what worked best for him there The political environment made all the difference.

When rulers depend on the support of many the best way to rule is by creating good policies. When leaders require the backing of a few to stay in power they need to focus on satisfying the few, even if the rest of the population are left in abject poverty.  It is not that the leaders in some countries are more venal and corrupt. Nor do people in some countries differ in their willingness to accept tyranny. The fundamental difference is the constraints placed upon the rulers.

I wouldn’t want to single out Belgium. The colonial legacy is one that we all need to reflect upon. I can report that the statues of Leopold have not been faring too well recently. At Ostend in 2004 the equestrian statue was vandalised; one of the “grateful” Congolese in it has had his hand chopped off to make it more realistic. In the palace of Tervuren, in a leafy suburb of Brussels, a statue of Leopold has been moved to a distant corner. A six-metre statue of the king was erected in the middle of a roundabout near Kinshasa’s central station. However it was taken down again after just a few hours. If only the real Leopold’s impact had been so ephemeral.

Alcatraz and the meaning of prison

Break the laws of society and you go to prison, break the prison-rules and you go to Alcatraz. Famous saying about Alcatraz

You are entitled to food, clothing, shelter and medical attention. Anything else that you get is a privilege.  Alcatraz Inmate Regulations, Rule # 5

There will always be the need for specialized facilities for the desperadoes, the irredeemable, and the ruthless, but Alcatraz and all that it had come to mean now belong, we may hope, to history. James V. Bennett, Director of the Bureau of Prisons

On March 21, 1963, Alcatraz officially closed. All the prisoners were transferred off the island. Only that’s not what happened…not at all… Opening from the JJ Abrams TV series Alcatraz

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On March 21, 1963, the final 27 inmates departed Alcatraz. For 29 years the worst of the worst had been housed in the notorious prison on an island in the San Francisco Bay. This was the end of an era. The local press had been invited to record the event for posterity. It was a poignant moment as the 27 prisoners spent their final hours on the rock. Even on the last day the Warden was determined to adhere to the rigid regulations; the final meal, breakfast, would last only twenty minutes. The inmates were then led back to their cells, where they were met by an officer and then handcuffed and shackled, ready for final departure. Amid the flash of cameras the prisoners went to board the prison launch. Frank C. Weatherman, inmate AZ-1576, was the last prisoner onto the launch. On being questioned about his feelings about the closure, he provided the prison’s unofficial epitaph: “Alcatraz was never good for nobody.”

I shall be coming back to Alcatraz later but I want to look at the history of imprisonment first. We are so used to the idea of prison that we do not realize that until relatively recently putting people in prison was not a punishment in itself, but rather a way of confining criminals until corporal or capital punishment could be meted out. Many credit the Quakers with the idea of reforming criminals through time spent under lock and key. In 1790 the Pennsylvania Quakers built a small prison with sixteen individual and fully isolated cells. The criminals were left there with only a copy of the Bible. The reformers believed that this would help them to achieve penance. From this practice we get the word penitentiary meaning prison.

The notions that locking criminals up was a form of punishment and that you could reform them were revolutionary. And it was in Britain in the 19th century that prisons as we understand them emerged, inspired to a large extent by the ideas of that great British philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism.. Bentham actually designed a kind of institutional building called a Panopticon, which allowed the observer to see all inmates of an institution without them being able to tell whether or not they were being watched. Bentham conceived the circular building as being equally applicable to hospitals, schools, poorhouses and lunatic asylums, but he devoted most of his efforts to developing a design for a Panopticon prison. He persuaded the parliament to allow him to build a prison based on this model. The scheme never got off the ground and the project was halted in 1801. Bentham may have been unsuccessful, but in the 1920s Cuban dictator Gerardo Machado did have the Presidio Modelo built following Benthem’s guidelines. Fidel and Raul Castro were imprisoned there the unsuccessful rebel attacks on the Moncada Barracks in 1953. The Castro boys obviously found it a positive experience – after the revolution they extended their hospitality to dissidents, counter-revolutionaries, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and other assorted enemies of the state, who were able to study Bentham’s designs at close quarters.

A few years after the completion of the Presidio Modelo the world’s most famous prison came into being. On October 12 1933, the United States Justice Department announced plans to take over Alcatraz as a federal prison. To illustrate the fact that NIMBYISM is not a modern phenomenon we can observe the reaction of San Francisco’s citizens; they were none too pleased with the idea of sharing their scenic bay with nation’s most hardened criminals. Alcatraz was officially named as a federal penitentiary on January 1, 1934. As a federal “super-prison,” it had two key functions:

1. to incarcerate the nation’s most notorious criminals in a harsh, maximum security / minimum privilege institution.
2. to act as a deterrent to the new breed of criminal that had emerged during prohibition.

The federal government wanted to show that were getting tough on crime. An essential component of the punishment for famous inmates would be not allowing them to see their names in print.Alcatrazwould serve to completely isolate the inmates from the public, and every aspect of their daily lives would be controlled.

The prison could hold 336 men, but the prison never reached full capacity and the occupancy was usually about 75%. 1,545 men were incarcerated in Alcatraz in its 29 years of existence – from Frank Lucas Bolt, AZ-1, to  Frank Weatherman, the last man to board the prison launch. The rock’s three most famous guests were Al Capone, ‘Machine Gun‘ Kelly and Robert “The Birdman” Stroud. The convicts lived a highly repetitive, regimented, almost monastic life. Everything was done in accordance with a strict daily schedule, which never varied through the years. The schedule was established by the prison’s first warden, James A. Johnston. From the 06.30AM morning bell to lights out at 09.30PM everything was highly regimented. Alcatraz was the prison system’s prison – if a man did not behave at another institution, he could be sent to Alcatraz. The reason for all of this regimentation was to teach the inmates to follow rules and regulations. Once prison officials felt a man no longer posed a threat and could follow the rules, he could then be transferred back to another Federal prison to finish his sentence and be released. The punishments have become an essential part of Alcatraz lore. The notorious Strip Cell was a dark steel cell, where inmates would be stripped naked and given water and bread once daily, an occasional meal and a mattress at night. The only toilet was a hole in the cell floor and there was no sink. The convicts were completely isolated from the rest of the prison population and spent their time in total darkness.

Alcatraz was undoubtedly a strict prison but it was not the brutal hellhole depicted by many a Hollywood blockbuster. Our image of the prison is mediated by its representation in popular culture. Who can forget Burt Lancaster’s performance as Robert Franklin Stroud in as “The Birdman of Alcatraz?  It is a great film but it does contain a number of inaccuracies. Robert Stroud really should have been known as the “Birdman of Leavenworth,” since it was at the Kansas prison that he kept his birds and did his research. He was not actually allowed any birds during his time at Alcatraz. But the real problem is in the characterisation of Stroud. Philip Bergen, a prison guard was asked which character depiction he found most accurate. His reply was succinct:

“Well… the birds were very well written don’t you think?”

The reality was that Stroud was complex, multi-layered character, who was very manipulative and clearly had a vicious streak.  He first went to prison for manslaughter after killing a barman. Then whilst in prison he brutally stabbed and killed a guard. He was sentenced to execution by hanging, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by President Woodrow Wilson. In total Stroud would spend fifty years of his life behind bars, at the time the longest federal prison sentence ever served. For all the celebrities calling for his release and the tender images from the film of Stroud curing frail canaries, he never once expressed any remorse for his killings. What’s more he was said to have boasted to other inmates about the crimes he would commit if he were ever released.

For me the best film about the prison is Don Siegel’s 1979 thriller Escape from Alcatraz, which chronicles the story of Frank Morris and two brothers John and Clarence Anglin, who escaped from Alcatraz in 1962.  Morris and the Anglin brothers meticulously planned their escape from this island for almost a year. They stole prison-issue raincoats to make a boat and life jackets. They moulded soap and paper into life-sized heads with hair, lips and eyebrows, which they placed on their pillows to fool the guards into thinking they were sleeping in their cells. Using stolen tools and kitchen spoons they were able to dig a hole in the back of their cells big enough for them to crawl through.

There were 14 known escape attempts, with 36 would-be escapees, but this was the most famous This June will mark the fiftieth anniversary of their daring breakout. What we don’t know is if they survived in the chilly, turbulent waters of the Bay in their makeshift raft. It is not an impossible feat. There are no man-eating sharks in the bay and a well-trained and conditioned swimmer with knowledge of the speed and direction of the currents can swim to the mainland. It has been done. The problem is that the prisoners had no control over their diet or physical training. However, no proof of death has ever been found. We will probably never know the truth as to what happened nearly half a century ago.

Most recently we have had the 2012 television series Alcatraz by JJ Abrams, the man behind Lost. The premise of the series is that when the prison closed in 1963, the prisoners were not transferred from the island, but mysteriously disappeared. They have now reappeared without any aging and have begun committing crimes. A task force has been set up to track them down. The mystery is what has happened on the island. There are strange experiments involving the prisoners’ blood and a Machiavellian warden and the keys to a secret gold stash hidden beneath the prison.

Now the island is a tourist park and its influence is confined to movies and TV.Alcatrazmay have been shut down, but a lot of Americans are in prison.  The incarceration rate in the United States is 743 per 100,000 of national population, the highest in the world. When Alcatraz was inaugurated, the corresponding figure was 100 per 100,000. Despite having around 5% of the world’s population, 25% of the world’s inmates are in the United States. This is a very sobering figure. This massive increase has led to a significant decrease in the crime rate. Keeping people in prison is expensive, but allowing criminals to roam the streets to commit more crimes is also costly for society. However, the demented War on Drugs has led to more and more people are being convicted for nonviolent offenses. Prison is the right place for anyone committing crimes like rape, assault, armed robbery etc. but it is the wrong punishment for crimes without victims, or where other punishments are more effective. Buyers of drugs are generally engaging in voluntary transactions with sellers. Yet nearly 25% of all US inmates are there on drug-related charges. Moreover, since drug prices are kept artificially high by the drug policy, many others go to prison for crimes they committed to finance their consumption. Luckily in Europe we don’t have the crime rates they have in the States. But I think that prison should instil a sense of dread in potential criminals. Punishment should not be a dirty word. It is great if incarceration serves to reform criminals. But if that is not possible, then we need to protect society from these miscreants.

To boldly go: some thoughts on space travel

We have been observing the stars since before recorded history. In 1865 Jules Verne published From the Earth to the Moon a tale of a lunar expedition. In Verne’s novel the Baltimore Gun Club decide to build an enormous cannon, large enough to fire a projectile at the moon. This appeared to an extravagant flight of fancy by the French author. But with the development of large and relatively efficient rockets during the first half of the 20th century space exploration became a reality. But before humans could go into space we would require the help of other animals.

Contrary to popular belief the first animal in space was not a dog, but a fruit fly. The Americans define space as beginning at an altitude of 80 km. The diminutive astronauts were loaded on to an American V2 rocket along with some corn seeds, and blasted into space in July 1946. They were used to test the effects of exposure to radiation at high altitudes. Albert II, the first monkey in space, went up in 1949. he was known as Albert II because there had been an Albert I, who had suffocated to death in 1948 before reaching the 100 km barrier. Albert II also had an unfortunate end when the parachute on his capsule failed on landing. In 1951 Albert VI managed to get back from space, only to die two hours later. There was one exception to all this death. Miss Baker, a squirrel monkey, lived for another 25 years after she spent 16 minutes in space 1959 mission. Baker died of kidney failure after breaking the record for oldest living squirrel monkey. Her gravestone frequently has one or more bananas on top.

The first animal in orbit was indeed a dog, Laika, who was sent up by the Russians in 1957. She died of heat stress during the flight. And a further ten dogs were launched into space before Yuri Gagarin, made it up there in 1961. Six of the dogs survived. The Russians also sent the first animal into deep space in 1968 – a tortoise. Guinea pigs, frogs, rats, cats, scorpions, wasps, worms, beetles, cockroaches and spiders have all been into space. In 1973 the mummichog became the first fish in space when carried on Skylab 3 to use for biological. The first Japanese animals in space were ten newts in 1985.

The Soviet launch of a Sputnik in October 1957 was a traumatic moment for the United States. The satellite, which was the size of a basketball, orbited the Earth nearly 1,550 times. It was a stunning propaganda victory for the Soviet Union. President Eisenhower immediately declared the “Sputnik crisis” – there were important military implications – a country able to launch a satellite into space could also effectively deliver nuclear missiles to American soil. In 1958 The National Aeronautics and Space Act created NASA. But the effects were more far-reaching. There was a massive boost given to science in general.

The Space Race was won by the Americans in 1969 with the first moon landing. Of course you could argue that the Russians had already won after Gagarin went up. The Americans simply invented a new race. It was President Kennedy who set the challenge of reaching the moon by the end of the sixties. The Americans were spending 5% of GDP on the space program. 400,000 people worked on the Apollo project for nearly ten years, a total of four million man hours. Kennedy would not see his dreams fulfilled, but the Americans were able to set foot on the moon just before the decade ended. Between July 1969 and December 1972 they would land on the moon six times and twelve astronauts would walk on the moon. And then it all stopped.

The next challenge appears to be Mars. But any manned mission would present serious difficulties. The journey would be long and extremely boring. The astronauts would be living in cramped conditions with no privacy. And the food would be awful too. It would take six months each way. They would then have between 30 days and a year and a half on the red planet. If the astronauts stayed the latter time it would be 1,000 days in Space twice the previous record.

Space can have very negative effects on humans Astronauts spend most of the first 24-48 hours feeling or being sick. You remove gravity, which has been a constant as life on this planet has evolved over billions of years.  Bones and muscles waste. The heart atrophies. You come back less than you were; it has been estimated that on a Mars mission, astronauts would lose one-third to one-half of their bone mass. There are problems of hand-eye coordination.

There are also the psychological effects of being cooped up in confined spaces for extended periods of time. Last year saw the finalisation of a record-breaking simulated mission to Mars. Six male volunteers, from Russia, Italy, France and China, travelled 100m kilometres without moving a centimetre. The experiment, known as Mars500, had the six brave guinea pigs living in a “spacecraft” for 520 days. The simulation took place at the Institute of Biomedical Problems in Moscow. The crew managed to survive without killing each other, even if nerves were a bit frayed at times. It was a challenge for the men: one of them claimed that what he most missed was the randomness of life.

What does the future hold for space travel? A manned Mars mission seems decades away. There is much less optimism around. Space exploration now represents just 0.5% of American GDP, although the U.S.still spends more than the rest of the world put together. There are still some possibilities. Perhaps we could send robots. Other nations, especially China, will surely play an increasing role. Given the complicated economic situation and the prohibitive costs, greater international cooperation could be another solution. Finally I imagine there will be more commercial activity in space. However I do rather miss the visionary rhetoric of the last century. I will finish with just such an inspiring quote.  It comes from Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan:

Whatever the reason we first mustered the Apollo program, however mired it was in Cold War nationalism and the instruments of death, the inescapable recognition of the unity and fragility of the Earth is its clear and luminous dividend, the unexpected final gift of Apollo. What began in deadly competition has helped us to see that global cooperation is the essential precondition for our survival. Travel is broadening. It’s time to hit the road again.

Translation goes to the movies

I haven’t got round to seeing The Artist yet, but it’s definitely on my wish list. Who could have imagined that a film without colour or sound have such an impact? Watching a silent movie is like travelling to a foreign country. I remember I saw D.W. Griffith’s 1915 classic Birth of a Nation at home a few years ago, and I have to say that it felt rather strange. I couldn’t lose myself in the film. Actually I fell asleep, but it was rather late Dialogue is such an important part of a film; I really don’t care too much about special effects. Ben Hecht, Billy Wilder, I.A.L. Diamond, William Goldman, Woody Allen, and the Coen brothers are the kind of people whose films have inspired me

But with the introduction of sound in 1927 something was also lost. Before that year cinema had a certain universal appeal. Cinema really caught on with immigrants whose mastery of the language was not enough to allow them to go to the theatre or read a book. There will probably never be another universal figure like Charlie Chaplin, whose humour could so easily cross borders – it was a similar experience watching Chaplin in New York, Paris or Tokyo Spoken language gets in the way. In those days all you had to do was translate the intertitles.

However after the first talkie, The Jazz Singer, countries had to choose which was the best way to render foreign films in their languages. The two rivals systems which emerged were dubbing and subtitling.. I have always been fascinated by this subject. And recently I have been reading David Bellos’s Is That a Fish in Year, an engaging look at the world of translation. In one chapter he talks about the translation of movies. That is what I’m going to be blogging about this week

Subtitling is the process of providing synchronised captions for film and television dialogue. Subtitles are typical in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Belgium,  Portugal,  Greece,  Israel  and throughout the Arab world.  The average moviegoer probably doesn’t give it too much though, but subtitling is a highly skilled form of translation. You are operating under a number of constraints. It is necessary to decide what dialogue is necessary, and what can be cut out so that it translates properly and fits on the screen in the time allotted. You are fundamentally restricted by the cognitive capabilities of the audience. Subtitles must generally compress all the information with a maximum of two lines around 35 characters for each one. The time available is generally between 0.5 and 1.5 seconds, depending on the speed at which the actors are speaking. Subtitles do not offer a translation of all the words spoken; they can offer only hope to offer a summary.

These constraints on film translation may well affect the makers of original movies, especially if they depend on foreign-language markets. They are very aware how little spoken language can actually be captured in the subtitles. Because of this they may voluntarily make their characters less garrulous so that the dialogue will fit more easily on the screen. There is even a name for this phenomenon – the “Bergman effect.” Bellos points out that the renowned Swedish director made two quite different kinds of films—jolly comedies with lots of words for the Swedish market and tight-lipped, moody dramas for international consumption.

In many countries, dubbing is preferred. Dubbing skills are much more widely used and appreciated in Spain, France Italy and Germany. Because the cost is greater it tends to be in languages with a large pool of speakers. The germanophone dubbing market (Germany,Austria and the German-speaking part of Switzerland) is the largest inEurope.Germanyhas the most foreign movie dubbing studios, both per capita and per square kilometre. Virtually all films, shows, television series and foreign soap operas are dubbed into German. Even the speaking parts of video games are dubbed.

There is an interesting political background to dubbing in Spain. On April 24 1941 Franco issued an order forbidding the projection of films in any language apart from Spanish. Dubbing was an essential tool for censorship; original voices had to be erased and access to foreign languages was out of the question. One of the most famous script changes was from Casablanca. “In 1936 he fought for the Republicans in Spain” had to go. And the Billy Wilder comedies The Apartment and Some Like It Hot were manipulated and substantially reshaped because of their supposed immorality.

Translators working on dubbing face a different set of limitations. The goal is to translate the speech in such a way that it matches the lip movements of the original speaker—measured in fractions of a second — no mean feat. They are, in the words of Bellos, “world-class gymnasts of words.“

In Eastern and Central Europe they have a variation on dubbing called lectoring. I remember being on holiday in Poland in 1994. We were at a hotel in Warsaw and they were showing Northern Exposure, the series about a doctor from New York working in Cicely,Alaska. I was shocked to hear a single voice speaking for all characters of both genders. And you could hear the original English-language sound clearly audible in the background. This is lectoring. The advantage of this system is that you can hear the original language. It is also much more economical than dubbing. There are some obvious disadvantages with this system. It must be quite confusing. How do you know which character is speaking? And I got the impression that the person doing the voice-over didn’t really capture the emotion very well.  Bellos explains out that this technique was used in the synagogues of Palestine some 2,500 years ago. Long before the Romans occupied the Holy Land, Biblical Hebrew had ceased to be a spoken language among Jews. Aramaic interpreters would read out a translation of the words of the service sotto voce, just after or even simultaneously with the rabbi., who was speaking or chanting in Hebrew. The original was maintained because it was seen as a language of prestige. English has now become this language, a cultural asset and an object of desire.

Which is the best? Reading subtitles requires more cognitive effort when compared to dubbing. The dubbing process requires less compression of the message. It is less elitist; you tend to associate subtitling with the art house cinema.

Subtitling, on the other hand, has the feeling of being more authentic. The voice of an actor is such an important part of the performance. When that voice is hidden you are losing out on so much. Subtitling is also much faster and cheaper; dubbing can be up to fifteen times more expensive than subtitling due to its characteristics. Another problem with dubbing is what I call the Homer Simpson effect. This is when you are watching a moving drama and one of the actors open his mouth and you hear Springfield’s most famous resident. It is most distracting. The actor who does Homer  Simpson is one Carlos Ysbert, who also does Norm from Cheers, Tony Soprano from The Sopranos.  Obviously it would be impossible to have one dubbing actor for each Hollywood star. So, dubbing actors take on various roles. I found a list ranking the top Spanish dubbing actors. One of the hardest working must be Jordi Brau. Here is a list of the actors he dubs: Robin Williams, Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, Nicolas Cage, Sean Penn and Dennis Quaid. Does this man ever sleep? Here are a few more examples:

José Luis Gil – Hugh Grant, Patrick Swayze.

Luis Posada  –  Johnny Depp, Leonardo Dicaprio and Jim Carrey.

Luis Porcar – Hugh Laurie, George Clooney, Chuck Norris.

Ricardo Solans  – Al Pacino, Robert de Niro, Sylvester Stallone, Dustin Hoffman.

What’s my conclusion? I prefer to hear the original voices of the actors. I have become a big fan of the Swedish and Danish detective dramas that are all the rage at the moment. My wife is always surprised when I turn up the volume, but I like the feeling transported into another world. We are dealing with two different kinds of translation, and there trade-offs to be made. Each method involves the loss of something. Of course I should really learn those Scandinavian languages. That way I wouldn’t miss out on anything – provided that I reached level C2. Alas, life is too short. The great thing these days is that with the new technology there is a much greater variety of choices available to the public.

Are we becoming less violent?

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. Abraham Lincoln

 _________

This quote by Abraham Lincoln is the origin of the title of the latest book by Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature. I have recently been immersing myself in violence. Apart from Pinker’s book I have also read Atrocitology: Mankind’s 100 Deadliest Achievements by Matthew White, which documents the worst cases of atrocities throughout history to produce a ranking of the top 100. Pinker’s book is undoubtedly a tour de force, encompassing research, spread across so many different fields. The central thesis is that our era is less violent, less cruel and more peaceful than any previous period of human existence. This counterintuitive observation is true for violence in the family, in neighbourhoods, between tribes and between states. This is not the message that the mass media wants to portray. They have a different agenda; “If it bleeds, it leads” is their philosophy. Look at the news and you get a diet of one violent story after another.

_________

How does Pinker seek to substantiate his shocking claim? He breaks down his study into a number of historical themes which include:

The Pacification Process

Jean Jacques Rousseau argued that man was intrinsically good and that civilisation was what made humans bad. John Lennon imagined a world without countries where we’d all be living in harmony. This is however sentimental drivel. Thomas Hobbes was right. This kind of life was nasty, brutish and short. Hunter gatherer societies have always had very high murder rates. The rise and expansion of states drove death rates down. Let’s be clear about what was motivating the leaders of these states. They did not have a philanthropic interest in the welfare of their subjects. Here we are talking about the logic of political survival. Tribal raiding and feuding is a nuisance to imperial overlords. They do not benefit from this and any dead subjects would no longer pay taxes to them.

The Civilizing Process

The term civilised is a loaded one. The historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto took a cynical view:

All definitions of civilization … belong to a conjugation which goes: ‘I am civilized, you belong to a culture, he is a barbarian.’

Pinker has borrowed this concept from the book The Civilizing Process, which was written by Norbert Elias, a German sociologist. It deals with European history from around 800 AD to 1900 AD. There was a consolidation of feudal economies into larger kingdoms and empires with central authority, trade and greater economic specialization. Criminal justice became “the king’s justice.” And at the same time commercial society led to a shift in incentives from zero-sum plunder to positive-sum trade.

The Humanitarian Revolution

This period in the 17th and 18th century includes both the Age of Reason and the European Enlightenment. The early states had been successful in bringing down rates of homicide, but they were rather brutal. A lot has been made of Abu Ghraib, but listening to Barney the Purple Dinosaur or waterboarding do not really compare to burning at the stake, being hanged drawn and quartered, breaking on the wheel, the rack and many more devices so beloved in the Middle Ages. It was during the Humanitarian Revolution, especially in the 18^th century, that such practices as witch hunts, duelling, and of course slavery were abolished.

The Rights Revolutions

The final historical development mentioned by Pinker is the Rights Revolutions, the reduction of systemic violence at smaller scales against vulnerable populations such as racial minorities, women, children, homosexuals and animals. There has been an 80% reduction in rape since the early ’70s, when it became a feminist issue. There has also been a 66% decline in wife beating, and a 50% decline in husband beating. There’s been a decline both in the number of wives that are murdered by their husbands and the number of husbands that have been murdered by their wives. Indeed the fall has been much more dramatic for husbands. Feminism has actually been very good to men. More men survive matrimony, as women are no longer trapped in marriage and they don’t feel the need to resort to killing their spouses. This decline is not what we see reflected in the media. It really annoys me when news programmes fail to put violence into any kind of historical context.

Pinker then goes on to look at what makes us violent. He lists four factors:

Exploitation

This is the utilization of another person or group for selfish purposes. Examples include rape, plunder, conquest, and the elimination of rivals.

The drive toward dominance

This refers both to the competition among individuals to be the alpha male, and the competition among groups for ethnic, racial, national or religious ascendancy.

The lust for revenge

This is the type of moralistic violence that that can trigger vendettas, vigilante justice, and cruel and unusual punishments.

Ideology

Ideology comprises both extreme political systems, – nationalisms, fascism, Nazism, and communism or militant religions which seek to create utopias on earth. This is perhaps the biggest contributor of all to the list of mankind’s atrocities.

Luckily we have the better angels that Pinker alludes to in the title of his book. There are five of them:

The Leviathan

This is the strong state which emerges from a Hobbesian social contract which grants to the state a full monopoly on the use of violence from within.

Gentle Commerce

This increases economic incentives for cooperation.

Feminization

The empowerment of women as intellectual equals has led to a decline of authoritarian/patriarchal based societies. Pinker argues that women are generally  more risk-averse and less violent.

The Expanding Circle

This idea, from the Australian philosopher Peter Singer, deals with how we have gradually extended sympathy to more and more groups, including animals. An activity like novel reading is an exercise in perspective-taking and helps to expand people’s circle of sympathy. In reality Pinker is arguing what has expanded is not so much a circle of empathy but a circle of rights. We may not love them but we now feel that fellow humans and now animals should not be harmed or exploited.

The Escalator of Reason

The “Escalator of Reason” is another concept created by Singer. As reason is used in human affairs, it takes us in unforeseeable directions but generally toward even more reasoning and the flourishing of humanity.

_________

Here then is my brief and incomplete summary of The Better Angels of Our Nature.

Now you may want to know what my opinion is. I think it is an impressive piece of work. It does make you see the world in a different way. However, I do have some reservations. It is rather Eurocentric, but that is probably because Europe is the area about which the best data is available.

I belong to a more pessimistic school of thought than Pinker, whose vision seems to be more like the Whig Interpretation of history, which sees an inevitable progression towards ever greater liberty and enlightenment. For Whig historians the rise of constitutional government, personal freedoms and scientific progress are central to these advances. I believe in all of those things, but there is nothing inevitable about them.

To be fair to Pinker, he doesn’t claim that what he calls the Long Peace will go on indefinitely. The sixty or so years since the end of WWII are just not long enough to draw any lasting conclusions. A few years ago economists were talking about the Great Moderation a period roughly between 1987–2007, which was characterised by predictable policy, low inflation, and modest business cycles. This new paradigm was believed to have been caused by institutional and structural changes in developed nations. Where is all that now? Francis Fukuyama talked about the end of history. Alas I fear in 300 historians will have plenty of material with which to analyse from this epoch. The Long Peace is contingent and could be reversed in the future.  I am worried about the sheer destructiveness of modern warfare. The Crusades lasted centuries World War Two was six years. Now we have even more destructive power. Moreover, we are living in a world of more than seven billion souls and increasingly scarce resources. This is one of the central insights of Thomas Hobbes that even without our thirst for power and glory, scarcity and uncertainty bring us into mutual conflict. Nor do we know what the effects of widespread climate change will be.

After reading Pinker I went to read a review by John Gray in Prospect. I wanted to get a  contrarian viewpoint:

Pinker’s attempt to ground the hope of peace in science is profoundly instructive, for it testifies to our enduring need for faith. We don’t need science to tell us that humans are violent animals. History and contemporary experience provide more than sufficient evidence. For liberal humanists, the role of science is, in effect, to explain away this evidence. They look to science to show that, over the long run, violence will decline—hence the panoply of statistics and graphs and the resolute avoidance of inconvenient facts. The result is no more credible than the efforts of Marxists to show the scientific necessity of socialism, or free-market economists to demonstrate the permanence of what was until quite recently hailed as the Long Boom. The Long Peace is another such delusion, and just as ephemeral.

I like reading Gray because his bracing pessimism challenges you to think about what you believe. However, ultimately I have to disagree with him. While I have no illusions that we are about to enter an era of Kumbaya, I do feel that he doesn’t give enough credit for the incredible changes we have seen. Reversible progress is surely better than no progress at all.

The atrocitologist and the world’s hundred deadliest multicides

Matthew White a federal courthouse librarian from Richmond, Virginia is an amateur atrocitologist. He begins with the Second Persian War (480–479 BCE) and closes with the Second Congo War, which took place between 1998 and 2002. He has a simple technique; he takes the highest and lowest estimates available in the research and averages them. Some academics are sceptical of this, while for others it’s a reasonable way to go about what is an inherently complex task. What nobody can deny is that Mr. White has invested staggering amounts of his time in producing his list of the 100 worst atrocities in world history. And his selection is most definitely not Eurocentric. What do we learn from this list? One point White makes is that Dictatorships are harmful to the health of their subjects, but chaos is also a great killer. Another one is that anyone with the Great after the name may well be a psycho. The other interesting thing is the surprises in the list. I had no idea that the Gladiatorial Games (264 BCE–435 CE) were so bloody – they cost 3.5 million lives. Chinggis Khan’s (1206–27) feat of forty million is pretty impressive, especially considering the time in which he did it. We hear a lot about the Atlantic Slave Trade but the Mideast Slave Trade (7th–19th centuries) responsible for 18.5 million lives is never mentioned. How many of you were aware of An Lushan Rebellion (755–63) which saw 13 million deaths. The shameful famines in British India (18th–20th centuries) killed a staggering 27 million. Here is White’s list:

1 Second World War (1939–45) 66,000,000

2=Chinggis Khan (1206–27) 40,000,000

2=Mao Zedong (1949–76) 40,000,000

4 Famines in British India(18th–20th centuries) 27,000,000

5 Fall of the Ming Dynasty (1635–62) 25,000,000

6=Taiping Rebellion (1850–64) 20,000,000

6=Joseph Stalin (1928–53) 20,000,000

8 Mideast Slave Trade (7th–19th centuries) 18,500,000

9 Timur (1370–1405) 17,000,000

10 Atlantic Slave Trade (1452–1807) 16,000,000

11= Conquest of the Americas (after 1492) 15,000,000

11=First World War (1914–18) 15,000,000

13 An Lushan Rebellion (755–63) 13,000,000

14=Xin Dynasty (9–24) 10,000,000

14=Congo Free State(1885–1908) 10,000,000

16 Russian Civil War (1918–20) 9,000,000

17= Thirty Years War (1618–48) 7,500,000

17= Fall of the Yuan Dynasty (ca 1340–70) 7,500,000

19= Fall of the Western Roman Empire(395–455) 7,000,000

19=Chinese Civil War (1927–37, 1945–49) 7,000,000

21 Mahdi Revolt (1881–98) 5,500,000

22 The Time of Troubles (1598–1613) 5,000,000

23 Aurangzeb (1658–1707) 4,600,000

24 Vietnam War (1959–75) 4,200,000

25 The Three Kingdoms of China(189–280) 4,100,000

26 Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815) 4,000,000

27 Second Congo War (1998–2002) 3,800,000

28 Gladiatorial Games (264 BCE–435 CE) 3,500,000

28= Hundred Years War (1337–1453)3,500,000

30 Crusades (1095–1291) 3,000,000

30= French Wars of Religion (1562–98) 3,000,000

30= Peter the Great (1682–1725) 3,000,000

30= Korean War (1950–53) 3,000,000

30=North Korea(after 1948) 3,000,000

35 War in the Sudan(1955–2003) 2,600,000

36 Expulsion of Germans from Eastern Europe(1945–47) 2,100,000

37 Fang La Rebellion (1120–22) 2,000,000

37=Mengistu Haile (1974–91) 2,000,000

39 Democratic Kampuchea(1975–79) 1,670,000

40 Age of Warring States (ca 475–221 BCE) 1,500,000

40= Seven Years War (1756–63) 1,500,000

40= Shaka (1818–28) 1,500,000

40= Bengali Genocide (1971) 1,500,000

40= Soviet-Afghan War (1979–92) 1,500,000

45   Aztec Human Sacrifice (1440–1521) 1,200,000

46 Qin Shi Huang Di (221–210 BCE) 1,000,000

46= Roman Slave Wars (134–71 BCE) 1,000,000

46= Mayan Collapse (790–909) 1,000,000

46= Albigensian Crusade (1208–29) 1,000,000

46= Panthay Rebellion (1855–73) 1,000,000

46= Mexican Revolution (1910–20) 1,000,000

46= Biafran War (1966–70) 1,000,000

53 Rwandan Genocide (1994) 937,000

54 Burma-Siam Wars (1550–1605) 900,000

55= Hulagu’s Invasion (1255–60) 800,000

55= Mozambican Civil War (1975–92) 800,000

57 French Conquest of Algeria(1830–47) 775,000

58 Second Punic War (218–202 BCE) 770,000

59 Justinian (527–65) 750,000

59= Italo-Ethiopian War (1935–41) 750,000

61 Gallic War (58–51 BCE) 700,000

61= Chinese Conquest of Vietnam(1407–28) 700,000

61= War of the Spanish Succession (1701–13) 700,000

61= Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) 700,000

65 American Civil War (1861–65) 695,00066

66 Hui Rebellion (1862–73) 640,000

67 Goguryeo-Sui Wars (598 and 612) 600,000

67= Sino-Dzungar War (1755–57) 600,000

69 Algerian War of Independence(1954–62) 525,000

70 Alexander the Great (336–325 BCE) 500,000

70= Bahmani-Vijayanagara War (1366) 500,000

70=Russo-Tatar War (1570–72) 500,000

70=War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48) 500,000

70=Russo-Turkish War (1877–78) 500,000

70=Partition ofIndia(1947) 500,000

70=Angolan Civil War (1975–94) 500,000

70=Ugandan Bush War (1979–86)  500,000

70=Somalian Chaos (since 1991) 500,000

79 War of the Triple Alliance(1864–70) 480,000

80 Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) 435,000

81 First Punic War (264–241 BCE) 400,000

81= Third Mithridatic War (73–63 BCE) 400,000

81= Cromwell’s Invasion of Ireland (1649–52) 400,000

81= Mexican War of Independence(1810–21) 400,000

81= Haitian Slave Revolt (1791–1803) 400,000

81= Greco-Turkish War (1919–22) 400,000

81= Indonesian Purge (1965–66) 400,000

88 French Indochina War (1945–54) 393,000

89 Great Turkish War (1682–99) 384,000

90 Great Northern War (1700–21) 370,000

91 Spanish Civil War (1936–39) 365,000

91= Postwar Vietnam(1975–92) 365,000

93 Cuban Revolution (1895–98) 360,000

94 Sanctions against Iraq(1990–2003) 350,000

94= Roman-Jewish Wars (66–74, 132–135) 350,000

96 Second Persian War (480–479 BCE) 300,000

96= War of the Allies (91–88 BCE) 300,000

96= Crimean War (1854–56) 300,000

96= Idi Amin (1971–79) 300,000

96= Saddam Hussein (1979–2003) 300,000

The economics of religion

It may seem perverse to look for God in supply-and-demand curves, endogenous growth theory and circular-flow diagrams, but that isn’t stopping economists from bringing their own particular way of thinking to religion. I can hear your objections already – they haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory in our current financial meltdown. But I feel that the dismal science can offer some interesting insights. There are now economists like Larry Iaconne who have specialised in investigating the economics of religion. These economists start from a couple of assumptions. They treat religion as a market in which the religions are like firms.  The producers of religion, be they churches mosques, temples or synagogues, have to compete for by seeking followers. Their other premise is that believers are rational actors – people choose which religion they want to belong to at some level.

One of the lessons taught by economics is the beneficial effects of competition. And in the United States there has been a wonderful experiment in a laissez-faire approach to religion.  It is the ultimate religious marketplace in which faiths compete for followers. The United States is of course an anomaly. In general economic development tends to lead to less religiosity. At least that’s the theory.

Economists also like to examine the role of religion in fostering or hindering economic growth. The seminal work about religion and its role in economic growth is Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism which first came out in 1905. Weber was definitely on to something. The Calvinist mentality about making money was very different to official Catholic doctrine. The Franciscans in particular seemed to abhor money:

A legend from the Franciscan tradition speaks of a person who, when he entered the church of Saint Mary of the Portiuncula to pray, left some money near the cross as an offering. After he had left, one of the Franciscan brothers simply picked it up and threw it on the windowsill. St. Francis found out what the brother had done. The brother seeing that he was found out, hurried to ask .pardon. He cast himself on the ground and asked to be beaten. St Francis rebuked him most severely and commanded him to lift the money with his mouth and place it with his mouth on the ass’ dung that lay outside the walls of the church.

Having said that, the causes of economic growth are complex, and should not be reduced to one factor. Many of the institutions of capitalism were created in renaissance Italy, a Catholic country. Within Europe, Protestant areas did not necessarily grow faster than other areas.Scotland, a centre of Calvinism did less well than England, which had a more moderate brand of Protestantism.

Now the debate is about Islam. According to Wikipedia in 2008, at least $500 billion in assets around the world were managed in accordance with Sharia law, with the sector growing at more than 10% per year. Islamic finance seeks to promote social justice by banning what they call exploitative practices. This results in a set of prohibitions on:

• charging interest
• derivatives and options,
• investments in firms that make pornography or pork

There are some elements of Islam that do not seem conducive to economic growth. The discrimination against women has important economic costs. These were described by David Landes in his book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations:

“To deny women is to deprive a country of labour and talent, but even worse – to undermine the drive to achievement of boys and men. One cannot rear young people in such ways that half of them think themselves superior by biology, without dulling ambition and devaluing accomplishment. …But it cannot compete with other societies that ask performance from the pool of talent.”

And there is the famous prohibition on charging interest. However it should be pointed out that there are ways round it. The Islamic economic record is mixed. There has been lots of economic populism.Iranhas been heavily statist with a large public sector. I think these policies are bad in themselves, but I wouldn’t want to put all the blame on religion.Turkey,Malaysia and Indonesia seem to have done much better.

Economists analyse the sacrifices that religions place on their adherents in terms of dress code, eating habits etc. Religious groups face a free-rider problem. They want followers who are committed to the cause. What may seem extreme to an outsider is exactly what promotes commitment. The Hare Krishna movement demands that its followers shave their heads, wear those rather garish orange robes and chant in the streets. This will weed out those who are not serious. What’s more it is easy to check compliance. The strict rules that church members have to follow actually help and strengthen the ties within the group. This conclusion is a bit depressing as it suggests that religions will tend to extremism. Doubt and uncertainty don’t seem to do well in the religious marketplace.

My final topic is sainthood. This has been the subject of an economic study by Robert J. Barro and Rachel M. McCleary of Harvard. It’s called Saints Marching In, 1590-2009. The Catholic Church has been making saints for centuries. I should make a clarification here. The church would argue that they don’t “make” saints and neither does the pope. The Church, through the ministry of the Bishop of Rome, recognizes the saints that God has made. Anyway the process typically involves two stages:  beatification and canonization. The academics have produced an extensive data set of the “beatifieds” and saints chosen since 1590. Their conclusion is that the last two popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI are outliers, creating blessed persons at a much higher rate than that of their predecessors. Barro and McCleary see it as a response to competition from Protestantism. And this competition has escalated in recent years. They claim Pope John Paul II beatified as many individuals as all of his predecessors combined.

In 1984 the process was speeded up. Under the old system you had to perform two miracles in order to be beatified. And a further two miracles had to be performed in order to qualify for sainthood. These miracles had to be posthumous. In addition you had to wait 50 years before you could nominate somebody to even be considered as venerable, the first stage in this arduous process. That’s been shortened; it’s now only one miracle for each stage and you have to wait just five years after the death of the individual before you can promote them to be venerable and then beatified. Benedict has continued the streamlining process. This may be due to a huge backlog of “beatifieds” created by his predecessor.

This has been my brief survey of the economics of religion. I realise that the economic study of religion doesn’t provide any insights into the transcendent aspects of religion, but I feel it can shed light on the behavioural aspects.

Glass half full

I am currently reading Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature. I thought I would share this extract with you:

I graduated from university in 1976. Like most college alumni, I have no memory of the commencement speech that sent me into the world of adulthood. This gives me license to invent one today. Imagine the following forecast from an expert on the state of the world in the mid-1970s.

Mr. Principal, members of the faculty, family, friends, and Class of 1976. Now is a time of great challenges. But it is also a time of great opportunities. As you embark on your lives as educated men and women, I call on you to give something back to your community, to work for a brighter future, and to try to make the world a better place.

Now that we have that out of the way, I have something more interesting to say to you. I want to share my vision of what the world will be like at the time of your thirty-fifth reunion. The calendar will have rolled over into a new millennium, bringing you a world that is beyond your imagination. I am not referring to the advance of technology, though it will have effects you can barely conceive. I am referring to the advance of peace and human security, which you will find even harder to conceive.

To be sure, the world of 2011 will still be a dangerous place. During the next thirty-five years there will be wars, as there are today, and there will be genocides, as there are today, some of them in places no one would have predicted. Nuclear weapons will still be a threat. Some of the violent regions of the world will continue to be violent. But superimposed on these constants will be unfathomable changes.

First and foremost, the nightmare that has darkened your lives since your early memories of cowering in fallout shelters, a nuclear doomsday in a third world war, will come to an end. In a decade the Soviet Union will declare peace with the West, and the Cold War will be over without a shot being fired.Chinawill also fall off the radar as a military threat; indeed, it will become our major trading partner. During the next thirty-five years no nuclear weapon will be used against an enemy. In fact, there will be no wars between major nations at all. The peace in Western Europe will continue indefinitely, and within five years the incessant warring in East Asia will give way to a long peace there as well.

There is more good news. East Germany will open its border, and joyful students will sledgehammer the Berlin Wall to smithereens. The Iron Curtain will vanish, and the nations of Central and Eastern Europe will become liberal democracies free of Soviet domination. The Soviet Union will not only abandon totalitarian communism but will voluntarily go out of existence. The republics that Russia has occupied for decades and centuries will become independent states, many of them democratic. In most of the countries this will happen with not a drop of blood being spilled.

Fascism too will vanish from Europe, then from much of the rest of the world.Portugal,Spain, and Greece will become liberal democracies. So will Taiwan,South Korea, and most of South and Central America. The generalissimos, the colonels, the juntas, the banana republics, and the annual military coups will depart the stage in most of the developed world.

The Middle East also has surprises in store. You have just lived through the fifth war between Israel and Arab states in twenty-five years. These wars have killed fifty thousand people and recently threatened to drag the superpowers into a nuclear confrontation. But within three years the president of Egypt will hug the prime minister of Israel in the Knesset, and they will sign a peace treaty that will last into the indefinite future.Jordan too will make a lasting peace with Israel.Syria will engage in sporadic peace talks with Israel, and the two countries will not go to war.

In South Africa, the apartheid regime will be dismantled, and the white minority will cede power to the black majority. This will happen with no civil war, no bloodbath, no violent recriminations against the former oppressors.

Many of these developments will be the results of long and courageous struggles. But some of them will just happen, catching everyone by surprise. Perhaps some of you will try to figure out how it all happened. I congratulate you on your accomplishments and wish you success and satisfaction in the years ahead.

How would the audience have reacted to this outburst of optimism? Those who were listening would have broken out in snickers and shared a suspicion that the speaker was still tripping on the brown acid from Woodstock. Yet in every case the optimist would have been right.