The Binding Power Of Stone Monuments And The Power of Walls

THE BINDING POWER OF STONE MONUMENTS

There is something that I have never seen written in history that should be explained. It applies from ancient times until now, and concerns stone monuments and their enduring power to bind nations together.

To begin with, what makes Egypt different from the rest of north Africa? The simple answer is that Egypt has been a nation since ancient times while Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and, Chad are relatively recent arrangements as nations.

My hypothesis is that it is the pyramids, and other monuments such as the Sphinx and Abu Simbel, that literally held Egypt together. If not for these massive monuments, Egypt would be just another name from ancient history and not the nation that it is today.

One thing that is different in history about Egypt is that those who managed to conquer it did not erase it's identity, but rather adapted it themselves. The Hyksos were a Semitic people who conquered Egypt in ancient times. But they, in many ways, became Egyptians rather than the other way around.

Likewise, the Seventh Century Arab conquest of Egypt converted it to Islam but in no way diminished it's national identity. Assyria and then Babylon both matched Egypt in power, but neither has existed in two-and-a-half millenniums while Egypt still stands. I see this as all due to the influence of the pyramids.

The other modern nations of north Africa have ancient ruins, Carthage in Tunisia began as a Phoenician colony and was later the great rival of Rome. But there is nothing like the pyramids of Egypt anywhere else in the region.

Ethiopia, once known as Cush or Kush, is another ancient nation that has endured to the present day. It lies to the south of Egypt, in east Africa. Just like Egypt, Ethiopia has pyramids from ancient times that has held it together as a nation. Ethiopia has about twice the number of pyramids that Egypt has, although they are smaller in scale.

Greece, across the Mediterranean from Egypt, is another modern nation that has been around since ancient times. Just as Egypt has staying power as a nation that nearby kingdoms in north Africa did not, the same can be said of Greece with regard to the rest of the Balkans. The difference being that Greece had stone monuments remaining from it's early days, such as the Acropolis, which held it together as a nation. Alexander's empire did not hold together after his death, but the home country did in the same way as Egypt.

What about the modern nation of Iran? It also goes back to ancient times, and is traditionally known as Persia. The name was changed to Iran, meaning "The Land of the Aryans", in 1935. Persia did not have pyramids like Egypt, but did have abundant ruins from it's glory days.

The ruling shah that was overthrown in 1979 had celebrated the 2500th anniversary of the Peacock Throne in 1971. Possibly the grandest party ever given in human history was held in the ruins of Persepolis in the autumn of 1971. There is an article on www.wikipedia.org about it titled "2,500 Year Celebration Of The Persian Empire". Only a king that doesn't need approval from congresses and parliaments to spend money could put on a party like this.

Further east, we find a great modern nation in China that has been around for about as long as Egypt. China is a vast country that would seem likely to fragment into smaller states. The Chinese language is written in one way but spoken in several ways besides the standard Mandarin, such as Cantonese and Fujianese.

But, once again, we find the binding power of stone monuments at work. The legendary "Great Wall of China" was a network of walls that were built to keep out barbarians from the north. My theory is that it accomplished something that was much more important, it was what bound this diverse country together into one so that it has lasted from ancient times until now.

To the south, the Khmer people of what is now called Cambodia have been there as a nation for a very long time. There was once a great Khmer Empire. As we might expect, we find an ancient stone monument from the early days of the Khmer Empire in the Temple of Angkor Wat.

It seems to me that without the binding power of such stone monuments, nations simply do not last for thousands of years. Neither language nor religion can hold a nation together over the long span of history like a massive stone monument. The working together to build the monument would likely be a powerful force in the binding of the nation to begin with.

This concept is similar to "The Mecca Hypothesis", on the world and economics blog, where we saw how the pilgrimage to Mecca had the effect of maintaining the Arabic language as one while the early European languages on the other side of the Mediterranean fragmented into the languages that we see today. "The Center Of The World" explains my view of the effect that the monuments of ancient Egypt have had across the world.

THE POWER OF WALLS

In "The Binding Power Of Stone Monuments", we saw how the stone monuments that a nation produces can be the determining factor in whether a nation lasts for a historically brief time, or for thousands of years.

Today, I would like to discuss a related concept, how the development of nations is affected by walls. Examples of how physical walls, constructed along borders, affect developments far into the future are much more rare than examples of how nations are bound, over the long term, by stone monuments that they have constructed. But there are three examples, that I can see, where physical walls have had a great long-term effect. A wall along a border can have a powerful effect on future developments long after it ceases to be an actual political or military barrier.

Let's start with Scotland. Scotland was a separate nation from England until 1707, and has always had it's own identity even though it speaks English and both nations landed on the same side of the Protestant Reformation. Scotland is more Celtic in nature than England, but it seems to me that there had to be more to the separate sense of identity then this.

But what about Hadrian's Wall? it was built by the Roman emperor of that name to keep out the tribes to the north. This means that the wall has been there for two thousand years, making it one of the oldest structures in Britain. The wall is not exactly on the boundary between England and Scotland any more, but what kind of psychological effect must it have had through all of that time?

The question is now why Scotland has a separate identity, but how it could not have a separate identity? If you take people that are exactly the same, and have a wall across their territory for two thousand years even if that wall is not an actual impermeable barrier, and you can be sure that there will be some kind of separate identity on opposite sides of the wall.

About six hundred years after the construction of Hadrian's Wall, but before England was a united country, there was a kingdom known as Mercia in the region that is now known as the Midlands, as well as areas to the south and west. I am actually a Mercian because this includes the area where I was born. The Midlands is still occasionally referred to as Mercia.

There was a great Mercian king, known as Offa. Mercia was a very powerful state at the time of Offa's reign and this period, when Mercia was the dominant state of those that now make up England, is known as the Mercian Supremacy. Offa is recorded as having begun construction of a military barrier against the Kingdom of Powys, the area that is now known as Wales, to the west. This barrier, known as Offa's Dyke, was a simple ditch and berm of earth along the border, designed to give a military advantage to the Mercian side. I had been to castles in the area, such as Chepstow and Goodrich, but cannot remember ever seeing Offa's Dyke and never considering it as really any more than a name on a map.

But now I realize how important Offa's Dyke has been, not for England but for Wales. It has formed essentially the boundary between England and Wales ever since and, more importantly, has been a basis for a separate sense of Welsh identity in the same way as Hadrian's Wall for Scotland.

Wales and Scotland are Celtic domains that have always had some sense of a separate identity from England. But my conclusion is that these two walls, Hadrian's Wall and Offa's Dyke, have been essential to that separate identity. There are two other such Celtic domains in the area, other than Ireland, which do not have as strong of a separate identity. These are Cornwall, the southwestern county of England, and Brittany in France.

Brittany occupies the long peninsula off western France, giving it a sound geographic definition. Cornwall is on a parallel peninsula and once had it's own language. But neither has the separate sense of identity of Wales or Scotland. This can be explained by the fact that neither is defined by a wall, like Hadrian's Wall or Offa's Dyke.

Now, let's apply this concept of the power of walls to the other side of the world. The most significant wall in the world is by far the Great Wall of China. Wikipedia describes it as having been begun by the first Chinese emperor. The Great Wall is actually a complex structure of many different walls that were built over centuries. Construction of these walls certainly helped to bind China as a nation, as described in "The Binding Power Of Stone Monuments".

I read an article that one thing about the world that seems incongruous is that Siberia should really belong to China, rather than Russia. There are quite a few articles online about this issue. Siberia seems psychologically very distant from Moscow, and it has vast stores of resources that China's voracious economy needs. The native people of Siberia look much more Oriental then European.

Historically China has traded abroad along the fabled "Silk Road", which included both land and sea trading routes, and has sent ventures like the fleet of Admiral Zheng He abroad. To the west, China incorporated the vast central Asian territory of Xinjiang. But China has never had the same kind of economic interactions with lands to the north, what is now known as Siberia.

My conclusion is that the reason for this is that the Great Wall acted as a psychological barrier over the centuries, and prevented incorporation of Siberia into China.

This does not mean that China would necessarily be better off today with Siberia. For one thing, it was the shared construction of the Great Wall that helped to bind it as a nation as described in "The Binding Power Of Stone Monuments". For another, there is the phenomenon known as the "resource curse" or the "paradox of plenty", where the people of a nation that is rich in natural resources end up being worse off as a result.

The Yard Society

If anyone really wants to understand North America, and what makes it different from most of the rest of the world today, there is a vital component to that understanding that has nothing to do with technology or democracy. North America could literally be renamed "Yardland".

The people of North America, particularly those of the suburbs, insist on having spacious front yards and back yards adjoining their homes. I have not yet seen an article detailing just how profoundly this affects the entire society, so I decided to write such an article myself. This, more than anything else, is what makes the continent different from the rest of the world.

When homes have yards, it means that everything must be further apart. This brings us to what we could call "The Automobile Spiral". Having everything further apart means that car ownership is a practical necessity. This, in turn, means that everything must be still further apart because cars require a driveway at the home to park in, wider streets to accommodate them and, highways for through traffic to avoid local congestion.

Most of all, cars mean that there must be parking lots wherever people will be driving to. It is these parking lots that shape the forms of our cities like nothing else. Urban areas balloon with parking lot space so that cities tend to sprawl into one another, rather than having much of a sharp definition.

None of this takes place if buses, streetcars, bicycles and, walking can accomplish daily transportation. But that is only practical without yards. Levittown, New York is considered as the prototype postwar suburb and was followed by a development in Pennsylvania with the same name. Those suburbs were named after the builder, but could just as easily have been named "Yardtown".

Here is a map link if you want to have a look: www.maps.google.com . Compare the suburbs of North America with older cities in other countries, where most homes do not have much of a yard.

The Yard Society cannot be found anywhere, it requires a large country with a lot of open space on which to establish all of the yards. There are economic requirements also, a middle class that can afford the homes with yards and the cars that they make necessary. Obviously, there could be no yard society without modern technology.

Postwar Britain had it's own version of suburbanization with the so-called "New Towns", building towns where there had been none before. Most turned out well, but there was not the available space that there was in North America and it did not develop into the same kind of Yard Society.

Individual yards replaced the town square of days gone by. Yards became an extension of personal space. The emphasis was on the individual, rather than the group, and apartment buildings seem to be rarely built with communal courtyards anymore. It is no secret that ethnic groups which live in pre-suburban areas of cities tend to be more communal that suburbanites.

The entire economy is shaped by those backyards and front yards. The auto industry quickly became one of the most important. The oil industry grew alongside it to provide fuel for the cars that were made necessary by the distance which yards put between everything. Global politics was built around making sure that we had the supply of foreign oil that we needed for the cars that we needed because of the yards. Burning this oil for fuel brought us into the peril of global warming.

Building and maintaining the necessary highways was yet another major industry. The Urban Renewal movement, from the 1950s to the 1970s, was the reshaping of the older sections of the city to accommodate the cars. New developments were designed for cars, rather than people, such as drive-through fast food restaurants.

The cars that we needed because of the yards affected the health of the general population. Driving cars, instead of walking or bicycling as in days past, is sedentary. That brought about more of diseases like diabetes, heart disease, obesity and, certainly increases the chances of developing cancer. The sedentary way of life brought about all manner of exercise gyms and routines, as well as an entire diet industry. All of it was ultimately rooted in our yards, as is the typical grid street pattern of cities.

The yards themselves have had a great effect on the culture from pools and barbecues to ease of pet ownership, as well as the fence and lawn care industries.

It is yards, more than anything else, that makes North America different from the rest of the world.

The Three Sides Of History

I find that there are really three sides to history. In the middle, there is the history with all of it's ideology and high principles as it is portrayed in the history books. To one side of this there is religion, the fact that people are designed to believe in something, and when they do not believe primarily in a religion they tend to put another cause in it's place. The cause or movement gains supporters simply because they require something to believe in.

The third side of history, on the other side of the lofty principles in the middle, is the one that I want to discuss today. It is my belief that history is often idealized and over-simplified in that it is actually driven largely by mundane personal motives.

When a new country gains independence it may be trumpeted as the fulfillment of some lofty ideal, but is more likely to spring from the fact that a majority of people perceive that it will make them better off than previously. U.S. independence in 1776, for one example, was largely brought about because Britain had forbidden further westward expansion of the colonies and a lot of people thought that they were missing out on wealth to be gained. A driving force behind the formation of the Confederacy was simply the unwillingness to give up slave labor (labour).

The idea of communism became so popular because it was based on the gain of the individual, too many of which were economically oppressed by wealthy capitalists. Capitalism had earlier started when a lot of people felt oppressed by rigid class systems and hereditary nobility, and were sure that they could do better in a meritocracy. In times of change, majority opinion often turns out to be wrong and a new system can be an overreaction to the faults of an old one, but the betterment of the individual is what drives such change no matter how much history clothes it in high ideals.

The race to the moon during the 1960s was not so much the great scientific crusade that was portrayed as it was an economic competition between capitalism and communism, between the U.S. and Soviet Union, to be the first to reach the moon. The U.S. put humans on the moon first, but the Soviets took photos of the previously-unseen far side of the moon first.

The Reformation, the breaking away of the new Protestant churches from Catholicism in the Sixteenth Century, was not only about religion. It was also about material betterment. For the Protestants, there was resentment of the flow of wealth from Germany to the Vatican so that the mostly-Italian cardinals could live like royalty. For the Catholics there was reluctance to accommodate the new movement by giving up the profitable sale of indulgences, the forgiveness of sins for a monetary price.

For the first Buddhists and Jains in India, it was almost certainly not only about the new faith but also about escaping the lower castes in the caste system of Hinduism.

For Nazi supporters in the crushing economic depression of the 1930s, it was probably not so much about ideology and promises of a glorious "Thousand-Year Reich" as it was the jobs brought about by the factory orders for military equipment and the virtual elimination of unemployment by the drastic expansion of the armed forces.

What it all comes down to is the question "Will I be better off, or not". Separatist tendencies, the desire of a group of people to break away and form their own country, tend to thrive during economic downturns. It is often not as much about the national identity portrayed in history as simple economic welfare.

In any conflict, a powerful factor in which side people will take is often not the ideology in the history books at all but simply which side looks as if it is going to win. If there is one lesson of history, it is that those on the winning side tend to end up a lot better off than those on the losing side. This forms a spiral in that it then draws still more people who select it as the side likely to win, the ideology and high principles of the history books is secondary.

The Inverse Square Law And Society

I have written two previous postings about more that could be done with Sir Isaac Newton's Inverse Square Law. One was "Do We Really Need Calculus", on the progress blog www.markmeekprogress.blogspot.com . This is about my observation that just about anything that can be calculated with calculus can also be accomplished by creative use of the Inverse Square Law.

The other was "Galileo's Paradox And Newton". This explains how Galileo's Paradox, that every number must have a perfect square yet few numbers are perfect squares which proves numbers must be infinite because this cannot be true of any finite set of numbers, is also solved by Newton's Inverse Square Law. As numbers get higher, perfect squares become more sparse according to the Inverse Square Law.

The Inverse Square Law is basically that if a source of light is twice as far away, it will be only one-quarter as bright. This is because the circle of circumference at twice the distance will have four times the area or circumference. Using the Inverse Square Law to explain Galileo's Paradox is simply applying it to numbers instead of space.

Today, I would like to point out that there is still more that is explained simply by this extremely versatile inverse square law.

First, there is one fact about technology, and all human organizations and enterprises, that I would like to establish. The more complex something is, the more room it has for improvement. Consider a chair and table. Chairs and tables are simple devices that have remained pretty much the way they are today since ancient times.

Now, consider a machine. Machines have many parts, and thus many ways in which the parts fit together. This means that machines have a lot of potential for improvement, since each part and each way that each part fits together could potentially be improved.

Technology has progressed on a steep upward curve. In times past, life remained essentially the same for century after century. Then, progress gradually began the upward curve which continues today. Some would consider the Industrial Revolution as the beginning of this steep upward curve. But few people would doubt that there has been vastly more technical progress in the sixty years from 1950-2010 than there was in the sixty years from 1800-1860.

My explanation is that the undeniable upward curve of technological progress is a function of the Inverse Square Law applied to the complexity of technology, based on the fact that the more complex something is the more room it has for improvement. Just as the area of the circumference circle of the Inverse Square Law grows larger as we move out from the point of origin.

Technology has a certain complexity because it is the result of us imposing our higher level of complexity on the lower level of the surrounding environment. This complexity gives it room for improvement, but this improvement usually means more complexity which gives the machine even more room for improvement. Hence the ever-steeper upward curve of technology, and it is all a function of the Inverse Square Law.

It is true that machines become obsolete over time, as more progress is made. But it must be remembered that a machine cannot be considered as an island of complexity unto itself, but exists within the context of the entire society that is progressing.

What about economics? If the Inverse Square Law is as all-encompassing as I am claiming it is, should it not have an influence on economics as well?

It seems to me that Newton's Inverse Square Law actually underlies the fundamental Law Of Supply and Demand. Suppose that a product is in demand, but is expensive. Now suppose that we suddenly start manufacturing four times as many of that product. The price is likely to drop by one-half, according to the Inverse Square Law.

If only the same number of people bought the product after four times as many were produced, the price would probably drop to one-quarter. But the increase in production would likely get more people to buy the product, who did not previously buy it because it was too expensive. This increased demand would cause the product to drop in price to one-half, rather than one-quarter, thus manifesting the Inverse Square Law.

Of course, the real world is complex and it may not work exactly according to these figures for each and every product. But, on the whole, we can safely state that economics, like progress in technology, operates by the Inverse Square Law which is commonly phrased as the Law of Supply and Demand.

Another economic rule which guides how people behave is the Law of Diminishing Returns. If you gained a million (dollars, pounds, euros, rupees, yuan, rubles, pesos, etc.) you would be better off. If you gained two million, you would be even better off than if you gained only one million. But you would not be twice as better off if you gained two million than if you gained one million.

While we cannot be precise with this, because it involves human nature, it is easy to see how this also is based on the Inverse Square Law. The further out something is, or the more that you already have, the less impact something new will make in relation to it's volume.

The Euro, The Gold Standard And, Jimmy Carter

If you are wondering what one earth the euro, the gold standard and, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter have to do with each other, read on.

Let's begin with the gold standard. This is a system that is no longer used by any country in the world. The gold standard is the idea of basing a country's money on gold in order to provide currency stability. This used to be done by either actually making coins out of gold or, more often, issuing paper currency notes that are defined in value as being equivalent to a given quantity of gold. The notes may or may not be redeemable in gold on demand.

When a country begins printing money, particularly if it is a new country that came into being by fiat or upheaval, there may not be a lot of confidence in it's money. Backing the currency with gold provides the confidence that is necessary for the functioning of the economy. Backing a currency with gold also provides currency stability in troubled times, limiting any swings in value. If we want to virtually eliminate inflation, all we have to do is to peg the currency to gold.

But the gold standard also has disadvantages. It limits the power of a government to stimulate the economy by manipulating the currency supply. If all currency issued has to backed by actual gold, the government cannot just print money as it sees fit. The gold standard did not prevent the 1929 crash and Great Depression that followed, and it is no secret that countries that were on the gold standard at the time, including the U.S., took longer to recover from the crash than those that were not on it. The gold standard presumes that the price of gold itself is ideally stable which, of course, it isn't.

If the U.S. was on the gold standard today, the so-called quantitative easing being done by the Federal Reserve Bank to (hopefully) bring about recovery from the crash of 2008 and the Great Recession would not be possible. This refers to the government putting money into the economy by the purchasing of bonds to keep interest rates low by increasing the money supply so that business can more easily get loans to start or expand.

The Bretton Woods agreement of 1944 was to set up the postwar international economic structure by pegging various national currencies to the U.S. dollar, which was pegged to gold. This got the postwar world on track until the arrangement became outdated and countries began leaving it. In a landmark event, known as the "Nixon Shock", U.S. president Richard Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard on August 15, 1971, this effectively ended Bretton Woods and today no nation uses the gold standard.

Next, let's have a look at another former U.S. president, Jimmy Carter.

Jimmy Carter was elected U.S. President in 1976. He was a Democrat and had nothing to do with the gold standard because Nixon had taken the dollar off it in 1971 and his vice president and successor, Gerald Ford, had finally redefined the dollar with gold not being part of the definition.

My reason for bringing Carter into this discussion is that he has really been treated unfairly by history. The term associated with his presidency, in the late 1970s, is "stagflation", meaning a toxic mixture of stagnation and inflation. We usually see inflation in the economy when it is growing, but President Carter supposedly mismanaged the economy into a high rate of destructive inflation without the growth.

I realize now that this is nonsense and is the result of Reagan-era Republican propaganda from the 1980 election. The high rate of inflation during Carter's presidency was the result of the exit from the gold standard, combined with a perfect storm of other events which took place before Carter took office.

First, there was the spending on the Great Society social programs of the 1960s. This produced prosperity at the time, although inflation afterward. There was massive government spending on the Vietnam War, and for programs like the Apollo Space Program. Then, after Nixon had taken the dollar off the gold standard, there was the Oil Embargo of 1973 followed by a steep climb in the price of fuel. As we know only too well, when fuel gets expensive it not only cuts into everyone's purchasing power, but it makes everything else more expensive because the transportation costs of products factor in with production costs.

When a currency is taken off the gold standard, the government is free to print currency at will and it's value "floats" with the total value of goods and services produced in the economy divided by the amount of currency printed. Printing money can thus be expected to bring about inflation.

A very moderate amount of inflation, maybe a couple of percent per year, is not necessarily a bad thing because it acts as a cushion against deflation, which is worse. If prices are deflating, it doesn't make sense to manufacture things because, by the time they can be sold, the manufacturer might have to sell the goods for less than it cost to make them.

The gold standard became outmoded in the modern world, but leaving the standard brings a certain amount of risk because it almost inevitably results in inflation when the currency supply is no longer constricted. The most notorious inflation that the world has ever seen is, of course, Germany in the 1930s. According to the article on the gold standard on www.wikipedia.org , this was the result of the country being unable to return to the gold standard because of it's gold reserves being depleted by First World War reparations payments.

These factors all converged on Jimmy Carter's presidency, but in no way were they his fault. I am not faulting Nixon for taking the country off the gold standard in 1971, actually it should have been done sooner. Neither am I faulting Ronald Reagan for purposely inducing the recession of the early 1980s, because that was the only way to get the resulting inflation under control.

But blaming this on Carter is like blaming the government for a hurricane. Reagan's rightward economics is what it took to stop the inflation that had been unleashed by the end of the gold standard, and it's convergence with the other spending factors, but he stayed too far right throughout the 1980s and it resulted in the Crash of 1987.

Finally, for the euro.

My view of the common European currency, the euro, is that it acts as a kind of artificial gold standard. Instead of pegging their currencies to gold, Europeans have pegged them to one another's by joining a common currency. Like currencies on the gold standard, the euro has proven to have stability and has simplified transactions between countries on the same standard. Inflation has also not been much of an issue.

But the economies of the struggling countries in Europe are also manifesting the great disadvantage of the gold standard. The governments of these countries can no longer print their own currency and so are limited in what they can do to help bring about an economic recovery. It is much more difficult to put money into the economy to bring down interest rates, and make funding more available, so that businesses can start and expand. We looked at the debt of these struggling countries in Europe in the posting "Inflation And Debt", on this blog.

As of this writing China does not allow it's currency to float freely, although Xi Jinping's 2013 reform package included liberalizing currency policy. But the economy of China is still growing without requiring anything like the quantitative easing being done in the U.S. If the time ever came when the economy needed help from the government, pegging the currency would no longer make sense.

Another View Of The Cold War

In the posting "The Wave Model Of Economics", I explained how America has alternated between a left wave and a right wave, over the past century or so. Today, I would like to point out how the left wave from around the end of the Second World War to 1980 was affected by the Cold War with Communism.

The great economic crash of 1929 happened before Communism was a major world force. In fact, this crash was what made it a major world force. Assembly line manufacturing had been implemented on a vast scale and all kind of products, from cars to radios, continuously flowed from factories. The trouble was that workers were not being paid enough to be able to afford to buy the products that they were producing, and the goods were just piling up in warehouses. Factories began cutting back on production, meaning that workers had even less money, and it spiraled into a devastating economic crash.

When the Cold War came along, we could not have harsh capitalism or that would prove the Communists correct, another such crash would almost certainly mean a Communist victory as capitalism lost credibility. During this time, it is striking how moderate Republican administrations were. Eisenhower, Nixon and, Ford were Republicans, but they were the most economically moderate Republican presidents ever. There was nothing like the harsh capitalism of the 1920s and before, which led to the Crash of 1929.

Nixon actually added to the anti-poverty Great Society programs of his Democrat predecessor. When is the last time you saw a Republican president adding to the Democrat's social programs, instead of cutting or eliminating them? In fact, we clearly went too far left in the late 1970s which brought radical Conservatives back to power in both the U.S and Britain.

Communism began to fade in the late 1980s, and the Cold War began to wind down. There had not been an economic crash, or even a deep recession, in decades. Reagan and Thatcher had to induce the recession of the early 1980s because that was the only way to purge inflation. But no sooner was the Cold War over than the economy crashed in 1987, in the most serious economic downturn since 1929. Reagan moved to the right to purge inflation early in the decade, but then stayed too far right and it brought about the crash.

There was an even more serious crash in 2008. It is no coincidence that all three of these economic crashes have came after two consecutive conservative Republican presidential terms. With no competition from Communism there came the drastic shift to the right, essentially letting those with a lot of wealth set up the system to suit themselves and take more and more money for themselves until the lack of consumer spending by the cash-strapped population brings it all crashing down.

Maybe we should have a certain nostalgia for Communism. Even if we do not really want it here, as long as it was "out there somewhere" the governments of the U.S. and other western countries had to compete with it ideologically and could not afford to have a lot of poor people and certainly could not afford to have another economic crash.

Communism came about as a reaction against the extreme "robber-baron" capitalism of the late Nineteenth Century. Having Communism as an opponent did mean the Korean and Vietnam Wars, but it cannot be denied that it also meant a much better living standard for the average person. It was at the height of the Cold War that the wealth distribution in America was the most balanced.

Now (2013), the wealth balance in the U.S. is the most slanted that it has been since the 1920s, just before the crash. There has been a dramatic improvement in productivity since 1980, but without the competition of Communism it has only gone to make rich people richer. Even with all of the additional wealth, the average American today is worse off than in 1980.

The news around the beginning of 2012 was that half the population of the U.S. was considered as poor or "low-income". More people than ever are millionaires, and many of the millionaires that there were have become billionaires, the trouble is that everything else is broke.

Since the end of the Cold War, and the ideological competition with Communism, we have returned to having it built into the system that the rich get richer while the poor get poorer. Having Obama as president has slowed this process, but has not halted it and certainly has not reversed it.

The end of the Cold War may seem like a good thing, but it is also comparable to the principle of monopoly. Suppose that there are two competing stores in a town, but then one of the stores goes out of business. At first, the employees of the remaining store consider it as a victory for their store. But then they realize that it means that the owners of the store can get away with raising prices so that their customers have to pay more, and doing away with raises so that their employees get paid less. This is simply because the customers in town now have no other store to shop at, and the employees have no other store to work at.

The American middle class is now vanishing. In the book "The Commoner Syndrome", which I wrote in the autumn of 1997, I compared it to the humps on camels. The single hump of the dromedary, or Arabian camel, which represents most people in the middle with a few rich and poor on either end, was being replaced by the two humps of the Bactrian camel, which has two humps. One hump is the rich and very well-off, the other is the poor. This model turned out perfectly with the news at the beginning of 2012 that half the population was now poor or "low-income".

It is thus my conclusion that the middle class was the product of the Cold War.

Another View On Syria

I am not stating that the conflict in Syria will necessarily be the beginning of a major war. But this is very reminiscent of the situation a century ago, prior to the beginning of the First World War. The Balkans were unstable. Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire visited Serbia. A nineteen-year-old anarchist appeared and shot him. The empire was enraged. Russia was bound by treaty to Serbia, Germany was allied to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, France was allied to Russia. Before anyone realized what was happening, the world was engaged in the greatest conflict that it had yet seen.

Today, Russia, Iran and, Hezbollah are allied to the Government of Bashar Assad. Most of the other world powers and Sunni Moslem nations favor (favour) the rebels who are trying to overthrow him, although many in the west are not quite comfortable with actually giving weapons to the rebels.

My view is that neither the rebels or Bashar Assad is actually the problem. The real problem lies with Syria itself, or rather it's boundaries. The country, like so many others in the region was put together after the First World War from the territories of the former Ottoman Empire, which was in that war on the side of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany.

Boundaries can be drawn to create nations that are convenient, but have a way of being an invitation to future trouble. On this blog is a posting titled "A Few Words About Libya", I wrote it just after Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown in 2011.

If you review that posting, you will see what I mean here. Libya, like Syria, was an artificial country that was put together from the remnants of empires. Both countries are diverse, including people who would not ordinarily be a part of the same country. Libya is a vast country with two large cities, which are opposing power centers on opposite sides of the country. The old king whom Gaddafi overthrew in 1969 was from the Benghazi (eastern) side of Libya. Gaddafi was from the Tripoli (western) side of Libya. The Arab Spring movement which displaced Gaddafi began in Benghazi, and brought power back to that side of the country.

The trouble is that, while the world seems to want to be rid of dictators, a strong leader is needed to hold such a country together. Now that Gaddafi is gone, the various militias that worked together to overthrow him do not feel like giving up their armaments and the country has become a dangerous place. It is a long way from the democracy which was envisioned, with a deadly attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi in 2012.

Such militias, both in Libya and among the rebels in Syria, are a reflection of the fact that it is the tribe that is traditionally the fundamental unit of society in this region, not the artificial nations that were created. This is why strong leaders are required to hold these nations together. We have a way of wanting to eliminate dictators without considering what will happen once we do. We hope for democracy, but are as least as likely to get dangerous chaos.

This phenomenon of nations which probably should never have existed, and the wars when they eventually come apart, can be seen across the world. Pakistan was partitioned from India into two sections on opposite sides of India, known as East and West Pakistan. But the two were far apart, with different people and completely different languages. The breaking point was the devastating 1970 typhoon in the Bay of Bengal, with East Pakistanis upset at the government response from the western side of the country and declaring independence as the nation of Bangladesh with the bloody war that followed.

Then there was Yugoslavia, put together from the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the First World War and coming apart in a series of wars in the 1990s after the Communism that was holding it together disintegrated. Czechoslovakia was created in the same way and around the same time, but came apart without any violence (The Velvet Divorce).

Egypt, in contrast, has painfully made it's way to a new government after the overthrow of Mubarak in 2011, but the difference is that Egypt is a much more homogenous country, with the exception of it's Coptic Christian minority, and was not artificially created.

Africa is also a place where the tribe is the traditional unit of society but where artificial nations have been created, although there have been large nations in the past particularly in west Africa. Should it be a surprise that it is also a continent known for it's dictators, since strong leaders are a necessity for holding such artificial countries together?

Take the most populous nation on the continent, Nigeria, for example. The population is composed of three major groups; the Hausa, the Igbo and, the Yoruba. There was a civil was in the 1960s, known as the Biafran War, and a religious division between Christian and Moslem further divides the country. Nigeria is known for it's dictators simply because strong leaders are all that can hold the country together.

As I have long written, it is folly to think that all that is necessary is to take out a dictator and democracy will automatically bloom just as flowers can grow when the weeds are removed. A nation must undergo an extended period of what I refer to as "The Strong Leader Binding Phase" before it is ready to be a democracy. European countries spent a long time under the rule of powerful kings before they could be the democracies that they are today.

What about Iraq? The truth is that it is as artificial as any nation, a cobbling together of a majority of Shiite Moslems with Sunni Moslems and Kurds in the north, who long sought a country of their own. Saddam Hussein was reviled as a dictator, but what else could hold this country together? After Saddam was removed, the country came close to civil war in 2006-07 and is moving back in that direction now with lethal bombings on an almost daily basis. I recall one news article in which an Iraqi stated that "Iraq needs another Saddam".

The United States underwent it's strong leader binding phase under English kings prior to gaining independence. My theory is that the U.S. Civil War of 1861-65 came about primarily because the strong leader binding phase had been prematurely interrupted by the Revolutionary War, which brought independence.

So, you can see that we cannot just say that all we have to do is to remove Bashar Assad and then democracy will bloom, or at least it will be better than it was before. Aside from the attachment of Iran, Russia and Hezbollah to Assad, Syria is also a diverse country with it's leader being from the Alawite Shiite minority. It requires a strong leader to hold Syria together. His father, Hafez Assad , was a member of the relatively secular and socialist Baath Party and shed a lot of blood in the 1982 battle against the Moslem Brotherhood uprising.

If he were not leading Syria, with it's boundaries being as they are, another strong leader would be required to hold the country together. When there is a diverse majority and minority together within a country, it seems to be more stable if the leader is from the minority. This is true of both Assad and of Saddam Hussein, who was a Sunni in a country with a majority Shiite population.

A Few Words About Libya

(Note-This was originally written after the death of Moammar Gaddafi in late 2011).

What does the future hold for this country now that Moammar Gaddafi is dead? Let's consider the posting on this blog a while back, "The Strong Leader binding Phase", nowhere does this apply more today than in Libya. The Strong Leader Binding Phase is simply the extended period of time in which a diverse country must be ruled by a strong leader, of some description, before it can become a functioning democracy.

Many in the west would like to see Libya now become a democracy. But it most likely requires a strong leader, like Gaddafi or the king which preceded him, just to hold the country together.

Libya is a sparsely-populated country with two major cities, Tripoli in the west and Benghazi in the east. It would be quite difficult at this time for a democratically-elected president or prime minister to hold those two cities together into one country.

Libya's two major cities have historically represented two rival centers of power. The power base of King Idris, who Gaddafi overthrew to take power, was in Benghazi and the east. The power center of Gaddafi was in Tripoli and the west. The rebels who have now overthrown Gaddafi have their power base, once again, in the eastern part of the country, and early on made Benghazi their capital city.

This does not mean that a country with rival cities cannot be a working democracy. But it does require quite a bit of time together under a strong leader first. It remains to be seen whether Libya has completed this phase, they way the rebels handled Gaddafi after capturing him does not bode well.

There is another way of looking at the so-called "Arab Spring" movement, which has been underway for nearly a year now. It could also be looked at as the "African Spring". The Arab Spring movement to overthrow unwanted dictators was concentrated in six countries. Three of those countries are in Africa, and the other three in Asia.

As of this writing, the three Arab Spring movements which have succeeded in overthrowing their governments are the three which are geographically in Africa. They are the neighbors Tunisia, Libya and Egypt.

The three which have not succeeded in overthrowing their governments, at least not yet, are the three in Asia: Syria, Yemen and, Bahrain. The one of these that has come the closest to succeeding is the one closest to Africa, Yemen. It's leader, Saleh, was seriously wounded in an explosion. The one in which the uprising seems to have been less-than-successful is the one furthest from Africa, Bahrain.

There were early demonstrations in Morocco, in Africa, and in Saudi Arabia, in Asia, but these did not develop into full-scale uprisings.

If we look at this as the "African Spring", we can include the uprising in Ivory Coast against Laurent Gbagbo. It followed a pattern very similar to that in the three Arab countries in Africa where dictators were removed. The successful partition of Sudan this year also fits in with this African Spring view.

One final thought. Years ago, Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania visited Moammar Gaddafi in Libya. Later, during the autumn 1989 uprisings in eastern Europe which was the European version of the Arab Spring, Ceausescu was overthrown and executed. He was caught trying to escape. Romania was one of the last countries to have it's government overthrown in that movement.

Who would have ever thought at the time that Gaddafi would end in just about exactly the same pattern of events?

The Art Of Writing

With all of the writing that I have done here, at last I have gotten to an article about writing itself.

Writing is an art, rather than an exact science, meaning that there is plenty of room for individual expression. Technology has made writing far easier, but that also means that it has made it easier for other writers so that there is more competition for the attention of the reader.

In my opinion, the best way to learn to write is simply to read. I have never taken any kind of special class in writing, other than the usual courses in school, but have been an avid reader since I began reading about the Apollo Space Program at age eight. Writing is something that has to actually be done to be learned. Just do your best, and than keep on looking for ways to improve it. That is what writing is all about, rewriting so that it gets better every time.

A skilled writer can convey fine shades of meaning by selective use of words. I have become pretty good at covering myself when I am not completely certain about something, using terms and phrases such as "at least", "at most" and, "essentially the same thing". This gives me a little bit of leeway so that if two quantities turn out to be close, but not exactly the same, I never wrote that they were precisely the same but were "essentially the same" so that I am correct whether the two turn out to be either exactly equal or just close to equal.

When writing, you should have an idea who your audience is. Are you writing for children, for engineers, or for the general public? My audience is the general public that is well-informed, seeking to learn more and wanting to read facts and points of view that they will not find anywhere else. Everything that I write here is either something completely new, or at least a new way of looking at things, and that educated readers can verify with their own reasoning. If I was just presenting scientific and other facts that were already known, readers would not need me but could just read articles on sites such as Wikipedia.

One assumption that I make about readers is that you are pressed for time. I do not write time-consuming flowery prose, but get right to the point of the article.

The most important part of writing is, of course, the content. No matter how well one can write, what really matters is what the writer is writing about. The writing is nothing more than the vehicle that delivers the content.

There are several organizational tools that are used in writing. The most basic of these are sentences, commas and, paragraphs. In longer writing, these tools can also include headings, sub-headings and, chapters.

I prefer long sentences, sub-divided by commas, in short paragraphs of usually 3-4 sentences. Each paragraph should be a new idea, structured in such a way that it makes the writing more digestible as the reader grasps one paragraph at a time. If conveying the meaning in an article can be compared to walking up a flight of steps, then each step is a paragraph. I find that, if a topic is complex, it helps to make paragraphs longer so that the jump from one major idea to another is more clear because the major ideas are each kept in one paragraph.

There are a few general rules with regard to sentences, such as do not begin a sentence with "and". But even this is not a strict rule, and I break it occasionally if it makes the writing easier to understand. This is where reading comes in, someone who reads quite a bit can tell if a sentence "sounds right".

Use of commas is the trickiest of the basic rules, but one with a lot of potential to make really good writing. I am a heavy comma-user. When a sentence contains the word "and", it often means that there are two segments of information within that sentence and that is what commas are for. A comma separates segments of information, but is more permeable than a period (full-stop in Britain). A period ends a sentence, while a comma sub-divides it. It is not really good writing to have a lot of short sentences, it is better to have fewer sentences and to sub-divide them with commas.

Another use of commas is to facilitate an insertion into a sentence. Consider the following: "I stopped at the store, which had just opened, on my way to work". The portion "which had just opened" is a segment of information about the store which is separate from the meaning of the rest of the sentence. This is why it is separated by commas, one on each side of it. Making full use of commas is a step toward really good writing, one rule that must be remembered is to never have "commas within commas".

There must not be too many commas in writing. There may be a case where there are two points in a sentence that are close together, and where commas could possible be applicable. An example is: "I went to visit my brother and then to the store, but not with my brother". The portion about going to the store could possibly be separated by a comma, but this would be too close to the second comma. While commas are a powerful tool in writing, too many of them just make a mess and so it must be decided where a comma should best go, and not to put one in the other place.

Parenthesis fill the same role as commas, but are more divisive. Parenthesis are rarely used in non-technical writing, and usually only where one or two words must be inserted into a sentence. An example is where a person may be known by more than one name, so that one is given and the other follows in parenthesis.

One essential of good writing is the handling of the most important point or points of the article. I often put the most important sentence of the article, the one around which the entire article revolves, in a paragraph of it's own to emphasize it's importance. Also, the most important points should be repeated rather than stated just once.

Get the writing off to a good start. Do not just plunge into complex or technical information without a brief introduction, using a paragraph of maybe one or two sentences.

Suppose that you are writing an article that involves electrical charges. It is not necessary to write "electrical charges" every time, you can just write "charges". But still, not all readers may be familiar with the subject matter and it is best to periodically remind the reader that the charges are "electrical charges".

Some people believe that the best writing is that which can express the same idea in the least number of words. I do not completely agree with this because some repetition of the most important ideas is necessary to best convey the information in the article. But one way to trim writing is to eliminate unnecessary duplication of meaning. For example "a prosperous, well-to-do town" is such a duplication because "prosperous" and "well-to-do" mean the same thing.

Good writing makes use of different words that mean the same thing so that the same word is not used over and over again. The most common example is probably "but" and "however". This is where you can use a thesaurus, which lists words with the same meaning. But there are exceptions to this, in a complex article you can use the same word again and again if it helps to emphasize that certain points are related. Remember that, as always, writing is an art rather than an exact science.

A good writer is, of course, a good speller. I used to have some difficulty with words that have i and e together, in remembering whether the i or the e comes first. In my early writing efforts, I recall that if I was unsure whether a word should be capitalized I would rearrange the sentence so that it began with the word so then I knew that it would be capitalized (Those were the days before spell check technology).

Proper names are always capitalized. What is the difference between North America and north Africa? North America is the official name of a continent and is capitalized. But north Africa is only a general description of a region and is not the official name of a country or continent and so the "north" is not capitalized.

Another rule to remember is the "only one s rule". Consider "the trees grow" and "the forest grows". Both are similar in meaning, but if we use a plural, trees, then we do not put an s on "grows". Also, as you can see, quotation marks are a useful tool in creating expressive writing.

Be wary of excessive use of abbreviations. They can be used, but if the use is often then periodically remind the reader what it stands for. This is one of those occasions when it is necessary to remember that the reader may not be as familiar with the general subject matter as the writer.

My writing process in developing the postings on these blogs is to first look into a possible article in my mind in order to see if it is worth writing a posting about. One great thing about writing is that there is no such thing as wasted time, I can be stuck in traffic or standing in line and still be working on my writing. Then, if it is, I begin writing down on paper anything that I can think of that will be a part of the posting.

The next step is to organize what I have written down into a logical sequence. Unless the article is long, I do this by simply reviewing it and placing a number in front of each piece of material that I have written down and this is the order in which it will be written. If it may be some time before the article will be written, I save this organization until near the time when I am ready to write it because the organization process will then serve as a review prior to writing.

If quite a bit of material is involved, so that the article will be long, it is best to begin sub-dividing the material into logical sections or chapters as soon as is practical. This makes organization much easier.

I am a pre-planner when it comes to writing. By the time I get to the computer, most of the work is done. But this is not the only way to write. Some writers just start writing, and organize it as they go along.

The written word is far more reliable than the spoken word. The reason that I decided to start writing is that I once explained verbally to someone a scenario that I had developed about the fulfillment of the prophecies in the Bible of the last days of the world, and that person then told someone else. But when it was repeated back to me what I had supposedly said, it only very vaguely resembled the original scenario. I decided then that it was much better to write things down.