Asleep Awakes

I fell asleep last night while thinking tiring thoughts.

Anglo-Saxons still carry the burden of their past, the unsettling lack of fit between empire-building and empire-burning. I looked across the darkling plain, as Matthew Arnold puts it, and saw ignorant armies clashing by night on the battlefield of the spirit.

How else to explain the contempt, revulsion, fear and disgust that comes out of the USA as it used to come out of Victorian England? There is a kind of socially-mandated or oddball respect for the ancient cultures of China, India, Persia and the rest of the cradle of civilisation — a cradle that runs from Asia's western border with the Mediterranean and Africa to its eastern border on the Pacific, rocking on its base in the Indian Ocean. But there is also a visceral horror at the purported barbarism and inhumanity of the evil Oriental who can be found throughout the region.

This is why the United States of America, while speaking peace and joy, still wants to keep bases in the Indian Ocean (where the US really doesn't belong), float navies in the South China Sea (which has been the Nanyang or Southern Ocean to China for centuries), and neutralise the Persian Iranian nuclear programme (despite the fact that Pakistan and India, just round the corner, already have nukes ready to go). They deny the overwhelming desire to obtain and keep a resource-rich empire, with very British precedent, while lusting after the kingdoms of the world.

Such an insecure power. When the crude but much-trumpeted beginning of that power came in 1776, my ancestors had left China and settled elsewhere already. My ancestors lost the use of their Chinese language before the USA was more than a dream. By the time the present 50-state confederation (with protectorates and assorted imperial fragments) was formed, English had become my mother tongue — but not American.

But America has a right to be an Eastern Pacific and Northern Atlantic power. Where it fails is its oil-driven hunger to be a Middle Eastern power (meddling through proxies) as well. This meddling in Asia is what did for Britain eventually, and may yet do for the Pax Americana. It ain't healthy, cowboy.

America the beautiful, God shed His grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea. But stay out of other people's seas, do.

Empirical Problem

The problem, thought Wolff (once, he had been Sir Wolff) to himself, was unusual. In most empires of the past, large or small, the issue of who would inherit the poisoned chalice (or sanctified mantle) always arose. Even if there were no direct heirs, at least there were generals of prowess who would raise competing standards over the kingdom-sized fragments of the dying realm.

But here, there were none. The Emperor had pretty much burned the earth and salted the soil. There were no heirs to split, and the problem would not be settled by general solutions.

Wolff chuckled to himself. The empire's between a rock and a hard place.

Whose World? What Cup? (Day 10)

Paraguay, inventive and fluid, beats Slovakia 2-0. Why should things be any different? In all the talks of dogs and underdogs during any World Cup, it's never easy to say who a clear favourite might be except on the basis of form and depth — are the team always doing well against other teams of all kinds? And if the entire team were to be replaced by reserves, would that reserve team also do well?

The other factors are just too nebulous. Tonight we'll also see Italy play New Zealand. Italy have good depth, and fair form. New Zealand are relative unknowns who drew Slovakia 1-1 earlier. Logic would say Italy 2, NZ 0. This would be the result most of the time.

We live for the remaining chances, the slim shreds of possibility that say NZ will pull off an upset. But Italy are hard to defeat, although drawing is not such a difficult result to obtain. We'll see.

What's truly delectable is the match-up even later this evening, when Brazil (ex-Portuguese colony) meet Côte d'Ivoire (ex-French colony). Looking at the World Cup's interesting geography, one is struck by the thought, "Be careful when you build an empire; some day, the empire strikes back."

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Ho ho... NZ just scored against Italy. 1-0 to the Land of the Long White Cloud.

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And that De Rossi has just got himself a penalty for Italy. Iaquinta converts it! 1-1.

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Afternote: 1-1 at the death. This just feels like a moral defeat for Italy, though. World Cup champions eh? Ha. And NZ keeper Paston should be the man of the match.

Imperial Overstretch

No, this has nothing to do with eating too much, although I must say that I've had a bit of that over the weekend just past. Actually, it's all about the old hypothesis that, like Rome and Britain, the maintenance of empire can lead to the collapse of commitment.

This can be seen in any sufficiently large organisation. The bread and circuses are still abundant, long after the driving force has turned into some sort of zombified parody of the original. In fact, to this day the memories of Rome and of Britain are dear to some people. We still have the mottos of elite schools in Latin, with British heraldry.

Why is this so? I think that we all fall in love with the greatest pomp in the direst circumstances. When it is gone, we remember the good times, but not the bad. And when overstretch has turned into decay, like the collapse of a soufflé, we still dream of an imperial zenith that perhaps never really was.

Empire Building

On 6 May 1946, the renowned journalist Alistair Cooke said this on Letter from America, his decades-long radio broadcast programme:

"Americans are not particularly good at sensing the real elements of another people's culture. It helps them to approach foreigners with carefree warmth and an animated lack of misgiving. It also makes them, on the whole, terrible administrators on foreign soil. They find it almost impossible to believe that poorer peoples, far from the Statue of Liberty, should not want in their heart of hearts to become Americans. If it should happen that America, in its new period of world power, comes to do what every other world power has done: if Americans should have to govern large numbers of foreigners, you must expect that Americans will be well hated before they are admired for themselves."

It was a remarkably prescient piece of his inimitable mind, and his trans-Atlantic thought should inform American policy on adventures in Iraq and other parts of the wide world. I cannot help but think that unless you have the genuine blood of Empire in your veins, to the point that you understand you live to serve the Empire and not to dictate terms over it, you will never be a good administrator in a foreign land.

Worse still, you may be hung up to twist in the wind by those you tried to rule.

Thanksgiving Reasons

There is always a reason for the things we do. Of late, I've been thinking and writing about food even while part of my brain contemplates globalisation.

The first wave of globalisation was great, but landbound. Alexander's host swept out of Macedonia. By the time he died in Asia scant years later, the Hellenic wave of philosophy and understanding had reached India. The great empires of the time were Hellenized: the Egypt of the Ptolemies, Persia, the Rome that was growing from a seed. India and China felt it, but their masses of culture were more resistant.

In the light of that wave, the Pax Romana was a secondary wave. It built on the remains of the Greeks, for Alexander was heir to Aristotle, and Aristotle to Plato, and Plato to Socrates. And Rome was Plato's Republic writ large, but different from what the old sage would have thought. The Imperium filled a lot of Europe, and all the Mediterranean, with the language and the voice which we hear today echoed in Catalan, French, Italian, Romanian, Spanish.

Later, the third wave built on these two waves with the ascent from Elizabeth I of England to Victoria, Empress of India and, by the grace of God, Queen of England. It is this third wave, a tide of British vigor crossed with Graeco-Roman pollen, which spawned the bastard sons and daughters of Empire. To this day, the Venetian lion of the sea is echoed in the merlion of Singapore and the trident of Barbados.

And behind, and with, and through all these waves, we learned to eat many things. Bananas, chocolate, wheat, tea, prawns, coffee, cinnamon, rice; we learned to eat the flesh of all things that crawl and walk and swim and fly, the fruit of all things that sprout and bloom and spread. Not all of us eat all things. Many of us eat many things.

Today, I was at the eating house called Gastronomia da Paolo when it hit me. I eat the sun-dried tomatoes and the durum pasta of ancient Rome. I eat the chocolate and the fruit of countries distant, the scones of a British summer, the stuffed vine leaves of Greece. I am the son of the waves of change and empire crashing on the shores of the once-immutable and mysterious East.

All of these things are miracles of time and space and energy. All of these things are to be appreciated and enjoyed. I give thanks for every single bastard child of these phenomena of greed and gain, of adventure and daring, of life and empire. For we are all the world, and all the world is us.

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From last lines of Ulysses by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

From the last lines of Prometheus Unbound by Percy Shelley:

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life; Joy, Empire, and Victory!

The New Emperor's Clothes

In recent news, the Americans have discovered that their government has been looking at ways of effectively ruling the world. (You can even download the PDF of that briefing document, if you want.) Such fools, these mortals be.

The problem with the American (well, Republican American) point of view is that Empire is a silly thing to have. About the only thing that our historical experience of empires (and, yes, our empirical experience) has shown is that they are hard to manage and bring few long-term benefits to the dominant political entity. In fact, history shows us that only when great powers come to dynamic equilibrium do benefits accrue significantly to all.

Why isn't Empire, empirically speaking, a good idea? The obvious thing is that Empire is by nature inefficient. As Empire grows, the only thing that keeps it borderline efficient is the promulgation of universal values (i.e. the values, language(s), culture, religion etc of the Imperial overlord). If the imperial power fails to clone itself into the cultural DNA of every one of its subsidiary centres of authority, the day of imperial overstretch will arrive. Just as a rubber-band comes to grief more violently the greater the degree of overstretch, so too goes an empire.

One simple chain of reasoning will suffice to show why Empire doesn't work (and we won't even have to go to Edward Gibbon or Isaac Asimov for this). Consider a resource that occupies space and must be moved (which is most of them). The more locations that produce it, and to which it must be moved (and its consequent products as well), the more roads you need to build and maintain. This is why sea-lanes and air-routes are strategically vital for an empire; land empires have serious logistic problems. However, eventually even sea and air routes will fail, as the total transactions in physical terms multiply.

The solution is either to find transport with zero logistic cost (or close to it), or resources which require no transport (or close to none). In real terms, this means you develop teleportation or you became an information-driven empire. The former is not within our reach above the scale of the sub-atomic for now. The latter... ah ha, you might say.

No, information empires don't work either. Consider the necessity to store and process data. If you have a single datum, then it has no relationships with anything except the 'identity' relationship. It just is. You store it, and you need at least one more bit to store the information 'identity'. It therefore needs at least two bits to store one piece of information (as opposed to data). Consider two data points. They will have at least one relationship between them, and one 'identity' relationship each. So to store two points as information, you need five bits at least. For three data points, you have three 'identity' bits, three 1-to-1 bits, and perhaps three 1-to-2 bits and maybe a 'this is a chain' bit. It is obvious that for an empire of data, you would quickly bog down in a morass of unprocessed information.

But it is still possible for a pseudo-empire to flourish. If there are wise and intuitive leaders (or powerfully controlled decentralised authorities), they can decide what to throw away by rule of thumb. They might actually be able to cut the information load down to a minimum and wing it. This seems to be the driving force behind any empire that actually succeeds: willful ignorance. Paradoxically, a desire for unknowing may save a glutted empire. It is certainly no long-term solution, existing as it does on a wing and a prayer. But it may last long enough for the imperial power to put an eagle up in every courtyard before the whole shebang collapses.

Disengagement

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire.
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre.

Looking into the future of an over-extended empire is not a new thing. Looking into history to see what normally happens is also not new. But I think it's fascinating how well the British managed it. Although the Brits always seem to be flailing around like an amputee with a phantom limb which used to be an empire, at least they can say that English is not a dead language, and that their literature is still fairly widely respected.

It takes skill, nerve, and no small amount of self-esteem to survive the loss of empire. Some just don't have it; some fake it. But in the end, a few markers serve to test the quality of the once-imperial. How broad and deep does the linguistic influence remain? What happened to the institutions and establishments? Are the fallen imperials remembered fondly? Many years down the road, would you still want to take them out for lunch? Heh, I am fascinated at the implications of these questions, and many related to them.

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Update: You can find a more detailed response to the questions I have been idly pondering here. There have been many works discussing the various world empires of the past; the legacy of the first real world-spanning empire, the Pax Britannica, is the most interesting one. This is possibly because it was the first to show significant signs of what we now call 'globalisation'. Literally, the sun never set on this empire; administrative offices of the Empire, that were doing the same business in largely the same way, were open at any time somewhere in the world.

Empire

I remember the day it all went pear-shaped, although I did not want to believe it at that time. I sat before the man who had not recruited me, although he had certainly employed me. He had recently maligned his predecessor in public, and was now accusing me of empire-building. I remember feeling bemused; I had no idea such a thing was going on, or that such a thing was in his vocabulary, or that I was engaged in any way in any activity that could be construed as such.

This was many years ago. At that time, my lawyers and my friends said that I should leave. How could I work for such a person? And my Bible reading, today as it was all those years ago, was from the first chapter of Exodus. That word exodus of course means 'the way out' or 'leaving' in Greek. But I persevered. After all, I have never seen myself as a Moses contending against a Pharaoh. I am no Moses; my then-boss is no Pharaoh.

But how on Earth had I been empire-building? I knew nothing of it then, but I am beginning to suspect certain things as I gaze back upon Egypt with a stranger's eye.

The big ideas are the dangerous ones. They build an empire of the mind, which endures and ingrains itself within the bones of men. If you have a big idea, you are an empire-builder. And those with the smaller ideas will fear you. In the lecture I used to give every year on the nature of the scientific paradigm (how it both leads and misleads), I actually likened ideas to weapons in a war of paradigms. Sometimes, both sides can use an idea; sometimes, an idea only fits into the paradigm for one side.

Where I had gone wrong was this. I had neglected the iron discipline of a man under orders. As a lowly foot-soldier (or even a sergeant-at-arms), I should never have forgotten a few rules. To paraphrase Orson Scott Card (in his book, aptly enough entitled Empire), one should be able to stand in the same room as others with lesser ideas and say nothing, show nothing. One should be able to withhold threat or the appearance of threat when one is not intending a threat. In fact, the only thing I seem to have remembered was from Grimwood: "Never show surprise, never show fear, never even pretend to take anything seriously."

Well, now I need the discipline of a ronin, a mercenary soldier who yet adheres to a warrior code. And I am still not an empire-builder, although I must confess that the big ideas and the grand sweep of things are still in my mind. Some day, I would like to see the large ideas worked out in reality, upon the great foundation was established so long ago, to the glory of God the Father.