Spinoza's tiered society

Absent the dyothelete society, the Leviathan tends to a vertical dyotheletism. The Holy Spirit descends from the Father through the Son. The Scripture is politicised. That, argues (at great length) Wiker and Hahn, is the story of Bento Despinoza.

To such lengths, I didn't even spot the politics in the first half of their chapter. Ah me of little faith.

Spinoza is like Locke as a mufassir on Hobbes. He doesn't like that the sovereign be absolute. Wiker and Hahn notant bene that all these philosophers reacted to dangers of their time. As Hobbes demanded security from chaos, Spinoza wanted some means of keeping out the ignorant (goyische) mob. Both agreed that there must be a sovereign, and that the sovereign must use the ambient Scripture to mollify the plebs. Spinoza, as a Jew closer to Torah, proposed how to do this.

Making the Bible an historical document, was how Spinoza did it. Machiavelli had already proposed this before all the Protestants.

And, really, to evangelise the Bible outside Judaeo-Christian circles, anyone has to address unbelievers who will start out assuming it's just someone else's literature. If Machiavelli, Hobbes, and now Spinoza were more motivated to treat this text as outsiders, I don't know that this discredits their project. In fact Catholics should be more motivated than these secular authoritarians; once Luther started out-scriptura'ing the Pope, a pivot against scriptura on Tradition's behalf seems exactly the winning move.

Also like Machiavelli, as noted, Spinoza didn't intend that his advice to princes get out among the rest of us. For Spinoza, the princes were the Protestant elite in Holland and maybe republicans in Italy. Rather than King Henry VIII telling his subjects what Scripture meant, the burghers of Amsterdam and of New Amsterdam would figure out what Scripture intrinsically meant, and - in their wisdom - decide what lessons their pastors (and rabbis!) may preach. Those lessons would be entirely moral, alongside respect for wise authority. In the meantime the universities can get cracking on the exegesis of Scripture because, as Spinoza became aware, the Scripture was riddled with holes and its seventeenth-century interpretation inadequate.

Spinozan liberalism is fragile, assuming the Nederlander bourgeoisie don't suddenly decide to spout self-detrimental slogans like "Spaniard Lives Matter". I wonder if, for Spinoza, Hobbes lay out there as a bogeyman: accept this two-tiered system, and propagandise accordingly; or else you'll default to Leviathan, because the third alternative is anarchy and death.

Maybe Ibn al-Ashraf wasn't murdered

It sometimes happens that extremists agree. Noted earlier was the case of mediocre philosophette Hypatia, killed by Christians during a riot. Modern atheists blame Ephesian Christians; Ephesians in antiquity proudly claimed it, themselves. Impartial historians these days suspect the Christian establishment didn't approve an execution. So: on to the Jews of Yathrib, and why there aren't any there today - the so-called "Khaybar" (oasis) expulsion. Or at least the murder of Ka'b bin al-Ashraf.

If you ask a Palestinian, he'll chant about the Yahud of Khaybar and about Ibn al-Ashraf in threats against Israel. If you ask Robert Spencer... well, The Truth about Muhammad should still be available for purchase. Ehsan Roohi offers a contrary opinion.

There exist skeptics of the Muhammadan sîra. Spencer took the skeptic tack in another book, Did Muhammad Exist?. Roohi splits this baby: he bypasses the Meccan mab'ath, to accept the Madinan maghâzî.

The man who has taken on much of the credit, or blame, for Ka'b's execution is one Ibn Maslama. This man turns out, at the time, to be a Jew himself. Plenty of Arabians converted to Judaism in sixth-century Late Antiquity; the king of Yemen was one. Ibn Maslama is credited/blamed for further murders of erstwhile-fellow Jews. It would be possible that we have a Torquemada here - but the accounts all follow the same pattern. This induces Roohi to consider Ibn Maslama's spree a topos, a "meme" in our parlance.

As alternative, Ibn Maslama and Ka'b were both Jewish-with-emphasis-on-ish warriors aligned with Muhammad. Ka'b may have died in battle but, perhaps, not with particular distinction or even on the "wrong" side. Ibn Maslama, who survived, ended up in high positions in 'Umar's circle and then with 'Uthman al-Umawi. Ibn Maslama faced accusations that he favoured the Jews among the Believers. It was remembered that Ibn Maslama made a personal petition with Ka'b. Ibn Maslama saved his reputation among the Muslims against the Jews by inventing or at least permitting a story that he had murdered some prominent Jews in his life.

Roohi does however accept that the Muslims expelled the Jews from Khaybar. Although even that might not be the Prophet's fault.

Moral Collapse theory

Alongside Michael Hudson's neoMarxist analysis (I mean that as compliment), I recommend Richard E. Blanton, Gary M. Feinman, Stephen A. Kowalewski, and Lane F. Fargher: "Moral Collapse and State Failure". Daily Mail got a summary.

The paper starts with a theory of the Good Government: the system which enables a productive working class. I'd call out the Mail's use of "middle class". As President Obama proved, that is a shield for what the "Lion of the Blogosphere" in his halfsigma heyday called value-transference. The middle-classer might earn the same salary as a worker, but his job is a Bullshit Job and he lives as a parasite, inhibiting production.

Blanton et al. don't look at democracies. Their paper looks at three empires for which we have good record: Flavian / Antonine Roma, Ming (not Tang!) China, the Mughals. Also one republic: Venice. Neoreactionaries will accept that this is because democracy doesn't work. Small-d democrats might excuse this in that those systems can serve as example and shame for democracies.

Michael Hudson isn't cited. I moot he should be. Hudson is ultra reactionary here, taking cue from Babylonia and from the crypto-monothelete Macedonian Constantinople. The Emperor Protects, and Forgives Us Our Debts. The Macedonian Dynasty is at least as well-documented as is second-century Rome. It is just not well studied, outside the Orthodox world.

The paper goes further than Hudson, to explain how the Good Empire fails. Empress Zoe presided over the Macedonians' failure. Installing a good system is necessary, but it also needs a plan to keep it aloft. Most of all - should the system falter - the Imperial Court needs a "plan b" of restoration. Antonine apologists often neglect the Flavian decades starting AD 70ish. Roma survived the later years of Domitian, the Nerva-Trajan coup, and Trajan's overextension into Iraq. The new dynasty wasn't genetically Flavian (a lot of it was Spanish!) but, I'll propose, the Flavians laid down the foundation for a post-Flavian Romania.

Also good news is the exercise of scientody in political science. Bruce Gilley at Portland State seems authoritarian enough; I suggest he take this tack of doing scholarship, instead of chasing notoriety and a conservative fanclub like the late Mike Adams did.

The Xinca never had a chance

Hearing about Ilopango, and considering its [lack of] effect abroad; I really should look closer to home, also supposedly literate. That's central El Salvador during the Classic Maya heyday.

Ilopango and the "Our Saviour" volcano both erupted during this time. We've now dated the former to about AD 431: longcount 8.19.15.*.*. The latter went up AD 600ish, 9.8.0-3.*.*; that one doesn't seem as well constrained.

Where Ilopango was an epic blast, affecting the whole Southern Hemisphere (tho' not so much the North); the latter Loma Caldera was more a Vesuvius. As a Vesuvius it did blanket the local villages and, here, the archaeologists have been hard at work at the "Jewel of Cerén".

These cultures are considered Maya; I don't know about their languages. Due north is Copán; west, Tazumal alias Chalchuapa. After all this San Andrés picked up, as a trade entrepôt.

What I don't hear about, here, is literacy. Nearby Copán etched out a LOT of monuments. I haven't heard about monuments in San Andrés nor even Tazumal. Copán for its part faced north, somewhat famously controlling Quiriguá downstream until 18 Rabbit got killed AD 738; Copán didn't care about the Pacific.

Quiriguá might not have been Maya at first, although its élite spoke the Chorti - Copán for its part still does. I cannot help but feel that El Salvador spoke different Maya, in the Quiché and Mam branch. Nahua came later; Lenca and Cacaopera cluster east of here, as in Honduras. And even Maya did not extend to the San Salvador volcanoes, now Nahua and Spanish. I am told that the local toponyms are Xinca. Xinca culture was inferior to Maya; the Xinca language, where it held on (west of here), borrowed Maya technical vocabulary.

At a guess, the eruptions AD 431 and 600ish cleared out the whole area, and made difficult for to resettle. When the Nahua-speaking Pipil came, when was decidedly Postclassic, they found few-to-none locals to oppose them.

I'd also not hold out hope that we'll find dramatic pyramids or monuments as we find in Copán or will probably find in Tazumal. Toponyms are all we'll get from the eastern Xinca culture.

De Peyrère's intuition

Following René Descartes, now Wiker and Hahn are on to Bento d'Espinoza. In between they discuss a few others.

I don't know that Spinoza has a place in a book titled Politicizing the Bible. Spinoza didn't do politics. Spinoza's antecedents were Hobbes arguing for a theory of absolute kingship and Machiavelli advising on the king's conduct. About all He has in common with the former that his books got banned and, with the latter, that he left several of his manuscripts to be published posthumously. In Spinoza's times the Bible was already subject for secular study. I am worrying if Hahn's and Wiker's own book has carried on too long by now.

What this chapter does net us are those intermediaries between Descartes and Spinoza. Da Costa seems very tragic - less a philosopher than a depressive. De Prado held to a universe boundless in time so was, er, wrong. Wiker and Hahn find more interesting Isaac de la Peyrère.

Like Descartes, la Peyrère was optimistic about how much knowledge seventeenth-century Europe had acquired. In 1655 he published the Prae Adamitae which entered the English tongue the following year as Men Before Adam. Samuel Fisher built from la Peyrère in turn. Menassah ben Israel rebutted him.

La Peyrère believed that Egyptian and Babylonian astronomy preceded 4000 BC. He also could not see where to fit the Native Americans and Inuits - "Eskimos" then called. He noted that not all the races owned a Flood myth as had the Greeks and the Jews. But the man was unwilling to abandon the Bible entirely. He concluded that vast swathes of humanity had branched away before Adam's Fall. Adam is, then, the father ultimately only of Noah so of Ham, Shem, and Japheth; Asians, Americans, and Africans are para-Adamites. And the Flood never reached them, or at least reached only part of them.

His main source was Claude Saumaise' De annis climactericis, a comprehensive refutation of astrology published 1648 which, I think, had pretty much written off the whole science.

We now know through several scientodic lines that la Peyrère was right: the Bible is for Semites and doesn't know much beyond its Levantine and Iraqi world. The world's Flood myths as we know them postdate, by far, the migrations and separations of the world's human races and have little in common besides the molecule of water. In addition not all human races even have a Flood myth. Egyptian and Babylonian history are deeper than the Biblical narrative. The Mesoamericans (and Chinese) kept their own records, Mesoamerica fixing its year-zero at 3114 BC.

What I don't know is how Saumaise or la Peyrère could have known all this and, I have to conclude, that they didn't. Egyptian, Sumerian, and Mayan in script were none of them legible to the seventeenth century reader; Sumerian not even comprehensible. European sources for these cultures were really, really second-hand at best. These two skeptics left themselves wide open to a critique like Menasseh's.

UPDATE 10/16: The authors get into Spinoza's politics later in that chapter.

Syngas is awesome

The best thing you can do with your plastic waste is reuse it - especially if plastic is expensive. Stony asteroids and our own Moon run short on hydrogen, so will find plastic expensive. But sometimes it is not feasible to reuse the plastic. A plastic item might tear or, if in oxygen and sunlight for too long, degrade.

Via hbdchick comes a means to accelerate the degradation: microwave. We're all here to retrieve the hydrogen. But looking into all this, I'm not minding the Old And Busted way.

The usual process does this at 1025 K but that is too hot even for Venus' surface; it also gets syngas back, which mixes the hydrogen with carbon-monoxide. Luckily hot syngas at least will not explode outside a zinc-oxide catalyst and 30 MPa which is, what, five times the surface pressure. (Unless you add oxygen, which in free gaseous form isn't natural to... anywhere.) Unluckily it takes a second step to separate the gases.

... if we cared to do that.

The CO, as Robert Zubrin teaches us, grants a wide array of useful chemistry (or is that "chemody"?). Mixed with hydrogen it should reduce our rusty metals better - and syngas is so used in sponge iron production. Syngas also makes alcohols starting with methanol at 575 K with those catalysts. It's good for all sorts of stuff. Waste products are carbon dioxide, which we vent out; and water, which we also love. Might be a bit fizzy.

We're here for Venus; hydrogen might be hard to liberate from all that sulfur, absent caustics. CO's molecular mass is 28 like nitrogen gas. Given that Venus' atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, our poison waste is a lifting gas even better than the breathable-air mix which will be some high percent of oxygen gas (at 32). Especially if CO be mixed with hydrogen instead. [UPDATE 9/11/26 Humans will be happiest where 0.5 bar with 40% O₂, but the syngas balloon can float anywhere.]

How do we get 1025 K over Venus' surface? Float a BIG transparent balloon with your plastic trash and a few focusing mirrors in it. Let it break the clouds, above. As mentioned this process will only lighten the load.

AMMONIA 12/15: We can also talk fertiliser from urea.

National holiday for some nation

I dealt with Chris' deeds last year. [MISSED THIS 10/14/21: Fynn-Paul "The myth of the ‘stolen country’".] This year, let's look at his family. Some claim him for the Tribe.

Since 2002, at least, researchers have been looking at the man's family DNA. Periodically the case rises up in media. It never goes anywhere. My only conclusion is that the DNA doesn't help any hobby-horse. The Sephardim aren't like us Ashkenazim whose DNA can be spotted a mile off; they're more Moroccan-tinged Spaniards like the, er, Galicians. But in Iberia, if someone's DNA is Aragonese: you do know he is not Jewish.

We are left with some loose ends - Chris' Spanish was accented, with Judaisms in certain Ladino turns of phrase; he didn't care to share genealogy. When Chris found himself in a Genovese prison he (finally) bandied about that he was a fellow Ligurian. But nobody there knew who he was, and nobody had raised the issue beforehand - not Chris, not Genovese diplomats.

But the accent is Aragonese, even Catalan; the opposite of the more Moorish tongues along the Atlantic and Granada (then still Muslim, if tributary). And as Jared Taylor helpfully reminds us the religion is Catholic to a fault. As for the Ladino, consider how Yiddischkeit has entered common New York speech or even the speech of my generation brought up on MAD magazine and Mel Brooks.

If Chris was, in fact, Catalan: to European bigots that might well be enough. Spaniards were aware of the Catalan language as an outlier in Iberian Romance, further off than Portuguese. Castilians deemed the region as a debateable land with southern France - the peninsula was fresh off a war over the succession. As for Italy, the 1490s AD was the de Borgia age. Many Italians had learnt to distrust the Catalans.

Let's go with that this guy was Northwest Mediterranean Mystery Meat. Father Catalan; mother perhaps Piedmont.