Storm and Conquest

Stephen Taylor's Storm and Conquest: The Clash of Empires in the Eastern Seas, 1809. An entertaining, instructive, and moving read. Highly Recommended. Suitable for Young Adults and especially for those with an interest in Military History, Napoleon, Maritime History, the Indian Ocean, India, or the British Empire. A non-fiction book in the spirit of C.S. Forester (Mr. Midshipman Hornblower), Patrick O'Brian (the Jack Aubrey novels beginning with Master and Commander), or Alexander Kent (the Richard Bolithio novels beginning with Richard Bolithio, Midshipman).

Storm and Conquest recounts the tribulations of the East India Company and the British Navy 1808-1810 in the Indian Ocean during which more than half dozen Indiamen were lost to hurricanes, nearly half a dozen British warships were lost to the resurgent French navy and more than 2,000 sailors and civilians lost their lives to battle and mishap. At a time when Great Britain had a population of some 12 million, it would be the equivalent to the US losing some 50,000 people in a conflict in a two year span.

Storm and Conquest reads like Livy's account of the Romans, losing time after time to the Carthaginians at sea, yet bullheadedly returning to contest with their foe once more, eventually winning by dent of deliberate habit.

There was all the East before me

From Youth: A Narrative by Joseph Conrad.

There was all the East before me, and all life, and the thought that I had been tried in that ship and had come out pretty well. And I thought of men of old who, centuries ago, went that road in ships that sailed no better, to the land of palms, and spices, and yellow sands, and of brown nations ruled by kings more cruel than Nero the Roman and more splendid than Solomon the Jew.

I am reading a rather excellent account of the maritime conflicts in the Indian Ocean during the Napoleonic wars, Storm and Conquest: The Clash of Empires in the Eastern Seas, 1809 by Stephen Taylor. Highly recommended.

Conrad, a hundred years later, caught some of the maritime magic of the Indian Ocean.

To come down the China Sea before a fair monsoon with stun'-sails set alow and aloft

Regretably, an England now passed. From Youth: A Narrative by Joseph Conrad.

This could have occurred nowhere but in England, where men and sea interpenetrate, so to speak—the sea entering into the life of most men, and the men knowing something or everything about the sea, in the way of amusement, of travel, or of bread-winning.

We were sitting round a mahogany table that reflected the bottle, the claret-glasses, and our faces as we leaned on our elbows. There was a director of companies, an accountant, a lawyer, Marlow, and myself. The director had been a Conway boy, the accountant had served four years at sea, the lawyer—a fine crusted Tory, High Churchman, the best of old fellows, the soul of honour—had been chief officer in the P. & O. service in the good old days when mail-boats were square-rigged at least on two masts, and used to come down the China Sea before a fair monsoon with stun'-sails set alow and aloft. We all began life in the merchant service. Between the five of us there was the strong bond of the sea, and also the fellowship of the craft, which no amount of enthusiasm for yachting, cruising, and so on can give, since one is only the amusement of life and the other is life itself.

It is not something that can be picked up and studied in one's spare time.

h/t Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy by John R. Hale. Page 77.

Seamanship, just like anything else, is an art. It is not something that can be picked up and studied in one's spare time. Indeed, it allows no spare time for anything else.

The need for focus and practice in order to achieve excellence, recognized 2,500 years ago.

Courage is the beginning of victory

h/t Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy by John R. Hale. Page 43.

Pindar rightly called the battle of Artemisium the place where the sons of Athens laid the shining cornerstone of freedom; for courage is the beginning of victory - Plutarch

Consent of the governed

Denish D'Souza, What's So Great About America. Page 114-116.

D'Souza has an intriguing discussion as to both the 3/5s issue in the constitution as well as an explanation of Lincoln's views on race and slavery. At first blush this discussion seems disingenuous but on reflection, I wonder if he doesn't present the most logical argument I have seen for squaring the circle between the private actions and thoughts of these classical Liberal founding fathers and the actual words of the constitution.

Starting on page 114 he summarizes the issues, logical conundrums and competing philosophical and commercial views.

The deference of Jefferson and the American Founders to popular prejudices strikes many contemporary scholars as an intellectual and moral scandal. Some, like John Hope Franklin, suggest that popular convictions simply represented a frustrating obstacle that the Founders should have dealt with resolutely and uncompromisingly. But in a democratic society, the absence of the people's agreement on a fundamental moral question of governance is no mere technicality. The case for democracy, no less than the case against slavery, rests on the legitimacy of the people's consent. To outlaw slavery without the consent of the majority of whites would be to destroy democracy, indeed to destroy the very basis for outlawing slavery.

The men gathered in Philadelphia were in a peculiar predicament. For them to sanction slavery would be to proclaim the illegitimacy of the American Revolution and the new form of government based on the people's consent; yet for them to outlaw slavery without securing the people's consent would have the same effect. In practical terms as well, the choice facing the founders was not to permit or to prohibit slavery. Rather, the choice was either to establish a union in which slavery was tolerated, or not to have a union at all. Any suggestion that Southern states could be persuaded to join a union and give up slavery can be dismissed as preposterous. As Harry Jaffa puts it, had the founders insisted upon securing all the rights of all men, they would have ended up securing no rights for anybody.

Thus the accusation that the Founders compromised on the Declaration's principle that "all men are created equal" for the purpose of expediency reflects a grave misunderstanding. The Founders were confronted with a competing principle, also present in the Declaration: governments derive their legitimacy from the "consent of the governed." Both principles must be satisfied, and where they cannot, compromise is not merely permissible but morally required.

The American Founders found a middle ground not between principle and practice, but between opposition to slavery and majority consent. They produced a Constitution in which the concept of slavery is tolerated in deference to consent, but not given any moral approval in recognition of the slave's natural rights. Nowhere in the document is the term "slavery" used. Slaves are always described as "persons," implying their possession of natural rights. The Founders were also careful to approve a Constitution that refuses to acknowledge the existence of racial distinctions, thus producing a document that transcended time.

[snip]

Even so, the test of the founders' project is the practical consequence: did the founding strengthen or weaken the institution of slavery? The American Revolution should be judged by its consequences. Before 1776, slavery was legal in every part of America. Yet by 1804 every state north of Maryland had abolished slavery either immediately or gradually; southern and border states prohibited further slave importations from abroad; and Congress was committed to outlawing the slave trade in 1808, which it did. Slavery was no longer national but a sectional institution, and one under moral and political siege.

Abraham Lincoln not only perceived the founders' dilemma, he inherited it. The principle of popular rule is based on Jefferson's doctrine that "all men are created equal," yet the greatest crisis in American history arose when the people denied that "all men are created equal" and in so doing denied the basis of their own legitimacy. Lincoln had two concrete choices: work to overthrow democracy, or work to secure consent through persuasion. Conscious that he, too, must defer, as the founders did, to prevailing prejudices, Lincoln nevertheless sought to neutralize those prejudices so they did not become a barrier to securing black freedom. In a series of artfully conditional claims - "If God gave the black man little, that little let him enjoy" - Lincoln paid ritual obeisance to existing racism while drawing even racists into his coalition to end slavery. Lincoln made these rhetorical concessions because he knew that the possibility for securing antislavery consent was far better in his time than in the 1780s.

Commenting on the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln said of the founders: "They intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They defined with tolerable distinctness in what respects they did consider all men created equal—equal in certain inalienable rights. They did not mean to assert the obvious untruth, that all were then actually enjoying that equality, nor yet, that they were about to confer it immediately upon them. They meant simply to declare the right, so that the enforcement of it might follow as fast as circumstances should permit." By working through rather than around the democratic process, Lincoln justified the nation's faith in the untried experiment of representative self-government. In vindicating the slave's right to rule himself, Lincoln also vindicated the legitimacy of democratic self-rule. Thus it is accurate to say that Lincoln gave America a "new birth of freedom."

Lincoln's position came to be shared by Frederick Douglass, who had once denounced the Constitution but who eventually came to the conclusion that it contained antislavery principles: "Abolish slavery tomorrow, and not a sentence or syllable of the Constitution need be altered," Douglas said. Slavery, he concluded, was merely a "scaffolding to the magnificent structure, to be removed as soon as the building is completed."

Speech on the Dred Scott Decision by Abraham Lincoln

Is it real?

H/T Rick O'Leary.

Don Schrello's criteria for assessing the value of a new venture:

1.Is it Real?
2.Can We Win?
3.Is it Worth it?

- Don Schrello, 1974, Product Evaluation and Planning Seminar

What Scientists Believe by Peter Lopatin

What Scientists Believe by Peter Lopatin.

Putting numbers behind stereotypes about scientists and faith.

One person with a belief is a social power equal to ninety-nine who have only interests.

Driving my son to work this morning, we are discussing the proper role of government and the constant ebbs and flows of limitation and expansion.

On returning, and just before getting started on work, I do my quick run through of news and blogs and come across Representative Government by John Stuart Mill, last read probably sophomore year in college. What seemed so dry and theoretical then now seems rather pertinent. Within the essay there is this powerful quote that frequently gets summarized or even bowdlerized but is intriguing in its original context. Emphasis added.

But there are still stronger objections to this theory of government in the terms in which it is usually stated. The power in society which has any tendency to convert itself into political power is not power quiescent, power merely passive, but active power; in other words, power actually exerted; that is to say, a very small portion of all the power in existence. Politically speaking, a great part of all power consists in will. How is it possible, then, to compute the elements of political power, while we omit from the computation anything which acts on the will? To think that because those who wield the power in society wield in the end that of government, therefore it is of no use to attempt to influence the constitution of the government by acting on opinion, is to forget that opinion is itself one of the greatest active social forces. One person with a belief is a social power equal to ninety-nine who have only interests. They who can succeed in creating a general persuasion that a certain form of government, or social fact of any kind, deserves to be preferred, have made nearly the most important step which can possibly be taken towards ranging the powers of society on its side. On the day when the proto-martyr was stoned to death at Jerusalem, while he who was to be the Apostle of the Gentiles stood by "consenting unto his death," would any one have supposed that the party of that stoned man were then and there the strongest power in society? And has not the event proved that they were so? Because theirs was the most powerful of then existing beliefs. The same element made a monk of Wittenberg, at the meeting of the Diet of Worms, a more powerful social force than the Emperor Charles the Fifth, and all the princes there assembled. But these, it may be said, are cases in which religion was concerned, and religious convictions are something peculiar in their strength. Then let us take a case purely political, where religion, so far as concerned at all, was chiefly on the losing side. If any one requires to be convinced that speculative thought is one of the chief elements of social power, let him bethink himself of the age in which there was scarcely a throne in Europe which was not filled by a liberal and reforming king, a liberal and reforming emperor, or, strangest of all, a liberal and reforming pope; the age of Frederic the Great, of Catherine the Second, of Joseph the Second, of Peter Leopold, of Benedict XIV., of Ganganelli, of Pombal, of Aranda; when the very Bourbons of Naples were liberals and reformers, and all the active minds among the noblesse of France were filled with the ideas which were soon after to cost them so dear. Surely a conclusive example how far mere physical and economic power is from being the whole of social power.

To me this whole paragraph is insightful and speaks a truth rarely acknowledged - ends are achieved to a large degree based on the differential in will power. Most of the other factors contributing to success are details and footnotes: relevant and necessary but not the strongest predictors of success. And while I endorse this as a general principle, there are of course exceptions. The French army in advance of World War I became enamoured of the idea of "elan", the vigorous spirit, and pinned their hopes for martial effectiveness on elan rather than training and numbers which was the focus of their future enemy. Will can't guaranty victory, but ceteris paribus, it is the differentiating factor.

Out of the whole paragraph quoted above, it is that one sentence "One person with a ..." which is cited. Yes, it is very quotable. But it seems to me that the meat is in the sentence that follows:

They who can succeed in creating a general persuasion that a certain form of government, or social fact of any kind, deserves to be preferred, have made nearly the most important step which can possibly be taken towards ranging the powers of society on its side.

Isn't that what all our debates are about? Creating a general persuasion, often independent of the facts, towards harnessing the powers of society?

A side train of thought: this is coupled with the Swiss philosopher Helvetius' epigram "When I speak I put on a mask. When I act, I am forced to take it off."

Be it never so bad or decried

H/T Nicholas Basbanes, A Splendor of Letters: The Permanence of Books in an Impermanent World.

For certainly there is nothing which renders a Library more recommendable than when every man finds in it that which he is in search of, and nowhere else encounter; this being a perfect maxim, that there is no book whatsoever, be it never so bad or decried, but may in time be sought for by some person or other. - Gabriel Naude (1600-1653), Instructions Concerning Erecting of a Library.