The Little Red Blog

Sunday Sermon: Salt of the Earth

“Salt of the Earth” (by the Rolling Stones)

Let's drink to the hard working people
Let's drink to the lowly of birth
Raise your glass to the good and the evil
Let’s drink to the salt of the earth

Say a prayer for the common foot soldier
Spare a thought for his back-breaking work
Say a prayer for his wife and his children 
Who burn the fires and who still till the earth

When I search a faceless crowd
A swirling mass of gray and
Black and white
They don't look real to me
In fact, they look so strange

Raise your glass to the hardworking people
Let's drink to the uncounted heads
Let's think of the wavering millions
Who need leading but get gamblers instead

When I look in the faceless crowd
A swirling mass of grays and
Black and white
They don't look real to me
Oh, don't they look so strange?

Let's drink to the hardworking people
Let's think of the lowly of birth
Spare a thought for the rag taggy people
Let's drink to the salt of the earth

Let's drink to the hardworking people
Let's drink to the salt of the earth
Let’s drink to the two thousand million
Let's think of the humble of birth

Let's take a drink to the salt of the earth
Let's take a drink to the salt of the earth

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The Rolling Stones – Salt of the Earth Lyrics | Genius Lyrics

From the album “Beggar’s Banquet”

Album version: The Rolling Stones - Salt Of The Earth (Official Lyric Video) - YouTube

Live version (with Axl Rose): Salt Of The Earth (Live) - YouTube

Cover version by Lucinda Williams: Lucinda Williams - SALT OF THE EARTH (Rolling Stones Cover) - YouTube

Saturday Lecture: Choosing Nonviolence

Manfred Steger, from Judging Nonviolence (2003):

It is time to challenge the dominant ideology of violence.

Expressed in cold numbers, the social and environmental impacts of violence are truly frightening. Researchers have calculated that war-related killings in the twentieth century exceeded 105 million people, including 62 million civilian victims. Still, there is little indication that we have learned the bloody lessons of the past. Let us consider contemporary (2003) American society. Today, US citizens own a total of 70 million rifles, 65 million handguns, 49 million shotguns, and 8 million other long guns. More than 15,000 Americans are murdered each year. Every day in the United States four women are murdered by a male partner. Each year, 6 million women are beaten in their homes. Each year, as many as 6.9 million American children may be physically abused, depending on the definition used. Total homicides in the United States since World War II are estimated to be at least 750,000, thus exceeding the 650,000 total battle deaths in all of America’s major wars. The prison population in this country has exploded to 1.8 million, including almost 4000 convicts who await execution.

The pervasiveness of our culture of violence makes reliance on force a normal occurrence. Add to this culture of violence the widespread and easy availability of arms and you get an explosive recipe. To be sure, the obsession with violence is not exclusively an American phenomenon. Yet many studies have shown that Americans are far more accepting of violence than citizens of other nations. Rates of violence are much higher in the United States than in any other industrialized nation. For example, there is a dramatic contrast between rates of violence in Canada and the United States, two countries that share a long common border and many similar values and cultural traits. For more than half a century, levels of violence as measured by homicide rates have consistently been four times higher in the United States than in Canada.

From the day they are old enough to sit in front of a television, American youngsters are fed a steady stream of media images and sound bites that often depict violence as heroic and inevitable. Jeff Bleich, executive director of the National Campaign Against Youth Violence, has long argued that violence constitutes a central pillar of the American belief system. We encourage boys—and increasingly girls—to believe that in order to become honorable persons, they must demonstrate that they are willing to use violence. Our enthusiasm for guns, our glorification of war and the military, our choice of superheroes, our appetite for violent sports games, and our use of belligerent language reflect the myriad ways in which we put violence at the center of our collective identity. And yet, violence is a financial drain on the resources of a nation. Conservative calculations show that the U.S. nuclear weapons program alone cost taxpayers almost $6 trillion during the last five decades.  

One reason why nonviolence is so easily dismissed in public discourse seems to be obvious: a serious consideration of nonviolent strategies might create an alternative vantage point from which the alleged normality of violence could be challenged. This widespread reluctance to afford the subject of nonviolence a more prominent place in our public discourse and educational programs points to the remarkable power of social forces with vested economic and political interests in protecting the business of violence—be it violence-glorifying entertainment, war, or the global arms trade. Often hiding their commercial interests behind the language of “security” and “necessity,” these forces habitually downplay the feasibility of nonviolent politics. Instead, they present violence as a universal urge or a set of unalterable biological behaviors sewn into the very fabric of human nature that get played out on the allegedly anarchic stage of international politics. The nonviolence movements of the twentieth century are dismissed as either grand moral experiments that ultimately failed or rare exceptions that merely confirm the (violent) rule.

All human behavior is learned. Every human being has the biological capacity for violent and nonviolent behavior; people are not ‘naturally’ one way or the other. The deepest sources of human violence and aggression are to be found in culture and the social environment. Violence is not an inevitable feature of human nature but a learned behavior that can be changed. The idea of humanity remaining forever confined to violent societies is but a dangerous myth of pessimistic ‘realists’. Unless we are willing to accept the very real possibility of our planet’s destruction as the result of our learned aggressive behavior, we must develop the courage to break the cycle of violence.

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Manfred Steger was born in Austria. He studied at Rutgers University and has taught in Hawaii, Australia, and mainland America. The author of the 2008 book The Global Imaginary, he is considered a leading scholar on neoliberalism and globalization.

The Characterological Revolution

“When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me. We shall die alone.”  --Blaise Pascal (1623—1662)

“The modern world debases. It debases the state; it debases man. It debases love; it debases woman. It debases the race; it debases the child. It debases the nation; it debases the family. It even debases what is perhaps the most difficult thing in the world to debase—it debases death.” --Charles Peguy (1873—1914)

Although Virginia Woolf famously claimed that “On or about December 1910, human character changed,” as a matter of historical fact, the change happened much earlier. ¹ We have yet to take its measure; for the most part, we are in denial that it even took place. 

The following is from the editors’ introductory essay to the 1962 anthology Man Alone, edited by Eric and Mary Josephson:

Although medieval Europe was less harmonious than many moderns would believe, its unity, provided largely by the Church and a rigid caste system, was no myth. As Lewis Mumford writes, “The unattached person during the Middle Ages was either condemned to exile or doomed to death: if alive, he immediately sought to attach himself, if only to a band of robbers. To exist, one had to belong to an association: a household, a manor, a monastery, a guild; there was no security except in association and no freedom that did not recognize the obligations of an associated life. One lived and died in the style of one’s class and associations.” Moreover, as Herbert Muller notes, “Men knew a kind of psychological security; they took for granted all the actual insecurity of life in a vale of tears.”

But if the pre-industrial world was in many ways no less insecure than our own, at least work and community life were ordered on a human scale. Most men lived in small, tightly knit communities in which the family was the productive unit. The tools that men used, the pace of work, the distribution of things that were made—all of these were controlled by human capacities and needs. Perhaps most important, instead of being separated from what we now call “leisure activities,” work itself--ordinarily some craft—was closely integrated in the total life of individuals and communities. Peter Laslett calls this “the world we have lost”. It was by no means an idyllic world, but, as Laslett says, “Time was, and it was all the time up until 200 years ago, when the whole of life went forward in the family, in a circle of loved, familiar faces, known and fondled objects, all to human size. That time has gone forever.”

The technological revolution, with its transformation of working conditions, the communities in which men live, and the whole complex social order that governs our lives, was not just a revolution in techniques and controls but an accompanying change in human personality or character; and it is this “characterological” revolution which must be understood if we are to determine whether alienation today differs in form and degree from the miseries of which earlier men complained.

According to Jacob Burckhardt, “Medieval man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category.” With the Renaissance emerged the individual as we know him. Raymond Williams points out, in The Long Revolution, in the Middle Ages the word “individual” meant “inseparable,” and it was used chiefly in theological arguments about the Holy Trinity or to indicate a member of some group, kind, or species. [Modern usage] enables us to think of ‘the individual’ as a kind of absolute, without immediate reference to the group of which he is a member.” This change took place in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and since then we have come to speak of ‘the individual in his own right.’ This semantic change reflected profound changes in the social order after the medieval period, particularly the breakup of the feudal caste system. When men found that they could change their status and social mobility increased, the idea grew of being an individual apart from one’s social role.  Also important was man’s new detachment from and power over nature: when man (as subject) divorced himself from nature (as object) to understand and control it, individualism was given further impetus.

It is the historical emergence of the individual as we now know him, of man alone, that makes alienation so crucially a modern problem. When the medieval system collapsed, the likelihood of alienation increased appreciably. Indeed, only with the release of the individual from medieval bonds could alienation have become a widespread social problem. Leo Lowenthal has summed up this historical process:

“The breakdown of the feudal order forced man to fall back upon himself; he had to learn how to cope with countless problems and decisions that were once taken care of by worldly and spiritual hierarchies. But together with the anxieties generated by this new autonomy he sensed a great promise, for in the period of the formation of the national state and the development of a mercantile economy, his own future seemed to have infinite possibilities. In our own century, he begins to feel threatened by the encroachment of powerful social forces emanating not only from his own corner of the earth but from every part of a contracting world.”

If men today fear freedom or wish to ‘escape’ from it, this was not always so—certainly not for the optimists of the political and scientific enlightenment. Alienation, though, is not only a consequence of individualism; above all, it is a response to fearful new powers—foremost among them the machine and the social structures that administer it—that man himself has created and that threaten his hard-won freedom.

The Josephsons’ Man Alone was about “alienation in modern society,” a popular topic in the postwar world. Philosophical sociology in general flourished in the 1950s and the early 1960s: from Erich Fromm to Rollo May, from David Riesman to Philip Rieff, and from Paul Goodman to Victor Frankl, the ills of modernity were identified, diagnosed, and fretted over. Existential unease (and the guilty conscience with which modern Westerners were burdened) had once been the province of gloomy eccentrics (Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche), misanthropic Russians (e.g., Shestov and Dostoevsky), and, of course, fashionable French philosophers (Sartre and Camus). After World War II, though, with Americans living in the shadow of the Bomb and the Holocaust, alienation, angst, and anxiety were more common than the common cold.

In the Sixties, alienation was no longer a merely academic subject but was acted out in the streets, perhaps to some cathartic effect. The civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, the war on poverty, and a succession of high-profile assassinations concentrated the nation’s attention on the urgent matter of maintaining social cohesion. In the Seventies, political and economic shocks convinced everyone—well, convinced most people—that alienation (or, as Jimmy Carter did not call it, “malaise”) was a luxury the country could no longer afford; in the Eighties, Ronald Reagan made us all—well, made most of us—feel good again, about ourselves and about America. By the Nineties, angst and anxiety were as outdated as hula hoops and just as irrelevant. It turned out that alienation, like most everything else in a modern consumer society, was just a fad, man.

Is it possible, though, that we have merely been postponing a reckoning with the world we have made and our place in it? Is it possible we have made a world in which it is all but impossible for human beings to feel at home, and in which our dis-ease with our own existence is played out in numerous  social pathologies with which we seem unable to cope? If that is the case, we could do worse than to read, or to re-read, Fifties’ books like Man Alone, Growing Up Absurd, The Lonely Crowd, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, etc. Written in an era before polemics and sound bites had entirely displaced rational, thoughtful analysis, they may well contain insights we can ill afford to overlook.   

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¹ The Woolf quote is often inaccurately cited as “human nature changed.” There is a significant difference between “human nature” and “human character”; the former suggests a kind of biological essence, but the latter allows for how humans are shaped by environment and by cultural and social influences. In essence, we moderns remain the same “poor, bare, forked animals” we have always been, but our character is nothing like that of our ancestors—or so the claim goes.

Out of the Whirlwind and into the Fire

"Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind. He said, 'Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Let him who accuses God answer!' Then Job replied to the LORD, 'Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes'." [The Book of Job]

"I killed the tsar and his ministers / Anastasia screamed in vain." ("Sympathy for the Devil")

Speaking of saints, as I was yesterday, today (May 6) is, according to the calendar of the Orthodox Church, the feast of Job the Long-Suffering. The following is from the Orthodox Church of America’s website:

The righteous Job (whose name means “persecuted”), God’s faithful servant, was the perfect image of every virtue. The son of Zarah and Bossorha (Job 42), Job was a fifth-generation descendent of Abraham. He was a truthful, righteous, patient, and pious man who abstained from every evil thing. Job was very rich and blessed by God in all things, as was no other son of Ausis (his country, which lay between Idoumea and Arabia). However, divine condescension permitted him to be tested. ¹

Job lost his children, his wealth, his glory, and every consolation all at once. His entire body became a terrible wound covered with boils. Yet he remained steadfast and patient in the face of his misfortune for seven years, always giving thanks to God.

Later, God restored his former prosperity, and he had twice as much as before. Job lived for 170 years after his misfortune, completing his earthly life in 1350 B.C. at the age of 240. Some authorities say that Job’s afflictions lasted only one year, and that afterwards he lived for 140 years, reaching the age of 210.

Far be it from me to engage in exegetical controversies, but the above summary of Job’s story is nonsense on stilts. “Steadfast and patient” Job was not, much less “always giving thanks to God”. As anyone knows who has read the Book of Job, Job’s response to his accumulated sufferings was to demand that God explain Himself. God eventually speaks to Job, intimidating him into silence and mocking the presumption of a lowly human in confronting the Deity. God never tells Job why he has been afflicted, and the book’s upbeat ending, in which Job has his fortunes restored and receives “twice as much as before” is a later add-on to the original text, a belated attempt to salvage God’s reputation.

By sheerest coincidence, today is also the birthday of Tsar Nicholas II, the ill-fated final tsar of all the Russias. Confined with his family in Bolshevik captivity for the last year of his life, Nicholas stoically reflected:

“I am aware that I am fated to undergo terrible tests and shall not obtain a reward here on earth. It is God’s Will. I was born on 6 May, on the feast-day of St Job the Long-suffering. I am ready to accept my fate. I have solid and absolute confidence that the fate of Russia, my fate, and the fate of my family, is in the hands of God, who placed me where I am now. I shall follow His Will, being conscious of the fact that I have no other thought than of how I can serve this country that He entrusted to me.” ²

Early in his reign, following what we might call a series of unfortunate events, Nicholas had been nicknamed “Nicholas the Bloody”. He and his family, in 1918, suffered a bloody end themselves; they deserved a better fate, but then, so did Job. Nicholas Romanov is now referred to, by the Orthodox devout, as “St. Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II”; if Russian revanchists have their way, he will be joined in the national martyrology by none other than Gregory Rasputin, the scandalous monk and unofficial (but omnipresent) advisor to the Romanov court in the final decade of Nicholas’ reign.

I have no intention of lighting a candle today (or any other day) to the late Nicholas II. I will, however, raise a glass to Job, a godly man from the land of Uz, who taught us that we have every right to shake our fists at the heavens in the face of life’s injustices, even if the only reaction we are likely to receive will be God’s majestic but unhelpful thunder.

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¹ I do not know what the phrase “divine condescension” is supposed to mean. I do know that the Book of Job makes clear that Job’s sufferings stemmed from a wager between God and Satan, with God giving Satan the go-ahead to wreak havoc on Job’s life, just for sport. Later, in thundering at Job, God omits this seemingly relevant information.

² By all accounts, Nicholas II was a decent man, albeit one with a pronounced streak of anti-Semitism; he was also, alas, an inept and feckless tsar who led his country to war, revolution, and ruin.  

Righteous Job the Long-Suffering - Orthodox Church in America (oca.org)

The St. Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II Birthday. ‘’I was born on 6 May, on the feast-day of St Job the Long-suffering. I am ready to accept my fate”. | iconandlight (wordpress.com)

Send in the "Yurodivy"

{This is the first of a series of weekly posts about Russia’s “yurodivy,” a species of holy men and women whose behavior was often bizarre and sometimes scandalous but who achieved sainthood despite (or because of) their antics. I will also look at a few of Russia’s non-bizarre saints, to provide both contrast and historical background. Until further notice, Wednesdays will be “Yurodivy Day” at The Little Red Blog.}

"But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise... If any man among you seemeth to be wise in this world, let him become a fool, that he may be wise. For the wisdom of the world is foolishness with God." (Corinthians 1: 20-21, 3: 18-19)

Saintliness, I was raised to believe, is no laughing matter.

In my Roman Catholic education in the late 1950s and early 1960s, saints were, for the most part, martyrs, individuals whom we were taught to admire because they clung to their religion even when faced with torture and the most horrendous deaths imaginable. We were aided in imagining them by having to read gruesomely detailed (and illustrated!) stories of pious martyrs in flames or being ripped apart by ferocious beasts. Aside from that, the only other road to sainthood was the celibate/virginal life; in other words, courting death and/or renouncing sex were the tickets to heaven.

In contrast, Orthodox Christianity, though it has its share of martyrs and virgins, has been able to find saintliness in persons who manifest it in unconventional ways. From at least the sixth century, when Simeon the Holy Fool offered his life to God as a “sign of contradiction” (i.e., by behaving in such bizarre ways that people dismissed him as insane), the Orthodox Church has canonized dozens of “salos,” or “fools,” who impressed their contemporaries as concealing a Christ-like method beneath their apparent madness. As more than one such salos discovered, it may be safer to speak truth to power when the truth is adroitly mixed with seemingly incoherent ravings.

Russian Orthodoxy borrowed the “holy fool” tradition from the Greek Church and gave it a Slavic spin. Russia’s secular authorities were not entirely amused by such antics; Peter the Great is quoted as having said, “Any sensible person can see how many thousands of such lazy beggars can be found in Russia, who devour the labor of others with their impudence and their feigned humility and who drive ordinary simple people insane. They slander high authorities, yet they themselves take on no Christian responsibilities. They go into church but think it has nothing to do with them, so long as they can carry on their shrieking in front of the church.” Yet even Ivan the Terrible had been reprimanded to his face by a yurodivy (Russian for “holy fool”) and had supposedly changed course as a result.

Although the larger tradition can be traced back to the early Christian era, in Russia “Foolishness for Christ became truly popular in the 16th century. Holy fool Arkady of Vyazma, according to legend, had the ability to see snakes hiding in jugs and pots and repeatedly “exorcized” them, breaking said pots. In Rostov, there was Ioann Vlasaty, and in Moscow in 1547, Maxim of Moscow, a holy fool who lived a century earlier and had been known for walking about naked, was proclaimed a saint. Very little is known about his life, but still he was also revered as a holy fool.” The yurodivy were not only popular; according to Troy Thomas, they commanded respect: “In the late sixteenth century the yurodivy had so much support that Tsar Feodor and ruling elites recognized them as high authority figures.”

As but one example of yurodivy wisdom and audacity, Blessed John of Moscow was said to have addressed the following cryptic words to Tsar Boris Godunov: “A clever mind, you ask God’s doing. God long waits, painfully indeed it breaks”. This has been helpfully rephrased as "O wise head, comprehend the works of God. God bides His time, but His blows are painful.” My favorite translation, however, is this: “Clever mind, sort out the things of God. God waits for a long time. Yes, it hurts.” However one translates Blessed John’s words, the tsar must have been impressed.

Ultimately, the essential question regarding the yurodivy phenomenon is: were these people feigning insanity or were they genuinely disturbed? Were they crazy like a fox or mad as a hatter? ¹ S.A. Ivanov, who has written extensively about “holy fools,” opts for the former:

The yurodivy is a Holy Fool, one who acts intentionally foolish in the eyes of men. The term implies behavior "which is caused neither by mistake nor by feeble-mindedness, but is deliberate, irritating, even provocative." In his book Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond, Ivanov described "holy fool" as a term for a person who "feigns insanity, pretends to be silly, or who provokes shock or outrage by his deliberate unruliness." He explained that such conduct qualifies as holy foolery only if the audience believes that the individual is sane, moral, and pious. The Eastern Orthodox Church holds that holy fools voluntarily take up the guise of insanity in order to conceal their perfection from the world, and thus avoid praise.

Some characteristics that were commonly seen in holy fools were going around half-naked, being homeless, speaking in riddles, being believed to be clairvoyant and a prophet, and occasionally being disruptive and challenging to the point of seeming immoral (though always to make a point).

The method in yurodivy madness was often difficult to discern and perhaps was only clear in hindsight; or perhaps it was just an invention of chroniclers and devotees of the reputed saints, hoping to bolster the case for canonization and/or to make a quick buck from pilgrimages.

Regardless, the yurodivy tradition continues in Russia to this day. Ivanov claims that, “unlike in the past, modern yurodivy are generally aware that they look pathetic in others’ eyes. They strive to pre-empt this contempt through exaggerated self-humiliation; following such displays, they let it be known both that their behaviors were staged and that their purpose was to disguise their superiority over their audience.” Sleeping on trash heaps and muttering nonsense while half-naked and unwashed would have gone a long way toward disguising the yurodivy’s spiritual superiority.

Not all Russians saints were yurodivy, of course; some were entirely respectable. Saint Fyodor Ushakov, for instance, was Russia’s most famous admiral as well as being a man of impeccable character and piety; no yurodivy he, Ushakov never lost a battle or even a ship, and he commanded the Russian fleet to its dominance in the Black Sea. Seraphim of Sarov (1754-1833) displayed such moral rectitude that he has been entrusted with overseeing, from his perch in heaven, Russia’s nuclear arsenal.

On the other hand, there is John of Kronstadt, a saint of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who exemplified Christian charity to everyone except Jews, whom he viciously libeled and against whom he encouraged violence; he joined and blessed the Union of the Russian People, an anti-Semitic and proto-Fascist offshoot of the notorious “Black Hundred” groups. His sainthood ought at least to have an asterisk. ²

Famously, Gregory Rasputin was widely considered to have been something of a yurodivy, but in truth he was significantly more sane than other “saints” who had infiltrated the Romanov circles. In fact, his relative sanity may have been what impressed the tsar and tsarina, who were accustomed to the more outlandish antics of yurodivy such as Matronushka the Barefooted and Mitya the Blissful. ³ There is currently a movement afoot in Russia to have Rasputin canonized; his royal protectors, Nicholas and Alexandra, are now saints themselves, having verifiably died at the hands of the Bolsheviks for the accumulated sins of imperial Russia.

In future Wednesday posts, then, we will consider select Russian saints and yurodivy, from whom we might even learn something.

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¹ Just as not all saints were not yurodivy, not all fools were holy; some were possessed by demons. According to Avery Imes, old Russia also recognized “the phenomenon of ‘klikushestvo’. This form of demon possession typically struck young women, and manifested as unintelligible screaming, yelling obscenities, or physical writhing fits, especially in response to holy acts or places. However, despite the typically intolerable behavior of the ‘klikusha,’ she was often treated with kindness and perceived as a sinless victim. This treatment is likely an extension of the broader belief that fools or lunatics are special to God.”  

² Father John, although married, was a lifelong voluntary celibate. His wife, who had not been advised prior to the marriage that it would never be consummated, protested frequently and vigorously to Church authorities, to no avail. The charismatic priest also had a cult following of female devotees who believed him to be Christ returned to earth; John somehow escaped any accusation of impropriety regarding these women, but his ecclesiastic superiors could not have been happy.

³ Mitya Kolyaba has been described as a “strange, deformed creature” whose utterances tended to be incoherent. Almost certainly deranged, Mitya battled Rasputin for influence at the Romanov court; he is said to have once struck his rival over the head with a crucifix. As for Matronushka the Barefooted, by all accounts she was nothing more than a peasant woman with a pleasant disposition and severely limited cognitive ability.  

Sources:

Foolishness for Christ - Wikipedia

Why did Russian tsars love ‘holy fools’? - Russia Beyond (rbth.com)

Russian Demons: The Klikushestvo Phenomenon

Becoming St. Xenia: A Study of Sanctity and Madness (uwm.edu)

Microsoft Word - 01_Intro_PH_1-14.doc (indiana.edu) 

When Empires Fall

According to Walter Scheidel, the fall of the ancient Roman empire was a blessing—a multitude of blessings, in fact—in disguise:

Had Rome’s empire not unraveled, or had it been replaced by a similarly overpowering successor, the world wouldn’t have become modern.

This isn’t the way that we ordinarily think about an event that has been lamented pretty much ever since it happened. In the late 18th century, in his monumental work The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788), the British historian Edward Gibbon called it ‘the greatest, perhaps, and most awful scene in the history of mankind’. Tankloads of ink have been expended on explaining it. Back in 1984, the German historian Alexander Demandt patiently compiled no fewer than 210 different reasons for Rome’s demise that had been put forward over time. And the flood of books and papers shows no sign of abating: most recently, disease and climate change have been pressed into service. Wouldn’t only a calamity of the first order warrant this kind of attention?

In a lengthy essay at Aeon, based on his 2019 book Escape from Rome, Scheidel patiently explains how the fall of a Leviathan like imperial Rome creates room for new social and political arrangements:

The resultant landscape was a patchwork quilt of breathtaking complexity. Not only was Europe divided into numerous states great and small, those states were themselves split into duchies, counties, bishoprics and cities where nobles, warriors, clergy and traders vied for influence and resources. Aristocrats made sure to check royal power: the Magna Carta of 1215 is merely the best-known of a number of similar compacts drawn up all over Europe. In commercial cities, entrepreneurs formed guilds that governed their conduct. In some cases, urban residents took matters into their own hands, establishing independent communes managed by elected officials. In others, cities wrung charters from their overlords to confirm their rights and privileges. So did universities, which were organized as self-governing corporations of scholars.

Councils of royal advisers matured into early parliaments. Bringing together nobles and senior clergymen as well as representatives of cities and entire regions, these bodies came to hold the purse strings, compelling kings to negotiate over tax levies. So many different power structures intersected and overlapped, and fragmentation was so pervasive that no one side could ever claim the upper hand; locked into unceasing competition, all these groups had to bargain and compromise to get anything done. Power became constitutionalized, openly negotiable and formally partible; bargaining took place out in the open and followed established rules. However much kings liked to claim divine favor, their hands were often tied – and if they pushed too hard, neighboring countries were ready to support disgruntled defectors.

Scheidel is best known for his earlier book The Great Leveler, in which he defended and documented the thesis that “mass violence and catastrophes [are] the only forces that can seriously decrease economic inequality”. Escape from Rome bolsters that case, highlighting how the collapse of the “Pax Romana” unleashed on Western Europe (and then North America) centuries of what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction”. Scheidel does not sugarcoat his message:

This story embraces a grimly Darwinian perspective of progress – that disunion, competition and conflict were the principal selection pressures that shaped the evolution of states, societies and frames of mind; that it was endless war, racist colonialism, crony capitalism and raw intellectual ambition that fostered modern development, rather than peace and harmony. Yet that’s precisely what the historical record shows. Progress was born in the crucible of competitive fragmentation. The price was high. Bled dry by war and ripped off by protectionist policies, it took a long time even for Europeans to reap tangible benefits.

When they finally did, unprecedented inequalities of power, wealth and wellbeing began to divide the world. Racism made Western preeminence seem natural, with toxic consequences to the present day. Fossil fuel industries polluted earth and sky, and industrialized warfare wrecked and killed on a previously unimaginable scale.

Scheidel is not saying that “progress” (as we in the West define it) was worth the cost, nor that its costs and benefits were equitably distributed. He is simply insisting that the costs and benefits cannot be assessed separately; they were, and are, inextricably entangled. The world that we in the West have made has come at a price, and we have done everything in our power to see to it that the price was paid by other, non-Western peoples—whose flourishing, in the 21^st century and beyond, may well come at the expense of the Western European/American empire to which we have grown accustomed.

What goes around, they say, comes around; and, as another saying goes, “Don’t think it won’t happen just because it hasn’t happened yet…”

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How the fall of the Roman empire paved the road to modernity | Aeon Essays

Sunday Sermon: Daniel and the Sacred Harp

The Band, “Daniel and the Sacred Harp”:

Daniel, Daniel and the sacred harp
Dancing through the clover
Daniel, Daniel would you mind
If I look it over

I heard of this famous harp years ago back in my home town
But I sure never thought old Daniel be the one to come and bring it around
Tell me Daniel how the harp came into your possession
Are you one of the chosen few who will march in the procession?
And Daniel said

The sacred harp was handed down, from father unto son
And me not being related, I could never be the one
So I saved up all my silver, and took it to a man
Who said he could deliver the harp, straight into my hand

Three years I waited patiently
'Till he returned with the harp from the sea of Galilee
He said there is one more thing I must ask
But not of personal greed
But I wouldn't listen I just grabbed the harp
And said take what you may need

Now Daniel looked quite satisfied, and the harp it seemed to glow
But the price that Daniel had really paid, he did not even know
Back to his brother he took his troubled mind
And he said dear brother I'm in a bind
But the brother would not hear his tale
He said Old Daniel's gonna land in jail
So to his father Daniel did run
And he said oh father what have I done
His father said son you've given in, you know you won your harp
But you lost in sin

Then Daniel took the harp and went high on the hill
And he blew across the meadow like a whippoorwill
He played out his heart just the time to pass
But as he looked to the ground, he noticed no shadow did he cast

Daniel, Daniel and the sacred harp
Dancing through the clover
Daniel, Daniel would you mind
If I look it over

The Band – Daniel And The Sacred Harp Lyrics | Genius Lyrics

Listen here: (3) Daniel And The Sacred Harp - YouTube 

Saturday Lecture: The Limits of Reason

F.A. Hayek, from The Fatal Conceit:

The dispute between the market order and socialism is no less than a matter of survival. To follow socialist morality would destroy much of present humankind and impoverish much of the rest.

To understand our civilization, one must appreciate that the extended order resulted not from human design or intention but spontaneously: it arose from unintentionally conforming to certain traditional and largely moral practices, many of which men tend to dislike, whose significance they usually fail to understand, whose validity they cannot prove, and which have nonetheless fairly rapidly spread by means of an evolutionary selection - the comparative increase of population and wealth - of those groups that happened to follow them. The unwitting, reluctant, even painful adoption of these practices kept these groups together, increased their access to valuable information of all sorts, and enabled them to be `fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it'.

This process is perhaps the least appreciated facet of human evolution. Socialists take a different view of these matters. They not only differ in their conclusions; they see the facts differently. If socialist analyses of the operation of the existing economic order, and of possible alternatives, were factually correct, we might be obliged to ensure that the distribution of incomes conform to certain moral principles and that this distribution might be possible only by giving a central authority the power to direct the use of available resources; we might presuppose the abolition of individual ownership of means of production. If it were for instance true that central direction of the means of production could effect a collective product of at least the same magnitude as that which we now produce, it would indeed prove a grave moral problem how this could be done justly.

This, however, is not the position in which we find ourselves. For there is no known way, other than by the distribution of products in a competitive market, to inform individuals in what direction their several efforts must aim so as to contribute as much as possible to the total product. The conflict between, on one hand, advocates of the spontaneous extended human order created by a competitive market, and on the other hand those who demand a deliberate arrangement of human interaction by central authority based on collective command over available resources is due to a factual error by the latter about how knowledge of these resources is and can be generated and utilized.

As a question of fact, this conflict must be settled by scientific study. Such study shows that, by following the spontaneously generated moral traditions underlying the competitive market order (traditions which do not satisfy the canons or norms of rationality embraced by most socialists), we generate and garner greater knowledge and wealth than could ever be obtained or utilized in a centrally-directed economy whose adherents claim to proceed strictly in accordance with `reason'.

Socialist aims and programs are factually impossible to achieve or execute; and they also happen, into the bargain as it were, to be logically impossible. This is why, contrary to what is often maintained, these matters are not merely ones of differing interests or value judgements. Indeed, the question of how men came to adopt certain values or norms, and what effect these had on the evolution of their civilization, is itself above all a factual one. The demands of socialism are not moral conclusions derived from the traditions that formed the extended order that made civilization possible. Rather, they endeavor to overthrow these traditions by a rationally designed moral system whose appeal depends on the instinctual appeal of its promised consequences. They assume that, since people had been able to generate some system of rules coordinating their efforts, they must also be able to design an even better and more gratifying system. But if humankind owes its very existence to one particular rule-guided form of conduct of proven effectiveness, it simply does not have the option of choosing another merely for the sake of the apparent pleasantness of its immediately visible effects.

My argument is in no way directed against reason properly used, by which I mean reason that recognizes its own limitations and, itself taught by reason, faces the implications of the astonishing fact, revealed by economics and biology, that order generated without design can far outstrip plans men consciously contrive. I do not dispute that reason may, although with caution and in humility, and in a piecemeal way, be directed to the examination, criticism and rejection of traditional institutions and moral principles. However, the traditional norms of reason that guide socialism are norms that I believe embody a naive and uncritical theory of rationality, an obsolete and unscientific methodology. I wish neither to deny reason the power to improve norms and institutions nor even to insist that it is incapable of recasting the whole of our moral system in the direction now commonly conceived as `social justice'. We can do so, however, only by probing every part of a system of morals. If such a morality pretends to be able to do something that it cannot possibly do, e.g., to fulfill a knowledge-generating and organizational function that is impossible under its own rules and norms, then this impossibility itself provides a decisive rational criticism of that moral system.

The notion that, in the last resort, the whole debate is a matter of value judgements and not of facts has prevented professional students of the market order from stressing forcibly enough that socialism cannot possibly do what it promises. It is not that I do not share some values widely held by socialists; but I do not believe that the widely held conception of `social justice' either describes a possible state of affairs or is even meaningful. Neither do I believe, as some proponents of hedonistic ethics recommend, that we can make moral decisions simply by considering the greatest foreseeable gratification. The starting point for my endeavor might well be David Hume's insight that `the rules of morality ...are not conclusions of our reason'. This insight frames the basic question we need to answer - which is how does our morality emerge, and what implications may its mode of coming into being have for our economic and political life?

The contention that we are constrained to preserve capitalism because of its superior capacity to utilize dispersed knowledge raises the question of how we came to acquire such an irreplaceable economic order - especially in view of my claim that powerful instinctual and rationalistic impulses rebel against the morals and institutions that capitalism requires. The answer to this question is built upon the old insight, well known to economics, that our values and institutions are determined not simply by preceding causes but as part of a process of unconscious self-organization of a structure or pattern. This is true not only of economics, but in a wide area, and is well known today in the biological sciences. This insight was only the first of a growing family of theories that account for the formation of complex structures in terms of processes transcending our capacity to observe all the several circumstances operating in the determination of their particular manifestations.

Our chief task remains to demonstrate that one of the most influential political movements of our time, socialism, is based on demonstrably false premises, and despite being inspired by good intentions and led by some of the most intelligent representatives of our time, endangers the standard of living and the life itself of a large proportion of our existing population. We must examine and refute the socialist challenge to the account of the development and maintenance of our civilization, and we must show how language has been debased under socialist influence and how careful we must be to keep ourselves from being seduced by it into socialist ways of thinking. Finally, we cannot ignore the role of religion in the development of our moral traditions.

I suggest that we need not only an evolutionary epistemology but also an evolutionary account of moral traditions, and one of a character rather different than hitherto available. Of course, the traditional rules of human intercourse, after language, law, markets, and money, were the fields in which evolutionary thinking originated. Ethics is the last fortress in which human pride must now bow in recognition of its origins. Such an evolutionary theory of morality is indeed emerging, and its essential insight is that our morals are neither instinctual nor a creation of reason but constitute a separate tradition ' between instinct and reason,' a tradition of staggering importance in enabling us to adapt to problems and circumstances far exceeding our rational capacities. Our moral traditions, like many other aspects of our culture, developed concurrently with our reason, not as its product. Surprising and paradoxical as it may seem to some to say this, these moral traditions outstrip the capacities of reason.

I Can See Real Clearly Now

Once again, I have been cruising the busy streets of Real Clear America: Policy Avenue, Religion Boulevard, Books Alley, and so forth. Though the traffic pattern seemed unfairly skewed to the Right, I still found much of interest (while keeping my eyes on the road, of course).

For instance, at Law and Liberty, Mark Pulliam reviews F.H. Buckley’s Curiosity and Its Twelve Rules for Life. Pulliam’s review is titled “The Importance of Curiosity,” but “The Decline of Curiosity” might better have conveyed both his and Buckley’s message:

Curiosity was once thought to be, in the words of English historian G.M. Trevelyan, “the life blood of real civilization.” Frank Buckley laments that “there’s less curiosity today than in the past,” and has written a new book, Curiosity and Its Twelve Rules for Life, in an attempt to rectify the dearth. 

After a year of pandemic-induced isolation, and in the wake of four years of escalating (and increasingly toxic) obsession with partisan politics, Buckley wants us all to look beyond headlines, turmoil, and social media messaging to savor the “world of wonders” available for our “enjoyment and delight,” if we simply open our eyes and allow our imaginations to explore them. As a well-read and cultured (self-described) boomer, and with a younger audience in mind, Buckley serves as a tour guide into the world of wonder beckoning to the curious.

Should all this sound thoroughly, and refreshingly, non-ideological, just wait for it:

How did we become so incurious? Buckley contends that “We’ve placed all our chips on harsh ideologies that, by purporting to explain everything, teach us to ignore inconvenient counterexamples…. Curiosity, which used to be a liberal virtue, is increasingly a conservative one, as progressives bury themselves in a distorted universe of risk-free lives, intersectional victims, and cartoon-like villains.” Buckley explains:

“On the extremes, Trump-haters and Trump-lovers shriek past each other, like furious apes locked in a cage. But it’s mostly the rage-filled progressives who are to blame. In 2020, they made curiosity about anything other than Black Lives Matter or the pandemic seem sinful. They’ve tried to banish risk and fault the risk-taker for his negligence or toxic masculinity. They’ve descended into incurious ideologies and bitter partisanships that permit them to ignore the harms imposed on others…. But it cannot last. However worthy you might think the progressives’ causes, they’ll bore you in time, unless you are wholly without a spark of curiosity.”

Okay, “well-read and cultured” Boomer: if you say so.

The Importance of Curiosity - (lawliberty.org)

Next, at American Affairs Journal, Conor Skelding writes about Fredrik deBoer’s Cult of Smart, a controversial critique, from the Left, of American meritocracy:

In the United States today, the academically talented are prized above the unintelligent—unfairly, deBoer asserts—because, for the most part, you’re born as smart as you are going to be. Early environmental influences apart, no parental love, pedagogical atten­tion, or standardized test cramming will help much. “We know that not everyone is equal in ability, and we know that this will never change,” deBoer writes.

Thus, he argues, an ostensibly “meritocratic” society would be extremely cruel in denying status and wealth to the less intelligent. A truly meritocratic society would be even crueler. “[A] system that doles out wealth and hardship based on academic ability is inherently and forever a rigged game.” And who can argue that dignified work shouldn’t be available to those who aren’t right for college, those who may be stronger, gentler, more generous, possessed of who knows what other virtues that many clever people conspicuously lack?

It is obvious that “not everyone is born with the same academic gifts,” deBoer writes, but among teachers and educational officials there is a “prohibition against talking plainly about differences in academic talent.” The “cult of smart”—deBoer defines his title on page five—is “the notion that academic value is the only value, and intelligence the only true measure of human worth.” What we need, instead of our unjust, so-called meritocracy, is “a society where you can fail at school and still be okay.”

Skelding, like deBoers, bemoans American “hyper-competitiveness”; he also bemoans the lack of secure, well-paid, blue-collar jobs, which he attributes to “outsourcing” and “automation”. In all, “The Death Cult of Smart” would have been provocative had it been written circa 1975—1985; in 2021, it is old news; or, to try a different metaphor, it is a familiar diagnosis of a chronic social condition, with no new prescription or remedy in sight.

The Death Cult of Smart - American Affairs Journal

Lastly, I pulled over briefly at The American Mind to examine Cole Simmons’ “Refashioning American Whigism,” which I admit to thinking would be a celebrity profile of Shea Whigham. Realizing my error, I hurried back to my vehicle, but not before learning about the strategy of “winning by losing” that Simmons invokes:

Those who lose are not necessarily defeated. Our Founders were radical in the way losing makes young Americans radical today. The freedom of movement is on our side. While the leftist winners can talk about “Our Democracy,” they cannot help but become increasingly stultified. Even their most exciting popular thinkers produce nothing more than platitudes. The only way a leftist can be edgy today is by going after children with antiracist propaganda and hormone blockers. Once you’ve abandoned natural right, all that is left is the titillation of power—the discovery of more guilt and therefore the need for more authority.

Those who have ears to hear, let them hear, and then let them explain it to the rest of us.

Cole Simmons is not done, not by a long shot. He excoriates the Left for its failures:

The left offers more welfare to cure the ills of welfare; less property to cure the ills of poverty; more sharing to cure the ills of having little; propaganda to cure the ills of misinformation (more ignorance to cure the ills of ignorance); fewer privileges of citizenship to cure the ills of increasingly meaningless citizenship—in sum: more democracy to cure the ills of democracy. You cannot formulate an ideal when your putative ideal is causing the illness, nor can you “abolish” the cause of illness.

From his neo-Whig platform, Simmons concludes with a clarion call to jettison democracy, which has had its day and served its purpose:

I doubt there will be a republican solution. The republican was a great type of man in American history, but we cannot will him back into existence. The township cannot be artificially constructed. Property cannot be artificially made equal enough, and a relative equality in property would be necessary. We cannot make the populations small enough. The militia will never again be the backbone of our military. These hurdles and many others lead me to believe the republican character of the citizens is through.

That does not mean we have to show ourselves disloyal to the American regime of Jefferson and Madison. The original republic was composed of philosophic, aristocratic, democratic, and other regime-strains. We do not have to adopt democratic solutions to democratic illnesses to stay loyal to America. With this in mind, we should dispense with the trappings of Liberalism that were in fact democratic—not because they were not good, but because they no longer are. 

Some readers will say to me, “Dear Mr. Little Red Blog, why are you wasting your time and ours on such twaddle?” My response is (a) twaddle is in the eye of the beholder, and (b) The American Mind represents the cream of American conservatism’s current crop, and we should be aware that contemporary conservative thinkers are seriously advocating ideas like secession, nullification, interposition, states’ rights, and something called “nonacquiescence,” which seems to be a state-level version of civil disobedience.

In other words, John C. Calhoun is apparently alive and well. You have been warned.

Refashioning American Whigism - The American Mind

Crime and "Punishment"

{The following story has been sitting in my “Russia” in-box since this past December. I originally planned to title it either “A Farewell to Arms” or “Arms and the Man,” but, after much thought, I decided I am better than that.}

Napoleon’s influence on Russian history is often underestimated, if not completely overlooked. His invasion of Russia in what is now known, by Russians, as the Great Patriotic War—and which most of us in the West remember only from Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture—led not only to his ultimate defeat and final exile, but to Russian troops marching triumphantly into Paris in 1814.  Moreover, Russian troops who participated in that campaign returned home with eyes opened (by exposure to European culture, liberty, and prosperity) to their own country’s failings; a decade later, some of those veterans would spark the Decembrist uprising, the first volley in what would be a hundred years of Russian civil unrest and revolution.

I mention this by way of putting in context the storied academic career of Professor Oleg Sokolov, who, until recently, bestrode Napoleonic studies in Russia like a colossus. To call him a “history buff” is to understate the matter considerably; even before his scholarly achievements, Sokolov participated in historical reenactments (aka “cosplay”). In 1976, he founded Russia’s first group dedicated to reenactments of the Napoleonic era; in 1989, he was named president of the Soviet Federation of Military History Clubs. As a member of the Faculty of History at Saint Petersburg State University, Sokolov published a number of works to great acclaim, notably Napoleon’s Army and then the two-volume Austerlitz, Napoleon, Russia and Europe, 1799-1805. In 2003, he was awarded the French “Legion of Honor” (Chevalier) for his contributions both to 17^th-19^th-century history studies in general and to Napoleonic studies in particular.

Professor Sokolov had his flaws, of course. Some felt he took historical reenactments a bit too seriously; his emphasis on Napoleon may have had an undesirable influence on his character. According to someone who knew him, “He thought he could do anything and looked down on the world around him as if he really were Napoleon.” He was well known as a tyrant in the classroom; it did not help that his administrative superiors at Saint Petersburg State University looked the other way when confronted with reports of Sokolov’s bullying students and of his abusive behavior—especially towards his female students.

In fact, as we now know, Oleg Sokolov was a serial sexual predator who, from his position of authority in the Department of Modern History, seduced, manipulated, intimidated, and abused an unknown number of women decades younger than he was. As far back as 2008, “A female student turned lover detailed how Mr. Sokolov, furious that she wanted to end their relationship, had tied her to a chair in a rented Moscow apartment, beaten her repeatedly and threatened to disfigure her with a hot iron. She escaped and reported what she described as a murder attempt to the authorities. Nothing was done.” Not only was Sokolov a prominent academician at Vladimir Putin’s alma mater, but he had ties to various right-wing and reactionary figures, ties which helped shield Sokolov from such accusations.

His political connections could not shield him in November 2019, however, when Professor Sokolov was pulled (allegedly drunk, or, as one source put it, “boozed up”) from the Moika River in St. Petersburg. Andrew Higgins wrote about it a few days later for the New York Times:

On Monday, the once haughty Mr. Sokolov, 63, sobbed uncontrollably as he appeared in a St. Petersburg court to express “deep repentance” for killing and dismembering his 24-year-old student and lover, Anastasia Yeshchenko. “I am devastated,” he said. On Saturday, Mr. Sokolov was fished out of the frigid Moika River in St. Petersburg — he had fallen in, drunk — along with a backpack containing the severed arms of Ms. Yeshchenko. A search of his apartment uncovered her decapitated corpse, and local news media said he had planned to dispose of his victim’s body parts in the river and then commit suicide, dressed as Napoleon, outside a St. Petersburg fortress. ¹

This is not the behavior one expects from a faculty member of the Department of History, much less from a recipient of the French Legion of Honor (Chevalier)! After the police took Sokolov into custody, they searched his home and found other parts of Ms. Yeshchenko’s body (including her head); her torso would be found in the Moika a few days later, neatly wrapped and packaged for disposal.

To Sokolov’s credit, he did not deny his crime; he simply blamed it on the victim, Ms. Yeshchenko, who had pushed him, he said, beyond human endurance, or at least beyond his endurance. At a preliminary hearing, Sokolov told the court that “The crime was committed on the basis of a personal conflict, because Yeshchenko had ‘recently a terrible reaction to my children’ and ‘she started to freak at their mention’ and then they both ‘lost control’ during a quarrel and then ‘she attacked me with a knife’.” Alcohol may have been involved; one news outlet referred to the argument as a “champagne-fueled domestic row”.

It was self-defense, then, according to Sokolov, a claim with which the trial judge disagreed, as a Reuters report explains: “As she handed down the verdict, the judge said Sokolov had shot Yeshchenko four times with a rifle before dismembering her with a knife and saw, taking the body parts out in bags and dumping them in St Petersburg’s River Moyka. He got rid of her phone in the river near his home but was caught while disposing of the body parts. When the severed arms failed to sink, he got into the frigid waters and was then physically unable to get back out because of the cold, the judge said.”

As proof of his remorse, Sokolov could only say that, following this crime of passion to which he had been driven (“I have never seen such a stream of aggression,” he complained about Ms. Yeshchenko’s conduct), he had planned to commit suicide at the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. His plan included dressing, for the occasion, as Napoleon.

In December 2020, as the end of the trial approached, Sokolov finally decided to cut his losses, so to speak, and plead guilty, in hopes of receiving a lighter sentence. His hopes were not disappointed; even though the presiding judge, having clearly expressed her disapproval of Sokolov’s behavior, made sure the charges included the offense of illegal possession of a weapon, she handed down a sentence of…twelve and a half years. The prosecution had only been asking for fifteen years, so the judge did not offer Sokolov much of a discount, but still: twelve and a half years for viciously murdering a young woman, then dismembering her body?

The wheels of justice everywhere turn slowly. In Russia, as elsewhere, those wheels are burdened with a long history of injustice, and they are further impeded by persistent cultural attitudes that give men all but a free hand when dealing with the troublesome women in their lives. In Professor Sokolov’s case, why is Siberian exile not an option? Wherever he serves his time, I hope he is not allowed to wear his Napoleon costume. I would also advise limiting his access to guns, knives, saws, and young women.

 ___________________________________

¹ Higgins’ report, though brief, highlights not only the gruesome nature of Sokolov’s crime, but the unconscionable failure of university authorities to respond to previous complaints. Higgins also touches on the larger question of Russian attitudes towards domestic violence; “Russian police officers and judges are often sympathetic to claims by men accused of abuse that they were provoked into violence by their girlfriends or wives.”

Russian Professor, Found With Bag of Severed Arms, Admits He Killed Student - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Oleg Sokolov - Wikipedia

Russia jails historian for 12.5 years for grisly murder of student lover | Reuters

Professor Oleg Sokolov, cosplaying as Napoleon in happier times.