zenpundit.com

A QUICK INTRO FOR LATECOMERS

Your Host

An anonymous but quite gracious commenter from Britain wrote in, asking:

“….what I would find really helpful is if you did a sort of re-introduction – something on what your influences are, what you’re trying to achieve, what books you think are most important in your area – it would be a good way of educating us latecomers…”

Fair enough. The durability of my regular commenters tends to make me forget the dynamic nature of blogospheric audiences. A brief history of Zenpundit:

My background is in diplomatic and economic history, where my mentors were from ” the Open Door School” and ” the Maryland Mafia” circle of historians, respectively. As a result, I received a thorough schooling in economic forces as a major driver of historical causation ( though I disagreed with many of their normative conclusions). A secondary influence were the late historians, Jordan Schwarz (American political history) and W. Bruce Lincoln (Russian history). My primary area of research interest was Soviet-American relations during the Nixon administration and American foreign policy during the Cold War but I spent almost as much time on what is loosely called “Soviet Studies”.

Authors who had an impact on shaping my worldview, earlier on, include Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Eric Hoffer, Ayn Rand, Alvin Toffler, George Kennan, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Galbraith, Adam Ulam, Machiavelli, George Orwell, Thorstein Veblen and a few others. Generally, it was systemic thinkers and iconoclasts who caught my eye. My library shelf (part of it, anyway) is visible for your perusal at Shelfari

Blogging became attractive for me when the H-Net listserv, H-Diplo became somewhat overmoderated some years back. Evidently, others felt the same way because other posters on H-Diplo who have also joined the blogosphere include Juan Cole, Austin Bay, Rick Shenkman, Judith Klinghoffer, Bruce Kesler and David Kaiser. I’m sure by now there are many other H-Diplo veterans busy blogging. Another well known H-Diplo member, though he seemed to be more active on C-NET, was David Horowitz, the conservative author and publisher of Frontpagemag.com. It was a vibrant listserv back then, with many brilliant and accomplished scholars participating ( or getting unceremoniously kicked off for intemperate posts) but blogging ultimately offered a better platform for debate and intellectual dialogue.

After connecting with Tom Barnett shortly after his first book was published, I’ve increasingly become more interested in strategy, intelligence, military theory, technology, futurism and social networks with less time for diplomatic history and “pure” foreign policy postings. However, as the blog tends to reflect what I’m reading at any given time, the subjects can wander fairly far afield.

Hope this helped fill in any blanks for new readers. Thanks again to anon for his suggestion!

200,000 HITS !

Today, someone from Washington, D.C. was the 200,000th visitor to Zenpundit. They stayed for about a minute and a half, reading a post about Tom Barnett’s ideas.

Small beer, I realize, compared to the daily traffic of the top ten 800 pound gorillas of the blogosphere. Nevertheless, it is very flattering that, over the course of a few years, close to a quarter-million times, other people felt it was a worthy expenditure of their time to stop by, read a little, or even comment. If Zenpundit was a book, I’d be a market success.

Thank you all very, very, much!

LINGUISTIC EXTINCTION

Can you read Demotic ?

Linguistic diversity, historically under the pressure of the homogenizing forces of empire-builders, market connectivity and nationalism, appears to have reached a crisis point with the era of globalization:

“While there are an estimated 7,000 languages spoken around the world today, one of them dies out about every two weeks, according to linguistic experts struggling to save at least some of them.

Northern Australia, 153 languages. The researchers said aboriginal Australia holds some of the world’s most endangered languages, in part because aboriginal groups splintered during conflicts with white settlers. Researchers have documented such small language communities as the three known speakers of Magati Ke, the three Yawuru speakers and the lone speaker of Amurdag…”

Around the turn of the 20th century, the last known speaker of Dalmatian, a bastardized vestige of the tongue spoken by the ancient Dalmatae tribes of the Balkans, was killed in a terrorist bombing and the language was forever lost. This was in the heyday of linguistic scholar-adventurers when the mastery of twenty or forty languages by experts was not unusual. Today, it is not that unusual to have monolingual “linguists” who study the neurology or grammar of languages but not the tongues themselves.

As human population has increased, linguistic diversity has decreased. This may simply be a correlation but I think it is causation; increasingly complex societies can ill-afford the added inefficiencies of the uber-multilingualism of hundreds of languages and thousands of dialects. Political power and market dynamics exert pressure for a leveling of languages down to a common tongue. The process is not a rational one, as evidenced by the global ubiquity of English, riddled as it is with illogical exceptions to jerry-built rules.

For myself, I am, admittedly, exceedingly mediocre at learning foreign languages. I have no more ear for it than I do for music. At best, I mastered enough Portuguese to read Brazilian newspapers and today I’d be lucky to be able to ask where a bathroom was in a Sao Paulo hotel. That being said, lost languages represent a loss to the cognitive capacity of humanity. Every language contains a nucleus of effectively untranslatable words that express the unique insights of particular cultures. When languages become extinct, these insights vanish from the cultural heritage of mankind.

Of new languages in the last millenium, the only real creative growth appears to be in the realm of computers and the programming languages that make the internet hum. What does this portend for the future ?

ADDENDUM:

The esteemed Dan of tdaxp is the apostle of linguistic efficiency.

STRICTLY FOR FUN

A much more creative version of Terminator III:

A LEGITIMATE QUESTION: 4GW AND POLITICAL LEGITIMACY

The enigmatic M-1 of the lively IO/PSYOPS blog Swedish Meatballs Confidential graced the comment section of the previous post and posed an excellent question:

“Q: Can there per definition exist legitimate* 4GW entities? If so, could you please, at your convenience,name any number of them.”

I can attest, from some years of studying diplomatic history, that “Legitimacy” in international relations is a lot like obscenity – hard to define but everybody knows it when they see it. The problem is that scholars, diplomats, jurists and intellectuals tend to see legitimacy most clearly when it happens to accord with their own interests.

For example, Neo-Realist IR theorists, Islamists, Marxist-Leninists, Burkean Conservatives, Lockean classical liberals and Liberal Internationalists will all construct arguments that appeal to the legitimacy, or argue the lack thereof, in certain regimes or institutions. Their premises differ as to the origin of legitimacy but the concept itself is regarded as sound across a wide political spectrum – excepting perhaps the fringe of Gramiscian -postmodernist-deconstructionistic radicals, whose tireless efforts to de-legitimize and dismiss nearly everything in the Western intellectual tradition only emphasizes the importance they really attach to legitimacy (At this point, I’d like to invite Dr. Daniel Nexon of The Duck of Minerva to add anything on academic perceptions of legitimacy, disagree with me or generally put in his well-informed two cents).

That being said, as average people are not afflicted with the abstruse theories of intellectuals, I think the Lockean concept of “consent of the governed” is most useful here in addressing M-1’s question. Most people stuck in a conflict zone are going to be pragmatists, interested in the restoration of peace on the best terms possible for themselves. It is for their affinity that the 4GW game is played.

Consent does not require democratic elections. Elections make popular consent visible, quantified and, where society operates under the rule of law, elections are a regular, contractual, but temporary grant of authority from the people to their government. Authority can also be granted implicitly by consensual, popular, deference as with homage given to Shiite maarjas, the King of Thailand, the Pope, the Emperor of Japan and the Supreme Court of the United States, whose powerful judicial role is formidibly augmented by the widespread acceptance of it’s moral authority as the legitimate arbiter of the meaning of the Constitution.

4GW entities, like states, can acquire ( and lose) moral authority and thus, political legitimacy, through their actions. We may not find this to be logical or objectively factual when Hezbollah or al Qaida are measured against a theoretical ideal. That however, is irrelevant to most the audience in the conflict zone. What matters is what you are measuring the 4GW entity against in the real world. A corrupt, incompetent, oligarchy? A vibrant, prosperous, liberal democracy? A constitutional monarchy backed by long tradition? A Communist regime? A hated dictator ? A foreign army? What ?

Much like time, legitimacy is entirely relative. The people might yearn for steak but if one side is providing nothing but crumbs and the other promises chicken – and can come across with a drumstick now and again – the side with the chicken wins.

ADDENDUM:

Soob weighs in as well with an appropriately timed taxonomy.