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Date: Mon, 15 Feb 93 22:54:12 EST
From: "Daniel A. Foss" <
[email protected]>
Subject: The uses of making a mockery of Knowledge
To: Chris Chase-Dunn <CHRISCD@JHUVM>
[Chris Chase-Dunn couldn't have said it better, "DON'T READ THIS." Actually,
the essay entitled "What the precapitalist capitalist maximizes" was intended
to get killed outright; the circumstances under which a REPRO copy is desired
have been made public and, apparently, must be reiterated privately. The one
following that, "precapitalist accumulation of precapital in the seventh
century," should likewise get erased <poof>.]
The good reason for making a mockery of Knowledge - the motives should be
as uniformly wicked as possible for maximum effect - is our habitual
incapacity to imagine social actors of the past as much different from
yourselves. (As claimant to the title of Univeral Spatiotemporal X-cultural
Other, USXO for short, this is not one of my problems.) There is hardly ever
any overt peddling of outright nonsense to the effect that social actors of
the past traded, waged war, organized large scale industrial production, or
innovated productive technique by the same motives our mythologized culture
heroes are said to have been animated. Instead, it is noted that ungooey
gumdrops waned, as the gooeyer sort racked up record sales everywhere the
gooey gumdrop was allowed by religious law. The producers and vendors in the
gooey gumdrop industry make more money; the upholders of the Fine and Noble
Tradition of ungoo'd gumdroppings go to the wall, and this is perfectly
comprehensible.
What else, switching now to less fanciful examples, must ironmasters
themselves with other than maximizing profits? Does the maximization of
profits represent the profits retained before or after these other and
quite possibly extraordinarily expensive considerations are paid off? If
indeed they can be paid off? In the twelfth century China was producing a
million tons of cast iron a year. (This is the first quarter of the twelfth
century, since the Northern Song fell in 1126-7). The story is told of an
ironmaster whose hired laborers numbered into the thousands. The state found
this eo ipso subversive. The entrepreneur felt paternalistic responsibility
for his laborers, and died with them in the inevitable battle to the death.
Crowds of any sort were political; concentrations of people in rural areas
outside direct surveillance of the state were by ancient custom and tradition
bandits/rebels; and if they weren't to begin with they must be assimilated to
what they immanently had to be or so it seemed. (In the capital, Kaifeng, the
students at the National University, enrollment 10,000, actually had to commit
the overt act of political demonstration to get themselves killed. The first
student riot in world history took place in 1125. The demand was aggressive
foreign policy. Three were executed. The barbarians arrived next year.) The
entire Song state and society, exuberantly commercial, Paranoid over internal
security, supine before external aggression, and nurturer of the finest
scholars, historians, philosophers, military engineers, and mechanical
inventors in the world, grabs our attention because *it makes no sense* to us.
There were people at the time and place to whom it made no sense either. Song
art gave us Impressionism (a useful vulgarization and no more) and Zen
Minimalism).
Nobody wanted capitalism. Moralistic reformers haunted the minicities and
townlets of tweltfth cntury Europe denouncing the worship of "St. Rufinus,"
gold, and "St. Albinus," silver, which, they said, had supplanted Christianity
and most of all in the Church. That mere moneygrubbers would become the
highest form of life was a vision so horrid it discredited the noble art of
Prophecy of Doom as excess. Now, when never have so many owed so much to
so few, this is our lousiest hour. "It was always inevitable they were going
to have capitalism, who is going to deny that now, but shouldn't They have
tried a little harder to build a *safety net* into the thing?"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Don't care about what anyone else means by it, to me the Archeology of
Knowledge is excavation of a book previously read. These are stored in
cardboard cartons the filling of which is the whole of the meaning and purpose
of reading, excepting only the performace of the Ceremony of Fulfillment and
Completion, where the Filler, the organism or machine who/ich has read the
Fill, performs with Magic or Marks-A-Lot Marker the drawing of the glyph R on
four (4) sides of the Filled. Some perfectly amazing serendipitous finds were
found, including: I'd *already read* Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and
Violence; so you can forget it, too, without reading it first.
The object of the quest was my Mongol books, which I needed to consult on
account of the possible necessity for correction of the picture of the Middle
East, that is to say, Egyptocentric, in Janet Abu-Lughod's Before European
Hegemony (1989); the citizenship of Ibrahim Abu-Lughod is for this purpose
not of interest. What is of interest is the impact of the "special
relationship" between the Empire of the Great Khan, China of the Yuan dynasty,
and the Ilkhanid regime in Persia. This arose when, at the *kuriltai* of 1260,
when Khubilai usurped the title of Great Khan, the steppe representatives,
the Chaghadai Empire and the Golden Horde, rejected him. The only other Mongol
power in his favor was the Ilkhanid Empire created by Hulegu.
Most conspicuously and catastrophically, Khubilai's resident in the
Ilkhanid capital, Tabriz, in 1291 advised the Ilkhan Geikhatu's finance
minister, Sadr al-Din, to introduce Chinese *zhao*, or paper notes. The
copying was so slavish that the notes bore Chinese writing. The Turco-Mongol
state - the Tabriz area is inhabited by Azeri Turks and until the early
nineteenth century the Turkish tribal element represented nearly or fully
half the population of the nominally Persian Empire - was far too backward
to emulate the Chinese innovation.
In the other direction, it was the Ilkhan side which provided technical
assistance, requested first in 1271 by Khubilai from the Il-Khan Abakha to
attack the Song fortifications at Xiangyang. The contraprions built by
Ismail and 'Ala al-Din were not, as I mistakenly stated elsewhere, gunpowder
cannon, but merely very hypertrophied rock-throwing devices. The astronomer
Jamal al-Din came to China in 1265 to build an observatory: Here Islamic
civilization had the edge, being in this regard the repository of the Greek
scientific heritage which in its turn had systematized centuries or millennia
of Mesopotamian observations.
These trivialities introduce my principal point: The Mongol Era represented
the most intense exposure of Chinese society and civilization to new ideas,
foreign cultures, innumerable sects of the major religions, and doctrines of
statecraft and their associated practices wholly orthogonal to the Chinese
Confucian tradition. The latter, notwithstanding its reverence for scholarship
tended altogether too much toward formalism and overemphasis upon social
proprieties and protocol while its metaphysical side indulged in flights of
pure logic uncontaminated with empirical observation.
The Yuan period was, with the exception of the Barbarian Invasions of the
Six Dynasties period (220-589), the single most massive exposure to non-Chinese
art, craft, forms of writing (an attempt to replace the ideograms with an
alphabet was made, but mishandled and attempted in the first place at the
behest of the despised 'Phags-pa Lama).
Indigenous Chinese art forms, notably the theater and the novel, flourished
at this time. Painting and ceramics were stimulated, not by Mongold patronage,
but by the *negative* effect of the *nonenforcement* of Song academic canons
of taste. (That is, the old distinction between approved Court Academy style
and deviant art which cognoscenti kept to themselves among themselves, broke
down in the cultural marketplace.)(See Morris Rossabi, Khubilai Khan: His Life
and Times, California, 1988.)
The examination system was syspended in South China, having been in disuse
under the Jurchen Tartars for over a century before that. There was a brief
resuscitation in 1315; but the examination-system degree-holding civil-service
complex was ruptured as it was not to be again till 1905. A curiously familiar
litany by one Huang Jin is cited by John Dardess, seemingly indicative of a
diversion of dalent into business:
"And so now, at a time when Confucianism (lit. "scholars' robes and ritual
objects") shows every sign of flourishing, there are many refined and
learned men who cannot gain entry into the occupation, while at the same
time not a few [who are registered as *shih*] are smug, complacent, idly
prosperous, and devoted to commerce and the trades. Those few who make an
effort to discipline themselves to take a proper leadership role in the
world often [find themselves] ground down by paperwork, frustrated by
the administrative stipulations, and compelled to suppress their
capabilities and do things they are unsuited for....Thus their true
occupation is lost." (John W. Dardess, Confucianism and Autocracy:
Professional Elites in the Founding of the Ming Dynasty, University of
California Press, 1983, p. 14. Dardess fans will also love: John W.
Dardess, Conquerors and Confucians, New York NY: Columbia Univeristy
Press, 1973.)
I've failed to ascertain whether and to what extent Baghdad recovered from
whatever Hulegu did to it in 1258; an act of terrorism blamed by champions of
Arab-Islamic civilization to this day as a major cause of stagnation, economic,
intellectual, and political, which afflicted the Middle East for centuries
thereafter. "The later Persian historian Hamd Allah Mustawfi Qazwini put the
death toll at 800,000, a figure that has often been quoted." (David Morgan,
The Mongols, Blackwell, 1986[1990], p. 151.) Which was 300,000 in excess of
the usual estimates of the population. Hulegu wrote to Louis IX of France in
1262; "he says that more than 200,000 were killed in Baghdad." (*loc cit*).
No comment.
Enough remained of Baghdad to get besieged by Tamerlane in 1393 and 1401.
(Beatrice Forbes Mainz, The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane, Cambridge, 1989[1991].)
In place of the *Conclusion* originally scheduled for this time, we bring
you this message:
The "permissiveness" of which the Chinese conservatives accused the Mongol
regime was not, generally speaking, a wholly bad thing. "Involuntary Multicul-
turalism," our University Vice-President might quip today among close friends.
Taking the Mongol perspective, it may be that the system, in its political
recruitment aspects, was not carried far enough; for the abeyance of the
gerontocratic-tending Confucian examination-civil service permitted careers
open to talent as would prove difficult under the most stable Secretariat
systems of the Ming and Qing, with their cloistered, housebroken emperors.
The dictatorship of the Mongol Toghto, a political genius in a hopeless cause,
was unimaginable in native Chinese regimes earlier and later. At his second
fall from power, in 1355, he was led off to Yunnan and death, presumed of
unnatural causes, at age not-quite-forty.
Daniel A. Foss
