"How much is enough?" is the wrong question

My eyes landed on the opening page of Simkhovitch's wonderful essay "Rome's Fall Reconsidered". Ha! You thought we were done with Simkhovitch. No such luck.

From page 201:

"Seneca himself was one of the richest land owners of Rome, but as a statesman he gave warning, in public, of what the wealthy landowners did not care to hear in private. Seneca asks: "How far will you extend the bounds of your possessions? A large tract of land, sufficient heretofore for a whole nation, is scarce wide enough for a single lord."

The quote is from Seneca's Letter 89, item #20.

Note that Seneca asks his wealthy bretheren "How far will you extend the bounds of your possessions?" How far will you extend those bounds? 

Seneca is asking How much is enough? It wasn't that long ago people were asking the same question about the wealth of the wealthy of our own time.

It was the wrong question, wrong for our time and wrong for Seneca's time. The answer, as we should know by now, is: They already have more than "enough". They are not doing it to get "enough". The are doing it for personal satisfaction. It is a kind of game, like poker except that our lives depend on the outcome. And, except that the survival of civilization requires that the game be halted.

In the late stage of that game, you only have "enough" when you are the only player left. But by that time the rest of us are all serfs, and civilization is one cold memory.

 

Later in the Simkhovitch essay, where he is talking about reasons for the concentrated ownership of land, he mentions not only the obvious (the debts of small landholders, and the fact that raising cattle  requires more land than growing crops) but also the pleasure wealthy Romans got from accumulating as much as they could:

Wealthy men acquired and accumulated vast domains rather for the pleasure of possession than as a paying investment. [p.219]

It's not just an assertion, either. Simkhovitch has already quoted Pliny the Younger, who was considering the purchase of an "enormous" estate neighboring his own:

I feel tempted to purchase, first, because the conveniences resulting therefrom would be as great as the pleasures it would give me... [p.218]

Pleasures and conveniences; these are his reasons to buy. Remarkably, in the same quote, Pliny expresses hesitation to purchase because "the fertility of the land is overtaxed by the lack of capital of the tenants." Note that the low income expected from this "overtaxed" property makes Pliny hesitate, but it is not enough to turn him against the purchase. Even the additional cost of providing slaves for the tenants is not enough to make him decide against the purchase. It is not only the quest for wealth that influenced Pliny's decision, but also the quest for pleasure and personal satisfaction. Perhaps he was asking himself: How will I look in the eyes of my fellow wealth-holders? It could be a smart move to sacrifice a little income if the purchase moved Pliny's status up a few notches in the eyes of his wealthy friends.

Pliny's letter is available online. I read it, and found this extra bit on the pleasure of purchasing, instead, an estate at greater distance from his own:

Again, there is something exceedingly pleasant in changing one's air and place, and in the travelling from one estate to another.

Pliny the Younger was a sentimental fool. But then, he could afford to be.

Latouche (a second fragment from the Introduction)

Robert Latouche (1961): The Birth of Western Economy. Online editions:

1. the 2005 edition as a Google Book with 42 preview pages (of 376 pages); and
2. the 2013 edition as a Google Book with 58 preview pages.

I prefer the first of those two links.

Vladimir Simkhovitch (1916): "Rome's Fall Reconsidered". Open access at JSTOR.

 
Latouche, most of one paragraph, from page xiv of the Introduction:

We shall have to explain our attitude to the dangerous illusion fostered by those who differentiate sharply between a natural economy (Naturalwirtschaft), regarded as the typical economic system of the Early Middle Ages, and a money economy (Geldwirtschaft), believed to have prevailed in the ancient world and to have made a diffident reappearance at the end of the eleventh century.

A "diffident" reappearance -- I like that.

We shall also come up against other traditional ideas, which will have to be less rigidly interpreted, as for instance that of a closed economy, for many years the classical definition of the Carolingian economic system. Without wishing to anticipate a controversy which will be dealt with at some length later, need we also continue to accept as axiomatic the predominance of the great landed estate during Merovingian and Carolingian times?

Oh, that is important. The predominance of the great landed estate defines the economy of ancient Rome. And according to Vladimir Simkhovitch's translation of Pliny, "The large estates, the latifundia, were ruining Rome as well as its provinces." So how did we get from the unsustainable great estates of Rome to great estates that were not only sustainable but formed the basis of economic society under feudalism? This is why Latouche's book fascinates me. I think he may have the answer I'm looking for.

If for almost a century the great domain has been considered as the basic framework of rural life under the Carolingians, the unanimity with which scholars have accepted the idea must be attributed to Charlemagne, the author of a detailed Capitulary on the organization of his villae, and also to several wealthy abbots of the eighth and ninth centuries, to those of Saint-Remi of Rheims, of Prüm, and in particular of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, who have left us in the form of polyptyques minutely detailed inventories of the property owned by their monasteries. It is, however, all too readily forgotten that side by side with the great landowners whose numbers and whose power are not in question, there existed a host of small, illiterate landowners who kept no archives and of whose way of life we know little.

I like this book! "All too readily forgotten" are the poor, who once were called the middle class: those who do not publish books describing life from their own point of view. Many of them do not even have their own point of view but simply repeat what they hear from their favorite media. Simkhovitch, too, reminds us that history and literature preserve not the "ruts of a muddy country road" but the "mountain-climbing expedition":

The story of the plain farmer we can expect to find in neither literature nor history. [p.205]

The "polyptyques" --  "minutely detailed inventories of the property owned" -- remind me of Michael Wood's Domesday book about William the Conqueror's survey of wealth and property in all of England as of 1086. Apparently, William was not first to create such a list.

//

polyptyques: "In medieval history, the Polyptych (or Polyptyque) was a document detailing the lands that a noble owned." - Wikipedia

Capitulary: "A capitulary was a series of legislative or administrative acts emanating from the Frankish court of the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties, especially that of Charlemagne..." - Wikipedia

diffident: "modest or shy because of a lack of self-confidence." - Oxford Languages via Google

Toynbee and Latouche

Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History. The complete abridgement: 1960.

Robert Latouche (1961): The Birth of Western Economy. Online I find the 2005 edition as a Google Book with 42 preview pages (of 376 pages); but page xiii (from which I quote below) is not one of them. Also online I find the 2013 edition as a Google Book with 58 preview pages, including the text that I quoted -- but the pages are not numbered. The relevant page is the first page of the Introduction, with text that begins "ANY ATTEMPT TO TRAGE the origins ..."

If I was Latouche I'd be ouTRAGEd.

From the Introduction of Robert Latouche's The Birth of Western Economy (page xiii in the 1961 edition):

Any attempt to trace the origins of medieval economic life in the West must inevitably raise in its most material form the problem, often debated but never solved, of the transition from the ancient world to the Middle Ages...

The whole conception of a middle age is gradually breaking down, or at least is in process of changing. The idea of inserting this vast period between the ancient world and modern times sprang first from the imagination of seventeenth-century scholars, and it was not until 1838 that its chronological limits were officially laid down...

Latouche goes on to say that the purpose of his book is "to trace the gradual development of economic life in Western Europe during the period ending with the eleventh century". The book's subtitle, by the way, is "Economic Aspects of the Dark Ages". And in the Foreword Philip Grierson mentions "those centuries of European history which are usefully if now somewhat unfashionably known as the Dark Ages." 

The Dark Ages: "often debated but never solved", Latouche says. And now we mostly just bicker about what to call that era. 

There can be little doubt we are experiencing the decline of our own civilization.


The Toynbee quote below begins on page 38 in the introductory chapter of the abridgement.

The illusion of progress as something which proceeds in a straight line is an example of that tendency to over-simplification which the human mind displays in all its activities. In their 'periodizations' our historians dispose their periods in a single series end to end, like the sections of a bamboo stem between joint and joint or the sections of the patent extensible handle on the end of which an up-to-date modern chimney-sweep pokes his brush up the flue. On the brush-handle which our modern historians have inherited there were originally two joints only -- 'ancient' and 'modern', roughly though not exactly corresponding to the Old Testament and the New Testament and to the dual back-to-back reckoning of dates B.C. and A.D. ... 

As time has gone on, our historians have found it convenient to extend their telescopic brush-handle by adding a third section, which they have called 'medieval' because they have inserted it between the other two...

That's just what Latouche was talking about.

But we have strayed from the point, which is that an equation of Hellenic and Western history with History itself -- 'ancient and modern' if you like -- is mere parochialism and impertinence.

I can't say for sure whether by "impertinence" Toynbee means rudeness or irrelevance.


I found it interesting that both Toynbee and Latouche found the parceling-out of historical time interesting enough to bring it up in their opening thoughts.

Similarities: Average Men

Simkhovitch, "Rome's Fall Reconsidered", p220-221:

The owners of the rundown farms are impoverished, and when a farmer is economically sinking he is not in a position to improve his land. Only one with sufficient resources can improve his land... 

The exceptional man might pull himself up under adverse conditions, but on the other hand a man of such exceptional resourcefulness and ability will not permit such deterioration of his farm. But whatever the exceptional man may or may not do, here we are dealing with the average men, the habitual victims of circumstance.

 

Keynes, the General Theory, chapter 24:

Hitherto the increment of the world’s wealth has fallen short of the aggregate of positive individual savings; and the difference has been made up by the losses of those whose courage and initiative have not been supplemented by exceptional skill or unusual good fortune. But if effective demand is adequate, average skill and average good fortune will be enough.

Simkhovitch identifies a problem. Keynes offers a solution.

Similarities: Down on the Farm

Owen is optimistic about the farm. He needs Luke for only one more year.
Luke is realistic. He doesn't have high hopes for the farm. Luke wants out:

LUKE: And if these new droids do work out, I want to transmit my application to the Academy this year.

Owen's face becomes a scowl, although he tries to suppress it.

OWEN: You mean the next semester before harvest?

LUKE: Sure, there're more than enough droids.

OWEN: Harvest is when I need you the most. Only one more season. This year we'll make enough on the harvest so I'll be able to hire some more hands. And then you can go to the Academy next year.

- from Star Wars: A New Hope (Episode IV)

As you know, things don't work out as Owen predicts.

"If the farmer is borrowing to meet the exigencies of a so-called bad year, his distress is temporary, and he is likely to square himself during the next good year; but if his distress is due to the progressive deterioration of his farm, he will be unable to extricate himself. Such indebtedness is hopeless. The increasing weight of accumulated interest on the loan and the decreasing productivity of the land seal the fate of the landowner.

 - "Rome's Fall Reconsidered", by Vladimir G. Simkhovitch

As you know, things didn't work out well for ancient Rome.

When ancient Rome was young

A multi-faceted remembrance of Rome: 

In her early days Italy was famous for her wheat, which provided not only her own population but also that of Greece. The fertility of Italian soil was probably the reason for the establishment of Greek colonies in southern Italy. The importation of Italian wheat into Greece in Sophocles's time is still famous. But in Cato's time Italy was already dependent upon Sicily, which Rome's great old man called the provider for the Roman people. In all probability this dependence upon Sicily as its granary was the paramount reason for Rome's conflict with Carthage. Province after province was turned by Rome into a desert, for Rome's exactions naturally compelled greater exploitation of the conquered soil and its more rapid exhaustion.

From "Rome's Fall Reconsidered" by Vladimir Simkhovitch (page 223).

Dates:

Greek colonies established in Italy: from the 8th to 5th centuries BC. Italy was fertile then.

Sophocles's time: 496-406 BC, or almost all of the fifth century BC. Sophocles was born just at the end of the Greek colonization of Italy. And 496 BC is, what, 13 years after the Roman Republic was established in 509 BC on the entrails of the Roman Kingdom.

Cato's [the elder] time: 234-149 BC. Suppose we count from 200 BC and say Cato had 50 years, the whole first half of the second century BC, to be Rome's "great old man". 

Greece colonized various fertile areas of Italy between 800 and 500 BC. And Italy was still considered fertile in Sophocles's time, that is, for the next hundred years after 500 BC. But then, three hundred years later, around 200 BC (in Cato's time) fertility on the Italian peninsula was wearing thin.

 

I'm still thinking about how Simkhovitch's exhaustion-of-the-soil argument stands up to Ellsworth Huntington's climate-change argument.

"Who Invented What, and When Did They Invent It?"

At First Monday:

The Internet Society hosts a monograph called called "A Brief History of the Internet." (See http://www.isoc.org/internet-history/brief.html) The authors include some of the designers of the essential components of how the Internet works today: Barry M. Leiner, Vinton G. Cerf, David D. Clark, Robert E. Kahn, Leonard Kleinrock, Daniel C. Lynch, Jon Postel, Larry G. Roberts, and Stephen Wolff. The paper notes these key milestones in Internet history:

• 1961: Leonard Kleinrock writes the first paper on packet switched networks. 
• 1962: J.C.R. Licklider of MIT writes a paper describing a globally connected "Galactic Network" of computers.
• 1966: Larry Roberts proposes the ARPANET to the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA).
• 1968: ARPA issues Request for Quotations for the Interface Message Processors (IMPs), which became the first routers.
• 1969: First IMP is installed at UCLA.
• Early 1970s: Universities and defense agencies and contractors begin to connect to ARPANET.
• 1973: Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf begin research into what eventually becomes IP - the Internet Protocol and its companion, TCP - the Transmission Control Protocol.
• 1973: Bob Metcalfe develops Ethernet, which had been the subject of his PhD thesis, while working at Xerox.
• Early 1980s: The Personal Computer revolution begins.
• Mid 1980s: Local Area Networks (LANs) begin to flourish in business and university environments. Campus area networks soon follow.
• January 1, 1983: All "old-style" traffic on the ARPANET ceases, as TCP/IP becomes the only protocol used. [Arguably, this is the date of the birth of the Internet as a functioning, practical, production network.]
• 1985: Dennis Jennings chooses TCP/IP as the protocol for the planned National Science Foundation Network (NSFnet).
• 1988: NSF sponsors a series of workshops at Harvard on the commercialization and privatization of the Internet.
• 1988: Kahn et al. write a paper "Towards a National Research Network." According to the Brief History, "This report was influential on then Senator Al Gore, and ushered in high speed networks that laid the networking foundation for the future information superhighway."

From Al Gore and the Creation of the Internet by Richard Wiggins