I also think you make some factual errors : saying the “american revolution” is a success but the french one a collapse is a great mistake. Most of the progress of the French Revolution lasted for very long and still last.
With all due respect, your account of the French Revolution is just cartoonishly biased. The “progress of the French Revolution” included, among other things:
The introduction of total war fought with mass conscript armies, for which all the resources of the nation are requisitioned, in place of the 18th century limited and professional warfare regulated by strict codes and financed mostly from monarchs’ private purses.
This invention leading to two decades of Europe-wide mass slaughter and destruction that left an unknown number of millions of people dead. It also left the recurring idea of spreading the national glory and ideology (as opposed to mere interests of rulers, which may be vicious but are at least limited and sane) by war and conquest.
Overall, the nationalist ideology born in the Revolution and the Revolutionary Wars, both in France and elsewhere as a reaction to it, had subsequent historical consequences for which “cataclysmic” would be an understatement. Subsequent European revolutions inspired by the French one, even if initially non-violent, would usually lead straight to bloody ethnic conflicts.
These “rights” introduced by the Revolution included the “right” to the imposition of a rigid centralized government and elimination of all local historical customs and institutions in the name of national homogenization. Those who resisted were dealt with by methods that Europe wouldn’t see again until the Nazis. This is analogous to the bloody total wars between nations engendered by the nationalist ideology, only in this case the violence is directed towards those elements within the nation who refuse to fall in line.
The legacy and inspiration of all these innovations around the world has indeed lasted until the present day, but I don’t think it’s something to be happy and proud about—certainly not a “jump forward in humanism” by any stretch of imagination.
As for the events specific to the Revolution itself, the picture is perhaps even more gruesome—from mobs dismembering their victims and parading their heads on pikes (which revolutionary propagandists proudly bragged about) to the mechanized mass executions with the guillotines.
Even the abolition of slavery was done in a way that caused a race war of enormous brutality in Haiti (the main center of French slaveholding), which was concluded by an all-out extermination of the losing side down to the last man, woman, and child. And in any case, the effective abolition of worldwide slave trade (and subsequently slavery) was due to the ideological and political developments in Britain and America, and their subsequent political and military actions. The French Revolution had little or nothing to do with it.
Well, you are so far away from the historical truth than I hardly know where to start to answer, and I wondered for long before answering… or just granting you a Godwin point for comparing the Revolution with Hitler.
Your view of the medieval wars (and the massive famine, plunder, rape) as just a nice game is ridiculous. Revolutionary France didn’t declare war to conquest others. It fought a war because it was assaulted by all its neighbors. In that respect, yes, it’s the whole french people that fought. But unlike you claim, it was made of volunteer, not of conscripts, until Napoleon (which pursued some of the Revolution, like the civil code, which is indeed a huge progress towards the previous law of the first born).
Massive wars in Europe were in no way invented by the Revolution. Roman conquests, Germanic invasions, Hundred Years war, conquest of the americas, arabic invasions and crusades, … Europe was waging wars, both internally and externally, in a very constant fashion way before the Revolution. To the contrary, the Revolution aimed to end war, stating in the Constitution of the First French Republic (at my knowledge, for the first time in history, but I may be wrong on that) :
« Article 118. - The French People is the friend and natural ally of free people.
Article 119. - It doesn’t temper in the government of other people ; it doesn’t tolerate that other nations would temper in its own. »
There is no ethnic conflict that was started inspired by the French Revolution. The French Revolution was the first to proclaim absolute equality of people, whatever their race, nationality, religion (or lack of religion) was. That’s what it abolished slavery, for example.
The “rights” introduced by the Revolution are absolutely scandalous dictatorial things like rights to freedom, to safety, to receive a job or adequate conditions of living, to education.
Comparing the French Revolution to the nazis is nothing but a troll.
The abolition of slavery didn’t lead to a race war. The race war in Haïti started when Napoleon reinstored slavery, undoing one of most important conquests of the Revolution.
Well, I could continue for long, I’ll stop it here because it’s not really the main topic of the article. But it just proves my initial point : the French Revolution (and the American one) are so heated and disputed topics (that reached Godwin level in a few posts) that Eliezer should have, for the sake of the comparison between Science and Bayes, chosen another example.
Edit : oh, I find it very… surprising that on LW someone can quote Philippe De Villiers, who is a representative of our extreme right, a fundamentalist Catholic and openly racist and homophobe. Sure, even Hitler is sometimes right, but quoting an extreme-right politician who viscerally oppose the French Revolution because the French Revolution broke the power the Catholic Church had on the government, and stripped the priests from the powers they had over daily life. What a reference on a community dedicated to refining the art of human rationality.
I was comparing the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars with the 18th century standard of warfare (basically, the standards that held from the 1648 Peace of Westphalia until the French Revolution). It is true that some previous wars in European history had been just as awful, like for example the Thirty Years’ war. However, the innovations brought by the French Revolution destroyed a century and a half long tradition of reasonably limited and civilized warfare. To see this, it’s enough to look at the casualty figures of 18th century European wars prior to 1789 and compare them with the death toll of those in the period 1792-1815. It’s an order of magnitude difference.
Moreover, some of your claims are wildly inaccurate. In particular, the first mass conscription (levée en masse) was levied in the summer of 1793, six years before Napoleon’s Brumaire coup. And it was by no means “the whole [F]rench people” that stood behind the revolutionary regime. A very large percentage was monarchist and saw the Revolution as an illegal and tyrannical usurpation—for which they had at least some good reason, considering that it immediately abolished centuries old traditional institutions of local autonomy and submitted them straight to the dictate from Paris. You yourself said that “there were many people inside France trying to destroy the Revolution from inside” because they didn’t like the change. Does this mean that, according to you, these people deserved the Terror to be unleashed against them?
In some places, like the Vendée, the monarchists had overwhelming support—which was crushed by the revolutionary regime in a campaign of mass atrocities whose scale and brutality would truly not be repeated in Europe until the 20th century totalitarians took over. (If you think my assertion about the Nazis is incorrect, can you name some campaign of atrocities in Europe between the French Revolution and the Nazis that rose to the same level? Perhaps some things that happened in Eastern Europe in the post-WW1 chaos would qualify.)
The assertion that “[t]here is no ethnic conflict that was started [or] inspired by the French Revolution” is also absurd. If anything, the German-French rivalry and revanchism that was to produce a series of cataclysmic wars in the next 150 years was a direct consequence of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Moreover, nothing like the European nationalist ideologies that would cause all the strife and wars in the subsequent 200 years existed before the French Revolution. The novel idea of a centralized and ethnically uniform nation-state that is the very essence of nationalism was at the center of the French revolutionary project. (This is especially obvious in the revolutionary government’s policy of eliminating local languages and dialects and forcible imposition of linguistic uniformity.) Once such ideas start taking hold in ethnically diverse places, the consequences are terrible almost without exception.
In Haiti, the story is much more complicated than what you say, and altogether horrible—certainly nothing like the idealistic story of successful abolition of slavery that you suggest. When the formal abolition came in 1794, the slave rebellion that would ultimately turn into all-out race war was already well underway. The bungling politics of the republican commissioners newly arrived from France, principally Sonthonax, certainly didn’t help the situation. (It is true that the conclusive and most brutal events happened after Napoleon’s unsuccessful invasion in 1801-02, but the situation had turned very nasty even before that.) And in any case, the worldwide slave trade was abolished by the Royal Navy prompted by British abolitionist politics. The French Revolution had nothing to do with that.
Your constant pointing out of all the nice and sweet things that the revolutionary regime was declaring on paper is rather absurd considering what this regime was doing in practice. (And a more in-depth analysis would in fact show that some of these nice-sounding ideas did in fact predictably lead to awful consequences when attempted in practice, while many of them weren’t at all nice when one looks at what they really meant behind the lofty language.)
All in all, you seem to be repeating a very naive and cartoonish version of events. I suggest that you read more on this historical period if you’d like to discuss it seriously.
Correction: The first levée en masse was in February 1793, not the summer of 1793 as I wrote originally. This however goes even further towards the point I was making.
Since you are issuing a post, not a book, you had to leave out most of the crimes of the French revolution, such as the infamous red terror, which was the very essence of the French revolution and its most emblematic act, the prototype and original for all the many terrors and mass murders of the twentieth century, the inspiration for all our most evil intellectuals.
Among the many crimes you left out was two years of hyperinflation with price control between 1793 and 1795, which employed the most savage terror to control prices, and imposed widespread famine, which famine produced massive riots, which were in turn put down by measures of extraordinary brutality.
(If you think my assertion about the Nazis is incorrect, can you name some campaign of atrocities in Europe between the French Revolution and the Nazis that rose to the same level? Perhaps some things that happened in Eastern Europe in the post-WW1 chaos would qualify.)
Anti-Jewish pogroms killed somewhat more people than the tens of thousands in the Terror. According to Wikipedia, 70,000 to 250,000 during the civil war period in Russia.
You’re right, of course—the 1917 Russian Revolution and the subsequent civil war involved atrocities on all sides that easily beat the French revolutionary terror.
For some interesting reason, when I make a query to my brain on what happened in Europe in some period X-Y, the answer usually excludes Russia unless I ponder it more carefully. Even when I wrote about post-WW1 Eastern Europe in my above comment, I was vaguely thinking of the Freikorps fighting it out with Poles and Czechs rather than the Russian Civil War.
It would certainly mean moving the goalposts if I insisted on excluding Russia from Europe, but it still says something that you have to go all the way to the rise of the hardcore 20th century totalitarians to find similar examples.
You’re right, of course—the 1917 Russian Revolution and the subsequent civil war involved atrocities on all sides that easily beat the French revolutionary terror.
On the other hand, it’s standard to the point of cliché to regard the events in France post-1789 as specifically foreshadowing those in Russia post-1917 (with Lenin “correcting” some of Robespierre’s mistakes, for instance making sure all the heirs of the old regime were dead).
To be fair, white terror can be extremely nasty and non-selective too. This was true in the time of Sulla as much as in the 20th century, including the killings by the Russian Whites cited by Lessdazed.
Sulla then resigned the dictatorship, restored the Republic, and returned to private life, though the fact that such measures as Sulla’s were necessary to protect and revive the Republic should have demonstrated it could not be revived.
In general, white terrors are response to red terrors, or to the dire and imminent threat of a red terror.
In war, both sides always do dreadful things, for to win, you have to be twice as bad as the bad guys. If one side is better than the other, they demonstrate moral superiority by how they behave after they have won, not by how they win. Compare what followed the white terror in Taiwan, with what followed the red terror on the Chinese mainland.
I find it very… surprising that on LW someone can quote Philippe De Villiers, who is a representative of our extreme right, a fundamentalist Catholic and openly racist and homophobe.
In this context, his value system isn’t the issue. There’s nothing that Vladimir is using that’s a questionable claim. He linked to an article which quotes De Villiers and doesn’t say something like “oh, and mainstream scholars think this is bullcrap”- because the events unquestionably occurred. In fact the article quotes mainstream historians as agreeing with De Villiers on the factual history. The only reason De Villiers is bringing it up is for his own political goals. But that doesn’t impact the factual accuracy of the points.
In general, it is a hallmark of rationality to take facts where they come from even when they come from very distasteful sources. Thus, we’ve had in our rationality quotes threads quotes from people as diverse as Jack Chick, Ted Kaczynski, C. S. Lewis, and G.K. Chesterton.
Sure, in the case of De Villiers if he made a specific factual claim and was the primary source for that claim I’d be less inclined to trust it than if say Richard Dawkins made the same statement but that’s completely distinct from someone happening to be willing to cite an article that De Villiers appears in.
To be fully precise, the exact extent of the revolutionary atrocities in Vendée and elsewhere is a matter of some controversy. Unfortunately, as it happens with all atrocities that become an issue in ideological battles, there has been both exaggeration and denial motivated by sympathies for one or another side. However, as far as I know, there is no serious disagreement among historians that the extent of atrocities was unparalleled by anything else in Europe that happened in the centuries between the end of the Thirty Years’ War and the rise of the major 20th century totalitarians (i.e. Bolsheviks and Nazis).
(Again, if I’m missing some counterexample, I’d be really curious to hear it.)
To give another illustration, one way in which the French revolutionary regime clearly stands out is its really extreme bloodthirsty and exterminationist rhetoric, which is again unlike anything else seen in European history until the outbreak of extreme 20th century totalitarianism. (Some of this rhetoric is still reflected in the lyrics of the Marseillaise calling for the spilling of “impure blood.”) When such rhetoric becomes mainstream, similar deeds usually also follow. (The advocates of “hate speech” restrictions actually have a point when they argue this, however much they tend to be confused or disingenuous otherwise.)
On the other hand, the fact about the European wars in the period 1648-1789 being limited, professional, disciplined, and reasonably considerate towards civilians is completely uncontroversial in mainstream history. The standard name for the type of war in this period is “cabinet wars” (German Kabinettskriege). The Wikipedia page gives a concise summary.
The advocates of “hate speech” restrictions actually have a point when they argue this
” are murderous thugs” is hate speech that is apt to result in race war even if it is true of a disproportionate minority of that group, indeed particularly if it is true of a small but disproportionate minority of that group.
″ no-hablo-english with no job purchased million dollar houses no money down” is also categorized as hate speech, but is more likely to result in responsible lending policies than race war.
Thus, we’ve had quotes from people as diverse as Jack Chick, Ted Kaczynski, C. S. Lewis, and G.K. Chesterton.
We’ve had stupid quotes in the quotes thread from all sorts of smart, dumb, misguided, insane, and perceptive people. Do you mean to say that LW has collectively upvoted quotes from those people?
Revolutionary France didn’t declare war to conquest others...To the contrary, the Revolution aimed to end war
People excuse by citing intentions, and accuse by citing consequences.
To the contrary, the Revolution aimed to end war, stating in the Constitution of the First French Republic (at my knowledge, for the first time in history, but I may be wrong on that)
It seems like that’s the implicit goal of nearly every ideology, for after it’s universally adopted.
People excuse by citing intentions, and accuse by citing consequences.
It seems to be possible either way, excusing by citing consequences and accusing by citing intentions alike. Your commentary seems to lack explanatory power.
(On the other hand, the point about the evidence being filtered is well-taken.)
Intentions are usually actually good. It’s true people defend and attack on both avenues simultaneously to see what sticks, but the reality is usually good intentions leading to bad effects (not net effects, this is assumed to be true of all individual outcomes through the halo effect), so rhetorical moves count on the audience to assume intentions and effects are correlated while citing true and incontrovertible things about intentions or effects, depending on the side.
...or just granting you a Godwin point for comparing the Revolution with Hitler.
...
Edit : oh, I find it very… surprising that on LW someone can quote Philippe De Villiers, who is a representative of our extreme right, a fundamentalist Catholic and openly racist and homophobe. Sure, even Hitler is sometimes right, but quoting an extreme-right politician who viscerally oppose the French Revolution because the French Revolution broke the power the Catholic Church had on the government, and stripped the priests from the powers they had over daily life. What a reference on a community dedicated to refining the art of human rationality.
I’ve edited my comment several times, yet I remain quite unsure as to what I should say.
I defend kilobug here; It’s not as bad as it looks. Each unnecessary Hitler reference is fractionally as bad as the previous, as Godwin’s law is about the subject arising in the first place.
What’s more, Vladmir_M referenced Hitler in an argument that something bad wouldn’t be repeated until Hitler. That’s not hypothetical, that references a terrible thing in the technically true rhetorical construct of “X is/was the worst thing since/until Y” where Y is/was worse than X, possibly by orders of magnitude, but the brain associates X and Y as similar regardless, in a way that is inappropriate.
kilobug only mentioned Hitler as a most extreme example of bad character, but it was clearly hypothetical. It’s a cheap rhetorical move, maybe, but I think it’s worse to say something is the “worst thing since.until Hitler”, even if true, if that thing is orders of magnitude less bad (for several reasons), since it’s not taking a hypothetical extreme case.
I think Hitler’s killing program was much worse than Revolutionary France’s for several reasons. First, quantitatively, hundreds of times as many innocents were killed. Second, France’s was a case of willingness to convict nine innocents lest a guilty person go free, while a significant part of Germany’s was gratuitous—this is a qualitative difference.
The news media love to use the “since” construction to inflame things and exaggerate importance, i.e. “This is the worst economic slowdown since the Great Depression” may mean “This economic slowdown is slightly worse than the one in the 1970′s that you remember and have in your mind as a close comparable and that by all rights we should be comparing it to, also we either forgot 1937 or include it as part of the ‘Great Depression’”.
That’s a fair point. I shouldn’t have used the Nazi comparison due to its rhetorical effects that always obscure and sidetrack the concrete issue at hand.
When I wrote that, I had in mind specifically the history of Western Europe, and what a typical inhabitant of a Western European country would have seen through the centuries. If you plot the severity of atrocities that a random Western European would have had the chance to witness in his local region of residence after the Peace of Westphalia (1648), using any reasonable measure of their severity, there would definitely be sharp peaks around the time of the revolutionary/Napoleonic wars and WW2, with other peaks such as the Franco-Prussian War and even WW1 significantly lower.
But yes, I do plead guilty to rhetoric that, even if not strictly inaccurate, goes too far into the Dark Arts territory.
But yes, I do plead guilty to rhetoric that, even if not strictly inaccurate, goes too far into the Dark Arts territory.
I don’t find it rhetorical, I find it factual. If we avoid stating certain facts in order to avoid offending certain sensibilities, then we are committing an error of omission. As I see it, in this case you were not pulled from the brink of Dark Arts. Rather, you were pulled from the brink of political incorrectness. Which is not the same thing at all.
When any group is being sufficiently totalitarian in the name of lofty ideals, I support comparisons to other totalitarian groups, which may include the Nazis and the Soviets (among others). I believe that such comparisons can help us learn from history. Of course, the subject of such comparisons will always be both quantitatively and qualitatively different, but the Nazis and the Soviets provide intersubjective references points for certain political ideas gone wrong.
Of course, it could be more rhetorically pragmatic to swallow these analogies even when accurate depending on the audience.
Upvoted since I definitely agree that comparing anything to Hitler or Nazis causes fairly consistent and predictable problems in the rationality of responses.
I think kilobug goes too far in supporting the French Revolution—I think it’s good that France no longer has even a symbolic monarch, but I agree with Vladimir that kilobug glosses over the loss of human life and freedoms that occurred during the revolution. Saying things like this without backing them up with a lot of evidence (which probably doesn’t exist given the absolutes used to qualify the statement), sounds overly idealistic(emphasis mine):
There is no ethnic conflict that was started inspired by the French Revolution. The French Revolution was the first to proclaim absolute equality of people, whatever their race, nationality, religion (or lack of religion) was. That’s what it abolished slavery, for example.
I think kilobug goes too far in supporting the French Revolution—I think it’s good that France no longer has even a symbolic monarch,
I live in Canada, which still has a symbolic monarch. What precise advantage, in your opinion, does France enjoy over Canada because it no longer has one? Or do you think that there is some difference that makes the lack of a monarch beneficial only for the French?
I think I should emphasize that I don’t think anything horrible should be done to any current symbolic monarch, and I do not approve of what happened to the full monarchs during the French Revolution. However, symbolic monarchs are very expensive politicians to maintain, and whether or not they gain their position is an accident of birth. They may not have absolute power like a full monarch would have, and therefore I disapprove of them less than I would a full monarch (since their role is quite different), but I still disapprove.
I should note that I disapprove of full monarchs because I disapprove of so few people holding such great power in society. I disapprove of symbolic monarchs because I don’t feel any one politician should occupy a position where they are automatically made so important over others.
For those symbolic monarchs today who perform in their current roles admirably, I feel it would be better to simply drop the title and change it to something more reflective of their political duties, drop the inheritance of the role, and change the income from the state to something more in line with what other politicians receive. The lifelong nature of the role can be kept if this still better fulfills some function of the new, but similar, role.
To answer your two questions, there’s not much of a practical advantage, but I simply prefer the lack of a symbolic monarch because I dislike monarchy. I don’t think this would make the lack of a symbolic monarch only beneficial to the French. However, I do think this is mostly a cultural and/or individual preference
a person may have.
Supporting Notes
Compare the price of an example symbolic monarchy vs an example president. While its true that a symbolic monarch probably isn’t going to strain the finances of a relatively rich country, I must also consider the price of an example prime minister of the same country as for the symbolic monarch and I have to disagree that they should be worth so much less than the symbolic monarch (this is irrespective of who the monarch is or how many separate countries share the monarch between them, and more about how I rate the value of the respective positions, since the individuals come and go).
symbolic monarchs are very expensive politicians to maintain
You link to a web page that says: “Latest figures show the cost of supporting the Royal Family has gone up to nearly £37m a year.” That’s a drop in the bucket. The American Congress is much more expensive to maintain. I refer not to their salaries but to what they cost the US. For example, when Congress passes a law that requires that a hundred billion dollars be spent on something that does more harm than good, then the Congress has cost us a hundred billion dollars. In comparison to that, the damage done to the country’s purse by the Royal Family is pocket money.
...I do not approve of...I disapprove of …I disapprove of …I disapprove of …I disapprove of … I feel it would be better...I simply prefer...
Much of your reply is devoted to stating your preferences, which tells us only about you (you are signaling your political allegiances). However, the question that was asked was not about your preferences. It was “what precise advantage, in your opinion, does France enjoy...” and “do you think that there is some difference that makes the lack of a monarch beneficial only for the French...” Your preferences and your political allegiances are not quite the same thing as what advantages and benefits a population enjoys.
I view a question about my opinion as a question about my preferences. In fact, I don’t think there’s any way a person can answer that question without referencing their preferences. Of course, I did try to go into more detail about what specific preferences were involved and reference facts when applicable, but I’m not really sure what benefits or advantages other people would enjoy, excepting those who agree with me. This is why I didn’t reference that particular preference.
I’m not really sure why you think the comparison to the laws congress passes is applicable. As far as I understand, a symbolic monarchy doesn’t pass laws. Are you saying that people who pass laws should be eliminated because they can make awful choices? The consequences of people’s choices is entirely dependent on how much power they have. Also, I was only commenting about the inequality of their pay, not so much that it is a burden on their society (as I stated in my previous post). Once again, this is a personal preference.
What precise advantage, in your opinion, does France enjoy over Canada because it no longer has [a monarch]?
Obviously there are tons of confounding variables here that make the net benefit hard to measure, but clearly the main advantage is the ability of the population to elect the head of state.
(Also, Canada has the additional disadvantage of sharing its monarch with other countries; the reasons why this is problematic at least in theory should go without saying.)
I don’t think this would be the right place to enter a general discussion of these issues, but I must note that your response reflects beliefs that are, in my opinion, far below the standards of intellectual scrutiny that are supposed to be observed on LW. In particular, you seem to be assuming that, by any reasonable standards, democratic election of the head of state is clearly a good thing, while personal unions between countries are clearly bad. You also treat these claims as obvious.
To me it seems that both these claims are easily falsified by real-world evidence, and even setting aside that stronger rebuttal that would take some effort to justify, there is certainly no rational reason to treat them as self-evident.
your response reflects beliefs that are, in my opinion, far below the standards of intelectual scrutiny that are supposed to be observed on LW.
I don’t think that’s fair. We all have a great many beliefs inherited from general culture, more than we have the opportunity to scrutinize (especially without specific prompting). Even if my standards of intellectual scrutiny are very high, some of my beliefs are bound to be false; if you want to judge whether I’m meeting the LW standards of intellectual scrutiny, you should observe how I update in the face of new evidence or contrary argument, not necessarily the content of my starting beliefs themselves.
In particular, you seem to be assuming that, by any reasonable standards, democratic election of the head of state is clearly a good thing,
Only ceteris paribus, however; and I was careful not to claim that democratic election is necessarily a good thing on net in any specific case (such as that of the countries mentioned), but only a desideratum to be weighed against whatever disadvantages it may involve in a particular context.
while personal unions between countries are clearly bad
“Clearly present certain problems” would be a better paraphrase.
To me it seems that both these claims are easily falsified by real-world evidence,
If you interpreted them in the unreasonably strong senses that I have disclaimed above, I can see why you might think so. However, when understood in the sense I intended, I think my claims are perfectly true and hardly worthy of controversy.
and even setting aside that stronger claim that would take some effort to justify, there is certainly no rational reason to treat your beliefs as self-evident.
Again, I would by no means claim it is self-evident that France’s governmental structure is superior to Canada’s on the whole; only that France’s has at least some desirable features that Canada’s lacks.
OK, pardon if I have interpreted your claims too uncharitably, or if I sounded too personally critical. I didn’t mean to pick on you as having low intellectual standards or anything like that—I merely wanted to point out that your reply sounded like a cached thought of a sort that, in a different context, would likely raise a red flag for many people here, possibly including you, thus potentially indicating some widespread biases reflected in failure to notice the cached thoughts in this particular case.
When you say that “clearly the main advantage is the ability of the population to elect the head of state,” this can mean, to the best of my interpretation, either that this ability is somehow valuable in itself (so that this value should be counted as a positive term separately from its practical consequences), or that it self-evidently has advantageous implications. Do you think this interpretation is incorrect or uncharitable? I certainly find neither the former nor the latter possible meaning as “hardly worthy of controversy.”
Your subsequent comments indicate that you had in mind the former meaning, i.e. that popular election of the head of state is somehow desirable and valuable in itself, which however may need to be weighted against its possible bad practical implications. But as I said, I definitely don’t see how this claim is self-evident. How exactly would you justify it?
As for the issue of personal union (i.e. sharing the head of state with other countries), you characterized it as an “additional disadvantage,” thus implying (again to the best of my interpretation) that it is indeed, on the net, a disadvantage. But I don’t see how this could possibly be self-evident either—off-hand, I can easily produce a bunch of reasons why it could plausibly have both disadvantages and advantages. (As an off-hand example of an advantage, as a Canadian, you can still get some degree of British consular protection.) Which of these prevail of course depends both on empirical questions and how we choose to weight individual concerns. But again, I really don’t see how such an assertion could be “hardly worth of controversy.”
OK, pardon if I have interpreted your claims too uncharitably. I didn’t mean to pick on you as having low intellectual standards or anything like that—I merely wanted to point out that your reply sounded like a cached thought that
What’s more, Vladmir_M referenced Hitler in an argument that something bad wouldn’t be repeated until Hitler. That’s not hypothetical, that references a terrible thing in the technically true rhetorical construct of “X is/was the worst thing since/until Y” where Y is/was worse than X, possibly by orders of magnitude, but the brain associates X and Y as similar regardless, in a way that is inappropriate.
Every totalitarian terror state has been consciously inspired by the French Revolution and Red Terror—Marx invokes the red terror as a good idea, though perhaps not carried out with sufficient thoroughness.
While “X was the worst thing until Y” can inappropriately associate X and Y, there are in this case many connections and similarities between X and Y.
Critics of the French Revolution foresaw twentieth century totalitarianism in its actions and ideology:
Joseph de Maistre foretold:
The people are told by their masters:
You believe that you don’t want this law, but we assure you that you do. If you dare reject it we shall shoot you down in order to punish you for not wanting what you do want.
and then they do so
Since reference to Hitler automatically provokes irrationality, I would have said, and come to think of it I did say, that the French revolution prefigured the totalitarian terror regimes of the twentieth century.
“Every totalitarian terror state has been consciously inspired by the French Revolution and Red Terror”
Every democratic and freedom-loving state has also been inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
Also everything good and everything bad in the Western World since the Rise of the Roman Empire, has been influenced from the Roman Empire. This includes the czars of Russia being called “Czars” (from Caesar), and the Senate of the United States being called a “Senate”.
Saying that a world-smashing thing helps inspire subsequent things, both bad and good, isn’t a testament to its badness—it’s a testament to its importance.
the totalitarian terror regimes of the twentieth century.
That’s the phrase you use to avoid provoking the irrationality that comes from referencing Hitler?
France’s was a case of willingness to convict nine innocents lest a guilty person go free, while a significant part of Germany’s was gratuitous—this is a qualitative difference.
While “X was the worst thing until Y” can inappropriately associate X and Y, there are in this case many connections and similarities between X and Y.
People are well trained to go instant frothing at the mouth crazy at such words as “Hitler”, “Nazi”, and “fascist”. Four legs good, two legs bad.
But such words as “totalitarian” and “terror” instead provoke the anti anti communist reflex and the anti Islamophobia reflex, where with great sophistication, calmness, maturity and civility they assure us that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.
Downvoted: If you know these words provoke irrational responses, then that’s all the more reason that you shouldn’t have used them. We’re a forum that seeks to promote rationality, not irrationality.
Edit : oh, I find it very… surprising that on LW someone can quote Philippe De Villiers, who is a representative of our extreme right, a fundamentalist Catholic and openly racist and homophobe. Sure, even Hitler is sometimes right, but quoting an extreme-right politician who viscerally oppose the French Revolution because the French Revolution broke the power the Catholic Church had on the government, and stripped the priests from the powers they had over daily life. What a reference on a community dedicated to refining the art of human rationality.
With all due respect, your account of the French Revolution is just cartoonishly biased. The “progress of the French Revolution” included, among other things:
The introduction of total war fought with mass conscript armies, for which all the resources of the nation are requisitioned, in place of the 18th century limited and professional warfare regulated by strict codes and financed mostly from monarchs’ private purses.
This invention leading to two decades of Europe-wide mass slaughter and destruction that left an unknown number of millions of people dead. It also left the recurring idea of spreading the national glory and ideology (as opposed to mere interests of rulers, which may be vicious but are at least limited and sane) by war and conquest.
Overall, the nationalist ideology born in the Revolution and the Revolutionary Wars, both in France and elsewhere as a reaction to it, had subsequent historical consequences for which “cataclysmic” would be an understatement. Subsequent European revolutions inspired by the French one, even if initially non-violent, would usually lead straight to bloody ethnic conflicts.
These “rights” introduced by the Revolution included the “right” to the imposition of a rigid centralized government and elimination of all local historical customs and institutions in the name of national homogenization. Those who resisted were dealt with by methods that Europe wouldn’t see again until the Nazis. This is analogous to the bloody total wars between nations engendered by the nationalist ideology, only in this case the violence is directed towards those elements within the nation who refuse to fall in line.
The legacy and inspiration of all these innovations around the world has indeed lasted until the present day, but I don’t think it’s something to be happy and proud about—certainly not a “jump forward in humanism” by any stretch of imagination.
As for the events specific to the Revolution itself, the picture is perhaps even more gruesome—from mobs dismembering their victims and parading their heads on pikes (which revolutionary propagandists proudly bragged about) to the mechanized mass executions with the guillotines.
Even the abolition of slavery was done in a way that caused a race war of enormous brutality in Haiti (the main center of French slaveholding), which was concluded by an all-out extermination of the losing side down to the last man, woman, and child. And in any case, the effective abolition of worldwide slave trade (and subsequently slavery) was due to the ideological and political developments in Britain and America, and their subsequent political and military actions. The French Revolution had little or nothing to do with it.
Well, you are so far away from the historical truth than I hardly know where to start to answer, and I wondered for long before answering… or just granting you a Godwin point for comparing the Revolution with Hitler.
Your view of the medieval wars (and the massive famine, plunder, rape) as just a nice game is ridiculous. Revolutionary France didn’t declare war to conquest others. It fought a war because it was assaulted by all its neighbors. In that respect, yes, it’s the whole french people that fought. But unlike you claim, it was made of volunteer, not of conscripts, until Napoleon (which pursued some of the Revolution, like the civil code, which is indeed a huge progress towards the previous law of the first born).
Massive wars in Europe were in no way invented by the Revolution. Roman conquests, Germanic invasions, Hundred Years war, conquest of the americas, arabic invasions and crusades, … Europe was waging wars, both internally and externally, in a very constant fashion way before the Revolution. To the contrary, the Revolution aimed to end war, stating in the Constitution of the First French Republic (at my knowledge, for the first time in history, but I may be wrong on that) :
« Article 118. - The French People is the friend and natural ally of free people.
Article 119. - It doesn’t temper in the government of other people ; it doesn’t tolerate that other nations would temper in its own. »
There is no ethnic conflict that was started inspired by the French Revolution. The French Revolution was the first to proclaim absolute equality of people, whatever their race, nationality, religion (or lack of religion) was. That’s what it abolished slavery, for example.
The “rights” introduced by the Revolution are absolutely scandalous dictatorial things like rights to freedom, to safety, to receive a job or adequate conditions of living, to education.
Comparing the French Revolution to the nazis is nothing but a troll.
The abolition of slavery didn’t lead to a race war. The race war in Haïti started when Napoleon reinstored slavery, undoing one of most important conquests of the Revolution.
Well, I could continue for long, I’ll stop it here because it’s not really the main topic of the article. But it just proves my initial point : the French Revolution (and the American one) are so heated and disputed topics (that reached Godwin level in a few posts) that Eliezer should have, for the sake of the comparison between Science and Bayes, chosen another example.
Edit : oh, I find it very… surprising that on LW someone can quote Philippe De Villiers, who is a representative of our extreme right, a fundamentalist Catholic and openly racist and homophobe. Sure, even Hitler is sometimes right, but quoting an extreme-right politician who viscerally oppose the French Revolution because the French Revolution broke the power the Catholic Church had on the government, and stripped the priests from the powers they had over daily life. What a reference on a community dedicated to refining the art of human rationality.
I was comparing the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars with the 18th century standard of warfare (basically, the standards that held from the 1648 Peace of Westphalia until the French Revolution). It is true that some previous wars in European history had been just as awful, like for example the Thirty Years’ war. However, the innovations brought by the French Revolution destroyed a century and a half long tradition of reasonably limited and civilized warfare. To see this, it’s enough to look at the casualty figures of 18th century European wars prior to 1789 and compare them with the death toll of those in the period 1792-1815. It’s an order of magnitude difference.
Moreover, some of your claims are wildly inaccurate. In particular, the first mass conscription (levée en masse) was levied in the summer of 1793, six years before Napoleon’s Brumaire coup. And it was by no means “the whole [F]rench people” that stood behind the revolutionary regime. A very large percentage was monarchist and saw the Revolution as an illegal and tyrannical usurpation—for which they had at least some good reason, considering that it immediately abolished centuries old traditional institutions of local autonomy and submitted them straight to the dictate from Paris. You yourself said that “there were many people inside France trying to destroy the Revolution from inside” because they didn’t like the change. Does this mean that, according to you, these people deserved the Terror to be unleashed against them?
In some places, like the Vendée, the monarchists had overwhelming support—which was crushed by the revolutionary regime in a campaign of mass atrocities whose scale and brutality would truly not be repeated in Europe until the 20th century totalitarians took over. (If you think my assertion about the Nazis is incorrect, can you name some campaign of atrocities in Europe between the French Revolution and the Nazis that rose to the same level? Perhaps some things that happened in Eastern Europe in the post-WW1 chaos would qualify.)
The assertion that “[t]here is no ethnic conflict that was started [or] inspired by the French Revolution” is also absurd. If anything, the German-French rivalry and revanchism that was to produce a series of cataclysmic wars in the next 150 years was a direct consequence of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Moreover, nothing like the European nationalist ideologies that would cause all the strife and wars in the subsequent 200 years existed before the French Revolution. The novel idea of a centralized and ethnically uniform nation-state that is the very essence of nationalism was at the center of the French revolutionary project. (This is especially obvious in the revolutionary government’s policy of eliminating local languages and dialects and forcible imposition of linguistic uniformity.) Once such ideas start taking hold in ethnically diverse places, the consequences are terrible almost without exception.
In Haiti, the story is much more complicated than what you say, and altogether horrible—certainly nothing like the idealistic story of successful abolition of slavery that you suggest. When the formal abolition came in 1794, the slave rebellion that would ultimately turn into all-out race war was already well underway. The bungling politics of the republican commissioners newly arrived from France, principally Sonthonax, certainly didn’t help the situation. (It is true that the conclusive and most brutal events happened after Napoleon’s unsuccessful invasion in 1801-02, but the situation had turned very nasty even before that.) And in any case, the worldwide slave trade was abolished by the Royal Navy prompted by British abolitionist politics. The French Revolution had nothing to do with that.
Your constant pointing out of all the nice and sweet things that the revolutionary regime was declaring on paper is rather absurd considering what this regime was doing in practice. (And a more in-depth analysis would in fact show that some of these nice-sounding ideas did in fact predictably lead to awful consequences when attempted in practice, while many of them weren’t at all nice when one looks at what they really meant behind the lofty language.)
All in all, you seem to be repeating a very naive and cartoonish version of events. I suggest that you read more on this historical period if you’d like to discuss it seriously.
Correction: The first levée en masse was in February 1793, not the summer of 1793 as I wrote originally. This however goes even further towards the point I was making.
Since you are issuing a post, not a book, you had to leave out most of the crimes of the French revolution, such as the infamous red terror, which was the very essence of the French revolution and its most emblematic act, the prototype and original for all the many terrors and mass murders of the twentieth century, the inspiration for all our most evil intellectuals.
Among the many crimes you left out was two years of hyperinflation with price control between 1793 and 1795, which employed the most savage terror to control prices, and imposed widespread famine, which famine produced massive riots, which were in turn put down by measures of extraordinary brutality.
Anti-Jewish pogroms killed somewhat more people than the tens of thousands in the Terror. According to Wikipedia, 70,000 to 250,000 during the civil war period in Russia.
You’re right, of course—the 1917 Russian Revolution and the subsequent civil war involved atrocities on all sides that easily beat the French revolutionary terror.
For some interesting reason, when I make a query to my brain on what happened in Europe in some period X-Y, the answer usually excludes Russia unless I ponder it more carefully. Even when I wrote about post-WW1 Eastern Europe in my above comment, I was vaguely thinking of the Freikorps fighting it out with Poles and Czechs rather than the Russian Civil War.
It would certainly mean moving the goalposts if I insisted on excluding Russia from Europe, but it still says something that you have to go all the way to the rise of the hardcore 20th century totalitarians to find similar examples.
On the other hand, it’s standard to the point of cliché to regard the events in France post-1789 as specifically foreshadowing those in Russia post-1917 (with Lenin “correcting” some of Robespierre’s mistakes, for instance making sure all the heirs of the old regime were dead).
You compare the French revolution with the other totalitarian terror regimes it prefigured and inspired.
To be fair, white terror can be extremely nasty and non-selective too. This was true in the time of Sulla as much as in the 20th century, including the killings by the Russian Whites cited by Lessdazed.
Sulla then resigned the dictatorship, restored the Republic, and returned to private life, though the fact that such measures as Sulla’s were necessary to protect and revive the Republic should have demonstrated it could not be revived.
In general, white terrors are response to red terrors, or to the dire and imminent threat of a red terror.
In war, both sides always do dreadful things, for to win, you have to be twice as bad as the bad guys. If one side is better than the other, they demonstrate moral superiority by how they behave after they have won, not by how they win. Compare what followed the white terror in Taiwan, with what followed the red terror on the Chinese mainland.
Granted being bad can be useful, being bad can also be useless or counterproductive. As it often is the latter two, the principle doesn’t hold.
In this context, his value system isn’t the issue. There’s nothing that Vladimir is using that’s a questionable claim. He linked to an article which quotes De Villiers and doesn’t say something like “oh, and mainstream scholars think this is bullcrap”- because the events unquestionably occurred. In fact the article quotes mainstream historians as agreeing with De Villiers on the factual history. The only reason De Villiers is bringing it up is for his own political goals. But that doesn’t impact the factual accuracy of the points.
In general, it is a hallmark of rationality to take facts where they come from even when they come from very distasteful sources. Thus, we’ve had in our rationality quotes threads quotes from people as diverse as Jack Chick, Ted Kaczynski, C. S. Lewis, and G.K. Chesterton.
Sure, in the case of De Villiers if he made a specific factual claim and was the primary source for that claim I’d be less inclined to trust it than if say Richard Dawkins made the same statement but that’s completely distinct from someone happening to be willing to cite an article that De Villiers appears in.
Politics is the mind-killer.
To be fully precise, the exact extent of the revolutionary atrocities in Vendée and elsewhere is a matter of some controversy. Unfortunately, as it happens with all atrocities that become an issue in ideological battles, there has been both exaggeration and denial motivated by sympathies for one or another side. However, as far as I know, there is no serious disagreement among historians that the extent of atrocities was unparalleled by anything else in Europe that happened in the centuries between the end of the Thirty Years’ War and the rise of the major 20th century totalitarians (i.e. Bolsheviks and Nazis).
(Again, if I’m missing some counterexample, I’d be really curious to hear it.)
To give another illustration, one way in which the French revolutionary regime clearly stands out is its really extreme bloodthirsty and exterminationist rhetoric, which is again unlike anything else seen in European history until the outbreak of extreme 20th century totalitarianism. (Some of this rhetoric is still reflected in the lyrics of the Marseillaise calling for the spilling of “impure blood.”) When such rhetoric becomes mainstream, similar deeds usually also follow. (The advocates of “hate speech” restrictions actually have a point when they argue this, however much they tend to be confused or disingenuous otherwise.)
On the other hand, the fact about the European wars in the period 1648-1789 being limited, professional, disciplined, and reasonably considerate towards civilians is completely uncontroversial in mainstream history. The standard name for the type of war in this period is “cabinet wars” (German Kabinettskriege). The Wikipedia page gives a concise summary.
Never mind, I agree.
” are murderous thugs” is hate speech that is apt to result in race war even if it is true of a disproportionate minority of that group, indeed particularly if it is true of a small but disproportionate minority of that group.
″ no-hablo-english with no job purchased million dollar houses no money down” is also categorized as hate speech, but is more likely to result in responsible lending policies than race war.
We’ve had stupid quotes in the quotes thread from all sorts of smart, dumb, misguided, insane, and perceptive people. Do you mean to say that LW has collectively upvoted quotes from those people?
That’s a good point. But yes, we have collectively upvoted such quotes:
Jack Chick quote upvoted to +19.
G. K. Chesterton quote upvoted +14. (There is possible bias since the person who gave the quote was Eliezer.)
C.S Lewis quote upvoted to +18.
Ted Kaczynski quote upvoted to +8.
For that matter we’ve also had a quote from the Time Cube Guy voted up to +10.
People excuse by citing intentions, and accuse by citing consequences.
It seems like that’s the implicit goal of nearly every ideology, for after it’s universally adopted.
It seems to be possible either way, excusing by citing consequences and accusing by citing intentions alike. Your commentary seems to lack explanatory power.
(On the other hand, the point about the evidence being filtered is well-taken.)
Intentions are usually actually good. It’s true people defend and attack on both avenues simultaneously to see what sticks, but the reality is usually good intentions leading to bad effects (not net effects, this is assumed to be true of all individual outcomes through the halo effect), so rhetorical moves count on the audience to assume intentions and effects are correlated while citing true and incontrovertible things about intentions or effects, depending on the side.
...
I’ve edited my comment several times, yet I remain quite unsure as to what I should say.
I defend kilobug here; It’s not as bad as it looks. Each unnecessary Hitler reference is fractionally as bad as the previous, as Godwin’s law is about the subject arising in the first place.
What’s more, Vladmir_M referenced Hitler in an argument that something bad wouldn’t be repeated until Hitler. That’s not hypothetical, that references a terrible thing in the technically true rhetorical construct of “X is/was the worst thing since/until Y” where Y is/was worse than X, possibly by orders of magnitude, but the brain associates X and Y as similar regardless, in a way that is inappropriate.
kilobug only mentioned Hitler as a most extreme example of bad character, but it was clearly hypothetical. It’s a cheap rhetorical move, maybe, but I think it’s worse to say something is the “worst thing since.until Hitler”, even if true, if that thing is orders of magnitude less bad (for several reasons), since it’s not taking a hypothetical extreme case.
I think Hitler’s killing program was much worse than Revolutionary France’s for several reasons. First, quantitatively, hundreds of times as many innocents were killed. Second, France’s was a case of willingness to convict nine innocents lest a guilty person go free, while a significant part of Germany’s was gratuitous—this is a qualitative difference.
The news media love to use the “since” construction to inflame things and exaggerate importance, i.e. “This is the worst economic slowdown since the Great Depression” may mean “This economic slowdown is slightly worse than the one in the 1970′s that you remember and have in your mind as a close comparable and that by all rights we should be comparing it to, also we either forgot 1937 or include it as part of the ‘Great Depression’”.
That’s a fair point. I shouldn’t have used the Nazi comparison due to its rhetorical effects that always obscure and sidetrack the concrete issue at hand.
When I wrote that, I had in mind specifically the history of Western Europe, and what a typical inhabitant of a Western European country would have seen through the centuries. If you plot the severity of atrocities that a random Western European would have had the chance to witness in his local region of residence after the Peace of Westphalia (1648), using any reasonable measure of their severity, there would definitely be sharp peaks around the time of the revolutionary/Napoleonic wars and WW2, with other peaks such as the Franco-Prussian War and even WW1 significantly lower.
But yes, I do plead guilty to rhetoric that, even if not strictly inaccurate, goes too far into the Dark Arts territory.
I don’t find it rhetorical, I find it factual. If we avoid stating certain facts in order to avoid offending certain sensibilities, then we are committing an error of omission. As I see it, in this case you were not pulled from the brink of Dark Arts. Rather, you were pulled from the brink of political incorrectness. Which is not the same thing at all.
When any group is being sufficiently totalitarian in the name of lofty ideals, I support comparisons to other totalitarian groups, which may include the Nazis and the Soviets (among others). I believe that such comparisons can help us learn from history. Of course, the subject of such comparisons will always be both quantitatively and qualitatively different, but the Nazis and the Soviets provide intersubjective references points for certain political ideas gone wrong.
Of course, it could be more rhetorically pragmatic to swallow these analogies even when accurate depending on the audience.
Upvoted since I definitely agree that comparing anything to Hitler or Nazis causes fairly consistent and predictable problems in the rationality of responses.
I think kilobug goes too far in supporting the French Revolution—I think it’s good that France no longer has even a symbolic monarch, but I agree with Vladimir that kilobug glosses over the loss of human life and freedoms that occurred during the revolution. Saying things like this without backing them up with a lot of evidence (which probably doesn’t exist given the absolutes used to qualify the statement), sounds overly idealistic(emphasis mine):
I live in Canada, which still has a symbolic monarch. What precise advantage, in your opinion, does France enjoy over Canada because it no longer has one? Or do you think that there is some difference that makes the lack of a monarch beneficial only for the French?
I think I should emphasize that I don’t think anything horrible should be done to any current symbolic monarch, and I do not approve of what happened to the full monarchs during the French Revolution. However, symbolic monarchs are very expensive politicians to maintain, and whether or not they gain their position is an accident of birth. They may not have absolute power like a full monarch would have, and therefore I disapprove of them less than I would a full monarch (since their role is quite different), but I still disapprove.
I should note that I disapprove of full monarchs because I disapprove of so few people holding such great power in society. I disapprove of symbolic monarchs because I don’t feel any one politician should occupy a position where they are automatically made so important over others.
For those symbolic monarchs today who perform in their current roles admirably, I feel it would be better to simply drop the title and change it to something more reflective of their political duties, drop the inheritance of the role, and change the income from the state to something more in line with what other politicians receive. The lifelong nature of the role can be kept if this still better fulfills some function of the new, but similar, role.
To answer your two questions, there’s not much of a practical advantage, but I simply prefer the lack of a symbolic monarch because I dislike monarchy. I don’t think this would make the lack of a symbolic monarch only beneficial to the French. However, I do think this is mostly a cultural and/or individual preference a person may have.
Supporting Notes
Compare the price of an example symbolic monarchy vs an example president. While its true that a symbolic monarch probably isn’t going to strain the finances of a relatively rich country, I must also consider the price of an example prime minister of the same country as for the symbolic monarch and I have to disagree that they should be worth so much less than the symbolic monarch (this is irrespective of who the monarch is or how many separate countries share the monarch between them, and more about how I rate the value of the respective positions, since the individuals come and go).
You link to a web page that says: “Latest figures show the cost of supporting the Royal Family has gone up to nearly £37m a year.” That’s a drop in the bucket. The American Congress is much more expensive to maintain. I refer not to their salaries but to what they cost the US. For example, when Congress passes a law that requires that a hundred billion dollars be spent on something that does more harm than good, then the Congress has cost us a hundred billion dollars. In comparison to that, the damage done to the country’s purse by the Royal Family is pocket money.
Much of your reply is devoted to stating your preferences, which tells us only about you (you are signaling your political allegiances). However, the question that was asked was not about your preferences. It was “what precise advantage, in your opinion, does France enjoy...” and “do you think that there is some difference that makes the lack of a monarch beneficial only for the French...” Your preferences and your political allegiances are not quite the same thing as what advantages and benefits a population enjoys.
I view a question about my opinion as a question about my preferences. In fact, I don’t think there’s any way a person can answer that question without referencing their preferences. Of course, I did try to go into more detail about what specific preferences were involved and reference facts when applicable, but I’m not really sure what benefits or advantages other people would enjoy, excepting those who agree with me. This is why I didn’t reference that particular preference.
I’m not really sure why you think the comparison to the laws congress passes is applicable. As far as I understand, a symbolic monarchy doesn’t pass laws. Are you saying that people who pass laws should be eliminated because they can make awful choices? The consequences of people’s choices is entirely dependent on how much power they have. Also, I was only commenting about the inequality of their pay, not so much that it is a burden on their society (as I stated in my previous post). Once again, this is a personal preference.
Obviously there are tons of confounding variables here that make the net benefit hard to measure, but clearly the main advantage is the ability of the population to elect the head of state.
(Also, Canada has the additional disadvantage of sharing its monarch with other countries; the reasons why this is problematic at least in theory should go without saying.)
I don’t think this would be the right place to enter a general discussion of these issues, but I must note that your response reflects beliefs that are, in my opinion, far below the standards of intellectual scrutiny that are supposed to be observed on LW. In particular, you seem to be assuming that, by any reasonable standards, democratic election of the head of state is clearly a good thing, while personal unions between countries are clearly bad. You also treat these claims as obvious.
To me it seems that both these claims are easily falsified by real-world evidence, and even setting aside that stronger rebuttal that would take some effort to justify, there is certainly no rational reason to treat them as self-evident.
I don’t think that’s fair. We all have a great many beliefs inherited from general culture, more than we have the opportunity to scrutinize (especially without specific prompting). Even if my standards of intellectual scrutiny are very high, some of my beliefs are bound to be false; if you want to judge whether I’m meeting the LW standards of intellectual scrutiny, you should observe how I update in the face of new evidence or contrary argument, not necessarily the content of my starting beliefs themselves.
Only ceteris paribus, however; and I was careful not to claim that democratic election is necessarily a good thing on net in any specific case (such as that of the countries mentioned), but only a desideratum to be weighed against whatever disadvantages it may involve in a particular context.
“Clearly present certain problems” would be a better paraphrase.
If you interpreted them in the unreasonably strong senses that I have disclaimed above, I can see why you might think so. However, when understood in the sense I intended, I think my claims are perfectly true and hardly worthy of controversy.
Again, I would by no means claim it is self-evident that France’s governmental structure is superior to Canada’s on the whole; only that France’s has at least some desirable features that Canada’s lacks.
OK, pardon if I have interpreted your claims too uncharitably, or if I sounded too personally critical. I didn’t mean to pick on you as having low intellectual standards or anything like that—I merely wanted to point out that your reply sounded like a cached thought of a sort that, in a different context, would likely raise a red flag for many people here, possibly including you, thus potentially indicating some widespread biases reflected in failure to notice the cached thoughts in this particular case.
When you say that “clearly the main advantage is the ability of the population to elect the head of state,” this can mean, to the best of my interpretation, either that this ability is somehow valuable in itself (so that this value should be counted as a positive term separately from its practical consequences), or that it self-evidently has advantageous implications. Do you think this interpretation is incorrect or uncharitable? I certainly find neither the former nor the latter possible meaning as “hardly worthy of controversy.”
Your subsequent comments indicate that you had in mind the former meaning, i.e. that popular election of the head of state is somehow desirable and valuable in itself, which however may need to be weighted against its possible bad practical implications. But as I said, I definitely don’t see how this claim is self-evident. How exactly would you justify it?
As for the issue of personal union (i.e. sharing the head of state with other countries), you characterized it as an “additional disadvantage,” thus implying (again to the best of my interpretation) that it is indeed, on the net, a disadvantage. But I don’t see how this could possibly be self-evident either—off-hand, I can easily produce a bunch of reasons why it could plausibly have both disadvantages and advantages. (As an off-hand example of an advantage, as a Canadian, you can still get some degree of British consular protection.) Which of these prevail of course depends both on empirical questions and how we choose to weight individual concerns. But again, I really don’t see how such an assertion could be “hardly worth of controversy.”
OK, pardon if I have interpreted your claims too uncharitably. I didn’t mean to pick on you as having low intellectual standards or anything like that—I merely wanted to point out that your reply sounded like a cached thought that
Hmm...
Every totalitarian terror state has been consciously inspired by the French Revolution and Red Terror—Marx invokes the red terror as a good idea, though perhaps not carried out with sufficient thoroughness.
While “X was the worst thing until Y” can inappropriately associate X and Y, there are in this case many connections and similarities between X and Y.
Critics of the French Revolution foresaw twentieth century totalitarianism in its actions and ideology:
Joseph de Maistre foretold:
Since reference to Hitler automatically provokes irrationality, I would have said, and come to think of it I did say, that the French revolution prefigured the totalitarian terror regimes of the twentieth century.
Every democratic and freedom-loving state has also been inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
Also everything good and everything bad in the Western World since the Rise of the Roman Empire, has been influenced from the Roman Empire. This includes the czars of Russia being called “Czars” (from Caesar), and the Senate of the United States being called a “Senate”.
Saying that a world-smashing thing helps inspire subsequent things, both bad and good, isn’t a testament to its badness—it’s a testament to its importance.
That’s the phrase you use to avoid provoking the irrationality that comes from referencing Hitler?
People are well trained to go instant frothing at the mouth crazy at such words as “Hitler”, “Nazi”, and “fascist”. Four legs good, two legs bad.
But such words as “totalitarian” and “terror” instead provoke the anti anti communist reflex and the anti Islamophobia reflex, where with great sophistication, calmness, maturity and civility they assure us that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.
Downvoted: If you know these words provoke irrational responses, then that’s all the more reason that you shouldn’t have used them. We’re a forum that seeks to promote rationality, not irrationality.
Haha, actually that didn’t even occur to me.
Downvoted for this.