War, pestilence, famine

by William H. Benson

March 30, 2020

Voltaire, the French philosopher, stated his creed in his Philosophical Dictionary. “I believe that theological disputes are at once the most ridiculous farce, and the most dreadful scourge on the earth, after war, pestilence, and famine.”

If we set aside Voltaire’s “theological disputes,” three scourges remain: “war, pestilence, famine.”

Throughout human history, people have lacked crucial pieces of knowledge to understand why certain events transpire, and the reasons that underlie them. The inception of a battle, of an insect or microbial infestation, of widespread hunger remain humankind’s most deadly of mysteries.

For example, the 60 Englishmen, out of 500, who lived through the “starving times” in Jamestown, in Virginia, during the winter of 1609-1610, knew nothing of what the Native American populations had endured throughout the previous century.

Millions had died, across North and South America, because of the diseases that the Europeans had brought with them, including small pox, cholera, and tuberculosis, among a host of others. The native population did not have the same immunity to the diseases that Europeans had acquired over centuries.

As recent as 50 years ago, anthropologists insisted that the Native American population at the time of Columbus’s arrival was about one million, but Jared Diamond, in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, suggests that the Native American population stood at “around 20 million.”

Entire villages along the Atlantic coast and throughout the Mississippi River Valley were wiped out.

Yet, the governor at Jamestown, said, “Indians killed as fast without [outside the fort] as Famine and Pestilence did within.”

Another example. The year 1816 is now called, “the year without a summer.” In Europe and North America, spring failed to arrive. “Temperatures in New York in May were below freezing almost every day; on June 2, snow fell in Albany, New York; on July 7, it was so cold, crops had stopped growing.”

Harvests failed to yield the usual wheat, oats, and potatoes in Britain, Ireland, and Germany. People rioted, they stole, they starved. “It was the worst famine of 19th-century Europe.”

Most people at the time did not know that a volcano, Mount Tambora, in modern-day Indonesia, had erupted twice in early April of 1815, that caused “a volcanic winter.”

Called “the most destructive explosion on earth in the past 10,000 years,” it “blasted twelve cubic miles of gases, dust, and rock into the atmosphere,” obscuring the sun for two years.

A third example. On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress for a declaration of war on Germany, and Congress agreed. The Great War in Europe had already killed millions of young men fighting in trenches, and it would continue its killing spree for another year and a half.

Wilson and the Congressmen were unaware in 1917, that the war would unleash a deadly pestilence, the Spanish flu epidemic, that would kill between 20 and 50 million people, perhaps as many as 100 million, through 1918, 1919, and 1920.

The pandemic may have begun in France, in Kansas or Boston, or in China. Scientists are unsure, but most agree that the Allies’ soldiers were “the main disseminators.” They caught it, transported it to the battlefields, and then carried it back home. It spread like a prairie wildfire.

A possible location for where this strain of influenza first began was a British hospital camp situated near Étaples, in France, where 100,000 soldiers—chemical attack victims—passed through everyday. For food, the hospital’s cooks daily slaughtered chickens, ducks, turkeys, and pigs.

One theory put forth is that the virus began in “the poultry, mutated, then migrated to the pigs,” and then jumped into the concentrated human population.

A fourth example. On April 2, 1979, spores of anthrax escaped from a biological weapons plant near the city of Sverdlovsk, in Russia, causing the deaths of about 100 victims. Years later, scientists determined that workers in the plant had “forgotten to replace an exhaust system filter.”

The Russian people suffered much throughout the twentieth century. First, there was Lenin, then the Russian famine of 1921-1922, then Stalin, then the Soviet famine of 1932-1933, then Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union, then the German siege on Leningrad that starved to death 800,000 of its citizens.

One wonders, “did the Russian people suffer more from war and famine than most of the world’s other people?” To top it off, their biological weapons slipped out of control and killed themselves.

War, pestilence, and famine, Voltaire’s choices for the three most dreadful scourges known to humankind. Most tragic is when they coincide, occur at the same time. The sadness then compounds.

Karl Marx

by William H. Benson

March 17, 2020

A month ago, I happened to catch a “Planet Money” podcast called “Overrated / Underrated.” An economist named Tyler Cowen, a professor at George Mason University, fielded a series of questions, and one was, “Who is the most underrated economist ever?” He answered, “Adam Smith.”

The next question was, “Who is the most overrated economist ever?” Cowan replied, “Karl Marx. His work influenced the Soviet Union, eastern Europe, and Communist China for decades, and most of what he said was wrong.

“Capitalism does not have to destroy itself, and the paradise of the workers, the proletariat that Marx envisioned, is not ever going to rule society very well. Marx’s reputation today is in tatters, but he is still overrated, and some of his ideas are making a comeback.”

The British historian, Paul Johnson, wrote a devastating critique of Karl Marx in 1988. In the third chapter of Johnson’s book Intellectuals, Johnson paints an ugly literary portrait of Marx, as a failed academic, poet, philosopher, scientist, economist, journalist, moralist, husband, and father.

Although Marx achieved a doctorate as a classical scholar at the University of Jena, in Prussia, he never taught at a university, because his revolutionary ideas forced him to flee Prussia with his wife Jenny, and their children, and settle in London.

There, the family lived a poverty-stricken life, in a dirty, dingy, dust-covered apartment. He worked days, sometimes nights. He slept whenever and wherever he wanted, oblivious to his wife and children. When awake, he smoked cheap cigars, and filled the apartment with a constant cloud of smoke.

For most of Marx’s life, he was stateless, an exile, a dreamer of revolution. He chose not to seek employment. Instead, for thirty-four years, until his death on March 14, 1883, he spent his days in the reading room in the British Museum, transcribing other thinkers’ ideas into over a thousand notebooks.

He said, “I am a machine condemned to devour books.”

From this mass of scribbling over a lifetime, Marx managed to publish just two books, “Communist Manifesto” in 1848, and the first volume of “Capital.” His associate, Frederich Engels, then published the second and third volumes of “Capital” after Marx’s death.

In addition, Marx wrote a stream of awful poetry. Paul Johnson said, “Savagery is a characteristic note of his verse, with intense pessimism about the human condition, hatred, and pacts with the devil. Marx is an eschatological writer from start to finish.”

One of his poetic characters says, “I shall howl gigantic curses at mankind.” Another says, “Every-thing that exists deserves to perish.” A “Day of Judgment” or a “Doomsday” waits in the wings. He writes, “History is the judge, its executioner the proletariat.”

Paul Johnson points out that Marx’s poetic vision fueled his economic vision. In other words, he began with a vision of terror, death, and destruction, and then worked backwards to find “evidence that made it inevitable, rather than forward to it.” None of this approach was scientific.

Indeed, Marx failed to complete any basic research that would have given his work scientific stature. Johnson says, “so far as we know, Marx never set foot in a mill, factory, mine, or other industrial workplace in the whole of his life.” He was without a clue what went on in a business.

He felt only contempt for “skilled workers, watchmakers, printers, shoemakers, because they were self-educated, disciplined, solemn, well-mannered, and moderate about the practical steps required to transform society.” Yet, these were the proletariat, those Marx believed would someday rule the world.

Marx was critical of them because they refused to join in his “apocalyptic visions of revolution,” and “to talk his academic jargon.” “Practical solutions to actual problems of work and wages” he had no patience for or interest in. “He refused to investigate working conditions in industry himself.”

Yet, Karl Marx hired one employee, his wife’s maid, a diminutive woman named Helen Demuth. She was permitted a room and meals in the Marx’s apartment, but he expected her to work day and night. “Marx though never paid her a penny,” “his most bizarre act of personal exploitation.”

“The proletariat have nothing to lose, but their chains, a world to gain. Workers of the world unite!”

Most tragic though was when Karl Marx’s savage, apocalyptic, and impractical ideas fell into the hands of the wrong people. Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung adopted Marxist philosophy, and with it, they tore the world asunder, murdering millions along the way.

Lenin once said, “Ideas are more powerful than guns.” Indeed they are, both those ideas that are true and those that are false and unworkable, like Karl Marx’s.

Adam Smith

by William H. Benson

March 6, 2020

Last week, I happened to hear an economist named Tyler Cowen, professor at George Mason University, play a game called “Overrated / Underrated” on National Public Radio’s podcast “Planet Money.” An interviewer asked Cowen, “Who is the most underrated economist ever?”

Cowen surprised the interviewer when he replied, “Adam Smith.”

Cowen admitted that Adam Smith remains, “a highly rated economist, but most people do not grasp the full subtleties of his work, how well it holds up, how deep the history there is in it, how good a philosopher he was, and how interdisciplinary a thinker he was.

“There are innovations in Smith’s work that people fail to pick up on. On the major issues of economics, Adam Smith was correct. His work, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, is a long book, and almost no one reads it today. People think they know it, but they don’t.”

Cowen is correct about one thing. My copy of “Wealth of Nations” contains 590 pages, a long book.

Adam Smith published “Wealth of Nations” in 1776, the same year when Thomas Paine published “Common Sense” and when Thomas Jefferson wrote The Declaration of Independence.

Unlike Paine and Jefferson, Smith though was not an Englishman who lived in the American colonies. Instead he was born a Scot, was raised by his widowed mother in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, midway between Edinburgh and St. Andrews, and was educated at Glasgow University and Oxford.

He joined academia in 1751, taught logic and moral philosophy for 14 years at Glasgow University, but in 1764, he retired to Kirkcaldy to write The Wealth of Nations.

In its first chapter, Smith emphasizes the advantages of “division of labor.”

He gives an example of a pin factory. With only ten employees, it makes “forty-eight thousand pins in one day.” Thus, Smith says, each employee “makes a tenth part of the total,” or 4,800 pins in a day, but if each worked alone, he would not have made “twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day.”

In his second chapter, Smith suggests that workers should act out of self-interest, rather than out of pity, charity, or benevolence for others. “Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.”

Workers who act out of self-interest want to know, “what is there in this bargain, this offer, for me?” But the charitable-minded say, “let me help you?,” without thinking of themselves.

Smith writes, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” They want paid for the products they sell.

Smith insists that a self-interested worker will benefit the larger society.

He writes, “a worker intends only his own gain, not the public interest. He is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. By pursuing his own interest, he promotes that of society more than when he really intends to promote it.”

In 1991, the economist Paul Samuelson asked a pointed question, “Can the desperate citizenries of Poland, Czechoslovakia, of Mainland China, and North Korea, of the Soviet Union and Cuba, even begin to understand this insight by the professor of the Scottish Enlightenment?”

As for the American Revolutionary War, Smith suggests in Wealth of Nations that the cost to maintain Britain’s empire was “not worth the cost of keeping it.” The taxes that shopkeepers in England were paying, plus the interest on the debt to fight the war against the 13 British colonies, was not worth the extra profit that the shopkeepers earned when they sold their products to the colonists.

Thomas Paine added to that argument in “Common Sense.” He said “Britain is oppressed with a debt of upwards of one hundred and forty millions sterling, and she pays upwards of four millions interest.”

Smith also insisted that a nation’s government should invest in human capital: educate and train the nation’s workforce, and provide health care for its citizens. Wages will vary depending upon the number of years of training that each job requires, and how odious or distasteful the job is.

Smith disapproved of English schools, in contrast to Scotland’s universities, because he believed the English teachers unmotivated and ill-trained. He said that “the professors there had given up altogether even the pretense of teaching.”

Adam Smith, father of classical economics, never married. He said, “I am a beau [boyfriend] only to my books.” He died in Edinburgh on July 19, 1790.

Next time in these pages, the most overrated economist ever.

Coronavirus / COVID-19

by William H. Benson

February 20, 2020

In October of last year, Eric Toner, a scientist at Johns Hopkins, ran a simulation of a pandemic of a coronavirus. After six months, his simulation indicated that all countries would report cases of the virus, and that the virus would end the lives of 65 million people, a chilling and alarming estimate.

Toner was not shocked when he heard in January that a coronavirus had appeared in Wuhan, in Hubei Province, in China. He said, “It’s part of the world we live in now. It’s the age of epidemics.”

On Feb. 11, 2020, the World Health Organization gave this novel coronavirus a name, COVID-19. The 19 refers to the year 2019, when it first appeared.

On Dec. 31, 2019, four Wuhan residents were admitted to the hospital with influenza-like symptoms, sore throats, headaches, and severe pneumonia. If untreated, septic shock and multi-organ failure would result. As of mid-February, the coronavirus has infected tens of thousands, with little signs of slowing down.

This new coronavirus resembles the 2003 outbreak of SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, that infected 8,098 people in 37 countries, and ended the lives of 774 people before health officials contained it. SARS also began in China, but in Guangdong province.

Both SARS and now COVID-19 first infected people who visited China’s wet markets. These are open-air markets where sellers sell live and dead animals, both domesticated and wild.

Chickens, for example, arrive in cages, and the sellers butcher them in front of the buyers. Fish are sliced open and gutted on the market’s floor. Skinned hares hang from strings attached to metal frames. Exotic animals caught deep in China’s forests are brought to the wet market where they are butchered.

The wet markets bring animals and humans together in congested areas, creating ideal conditions for zoonosis, or “spillover,” a point when a microbe jumps from animal to human.

Health officials have determined that human beings first caught the SARS virus from a weasel-like mammal called a masked palm civet, and they are convinced now that men and women first caught COVID-19 from pangolins, an animal that looks like a cross between an anteater and an armadillo.

“A group of researchers from South China Agricultural University found that samples from infected coronavirus patients and pangolins were 99% identical.”

Both of those spillovers from those two animal reservoirs occurred at a Chinese wet market.

Officials are confident though that it was first bats that infected the masked palm civet and also the pangolin. The virus in both cases jumped from bats to wild animals to men and women, who then, in turn, infected others through a cough or a sneeze.

“It is no coincidence that some of the worst viral disease outbreaks in recent years—SARS, MERS, Ebola, Marburg, and the COVID-19—originated in bats.”

What is it about bats and viruses?

Scientists have discovered that bat cells are unique, in that they are on constant alert for a foreign intruder, like a virus. “Viral infection in these bats leads to a swift response that walls the virus out of cells.” The bat’s cells will erect cellular barricades that block the virus from penetrating into the cell.

Although not infected itself, the bat carries the virus. “It becomes a unique reservoir of rapidly reproducing and highly transmissible viruses.” It infects others through its saliva, urine, or feces.

Because human beings’ cells do not display that same skill at blocking out a virus, a man or woman’s cells will succumb to the coronavirus’s attack without offering sufficient resistance.

A coronavirus exists at a midpoint between alive and not alive. Inside, it carries certain genetic material, either DNA or RNA, and on its surface is a protective coating that features numerous spikes pointed outwards, giving it a crown-like appearance, hence its name, “corona,” Latin for crown.

This virus cannot move, thrive, or reproduce on its own. Instead, it strives to enter into a host animal’s cells and replicate itself there again and again, until it ends the host’s life.

The estimate of 65 million dead that Toner’s simulation arrived at is not far-fetched. The Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918, due to the H1N1influenza virus, killed at least 15 million and possibly as many as 100 million, mostly young men and women in the prime of their lives.

As of mid-February, the coronavirus COVID-19 has ended the lives of a little more than 1,000 people, a figure greater than SARS’s total death count.

Health officials will continue to contain its spread “through quarantines, disease surveillance, and emphasizing rigorous hygiene practices,” but at this time, no one knows how many will succumb? A vaccine may require months or years of development. We now live in “the age of epidemics.”

Queen Elizabeth II

by William H. Benson

February 5, 2020

After George VI, King of England, passed away on Feb. 6, 1952, his eldest daughter, Elizabeth, then just 25, became Queen Elizabeth II on that day, although her coronation at Westminster Abbey did not occur for another 16 months, not until June 2, 1953.

As of this week, Elizabeth has completed 68 years as Queen, and she will turn 94 on April 21, 2020.

On Sept. 9, 2015, Elizabeth became the longest reigning monarch ever, when she surpassed Queen Victoria’s total number of days on the throne. On February 6, 2017, Elizabeth became the first British monarch to celebrate a Sapphire Jubilee, completing 65 years as the royal head of state.

On Nov. 20, 1947, when Elizabeth was just 21, she married Prince Philip Mountbatten. The royal couple celebrated their 72nd wedding anniversary last November. He is now 98. In 2017, he retired from active royal duties and lives a quiet life at the family’s Sandringham estate in Norfolk.

With Philip, Elizabeth produced four children: Charles, Anne, Andrew, and Edward.

The three oldest married, but then later divorced, Charles from Lady Diana, Anne from Mark Phillips, and Andrew from Sarah Ferguson. Edward though still remains married to his wife, Sophie.

Charles then remarried Camilla, Anne remarried Timothy Laurence, but Andrew remains single, although he and Sarah Ferguson share a residence at the family’s Royal Lodge in Windsor.

Prince Charles, heir apparent to the throne, turned 71 last November.

Each of the Queen’s four children produced two children of their own. Charles and Lady Diana had William and Harry. Anne and Mark Phillips had Peter and Zara Phillips. Andrew and Sarah Ferguson had two girls, Beatrice and Eugenie, and Edward and Sophie had Louise and James.

Thus, the Queen has eight grandchildren, four boys and four girls. Of those eight, Charles’ eldest son, William, is second in the line of succession to Great Britain’s throne. Lady Diana gave birth to William on June 21, 1982. He was 15 on Aug. 31, 1997, the day his mother died in a tragic car crash in Paris, France, when fleeing the paparazzi. He is now 37.

William met Catherine Middleton, or Kate, when both attended the University of St. Andrews, in St. Andrews, Scotland, fifty miles north of Edinburgh and the birthplace of golf. They began dating in 2003, and they married on April 29, 2011, also at Westminster Abbey.

Kate gave birth to Prince George, her firstborn son, on July 22, 2013. Now 6 ½, he is third in the line of succession to the throne, and would claim the title King George VII should he take the throne. Kate also gave birth to Princess Charlotte on May 2, 2015, and to Prince Louis on April 23, 2018.

Charles’ second son, Harry, was born on Sept. 15, 1984, and he was 13 when his mother, Lady Diana, was killed. Harry is now 35. He married Meghan Markle, a divorced bi-racial American actress, on May 19, 2018, and she gave birth to a baby boy, Archie Harrison, on May 6, 2019.

Beginning in Nov. of 2019, Harry and Meghan took a six-week break from royal duties, and celebrated Christmas at a luxurious waterfront mansion on Vancouver Island, in British Columbia, Canada, rather than with the Queen and her extended family in the UK.

Then, on Wednesday, Jan. 8, 2020, Harry announced that he and Meghan will “step away from ‘senior’ royal roles and will work toward becoming financially independent. They will now divide their time between Britain and North America.”

The couple agreed to surrender their “Her Royal Highness” titles when they would represent the Queen, although they will retain their designations as Duke and Duchess of Sussex. They also agreed that when in the UK, they will reside in their home, Frogmore Cottage, but they want to repay the £2.4 million of public funds spent to refurbish the Cottage on their behalf.

Reporters have now confirmed that the couple want to purchase a home in Los Angeles, California, Meghan’s hometown, and live there this summer. Meghan may want to return to acting soon.

Then, on Nov. 20, 2019, Prince Andrew, the Queen’s second son, withdrew from his public duties because of intense negative reaction following a television interview on the BBC that focused on his connection with the convicted sex offender, the American Jeffrey Epstein.

The scandal forced the Queen to ask Andrew to move his private office out of Buckingham Palace.

Then, on Friday, Jan. 31, the UK withdrew from the European Union. After months of debate, Brexit finally happened. Who knows what will occur in the weeks and months ahead?

A country and a royal family that takes the Mountbatten-Windsor family name. Royalty does not exempt a family from divorces, a tragic death, a dissatisfied daughter-in-law, or a scandal.

Time’s illusions

by William H. Benson

January 24, 2020

Mother Nature builds chunks of time: a day, a month, a year.

From one sunup to the next defines a day.

One full moon to another full moon—29 ½ days—defines a month. On occasion though, two full moons will fit inside a 30 or 31 day calendar, and that second full moon becomes a Blue Moon. Our next Blue Moon will occur this year, in 2020, on Oct. 31, Halloween.

Nature dictates that a year shall last 365 ¼ days. For three consecutive years, we live 365 days, but then during leap year, the fourth year, we gather the four extra quarters into an extra day, Feb. 29. This year, 2020, is a leap year.

Human beings though have constructed additional blocks of time: the second, the minute, the hour, the week. Wise men from ancient Babylon divided a day into 24 hour slots, an hour into 60 minute units, and a minute into 60 second units, each derived from a base 12 system.

The length of a week though is arbitrary. The ancient Aztecs relied upon two weeks, one that included 13 days and another that included 20 days, and the two worked together.

The ancient Romans looked forward to their “nundinae,” the week’s final eighth day, market day, a tentative weekend, but it was Constantine, Rome’s emperor in 321 A.D., who adopted the seven-day week, due to influence from the East.

Because Christians celebrated the Lord’s Day on Sunday, Constantine set Sunday as the first day of the week, and because the Hebrew people celebrated the Sabbath on Saturday, the week’s seventh day, he set Saturday as the week’s final day. I agree, seven days is sufficient time for a week.

English-speaking people still honor the sun on the week’s first day, the moon on its second day, and certain other ancient gods on its other five days.

The ancient Anglo-Saxons paid homage to a god of war named Tui, and the Vikings had a god of war named Tyr. One or both contributed to the name Tuesday. The Anglo-Saxons’ chief god though was Woden, and we honor him mid-week, on Wednesday.

Thursday refers to Thor, the ancient Vikings’ god of thunder; Friday pays homage to Freya, the Teutonic goddess of love and beauty; and Saturday looks back to Saturn, the Roman god of agriculture.

What is unusual is that Spanish-speaking people call the week’s last day “sabado,” a reference to the ancient Hebrew people’s Sabbath.

We began a new year four weeks ago, in this month of January, although the ancient Romans began their new year in March, near the vernal equinox, in the springtime. A common belief holds that January derives its name from Janus, the two-faced Roman god that has one face looking to the left, back into the past, and a second face looking to the right, forward into the future.

Yet, certain ancient Roman farmers’ almanacs state that January derives its name from Juno, the goddess of marriage and childbirth, wife of Jupiter, and the queen god. From her we also get June.

A new year beckons us forward. Time—as measured in days, weeks, and months—stretches before us. Yet, time belongs to no one. It is a gift from the gods, or from Mother Nature, or the amazing fact that we are here, alive, together on planet Earth, and we wake up every morning.

If we master the seconds, minutes, and hours of our lives, we master the days, months, and years. Along the way, we learn some things, or, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The years teach us things that the days never knew.”

The English poet, William Blake, wrote, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time. The hours of folly are measur’d by the clock, but of wisdom: no clock can measure.”

Emerson also wrote an astonishing essay that he entitled, “Illusions.” He says that, “Every god is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament; there is he alone with the gods alone. On the instant fall snowstorms of illusions.

“He fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that and whose movement and doings he must obey. What is he that he should resist their will, and think or act for himself.

“And when, by and by, for an instant, the air clears and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones—they alone with him alone.”

Oh, yes, time can seem an illusion. It jogs for the young, it sprints for the adult. We grip time and ride it as well as we can, but time slips away before we want it to. We wonder, how to slow down time?

I say, enjoy the year 2020, each second, minute, day, week, and month.