The higher stoopidity

| Gabriel |

I recently listened to Donald Kagan’s Intro to Ancient Greek History (itunes link) course and really enjoyed it. Kagan is of course well-qualified to teach the course (he wrote the book on the Peloponnesian War). In addition, he’s witty and has a definite point of view (he describes Rousseau as a “cancer on humanity”) and the course is in dialogue with issues in other disciplines, like the question of “balancing” in IR poli sci. The most obvious thing (especially in the intro and conclusion lectures) about which Kagan is opinionated is that Western civ a) derives from the Greeks and b) is the ultimate source of, such on-the-whole beneficial things as (lower-case “l”) liberalism, “the tragic vision,” and rationalism.

Putting aside Kagan’s opinions about the “hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go” question, Kagan’s most interesting lens is a methodological tendency that he calls “the higher naivete.” By this he means that we ought to give a heavy presumption in favor of the ancient sources even when they are speaking of things somewhat distant from the ancient writer’s direct knowledge. So if the ancients believed that there was a Trojan War, a Dorian invasion, a historical Homer, etc, then we ought to believe them unless we have good evidence to the contrary, rather than being skeptical of the written sources and demanding confirmation from archaeology. He’s not completely credulous though, for instance (like Plutarch) Kagan thinks that Lycurgus may have been a historical Spartan politician, but didn’t actually create the entire Spartan political-social system whole cloth. More controversially, Kagan reads Thucydides skeptically, seeing him as an apologist for Pericles against a prevailing anti-Pericles consensus for which we have no surviving history but of which we can find hints in Aristophanes. [According to Kagan, the ancient controversy centered on whether Pericles was right to demand that the Megarian decree be decided by arbitration since simply giving into Spartan demands to drop it outright would have been appeasement. There were also accusations against his personal character].

This is interesting in its own right, but in a weird way reminds me of pop music. To paraphrase Tertullian, you might be asking what hath Herodotus to do with (newly inducted Rock and Roll Hall of Famers) Abba? Well, last year I saw Jenn do a paper on the “rockism” critical perspective in which “pop” and other genres are disdained as less serious than rock. When I was younger and really seriously into music (as a fan, not a scientist) I was very much an ardent rockist, but now I’ve achieved what you might call the higher stoopidity. So for instance, when I was in college I thought “Enema of the State” was a disgraceful cheapening of punk rock (which of course is supposed to be really serious), whereas now it’s one of my favorite albums and I haven’t listened to “Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death” in years.

As I see it, rockism is really a special case of romanticism, seeing the artist as an autonomous actor whose work expresses his soul. With the exception of guitar-playing, it denigrates craft, especially when that craft is outsourced to short-term collaborators like songwriters or producers. Both simply aging and a deeper scientific understanding of art as a collaborative process has convinced me that a) craft is really hard and autonomy is a romantic myth and b) self-serious pop music is ridiculous.

David Galenson provides us with a typology of experimentalists (i.e., crafts) vs conceptualists. Although he is mostly interested in 20th century painters, you can apply the method to pretty much any type of art. The original context is interesting though because (unlike Galenson) I hate conceptualist visual art. Once you start thinking about it in a context like that you appreciate that there really is something to craft, including in the much maligned Tin Pan Alley and it’s heirs in Swede-pop (“Tin Pan Fjord”?). You can appreciate the craft with which something is put together even if it doesn’t transcend conventions, genre or otherwise. I mean, Blink-182’s “Don’t Leave Me” is just a beautifully crafted pop song that (like about half the songs on the album) is both musically catchy and lyrically expresses a fairly subtle and ironic take on romantic love.

Likewise from a variety of work — Howard Becker’s Art Worlds, Lena and Peterson’s ASR, Uzzi et al’s work on Broadway, my own work with Esparza and Bonacich on the Oscars — we see that artistic production is inherently and irreducibly collaborative. Once you undermine the autonomous artist you undermine romantic inspiration and the contrast between inspired breakthroughs and hack work starts to look a lot less tenable.

I don’t claim this is a professional opinion so much as a matter of aging, but I also have an increasingly low opinion of pop music that takes itself really seriously. A lot of people like to make fun of Allan Bloom’s essay “on rock music” as the musings of a clueless old snob, but I think he nailed it in criticizing the “infinite seriousness” with which we talk about rock music and its “three great lyrical themes: sex, hate, and a smarmy, hypocritical version of brotherly love.” All three of these Nihiline themes were perfectly captured in the video “Do Something” from Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and especially the “Sodomize Intolerance” sign he holds up at one point:

One of the most self-serious bands of my youth was Rage Against the Machine, who even went so far as to include a reading list in one of their liner notes. Their politics can broadly be summed up by the “arm the homeless” sticker on Tom Morello’s guitar and more broadly as “let’s fantasize about revolutionary violence to eliminate inequality.” [gee, what could possibly go wrong with that?]. Even if rock songs were a coherent means of articulating a political philosophy, and Rage did do a pretty decent job of it,  the kinds of politics they are best suited to express tend towards nihilism. The don’t-fuck-with-me ideologies of Mikhail Bakunin or Franz Fanon (or on the right, Robert Nozick) are really compelling and energizing which is why they can make for great pop music. In contrast it’s hard to imagine a really exciting and angry song advocating a centrist ideology of a basically liberal economy as overseen by sensible regulation and a moderate welfare state. (Now climbing to the top of the pop charts is the Wonks’ hit single “let’s make a revenue-neutral swap of the payroll tax for a pigovian carbon tax” from the album “Unintended Consequences”). The only examples I can think of for political but centrist pop music are Dropkick Murphys (center-left) and Oingo Boingo (center-right), but I think it’s noteworthy that this kind of thing tends to be rare and these bands aren’t nearly as focused on politics as bands with extremist politics like Dead Kennedys.

I mean, take Nirvana, which was probably the most critically acclaimed band of my youth. At the time I thought their best songs were really artsy-fartsy stuff like “Heart-Shaped Box” whereas “Sliver” was basically just pop candy, but in retrospect I see the former as an unstructured amalgam of pretentious imagery (see Dylan, Bob) and the latter as the perfect distillation of the subjective experience of childhood (or maybe it’s that my toddler recently pulled the “grandma take me home!” act).

I think this works in fine art too. This may be a minority opinion, but I think John Adams is at his best when he’s not trying to be hugely political (e.g., “Death of Klinghoffer” and “Nixon in China”) but when he’s evoking primal myth. I found “El Nino” to be incredibly moving largely because (if you ignore the didactic film Sellars shot to accompany it) it’s not meant to make any point other than to evoke the mythic power of the Christmas story (which makes for not just a great opera, but also a great movie).

I’m not entirely down on political art — I like “Nixon in China” in part because it expresses something really important about American character and foreign policy that’s hard to articulate in nonfiction. Nonetheless I see it as a higher stoopidity to embrace Abba and look forward to the day when Blink-182 and Beyonce take their places in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Links

| Gabriel |

• One of the several intersections between social movements, cultural soc, and econ soc is the “repertoire,” which is basically a special case of the cultural toolkit as applied to activism. The fun thing is that they are culturally specific and usually tie into some broader institutional logic. Here’s a Slate story on the roadblock protest. The story describes it as peculiar to Argentina, but I know of similar protests in France and in Mexico there was even a longstanding airport-runway-block protest.
• Talk about the socialist calculation problem, Marginal Revolution describes a project by the Allende government to create a central planning computer (complete with a control center that looks like the original queue for Space Mountain).

The big gens

| Gabriel |

I heard that a handful of clans (or “gens” in Latin) dominated the higher offices of the Roman republic and I figured that this would be a good data question. To start, I copied the Fasti Consulares from Wikipedia and limited it to the Republican period, defined as the Rape of Lucretia through the Battle of Actium.

Roman names followed the convention of “personal gens family [honorifics].” So, for instance “Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus” means “the man Publius from the Scipio branch of the Cornelius clan, the conqueror of Africa.” From the perspective of seeing which clans dominated the Republic, the key bit is the second name so I used the Stata string function “word” to pull the second word out of each of these names.

As can be seen, the distribution of consulships/gens follows a power-law. Since power-laws indicate a cumulative advantage mechanism we can interpret this as meaning that in Rome a family’s power and prestige was endogenous.

The most dominant clans  in the republic were the Furii (41 consulships), the Claudii (45 consulships), the Aemilii (53 consulships), the Fabii (62 consulships), the Valerii (71 consulships), and the Cornelii (106 consulships). This means that a Cornelius was consul about once every six years.

In contrast the Iulii (as in Gaius Iulius Caesar) held the consulship a relatively paltry 29 times, so small wonder that in order to establish the monarchy they had to form a marriage alliance with the Claudii. Likewise, the Pompeii were a politically obscure family but Pompey Magnus became powerful through his patron-client relationships with the Cornelii.

The Institutional Logic of War

| Gabriel |

We lost Robert McNamara last week, although I was too busy to blog it at the time. (Organizations and Markets was more timely). McNamara began as an academic, educated at Berkeley and working at Harvard. During WWII he advised on strategic bombing and later on went to work at Ford, rising through the ranks until being tapped by JFK as Secretary of Defense. From there he went on to have an important role shaping the World Bank. McNamara was interesting in part for his particular accomplishments but mostly for what he represented as an elite moving between the heights of academia, military, industry, and international NGOs. He was the very best and very brightest of the best and the brightest; one of those Harvard faculty whose rule William F. Buckley judged inferior to persons drawn at random from the phone book; the mid-20th century technocratic liberal consensus made flesh.

I highly recommend both that any social scientist interested in organizations, elites, or politics rent the documentary The Fog of War, in which McNamara describes his experiences in the 40s-60s at Harvard, the Air Corps, Ford, and Defense. In all of these areas McNamara rigorously applied the methods of systems analysis and operations research, treating organizational problems as technical engineering problems where measurement and mathematical analysis are the tasks of the manager. The film is organized as a series of lessons he offers drawn from his own life, but I suggest that the really interesting way to view the film is to treat his experience as data but get some critical distance from his own interpretation of it.

McNamara is thoroughly penitent, almost flagellantly so, about the moral aspects of his decisions. However he is thoroughly convinced of the technical wisdom of his decisions. In particular, his position on the Viet Nam war seems to have been something like “if I couldn’t have won that war then nobody could have and since I couldn’t win it then I should have put my foot down and insisted that we not get into the war in the first place.” At no point does he consider the argument, even for purposes of rebutting it, that it might have been smarter to treat the war as a counter-insurgency campaign waged over the control of territory and populations rather than a war of attrition waged over resources.

Consider two books that together make this argument, one of them by a sociologist (and a dove) and the other by a historian (and a hawk). James W. Gibson’s The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam describes the McNamara/Westmoreland phase of the Viet Nam war in all of its bureaucratic absurdity, which reminds me of nothing so much as the Jonathan Pryce character in the Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Hence the notorious obsession with body counts, or better yet, ratios of body counts. However it was worse than that. For instance, one infantry division ran a scored competition where the junior officers competed on the basis of a formula where (among other things) a captured enemy machinegun or mortar counted for 100 points, a captured enemy tactical radio 200 points, and a wounded American negative fifty points.

The Pentagon Papers reveal an obsession with using strategic bombing to disrupt North Viet Namese imports and supply lines from the North to forward NVA units and the VC. These documents show formulas demonstrating that if the enemy consumed so many tons of supplies per day, and we disrupted their supply lines such that they could not ship a quantity equal or greater to that quantity, then mathematically the enemy eventually had to lose. However the theory was that long before such attrition reached its actual mathematical solution, the enemy would extrapolate the function and surrender. Gibson writes that “For the Americans, the question became one of estimating when the foreign Other would recognize U.S. technical superiority and consequently give up all hopes of victory.”

A key component of this was aerial bombing, which was not so much tactical or strategic as symbolic. In WWII we leveled entire German and Japanese cities with aerial bombing, but we dropped an even larger quantity of bombs in Indochina — mostly in wilderness and rural areas (often leafleted in advance with evacuation warnings). In theory this bombing was targeted at enemy units and supply lines, but Gibson argues that we often had no real idea what was below the canopy and were basically just blowing up huge batches of countryside (and more than a few peasants) for symbolic effect, to send what he sarcastically calls “bomb-o-grams,” reminding the enemy in case he had forgotten that, yes, the American military was indeed backed up by the largest economy in the history of the world.

Gibson does not explicitly limit his critique of the war to the McNamara/Westmoreland era and I think it’s fair to say that he’d probably agree with McNamara’s recent assesment of the war as intrinsically immoral and unwinable, but I think it’s still telling that his attention focuses on 1965-1968. For the last phase of the war you can consider Lewis Sorley’s A Better War, which describes Abrams’ use of more traditional counter-insurgency doctrine and contrasts it favorably with the McNamara/Westmoreland strategy that Gibson calls “technowar.” Sorley argues that Abrams abandoned the use of hyper-rationality, attrition, etc and emphasized controlling populations and controlling territory.

You needn’t go so far as to agree with Sorley that the Abrams strategy was winnable to say that it was more suited (or perhaps, less poorly suited) than the McNamara strategy of treating Viet Nam like an assembly line at Ford or an operations case study at Harvard Business School. Assuming this mismatch is an accurate description, then the interesting thing is the transposition of an institutional logic of bureaucratic rationality from some domains where it work pretty well (academia, manufacturing, bombing Japan into the stone age, nuclear deterrence) to a domain where it is just flat out absurd (counter-insurgency).

Furthermore there is the issue that even outside of a comparative context, military doctrine is just plain interesting. Ian Roxborough had a 2004 review essay in Sociological Forum in which he argues that sociologists do not give enough attention to the military, and when we do we often treat war as an extremely abstract macro-historical problem or (as the DOD itself likes to hire us to do) as an organization with human resources issues. What we are less likely to do is focus on the main thing that the military exists to do, that is, use organized violence to coerce the enemy to our will. This is a key issue for organizational theory, and especially for institutionalism, because making war is organized around doctrine. The McNamara case described above shows the failure of importing doctrine to a situation where it really doesn’t work, but there are other interesting issues as well. For instance, how did the concerns of internal stakeholders promote the development of strategic air doctrine before WWII? Why was the Air Force so much more interested in the fact that nuclear bombs blow stuff up than in the fact that they also create firestorms? Why did the admiralty of the Royal Navy resist innovations like adapting gunnery to the waves that junior officers had developed? All of these are questions of military doctrine that are best understood by understanding the military as an organization that is subject to all the other pressures, constraints, and bounded rationality of any other organization.

To the philosopher equally false

| Gabriel |

Mark Kleiman and Robert Wright posted a bloggingheads diavlog (here’s the mp3 link*). In it Mark describes the UCLA faculty Tanakh discussion group and I can confirm that it’s exactly as he describes it and is really good. Although I haven’t actually attended in a few years I enjoyed it very much when I did and since then I have followed it vicariously through the excellent set of notes that Mark circulates every week.

Since Wright is obsessed with the evolution of cooperation, and his new book is about the social contingencies of religion supporting inter-group cooperation, Wright and Kleiman share a few thoughts on the “intolerant monotheism” thesis. This reminded me of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The thesis of the book is that Rome was destroyed by “immoderate greatness” and “superstition” (read: Christianity). The latter is often interpreted by people who haven’t read the book as meaning that Gibbon is arguing that the Christianized Romans took all that “turn the other cheek” stuff seriously and became a bunch of pussies. Of course, Gibbon wasn’t that stupid and was well aware that, for instance, the (Christian) Byzantine emperors especially weren’t shy about having their rivals murdered or blinded. What he was really arguing was that Christianity is a religion of orthodoxy, which implies conflict with heretics. Indeed, Constantine had scarcely legalized Christianity when bishops started asking him to take sides in various theological disputes. In contrast the concept of “heresy” was absurd to the pagan Roman mind. The pagan Romans acknowledged different versions of myth and ceremony, but they just kind of bracketed them and moved on as being kind of the same thing, kind of different, but who cares, we’ll do it both ways if we have to.

To this day the parishioners at a Catholic mass still recite “Lord Jesus Christ … begotten not made, being of one substance with the father” and ”we acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sin.” Most of them don’t know that these two clauses are references to extremely violent 4th century church controversies.

The “begotten” phrase is part of the perennially controversial “Christological” question as to what sort of entity exactly was Jesus. The orthodox answer is, as it says in John, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. … The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” Among the many heretical answers are the good and abstract god as compared to the evil and material father (Gnosticism), a single person with the father (Unitarianism), and a subordinate spiritual entity created by the father (Arianism). The last of these in particular caused a lot of trouble as Arianist missionaries got to the various German tribes before the Catholic Church and the fact that the German foederati were heretics created all sorts of headaches for Roman diplomacy for centuries.

The “one baptism” language is mostly a reference to the Donatist controversy. During the Diocletian persecution there were some very famous martyrs but a much larger number of collaborators. After the Edict of Milan the official policy of the church was amnesty, but the followers of the bishop Donatus disagreed and did things like trying to impeach collaborator bishops. Long story short, the legions marched through the province of Africa massacring Donatists but even a century later they were still a problem for Augustine.

Gibbon’s thesis as to Christianity is thus that religion created a source of cleavage within the empire. Of course this can’t be the whole story because even before the birth of Christ, Rome saw plenty of civil wars and succession movements brought on by such fractious figures as: Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, Marius, Sulla, Quintus Sertorius, Pompey Magnus, Julius Caesar, Marcus Brutus, Mark Antony, and Octavian. Likewise in the Kleiman-Wright conversation Wright flat out asserts that “wars of religion aren’t really about religion.” I half agree.

On the one hand, Rome was almost always a fractious place — especially in the century immediately preceding Christianization. Nonetheless, I don’t think it’s fair to say that the interjection of accusations of “heresy” was only super-structure or window-dressing. Basically I think that a cognitive toolkit approach is a useful way to approach the issue. Roman civil wars continued to have terrestrial motives, sometimes ethnic/provincial separatism and other times the personal ambitions of usurpers. Nonetheless, the accusation of heresy (or as the heretics themselves might put it, a new conception of orthodoxy) provided an ideological rallying point for fraction. I think it’s telling to compare the accounts of pre-Christian strife in Plutarch with those of Christian strife in Eusebius or Augustine. The civil wars of the (pagan) late Republic and the principate were almost exclusively about the personal ambitions of noblemen with their followers mostly being organized around a mix of patron-client ties and social class interests (I think the easiest way to understand Julius Caesar is to imagine Hugo Chavez in a toga). In contrast, the religious wars of the dominate were less personality-driven and more ideological and ethnic in character, often providing a unifying agenda to revolt of the sort that is very recognizable to us modern people used to ideological wars between, say, fascists and communists or anti-colonial wars of national liberation. Note that Arius himself was an Egyptian and the Germans he converted were across the frontier. The Donatists were mostly Berbers. Thus underlying theological disputes about Christology or reconciliation were essentially political differences. However, this is not to say that the theological disputes did not matter in that these theological disputes provided an ideological tool for framing the struggle in a way that changed their character.

Likewise you see similar issues at play in early modern history. For instance on one level the English civil war was about social class with the emerging middle class opposed to the aristocracy whereas on the other hand it was about Calvinism versus high church Anglicanism. I think it’s fair to say that the roundheads would not have been nearly so tenacious if the war were only about the power of parliament versus that of the king. Calvinism served as an organizing toolkit to impose sense on the underlying class and political issues in a way that changed the character of those issues.

——–

*I love text because I can skim it, and I love audio because it’s conducive to multi-tasking (while driving, etc), but I really don’t get the point of videos where the visual element adds essentially no entertainment or information. I can’t even imagine having so much time (or attention span) that I’d sit in front of my computer staring at a lo-resolution image of a couple of bush-league pundits for an hour. As far as I’m concerned it could be bloggingheads.fm instead of bloggingheads.tv.

Directed graphs?

| Gabriel |

Last year ago I read Richard Saller’s book on patron-client networks in ancient Rome, Personal Patronage under the Early Empire. I found it fascinating because the book wasn’t explicitly informed by economic sociology, but every few pages I’d think, this is just like Podolny, or Gould, or Zelizer, or Granovetter! Anyway, it’s a very good book but the thing I’m thinking about right now is a methodological point, which I’ll get to in a minute.

We have a variety of sources that tell us about the institution of clientela. Most concretely, it was built into the very architecture, such that a villa would have benches by the front door where clients could wait to suck up to the boss. Not only do these benches survive at places like Pompeii, but we have poetry and satiric plays making fun of the people who sat on them.

The methodological point stems from Saller’s observation that in some sources the very idea of clientela seems to disappear. For instance one of the historians (Cassius Dio? I’m going from memory) rarely used terms implying a directed tie (clientela, patronus, or cliens). The interesting thing is that whenever he did use such words it was in a context involving a (shameful) status inversion of social class where a senator would become a client of a knight or freedman. (The implication was that by putting commoners in structural positions of power the principate had disrupted the natural order of things that was respected during the republic, the complaint is similar to Southern narratives that complain about black political power during reconstruction). But this is not to say that the historian seldom mentions networks. Rather the historian talks a lot about amicitia (friendship), but always to refer to networks that were either intra-class or with an appropriate hierarchy. Likewise, Pliny wrote many letters to Trajan asking for some favor for Pliny himself or one of his cronies, and Trajan’s reply always used language of friendship.

What seems to be going on is that even in a society as hierarchical and status conscience as Rome, there was a level of discomfort with boldly asserting dominance and so the superior party euphemistically describes the relationship as egalitarian. Pliny sucks up to Trajan, but Trajan maintains the face-saving pretense that Pliny is his equal. So we have a system of directed ties but they can only be perceived as such when viewed from below. When viewed (credulously) from above they appear to be symmetric ties. This is particularly a problem if you’re relying on the superior party for evidence, as classicists do if they rely on the written sources (which are heavily dominated by the senatorial class) rather than, say, archeological discoveries of elaborate tombstones raised by freed slaves extolling the patronage of their former masters.

Similar issues can come up in modern contexts of interest to sociologists. For instance people tend to exaggerate the help they provide to others and minimize the help they receive so you get very different estimates of care-work and other domestic exchange if you ask about incoming versus outgoing transfers. Likewise when you’re doing social network research this isn’t so much a problem for whole network approaches because you can often get information on a dyad from both parties, but it’s potentially a big problem for ego-centric networks.

Why did you do that?

| Gabriel |

In a previous post, I applied diffusion methods to interpret the conversion of the Roman empire, today I’m thinking about the conversion of one particular Roman and what it can teach us about the problem of accounts for action. In Confessions, Augustine of Hippo describes his conversion to Christianity and makes important contributions to theology and philosophy. The book is important to the history of Western thought both for its impact on Christian doctrine and (my concern) that it was the first introspective memoir. Augustine tells us much more about how he felt and why he did things than about what he actually did. Most obviously, he frequently laments his lust but doesn’t give us any of the dirt. After an introductory prayer, the book begins by telling us that he’s not completely positive that he remembers it, but he’s pretty sure that he was a sinner as a baby and it goes on like that from there. A typical line about his boyhood goes ”For in thy eyes, what was more infamous than I was already, since I displeased even my own kind and deceived, with endless lies, my tutor, my masters and parents–all from a love of play, a craving for frivolous spectacles, a stage-struck restlessness to imitate what I saw in these shows?”

Contrast this with this passage from Gallic Wars, “When Caesar was informed by spies that the Helvetii had already conveyed three parts of their forces across that river, but that the fourth part was left behind on this side of the Saone, he set out from the camp with three legions during the third watch, and came up with that division which had not yet crossed the river.” Caesar’s memoir is an extreme case of all plot, no character, but most other ancient works were similar. Xenophon’s Anabasis is also written in third person and focuses on plot. Xenophon never describes his motives or feelings in the narrator’s voice but only in the dialogue when he answers direct criticisms of his leadership by other soldiers at assembly. (In a few places Xenophon does provide character portraits of other people, most notably a sycophantic obituary for Cyrus and a hilariously nasty obituary for Menon). The closest thing you get to prose emphasizing personality and mental states prior to Augustine are Plutarch’s Lives and 1st and 2nd Samuel but these are biographies not autobiographies and they mostly take a “show, don’t tell” approach.

Anyway, much of Confessions consists of Augustine explaining his actions, which can broadly be categorized as sinning and conversion. His explanation for his sins is primarily concupiscence (i.e., original sin has distorted human nature such that men freely choose to sin) and secondarily social contingencies such that his parents emphasized his social advancement over his moral education or that he was trying to impress other young miscreants. His explanation for his conversion is more complex. On one level he emphasizes social connections to Christianity. His father was a pagan but his mother, Monica, was a Christian and gave him an early education in Christianity which he rejected as a young man encountering the sophistication of pagan philosophy. Later as a young professor of rhetoric in Milan he saw Ambrose preach. Augustine was an intellectual snob who had until then thought of Christianity as embarrassing simple-minded, so to encounter a sophisticated and articulate bishop was very impressive to him and he became close to Ambrose. Meanwhile Monica and some of Augustine’s friends continued to push him to Christianity. It was only after Augustine came under the tutelage of Ambrose and returned to being close to his mother that he heard a voice in the garden saying “Take and read” whereby he opened Paul’s letter to the Romans, read a few sentences, and experienced a religious epiphany after which he consented to be baptized and ordained (dumping both his girlfriend and his fiancee in the process). Although Augustine tells us everything we need to know about the gradual influence exerted by Monica and Ambrose, he emphasizes the incident in the garden as the moment when he was converted.

To me Confessions illustrates both the potential and the problems of methodologies (such as in-depth interviews) that rely on actors giving accounts for the meanings of their actions. Note that Augustine is the best case scenario for accounts of action as he was not your average social science study respondent interviewed over the course of an hour but one of the world’s greatest philosophers who wrote an entire book of profound introspection. Yet even Augustine’s account of his conversion is self-evidently problematic.

Augustine recognizes the influence of his mother and friends. Likewise, he describes the gradual process by which he became intellectually disenchanted with Manichean dualism and interested in Christianity as consistent with neo-Platonist monism. Nonetheless he emphasizes the moment of grace in the garden. I have a feeling that if you put your digital voice recorder on the table and interviewed Augustine he’d give you very different accounts depending on whether you asked “when did you become a Christian,” “how did you become a Christian,” or “why did you become a Christian.” The first question he’d just tell you about the garden, the second question he’d tell you about Monica and Ambrose but still close with the garden, and the third question he’d give an entirely non-biographical answer about neo-Platonism.

One way to interpret Augustine’s emphasis of the garden is that he is following a cultural script. In this interpretation he is trying to make sense of his own religious experience as comparable to the prototypical conversion, Paul hearing a voice on the road to Damascus (which itself echoes such passages from Tanakh as Moses encountering the burning bush). The accepted cultural script of conversion is not to debate religion rationally for decades before finally giving in to it, but to have an epiphany where God’s grace opens your heart. Even if the rational debate was vastly more important to Augustine, that’s not how it’s supposed to go and so he emphasizes the comparatively minor incident in the garden which fits the cultural script much better.

Another interpretation (which is compatible with the first) is that Augustine really did have a religious epiphany in the garden but this epiphany was only the final stage of a process overwhelming mundane and gradual. A lot of work on cognition recently has established that, like fortune, insight favors the prepared. We subjectively experience insight as a sudden revelation of an often complex idea with all the parts hanging together fully-formed. However this only comes as the culmination of a long period of rumination. So Augustine had been thinking about Christianity and neo-Platonism for decades before he had an insight that synthesized these thoughts and finally brought him to Jesus. At the moment it probably did feel subjectively to Augustine like his mind had experienced a qualitative shift whereas his previous thinking to that point had been only evolutionary.

The same thing applies to much more mundane insights than the religious epiphany of a saint. I subjectively experience the basic concepts for most of my study designs as conceptual insights rather than things that I develop slowly. For instance, when I was in grad school I experienced a burst of insight of a complete methodology involving (what I later learned already existed and was called) cross-classified fixed-effects model. It subjectively came to me all at once, but this was after I had been thinking fairly intensively about the meaning of fixed-effects for over two years. If I were trained in a theoretical tradition that emphasized cultural scripts of creative genius over the accumulation of knowledge I would probably emphasize the moment of insight when the method came to me and ignore the long period of thinking and tinkering that led up to it.

Anyway, my point is that even someone as brilliant as Augustine is incapable of really completely understanding his own motives, in part because both cultural scripts and the subjective experience of cognition push him to emphasize certain narratives over others. If we can’t take Augustine’s testimony about the most important decision of his life at face value it gets even trickier to interpret transcribed in-depth interviews, let alone closed-form GSS attitude questions that all start out with “do you strongly agree, somewhat agree, neither agree nor disagree, …” You can get really cynical about it and adopt a hyper-structural perspective (e.g., early Marxism, exchange theory or networks in sociology, expressed preferences in economics), where the actor’s account of subjective experience drops out almost entirely and all we care about is action. On the other hand even if you are that cynical about the causes of action, the cultural scripts are fascinating objects of study in of themselves. Certainly it’s very interesting that conversion narratives often culminate in an epiphany, even if we think that conversion is actually a process involving influences through social networks and gradual rumination.

The greatest diffusion story ever told

| Gabriel |

While I do most of my serious work on trivial pop culture things like pop songs, I’m always interested in the big questions of western civ. As such, I figured I’d post something topical for Easter that I’d been playing around with. According to Mark and Matthew,* Jesus returned from the dead and told the eleven remaining apostles to convert the nations. In Acts each of these eleven (along with a twelfth appointed to replace Judas) basically strikes out in a different direction to try to achieve that goal. Whatever else it may be, this is the beginning of a very interesting diffusion story.

Most of the apostles managed to establish local churches and became the first bishops. Although all twelve of the apostles were martyred, their churches survived and new bishops followed them. For instance, the Apostle Peter was executed in 68 and succeeded  by Linus as bishop of Rome. These churches ordained new clergy who in turn established churches in other territories. In the Catholic and Orthodox churches (and I believe the Anglican Communion as well) the concept of “apostolic succession” is a key aspect of legitimacy and so churches have maintained lists of bishops and you can use this to date the point at which Christianity became somewhat institutionalized in a city. (Yes, a city, the Christians converted the urban population much earlier than the rural population. The word “pagan” is actually Latin for “hick”.) Although these Christian sources are partial we have some independent confirmation for the early spread of Christianity, most notably an early 2nd century letter from Pliny to Trajan. In this letter Pliny described his efforts to suppress Christianity in Northern Turkey and even relates how he tortured two Christian women so they would tell him about a mass. Likewise several Roman historians from the early empire mention rumors that various nobles had taken up “Jewish superstitions” and there is even a famous second century piece of Roman graffiti mocking Christians.

In any case, the Christian doctrine of apostolic succession can be understood as diffusion data. Diffusion is just prevalence over time and so if you count the number of cities with a bishop that’s what you get. Unfortunately the data isn’t as fine-grained as we might like and so for most cities I could only find the establishment date to the nearest century. Nonetheless this gives us a crude idea of how Christianity spread. In this graph I show how many cities had bishops by century.

The first thing to note is that this graph is basically an s-curve. By the end of the first century there were only 33 bishops, about triple the number of the original apostles. By the fall of the Roman empire in the West there were hundreds of bishops but Europe didn’t become fully Christianized until the 11th century when the Swedes finally gave up on Odin and Thor. (Of course by this time almost all of the old Eastern empire was now Islamic; you win some, you lose some). Note though that interpreting this as an s-curve is a bit tricky because one of the assumptions of an s-curve is a constant population (in this case a population of cities). In fact it’s not clear what geographic boundaries we’d expect for the population or how many cities big enough to deserve a bishop there were within these boundaries. For instance, there seems to have been a severe population decline in the third century and again during late antiquity (all those Germans were partly filling a demographic vacuum in the Mediterranean). We might thus expect that the number of decent sized cities would shrink during these periods as some cities shrank to the level of small towns or were abandoned altogether.

The second thing to note in looking at the curve is the dog that didn’t bark. Christianity was officially (but very haphazardly) persecuted until the edict of Milan in 313, briefly persecuted again under Justinian the Apostate, and then finally given a state monopoly under Theodosius in 391. Thus Christianity experienced a very different policy regime between the 3rd century (when it was most intensely persecuted) and the 4th century (when we see the beginnings of caesaropapism) and you might expect this to affect the diffusion. However the hazard doesn’t change. There’s a very smooth s-curve both before and after Constantine. I think the implication is that the emperors of the dominate did not so much drive Christianity as respond to it.

This seems to be a special case of what Lieberson calls “riding the wave,” which is when prominent people adopt a trend shortly before it peaks. Lieberson provides numerous examples of movie stars who were either born with a name or adopted a stage name shortly before that name peaked in popularity.  If you look only at a small time range it’s easy to misunderstand the prominent people as driving the trend when in fact they are often just responding to it like everybody else. Likewise it seems more appropriate to say that the church caused the Edict of Milan than vice versa.

*Update: I checked and it turns out this part of Mark (the earliest Gospel) probably wasn’t part of the original but was added a generation or two later. The undisputed part of Mark ends with the empty tomb. This is noteworthy because the disputed passage in Mark includes the phrase “go and make disciples of the nations.” Jews used “the nations” to mean non-Jews and this passage may have been added to bolster support for the relatively late decision advocated by Paul to evangelize the gentiles.