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Larry Dunbar, a polymath interested in genetics, psychology, and many other subjects has a new post synthesizing his thoughts on Christianity and the Military-Industrial Complex:

Take for instance the statement: the military/industrial complex will bring about world peace. Someone, a lot smarter than I, said something to that effect, and actually believes this to be true; it is his reality.

The real amazing thing is that this person pretends to be a follower of Jesus of Nazareth. Although I have never read the teachings of Jesus, I have been around the practitioners of Jesus all my life.

The military/industrial complex is what Howard Bloom calls a resource shifter. In Jesus’ time the moneychangers would represent them. I think Jesus had something harsh to say about moneychangers. I may have misunderstood, but I don’t think it had anything to do with world peace.

Larry is referring to my writings on Embracing-Defeat and Jesusism-Paulism. In the former series I argue that a military-industrial complex is necessary for victory in protracted struggles, and that are defeats in Vietnam, Lebanon, and Somalia are tied to a lack of a military-industrial-counter-insurgency complex. In the latter, I explain how early Christians used 4GW to conquer the Roman Empire and establish an order based on universal human dignity.

I'm interested in Larry's thoughts, and I hope he expands on them. However, I don't think the point he uses in his post is persuasive. Of course anything shifts resources, because anything costs. The question is whether the shifted resources are worth it. In the case of the Military-Industrial Complex the answer is a clear yes. Indeed, it's hard to think of a more Christian task for a great nation than building one.

Thank God, truly, that we are half-way there.

John Boyd, the American Air Force Colonel, wrote that there were five stages to victory. In the first two, Penetration and Isolation, one's forces enter the enemy's networks and began tearing it apart. In the last two, Reorientation and Reharmonization, the old world is refashioned in one's desired image.

There is only one grand choice, but that choice is critical. If, for the third stage, one chooses Subversion, one desires to "take-over" the enemy. The enemy's house -- his many mansions -- should be viewed as one's future property, and so their substance must be preserved while the deed is (re)-written

Christianity, a political philosophy that could accurately be described as Jesusism-Paulism, was designed to Subvert the Roman Empire and seize her institutions in order to remake them. Jesus summed up the essence of subversion -- the conquest of force by the service to force -- in one line:

If someone [a Roman soldier] forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.
Matthew 5:41

Of course, there is another strategy. Instead of attempted to take-over, one might take-down. One might Subdue the enemy, destroying what is his, and win through war instead of through peace. Six centuries after Jesus, another Semite elucidated that strategy

It is not for any prophet to have captives until he hath made slaughter in the land. Ye desire the lure of this world and Allah desireth (for you) the Hereafter, and Allah is Mighty, Wise.
The Spoils of War:67

The Rule-Set Revolution of Islam had begun.

On October 27, 312, the world changed.

What exactly happened is disputed. A "heavenly sign," apparently some form of crossed disc, appeared to Gaius Constantinus outside of Rome. Constantinus read into it "By this, Conquer." Within twelve hours the world had have turned. Christianity had a shield. More importantly, the Christians had an army.

The Roman Legions were not the first military force fielded by the Jesusist-Paulists. The Armenian King Trdat III submitted his armies to Christ eleven years earlier, but if Christianity had stopped at Armenia the plans of Caiaphas and Diocletian (to force Christianity to morph into violent military force that could be processed as a regular insurgency) would have been victorious. When Tiridates III converted, Christianity gained a weak country. When Constantine I converted, Christianity gained the world.

Catholicgauze notes that 745 years, today, the Roman Empire was crushed by the Empire of the Romans. On that date Byzantine Emperor Michael VII defeated Latin Emperor Baldwin II, restoring Constantinople to Greek rule. Nowadays the Turks are in charge.

Catholicgauze also explains how that the end of the this civilizational wars between the Roman Emperors led to the fall of the Greek Empire

In a twist of irony Michael VII's rise to emperor restarted the fall of the empire. He withdrew troops from Asia Minor to fight wars of reunification in Greece and against the Bulgarians. The lack of troops on his east flank allowed the Arabs to conquer more territory. Michael also refused to reform the government and bureaucracy of the empire which the term “byzantine” (number 4) comes from.

Wikipedia shows that the Latin Empire, at least in legal fiction, also survived its catastrophic defeat. The title of Empire of Rome was used until Emperor James, who willed the title to the Duke of Anjou -- who never cared enough to use the title himself. Thus the Latin Empire fades into history.

(Unrelated, Enterra CEO Stephen DeAngelis adds his thoughts to an article that begins with Rome as a Multinational Enterprise...)

After a particularly long post, Chirol from Coming Anarchy suggested that when I have a lot to say, I should break it up into a series of articles. I've taken his advice, and now for several subjects (Embracing Defeat, Guerrillaz, Liberal Education, and OODA-PISRR) I've written four tetrologies.

However, before all that I wrote a trilogy on early Christianity. I described it as essentially a 4G movement, such as Maoism, but one that also drew energy from existing family structures. In that sense it is similar to the religious right in America or al Qaeda in Iraq. Early Christianity was profoundly shaped by two thinkers, Jesus and Paul, similar to the way that Sovietism was shaped by Marx and Lenin.

This insight is not original. About the time I wrote my posts, Jeffrey Obbins of Lebanon Valley College published The Politics of Paul, where he wrote...

Paul is every bit Jesus’ equal as a social and political revolutionary, standing to Jesus as Lenin does to Marx.

"All Roads Lead to Rome," by Jeff Vail, A Theory of Power: Jeff Vail's Critique of Hierarchy & Empire, 5 October 2004, http://www.jeffvail.net/2004/10/all-roads-lead-to-rome.html.

The blogosphere is abuzz with empires. Chirol started it by talking about them -- twice. Zen Pundit --- three times. Jewish Blog jumped on the bandwagon. Even Dr. Daniel Nexon, someone with formal education who actually knows what he is talking about, offered his thoughts.

I offered my humble thoughts earlier. So for this I'd just like to highlight an article I found that discusses how Empires manage connectivity.

Author Jeff Vail first notes that Rome was a new type of Empire. Previous empires were largely thirst-based, but Rome became connectivity-based

Many of the major empires that preceded Rome shared a common source of formational energy. As described by historian Karl Wittfogel, they were all “hydraulic” empires. The mechanism of centralization [of the old Empires] was their shared need to pool massive labor and resources to build and maintain the irrigation works upon which their agricultural sustenance depended. Rome formed in the absence of great public-irrigation projects. As such, it required a new mechanism of political centralization to provide formational energies and counter the distributed spacing and centrifugal tendency of economic organization. Rome pioneered a new form of Empire, a connectivity empire, laying the groundwork for modern hierarchical state-economies (See Figure 4).

If we use Chirol's concept of "generations," we might call a Hydraulic Empire a "Zeroth Generation Empire" or a "Pre-Modern Empire." In a Pre-Modern, Hydraulic, of 0G Empire, the most important "flows" are the flow of labor into the center and the flow of water into the periphery. However, in a Connectivity or 1st Generation Empire the flows become much richer. Now the main flows are wealth and security, with a flow of wealth into the center and a flow of security into the periphery.

However, this is not done in a vacuum. In the Roman Empire, for example, this was done through roads.

If Rome had allows the market to function naturally, the power of the City of Rome would have gradually been reduced as other cities enjoy the economic benefits of security. A natural ebb-and-flow of exchange creates a decentralized Empire.

Visually:



However, the Romans did not want this. The Romans did not want ;the Empire' to become a decentralized polity. They wanted the Empire to remain a tool of Rome.

So the Romans purposefully warped their economy through their road network, purposefully undercutting minor hubs and linking as many nodes as possible directly to Rome.



So, some open questions

• Chirol described First Generation Empires as defined by "hard power" and Second Generation Empires as defined by "soft power." But the fact that Pre-Modern Empires exported water, without which a painful death is almost immediate, shows that their power was even "harder" than Rome. So instead of "hard power" and "soft power," do we simply have a continuum of "power hardness"?
  
• Likewise, the arteries of Pre-Modern Empires were canals that carry water, and the arteries of 1st Generation Empires were roads and ocean-routes that carried goods and men. Does this mean that the arteries of 2nd Generation Empires are telecommunication lines that carry ideas? But we know thatideas spread through the Roman road system. And many claim that information itself can be deadly. Is this another example of a continuum of power-hardness?
  
• If America wanted to "calcify" (in Vail's words) her world power, could she arrange ultra-high-speed fiber-optic lines to all run through the continental US? Or is this form of geographic power now obsolete?
  
• How does Rome's strategy of isolating competitive nodes harmonize with Chirol's statement that "Great empires don’t compete against other systems per se, they strive to become “the system.”"

Update: Mark at ZenPundit alerted me to Dr. Daniel Nexon's new post on Empires

As he agrees with me on the Mongols

Might there be a pattern in the phrases: Pax Romana, Pax Mongolica, Pax Britannia and Pax Americana?

That three of them were largely connected through internal waterways, high-tech roads, and/or oceans, while a fourth is a revisionist defense of a temporary barbarian occupation built-to-fail?

(compared to)

Chinggis Khan, for example, combined steppe cavalry techniques with a reorganization of the tribal structure of his forces, a not-so-healthy does of sociopathic paranoia, and, eventually, Chinese siege techniques. Despite Chirol's assertion about the Mongol imperium (which lasted, as such, for an extremely short period), it is pretty hard to know whether it was really a net positive. The Mongols did enormous damage to regions of China, destroyed the Kievan Rus', crushed the Abbasid Caliphate, and just plain killed a lot of people. The factors that led to Mongol success in warfare had very little to do with whatever contributions they brought to the world by making the east-west trade routes safer for a time.

he's clearly a genius. He also picks up this post's theme of a hydraulic Empire, if critically

I wasn't aware of Vail's work - and his book - until Dan linked to it; Vail shares some of the same sensibilities that Patrick Jackson and I have articulated in some of our collaborative pieces. That being said, the hydraulic theory of empire is, as a comprehensive account of the formation of ancient empires, probably wrong

Go read!

Something is strange in the heart of Christianity

"There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."

Paul (Galatians 3:28)

"I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent."

Paul (1 Timothy 2:12)

If we wanted an easy answer, we would say Paul (or "The Bible") is contracting himself. Or that two different people wrote it. Or that it was just meaningless rhetoric. But Paul is followi Jesus's pattern. In spite of reaching out to women far more than others around him, Jesus notably did not choose a single woman as a disciple. His inner-circle was a diverse lot -- a tax collector, a Zealot, various fishermen, even a non-Galilean (Judas Iscariot) -- but not one woman. What is going on?

Why was Jesus crucified? Why were the Christians thrown to the lions?

Douglas Adams began his epic Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by saying people didn't want to be kind

And then, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change...

While Juanna Hates sees something in the Christian message that the Temple found obnoxious

Surely it was because of these outrageous claims that the leaders of the Jewish community succeeded in having Jesus killed. His real claims struck at the heart of their religion, the identity of their nation.

Both these answers are too easy. They make people feel good about themselves, knowing how foolish and short-sighted their opponents were. But Caiaphas was wise and far-sighted. Diocletian was one of the greatest Emperors in history. Why did they make their decisions?

Joseph Caiaphas, Hellenized Jew, Roman political appointee, and High Priest of the Temple for 18 years, agitated against Jesus to his fellow priests.

Then one of them, named Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, spoke up, "You know nothing at all! You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish."

The founders of Christianity knew how they would win

But I tell you who hear me: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also. If someone takes your cloak, do not stop him from taking your tunic. Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. Do to others as you would have them do to you.

Jesus (Luke 6:27-31)

The commandments, "Do not commit adultery," "Do not murder," "Do not steal," "Do not covet," and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: "Love your neighbor as yourself."

Paul (Romans 13:9)

Generally, there are two means to use against an enemy -- violence and politics -- and two strategies -- take-over and take-down. To put it in a 2x2 matrix