Leon Battista Alberti

 But among these many-sided men, some who may truly be called all-sided, tower above the rest. Before analysing the general phases of life and culture of this period, we may here, on the threshold of the fifteenth century, consider for a moment the figure of one of these giants—Leon Battista Alberti (b. 1404? d. 1472).[306] His biography,[307] which is only a fragment, speaks of him but little as an artist, and makes no mention at all of his great significance in the history of architecture. We shall now see what he was, apart from these special claims to distinction.

In all by which praise is won, Leon Battista was from his childhood the first. Of his various gymnastic feats and exercises we read with astonishment how, with his feet together, he could spring over a man’s head; how, in the cathedral, he threw a coin in the air till it was heard to ring against the distant roof; how the wildest horses trembled under him. In three things he desired to appear faultless to others, in walking, in riding, and in speaking. He learned music without a master, and yet his compositions were admired by professional judges. Under the pressure of poverty, he studied both civil and canonical law for many years, till exhaustion brought on a  severe illness. In his twenty-fourth year, finding his memory for words weakened, but his sense of facts unimpaired, he set to work at physics and mathematics. And all the while he acquired every sort of accomplishment and dexterity, cross-examining artists, scholars, and artisans of all descriptions, down to the cobblers, about the secrets and peculiarities of their craft. Painting and modelling he practised by the way, and especially excelled in admirable likenesses from memory. Great admiration was excited by his mysterious ‘camera obscura,’[308] in which he showed at one time the stars and the moon rising over rocky hills, at another wide landscapes with mountains and gulfs receding into dim perspective, and with fleets advancing on the waters in shade or sunshine. And that which others created he welcomed joyfully, and held every human achievement which followed the laws of beauty for something almost divine.[309] To all this must be added his literary works, first of all those on art, which are landmarks and authorities of the first order for the Renaissance of Form, especially in architecture; then his Latin prose writings—novels and other works—of which some have been taken for productions of antiquity; his elegies, eclogues, and humorous dinner-speeches. He also wrote an Italian treatise on domestic life[310] in four books; various moral, philosophical, and historical works; and many speeches and poems, including a funeral oration on his dog. Notwithstanding his admiration for the Latin language, he wrote in Italian, and encouraged others to do the same; himself a disciple of Greek science, he maintained the doctrine, that without Christianity the world would wander in a labyrinth of error. His serious and witty sayings were thought worth collecting, and specimens of them, many columns long, are quoted in his biography. And all that he had and knew he  imparted, as rich natures always do, without the least reserve, giving away his chief discoveries for nothing. But the deepest spring of his nature has yet to be spoken of—the sympathetic intensity with which he entered into the whole life around him. At the sight of noble trees and waving corn-fields he shed tears; handsome and dignified old men he honoured as ‘a delight of nature,’ and could never look at them enough. Perfectly-formed animals won his goodwill as being specially favoured by nature; and more than once, when he was ill, the sight of a beautiful landscape cured him.[311] No wonder that those who saw him in this close and mysterious communion with the world ascribed to him the gift of prophecy. He was said to have foretold a bloody catastrophe in the family of Este, the fate of Florence, and the death of the Popes years before they happened, and to be able to read into the countenances and the hearts of men. It need not be added that an iron will pervaded and sustained his whole personality; like all the great men of the Renaissance, he said, ‘Men can do all things if they will.’

And Lionardo da Vinci was to Alberti as the finisher to the beginner, as the master to the dilettante. Would only that Vasari’s work were here supplemented by a description like that of Alberti! The colossal outlines of Lionardo’s nature can never be more than dimly and distantly conceived.

[306] For what follows compare Burckhardt, Geschichte der Renaissance in Italien, Stuttg. 1868, esp. p. 41 sqq., and A. Springer, Abhandlungen zur neueren Kunstgeschichte, Bonn, 1867, pp. 69-102. A new biography of Alberti is in course of preparation by Hub. Janitschek.

[307] In Murat. xxv. col. 295 sqq., with the Italian translation in the Opere Volgari di L. B. Alberti, vol. i. pp. lxxxix-cix, where the conjecture is made and shown to be probable that this ‘Vita’ is by Alberti himself. See, further, Vasari, iv. 52 sqq. Mariano Socini, if we can believe what we read of him in Æn. Sylvius (Opera, p. 622, Epist. 112) was a universal dilettante, and at the same time a master in several subjects.

[308] Similar attempts, especially an attempt at a flying-machine, had been made about 880 by the Andalusian Abul Abbas Kasim ibn Firnas. Comp. Gyangos, The History of the Muhammedan Dynasties in Spain (London, 1840), i. 148 sqq. and 425-7; extracts in Hammer, Literaturgesch. der Araber, i. Introd. p. li.

[309] Quidquid ingenio esset hominum cum quadam effectum elegantia, id prope divinum ducebat.

[310] This is the book (comp. p. 185, note 2) of which one part, often printed alone, long passed for a work of Pandolfini.

The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, by 

Jacob Burckhardt

Family As The Primal Form Of Community

 

While the economic aspect of marriage is badly neglected today, we are hardly uninterested in economic matters per se. On the contrary, money may be the one thing modern man obsesses over as much as sex. Our economic concerns, however, are concentrated on success and consumption in the market rather than on providing for home and children. That is remarkable, because the primary reason men have traditionally pursued wealth in the first place is that they have families to support (or wish to have them).

Elementary economics textbooks dutifully inform students that the word economy comes from the Greek term for household management. But no significance is attributed to that bit of information, and it may be the last time a student of economics ever hears households mentioned. “Economy” can still be found employed in its original domestic sense by Samuel Johnson and other 18th-century writers. Only gradually was its meaning extended metaphorically into “political economy,” the household management of the entire state, as it were. Once political economy had become a recognized discipline, “political” was dropped from the name as cumbersome and unnecessary to make the speaker’s meaning clear. Subsequently, the original sense faded from men’s minds. Factories and banks, not homes, came to be thought of as the principal settings of “economic” activity. Today we see journalists sloppily referring to the securities market as “the economy.” So completely has the market driven out consideration of the household that one economist, Gary Becker, has recently used marginal-utility theory in attempting to reinterpret the natural family itself as being the result of economically rational calculation.

There is something quite odd about trying to explain the primary and natural fact of procreation by means of the secondary and derivative behavior of the market. Consider, for example, the observable fact that many parents willingly risk their lives to protect their offspring. Such self-sacrificial behavior might be called transeconomic. People will not do that sort of thing for merely economic goods. (The stories of men jumping from hotel windows following the 1929 stock-market crash, by the way, originated in a comedy routine of the time.) While people “value” both resources and children, the two classes of goods seem to be incommensurable. Families are in large part the purpose of wealth.

The sale of children, indeed, is not unknown among the desperately poor. But the difficult question for any exclusively economic analysis would be to explain why such a practice is not normal and universal;  children most certainly consume enough resources to raise issues of “cost effectiveness.” The present writer hopes human beings never become that rational.

The economy of the home differs qualitatively as well as quantitatively from that of commercial enterprises or nations. The family actually does operate roughly according to the principle “from each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs.” This communist slogan is not, in other words, intrinsically utopian; it is only utopian to extend the principle universally, in defiance of the ineliminable qualitative differences between the natural family and political society. (Many socialist writers lose sight of the familial inspiration of their ideal, but in the original socialist utopia described in Plato’s Republic, Socrates explicitly recognizes that he is extending the preexisting familial principle to the polis.)

A second difference is that the home does not have a money economy. When the housewife of old spun wool to make clothing for her family, she was creating wealth—adding human value to raw materials—but the wealth found no monetary or numerical expression. So she could not calculate inputs and outputs, or the return on her invested labor. For that reason, muddle-headed feminists refer to the premodern woman’s domestic labor as “unpaid.”

Clearly, the traditional domestic economy was not “capitalist.” But what was it?

The  German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-1936) famously distinguished two fundamental types of human connectedness: society and community. Of these, community is both conceptually and historically prior. It is characterized by ascribed (i.e., unchosen) statuses, affective attachments to persons and places, strong habits and traditions, and a common worship. Work within a community is understood in the Aristotelian sense of energeia, as the realization of a natural potency, the carrying out of a meaningful task or vocation. The family is the prototype of all community.

Society is characterized by chosen or achieved statuses, self-interest, individualism, impersonality, contract, and competition. Work is understood not as a calling but as a “job,” an unpleasantness to be endured for the sake of extrinsic rewards such as money and status. The particular nature of the enterprise in which one competes may be a matter of indifference (e.g., dope-dealing being as good as agriculture). The commercial enterprise is the textbook example of a society understood by way of contrast to a community.

Communities such as families, family-based small businesses, villages, and religious congregations are the natural nurseries of larger and looser societies such as cities and large-scale business corporations: societies presuppose communities in a way communities do not presuppose societies. But even as society arises out of community, it has an inherent tendency to erode the natural soil from which it grew. Advanced societies are often marked by a nostalgic “quest for community,” in Robert Nisbet’s phrase, but members of such societies often fail to appreciate that a return to community would necessarily entail a sacrifice in freedom of personal action—and possibly in material standard of living as well. These are the waters in which cult leaders and demagogues fish. Prominent among such false prophets in recent times have been feminists, calling the duties of married life “slavery” when they are in reality the indispensable basis for the family, and therefore of all real community.

Tönnies himself saw that his typological distinction is not sexually neutral: men can thrive in loose, competitive societies; women generally do not, or, if they do, they lose their femininity in the process. In prefeminist America, we may note, comfortably supported women with time on their hands often did volunteer work in their communities. Nothing is more foreign and terrible to a woman’s original inborn nature, observed Tönnies, than trade, than independence as a contracting party and possessor of money. (Supporting a wife need not, be it noted, involve giving her money.) Conversely, nothing has been a greater factor in the modern encroachment of society upon community than the emancipation of women from communal bonds and pursuits.

My citation of a 19th-century sociologist to clarify the nature of the family, by the way, would probably have bewildered Tönnies himself. He could safely assume his readers already knew what a family was, and he used the concept to clarify the nature of other communities. But today, after several decades of a state-sponsored cult of individual gratification, Western Man might just require a course in sociology to grasp matters that the rest of the world has always considered too natural and obvious for explanation.

SEXUAL UTOPIA IN POWER:

THE FEMINIST REVOLT AGAINST CIVILIZATION 

by 

F. ROGER DEVLIN

Child Abuse

 (...)

In their relentless determination to punish, the family police have little regard for the rights of children (that elsewhere they claim to champion). Long and intrusive interrogations of children, with relentless suggestions of the alleged brutality and lust of their parents against them, poison their relationships with their parents, sometimes permanently. “Long, repeated interrogations by social workers—and the outright intimidation that sometimes accompanies them—forced physical and sexual examinations in some cases to determine if they have been sexually abused, and (essentially) forced therapy by psychologists, counselors,” is described by Krason (and others), who suggests they could be “considered torture under international human rights law.”311 The foster care into which children are placed after being taken from their parents is a far more likely setting for serious abuse than the children’s natural family, with more than 10 times the rate of physical abuse and more than 28 times the rate of sexual abuse of children in group homes than in the general population.312Like child support enforcement agents and other feminist gendarmes, child protective services blur the distinction between social work and law enforcement. In effect, they constitute another form of plainclothes family police. “Although spoken of in terms of social services,” writes Susan Orr, “the child-protection function of child welfare is essentially a police action.” Yet because they are not called police and do not wear uniforms, these social workers are not required to follow due process procedures; nor are the courts before which parents accused by them are summoned. Orr calls child protective services “the most intrusive arm of social services,” because of their power to remove children from their parents. Yet because the parents are seldom charged criminally, they are not afforded due process protections and are unable to defend themselves in proceedings that (like divorces) are usually secret and without public record. Like Orr, Krason argues that “child abuse and neglect should be treated as criminal matters to be dealt with in regular courts, where accused persons have the full range of due process and other constitutional rights.”313 Also like divorce proceedings, child protection blurs the distinction between civil and criminal law. It is “civil of a special type,”314 where officials can punish parents by taking away their children or incarcerating them without trial. For the few parents who do receive jury trials, “A verdict of not guilty in a criminal court will not effect [sic] the ‘true [substantiated] finding’ in Juvenile Court because that finding is based on a different and lower evidentiary standard.” So parents who have received their day in court and been found innocent are still guilty in the eyes of social workers and family court judges, who base their determination of guilt on . . . apparently whatever they feel like.315 “Even if parents are exonerated by a criminal court, agency actions and proceedings against them in juvenile and civil courts often may still go ahead,” notes Krason. “Criminal exoneration is no guarantee they will get their children back.”316Much like secret police operations in totalitarian states, the child abuse gestapo turns citizens into informers by providing for anonymous reporting, requiring mandatory reporting by doctors and other professionals of even suspected child abuse (whatever that might be), complete immunity from criminal prosecution or civil liability for knowingly false reports, and confidentiality of records and proceedings. “Much as we see in totalitarian regimes,” writes Krason, “The laws . . . have created a system driven to a certain extent by fear . . . Physicians, teachers, day care center workers, and other mandated reporters make reports—often on the slightest pretext—because they figure that it is better to speak up than not speak up for the sake of self-protection.”

Some US states mandate that every citizen must report even suspected abuse, and federal legislation has been introduced to require all states to do so. “This almost certainly would mean that, as with the mandated professional reporters currently, any person could face civil or criminal liability if he failed to report” something that has no definition.317 “Forcing the states to make every single adult a mandatory reporter with no exceptions will lead to a police-state environment, where every adult is forced to act as an informer against friends, family, and neighbors, or face possible charges.”318 As with divorce and other government measures to forcibly break up families, cases are shrouded in secrecy. Ostensibly, this is to protect family “privacy,” though in reality it provides a cloak to violate privacy with impunity. “Confidentiality laws are supposed to protect kids; instead they shield bureaucrats,” notes one commentator. “They were supposed to protect families; instead, they provide a basis for assaulting them.”319Also like child support agents, child protection officials are recruited largely from the ranks of divorced women and from graduates of social work and “women’s studies” programs, where they are trained in feminist ideology that is hostile to parents and especially fathers. It appears that homosexuals are also entering the social work profession in large numbers.320

Child abuse hysteria was carried into adulthood through “recovered memory therapy,” another fabrication by feminist theories in the psychotherapy industry. One eminent Johns Hopkins University psychiatrist describes “a craze reminiscent of the Salem witch hunts,” where wild, preposterous tales of lurid childhood sex crimes were manufactured from a psychological theory and used to demonize and arrest mostly fathers (who, as we shall see, commit very little sexual or physical child abuse). As a result, “many men (and a few women) were being found guilty of crimes they never committed and receiving punishing prison terms.”321 In Victims of Memory, Mark Pendergrast shows how the recovered memory hoax destroyed families, ruined lives, and sent innocent parents to prison with no evidence that they had committed any crime or abuse. Yet it is embarrassingly clear that, as the price for getting published, Pendergrast must issue repeated, seemingly gratuitous protests, unconvincing and contrary to his own evidence, that this hysteria was not incited by feminist ideology.322 Yet no one should doubt the ideological subtext. “The abuse therapists were joined by an influential group of conspiracy-minded feminists,” writes dissident feminist Christina Hoff Sommers. “When a few civil libertarian feminists . . . tried to blow the whistle on the witch-hunt, they were vilified by the conspiracy caucus as backlashers, child abuse apologists, and ‘obedient daddies’ girls of male editors.’”323

Feminist-dominated administrations in the United States have elevated child protection to a paramilitary operation. In 1993, US Attorney General Janet Reno used unsubstantiated child abuse rumors to launch military operations against American citizens in Waco, Texas, resulting in the deaths of 24 children that she was ostensibly protecting. The militarization of child protection was seen again in the largest seizure of children in American history, when almost five hundred children were seized from their polygamous parents in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints without any evidence of abuse. “A night-time raid with tanks, riot police, SWAT teams, snipers, and cars full of Texas Rangers and sheriff’s deputies—that is the new face of state child protection,” writes attorney Gregory Hession, “social workers backed up with automatic weapons.”

The media obfuscated the central role of feminist ideology in the action, which was nevertheless revealed when a spokeswoman for the state’s child protection agency described the “abuse”: “There is a mindset [among the sect] that even the young girls report that they will marry at whatever age, and that it’s the highest blessing they can have to have children.” As Hession comments, expressing respect for motherhood is “abuse,” and legally innocent American citizens can now be attacked militarily on their own soil by their own government for rejecting feminist ideology and practicing traditional values within their own homes.324As with other new gender crimes, the feminist gestapo’s “attempt to monitor and control vast numbers of people in the minutest of details about how they conduct their lives and raise their children is more than a touch of totalitarianism.”325

So does this mean that the entire child abuse epidemic is just another hoax? Stephen Krason and others do argue plausibly that, despite the  explosion of “reports” generated by the child abuse lobby, “the ‘epidemic’ of child abuse—real child abuse—that the American public heard so much about in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s is just not there, and probably never was.”326Yet it may be more serious even than that. The plausibility of the accusations stems from the possibility that, ironically, there may indeed be a child abuse epidemic, and it is being created by the “protectors.” Britain’s notorious Baby Peter case demonstrated that child protection is virtually useless against real abuse, though the extensive media attention given to that case refused to confront the corollary victimization of innocent parents. Popular exposés by journalists like Christopher Booker have likewise highlighted the bizarre combination of abusing innocent children and victimizing innocent parents.327

The explanation once again appears to be that the radicals have not eliminated child abuse so much as they have politicized and bureaucratized it. For the child abuse phenomenon is almost entirely the creation of the feminist welfare bureaucracies themselves. Here is one more textbook example—albeit an unusually horrifying one—of radicalized government creating a problem for itself to solve.

Real child abuse correlates directly and demonstrably with the rise of single-mother homes that are the setting for almost all of it. This is very clear from unambiguous figures from the US government, the British government, and numerous scholarly studies.328 In fact, no reputable scholar even tries to deny it, though feminists confirm even as they try to excuse it (“battered women who maltreat their children”).329 Overwhelmingly, the most likely physical abuser of a child is the child’s own single mother, and the most likely sexual abuser is the mother’s lover. Contrary to the innuendo of divorce and child abuse advocates—who intentionally and knowingly use fabricated abuse accusations in family courts to remove fathers from the home—it is not married fathers but single mothers who account for almost all child abuse. “Contrary to public perception,” write Patrick Fagan and Dorothy Hanks of the Heritage Foundation, “research shows that the most likely physical abuser of a young child will be that child’s mother, not a male in the household.” Mothers accounted for 55% of child murders, according to a Justice Department report (and natural fathers for a tiny percentage). Despite  later efforts to disguise it, the US Department of Health and Human Services shows that women aged 20 to 49 are almost twice as likely as men to be perpetrators of child maltreatment: “almost two-thirds were females.” Given that “male” perpetrators are not usually fathers but much more likely to be boyfriends and stepfathers, fathers emerge as by far the least likely child abusers. A study by London’s Family Education Trust found children are up to 33 times more likely to suffer serious abuse and 73 times more likely to suffer fatal abuse in the home of a mother with a live-in boyfriend or stepfather than in an intact family.330In other words, the most effective protection for children is precisely the rival figure the feminist welfare and divorce bureaucracies love to hate and are most intent on removing from the home: the father. “The presence of the father . . . placed the child at lesser risk for child sexual abuse,” concludes one study in a typically defensive tone. “It is solidly clear that an ongoing, co-residential social and biological father decreases, by far, the dangers to that child of being abused.”331 The very concept of fathers as protectors is so politically incorrect that researchers must hedge their findings with politically acceptable weasel words: “The protective effect from the father’s presence in most households was sufficiently strong to offset the risk incurred by the few paternal perpetrators.”332 In fact, the risk of “paternal perpetrators” is miniscule. While men are assumed more likely to commit sexual than physical abuse,333 sexual abuse is much less common than severe physical abuse and is almost entirely perpetrated by boyfriends and stepfathers (who are falsely classified as “fathers” in most statistical studies).

Yet feminists would have us believe that father-daughter incest is rampant, and feminist child protection agents implement this propaganda as policy, rationalizing the forced removal of fathers and creating  the very problem they claim to be solving. “An anti-male attitude is often found in documents, statements, and in the writings of those claiming to be experts in cases of child sexual abuse.” These scholars document techniques by social service agencies to systematically teach children to hate their fathers, including inculcating in the children a message that the father has sexually molested them. “The professionals use techniques that teach children a negative and critical view of men in general and fathers in particular,” they write. “The child is repeatedly reinforced for fantasizing throwing Daddy in jail and is trained to hate and fear him.”334 From the father’s perspective, the real child abusers have thrown him out of the family so they can abuse his children with impunity.

On the other hand, feminist groups consistently defend mothers, single and otherwise, who abuse and kill their children, such as the notorious Andrea Yates, who confessed to murdering her five children. “One of our feminist beliefs is to be there for other women,” Deborah Bell, president of Texas NOW told the Associated Press. “We want to be there with her in her time of need.”335 Perhaps Andrea Dworkin’s view is illuminating here: “Under patriarchy, every woman’s son is her betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.”336

It is implausible that judges are unaware that the most dangerous environment for children is precisely the single-parent homes they themselves create when they remove fathers in custody proceedings. Yet they have no hesitation in removing them, secure in the knowledge that they will never be held accountable for any harm that comes to the children. On the contrary, if they do not they may be punished by feminist-dominated family law sections of the bar associations and social work bureaucracies whose earnings and funding depend on a constant supply of abused children. A Brooklyn judge, described as “gutsier than most” by the New York Law Journal, was denied reappointment when he challenged social service agencies’ efforts to remove children from their parents. A lawyer close to the Legal Aid Society said that “many of that group’s lawyers, who [claim to] represent the children’s interests in abuse cases, and lawyers with agencies where [allegedly?] abused children are placed, have been upset by Judge Segal’s attempts to spur fam ily reunifications.” Though no evidence indicated that his rulings resulted in any child being abused or neglected, “most of the opposition [to his reappointment] came from attorneys who represent children in neglect and abuse proceedings.”337 An Edmonton, Alberta, judge was forced by feminists to apologize for saying, “That parties who decide to have children together should split for any reason is abhorrent to me,” in a case involving a divorcing mother whose two young sons were hospitalized for heat stroke after she left them in a hot parked car.338Seldom does public policy stand in such direct defiance of undisputed facts, to the point where the cause of the problem—separating children from their fathers—is presented as the solution, and the solution—allowing children to live with their fathers—is depicted as the problem. It is unambiguous and undeniable that if you want children abused, take them away from their fathers.

The logic is marvelously self-justifying and self-perpetuating, since by eliminating the fathers, feminist officials can then present themselves as the solution to the problem they themselves have created. The more child abuse—whether by mothers or foster care providers or even by social workers themselves (which is often the case)—the only option on the table is to further and endlessly expand the child abuse bureaucracy. Even when the horrors are exposed, meaningful reform is then deftly deflected with the self-serving argument that the welfare agencies are “overworked and underfunded,” thus rationalizing expansion of the very machinery creating the horrors. “State agencies . . . frequently complain that they are understaffed and overworked—even while justifying more and more intervention into families.”339Whether it is evicting the father from the home, establishing visitation centers where he may see his children under the surveillance of social workers, protecting the children from the abusive single mother and her boyfriend, treating the emotionally devastated children with drugs or psychotherapy, or removing them altogether into the control of state-sponsored foster homes and, later, juvenile detention facilities—the solution to the problems created by each cadre of officials is to create more cadres of officials.

This appalling conclusion is simply a commonplace of political science: bureaucracies relentlessly expand, often by creating the very prob lem they exist to combat. This time we have created a massive army of functionaries with a vested interest in creating as much child abuse as possible, and they are doing precisely that.

311. Ibid., 48. See also Baskerville, Taken Into Custody, ch. 4.

312. Cited in Krason, “Mondale Act,” 48.

313. Susan Orr, Child Protection at the Crossroads: Child Abuse, Child Protection, and Recommendations for Reform (Los Angeles: Reason Public Policy Institute, October 1999), 10–12; Krason, “Mondale Act,” 58.

314. Krason, “Mondale Act,” 40.

315. Child Sexual Abuse, Assault, and Molest Issues, Report No. 8, A Report by the 1991–92 San Diego County Grand Jury, 29 June 1992 (http://www.co.san-diego.ca.us/cnty/cntydepts/safety/grand/reports/report8.html).

316. Krason, “Mondale Act,” 38.

317. Krason, “Mondale Act,” 33, 3.

318. Internet site of the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, 12 December 2011, http://www.hslda.org/Legislation/National/2011/S1877/default.asp.

319. Krason, “Mondale Act,” 34, partly quoting Trevor Armbrister, “When Parents Become Victims,” Reader’s Digest (April 1993), 106.

320. See Mary Pride, The Child Abuse Industry: Outrageous Facts About Child Abuse and Everyday Rebellions Against a System that Threatens Every North American Family (Westchester, IL: Crossway, 1986), 241, and Brenda Scott, Out of Control: Who’s Watching Our Child Protection Agencies? (Lafayette, LA: Huntington House, 1994), 58.

321. Paul R. McHugh, Try to Remember: Psychiatry’s Clash Over Meaning, Memory, and Mind (New York: Dana Press, 2008), introduction, Kindle locations 820–21, 1302–03. McHugh acknowledges that “feminists attacked it [efforts to refute the accusations] because they believed ‘recovered memories’ confirmed their views about patriarchal oppression in family life.” Yet “90% of accusers are women,” and the main targets are “parents” (almost always fathers). Otherwise, like Pendergrast (see next note), he conspicuously avoids ideology. Kindle locations 815, 818, 820.

322. Hinesburg, Vermont: Upper Access Books, 1995. A writer who doth seem to protest too much on this point, Pendergrast never tells us who suggests that it is the creation of feminist ideology.

323. “Rape Culture is a ‘Panic Where Paranoia, Censorship, and False Accusations Flourish,’” Time, 15 May 2014 (http://time.com/100091/campus-sexual-assault-christinahoff-sommers/). As we have seen (above, under “Rape and Sexual Assault”), Hoff Sommers sees a parallel with the current hysteria surrounding “campus rape culture.”

324. Gregory A. Hession, “Whose Children Are They Anyway?” New American, 23 June 2008 (http://thenewamerican.com/node/8344#SlideFrame_1,).

325. Ibid., 61.

326. Krason, “Mondale Act,” 10.

327. See above, note 298.

328. Surveyed in Baskerville, Taken Into Custody, ch. 4.

329. Gregory Parkinson, et al., “Maternal Domestic Violence Screening in an Office-Based Pediatric Practice,” Pediatrics, vol. 108, no. 3 (September 2001), e43.

330. Robert Whelan, Broken Homes and Battered Children: A Study of the Relationship between Child Abuse and Family Type (London: Family Education Trust, 1993), 29. Whelan’s findings led the British government to stop publishing figures. “Whitehall no longer wants them to be collected.” Melanie Phillips, “The Darkest Secret of Child Sex Abuse,” Sunday Times, 26 November 2000.

331. Nancy Coney and Wade Mackey, “The Feminization of Domestic Violence in America,” Journal of Men’s Studies, vol. 8, no. 1 (October 1999), 45.

332. David L. Rowland, Laurie S. Zabin, and Mark Emerson, “Household Risk and Child Sexual Abuse in a Low Income, Urban Sample of Women,” Adolescent and Family Health, vol. 1, no. 1 (Winter 2000), 29–39 (www.afhjournal.org/docs/010110.asp).

333. Despite the ubiquitous stereotype of the pedophile male, it now appears to be female teachers who are engaged in an epidemic of raping underage boys. None seem to be seriously punished. The March 2006 issue of Whistleblower magazine is devoted to this problem. See “Another Woman Gets No Jail Time,” WorldNetDaily, 1 June 2006, http://www.wnd.com/2006/06/36416/.

334. Ralph Underwager and Hollida Wakefield, The Real World of Child Interrogations (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1990), 127.

335. Quoted by Phil Brennan, “NOW Throwing Lifebelt to Mom who Drowned Five Kids,” NewsMax.com, 30 August 2001.

336. Cathy Young, “The Misdirected Passion of Andrea Dworkin,” Boston Globe, 18 April 2005 (http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/04/18/the_misdirected_passion_of_andrea_dworkin/).

337. Daniel Wise, “Mayor’s Panel Rejects Brooklyn Family Court Judge for Second Term,” New York Law Journal, 14 March 2001, 1.

338. Gordon Kent, et al., “Judge Apologizes for Saying He Finds It’s ‘Abhorrent’ When Parents Split,” Edmonton Journal, 9 January 2003.

339. Krason, “Mondale Act,” 47.

THE NEW POLITICS OF SEX

The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Governmental Power

by

Stephen Baskerville

Pelliot – the Gentle Art of Making Enemies

 

Despite their colonial toe-hold on the continent (in Hanoi they even had an archaeological institute) the French were late in joining in the Central Asian treasure hunt, although they were not the last to try their luck. By the time Pelliot reached Chinese Turkestan in August 1906, the British, Swedes, Germans and Japanese had all been there at least once, the Beresovskys were nearing the end of their stay, and Stein was already back for more. The belated arrival of the French on the Silk Road is perhaps explained by their discovery, not long before, of a once-rich civilisation in the jungles of Indo-China – including the magnificent ruins at Angkor – which had been keeping their own orientalists busy. But whatever the reason for their dilatoriness, they were now determined to get their share. ‘If France was to do nothing,’ the distinguished French orientalist Sylvain Levi exhorted his fellow savants, ‘we would be betraying our glorious tradition.’ A powerful committee was set up, headed by Emile Senart, another leading oriental scholar and member of the French Academy, and backed by the Minister of Public Instruction. This had the support of no fewer than nine leading bodies devoted to scientific, geographical or cultural studies. It was decided to dispatch a three-man expedition to Chinese Turkestan as soon as possible. Chosen to lead this was a brilliant young sinologist of twenty-seven named Paul Pelliot, a former pupil of Levi’s now on the staff of Hanoi’s celebrated (but later to be embroiled in controversy) Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient. His companions were Dr Louis Vaillant, an army medical officer and old friend of his, who would be  responsible for mapping, collecting natural history specimens and other scientific work, and Charles Nouette, who was the expedition’s photographer.

In addition to Pelliot’s linguistic genius – he was at home in some thirteen languages – as a very young man he had won the Legion of Honour during the siege of the foreign legations in Peking in the summer of 1900. Trapped there at the age of twenty-one by the Boxer uprising while searching for Chinese books for the Ecole library, he was involved in two exploits which won him both praise and criticism. One was his daring capture, with the aid of two sailors, of a huge Boxer war standard, an act which greatly enraged the enemy. In his siege diary, published subsequently, there is a photograph of him proudly holding his trophy. The other exploit occurred during a temporary ceasefire when he climbed over the barricade announcing that he was going to have tea with the rebels. For several hours his fate was discussed, and his bravado condemned, by the besieged Europeans. But eventually, after being seen to take leave of the enemy with great displays of cordiality, he returned laden with gifts of fruit. He had told them, he said, that the Europeans’ morale was extremely high, but that they lacked fresh fruit.

Pelliot’s diary, much of it scribbled under fire, reveals a courageous but hot-headed young man always in the thick of the fray. He is fiercely critical of many of the senior diplomats, hinting at their cowardice and incompetence. It is not surprising, therefore, that some of them found him bumptious. (Even Stein, who greatly admired him as a scholar, described him some years later as ‘a bit too self-centred’.) One French officer, on the other hand, wrote: ‘Pelliot, the youngest of the volunteers, is adored by everybody, and, because of his youth and courage, we forgive him for getting carried away at times.’ Whether one liked him or was irritated by him, it seems that it was hard to ignore him. On his return to Hanoi, and still only twenty-two, he was made Professor of Chinese at the Ecole. At the same time he began to review – often very critically  – the works of other sinologists in learned journals and in the Ecole’s own bulletin. ‘The gentle art of making enemies …’ he once called this. Here perhaps are clues as to why, some nine years later, he would find himself victim of a vicious and concerted campaign in France when he returned in triumph from his Central Asian expedition.

Their preparations now complete, Pelliot and his two companions left Paris on June 17, 1906, travelling by rail via Moscow to Tashkent where they were held up for two months awaiting the arrival of their heavy baggage. Pelliot had used the time to polish up his Russian and also, as we have seen, to study Turki (or Eastern Turkish, as some scholars then called it). Thanks to his amazing gift for languages and prodigious memory, he was soon able to converse easily in the latter. It was this near-unbelievable power of recall that later was to mislead Pelliot’s detractors into challenging some of his claims. The expedition finally reached Kashgar on the last day of August. There they stayed at the Russian consulate-general as guests of Petrovsky’s successor, making diplomatic and other official calls on those mandarins whose goodwill and help they would require. This caused something of a stir, for few western travellers who passed through Kashgar (and certainly none of Pelliot’s rivals) spoke Chinese. Dr Vaillant recalled long afterwards ‘how amazed these high officials were to hear Pelliot speaking fluent and elegant Chinese, quoting from their classics and reading with ease the sentences written on the long scrolls which, in China, adorn all reception rooms’. Above all, they were impressed by his familiarity with what the doctor calls ‘the refined ceremonial practised by a civilisation so proudly aware of its longevity …’. Although all this sounds suspiciously like the young hero of the barricades showing off once again to the natives, it was – as Vaillant points out – soon to pay dividends. For a start they had decided to take with them a yurt (the circular tent of Central  Asia) and Pelliot asked the Prefect of Kashgar to try to obtain one for them. ‘When we mentioned this to the Russian consul,’ Vaillant recounts, ‘he laughed at our pretensions.’ He assured the three Frenchmen: ‘They are unobtainable and even if you did find one it would take you six months to get it.’ A week later, to the Russian’s astonishment, the yurt was delivered, whereupon – Vaillant adds – ‘Pelliot immediately got us used to erecting it and living in it in the consulate yard.’

Their plan was to travel eastwards to Kucha where they proposed to excavate at some length. This would take them past Tumchuq, where Hedin had reported seeing some ruins which he had dismissed as Moslem and not old enough, therefore, to be of interest. After six weeks of preparation at Kashgar, the three Frenchmen set out on the first leg of their journey. A few marches short of Tumchuq an amusing incident occurred when they halted for lunch at the small sub-prefecture of Faizabad. After paying their respects to the sub-prefect, and apologising for being unable to receive a return call from him, they returned to the inn for a hurried meal before moving on. Vaillant picks up the tale: ‘But scarcely had we regained our camp than we heard the three shots from the cannon which meant that the mandarin had left his yamen.’ Moments later Ting, their servant, shouted: ‘Here is the mandarin!’ The Frenchmen were aghast. Vaillant writes: ‘We had nothing prepared for a visit. Pelliot greeted him with profuse apologies and invited him into the reception room. After the customary courtesies we sat down and tried not to show our anxiety. We then saw cups of tea arriving and plates laden with slices of melon and cakes.’ When the meal was over, the mandarin turned to Pelliot with a smile and said: ‘Really, you Europeans certainly know how to travel. I am full of admiration for the way you are able to organise such a reception in the middle of a journey. I am deeply honoured by your delicacy.’ When he had gone, Pelliot immediately began to congratulate Ting on having coped so  well. ‘I did nothing,’ he replied. ‘Servants from the yamen brought everything.…’

The ruins at Tumchuq, far from being Moslem, proved to be those of an early Buddhist monastic city which had flourished until at least the year 800. It was mere chance which led Pelliot to discover this during their brief halt there. Idly prodding the ground with his riding crop, to his astonishment he turned up a figurine which was unmistakably Graeco-Buddhist. Although all their baggage, including their winter clothing, was already on its way to Kucha, Pelliot felt that they had no choice but to stay and excavate further. Six weeks later, numbed with cold but laden with painted sculptures and other finds, they hastened on to Kucha – and the comfort of their fur coats. They had been disappointed to learn that not only the Germans but also (as we shall see) the Russians and Japanese had preceded them to this archaeologically rich area. In the event they found plenty to do in the temples which their rivals had overlooked. Most important to Pelliot was their discovery of a large hoard of Buddhist documents, including many in unknown languages. Some of these proved later to be in the lost language of Kuchean, and were subsequently deciphered by Sylvain Levi.

After eight fruitful months in Kucha, the French expedition moved on to Urumchi to replenish their stores before making the desert crossing to Tun-huang. At this point their plan was merely to photograph and study the wall-paintings and sculptures in the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, for word of Stein’s great discovery six months earlier had not reached them.

While they were in Urumchi, Pelliot met an old friend – or rather foe – from Peking days. Following the defeat of the Boxers, the Duke Lan, brother of the movement’s leader and himself deeply implicated in the uprising, had been exiled for life to Urumchi, where he devoted his remaining years to photography. ‘We had fought one another in 1900, but the passage of time heals all things,’ Pelliot wrote afterwards, adding: ‘We  sealed our friendship with many a glass of champagne.’ When the day of their departure finally arrived, the Duke remarked sadly to Pelliot: ‘You are going, but I have to stay.’ Pelliot forbore from reminding the one-time Peking police chief that, some seven years earlier, there had been a day ‘when he had forced us to stay when we would have asked nothing better than to leave’.

In fact, although the Duke probably did not realise it, it was an act of generosity by him which made Pelliot even more eager to get away from Urumchi and reach Tun-huang. During their stay in Urumchi they had heard vague stories about a mysterious cache of manuscripts that had been found in the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. Pelliot knew at once that this was more than a mere bazaar rumour when the exiled Duke presented him with a manuscript which he said had come from Tun-huang. ‘Pelliot had hardly unrolled this,’ Vaillant recounts, ‘when he realised that it dated from before the eighth century.’

When the three men reached Tun-huang and the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas they found, just as Stein had, the manuscript cave locked and Wang absent. However, before long, they ran the priest to earth in the town. Dazzled no doubt by Pelliot’s Chinese, he agreed to show the Frenchman his finds. In view of the prolonged struggle that Stein and Chiang had had with Wang before being allowed to see the manuscripts, it may seem surprising that Pelliot managed it so relatively easily. Indeed, his enemies were to find it unbelievable. However, fear of discovery had been Wang’s great dread, as he repeatedly told Stein and Chiang. Now, because this new visitor from Europe did not even mention Stein (Pelliot still did not realise, it seems, that his rival had beaten him to the secret chamber), it must have appeared to Wang that the Englishman had kept his vow of secrecy. The discovery that these ‘foreign devils’ could be trusted not to talk must have been very reassuring to him. Furthermore, he had already begun to spend Stein’s ‘donation’ on his garish restorations,  and now, no doubt, was looking for further contributions.

But even Pelliot was made to bide his time. He recounts in a letter written from Tun-huang on March 26, 1908: ‘Wang arrived rather late and said he had left the key behind at Tun-huang. I had to wait again.’ It was then that Pelliot learned to his disappointment that Stein had already visited the secret chamber, but – he was assured – had spent only three days there. Had he known the true length of Stein’s stay he might have been less sanguine about his own prospects. As it was, he feared that in the eight years since its discovery much of the library inevitably would have disappeared. After all, the manuscript presented to him by Duke Lan, some four hundred miles away in Urumchi, was unlikely to be the only one to have escaped thus from the cave.

Finally the key arrived from Tun-huang and nearly a month after their arrival at the great ming-oi Pelliot was allowed into the secret chamber. ‘I was stupefied,’ he wrote. He estimated that there were between fifteen and twenty thousand manuscripts in the cave. To unroll each one and examine it properly, he realised, would take him a minimum of six months. However, his mind was quickly made up. ‘If only cursory, examination of the entire library was essential,’ he wrote. ‘I must at least open everything, recognise the nature of the text and see whether it offered anything new.’ He decided to make two piles : first the cream, which he must obtain at all costs, and then the desirable but less essential manuscripts.

Working by the light of a single candle, and crouched uncomfortably in the tiny space resulting (though he did not realise it) from the removal of Stein’s great haul, Pelliot spent three long and claustrophobic weeks sifting through the dusty bundles. In the Pelliot gallery at the Musée Guimet in Paris there is a memorable photograph of him at work in the secret chamber taken by Nouette. Behind him, as he crouches, can be seen a daunting mountain of tightly packed manuscripts.  ‘During the first ten days,’ Pelliot wrote in a long letter to Senart in Paris, ‘I attacked nearly a thousand scrolls a day, which must be a record …’ He likened himself, somewhat flippantly, to a philologist travelling at the speed of a racing-car. It was an analogy that his critics were to fasten onto with glee.

At the end of each long session in the cave, Pelliot would rejoin his two colleagues – ‘his greatcoat stuffed with his most interesting finds … radiant with joy’, Vaillant recalled years afterwards. ‘One such evening he showed us a Nestorian Gospel of St John; on another a description, dating from the year 800, of the curious little lake … situated in the high dunes south of Tun-huang; another time it was the monastery accounts.’ Pelliot ruled out any hope of persuading Wang to part with the entire collection, for the discovery was too well known in the district. ‘Mongol and Tibetan pilgrims came to read some of these precious documents as part of their pilgrimage,’ Vaillant explains. Pelliot’s great fear, however, was of leaving behind, or not recognising, any key document. ‘All the same, I do not think I overlooked anything essential,’ he wrote. ‘I handled not only every scroll, but every scrap of paper – and God knows how many bits and pieces there were.…’

Now came the most anxious moment of all, when Pelliot had to persuade the little priest to sell him the two piles of manuscripts which he had set aside. The negotiations were conducted between the two men amid great secrecy. ‘We ourselves’, Vaillant recalled, ‘were compelled to speak of the discovery in only the most guarded fashion, even in our letters.’ Finally the figure of 500 taels (about £90) was agreed and the hoard was carefully and discreetly packed for shipment to France. Vaillant wrote: ‘Only when Nouette had embarked on the steamer with the crates containing our collections did Pelliot mention them openly and leave for Peking with a box containing samples of the manuscripts.’ He added: ‘They were a revelation to Chinese scholars, who could scarcely  believe that such a find had been made.’ But as a result, a telegram was immediately sent by the Peking authorities to the sub-prefect at Tun-huang ordering him to place an embargo on whatever remained in the cave. Vaillant observed wryly: ‘The good monk must have had a bad quarter of an hour, and perhaps repented that he had accepted Pelliot’s money.’

Although the acquisition of the Tun-huang manuscripts represented a great personal triumph for Pelliot – whatever one may think of the ethics involved – his two companions had also been far from idle during nearly four months there. Nouette had taken hundreds of black and white photographs of everything that Pelliot considered worthy of interest, and these were published later in six volumes. Although Pelliot never got around to writing an accompanying text, this corpus remains today the principal source of information on the paintings and sculptures, mainly because of the vandalism which was to occur only a few years later when White Russian soldiers were interned in the caves.

When Pelliot finally reached Paris on October 24, 1909, he had been away for three years. He returned to a hero’s welcome, but also to find trouble brewing. This was to develop into a vicious campaign embracing not only himself but also Professor Chavannes and the Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient in Hanoi. During his absence, the long and often graphic letter he had written from Tun-huang to Senart in the first flush of excitement had been published in the widely read journal of the Ecole, where he was still officially employed. He might well have written differently had he known what capital his foes would make of it, and almost certainly would have omitted some of his more candid, and sometimes light-hearted, comments. We have already noted how Pelliot’s intellectual arrogance – as some saw it – had earned him enemies in the academic world. His letter to Senart gave them the opportunity they had been waiting for.

That part of the campaign which involved Chavannes and  the Ecole does not concern us here, but in essence it sought to cast doubts upon the former’s scholarship and upon the competence of the entire staff of that prestigious institution. It was waged initially as a whispering campaign, but before long it had spread to the columns of some newspapers and periodicals, especially those concerned with Indo-China. Pelliot’s involvement was on two counts. As Professor of Chinese at the Ecole, he, like all other members of the staff, had to face general accusations of élitism and – more serious – of having to rely on local interpreters for assistance with the publication of their works. But in addition to this, as leader of the highly successful expedition to Chinese Central Asia, Pelliot found himself singled out for special attention. For this triumph by one so young had inevitably aroused envy in some other French orientalists who felt, perhaps, that they instead should have been chosen.

Among his principal detractors was a senior librarian in the oriental department of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, where the Tun-huang manuscripts had been deposited by Pelliot in a locked room to which only he had a key. Clearly furious (and perhaps understandably so) at being denied access to them, the librarian wrote a caustic letter to a French newspaper in which he endeavoured to cast doubts on the authenticity of Pelliot’s manuscripts as well as upon the young scholar’s capabilities as a sinologist. On the pretext of wishing to safeguard his own reputation as conservator of the Bibliothèque’s oriental manuscripts – which those in the locked room were due to join – he announced that he was forthwith disclaiming all responsibility for Pelliot’s Tun-huang purchases. Meanwhile, the other works of art brought back by the expedition – paintings, sculptures, textiles, wooden figures and terracottas – were put on public view in the Louvre, in a specially named Salle Pelliot. These, too, his detractors endeavoured to belittle. ‘One wonders how it is possible that a room in the Louvre, however small, should be devoted to so little,’ wrote one.

 In December 1910, this ‘malevolent campaign’, as one French scholar has called it, reached its climax in a particularly virulent attack on Pelliot, Chavannes and the Ecole in the anti-colonial journal La Revue Indigène. A mixture of the unctuous and the vitriolic, and filling twenty-three pages of the magazine, it purported to analyse the Pelliot ‘scandal’. The author – M. Fernand Farjenel, an old China hand and himself a Chinese speaker – first disposed of Chavannes, whose translations, he claimed, ‘were inaccurate on every line when not in every word’. His main target, however, was Pelliot. The ‘young explorer’, as he repeatedly calls him, was accused of frittering away public money in two years of ‘wandering’ which, Farjenel claimed, yielded nothing of any value. He implied that by the time Pelliot reached Tun-huang he was so desperate to justify his mission that his critical judgement was seriously impaired.

In support of this, Farjenel quoted Pelliot’s letter to Senart in which he admits to being ‘stupefied’ at what he saw when he entered Wang’s secret chamber. So stupefied was he, Farjenel claimed, that he swallowed the priest’s tale ‘with credulous confidence’, apparently unaware that, shortly before, Stein had removed ‘twenty-nine cases’ of manuscripts and paintings from the chamber. ‘This must have pretty well emptied it,’ the writer argued. But Pelliot, he went on, ‘full of joy at the thought that he had just discovered a priceless treasure took no precautions whatever and made no attempt to check the monk’s claims’. The obvious conclusion, he added, was that the cave had been refilled with forged and other worthless manuscripts by the local people who knew that Europeans liked to buy such things. He reminded his readers that the Far East abounded with clever rogues, as Stein’s unmasking of Islam Akhun had shown. A scholar who, by his own admission, had to examine some thousand scrolls a day (Farjenel calculated that this meant two a minute) was a natural victim for such forgers, he added. The fact that the manuscripts remained even now behind locked doors, out of  reach of other oriental scholars, could only reinforce his and others’ suspicions. He demanded that in view of ‘the very large sum that the expedition has cost’, Pelliot should reply at once to his critics. But Pelliot did not reply, confident that his detractors would have to eat their words sooner or later.

The French public, of course, had no way of telling who was right. If Stein had cleaned out the secret chamber, then where had all these manuscripts come from? Anyway, why were they still under lock and key, unavailable to other scholars, a full year after being deposited in the Bibliothèque? It was not until 1912, when Stein’s Ruins of Desert Cathay came out, that Pelliot’s critics were finally put in their place. Had Farjenel been able to read it before launching so confidently into print, he would certainly have thought twice. For a start Stein made it perfectly clear that he had only been able to purchase part of the Tun-huang library, leaving behind him ‘masses of manuscripts’. Moreover, he had not been allowed to choose freely – as Pelliot had – from the secret chamber, being limited to the bundles that Wang brought him. Furthermore, unlike Pelliot, who – as Stein put it – had been ‘aided by his exceptional mastery of Chinese literature and bibliography’, he himself had been gravely handicapped by his lack of Chinese. Clearly aware of the campaign to discredit his young French colleague, Stein went out of his way to praise the excellence of Pelliot’s scholarship as well as to express admiration for his methods of excavation, evidence of which he had seen at Kucha.

Although the campaign had failed signally to damage Pelliot’s reputation where it really mattered – in the world of learning – it had not been for want of trying. But did Pelliot’s detractors genuinely believe the charges they brought so vituperatively against him, or were they seeking to destroy a man whom they clearly loathed or perhaps envied? Today, some seventy years later, and with all the witnesses long dead, it is impossible to say. But a comment by Vaillant perhaps provides the answer. During their expedition, he recounts: ‘Pelliot  made brief notes whose accuracy and detail astonished their recipients in France. They could not understand how, in the wilds and far from a library, he could possibly recall certain facts or texts … His prodigious memory enabled him to do without all reference material.’ This is confirmed by others. ‘When Pelliot has read a book, the whole thing remains in there,’ one colleague declared, pointing to his own forehead.

The fact that his enemies found him too clever by half is perhaps thus explained. Until they learned, too late, just how clever he really was, they simply assumed that he was a braggart. To some extent Pelliot appears to have brought it upon himself. Like many other archaeologists, he found it difficult to get down to the drudgery of classifying and publishing his material. As we have seen, his detractors made much of the fact that, a whole year after arriving at the Bibliothèque Nationale, the manuscripts were still in their packing cases, and that Pelliot had not so much as produced an inventory. This had enabled them to suggest that he must have something to hide – the dreadful discovery, perhaps, that his Tun-huang purchases were all forgeries.

Nor was this the only row in which he was to become embroiled, although it is the only one which concerns us here. Pelliot, who went on to carve out a brilliant career for himself as France’s foremost Chinese scholar, never again excavated in Central Asia – the only one of our principal characters not to return for more. But this was not because of any lack of interest on his part. When serving as French military attaché in Peking during World War I, he told the American archaeologist Langdon Warner that he had ‘several new sites up his sleeve’, but no money to work them. By the time there was money available it was too late, for the Chinese had finally shut the door in the face of western archaeologists.

FOREIGN DEVILS ON THE SILK ROAD

The Search for the Lost Treasures of Central Asia

Peter Hopkirk

The circulation of the élites

 “Whether certain theorists like it or not, the fact is that human society is not a homogeneous thing, that individuals are physically, morally, and intellectually different.… Of that fact, therefore, we have to take account. And we must also take account of another fact: that the social classes are not entirely distinct, even in countries where a caste system prevails; arid that in modern civilized countries circulation among the various classes is exceedingly rapid.… We shall consider the problem [in order to simplify it] only in its bearing on the social equilibrium and try to reduce as far as possible the numbers of the groups and the modes of circulation, putting under one head phenomena that prove to be roughly and after a fashion similar.” (2025.)

“Let us assume that in every branch of human activity each individual is given an index which stands as a sign of his capacity, very much the way grades are given in the various subjects in examinations in school. The highest type of lawyer, for instance, will be given 10. The man who does not get a client will be given 1—reserving zero for the man who is an out-and-out idiot. To the man who has made his millions—honestly or dishonestly as the case may be—we will give 10. To the man who has earned his thousands we will give 6; to such as just manage to keep out of the poor-house, 1, keeping zero for those who get in. To the woman ‘in politics,’ such as the Aspasia of Pericles, the Maintenon of Louis XIV, the Pompadour of Louis XV, who has managed to infatuate a man of power and play a part in the man’s career, we shall give some higher number, such as 8 or 9; to the strumpet who merely satisfies the senses of such a man and exerts no influence on public affairs, we shall give zero. To a clever rascal who knows how to fool people and still keep clear of the penitentiary, we shall give 8, 9, or 10, according to the number of geese he has plucked and the amount of money he has been able to get out of them. To the sneak-thief who snatches a piece of silver from a restaurant table and runs away into the arms of a policeman, we shall give 1. To a poet like Carducci we shall give 8 or 9 according to our tastes; to a scribbler who puts people to rout with his sonnets we shall give zero. For chess players we can get very precise indices, noting what matches, and how many, they have won. And so on for all the branches of human activity.” (2027.)

In some such way we shall be able to distinguish, at least roughly, the élite or better the élites in society from the mass. We shall quickly observe, moreover, that human beings are not distributed evenly over the scale. At the top there are very few, considerably more in the middle; but the overwhelming majority are grouped near the bottom. The élite is always a small minority.

Within the élite we may further distinguish a “governing élite” from a “non-governing élite.” The élite within many branches of human activity—chess-playing, for example, from the list quoted—does not exert any appreciable influence on political affairs and social structure.

The character of a society, Pareto holds, is above all the character of its élite; its accomplishments are the accomplishments of its élite; its history is properly understood as the history of its élite; successful predictions about its future are based upon evidence drawn from the study of the composition and structure of its élite. Pareto’s conclusions here are the same as those reached by Mosca in his analysis of the narrower but similar concept of the “ruling class.”

The élite in any society is never static. Its structure, its composition, and the way in which it is related to the rest of the society are always changing. Most obviously the élite changes through the death of its individual members, and their replacement by other individuals. In itself, however, this is of no significance. If each dead individual were replaced by another of the same type, the élites as a historical group would remain unaltered. What influences social development is not the mere shift of individuals, but change in the types of individual, and in the relations of various types to each other and to the rest of society.

If, in the selection of members of the élite, there existed a condition of perfectly free competition, so that each individual could, without any obstacle, rise just as high in the social scale as his talents and ambition permitted, the élite could be presumed to include, at every moment and in the right order, just those persons best fitted for membership in it. Under such circumstances—which Pareto seems to imagine after the analogy of the theoretical free market of classical economics, or the biological arena of the struggle for survival—society would remain dynamic and strong, automatically correcting its own weaknesses.

However, a condition of this sort is never found in reality. There are always obstacles, or “ties” as Pareto calls them, that interfere with the free circulation of individuals up and down the social scale. Special principles of selection, different in different societies, affect the composition of the élite so that it no longer includes all those persons best fitted for social rule. Weaknesses set in; and, not compensated by a gradual day-by-day circulation, if they go far enough they are corrected sharply by social revolution: that is, by the sudden intrusion into the élite of large numbers of individuals hitherto prevented by the obstacles from finding their natural social level.

The most evident and universal of the obstacles to free circulation is the aristocratic principle. The children of members of the élite are helped to a position in the élite regardless of their own capacities and at the sacrifice of individuals of greater capacity appearing among the non-élite. If this principle is carried far enough, if the élite becomes “closed” or almost so, degeneration is bound to set in. The percentage of weak and inferior persons within the élite necessarily increases, while at the same time superior persons accumulate among the non-élite. A point is reached where the élite will be overthrown and destroyed.

This, for example, is what happened to Sparta. The doors of entrance to the Spartan élite (the Citizens) were firmly closed to the other classes of the population (the Perioeci and the Helots). The élite to some extent guarded its internal health by the negative device of killing its weak and feeble children, but this was not enough. In spite of an unmatched tradition of self-sacrifice and discipline, the élite declined gravely in numbers and even more in quality until it was utterly defeated, in the 4th century, at the battle of Leuctra, by the people of a city (Thebes) which Sparta had for generations thought of as little more than a second-rate ally. From this defeat, which might in a nation less rigidly organized have become the stimulus to rejuvenation, Sparta never recovered.

From these considerations it follows that a relatively free circulation of the élites—both up and down the social scale—is a requisite for a healthy and a strong society. Conversely, it follows that when in a society the élite becomes closed or nearly closed, that society is threatened either with internal revolution or with destruction from outside. It must be added that Pareto is discussing here not the law or theory dealing with entrance to the élite, but the facts. In theory—as in almost all modern nations, for example—entrance to the élite may be open to all comers. This is of no importance if, in fact, by one device or another—as, again, is true of many modern nations especially since the end of the 19th century—newcomers are kept out. In the United States, everyone has the theoretic right to become a millionaire and the owner of a great industry. In fact, however, from about the time of the First World War the door admitting newcomers to multi-millions and major ownership has been narrowing. Conversely, there have been societies where, though in theory the élite was closed (by rigid hereditary regulations), it was in fact opened, at least sometimes, by such means as adoption or clientage or re-definition of citizenship. This was true at certain periods in Athens and in Rome.

But, since a perfectly free circulation according to ability is never found, a healthy and strong society is not assured merely by keeping the élite more or less open. The additional problem remains of the kind of individuals admitted to or excluded from the élite. We have noted that, according to Pareto, the basic residues within a given society change little and slowly. However, the character of the society is determined not only by the basic residues present in the entire population, but also by the distribution of residues among the various social classes; and this distribution may change quite rapidly. To put the matter simply: a given society will include a certain and relatively stable percentage of, for example, clever individuals; but an enormous difference to the society and its development will result from the extent to which these clever individuals are concentrated in its élite, or spread evenly throughout the entire population, or even concentrated in the non-élite.

The residues which, in their circulation, are of chief influence on the social equilibrium are those belonging to Class I and Class II. Indeed, in discussing the circulation of the élites, Pareto expands his definition of these two Classes so that the whole problem can be summed up roughly in terms of them.

Individuals marked primarily by Class I (Combinations) residues are the “Foxes” of Machiavelli. They live by their wits; they put their reliance on fraud, deceit, and shrewdness. They do not have strong attachment to family, church, nation, and traditions (though they may exploit these attachments in others). They live in the present, taking little thought of the future, and are always ready for change, novelty, and adventure. In economic affairs, they incline toward speculation, promotion, innovation. They are not adept, as a rule, in the use of force. They are inventive and chance-taking.

Individuals marked by Class II (Group-Persistences) residues are Machiavelli’s “Lions.” They are able and ready to use force, relying on it rather than brains to solve their problems. They are conservative, patriotic, loyal to tradition, and solidly tied to supra-individual groups like family or Church or nation. They are concerned for posterity and the future. In economic affairs they are cautious, saving and orthodox. They distrust the new, and praise “character” and “duty” rather than wits.

Pareto cites ancient Athens as a typical example of a state with a heavy proportion of Class I residues in its élite, and an unusually large proportion even in the non-élite (where Class II residues almost always greatly predominate). From this distribution sprang many of the glories of Athens, as well as the extraordinarily rapid shifts in its fortunes. In every field, economic, political, and cultural, Athens welcomed the new, and was ready for any adventure. After the defeat of Persia at Salamis, Athens could not return to the old ways. Taking immediate advantage of the fleet which had been built up for the war, she went on to establish her commercial empire in the eastern Mediterranean. When the tribute from the alliance was no longer needed for war, it was used to build the wonderful temples and statues. Philosophers and poets were honored for attacking the old, traditional ways of life. But her glories were comparatively short-lived. She was always weakened from within by the numerous Class I individuals who were constantly forming factions, plotting with internal or external enemies, and organizing rebellions. And Athens could not endure the long-drawn-out trials of the Peloponnesian Wars. On the one hand, the Class I tendencies led her to attempt too much: she refused peace when it could have been made with honor and profit, and launched the Sicilian Expedition which in its outcome proved her ruin. On the other, wit and shrewdness were not a firm enough foundation to sustain the shock of plague, death, siege, weariness, and defeat.

Sparta, in extreme contrast, was a nation where Class II residues were wholly predominant both in the general population and in the élite. Innovation in Sparta was a crime; everything was regulated by ancient custom and religion and time-sanctified tradition. The individual counted for nothing, the group for all. Adventure was always to be distrusted. From these roots Sparta derived a tremendous power of endurance when faced with adversity. But she always stopped short of anything spectacular. She produced no philosophy, no liquid wealth, and little art. She never tried to establish a great empire. Her own armies went home after the Persians were defeated. In spite of defeats and crushing hardships, she finally conquered in the Peloponnesian Wars; but in the 4th century, when the conditions of life and warfare greatly changed, she too was lost. Because of her lack of Class I residues, Sparta could not adapt herself to new ways; so, defending the old, she perished.

The social combination that is strongest against external enemies, and at the same time able to bring about a fairly high internal level of culture and material prosperity, is that wherein (1) Class II residues are widespread and active among the masses (the non-élite); (2) the individuals with a high level of Class I residues are concentrated in the élite; (3) a fair percentage of Class II residues nevertheless still remains within the élite; (4) the élite is comparatively open, so that at least a comparatively free circulation can take place.

The meaning of this optimum combination can be translated as follows into more usual terms: (1) The masses have faith in an integrating myth or ideology, a strong sense of group solidarity, a willingness to endure physical hardship and sacrifice. (2) The best and most active brains of the community are concentrated in the élite, and ready to take advantage of whatever opportunities the historical situation presents. (3) At the same time the élite is not cynical, and does not depend exclusively upon its wits, but is able to be firm, to use force, if the internal or external condition calls for it. (4) The élite is prevented from gross degeneration through the ability of new elements to rise into its ranks.

A combination of this sort does not, however, as a rule last long. The typical, though not universal, pattern of development of organized societies goes along some such lines as these: The community (nation) becomes established and consolidated after a period of wars of conquest or of internal revolutions. At this point the governing élite is strongly weighted with Class II residues—revolutions and great wars put a premium on faith, powers of endurance, and force. After the consolidation, activities due to Class I residues increase in importance and are able to flourish. The relative percentage of Class I residues in the élite increases; the Foxes replace the Lions. The proportion of Class II residues remains high, as always, in the masses. A time of great material prosperity may follow, under the impulse and manipulations of the Class I residues. But the élite has lost its faith, its self-identification with the group; it thinks all things can be solved by shrewdness, deceit, combinations; it is no longer willing and able to use force. It reaches a point where it cannot withstand the attack from an external enemy, stronger in Class II residues; or from within, when the masses, one way or another, get a leadership able to organize their potential strength. The combinationist élite is destroyed, very often carrying its whole society to ruin along with it.

Let us put this process in the simplest possible terms by reducing it to the problem of force (noting that a willingness and ability to use force is primarily an expression of Class II Residues). “To ask whether or not force ought to be used in a society, whether the use of force is or is not beneficial, is to ask a question that has no meaning; for force is used by those who wish to preserve certain uniformities [e.g., the existing class structure of society, the status quo] and by those who wish to overstep them; and the violence of the one stands in contrast and in conflict with the violence of the others. In truth, if a partisan of a governing class disavows the use of force, he means that he disavows the use of force by insurgents trying to escape from the norms of the given uniformity. On the other hand, if he says he approves of the use of force, what he really means is that he approves of the use of force by the public authority to constrain insurgents to conformity. Conversely, if a partisan of the subject class says he detests the use of force in society, what he really detests is the use of force by constituted authorities in forcing dissidents to conform; and if, instead, he lauds the use of force, he is thinking of the use of force by those who would break away from certain social uniformities.” (2174.) [*]That is one side of the matter. But, in addition, the argument may be carried further, and directed against the use of force in any sense whatever. Such arguments express a concentration of Class I residues, at the expense of Class II, in the élite whose spokesmen formulate the arguments. “The dispute is really as to the relative merits of shrewdness and force, and to decide it in the sense that never never, not even in the exceptional case, is it useful to meet wits with violence, it would be necessary first to show that the use of cunning is always, without exception, more advisable than the use of force. Suppose a certain country has a governing class A, that assimilates the best elements, as regards intelligence, in the whole population. In that case the subject class, B, is largely stripped of such elements and can have little or no hope of ever overcoming the class A so long as it is a battle of wits. If intelligence were to be combined with force, the dominion of the A’s would be perpetual.… But such a happy combination occurs only for a few individuals. In the majority of cases people who rely on their wits are or become less fitted to use violence, and vice versa. So concentration in the class A of the individuals most adept at chicanery leads to a concentration in class B of the individuals most adept at violence; and if that process is long continued, the equilibrium tends to become unstable, because the A’s are long in cunning but short in the courage to use force and in the force itself; whereas the B’s have the force and the courage to use it, but are short in the skill required for exploiting those advantages. But if they chance to find leaders who have the skill—and history shows that such leadership is usually supplied by dissatisfied A’s—they have all they need for driving the A’s from power. Of just that development history affords countless examples from remotest times all the way down to the present.” (2190.)

The result of such a revolution—for the passage just quoted is simply the generalized description of the form of social revolutions—is to get rid of the weaker elements of the old élite, open up the élite to the rapid influx of new elements, and to alter the balance of residues in the élite in favor of those from Class II. In spite of the cost of revolution in bloodshed and suffering, it may, under certain circumstances, be both necessary and socially beneficial. Even in the latter case, however, it is always an illusion to suppose that the masses themselves take power through a revolution. The masses can never successfully revolt until they acquire a leadership, which is always made up in part of able and ambitious individuals from their own ranks who cannot gain entrance into the governing élite, and in part of disgruntled members of the existing élite (members of the nobility, for example, in the opening stages of the French Revolution, or dissatisfied intellectuals and middle-class persons in the Russian Revolution). So long, therefore, as the governing élite is both willing and in a position to destroy or to assimilate all such individuals, it has a virtual guarantee against internal revolution. If the revolution does take place, we merely find a new élite—or more properly a renewed élite, for the old is almost never wholly wiped out—in the saddle. Nevertheless, the change may quite possibly be for the benefit of the community as a whole and specifically of the masses who, remaining the ruled and not rulers, may yet be better off than before.

Pareto’s theory of the circulation of the élites is thus a theory of social change, of revolution, and of social development and degeneration. It is a re-statement, in new and more intricate terms, of the point of view common to the modern Machiavellians and found, more crude, in Machiavelli himself.

Pareto claims, as we have seen, that, though we can come to objective conclusions about the strength of a society relative to other societies, we cannot make any objective judgment about what type of social structure is “best” from the point of view of internal welfare. However, a certain tendency in his own feelings becomes evident from his analysis. To begin with, he plainly puts external strength first, since it is a pre-condition of everything else: that is, if a nation cannot survive, it is rather pointless to argue in the abstract whether or not it is a “good society.” In order to survive, a society must have a fairly free class-circulation; the élite must not bar its doors too rigidly. This freedom will at the same time on the whole operate to increase the internal well-being of the society.

Second, in discussing the distribution of residues, Pareto implicitly joins the other Machiavellians in an evident preference for social checks and balances. The strongest and healthiest societies balance a predominance of Class I residues in the élite with a predominance of Class II residues in the non-élite. But Class II residues must not be altogether excluded from the élite. If Class II residues prevail in all classes, the nation develops no active culture, degenerates in a slough of brutality and stubborn prejudice, in the end is unable to overcome new forces in its environment, and meets disaster. Disaster, too, awaits the nation given over wholly to Class I residues, with no regard for the morrow, for discipline or tradition, with a blind confidence in clever tricks as the sufficient means for salvation.

The laws of the circulation of the élites serve not only to clarify our understanding of societies of the past; they illuminate also our analysis of present societies, and even, sometimes, permit us to predict the future course of social events. Writing in the years just prior to the first World War, Pareto analyzed at length the United States and the principal nations of Europe. He found that the mode of circulation of the élites during the preceding century had brought most of these nations into a condition where the ruling classes were heavily over-weighted with Class I residues, and were subject to debilitating forms of humanitarian beliefs.

The results of such a condition he summarizes in general terms as follows: “1. A mere handful of citizens, so long as they are willing to use violence, can force their will upon public officials who are not inclined to meet violence with equal violence. If the reluctance of the officials to resort to force is primarily motivated by humanitarian sentiments, that result ensues very readily; but if they refrain from violence because they deem it wiser to use some other means, the effect is often the following: 2. To prevent or resist violence, the governing class resorts to ‘diplomacy,’ fraud, corruption—governmental authority passes, in a word, from the lions to the foxes. The governing class bows its head under the threat of violence, but it surrenders only in appearances, trying to turn the flank of the obstacle it cannot demolish in frontal attack. In the long run that sort of procedure comes to exercise a far-reaching influence on the selection of the governing class, which is now recruited only from the foxes, while the lions are blackballed. The individual who best knows the arts of sapping the strength of the foes of ‘graft’ and of winning back by fraud and deceit what seemed to have been surrendered under pressure of force, is now leader of leaders. The man who has bursts of rebellion, and does not know how to crook his spine at the proper times and places, is the worst of leaders, and his presence is tolerated among them only if other distinguished endowments offset that defect. 3. So it comes about that the residues of the combination-instinct (Class I) are intensified in the governing class, and the residues of group-persistence (Class II) debilitated; for the combination-residues supply, precisely, the artistry and resourcefulness required for evolving ingenious expedients as substitutes for open resistance, while the residues of group-persistence stimulate open resistance, since a strong sentiment of group-persistence cures the spine of all tendencies to curvature. 4. Policies of the governing class are not planned too far ahead in time. Predominance of the combination instincts and enfeeblement of the sentiments of group-persistence result in making the governing class more satisfied with the present and less thoughtful of the future. The individual comes to prevail, and by far, over family, community, nation. Material interests and interests of the present or a near future come to prevail over the ideal interests of community or nation and interests of the distant future. The impulse is to enjoy the present without too much thought for the morrow. 5. Some of these phenomena become observable in international relations as well. Wars become essentially economic. Efforts are made to avoid conflicts with the powerful and the sword is rattled only before the weak. Wars are regarded more than anything else as speculations. A country is often unwittingly edged towards war by nursings of economic conflicts which, it is expected, will never get out of control and turn into armed conflicts. Not seldom, however, a war will be forced upon a country by peoples who are not so far advanced in the evolution that leads to the predominance of Class I residues.” (2179.)

Confronted with these circumstances, Pareto believed that analogies from comparable processes in the past made plain what was to be expected. In one way or another, probably catastrophically, the social unbalance within the élites would be corrected. Internal revolutions and the impact of external wars would re-introduce into the élites large numbers of individuals strong in the residues of group-persistence (Class II) and able and willing to use force in the maintenance of social organization. This development might mean the almost total destruction of certain of the existing élites, and, along with them, of the nations which they ruled. In other cases, a sufficient alteration in the character of the élite might take place in time to preserve the community, though greatly changed.

This survey should seem familiar today. Pareto was writing, in advance, an outline history of the generation just passed, and the present. Munich, in 1938 was, in its way, a definitive expression of his theory of the circulation of the élites. At Munich, there was demonstrated the importance of an exclusive reliance on Class I residues: combinations, no matter how shrewdly conceived, could no longer meet the challenge of the matured world social problems. And at the same time Munich revealed that only those two nations—Russia and Germany—where a redistribution of the élites had already taken place, had been able to prepare seriously for the war which was so evidently sure to come.

THE MACHIAVELLIANS DEFENDERS OF FREEDOM

James Burnham

Research on children who remember previous lives began around 1960

 Beliefs about reincarnation

Before diving into the evidence, I should remind you that what is documented here is another example of simply following evidence. Reincarnation, for some, is an emotionally charged subject because of existing beliefs. This book aspires to be detached from preconceptions or wishful thinking. I certainly hadn’t heard much about reincarnation before I began my research. It was a completely foreign topic to me that  had no basis in reality, as far as I knew. It was an idea that I assumed people made up to comfort themselves about their mortality.

Lead reincarnation researcher Dr. Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia reminded us: “Critics of the evidence for reincarnation have sometimes pointed to its element of hopefulness with the dismissing suggestion that such evidence as we have derives only from wishful thinking. This objection wrongly assumes that what we desire must be false. We might be more easily persuaded to believe what we wish to believe than the contrary; nevertheless, what we wish to believe may be true. Our inquiry into the truth or falseness of an idea should proceed without regard to whether it fortifies or undermines our wishes.”6Children who remember previous lives

Research on children who remember previous lives began around 1960. Then-department head of psychiatry at the University of Virginia (UVA) Medical School, Dr. Ian Stevenson, heard about such children and became intrigued. He then devoted the remainder of his life to this study, examining more than 2,500 cases around the world, until his death in 2007. Dr. Jim Tucker, also a professor at UVA, has continued Dr. Stevenson’s research.

Dr. Stevenson’s work is highly regarded. Dr. Larry Dossey remarks:

[Stevenson] reported thousands of cases of children who remembered past lives and whose descriptions of previous existences checked out on investigation.7…No one else has researched this area with the scholarship, thoroughness, and dogged devotion to detail as he has. Stevenson combed the planet, from back roads of Burma and the remote villages of India to the largest cities on Earth. He devoted decades to scouring every continent except Antarctica, investigating always the same quarry—children who appear to remember a past life. The scope of his work is breathtakingly universal, and even skeptics are generally awed by the thousands of cases he has amassed. The cases occur in every culture including our own and demonstrate strong internal consistency.8

Furthermore, Dr. Stevenson received praise from the well-respected Journal of the American Medical Association in 1975: “In regard to reincarnation [Stevenson] has painstakingly and unemotionally collected a detailed series of cases from India, cases in which the evidence is difficult to explain on any other grounds.”9 What did Dr. Stevenson find?

He found common themes in the cases reported all over the world and in different cultures: A child between the ages of two and five begins to speak emotionally of a past life, including specific events (typically traumatic ones) that are clustered around the end of some previous life.10 When a child remembers his or her death, the account described is usually violent.11 Dr. Stevenson stated: “Too often the children are troubled by confusion regarding their identity and this becomes even more severe in those children who, conscious of being in a small body, can remember having been in an adult one, or who remember a life as a member of the opposite sex.”12Dr. Stevenson also noted that age plays a role in a child’s ability to describe and recall past-life memories:

I cannot emphasize too strongly that—with some exceptions—a child who is going to remember a previous life has little more than three years in which to communicate his memories of other persons, and he often has less. Before the age of two or three he lacks the vocabulary and verbal skill with which to express what he may wish to communicate. And from the age of about five on, heavy layers of verbal information cover the images in which his memories appear to be mainly conveyed; amnesia for the memories of a previous life sets in and stops further communication of them.13Often children’s traits can be linked to the previous lives they remember, such as fears, preferences, interests, and skills.14 These traits typically bear no resemblance to those of anyone in the child’s current family. In some cases, the traits make no sense for a young child, such as desiring certain foods that the family doesn’t eat, or desiring “clothes different from those customarily worn by the family members.” Stranger than that are cases in which the child has “cravings for addicting substances, such as tobacco, alcohol or other drugs that the previous personality was known to have used.”15

In some cases, the person allegedly being reincarnated had made a prediction of the next life before his or her death. In other cases, the child has birthmarks, birth defects, or other biological features that align with events of past lives (to be discussed further in the next section).  In a minority of cases, the child exhibits “xenoglossy”: speaking a foreign language he or she hasn’t been taught.16Where possible, Drs. Stevenson and Tucker have looked for historical facts demonstrating that the person the child remembered matches the child’s description. The degree of historical verifiability varies from case to case, but in some cases the accuracy is astounding. In such cases, it is difficult to imagine how a young child could possess such knowledge without access to some broader consciousness.

James 3

One such case is of James Leininger, a young boy in Lafayette, Louisiana.17 When James was 22 months old, his father took him to a museum, and he showed an affinity for the World War II exhibit. Prior to going to the museum, James had been pointing at planes flying overhead, but he became much more interested after the museum visit. So his parents bought him toy planes and a video of the Blue Angels, the Navy’s exhibition team (formed after World War II). James was obsessed and would crash the toy planes into the family’s coffee table, denting and scratching the table while saying, “Airplane crash on fire.” After his second birthday, he began having nightmares several times a week. He thrashed around the bed with his legs in the air, yelling, “Airplane crash on fire! Little man can’t get out!” When awake, he said, “Mama, before I was born, I was a pilot and my airplane got shot in the engine and it crashed in the water, and that’s how I died.” He told his dad the Japanese shot his plane as part of the Iwo Jima operation, that the plane was a Corsair (a plane not at the museum James had visited), which flew off of a boat called the Natoma. He also mentioned that Jack Larsen was there. An additional strange behavior: James was signing his name “James 3.”

James’s parents were confused, so they investigated some of James’s claims. Ultimately, they discovered that James’s description matched the historical facts of the life of James Huston Jr. (i.e., James the second), a pilot on Natoma Bay who had flown a Corsair and was shot down (in another plane) by the Japanese. Huston was the only pilot killed in the Iwo Jima operation, and eyewitnesses reported that the plane was “hit head-on right on the middle of the engine,” after which it crashed in the water and quickly sank. Jack Larsen was the pilot of the plane next to James Huston’s plane.

 The Hollywood extra

Another case is of a four-year-old boy, Ryan, who was born into an Oklahoma family that was traditionally Christian and did not believe in reincarnation.18 When Ryan played, he would often act as though he was directing imaginary movies by saying, “Action!” When he would see the Hollywood Hills on TV, he would say: “That’s my home. That’s where I belong…I just can’t live in these conditions. My last home was much better.”19 He also talked about having traveled the world and loved Chinatown, saying it had the best food. Ryan claimed that he chose his mother before he was born.

Eventually Ryan started having nightmares, waking up saying he was in Hollywood and his heart exploded. Confused, his mother bought Hollywood books to see if they would trigger any memories. In one book, Ryan saw a photograph of six men from a 1932 movie called Night After Night. He said, “Hey, Mama that’s George. We did a picture together. And Mama, that guy’s me. I found me.” Ryan’s mother researched and learned that the man Ryan had identified as George was a movie star in the 1930s/1940s named George Raft. However, Ryan’s parents could not identify the person who Ryan claimed was “him.”

After investigation with the help of Dr. Tucker, they discovered that the man Ryan pointed to was named Marty Martyn, an extra who had no lines in Night After Night. Dr. Tucker tracked down Marty’s daughter, and she and Ryan then met in person. Ryan’s reaction: “Same face, but she didn’t wait on me. She changed. Her energy changed.”20

Many of the claims Ryan had made lined up. For example, Ryan talked of taking girlfriends to the ocean; Marty had taken girlfriends to the ocean and had been married four times. Ryan had remembered an African American maid, and indeed, Marty had one. Ryan mentioned meeting “Senator Five” in New York; Marty’s daughter had a picture of Marty with Senator Ives of New York. Ryan said he was a smoker; Marty smoked cigars. Ryan recalled having a nice home and traveling; Marty had a big house with a swimming pool and traveled the world. Ryan talked about liking the food in Chinatown; Marty had enjoyed a Chinese restaurant in Hollywood. Marty died in a hospital room when he was alone, so it is not known whether a heart attack was the ultimate cause of his death, as Ryan’s nightmares would have suggested.

 As Dr. Tucker summarizes it: “Many of the details Ryan gave did fit the man he pointed to in the picture, who had a much more exciting life than anyone could have guessed a movie extra would have.”21

How could these children know such detailed facts at such a young age with no evidence of exposure to the details they report?

No wonder Carl Sagan thought this was an area deserving “serious study.”

Birthmarks and physical defects

Dr. Stevenson also found links between previous lives and birthmarks and physical defects. His body of work is robust—he wrote a two-volume book entitled Reincarnation and Biology, which is more than 2,000 pages long, with dense scientific text and fine print, covering 200 cases (with photographic evidence).

Amazingly, the birthmarks and physical defects he studied correlate to “previous lives” described by the children he examined. It’s one thing to read summaries of Dr. Stevenson’s work here in this book, but it’s another to see the pictures and detail contained in his literature. In an attempt to simply provide some flavor here, I present several examples out of many.

In some cases, birthmarks correspond to wounds verified by a child’s memories. For example, Dr. Stevenson described a Turkish boy who remembered a previous life in which he was stabbed through the liver area. In this life, the boy had a “large depressed birthmark, really a small cavity in the skin, over his liver.”22 In another example, a boy from Burma had “a small round birthmark in his right lower abdomen and a much larger birthmark on his right back. These correspond to wounds of entry and exit on the bandit whose life he remembered.”23In the strongest cases, medical records verify that the location of a birthmark matches where a trauma occurred in a deceased person. A Lebanese boy recalled a previous life in which he was drinking coffee before leaving for work one day and was shot in the face. The story was verified by an actual shooting that took place. According to medical records related to the shooting, the bullet entered one cheek, damaged the man’s tongue, exited through the other cheek, and the man later died in the hospital. The boy, who claims to be the next incarnation of the murdered man, had birthmarks on each check and had difficulty articulating words that required him to elevate his tongue. Dr. Stevenson reported: “I was able  to study the hospital record in this case. It showed that the birthmark on [the boy’s] left cheek, which was the smaller of the two, corresponded to the wound of entry, and the larger birthmark on the right cheek corresponded to the wound of exit.”24In another case, a Turkish boy was believed to be the next incarnation of a recently deceased relative who died after being shot. The bullet did not exit his head, but the pathologist made an incision to extract the bullet. The Turkish boy was born with a birthmark that corresponded with the location of the incision. Dr. Stevenson commented: “Like many other children of these cases, [the boy] showed powerful attitudes of vengefulness toward the man who had shot [him in the previous life]. He once tried to take his father’s gun and shoot this person, but was fortunately restrained.”25 The boy came to his parents in their dreams, before he was born, saying he would be the next incarnation of this same deceased relative.

It gets even weirder.

Dr. Stevenson examined “experimental” birthmarks: cases in which a mark was left on the body of a deceased person in the hopes that the mark would show on the person who later reincarnates. In a case in Thailand in 1969, a boy’s dead body was marked with charcoal before he was cremated. He had died from drowning. The next boy that the same mother birthed was born with a birthmark near the location of the charcoal marking. Once the boy was able to speak, he began describing details of the life his deceased brother lived. He also had a fear of water.26In another case in Burma, a girl died after unsuccessful open-heart surgery. Her classmates put a mark in red lipstick on the back of her neck before she was buried, in the hopes that the mark would show in the deceased girl’s next incarnation. Thirteen months after the girl’s death, her sister gave birth to a girl who had a “prominent red birthmark at the back of her neck in the same location where [the deceased girl’s] schoolmates marked her with lipstick” [emphasis in original]. Dr. Stevenson commented that she also had a birthmark that appeared as a thin line with “diminished pigmentation that ran vertically from her lower chest to her upper abdomen. This corresponded to the surgical incision for the cardiac surgery during which [the girl] had died.”27

In other cases, more extreme physical deformities can be linked to traumas experienced by the previous life remembered by the child. A Burmese girl was born with birthmarks near her heart and on her head; she was missing  the fifth finger on her left hand, and she had “constriction rings” on her legs, the most dramatic of which was on her left thigh.28 In the disturbing picture provided by Dr. Stevenson in Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect (shown below), her leg looks as though it had been constricted by something like a rope. But her leg is naturally shaped that way, without anything constricting it. It is by no means the typical shape of a leg. When the girl was able to speak, she identified herself as a man who had been tortured (fingers cut, tied in ropes). Dr. Stevenson was eventually able to verify this man’s identity. There was indeed a person tortured and killed in the precise manner described by the little girl. Distressed by her birthmarks and deformities, the little girl said, “Grandpa. Look at what they did to me. How cruel they were.”29How could she have known such specific details? Why would a young child be saying these things? Why did her body reflect such distinctive deformities that matched the way the man had died?

Dr. Ian Stevenson investigated the case of a young girl who had specific, distinctive deformities that match how she described dying in a past life (shown above). In fact, there was a person who died in the precise manner described by the little girl. She described being tied in ropes and tortured in her past life. The shape of her legs seems to match that description. The figure above is from Dr. Stevenson’s bookWhere Reincarnation and Biology Intersect(1997).

 Dr. Stevenson noted that the girl’s mother happened to have walked past the tortured man’s dead body when she was two and a half months pregnant. She saw the police handling the situation. She believes the same man came to her in a dream before her daughter was born.30 Was this little girl the next incarnation of the man who was tortured—even though this man had no biological relationship to the little girl?

Maternal impressions

Dr. Stevenson conceded that in some cases it is not fully clear that birth defects can be tied directly to a previous life. Instead, “maternal impressions” sometimes could have been the cause. Maternal impressions refer to frightening mental images that the mother of a baby has during pregnancy, which result in the baby’s having a deformity that closely matches the mental image. Dr. Stevenson referenced an 1890 study at the University of Virginia written by a pediatrician who reviewed 90 maternal-impression cases. In these cases, the mother experienced something particularly frightening during pregnancy. And in 77 percent of the cases, there was “‘quite a close correspondence’ between the impression upon the mother during pregnancy and her baby’s defect.”31

Dr. Stevenson researched this topic further and focused on 300 cases from around the world, of which he studied 50 in detail. The example that Dr. Stevenson pointed to is disturbing, but makes the point. He recalled the case of a woman whose brother’s penis was amputated for medical reasons. While pregnant, “her curiosity impelled her to have a look at the site of her brother’s amputation.”32 She then gave birth to a male baby without a penis. Dr. Stevenson researched medical records of the general population and found the odds of a male baby being born with this birth defect is one in 30 million.

Dr. Stevenson’s analysis of the cases revealed that maternal impressions most likely impacted the baby when the impression occurred during the first trimester of pregnancy and when the traumatic incident occurred to the mother or someone close to her.33 Examples such as this caused Dr. Stevenson to question whether every case of physical deformity was induced by reincarnation. Instead, it is possible that some cases could be attributed to maternal impressions (which on its own deserves investigation!).

 But Dr. Stevenson noted that sometimes the mother had no knowledge of a deformity during pregnancy. In those cases, the maternal-impressions explanation doesn’t hold, and something else (reincarnation?) is needed as an explanation.34

Where does this leave us?

The totality of Drs. Stevenson’s and Tucker’s work points in the following direction, as summarized by Dr. Stevenson: “Some persons have unique attributes that we cannot now explain satisfactorily as due solely to a combination of genetic variation and environmental influences. Reincarnation deserves consideration as a third factor in play.”35 If this is true, the implications are immense for science, medicine, and beyond (as we’ll explore in chapter 13).

Under the materialist view that the brain produces consciousness, reincarnation is “nonsense.” However, if consciousness is more fundamental than matter and does not arise from brain activity, then the evidence discussed in this chapter is truly plausible.

Chapter Summary

❍Drs. Ian Stevenson and Jim Tucker of the University of Virginia have studied more than 2,500 children over 50-plus years who claim to remember previous lives.

❍Sometimes the stories these young children tell match historical records of the individuals they claim they were in past lives. In other cases, the children speak foreign languages that they had no way of knowing.

❍In some cases, the child has distinctive birthmarks or physical deformities that match the way in which the child describes having died in a previous life. Sometimes, medical records verified the accuracy of the child’s claims.

An End to Upside Down Thinking

Dispelling the Myth That the Brain ProducesC onsciousness, and the Implications for Everyday Life

Mark Gober