Pontius Pilate: the first Christian? Review of Aldo Schiavone’s "Pontius Pilate: Deciphering a Memory"

Aldo Schiavone is one of my favorite writers on ancient Roman economics, or more broadly Roman history. I learned a lot and truly enjoyed his elegant and small volume The end of the past which cleverly, and yet profoundly and in a beautiful prose discusses the greatness of a globalized empire created by Rome and the limits which prevented it from going further, developing ten centuries before it eventually appeared in Lombardy, a much more extensive form of globalized commercial economy. It was the economy of conquest leading to slavery and cheapness of labor that prevented Roman technological upgrading (a view shared by Marx and more recently by Bob Allen): “Military plunder turned out to be the sole mechanism for the self-support that the Roman economy managed to build” (The end.., p. 81).  In addition, Schiavone writes, there was disdain for labor in general, ideal life consisted of aristocratic rural indolence: all elements hardly leading to a capitalist economy. There was also a hubris, belief that the pinnacle of human evolution has been reached, that nothing new could be invented, summarized in a beautiful pithy sentence by Schiavone, “They all thought they had finished, but in truth they had not even begun” (The End…, p. 134).

Now, one of the most famous living historians of Rome has set himself the task in the just published, Pontius Pilate: Deciphering a Memory, to explore probably the most portentous meeting in human history: that of Pilate and Jesus. I was very excited when I saw that the French, and just a couple of days ago, English translations of the book are out. Nobody, I thought, could do this reconstruction better than Schiavone. I pre-ordered the book, and read it in one evening/night. It is short, some 200 pages including copious reference and discussion of numerous sources.

The first part, where Schiavone describes Judaea in some fifty years before the Common Era and in the period up to the year 30, when, by all evidence, the fatal encounter took place, does not disappoint. Schiavone describes very persuasively the intellectual febrility of Judaea, crisscrossed by preachers, holy men and vagabonds (imagine a Connecticut-size country with perhaps a several thousand Rasputins running around), its social structure, its implacable theocracy with high priests and Sanhedrin sitting on top of an aristocratic-religious regime that looks very similar to today’s Saudi Arabia. “It is no accident that the word ‘theocracy’ was invented by Josephus to describe the peculiarity of his county’s political tradition” (p. 110).

And then Schiavone explains perfectly the bewilderment of Romans in this environment that linguistically, and more importantly ideologically, they  find entirely alien. Although Jews and Romans (and Greeks) have lived together for several centuries by then, Roman incomprehension of Jews has never gone away. Gibbon gives literally dozens examples of their “oil-and-water” relationship—that is, when they were not at war. Even more difficult was it to be the prefect in such an environment, permanently trying to check the incipient insurrection while avoiding the converse danger that, in order to placate one faction of the Jews and prevent such insurrection, the Roman authorities may be used by that faction to suppress its rivals (the typical “tail-wags-the dog” dilemma of all big powers).

And this indeed is what happens here. The Jewish religious aristocracy feels threatened by the sudden popularity acquired by the Galilean preacher, convinces Pilate to arrest him, but then fails to produce the evidence that the preacher is undermining Roman political order. For the crux of the matter is here: Jewish religious establishment has a full control over its religious matters, but has no right to impose the capital sentence (which they desperately want to pass on Jesus). Only Romans can do that—but the Romans will do that, not because of a religious dispute  among the Jews, but only if the crime is political (that is, directed against Rome).

The rest of the story is well known and I will not tread on it here. It is where Schiavone’s two key points are made. First, he argues that, impressed by Jesus’s behaviors and answers (or lack of answers) during the interrogation, Pilate at first refuses to impose the death sentence even if it puts him in a potentially serious conflict with the Jewish establishment. But then—more extraordinarily—he is awed by this most unusual preacher who claims to descend from the Heavenly Kingdom, and becomes convinced that the preacher wants to be executed. The humiliating death on the cross is Jesus’s desired end-point, a culmination of his Earthly mission. We thus have at the very end, all three parties agreeing that Jesus should die: Jewish establishment wants to get rid of an inconvenient religious rebel, Jesus craves his sacrifice, Pilate is his willing accomplice.

Now, this part which I have just described is nicely argued and written but is in reality a genre of historical fiction. It could be that it happened exactly that way as Schiavone tries to convince us, but it could have happened in a myriad other ways. The number of parties, combinations of their interests, shifting alliances even in these twenty-four hours, leave may possibilities open. Schiavone makes a strange decision to treat John’s and the three Synoptic gospels as a textual evidence of what was said in the proceedings. But this is clearly baseless.  As Schiavone mentions,  very few people were likely to have been present at Pilate’s interrogation of Jesus; at most only the translators since Pilate was unlikely to have spoken Hebrew or Aramaic and Jesus unlikely to have spoken Greek or Latin (p. 102). Were Jesus’s disciples later in touch with interpreters? Did interpreters tell somebody else who then conveyed that information to the writers of Passion?  And even if we answer these questions is in the affirmative, it is naïve to believe that the Gospels would have written in a way unfavorable to Jesus. The nature of the documents is such that they have to present Jesus as a superior interlocutor in the duel between Caesar and God.

Further, since the textual evidence of the four writers differs on important points, Schiavone is reduced to doing what all writers who need to push one side of the story have to do:  to selectively choose now from one, then from another, writer. John is the most reliable (p. 97), before he becomes the least (“John’s account no longer holds up”, p. 164); tiny and probably meaningless or accidental inclinations in the text (e.g. “from then on” or “thus”) are given implausibly heavy interpretations. The whole story takes on an almost Hollywoodesque aspect where the implacable Roman prefect becomes awed by the holy man and decides to connive in his desire to die. “We are no longer in an interrogation. Progressively…we have been transported from the Praetoreum of Judaea to a dialogue of Plato” (p. 123). Roman prefect, hardened military man, some 15 years Jesus’s senior, caring about the eschatological mission of an itinerant preacher whose neither religion nor language he can understand? 

We are here touching at the  edges of Christian mysticism even if Schiavone tries hard to motivate presumed Pilate’s fall under Jesus’ spell by invoking the role of superstition in Roman lives.  The story totally collapses in that latter part: the scarce facts that we have cannot reasonably be expected to support Schiavone’s  heavy scaffolding.

The second important point that Schiavone makes, and which I am not qualified to discuss, is a theological/cultural one, namely that Jesus’s break of One God (omnipotent single God in a covenant with the Jews) into Two (divine and human nature of the God, and open covenant with the rest of the world) created “a breach of secularization”, “a theory of exclusion [between the secular and divine domains] within reformed monotheism” (p. 113) through which the entire history of the West went  through. In other words, Christianity got rid of the oppressiveness and doctrinaire intransigence of monotheism by reintroducing some elements of duality between the heavenly and earthly rules. To put it in a mathematical language 2 or 3 became closer to n than to 1.

Perhaps on that last point, Schiavone is right, but his story of the Pilate-Jesus relationship would have benefitted, in my opinion, from a much less definite reading than what Schiavone wants to impress on us. I would still strongly recommend the book: the description of Judaea, of the Roman military men in that enigmatic land, of Tiberius and Sejanus in Capri (“men of darkness”) who make cameo appearances are brilliant.             

Machiavelli as an economist

I was recently rereading The Discourses (as I periodically enjoy doing) and on Sunday I read a review of an interesting new book on Machiavelli—an inexhaustible topic indeed. So I thought of writing down why I, and I would presume many economists, admire Machiavelli (and thus adding to this inexhaustible topic yet another piece).

There is a clear affinity between economists and political scientists in the Machiavelli tradition. For Machiavelli, the objective of a ruler or a politician is maximization of power in two dimensions, at any point in time and over time. This is exactly the same as maximization of income or utility over time. The ruler is a rational homo politicus in the same way that people, according to economists, are rational homo economicuses.

Moreover, the ruler is a political entrepreneur: his job is no different from a job of a tailor, carpenter, teacher. He is after selfish objectives which are attained under constraints.  The constraints for the ruler are of two kinds: he must somehow acquire the power and he must be able to keep it despite attempts of many people to prevent him from coming to power or trying to overthrow him.

The ruler therefore must have the famous virtù which is indeed one of the rarest combination of talents. He must fight off domestic foes, foreign  enemies or adversaries, and must combine the use of deception, violence and genuine concern for his subjects in the right proportions to be able to stay in power. Machiavelli’s politician is like a businessman. There are cases when the businessman will gain more by lying and others when he would gain more by telling the truth. Similarly, the ruler would sometimes gain more through violence, guile and ruse, and at other times through honesty and improvements of his subjects’ welfare. The attractiveness of Machiavelli to economists comes also from the fact his  ruler always remains a self-interested individual who might do well for his subjects not because he cares about them but because he believes that doing well for them would be ultimately good for himself. In that he is like Adam Smith’s baker: he is selling us bread not because he is concerned about our hunger but because he is concerned about his self-interest.

Throughout centuries Machiavelli has, of course, been accused of condoning many  evils. Yet his type of the politician is much more benign and better for the mankind that the types that have normally ruled us. This is because the rulers who actually come to believe they are trying to accomplish good things are most likely to create endless bloodsheds. Most of the killings in history have been motivated by “goodness” and desire to be virtuous. Surely, all religious wars have been such. In recent past, all communist exactions (most notably, the collectivization in the Soviet Union and the Great Leap Forward in China) were motivated by the desire to lift people from their millennial poverty. George W. Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq cannot be explained otherwise since no economic or any other rational objective was ever achieved or was even given serious consideration in the decision to wage the war.

The most potentially destructive forces today are hidden under the banner of “goodness”. Whether this is done hypocritically or because the rulers believe in such professions of “goodness” is immaterial; the latter is even worse. The terms under which such “goodness” is projected to the heathens—“the American exceptionalism,”, “the Third Rome”, “Hindutva”, “the new (old) Caliphate”—are nothing but a self-license  to impose own values and beliefs on those who dare disagree with them. Such rulers are the most bloodthirsty because belief in own moral superiority renders them unconcerned with reality.

Machiavelli’s ruler will for sure also engage in deception and cruelty,  but his objective will never be to impose one form of government or religion, or more generally a set of beliefs as such, on others. He might decide to impose a new government if he believes that this would increase his dominion. This would be a rational objective, grounded in self-interest. Ideological puritans who want to bring happiness to others would engage in such operations more frequently and fully. Disengaging from them implies for the ideological zealots a destruction of their own intimate world of beliefs; never so with Machiavelli’s ruler who would give up the operation once its costs outweigh the benefits.

The world ruled by politicians who follow own interest like Adam Smith’s baker, and leave the rest of the world in peace, may be the best world we can hope for.

 

 

Did post-Marxist theories destroy Communist regimes?

The break-up of the Soviet  Union was one of the most unusual events in history.  Never before had an empire this powerful and vast given up its power and allowed the dissolution of its internal core (the Soviet Union) and its tributary states (Eastern Europe) so quickly and without a fight. The Ottoman empire went into a process of disintegration that lasted several centuries and was punctuated by numerous wars, both with western powers and Russia, and numerous struggles for national independence (Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria). The Habsburg  empire dissolved after four years of the hitherto largest conflict in history. The same is true of the Russian empire and the Hohenzollerns’. But the Soviet Empire gave way almost entirely peacefully and without a fight. How did that happen?

A slender volume by Wisła Suraska (How the SovietUnion disappeared, Duke University Press, 1998) tries to answer the question. It is important to explain what the book is not. It is not a book about Communism and economics.  It does not try to answer (at least, not directly) the question about successes and failures of Communism nor does it deal with economics at all. It is remarkable that the book does not contain a single number. It is a book written by a political scientist and it focuses on internal political determinants of the Soviet collapse.

It is a very well and clearly written volume. The key conclusion of Suraska, enounced in italics in the last chapter, is that the break up is due to “the general failure of communist regimes--their inability to build a modern state” (p. 134). It is “the state weakness, rather than its omnipotence [that] stalled communist project of modernization and, most notably, Gorbachev’s perestroika” (p. 134). Lest somebody believe that Suraska is a partisan of state power, let me explain that what she means is that the arbitrary nature of Communist state, overseen by the Communist party, prevented it from ever developing a responsible and impersonal machinery of Weberian bureaucracy. Such a machinery that follows well-known and rational rules cannot be established if the power is arbitrary. And without such a machinery, the project of modernization is doomed.

But this still does not explain why the country (the USSR) broke up. It broke up, she argues, because of a Brezhnevite equilibrium that—lacking a functioning centrally-controlled state apparatus and forsaking the use of terror—consisted in the creation of territorially-based fiefdoms. The power at the center depended on having peripheral supporters and these peripheral supporters gradually took over most of the local (in the USSR case, republican) functions. They could be dislodged only by the application of mass terror as when, under Stalin, the center actively fought the creation of local centers of power, either by “purging” the leaders or by shifting them constantly between the regions in order to prevent accumulation of power. But Brezhnevite equilibrium consisted precisely in “decentralizing” power to local “barons”  who would then support the faction in the center that gave them most power.   

When Gorbachev tried to recentralize decision-making in order to promote his reforms, he was obstructed at all levels and eventually figured out that without the republican support he could accomplish nothing. This is why, as Suraska writes, at the last Party congress in 1991, he outbid his competitors (Yegor Ligachev) by formally bringing all  regional party bosses into the Politburo and thus effectively confederalizing the Party and the country. But even that proved too little too late as the largest unit, Russia under Yeltsin, became, together with the Baltic republics, the most secessionist.

Suraska rightly adds to this vertical de-concentration of power the ever-present wariness and competition between the Party, the secret services (KGB) and the Army. The triangular relationship where two actors try to weaken and control the third contributed to the collapse. She sees the beginning of the end of the Army’s role in Politburo’s decision, strongly promoted by Andropov (then the head of KGB), not to intervene in Poland in 1980-81. Andropov’s positon (according to the transcripts of the Politburo meetings) that “even if Poland falls under the control of “Solidarity” …[non-intervention] will be” (p. 70) was grounded in the belief that every Soviet foreign intervention (Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968) reinforced the power of the Army and thus, if KGB were ever come on top, Army must not be in the driver’s seat.

The ultimate weakness of the Party could be, as Suraska writes, seen in the final denouements in the Soviet Union and Poland: in one case, the top party post went to a head of the secret police, in the other case, to the head of the Army.

In perhaps the most original insight, Suraska deals with the ideology of Gorbachev and the first entirely Soviet-raised and bred generation that came to power in the mid-1980s. They were influenced by post-Marxist thinking where democracy or its absence were simple external (or non-essential) features: democracy was a sham since the “real power” resides elsewhere. “Armed” with this belief and the 1970 ideas of convergence of the two systems plus (in my opinion) millenarian Marxist view that Communism represents the future of mankind, they began to see no significant contradictions between the two systems and trusted that even the introduction of democracy would not affect their positions. Thus, in an ironic twist, Suraska, who is thoroughly critical of both Marxist and post-Marxist theories,  credits the latter (p. 147) for bringing to an end the Marxist-based regimes.

In the penultimate chapter Suraska quickly and very critically reviews different theories that purported to explain the Communist state: modernization theory, totalitarianism, bureaucratic theory, are all found wanting. Suraska’s conclusion, stated in the beginning of this text, is then expounded in the last chapter revealingly entitled “Despotism and the modern state”.  There, in a final note worth pointing out, Suraska discusses Communist rejection of the state and its rules-bound procedures (which make Communists ideological brethrens of anarchists) and compellingly argues for the complementarity of  “council (“soviet”) democracy and central planning.  Both eviscerate the state, take over its functions, impose arbitrary decision-making, and do away with the division of powers. Anarchic and despotic features are thus shown to go together, moreover to be in need of each other.   

Note. Regrettably, I have to point one, extremely odd mistake in somebody whose knowledge of the Soviet and East European politics is, by all indications,  quite remarkable. Suraska puzzlingly writes of  Gheorghiu-Dej (also misspelled), the Romanian leader, as Bulgarian (p. 128). I think she had in mind Chervenkov, but made a mistake, not spotted by herself nor the editors.

Tony Judt’s “Reappraisals”: The shipwrecks of the 20th century

Tony Judt was a Jewish Anglo-American historian of France and of Western intellectual life. He used to write for the New York Review of Books.

After these two sentences (deliberately mimicking the first  sentence of Leszek Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism, very well reviewed in Judt’s book), you should basically know what to expect: Judt was a mainstream liberal thinker similar to the scores that have in the recent decades populated New York, Paris and London publications.  While in some sense this is true, it would be also a simplification of the man as he appears in these essays. There are at least two important areas where Judt diverges from the pensée unique which has so disastrously overwhelmed Western  intellectual life in the past thirty years.

He wrote extraordinarily prescient articles in the early naughts about the dangers that Western democracy faces due to the runaway globalization and rising inequality at home with the gutting out of the middle classes. These were not the usual homilies (although even such homilies were exceedingly rare prior to 2007) but well-argued and genuinely felt cris de coeurs about the perils of the post-Cold War Western triumphalism. Historians can often detect social trends much earlier and better than more empirically-minded economists, among whom only a tiny minority sensed the forthcoming dangers.

Judt was very critical of Tony Blair whom in another prescient essay about the emptiness of New Labour, and inauthenticity of the England outside of London, he calls “gnome” and “an inauthentic leader of an inauthentic land”. That essay, written in 2001, can be read today as an almost perfect introduction to Brexit.

The second topic on which Judt differs from the mainstream is his very tough stance on Israel, in this book appearing in the essay on Edward Said whose engagement and policies Judt fully supports. I will not enter into how realistic is his proposed one-state solution because I am not a specialist of the Middle East and it is not my topic here, but I just mention it to highlight the dissonance of Judt from other liberal thinkers.

Now, those who read carefully the first two sentences know that people who fit that description write on about six topics in toto: the Holocaust (Shoah), the Ribbentrop-Molotov  pact and the division of Poland, Kirov murder and Moscow show trials, the Vichy France, Camus vs. Sartre and McCarthyism. Judt is faithful to this description and most of his essays can be allocated to one of these themes.

But if you do only these themes, however  important they might seem, you are leaving out a lot of other themes and you end up with a strongly blinkered view of the world. It is that that I would like to discuss next.

What struck me as I was reading Judt’s reflections on Sartre, Camus, Kolakowski, Hobsbawm, Koestler etc., most of which obviously have to do with Communism and Marxism, are two things. First, they were discussions of ideas where people (“real people”) have almost no place, and second, their discussion, so anachronistically placed around the events in the 1930s or 1940s, has very scant real-life resonance to somebody who lived under Communism in the 1970s and 1980s (like me) and obviously even less to anyone today. It occurred to me that practically no one of these people (Kolakowski obviously excepted) lived under Communism and for them the Cold War battles were waged in New York and Paris. Moreover, they were waged around the issues that were of almost total irrelevance to the “real people” in Eastern Europe.  In some sense, these “battles” replicated Lenin without Leninism: primacy of ideology, disregard of real life.

This is why, “ the world he describes seems unreal, like the bodies of the Gods who in the Vedic belief project no shadow” (“le monde qu’il decrit semble irrreel, comme les corps des dieux qui, dans le croyance vedique, n´ont point d’ombre”; Paul Veyne on Rostovtzeff’s description of the Roman world).  

Today we can see much better the real importance of these ideological battles: it was quasi nil. Communism fell for entirely different reasons, because it lost the economic race with capitalism and because people wanted to own property. Whether Camus was right and Sartre wrong mattered in the end very little. In effect, it did not even matter to the French working class, and of course even less to anyone else. Reading of the sterile debates among the people who were either intellectual (Malraux) or political poseurs (Sartre) is today a waste of time.

When Judt wears the blinkers of his “pensée unique” he fails to make the subjects he discusses compelling and move them into interesting directions.

In his essay on Arthur Koestler he criticizes Darkness at noon for never mentioning the use of force whereby false confessions were extracted during the Moscow trials. Almost in a socialist realistic way, he chides Koestler for hiding the ugly truth of torture, stopping just short of implying that Koestler, despite his anti-Stalinism and anti-Communism, remained the prisoner of the ideas he once believed in. But Judt fails to see that this is precisely the strength of Koestler’s book. Extracting confession through torture is nothing new: it has been practiced through times immemorial. But convincing people that they should deliberately and falsely accuse themselves in order to further a cause is something truly important. It shows the quasi religious nature of Communism. Ignacio de Loyola and Glatkin (the interrogator in Darkness at Noon) would have perfectly understood each other, as indeed Dostoyevsky in his “Great Inquisitor”  saw a century before. Compared to that, beating somebody to a pulp is banal.

Than, take Eric Hobsbawm on whom Judt writes a nice essay that turns abruptly and sharply critical because Hobsbawm never explicitly abandoned his faith in Marxism. But Hobsbawm should have, much more interestingly, provided Judt with the theme of loyalty to one’s ideas and friends vs. loyalty to truth. We may be loyal to truth (as Djilas—unmentioned--, Koestler, Silone etc.) were but fail to be loyal to the people who are, often, our closest friends. What should we choose: loyalty or truth, mother or justice (to use Camus’ example)? It is important to acknowledge the existence of this difficult choice, perhaps the most common dilemma of the dreadful 20^th century. “Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus”  Is present here too.

Judt’s very narrow focus on Western Europe, plus Poland, makes him not realize how politically parochial he can be at times. In an otherwise nice essay on Romania (a bit unusual given the geographically constrained topics of the book), Judt reports, with apparent disapproval, how a listener in a Romanian town asked him whether European Union should be limited only to Christian nations (p. 258). The question is supposed to illustrate the “nativism” of the Balkan man. Judt finds the idea abhorrent. But only five pages later (p. 263), Judt mentions how Bucharest, being “Balkanic” and “Byzantine” (as opposed to Central European cities) somehow rules the country out from the membership in Europe. Thus, in the span of five pages, we move from a seeming (skin-deep?) cosmopolitan inclusiveness to cultural nativism.

There are many similar contradictions, rather bizarrely displaying the prejudices of the author—the very same prejudices that, when political correctness lights are “on”, he rejects in other, less enlightened, individuals.

I enjoyed reading Reappraisals. Given the number of writers covered in the book, I could write several reviews. But I do not think that reading this book made me wish to read his History of Europe since 1945. Too bad because he was a good writer.