Melvin Konner

The Tangled Wing

The twenty-first-century actresses and models we idolize would be a poor bet to bring a healthy infant to term, much less to lactate. But the women whose images grace our great museums had just the ripeness needed. Among our ancestors, the woman who matched this ideal would have enough energy in the bank to make childbearing safe and healthy without slowing down a very active life. The men attracted to her were no fools. What appealed to them—unconsciously, since they didn't do the calculation—was reproductive readiness. Why moderns like women who look like girls remains a mystery and a tribute to the role of culture and learning in setting sexual responses. Women now signal high status by looking as close to the edge of starvation as they can—pubescent girls for the first half of their lives, social X-rays for the second—they are that sure of their future wealth and comfort.

Most of our ancestors, unfortunately, could not keep enough weight on to attain the Titian ideal. Even the !Kung are no exception to the rule about shortages. In the 1960s and 1970s economic anthropologist Marshall Sahlins made a habit of referring to them as 'the original affluent society'—a strange way to describe a group of people with a 50 percent childhood mortality rate, resulting in a life expectancy at birth of thirty years. To be fair, Sahlins was referring to their apparent dietary sufficiency, their seemingly adequate leisure time, and above all their sense of satisfaction with their lives. But all three claims are controversial.

Excellent studies by Richard Lee showed that the !Kung spent just a few hours a day, a few days a week, in the food quest; that they had many leisure activities; that their diet was well balanced; that they did not exhaust their environment's food supply; that their caloric intake was just above the minimum needed for their size and weight; and that they did not aspire to the more well-to-do herding and agricultural life of their Bantu neighbors. Subsequent work, however, called some of these findings into question. Spending just a few hours a day and a few days a week in the food quest is impressive, but many more hours are spent making tools and weapons, curing skins, preparing and cooking food, making clothing, and planning future hunting-and-gathering expeditions—none of which was included in the initial research on !Kung work. If what lawyers and judges do is work, then when the !Kung sit up all night at a meeting debating a hotly contested divorce, they are also working. If what psychotherapists and ministers do is work, then a !Kung man or woman who spends hours in an enervating trance trying to cure people is working as well. Furthermore, the !Kung are often ill, with physical complaints apparent to anyone who visits them. They suffer endemic diseases including malaria, gut infections, parasites, and tuberculosis, among others. Most women spend the years from nineteen to forty-five either pregnant or nursing, a further major drain. Considering these facts about physical condition, we must also ask whether some of what looked like leisure to earlier investigators was perhaps just not feeling well. When people are feeling poorly they may not work, but that doesn't qualify as leisure.

As for available food left unused, that claim also requires scrutiny. Palatability and ease of access enhance eating, especially in the obese but also in normal people. Mongougo nuts are tasty and nutritious—they are the !Kung staff of life—but even a !Kung can eat only so many of them. If a woman who has eaten little else for a week straight declines an opportunity to take yet another ten-mile trek to the farther mongongo groves in the heat, carrying a child, and even chooses to skip a meal that day instead, this is not necessarily evidence that she is affluent. Perhaps she has merely made a cost-benefit analysis that allows the nuts to rot on the ground. Shortages of food were probably seasonal, and Edwin Wilinsen, who studied !Kung diet in the 1970s and 1980s, concluded that annual shortages result in significant weight loss (five to ten pounds) just as in Gambian farmers. In the end, both Lee and Wilinsen have a piece of the truth: Lee helped correct the widespread impression that hunting-and-gathering life was an unremitting, desperate search for food, but Wilinsen showed that it is not ideal.

Nancy Howell, a demographer at the University of Toronto, analyzed the !Kung population and found that food shortages help to explain its very slow growth. Her model of infertility draws on that of Rose Frisch. According to this widely accepted theory, fertile ovarian cycles are unlikely below a certain minimum level of body fat. Although the !Kung picture is not this simple, caloric insufficiency probably plays some role in lowering their fertility, by helping to lengthen birth spacing to four years. And then there are the mortality figures. How Sahlins could call such people affluent seems puzzling, but the argument goes something like this: the !Kung have lived in these same circumstances for thousands of years. Their continued existence in their present ecological situation would be impossible without high mortality, and they are used to it.

I do not buy this argument, and neither do the !Kung. Marjorie Shostak's book Nisa documented the life of a !Kung woman from her own narrative at age fifty-five, supplemented by Shostak's annotations. It was perhaps the most intimate life narrative ever collected from a 'primitive' person. Together with the follow-up study, Return to Nisa, which adds another fifteen years to the story, the account achieves unprecedented insight into the !Kung view of their own lives. Clearly they were not satisfied with their lot. They arc neither at peace with nor inured to the many losses those bleak mortality curves deliver, and they are quite envious of people who arc better off. Still, they are tough, good-humored, resilient, self-possessed, and generous. They are not self-pitying and they do not allow their poverty or the conditions of stress they endure to destroy their joy in life. The !Kung, with far greater challenges, generally whine much less than the average upper-middle-class American does in a mild recession or even during a gasoline price bump. To provide some idea of the absolute differences in these circumstances, there is little doubt that perhaps not the poorest 5 percent of Americans but the next poorest 5 percent would seem to the !Kung to possess fabulous wealth, comfort, and safety. Imagine sleeping in a bed! Imagine eating fruit that has more flesh than pit! Imagine a 95 percent chance that your child will live!

For the first few months after returning from my two years with the !Kung, I used to hear a phrase in my mind, in the !Kung language, one that would often have been on the lips of a !Kung, if one had been with me: 'Rich people, everywhere rich people.' I remember being in Harvard Square—one of the busiest corners in the world—on an ordinary autumn day, watching someone get out of an ordinary car in ordinary clothing. I stared and said it aloud: 'Rich people, everywhere rich people.' For years every time I scraped a plate into the sink—from the most modest of meals, and meals that by American standards were quite thoroughly eaten—I would hear one of my !Kung friends asking me, 'Are you a person who destroys food?' It was hard to throw out orange peels; !Kung women saved them to make perfume.

Norman Stone

Europe Transformed

In the Habsburg Monarchy, bureaucracy was deliberately used as a device for pre-empting minority nationalism. If sufficient Slovenes, Czechs or Poles were given State jobs, with a pension attached, they would have no incentive to pursue secessionist causes. Roughly a third of all students in Austrian universities therefore took law degrees and headed for jobs in the bureaucracy, for which a training in law (especially 'administrative law' or Verwaltungsrecht) was an essential preliminary. In other countries, the imperialist coalitions around 1900 had absorbed dissident young men in a drive for empire. The Habsburgs could not do this, for they were too weak. Instead, in the era of Ernst Korber (which ended in 1904) they spent government money building up government concerns, such as canals and railway lines. It all made for more bureaucracy and more law degrees.

In the more backward countries, such growing bureaucracy could be dangerous. It amounted to a social reiolution of a sort. The old 'notables'—landowners, for the greater part—began to lose their control of the countryside in the 1890s. The days when caciquismo ruled Spain, when a family of bosses (caciques) like the Pidals in the Asturias could run a locality, securing tax concessions, exemptions from conscription, post-office jobs and even 'fixed' trials for their clients, all in return for votes, were going: not least because by 1900 even larger estates were suffering from the rise in costs, and everywhere, without exception, were registering a perceptible fall in surface area. In Ireland, Spain, Sicily or Russia, whether the government attempted land reform or not, the great estates were in decline. In these parts, there was usually not much industry or commerce to revive the economy; more and more, government jobs were the only way ahead. In Italy, it was said, 'in the south, the only industry is power.' A government job, the prefect, the various hired thugs of the mafia or, in Naples, the camorra, were parasitical. In Russia, the police department was often part of the underworld. Anti-Semitism was tolerated and sometimes organized by the police, and it flared up in a context of declining great estates, in the western Ukraine or Bessarabia, the capital of which, Kishinyov, produced a notorious pogrom in 1903. In the province of Tver, a governor, Aklestyshev, actually did appoint men with criminal records to deal with the local representative council. The Irish Home Rulers became, in their enemies' eyes, a huge 'machine,' especially when English forms of local government were extended to Ireland in 1898. The city administration of Naples was dismissed fourteen times by government decree because of its corruption. There was a startling illustration of the problem in 1908, when the Sicilian city of Messina was wrecked by an earthquake and a tidal wave. From all over Italy and subsequently from all over Europe, money and volunteers arrived to restore the city and its stricken inhabitants. But the tons of goods and thousands of lire passed without difficulty into the hands of local 'bosses' and were sold off elsewhere.

In the west, the new bureaucracy also gained power, although that power could plausibly be represented as progressive. Senior civil servants could in effect dictate government policies, as was done by Morant at education, Llewellyn Smith or Askwith in matters of industry, or, in France, Arthur Fontaine at labour or Monod at education. In Great Britain, until shortly before this era, feudal institutions had survived: parish vestries, grand juries and quarter-sessions had been uneasily adapted to modern needs. The administrative reform, when it came, was too hasty and ill-thought-out, especially in its financing—the rating system, which was both oppressive and ineffectual. British towns did become healthier in this period, but the process really depended on their capacity to attract loans, which the city of Liverpool had pioneered in 1880, at a time of low interest-rates. In general, the expansion of bureaucracy in Great Britain compared badly with continental experience, since there was virtually no corpus of law to control the bureaucrats. In France (and, by extension, most other countries influenced by Napoleon) there was a droit administratif, over which the Cour des comptes presided. In England, the bureaucrats made it up as they went along, and could have gone much further than they did, only, in this era, they were held up by the extraordinary (in continental eyes) respect for property that English Common Law preserved.

Andrew Knoll

Life On A Young Planet

Wandering through an alpine forest or snorkeling above a coral reef, we observe an ecology shaped by plants (or seaweeds) and animals, with large vertebrates at the top of the food chain and other creatures below. Ecosystems also contain many organisms that we can't see, but concern for their contributions is generally fleeting—surely bacteria and other microorganisms, tiny and simple, eke out their living in a world of our making?

As large animals, we can be forgiven for holding a worldview that celebrates ourselves, but, in truth, this outlook is dead wrong. We have evolved to fit into a bacterial world, and not the reverse. Why this should be is, in part, a question of history, but it is also an issue of diversity and ecosystem function. Animals may be evolution's icing, but bacteria are the cake.

Plants, animals, fungi, algae, and protozoa are eukaryotic organisms, genealogically linked by a pattern of cell organization in which genetic material occurs within a membrane-bounded structure called the nucleus. Bacteria and other prokaryotes are different—their cells lack nuclei. In terms of biological importance, eukaryotes would seem to have a decisive edge; eukaryotic organisms display a variety of form that ranges from scorpions, elephants, and toadstools to dandelions, kelps, and amoebas. In contrast, prokaryotes are mostly minute spheres, rods, or corkscrews. Some bacteria form simple filaments of cells joined end to end, but very few are able to build more complicated multicellular structures.

Peter Richerson

Robert Boyd

Not By Genes Alone

Considerable evidence suggests that the ability to acquire novel behaviors by observation is essential for cumulative cultural change. Students of animal social learning distinguish observational learning or true imitation (hereafter, plain imitation) from other kinds of social transmission. Imitation occurs when animals learn a novel behavior by observing the behavior of more-experienced animals. Simpler kinds of social transmission are much more common. For example, local enhancement occurs when the activity of older animals in a particular location increases the chance that younger animals will visit that spot and then learn the older animal's behavior on their own. Thus, young chimpanzees that frequently accompany their mothers to termite mounds are more likely to acquire termiting skills than individuals whose mothers never termite. A similar mechanism, stimulus enhancement, occurs when a social cue makes a given stimulus salient to the animal. For example, smelling food particles on nest mates makes Norway rats more likely to sample these foods when foraging. Young individuals do not acquire the information necessary to perform the behavior by observing older individuals in either of these cases. Instead, the activity of others causes them to be more likely to acquire this information through their own interaction with the environment.

Local and stimulus enhancement and imitation both can lead to persistent behavioral differences among populations, but only imitation gives rise to the cumulative cultural evolution of complex behaviors and artifacts. To see why, consider the cultural transmission of stone tool use. Suppose that an early hominid learned, on its own, to strike rocks to make useful flake tools. Her companions, who spent time near her, would be exposed to the same kinds of conditions, and some of them might learn to make flakes, too, entirely on their own. This behavior could be preserved by local enhancement, because groups in which tools were used would spend more time in proximity to the appropriate stones. However, that would be as far as toolmaking would go. Even if an especially talented individual found a way to improve the flakes, say by blunting the back to protect the hand, this innovation would not spread to other members of the group because each individual has to learn the behavior independently, and individual learning is time consuming and chancy. Local and stimulus enhancement are limited by the learning capabilities of individuals, and by the fact that each new learner must start from scratch with only the barest clues from other animals to go by. Imitation allows each new innovation to be added to an individual's behavioral repertoire, because the information about how to perform the behavior is acquired by observing the behavior of others. To the extent that observers can rapidly and accurately use the behavior of models as a starting point, imitation leads to the cumulative evolution of behaviors that no single individual could invent on its own.

Several lines of evidence suggest that imitation is usually,not responsible for protocultural traditions in other animals. First, as we have already said, many socially learned behaviors, like potato washing in Japanese macaques, are relatively simple and could be learned independently by individuals in each generation. Second, new behaviors like potato washing often take a long time to spread through the group, a pace more consistent with the idea that each individual had to learn the behavior on its own, aided only by weak clues of stimulus or local enhancement. Finally, sophisticated laboratory experiments capable of distinguishing imitation from other forms of social transmission like local enhancement have usually failed to demonstrate observational learning, except for the specialized song-learning system of some birds.

Adaptation by cumulative cultural evolution is not a byproduct of intelligence and social life. We say 'monkey see, monkey do,' and use ape as a verb, but in fact monkeys and even apes do not seem to be especially clever imitators compared to humans. The best evidence comes from experiments in which the imitative capacities of children and apes have been compared. Primatologists Andrew Whiten and Deborah Custance designed an artificial 'fruit,' a rugged, transparent plastic box that held treats inside. Experimental participants could open the box by manipulating a latch consisting of either bolts or a pin-and-handle arrangement. The participants were eight chimpanzees three to eight years of age and three groups of children with mean ages of 2.5, 3.5, and 4.5 years. They watched a familiar human demonstrate a specific technique for opening the fruit, and then were allowed to attempt,open it themselves. The experimenters recorded whether the participants used the same technique that they had been shown. By most measures, chimpanzee imitative performances exceeded chance. However, 2.5-year-old children did even better, and older children were dramatically more proficient imitators than the chimpanzees.

Psychologist Michael Tomasello and his coworkers conducted similar experiments in which chimpanzees and children were shown how to use rakelike toots to obtain food that was out of reach. The chimps who watched expert demonstrators were more successful than untrained chimps in using the tool to obtain the food reward, but they did hot imitate the precise method that their demonstrators had used. Children, on the other hand, followed the method they had been shown: Tomasello describes the ape technique as emulation rather than imitation; apes learn that a tool can be used to cause some desired effect by watching a demonstrator, but they don't pay close attention to the details of how the tool is used. Children imitate so faithfully that they persist in using an inefficient technique, one that the chimpanzees usually abandon in favor of the more-efficient alternative. Children aren't smarter than chimpanzees in general, just much more imitative. Taken together, these experiments suggest that social learning in apes and humans is not the same. Children imitate very faithfully, while apes emulate or at least imitate less faithfully.

Although the evidence on hand suggests that most cultural traditions in other animals are not the product of imitation, some caution is in order. Negative results are always difficult to interpret; experiments can fail for many reasons. A recent clear demonstration of imitation by marmosets suggests that better experiments might detect imitation in a wider range of species. Experimental data from bottle-nosed dolphins suggests that they are excellent vocal and motor imitators, consistent with the field evidence. Thus, we don't claim that imitation is unique to humans. However, the current evidence suggests that (1) cumulative cultural evolution is rare, and perhaps absent, in other species; and (2) even our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, rely on different modes of social learning than humans.

So far, we know of no convincing evidence that any other species has a cultural item as complex as a stone-tipped spear. Rudimentary forms of observational learning are certainly present in chimpanzees, orangutans, whales, 'crows, various songbirds, and parrots, but as Darwin put it, a 'great gap' exists between humans and other animals. No other species seems to depend on culture to anywhere near the degree that humans do, and none seem adept at piling innovation atop innovation to create culturally evolved adaptations of extreme perfection. In fact, there is no evidence that humans made tools as complex as a stone-tipped spear until about four hundred thousand years ago.

Daniel Chirot

How Societies Change

Competition between feudal lords and centralizing kings persisted throughout the Middle Ages, and though some kings, notably in France and England, managed to create more centralized administrations, they were never able to bring their nobles under complete control. In other parts of Europe, particularly in Germany and Italy, regional lords and trading cities broke the power of centralized monarchs and further fragmented the political structure. Everywhere, the Church was yet another political actor, siding sometimes with kings, sometimes with lords, sometimes with increasingly independent towns prospering from the revival of trade after the tenth century.

One of the main consequences of this fragmentation was that merchant cities in Europe were able to bargain for considerable freedom and self-government. In contrast, in the Middle East they were subjected to control by mercenary military force, and in China they could never escape control by the empire.

Merchants and town artisans everywhere in the world have a peculiar outlook on life. Unlike warrior nobles, whose chief goal is to be brave and honorable, or peasants, who fall back on resignation and magic to help them out of difficult situations, those whose life consists of commerce are careful calculators who come to believe that it is possible to understand the environment as one understands doing one's job: by measuring what resources and investments one makes and by carefully maximizing profits. The lives of merchants and urban artisans are dominated by ledgers and accounts, not by the search for honor and the glory of battle, nor by attempts to magically manipulate an uncontrollable natural environment. Rationality, that is, an attitude that it is possible to calculate and purposively manipulate the environment, is more likely to be developed in an urban than in a rural setting because urban life is less subject to the vagaries of nature. It is more likely to grow among peaceful merchants than among warriors, who must depend far more on luck to survive and whose lives are more dependent on developing physical than intellectual skills.

The political stalemate in western Europe between kings, lords, and the church allowed a more rational urban culture to thrive and establish itself. At the same time, the discordance between the reality of a divided Europe and the perception that there should be more harmony led intellectuals to reexamlne Christian beliefs. The mixture of a growing, rational urban culture and the attempt to harmonize religious teachings with reality produced a rationalizing religious outlook. Its basic assumption was that the universe must make more sense than it seemed to, and that if one searched hard enough, it should become possible to find the calculable laws according to which everything worked.

This deep belief that the laws of God must manifest themselves as a set of regular, calculable relationships and that these were subject to rational understanding was not unique to western Europe. Urban dwellers and troubled philosophers had thought along these lines in all civilizations. But it was only in western Europe that there were enough individuals thinking this way, and for a long enough period of time, for this new way of viewing the world to gain a firm foothold. For this to happen, it was important that no unified imperial structure bring Europe together.

In agrarian societies rationalizing thinkers are inherently dangerous. They question the legitimacy of hereditary monarchs because they examine the political system from the point of view of practicality and efficiency. Their intellectualism demeans warriors and the ethic of noble honor, which is based on action rather than thought. They bring into doubt the great religions of resignation, which are supposed to keep the peasantry satisfied with their miserable lot, because they suggest that improvement is possible and that human beings have the capacity to make their own decisions. They cast doubt on established religious thinking by subjecting theology to its own rationality, that is, to testing and questioning in order to find the truth, as opposed to simply receiving it as it has been handed down over the ages. In all agrarian societies the really daring rationalist thinkers have been accused of being heretics and of being a menace to the established order in society. They might be protected by an occasionally enlightened prince, but they were more likely to wind up being imprisoned or killed by irate authorities.

Part of the European advantage was that such thought was somewhat protected by the diversity of political power and by the towns' interests in maintaining their freedom. Only in an independent urban environment were there many who might agree with dangerously rational thinkers. Only where it was possible for a thinker to flee to a safe haven could the continuing development of rational thought take place. Thus both political division and powerful towns were necessary.

Through a set of coincidences, western Europe, like ancient Greece before it, and for many of the same reasons, developed a greater tradition of free thought and rationality than other agrarian civilizations. And at the same time, it was thriving because of its growing agriculture and commerce. Had western Europe been a united imperial state like China there would not have been such an impetus to engage in religious self-exammation. Had there not been such a political stalemate that allowed towns independence and pitted church, kings, and nobles against each other, there would not have been as much space for the development of rational thought.

Robert Lopez

The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages

Many craftsmen were slaves; many merchants lacked citizen rights; and in many of the innumerable Roman 'cities' agriculturists and officials were not only more influential and wealthy but also more numerous than the trading class. The Commercial Revolution did to the medieval city what the Industrial Revolution was to do to the entire European scene. It gradually shook the numeric, economic and political predominance of landowners and officials and made the market, instead of the public place or the cathedral squares, the main focus of urban life.

The term 'market' (from the Latin mercatum) may mean both a gathering of merchants and their gathering place. In the latter sense, the Romans used more commonly the term forum, and they ordinarily called a merchant negotiator, that is, business man. During the later Middle Ages 'market' and 'merchant' (mercator) gradually crowded out the older words, probably because in the barbarian period the withering of urban life had made permanent market places and resident business men superfluous in all but a few towns. There was not enough to do for traders to get together every day at the same place or wait for customers in a shop. The collapse of continuous trade, however, stressed the significance of periodical gatherings, and these would grow in numbers, size, and complexity wherever and whenever economic activities picked up. They ranged; from weekly or monthly encounters, where townspeople and country people of the immediate surroundings exchanged handfuls of local goods in the course of a few hours, to annual affairs, usually lasting several days, where customers from a larger area bought provisions for the whole year, sold any surplus they produced, and got hold of a few outlandish objects. At their lowest level, daily markets opened no more than a loophole in a wall of self-sufficiency: many transactions were carried out directly between the producer and the consumer, sometimes, by barter, and nobody had to spend the night away from home. Annual markets, usually called fairs after the feria (feast or holiday) to which they were linked, called for more complex arrangements. Any empty space might do for professional merchants to set up their stalls and pitch their tents (tienda still designates the shop in modern Spanish), but they would not come from afar unless they had some assurance of free and easy access, some advantages and conveniences during their stay, and, of course, a reasonable chance for profit.

Urban growth did not destroy the temporary markets, which had been ordinarily confined outside the walls or segregated in the yards of churches and castles, but eventually transferred the bulk of trade to what we might call the shopping and business sections of the town. Stately halls for sectional or specialized trade, covered plazas and arcaded alleys, long rows of craftsmen's houses with a shop open on the street came alive in a picturesque disorder of which we can still get an idea when we visit the suks and bazaars of certain Muslim towns, from Marrakesh to Istanbul, where industrial pollution has not yet replaced preindustrial dirt. The more important transactions of wholesale or luxury trade were carried out more discreetly in the office of a notary or a guild, the inner rooms of a merchant's mansion, the private quarters of a sea captain or the premises of a company of merchant bankers. Obviously not all towns attained the same size and complexity, but many of them fitted the statement of Chretien of Troyes, the famous French writer of the late twelfth century: 'One might well believe that in a city a fair is being held every day.' More proudly, a Florentine chronicler of the early fourteenth century pointed out that his city had no use for special markets or fairs: you could buy and sell any amount of anything at any time. He exaggerated but slightly: Florence at her medieval peak, with a busy population of better than 100,000 inhabitants, a mint output of 500,000 gold florins a year, a wool production of 80,000 pieces of cloth, a meat consumption of 4,000 oxen, 80,000 lambs and 30,000 pigs, a wine consumption of 25 million quarts, a fertile district ruled by her independent commune, and the largest business companies in the Christian world, hardly needed the stimulus of periodical marts.

In all but a very few urban centers, however, markets and fairs continued to play an important role. Some economic activities are essentially seasonal: the gathering of certain crops, the opening of snow and icebound routes, the sailing dates for large convoys of ships, the traditional time for shearing sheep, preparing cheese, or delivering cloth to the wholesaler determined spurts that could best be channeled into a fair. Travel took a long time, and a merchant would be encouraged to take a specific trip if he knew that he would reach an extraordinarily large number of his colleagues and an unusual variety of goods. Moreover, markets and fairs tied their fortune to special facilities and privileges not normally available on the spot. Not many towns outside northern and central Italy enjoyed full independence and still fewer controlled the country around them; ordinary trade, therefore, had to cope with all kinds of obstacles in the unfriendly context of a feudal government and an agrarian society. No doubt the interests of lords and farmers were not in everything different from those of towns and traders, nor was unrestricted commercial liberty the ideal of most towns. A compromise was always possible, but it would be more easily attained for the limited duration of a fair than for the entire year. Lords and towns alike would then be willing to interrupt any war, lower any toll and tax, waive the customary restrictions on the residence and activities of aliens, grant speedy and informal justice according to international commercial law, strike abundant coinage of good and uniform quality, recognize and enforce written or verbal obligations, renounce such obnoxious customs as aubaine (confiscation of the property of deceased aliens), ius naufragii (seizure of the goods, and sometimes of the survivors, of wrecked ships), and reprisal (forfeiture of the wares of all fellow citizens of a defaulting merchant). Even the greediest prince and the most protectionistic town usually realized that at least temporary concessions were needed to get a market going, and that a going market would bring money and supplies outlasting the suspension of normal burdens.

Still if the absolute volume of transactions in markets and fairs kept increasing as the Commercial Revolution progressed, their share of total trade inevitably diminished. Seasonal factors cannot be entirely eliminated, but a steadier demand will elicit a more evenly distributed offer; sailors and muleteers will prolong their operations under all but the most forbidding weather; and craftsmen will use stocks of raw material to spread their work throughout the year. By the late thirteenth century a Pisan manual of business, foresees only one slack month out of twelve, and the detailed notarial records of Genoa show no serious variation at any time of the year. Less successful cities on peripheral shores or in the countrified center of Europe are more sensitive to seasonal fluctuations, but a city that for a long series of years has attracted peasants to her weekly market and merchants to her annual fair will normally become a permanent nerve center of trade.

William Ian Miller

Faking It

Once people suspect hypocrisy, many start to mistrust all appearances of virtue as so much glory seeking and shamming. Montaigne goes so far as to claim that virtuous deeds done openly are ever more compromised the grander they are: 'The more glittering the deed the more I subtract from its moral worth, because of the suspicion aroused in me that it was exposed more for glitter than for goodness.' Because virtue looks good, it looks bad. What are the virtuous to do? Pretend to vice? In fact this antihypocrisy strategy is often tried—recall that Jesus counsels it with regard to fasting: pretend that you are not fasting when you are (Matt. 6.16-18)—and it immediately gives rise to its own styles of hypocrisy, vanity, and playing at virtue. In one of Mark Twain's burlesques of Heaven we find Sir Richard Duffer, a butcher from Hoboken who died with a carefully cultivated reputation for meanness; he was awarded a baronetcy in Heaven for having secretly furnished the homes of 'honest square people out of work' with meat. Take the more famous cases of St. Thomas a Becket and St. Thomas More, who secretly wore itchy hairshirts underneath their sumptuous robes to punish themselves for the vanity of their rich clothing and high office. Better to appear completely given over to unapologetic luxury than to appear virtuously dressed in unostentatious habit and be suspected of ostentatious piety. Yet it is hard not to suspect Becket and More of smirking to themselves, vain of their hairshirt secret, or congratulating themselves on the brilliance of a move that turns their showy sumptuousness into fake showy sumptuousness, all to get around the stricture against trumpeting one's virtue.

Similarly, it is hard not to imagine the simpler Richard Duffer undertaking considerable extra labor to keep his generosity secret. We can see him delighting in his reputation for meanness, precisely because it is false, taking no small pleasure in a smug contempt for those fools who fall for his perfectly engineered deception, who are so wrong in their opinion of him. The townspeople's false blame purifies his virtue and shoots him straight to Heaven, at least according to this theory of obsessive hypocrisy avoidance.

There are certain false fronts that are not part of the niceties of politeness and decorum but instead turn the people who are their objects into fools: this is the sin of Frank Churchill in Emma, who by keeping his engagement to Jane Fairfax secret is assumed by others, namely Emma, to be available for flirtation. The unknowing are thus entrapped into humiliating themselves by fancying they are being attended to by Frank in ways they are not. When the sham is revealed people resent it, and with good reason. It is not likely that the denizens of Hoboken who disliked the falsely mean butcher will feel much more charitable toward him once his secret is revealed. No one likes being made a fool of, even (or especially?) in the interests of someone else's trip to Heaven. It is not as if Duffer's strategy doesn't impose costs on the unwitting others; they have had the vice of censoriousnes thrust upon them against their will.

With Becket and More, two very sophisticated actors, the suspicion of hypocritical antihypocrisy is stronger. They are not being vain of their virtue in the vulgar sense of parading holiness about literally trumpeting it, but instead are being vain of their virtue to their internal audience, for the benefits accruing to their self-esteem. Their secret self-mortification, however, eventually gets noticed. That is why I can write about it. When Becket died it was apparent when they stripped him, and we know of More's too. They, I suppose, knew we would know, for by playing to their internal audience they were also, just maybe, playing to a future earthly audience in addition to the one in Heaven.

Wearing a hairshirt, even in secret, is ostentatious in a way that other, less lurid kinds of devotion are not, especially back then, when the competition in matters of holiness was a political as well as social and religious issue. Even if the motives for wearing hairshirt for mortifiers of the flesh such as Becket and More were untainted by competitiveness or glorying, they would know that others might suspect that their motives were tinged with saintly ambition. They surely struggled with incessant temptation and could not always keep the pride of finery and high office at bay. The hairshirt is a testimony to that. But did they not also indulge in some self-satisfaction in knowing they were enduring itching silently, ever so patiently, while suffering the additional punishment of being blamed for their pride of office?

Unless, that is, hairshirts had already become a fad and you could not trust that the people you encountered were not also wearing one. Various ways of mortifying the flesh followed the rules of fashion ability; in the early centuries of Christianity, stylites—pole sitters—were in vogue; in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries pus drinking had its day. One can imagine a group of wags, all with hairshirts under their brocaded doublets, querying in their cups: tell me Philip, where do you go for your hairshirts? Do you order the lice separately?