Population and Bank Support

In their 1977 paper, Hill et al. The Kirtland Economy Revisited (BYU Studies Vol 17, 4, Article 2) argued that the idea of founding a bank such as the Kirtland Safety Society was an appropriate idea based on the size of Kirtland and the number of other banks in existence in other communities.

Kirtland at this time was one of the larger communities in northern Ohio---a number of smaller communities already possessed banks. Judging from the successful experience of other banks in Ohio, one with as little as $20,000.-- in paid-up capital, Kirtland probably could have supported a modest bank. (433)

In a footnote they go on to enumerate some of the locales with banks that Hill et al had in mind.

... smaller banks in northern Ohio included Warren (3), Ravenna (2), Canton (2), Salem, Youngtown, Elysia, Ashtabula, and Cuyahoga Falls. Cleveland, which had perhaps twice as many people [as Kirtland, RCK] had eleven [sic RCK] banks. (433 Fn 61)

In my dissertation,  where I discuss this argument (246), I argued that this exposition was misleading on multiple grounds. But in order to fully counter the claim by Hill et al, one needs to first explicate the argument structure. And in order to explicate the argument structure, we need to make clear that this argument is trying to support the larger notion that the creation of a bank, as endeavored by the Church leadership in 1836 was a reasonable thing to undertake and had all of the appearances of success on its side. 

So the argument structure goes something like this:

• Warren had a smaller population than Kirtland.
• Warren had three banks.
• Raven had a smaller population than Kirtland.
• Warren had two banks.
• Canton had a smaller population than Kirtland.
• Canton had two banks.
• Salem (Ohio) had a smaller population than Kirtland.
• Salem had one bank.
• Elysia had a smaller population than Kirtland.
• Elysia had one bank.
• Ashtabula had a smaller population than Kirtland.
• Ashtabula had one bank.
• Cuyahoga Falls had a smaller population than Kirtland.
• Cuyahoga Falls had one bank.

The inductive leap of this assumption then is that towns with smaller populations than Kirtland had between one and three successful banks in 1836. We will call this argument Min1-3

(Note: The bank of West Union, which is the one of $20,000 capitalization, is not in this list. Perhaps it was not possible to arrive at population data for West Union?)

The argument in the case of Cleveland goes in the other direction.

• Cleveland had double the population of Kirtland.
• Cleveland had twelve banks.

The inductive leap here is that Kirtland should be able to support six successful banks. We will call this argument Max6.

Combining these two inductive leaps Min1-3 and Max6, we can now create another inductive leap, to wit:

• Kirtland's population sized should have supported at least one to three banks (Min1-3) and possible as many as six banks (Max6).

We will call this argument Kirtland-1-3-6. 

Hill et al are arguing that the Church leadership made this same sequence of inductive leaps. They have no documentary proof for this, but it is a reasonable imposition: the members of the Church leadership were well connected with political leaders and the legislature; furthermore, they had taken out loans before and engaged in real estate speculation, a task that required banking connections during the boom times of the federal land sales [RCK15, 248f]. Assuming Kirtland-1-3-6 and the absence of any banks in Kirtland in 1836, at all, it was a reasonable idea to found one and to expect it to succeed.

The first problem is that the argument is prefixed by the assumption that Hill et al interpreted the data given in Coover correctly. Unfortunately, as I argued in my dissertation [RCK15, 247], that is not the case. Coover's list gives all the banks known for Ohio between 1803 and 1866, not just the banks operating in 1836 time. In fact, since Coover was a collector of banknotes, all that can be said is that at some point someone issued a note with the name of a bank located in one of these cities (and some people made notes for non-existent banks, as Coover pointed out). 

As I pointed out in my dissertation [RCK15, 247], the following banks have to be removed from the list, because we know nothing about when and how successfully they operated:

• Two of the three banks in Warren.
• Both banks in Ravenna.
• One of the banks in Canton.
• The bank in Salem.
• The bank in Youngstown.
• The bank in Elysia.
• The bank in Ashtabula.
• The bank in Cuyahoga Falls.
• Ten of the twelve banks in Cleveland.

In terms of inductive evidence that is a slaughter. 

But there are further problems. There are two key unstated assumptions in this argument:

1. Population size is a good predictor for bank success.
2. Past success is a good predictor for future success.

The first is wrong on the observation, as spelled out in my dissertation, that a lot of the money in Ohio banking was from out-of-state, both financiers of the East Coast [RCK15, 244] as well as Europeans doing import/export business with the United States. In the 1830s, the United States was effectively a third-world country, running a huge trade deficit on its import of goods and export of raw and somewhat processed materials. Because these problems were common to all of the frontier states, the situation was the same in Michigan for example.

The second one seems like a reasonable slogan, but one could only have agreed to that assumption with respect to a bank if one was ignorant of the then-brewing storm regarding small bills in general (New Jersey and Maine in 1835 forbidding small bills, Virginia & Maryland & Pennsylvania purging small bills from their monetary system at the same time). Furthermore, the no-bank Democrats had just won dominance in the legislature of Ohio, they had been cool on charters for bank for a while now, and they had passed no charters in 1836 by the summer, pointing to the unused potential for capitalization in the existing charters [RCK15,234f]. Ohio was also pressuring its bank during the spring of 1836 with threats of taxation should they not strive to remove the small bills from circulation, with all $3 bills phased out by July 4, 1836. 

Perhaps even more importantly, President Andrew Jackson on July 11, 1836 had issued his famous specie circular via the Treasury, which eliminated local banknotes as method of payment for purchasing federal lands and insisted on hard specie. Professional cashiers left the frontier banks after this circular, unless their fianciers promised additional monetary support, as Henry Dwight of Massachusetts did to H.K. Sanger, who was cashier at the Bank of Michigan [RCK15,244].

Post Scriptum

It is not entirely clear when the Church leadership decided to go ahead with the plan for the Kirtland Safety Society. Oliver Cowdery was already traveling to New York to inquire into credit for printing plates in August of 1836. The revelation promising resolution to the financial plights (v5) that is now Doctrines & Covenants 111 was given in Salem, Massachusetts, August 6th, 1836. The letter that reports the decision was printed in the Messenger & Advocate in September 1836.  

Points that I did not make clear with reference to this argument in my dissertation include that the Kirtland Safety Society was anything but modest [RCK15, 250], and the number of Cleveland banks in the research by Coover on Ohio Banking Institutions from 1913, on which the observations were based, is twelve not eleven.

Argument Structures around the Kirtland Safety Society

While historians want to be both educated and corrected by their sources, it is often difficult to pin down that that exactly means. In the following, I want to look at a few examples of how this plays out in the case of the economic history of the Kirtland Safety Society (this is Chapter 10 in my dissertation).

The backbone of course is the chronology. Many narratives already fall apart due to not aligning with the basic chronology of the matter. Of course the selection of what elements to include in the chronology brings us back to the problem of enplotment.

It is important to realize that a chronology is not a sequence of dates, but a sequence of dated events. The distinction is crucial, because dates are just chronometric units, while events have actors and properties and are enmeshed in a event sequence, as well as a geometric positioning. The chronometric units have a canonical order, but it is independent of all semantic contents---which is precisely what makes them units.

Perhaps it is best to first to tease apart the pieces that can go into a historical argument. For an intentional action, we have to presuppose some kind of script, that is, a codification of the "usual" way to do this. This would be the usual way from the point of view of the contemporaries, of course, not from the point of view of the historian. 

The "usual way" is typically distilled in some form from another event that has a similar structure. As Eduard Meyer pointed out (1912) [cited in the dissertation], it is this compare-and-contrast operation that is at the root of the historical research effort for distinguishing the common from the unusual. In the Kirtland case, I used the Owl Creek Bank, which did occur in Ohio about two decades before the Mormon arrival, as well as the Old Bank of Michigan, in which Joseph Smith~Jr's uncle Stephen Mack had participated. In the end it was the cross-comparison between these three instances that provided the fodder for the historical reconstruction.

These three elements were underpinned on the one hand by a history of banking in Ohio, mainly a sequence of state legislature actions and bank foundations (which had to be chartered by the legislature), and a history of the more global economic settings both in Ohio proper and in the US. This was the place for wealthy East Coast magnates and European importers, mainly from England, that had a strong influence on the money supply. This was also the place for Jacksonian interventionism at the national level and the ins and outs of the federal land sale that had such an impact on the monetary supply. All of these lines had their own event sequence with its own "arc" so to speak, mostly expressed as supporting or blocking specific aspirations on the legislative side and injecting or removing money on the financiers' side. 

The final element was the chronology of the creation and dissolution of the Kirtland safety (anti-)banking society itself. The comparison with the other banking charters in Ohio as well as with the Owl Creek Bank highlighted the inversion of the order of steps (charter last) as well as the enormous leverage that had been prototypical of other bank failures in the past and would eventually be outlawed in 1839 by the legislature, requiring 1:3 at the most.

For all of these elements, the observation of the overdetermined asymmetry of causation was in effect. For example, only a small fraction of the notes issued by the Kirtland society survived, supporting reconstructive efforts such as simulations how many bills of which type might have been issued. Also, the stock subscription book survived, allowing to determine which families of the Mormon elite had taken out the most stock and subscribed how much of their money. Some newspaper editorials and similar statements survived, but many other actions and their direct and indirect effects remain inaccessible, lost to time.

Aventinus on why God lets the Turks defeat the Christians -- Part 1 and 2

Among his smaller writings is a pamphlet in which Johannes Aventinus (Turmeyr) reports on his musing about why God allows for the Turks to defeat the Christians and what the Christians can do in the face of so much suffering.

Aventinus notes that his thinking began with the death of Ludwig, King of Hungary and Bohemia, on the battlefield of Mohacs (though he cites the event, not the locale) [172] but that the context of publication is the Turkish emperor besieging Vienna in 1529. Aventinus complains that he had warned people in high places of the impending dangers but had been ignored due to the unpopularity of his message (depicting the truth as a coarse farmer's wife that cannot bribe and speak after people's wishes) [172]. Similarly, the emperors, Friedrich II, Henry VII, Sigismund and Maximillian had written against the problems with the estates and the popes, but no one seems to read them [173]. Aventinus could have ignored these warnings as well, but his friends E.W. (Ernst and Wilhelm, the dukes of Bavaria?) pressed him, given how the present danger of the Turks in Austria makes the matter urgent ("the water is reaching the mouth"), and so he composed the pamphlet in four parts [173]. The first will explain the causes, the second the indicators for worst parts to come, the third what the Ancients---Christians, Jews and Pagans had done---and the fourth proposes reforms that will prevent this from happening in the future [174].

Christ alone is the throne of grace, powerful, self-ruling lord in heaven, hell and on earth, the eternal, just, natural pope and emperor, our doctor, salvation and justice; .... [174]

Part I 

Aventinus [175] discusses the great abuses of the masters, of the Church and of the world, that lead to this calamity. Because God is merciful, He would not be punishing Christianity if there was not a reason [175]. Concilia and Diets have not figured out why the Turks have grown so strong [175];  the Knights of St-John wrote to the emperor when Rhodos was under attack, that the Turkish Sultan was not afraid of the Empire, much less the Germans, because they are divide, focused on physical pleasures, cannot tell top from bottom and practice no justice [176]. And since, as Aristotle argued, all things in nature are naturally good [177], it must be the government that is the problem. Aventinus reminds his readers that even the pagans know that the love of money, avarice and the own advantage is a source of injustice [177]. The rapacity of the bureaucracies and the knavery of the judges amplifies this and was the death of the Roman empire [177]. Even worse than the unfair and impatient prince is the money fool ("geltnarr"), who only focuses on increasing his profit while showing neither mercy nor understanding for the lower orders [178]. Even the pagans handle this situation of the poor being oppressed by the rich better [179], how the office holders steal from the rulers even:

The office holders grow rich; the rulers rot away together with the lands and their people. [180]

Vox populi vox Dei is here taken to mean that the protest of the poor is the accusation of God [180]. Aventinus includes the hanseatic organizations in these, and how the money-fools press the last bit of bloods from everyone else [180], worse than any tyrant in the history of the world. They think themselves to be good Christians but are not even good pagans [181]. Since bringing life is the hard part, not bringing death, God cannot be react or He would stop being God [181].

If you punish the heretics, why do you not punish the bishops, pastors and the monks? [181]

Aventinus now refers to Maximillian's pamphlet against the German estates, calling himself a king of kings, because all of the rules of Germany want to be their own master and do not suffer the emperor [182]; the money fools take it from everyone and no one pursues unity. This is the core of the problem (though coin, toll and customs association could be mentioned as well, since they weigh down the people and anger God) [182].

But the Christian and the Jewish authors teach, that such abuse has its root in the wrong worship of and service to God [183]. God is infuriated and he uses one people to punish another:

Always one people has to punish another, eliminate and exterminate them [183]

The one form of this blasphemy is to exhibit outwardly proper religious behavior and long prayers while stealing from the widows and stiffing the poor [183]. This is especially galling in the case of the barfeeted monks [183], who sell their prayers and will end up like the stupid virgins, without any [184]. Aventinus sees the mendicant orders as the source of much of this, and compares the light of their churches to the darkness of their hearts [184]. Mendicant orders are like whore houses and equally forbidden by God [184]. They take and never give and the preaching orders are no better [185]. And the female orders are worse than the Amazons attacking the Greeks ever were; did StPaul and StJerome not say that the women should be quiet in church and not sing loudly? [186] And the auxiliary bishops (Weihbischof) the same, who pay for the bishopric of a far-off land that the Turk now controls, swear to go there and preach but never mean that, perjuring themselves? [187] This was the kind of thing that the reformation of Emperor Sigismund was planning to fix [187]. Aventinus compares the pastors unfavorably to the Good Shepherd, who are unwilling to sacrifice anything for their sheep.

They take leave of absence, eat the sin and drink the evil of mankind, preach nothing, do not earn a farthing, place vicars like themselves over the poor, don't inquire into the salvation of the poor people. [187]

The religious lords were supposed to be poor but now they are rich:

It was forbidden that bishops, prelates and clergy own any worldly good, no churches nor feudal estates, to pull toward them, had to get by on the Tenth. ... Now they own cities, markets and castles, and do not want to do anything for it. [188]

The once who have to support this are the poor, and Aventinus again points to Emperor Sigismund's reformation [188]. Now, with the Turks near Vienna again and threatening Bavaria, people still refuse to see the signs and recognize that God is getting ready to punish them for their sins [188].

The other blasphemy [189] is the way in which both clergy and laymen live openly in violation of the laws of God [189]---but especially the clergy, who will not marry but practice whoring, will not be honorable but are traitors and knaves. Again Aventinus refers to Emperor Sigismund's attempts of reform in the face of such simony that put them into imperial banishment in the empire of God [189]. For anyone who wants to live in agreement with the word of God, they are the worst traitors [190]. If their deeds happen without intent, they lack diligence, if they happen on purpose, they are knaves of the worst kind [191]. Adultery, weakening the virgins and abusing the widows, those are worse crimes than thievery in the eyes of God, but the only thieving that is punished is that of the poor, and the highers ones simply add it to their pile [191]. David was punished for his adultery, and Troy destroyed over adultery [192]. It would be better to have no order at all than one that is not enforced [192]. Even if by now all have fallen short, the only way to remedy the matter is to start at the head, because once the head is cured, the whole body will already be doing better [193]. A concilium needs to take place [193], as Pope Hadrian allowed at the last Diet, and as Emperor Maximilian I had demanded in his writings against Pope Julian [193].

 But the Pope fears a free concilium of the church like the devil fears holy water .... [194]

And Constanz and Basel have shown them that this is where popes are removed from office [194]. In the face of all these pointless consultations, the Turks say [195]:

The Christians consult much and have many diets, in the mean time I conquer land and people. [195]  

When they meet in Hungary, the Turk invades Friaul and beats the Venetians; they meet in Worms and the Turk wins Greek-Weissenburg; they meet in Nuremberg and the Turks take Rhodos; they meet in Speyer and the Turk invades Hungary and kills the king [195].

Nobody wanted to come and help [the King of Hungary, RCK], however much he kept writing for help; they [Herzog Ernst of Bavaria, RCK] had to help the Bishop of Salzburg against his own poor people at the same time instead. [195]

That year, they met in Speyer again, and the Turk invaded Austria and besieged Vienna, an no one knows how the story will end [195].

Part II

Aventinus now turns to other signs of coming disaster [196]. Aventinus now enumerate learned men who have prophesied that the Turks would come up to Cologne, that the Papacy will suffer and eventually be destroy, and that the Roman Empire before the Judgement Day will return to Asia [196],

The sundown will be suppressed again, the sunrise will rule again. [197]

Equally, Ezechiel had prophesied that the peoples Gog and Magog would come and cover the faithful [197]. 

Now many interpret Gog and Magog as meaning the Turks and the Saracene Belief [i.e. Islam, RCK]. [197]

Aventinus reminds them that at the Diet of Speyer, Philip Melanchthon had published a book that warns about how the Turks will fulfill the prophecies of Daniel, and things would have been better if the powerful had listened to him [197]. Also there were many signs in the heavens, but people only make fun of them [197]. As King David warned in his psalms, the godless do not recognize the anger of God [198]. Did God not embarrass the pope and have him called the antichrist in the streets? [198] Does anyone still fear his banishments?

I see no one who still fears him or gives much [for his opinion, RCK], except for those, that benefit from it, if they did not anymore either, they'd be his worst enemies. [198]

But Rome was sacked by the German Landsknechts [198], and the powerful French king embarrassed [1525 at Pavia, RCK], and now they write stupid pamphlets [199].

If the heads do this, there is no need to ask nor wonder, why the Turks are coming: they must punish the evil, as the scourge and rod commanded by God. [199]

The Franks and the Suebians have been attacked by their own farmers [199]. Even CharlesV, the powerful emperor, sees his siblings in danger, and the death of his brother-in-law Ludwig, king of Bohemia and Hungary [during the battle of Mohacs, 1526, RCK] [200]. Aventinus sides with Luther against Georg of Saxony and the Emser Testament, complains, that the lords do not understand Greek but want to help the clergy with their knavery [201]. God is ready to punish them, after several century of difficulties with the Turks [the crusades? RCK] [201].

(continued in next post)

The power role of historiography

As Justin E.H. Smith put it in his ruminations on what it means to compare Hitler and Trump:

History may be rooted in storytelling, but we can summon it to be something more — the arbiter of truth against lies told in pursuit of power.

Islamic State and Modernity

In preparation for considering the problem of secularization, I am reading a set of essays edited by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf and Heinrich Meier, Politik und Religion: Zur Diagnose der Gegenwart, published in 2013 by C.H.Beck.

The essay by Hillel Fradkin, Die lange Suche nach dem islamischen Staat,  (the long search for the Islamic state), and argues that the Islamic world, after the conquering successes of Mohammed, reigned such a large stretch of land for such a long time (1400 years from Hegira to the Fall of the Ottoman Empire) that Modernity for them is like a nightmare, nibbling away their success first in colonialism and then in modern republican nationalism (pp.136-139). That the infidels should rule the faithful appears like a devilish perversion, because it negates the trope of the superior political organization.

After discussing the Brotherhood in Egypt and the Iranian Revolution, Fradkin turns to the problem of what modernity means as a configuration for Islam.

Denn objektiv gesehen, und nach Erfahrung der westlichen Politik zu urteilen, welche die muslimische Macht zurückdrängte, ist die Macht, deren es heute bedarf, um die Weltpolitik zu dominieren, eine Funktion der Aneignung der Moderne. Damit ist nicht nur die moderne Technologie, sondern zuallererst der moderne Republikanismus und das moderne Denken gemeint, das beides hervorbrachte. Nicht zufällig war dieses Denken von Anfang an in hohem Maße von der Frage der Macht präokkupiert. Zumindest was die Macht betrifft, hat das moderne Denken sein Versprechen gehalten, insbesondere gilt dies für die ökonomische Macht, auf der andere Formen der Macht beruhen. (p.159)

[Viewed objectively, and judged by the experiences of western politics, which have pushed back Muslim power,  is the power that is necessary these days, to dominate world politics, a function of the acquisition of modernity. This does not mean just modern technology, but before all else, modern republicanism and the modern thinking that brought these two about. It is no accident that this thinking was preoccupied from the get-go to a high degree by the question of power. At least as far as power is concerned, the modern thinking kept its promise, and this is especially true for economic power, on which the other forms of power are founded. (p.159)]

But that seems to invert several things, in my mind. While economic power is clearly not independent of resources and raw materials, is it not most heavily tied to technological advances and a workforce that can participate in their use and construction?  Now, one can argue that modern republicanism is a prerequisite for that, but the Chinese system suggests that this is not necessarily so.

On the gift of speaking in tongues.

Middleton in his A free inquiry into the miraculous powers makes it clear that the gift of tongues, while most famous from the apostles' Pentecostal action, ceased almost immediately, as gifts became suspect for the establishing church, and then were en bloc rejected by the Protestant Reformation.

Middleton is willing to make this the decisive gift, the one that people need to show or shut up about.

Middleton then goes on (p.123) and sees the loss of moral superiority and spiritual quality when the Church becomes part of the Roman Empire, but that's of course the Protestant strategy of dating the split, when the true light was lost, providing the target to which the Reformation can aim back.

The problem with the "popish legends", as Middleton called St Augustin's narration of miracles (p.140), was that they were on the verge of crossing over into reliques on the one hand (Middleton mentions St Steven) and had all the odium of this quintessential anti-Protestant issue as well.

Of course, the sources, e.g. Chrysostomos, were just as disappointed in some sense that the miracles had ceased, and were blaming lack of faith as the reasons---thence the claim about St Paul's handkerchief (p.131).

In general the Protestant criticism was, specifically mentioning Cardinal Robert Bellarmine (who was notorious to English Protestants due to his involvement in the Oath of Allegiance debate of James I), that once Christianity had become state religion, the Church would no longer pray for but curse the princes that were in her way (p.157).

Thus, Middleton can write (p.162), in good Protestant stance (though he is paraphrasing the Church fathers' position at that point):

The History of Gospel, I hope may be true, though the History of the Church be fabulous.

The miracles are unhelpful because they take away from the the calm of the Christianity.

[The, RCK] ... sole tendency [of miracles, RCK] is to recommend, as a perfect pattern of the Christian life, the most extravagant enthusiasm and contemptible superstition, that any age or history perhaps has ever produced. (p.173)

The story of the tongues cut out by the Arian princes from the confessors who can then still speak is scientifically relativized by the description of two cases where people, who were born without tongue or lost it due to small-pox induced ulcers, were yet able to speak (p.184f).

Yet the humble testimony of this single Physician, grounded on real experiment, will overturn at once all his pompous list of dignified authorities, and convince every man of judgement, that this pretended miracle, like all other fictions, which have been imposed upon the world, under that character, owed it’s [sic!] whole credit to our ignorance of the powers of nature. (p.185)

Rorty on his own political Stance

In Thugs and Theorists, Rorty sketched his own stance as a social democrat and compared it to the stance of some of the people he agreed or disagreed with. In the closing section of that paper, Rorty focuses on the fact that philosophy should be treated like literature and that some people write books that are "relevant to current political practice"— he cites Mill, Dewey, Rawls, Habermas, Hugo, Zola, Dickens, Solzhenitsyn, Orwell —, while others write such that are not— he cites Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Wittgenstein, Woolf, Proust, Nabokov — , and that both are OK (p.572).

Derrida and Olson discuss Composition

These quotes are from an interview between Jacques Derrida and Gary A. Olson on rhetoric and composition:

You have to adjust your teaching according to the situation. I call my students in France back to the most traditional ways of reading before trying to deconstruct texts; you have to understand according to the most traditional norms what an author meant to say, and so on. So I don’t start with disorder; I start with the tradition. If you’re not trained in the tradition, then deconstruction means nothing. It’s simply nothing.

That’s why there is not one deconstruction, and deconstruction is not a single theory or a single method. I often repeat this: deconstruction is not a method or a theory; it’s something that happens—it happens. And it happens not only in the academy; it happens everywhere in the world. It happens in society, in history, in the army, in the economy, and so on. What is called deconstruction in the academy is only a small part of a more general and, I would say, older process. There are a number of decon­structions occurring everywhere.

Now, if we refer to deconstruction as an organized discourse which appeared under that name some twenty-five years ago, of course, this phenomenon, as such, appeared in France. Nevertheless, it was not originally French; it appeared in France as already the heritage of a number of old things—German things, for instance. It was a new hybrid or graft, the French graft, of something older which implies Marxism, Heideggere­anism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, and so on.

So contrary to what some people think I think—for instance, Habermas—I would be on the side of philosophy, logic, truth, reference, etc. When I question philosophy and the philosophical project as such, it’s not in the name of sophistics of rhetoric as just a playful technique. I’m interested in the rhetoric hidden in philosophy itself because within, let’s say, the typical Platonic discourse there is a rhetoric—a rhetoric against rhetoric, against sophists. I’ve been interested in the way concepts or arguments depend intrinsically on metaphors, tropes, and are in themselves to some extent metaphors or tropes. I’m not saying that all concepts are essentially metaphors and therefore everything is rhetoric. No, I try to deconstruct the opposition between concept and metaphor and to rebuild, to restructure this field. I m not at ease with metaphor either. I’m not saying, “Well, we should just substitute metaphor for concept or simply be content with metaphors”.

Richard Rorty on Feminism and Pragmatism

In the context of my research into positive examples of postmodernist historical writing, I stumbled into Richard Rorty's 1990 Tanner lecture, Feminism and Pragmatism, published in 1992, now accessible in Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Cambridge 1998.

In Feminism and Pragmatism, Rorty looks at the question of what could be meant by a feminist view of the world.

Only if somebody || had a dream, and a voice to describe that dream, does what looked like nature begin to look like culture, what looked like fate begin to look like a moral abomination. For until then only the language of the oppressor is available, and most oppressors have had the wit to teach the oppressed a language in which the oppressed will sound crazy—even to themselves—if they describe themselves as oppressed. (p.4f)

Feminists are trying to get people to feel indifference or satisfaction where they once recoiled, and revulsion and rage where they once felt indifference or resignation. (p.5)

Rorty reminds reader in (p.5 Fn 6) that in the 1920s, the Canadian Supreme Court in the context of the eligibility of women to becoming senators denied that "person" could refer to women as well, since it never had, until overruled by the privy council. The satisfaction or revulsion toward language use changes, and thus new language can be constructed through new uses (p.6). Rorty discusses the issue in the analysis of universalist (e.g. Kant) versus historicist (e.g. Hegel) philosophies of morals; the former requires a realist stance toward morals, which the latter does not (p.6), assuming (p.7) instead that only the actualized is known at the present.

By dropping a representationalist account of knowledge, we pragmatists drop the appearance-reality distinction in favor of a distinction between beliefs which serve some purposes and beliefs which serve other purposes—for example, the purposes of one group and those of another group. (p.8)

Memes are things like || turns of speech, terms of aesthetic or moral praise, political slogans, proverbs, musical phrases, stereotypical icons, and the like. Memes compete with one another for the available cultural space as genes compete for the available lebensraum. (pp.8-9) 

But this leads to a somewhat weak statement; and who would want to fall behind the negative examples given by Rorty (p.6).

So the moral world does not divide into the intrinsically decent and the intrinsically abominable, but rather into the goods of different groups and different epochs. (p.9) 

[When Rorty wonders with Michael Gross and Mary Beth Averill about the use of the male-connotated "struggle" for evolution, in preference over the bountiful aspects of nature (p.9 Fn 10), one wonders whether they are not aware of the way in which, say, bird chicks toss their siblings from the nest, or shark mothers eat their own young.]

Rorty's point is that (p.10) feminism is much easier to accommodate pragmatically, because under the guiding oppressors the claims just sound crazy. Thus any language suggesting realism should be avoided.

Arguments for the rights of the oppressed will fail just insofar as the only language in which to state relevant premises is one in which the relevant emancipatory premises sound crazy. (p.10)

A rhetoric of “unmasking hegemony” presupposes the reality-appearance distinction which opponents of phallogocentrism claim to have set aside. Many self-consciously “postmodern” writes seem to me to as trying to have it both ways — to view masks as going all the way down while still making invidious comparisons between other people’s masks and the way things will look when all the masks have been stripped off. ... || … I agree with Stanley Fish that much of what goes under the heading of “postmodernism” exemplifies internally inconsistent “antifoundationalist theory hope”. … (p.12 Fn 17)

I have argued in the past that Deweyan pragmatism, when linguistified along the lines suggested by Hilary Putnam and David Davidson, gives you all that is politically useful in the Nietzsche-Heidegger-Derrida-Foucault tradition. Pragmatism, I claim, offers all the dialectical advantages of postmodernism while avoiding the self-contradictory postmodernist rhetoric of unmasking. (p.14)

We pragmatists are often told that we reduce moral disagreement to a mere struggle for power by denying the existence of reason, or human nature, conceived as something which provides a neutral court of appeal. We often rejoin that the need for such a court, the need for something ahistorical which will ratify one’s claims, is itself a symptom of power worship — of the conviction that unless something large and powerful is on one’s side, one shouldn’t bother trying. (p.14 Fn 21)

An adoption of the pragmatist stance would free feminism for having to develop a general theory of oppression (p.14). Instead, women are encouraged to create and experience themselves through language, tradition and identity (p.16), since there is no reality behind these things that they could be 

describing more accurately. Rorty distinguishes his stance from radicals, who are trying to hunt down a mistake somewhere at the root. For pragmatism, a community that is imagined to think and treat and speak differently is the solution (p.18). 

This mean that one will praise movement of liberation not for the accuracy of their diagnoses but for the imagination and courage of their proposals (p.18).

… do not charge a current social practice or a currently spoken language with being unfaithful to reality, with getting things wrong. (p.22)

Drop the appeal to neutral criteria, and the claim that something large like Nature or Reason or History or the Moral Law is on the side of the oppressed. (p.23)

For us pragmatists, … we see personhood as a matter of degree, …. We see it as something that slaves typically have less of than their masters. This is not because there are such things as “natural slaves” but because of the masters’ control over the language spoken by the slaves—their ability to make the slave think of his or her pain as fated and even somehow deserved, something to be borne rather than resisted. (p.25) 

I am suggesting that we see the contemporary feminist movement as playing the same role in intellectual and moral progress as was played by, for example, Plato’s academy, …. For groups build their moral strength by achieving increasing semantic authority over their members, thereby increasing the ability of || those members to find their moral identities in their membership in such groups. (pp.30-31)

Rorty leaves the outcome open, of whether the group remains separate or gets assimilated, because the masters wish membership for their own children, and woven into the language of the dominant (p.31).

For to be a full-fledged person in a given society is a matter of double negation: it is not to think of oneself as belonging to a group which powerful people in that society thank God they do not belong to. (p.31)

We say that the latter groups [such as Galilean scientists or romantic poets, RCK] invented new moral identities for themselves by getting semantic authority over themselves. As time went by, they succeeded in having the language they developed become part of the language everybody spoke. (p.33) 

 “Truth" is not the name of a power which eventually wins through, it is just the normalization of an approbative adjective. (p.34)

To sum up for the last time: prophetic feminists like MacKinnon and Frye foresee a new being not only for women but for society. They foresee a society in which the male-female distinction is no longer of much interest. Feminists who are also pragmatists will not see the formation of such a society as the removal of social constructs and the restoration of the way things were always meant to be. They will see it as the production of a better set of social constructs than the ones presently available, and thus as the creation of a new and better sort of human being. (p.35)

Bibliographic Record

Richard Rorty, Feminism and Pragmatism, [published in 1992], in: Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Cambridge 1998, pp.202-227. 

Andrew Jackson on Land Policy in 1832 and the Manufacturers' Reply

On Tuesday, December 4th, 1832, the then-president of the United States of America, Andrew Jackson, had the opportunity to address both houses of Congress in the moral equivalent of a State of the Union address. Andrew Jackson did this in writing, which was then read before the members, and the Journal of the Senate preserves this document.

When turning to issues of the interior, Jackson addresses the problem of the public lands that had been set aside from the States for the Federal Government.

It cannot be doubted that the speedy settlement of these lands constitutes the true interest of the republic. The wealth and strength of a country are its population, and the best part of that population are the cultivators of the soil. Independent farmers are every where the basis of society, and true friends of liberty. (13)

For this purpose the public lands should be parceled out, surveyed and sold off at cost.

It seems to me to be our true policy that the public lands shall cease, as soon as practicable, to be a source of revenue, and that they be sold to settlers || in limited parcels, at a price barely sufficient to reimburse to the United States the expense of the present system, and the cost arising under our Indian compacts. The advantages of accurate surveys and undoubted titles, now secured to purchasers, seem to forbid the abolition of the present system, because none can be substituted which will more perfectly accomplish these important ends. (13-14)

Jackson is clear that the value of the land comes from the work of the settlers, "that it is their labor alone which gives real value to the lands" (14), and that by pursuing such a course the interests of the Nation coincide with the dreams of the individuals, namely "to afford to every American citizen of enterprise, the opportunity of securing an independent freehold" (14).

The enthusiasm that the US President displayed for the agricultural part of the populace was harshly criticized by the representatives of the manufacturing sector, as indicated by the documents in the appendix of the Congressional Debate records for the 22nd Congress.

That the President of the United States should, in a public document, addressed to the representatives of the whole people of this Union, peremptorily declare one part of the population by them represented better than the rest, appears to the subscribers little compatible with that equality of rights upon which our whole social system is, by them, believed to be founded. If one part of the population, parties to the social compact, is the best, it necessarily follows that another part of the same population is the worst; that there are different degrees of merit in different portions of the same population, estimated no by their moral, but by their social condition; not by their individual qualifications of virtue and understanding, but by their respective occupations and possessions (42).

The subscribers---John Quincy Adams and Lewis Condict---then proceed to interpret the "independent farmers" of Jackson's letter with the wealthy landowners of the feudal system, and from thence with slave-owning landowners of the South (43). The subscribers complained about the criticism levied against the US Bank, the refusal to fund internal improvements, the lack of protection for the output of the internal industries, "whether agricultural, industrial or mechanical", and the giving away of public lands to increase the landowners at the expense of the other members of society (43). And their counter-examples reveal that the focus of internal improvement targets the system of transportation that supports the conveying of goods of commerce.

To benefit the people, by making navigable the river or creek in their neighborhood---by bringing commerce to their doors---and by increasing the value of their property, are among the most important and most valuable services that a representative can render to his constituents. (44)

All of this is viewed in the context of the positive effects of the Constitution:

The constitution itself is but one great organized engine of improvement---physical, moral, political. (45)

The subscribers then go to show that it is their constitutional responsibility to manage the public lands properly, not to throw them away at sale prices:

It appears to the subscribers that Congress could neither give away the public lands to individual settlers, to enable them to acquire independent freeholds, or surrender them to the States in which they are situated, without a threefold violation of the constitution: …. (47)

The subscribers deem it an excellent part of the policy of the Union to welcome the useful liberty and equal rights, and honest subsistence, and the chances of affluence upon our shores; but they conceive it neither politic nor just to bestow upon them, or upon any adventurers, whether of foreign or of domestic birth, the acquisitions of the nation, made with the moneys levied upon all the people in all the States. (47) 

The underpinning of the problem is the continued protection of the tariffs which support the manufacturing inside the United States from the external world, which Jackson in a separate part of the letter had wanted to limit to articles needed for war.

The necessities of the nation in time of war furnish an unanswerable argument for the protection of its manufacturers---of all its manufacturers in time of peace. (51)

They [i.e. the subscribers, RCK] believe that protection, permanent protection, to the interest of domestic industry, including agriculture, manufacturers and || the mechanic arts, is a right secured to the citizens, whose property and subsistence depend upon that protection, by the constitutions itself, as well as by the laws; …. (51-52) 

In the end, the subscribers could not resist to point the fingers at the instigators of the stance that Jackson was taking, mainly because they had expected a stronger response to South Carolina.

Before the [State of the Union, RCK] message was delivered, a convention, assuming to represent the people of South Carolina, and to exercise, in their name, an absolute, unlimited, and, therefore, despotic power of sovereignty [sic!], had issued an ordinance, declaring and ordaining that all the several acts and parts of acts of the Congress of the United States, for imposing duties and imposts on the importation of foreign commodities, and now having actual operation and effect within the United States, where null and void, and no law, nor binding upon the State of South Carolina, its officers, or citizens. (52)

And not only was it obvious enough that this was South Carolina---and that its nullification attempts would permanently destroy the Union and thus could not be supported (53)---but that the South's economic dependence on slavery was at the root of this---which South Carolina had admitted.

The foundation of the complaints alleged by the South Carolina convention as the justifying cause of their extra-ordinary proceedings, is a collision of the sectional interests between the slaveholding and the exclusively free portions of the Union. The allegation is, that the protection extended to domestic industry, by the imposition of duties upon the productions of the like industry imported from abroad, necessarily operates to produce inequality in the burden of taxation upon the free and upon the slaveholding portions of the people, to the disadvantage and oppression of the latter … as the labor of slaves cannot be applied to manufactures, and as the agricultural products of the South derive no benefits from this protection, the ultimate result of the impost system is to make it at once a tax upon the slaveholder of the South, and a bounty to the free laborer of the North. (53)

Since thanks to a compromise with the Northern free states, the slaves are already counted in the representation of the popular assemblies, and thus have given the slave holding South the presidency and other key offices of the executive branch in the majority of the administrations (54), it strikes the subscribers as preposterous that the South Carolina assembly only now notices this imbalance. The imbalance at any rate was part of the compromise that settled the representation question in the first place.

[The compromise was, RCK] … that while the free States are represented only according to their numbers, the slaveholders are represented also for their property; and that the equivalent for this privilege is, that they shall bear in like manner a heavier burden of all direct taxation. That, by the ascendancy which their excess of representation gives them in the enactment of the laws, they have invariably, in times of peace, excluded all direct taxation [and rather resorted to duties and imposts, RCK], and thereby enjoyed their excess of representation, without any equivalence whatever. (55)

Thus, Vermont with 280,000 "free souls" has 5 representatives and 7 electors, while South Carolina with less than 260,000 has 9 representatives and 11 electors (55). What then is unfair about the uniform imposts?

All taxation is an assessment upon property---all just taxation bears some proportion to the property of the party taxed. If the rich pays a larger tax than the poor, it is not therefore a tax unequal and oppressive upon the rich. The unequal tax is that which exacts from the poor the same amount of contribution as from the rich. (57)

At two million slaves, at 300 US$ worth each, the slave-holding States are 600 million US$ richer than the free States (57), which give them 25 extra representatives and over 30 more electors.

Even the levying of imposts favors the South, as the duties are primarily on items that the Southern slaves, who from 60% of the community, neither do not receive or do not need:

Nine-tenths, at least, of all the revenue raised by impost duties are levied upon the articles of cotton, wool, and woolens, silks, flax, and hemp, iron, spirits, and molasses, wines, coffee, tea, and sugar. Now, the consumption, by any part of the slave population, of any of these articles, when imported, is exceedingly small; instead of being in the proportion of three to five in comparison with that of the free white population, it is certainly not in the proportion of one to ten. (58) 

If we analyze the articles upon which the great mass of revenue by impost is raised, we find it to be upon food and raiment; tea, coffee, sugar, wine, molasses, spirits, are of the first kind thus classified; wool, cotton, silk, flax, and leather, are of the second. Now, who does not know that the food and raiment of the slave are almost entirely of domestic growth and production? (58) 

The subscribers then explain how this report can be considered the product of the Committee on Manufacturing, and put the whole argument into a larger context of needs, protection and productivity.

A sound, uniform, and accredited currency; an inexhaustible and invaluable fund of common property in the public lands; an organized and effective application of the national energies and resources to the great undertakings of internal improvement; and a firm, efficient protection of commerce and navigation against the arm of foreign violence, and of manufacturers and agriculture against the indirect aggressions of foreign legislation and competition: these, the subscribers believe, are the cements which can alone render this Union prosperous and lasting. (59)

He [the Southern planter] is told that the tariff takes money from his pocket, and puts it into that of the Northern manufacturer. (59)

The myth dispelled, the subscribers remind their listeners that these protections are not in place for reasons of Governmental revenue.

The taxation of the country may be reduced to the wants of the Government, at whatever scale the standard of these wants may be fixed by the wisdom of Congress, without at all impairing the principle of protection. The two principles have no necessary connexion with each other; and all this bitter controversy has arisen from the blending of them improperly together. (60)

Jackson reacted to the situation in South Carolina with a statement reprinted here.

PS: Such messages of the president were accompanied by useful reports of other members of the government, such as the one by the US General post master on the total mail transported, categorized by means of transportation.

PPS: The whole issue of nullification is placed into a larger context in this digital history lesson from the University of Houston.

Erdmann Sturm Tillich and Politics

Presentation

Politics as Science within the system of sciences, which for Tillich was a complex science. This means that it has a social-technical and a normative science. Social-technical are bureaucracy, diplomacy and sciences of war (all sciences of being); but the normative element is missing, and that's the input of politics and gets there from the human spirit. Politics is practical sense-founding; art is theoretical sense-founding. Social relationships are the foundation, and Tillich cites Law and Community. Community is closer to irrational and content-driven. Both are forms of the conditioned (Bedingte). The transcendending is toward the ethos, the unconditional form (Unbedingte); a Law lacking this link would oscillate between formalism and Willkür. Ethics is the science of the ethos. There is no theonomic Law or Community; but there is the possibility of a theonomic ethos. Law and Community can thus be founded in the theonomic ethos, if that possibility arises. This is squarely within the cultural theology and the sense theory (the conditional sense, here). All of this remains abstract, there are no concrete decisions.

Between 1919 and 1932 Tillich wrote on religious socialism, where he made concrete statements about the politics. Der Sozialismus als Kirchenfrage (1919) argues that Christian love rejects a society that is based on economic and political egoism; he wants a community-based society, and he glosses that as Socialism. Tillich hopes for a new world of unity; Christianity can achieve a new synthesis here by supporting this development. The Kairos circle around Tillich discussed the problem of the Utopia, since the Kingdom of God cannot be realized in this world. The Kairos is supposed to replace the Utopia, which means that a demand and an expectation appears in historical time of the Kingdom of God. The demonic is both good and bad, sense-fulfilled and sense-destroying. Within history the demonic cannot be destroyed, only identified and named and politically to be placed in check. Theonomy means that an autonomous form of sense is carried through the Unbedingte; but the autonomy term is here difficult to interpret. The socialism was no new economic system, but the Kairos explication of theonomy, the demanded and expected appearance. Tillich kept fighting against the bourgeois sentiment. Die Sozialistische Entscheidung ist the last statement, where Tillich tries to get the socialism to have a sensible notion of state and power. Democracy is a hiding place for the bourgeois; democratically it cannot be decided, who should rule. The democratic principle is not constitutive for Tillich, neither power nor social state aspects require it, but a corrective principle. Tillich thus rejected the Weimarer democratic republic. 

Reich Gottes und Geschichte is a study by Tillich presented in Oxford, where he as a Lutheran analyzes the political notion of the Kingdom of God of the Calvinistic Anglican tradition (see also Eschatologie und Geschichte of Dresden, and rejects thereby his Frankfurter socialism). The Kingdom of God is a symbol of the final sense of existence, including the final victory over the demonic powers of the Past and the Present. Christus is for Christianity the mid-point of history; he is the single kairos. There might be other kairoi, which actualize that one kairos. Tillich identifies three demons: capitalism, nationalism, totalitarianism. Totalinarism is tyranny and is judged by the union of Love and Power, which is symbolized by the Kingdom of God. Tillich attacks the religious worship for the dictator, the creation of martyrs in the strict sense; Christianity should defend liberty, autonomy, because every child is potentially a child of God. All three demons pursue the Western world into self-destruction; the kairos is the positive principle that makes sense of this development. The Church has to distinguish itself from these demons and prepare for a new existence; for the Hidden Church this means that she needs to realize the Kingdom of God---Autonomy against Capitalism, Unity against Nationalism, God-likeness against the Dictatorship. The new aspect here is it the criticism of the power, and the identification of justice as worth of humans.

"Man is finite freedom." and thus rejects all utopia. Man's freedom is connected to tragedy---a line that runs from the Greek writers to Augustine and Luther. Mensch und Gesellschaft im religiösen Sozialismus (1943) discusses whether personal creative freedom is also political freedom. Tillich wanders through literature and continents to find out that personal freedom does not coincide with political freedom. Tillich again argues against representative democracy, because there are other forms of political self-decision. These other forms, such as communes, Sowjets, societies and clans, provide potentially stronger venues for creative freedom, than democracy does. Justice demands through natural law via the essential structure of humanity that no accidental differentiator has a stronger weight than the essential nature of mankind. Tillich focuses on this justice even more ontologically in his later writing.

In his systematic writing, Tillich looks at Justice one more time, the correlation of live and divine spirit. The creative work includes the creation of society, and justice is its top-most principle. But justice has ambivalences, and these arise when justice is implemented: The Presence of the Divine Spirit and the Ambivalences of Everyday Life. The ambivalences are those of : membership, equality, leadership, and law. The injustice of ambivalence is tackled by the inclusiveness of the realization of the divine spirit in the Christian churches; no one is excluded. The exclusivity of family is overcome through friendship, and friendship through larger communities. The divine spirit fights against exclusion and against identity destruction of the community. Inequalities come into being continuously---family, school, political power struggle, discussions---but under the divine spirit all are equal. In the Divine Spirit community the equality and the inequality are united; but inequality is judged, because it cannot be used to permanently damage or obscure equality. Leadership and power are necessary to lead groups; true leadership respects the individual, but the leadership is a member of other social systems as well, and represents their interests in the present time. Within the Divine Spirit, leaders can overcome by making themselves an object of their own leadership. However, Tillich sees here only the democratic idea, not a special form of the democratic system. The civil and penal laws are also oriented toward justice, but often end in injustice; externally this is because of the authorities that create, interpret and apply the laws and express the socio-economic classes involved; the interior ambivalence is its abstractness of formulation, which makes its mapping to a concrete situation problematic. The Divine Spirit can help because it can bring theonomic quality to the justice process. Every judgement expresses the spirit of the judge. The abstractness can be overcome by the theonomic inspiration of the wisdom of the judge.

The ethos must be the basis of Law, which is a Neo-Kantian move. Theonomic law making is the working of the Divine Spirit who utilizes the prophetic self-criticism of those that are responsible for the Law. The Divine Spirit uses the Human Spirit and its power of Self-Criticism.

Discussion

• Even Bonhoeffer was unhappy with US democracy in 1939.
• Tillich's focus on the wisdom of the judge would be replaced nowadays by the process.
• Tillich was chief editor of a newspaper paid for the by SPD, had to be forced to be a member, and left as soon as he could.
• The classical excuse for the intellectuals was that they would be above and outside of all parties and politics; there are studies for this for the German bourgeois by historians. Here Tillich was possibly a socio-economic reflex of Tillich's heritage.
• Mass-democratic is an anti-hierarchical society. 

Details

• Erdmann Sturm, Tillichs Philosophie des Politischen
• Prof Sturm's publication work has fronted the German and early Tillich by making all of the German Nachlass available, e.g. the lectures from Frankfurt, etc.

Pádraig Ó Riain on the church-political function of Irish heroic epics

Reading Notes

Pádraig Ó Riain begins his exposition by noting that the historical analysis of heroic epics and hagiographical tracts cannot ignore their common ancestry as being produced (or put onto paper) in the same location, namely a monastic scriptorium [p.14?].

Prinzipiell sollte der Forscher davon ausgehen, daß der von ihm zu untersuchende Text nicht nur, wie seit langem bekannt, in einer klösterlichen Schreibstube geschrieben worden ist, sondern daß er auch in seiner Aussage das klösterliche Interessensfeld widerspiegelt. [p.146]

In principle, researchers should expect that the texts they are studying were not only, as has been known for a long time, produced in a monastic scriptorium, but also reflect the interests of the monastic context. [p.146] 

This reflects a fundamental shift in orientation.

Im krassen Gegen- [p.147] satz zu der Behauptung Robin Flowers, daß die Iren in ihren Handschriften "wrote themselves down as they were, without arrière pensée or evasion or concealment" [Fn.16], ist jeder Text auf einen möglichen kirchlichen Hintergedanken hin zu untersuchen. [p.146-147]

In sharp contrast to the assertion of Robin Flowers, that the Irish in their manuscripts "schrieben diese selbst auf, wie sie waren, ohne arrière pensée oder Ausweichung oder Vertuschung" [Fn.16], every text has to be checked for a alternate motivations of the Church. [p.146-147] 

Pádraig Ó Riain then proceeds to interpret the Irish Epic Táin Bó Cúailnge  should be interpreted as a coded church-political pamphlet that argues against the election of Nuadu (✝ 812) to become Abbot of Armagh [p.147], who had aggressively pursued legislation against cattle rustling.

Damit läßt sich die Handlung des Táin Bó Cúailnge folgendermaßen auslegen: Ein Rinderraubzug nach Ulster (Emain Macha) wird der Provinz Connacht (Cruachain) zugeschrieben, damit der aus Loch Vama bei Cruachain kommende Bewerber aus dem Westen um das höchste Kircheamt Ulsters in Armagh (in der Nähe von Emain Macha), der sich mit einem Gesetz gegen Rinderdiebstahl brüstet, zum Spott und Hohn wird. [p.147]

The action in Táin Bó Cúailnge can then be summarized as follows: A cattle rustling trip to Ulster (Emain Macha) is attributed to the Province of Connact (Cruachain), in order to bring disgrace on the applicant from Loch Vama near Cruchain for the highest church office of Ulster, in Armagh (near Emain Macha)--an applicant who had championed laws against cattle rustling.   

As history shows, the pamphlet failed in its task. But the interpretation receives some interesting support when Pádraig Ó Riain looks at the potential sources or benefactors of such a smear campaign. Specifically, Pádraig Ó Riain suspects the family of the predecessor abbot of Armagh, Torbach, had the best reasons to perpetrate such literature.

 Torbach ist nicht nur bekannt für seine Rolle als Initiators des Buchs von Armagh ... das im Grunde ein Propagandawerk zu Gunsten Armaghs darstellt. Er war auch der Gründer einer Schreiberfamilie ... [der wir verdanken, RCK] ... daß die Fassung des Táin im lebor na hUidre erhalten geblieben ist. [p.149]

Torbach is not only known for his part as initiator of the Book of Armagh ... which basically is a work of propaganda for Armagh. He was also the founder of a family of scribes ... [to whom we owe it, RCK] ... that the form of the Táin in the lebor na hUidre was handed down. [p.149]

Thus, Pádraig Ó Riain can note

... die Forschung sollte prinzipiell damit rechnen, daß die irischen Heldensagen genauso wie die Heiligensagen zeitgemäße politische Interessen unterworfen waren. [p.149]

... researchers should basically expect, that Irish heroic epics are mastered by then-existing political interests, just as the hagiographic writings were. [p.149]

This also means that the authors of the Táin must have left enough clues to direct the readers attention to the church-political context, even if the epic is then often interpreted as "historical".

Pádraig Ó Riain takes the insights of Frank O'Connor's The Backward Look, London (1967) to show that the temporal backward projection of the event served to create a case of precedence that was church-politically most suitable, because now the epic was

... ein Präzedenzfall, dem niemanden widersprechen konnte [p.150] 

... a case of precedence that no one could argue against [p.150] 

Overall, the best parallel remains the hagiographic writing process,

bei der die Aktualisierung der vom Hagiographen zumeist erfundenen Vergangenheit eine wichtige Rolle spielt. [p.150]

for which the updating of the invented past by thru the hagiographic writer remains constitutive [p.150] 

Discussion

Though Pádraig Ó Riain does not cast the issue in economical terms, he is suggesting to me that the limited resources of the monastic context will ensure that only texts that further the church interests of the monastery receive the resources to be authored and (re-)produced.

Colophon

From:  Pádraig Ó Riain, Der Schein der trügt: Die irische Heldensage als kirchenpolitische Aussage, p.143-152,  in: Hildegard L.C. Tristram, Neue Methoden in der Epenforschung -- New Methods in the Research of Epic [sic], ScriptOralia 107, Tübingen (G. Narr), 1998; Sigl. OeNB 1,567.381-B Neu.
Purple translations from German to English are my own.