Soldiers of Fortune: Americans In The Egyptian Army

Soldiers of Fortune: Americans In The Egyptian Army

In 1865, after Lee signed the surrender to Grant at Appomattox, after Johnny Reb turned, dusty, tired, to wend his way to farms and villages in Mississippi, Georgia, or Alabama, after Billy Yank trudged wearily back to Iowa, Ohio, or New Hampshire, the war was not over for some officers on both sides. No, they were not ready to fight again. Rather, they liked soldiering, it was all they knew, and the United States was not the place for it--not unless they wanted to spend dreary years at some wilderness outpost on the plains or in the desert, waiting the next sutler's wagon with salted beef and whiskey to wash it down, helping them forget where they were--as they waited for some excitement such as the next hunt for Indians, who were rarely found.

Some had other ideas. Pick up and move on, they thought, but not toward the Western horizon, and instead across the waters to where the sun arose. Not to them just the East, but in those days the far, far East. Over there somewhere somebody could use a good soldier, tested in battle. One was Thaddeus Mot and he wound up fighting in the Egyptian army. You might say that he got there because Cotton was King in the South. With the War of The Rebellion, as it was then called by Northerners, cotton exports to Europe dried up. Europe turned to Egypt for her supply, and the Egyptian economy boomed. Cotton became King in Egypt, and when it was deposed the way was paved for Mot and his fellow soldiers. Here is the story.

Egypt's ruler, the Khedive Ismail had plans for his country. With money in his coffers from huge cotton exports during the American Civil War, he wanted to modernize Egypt. Not just for its own sake, but because the Khedive wanted to free Egypt from the Ottoman Empire, and to build Europe into a nation equal to European countries. His uncle Saïd had begun construction of the Suez Canal and Ismail finished the project. As money flowed to Egypt, Ismail tossed it on projects, especially the Suez Canal, finished at immense cost. The Canal's cost weakened his economy and opened the door to English and French influence in Egypt; he had fallen to their suasion.

The Khedive had a new problem, how to strengthen Egypt against their influence. An obvious answer was to build up his army, modernize it, and then use it to rattle his saber, the louder the better, and to fight wars, a disastrous one with Abyssinia. The Nile flowed quietly into the Mediterranean as it had to, the sun baked the pyramid at Cheops as it had since the time of the Pharoahs, and from afar Ismail had watched something new, a war in what was called the New World. This was a different kind of war, with fresh inventions and tactics. Gatling guns, armor plated warships, and men trained on the battlefield. The Khedive was interested in it.

Thaddeus Mot found his way to Turkey and became a familiar of those in power. In 1868, Mot, a Union colonel and a favorite of the Turkish court, met the Khedive Ismail in Constantinople, now Istanbul.

He impressed the Khedive, and was soon commissioned as a major general in the Egyptian army.

Mott quickly convinced Ismail to add more American veterans to the Egyptian staff. With the Khedive’s blessing he returned to the United States, and with the help of General of the Army William T. Sherman, began enlisting recruits. One of them was Confederate Major William Wing Loring, one-armed veteran of the Mexican war.

The situation presented a new chance for dozens of Civil War veterans. About fifty former Union and Confederate officers would make the three-week journey to Egypt. In addition, at least four active U.S. officers were given leaves of absence, allowing them to gain experience in Egypt. All of these men accepted actual commissions in the Egyptian Army, agreeing to fight for Egypt in any war, except one against the United States. One of then would become chief engineer in erecting the Statue of Liberty, originally proposed for the mouth of the Suez Canal.

Some stayed for only a few months (or even days), while others remained for years. Several Confederate luminaries, including P. G. T. Beauregard, Joseph Johnston, and George Pickett considered going, but declined.

More at Americans In The Egyptian Army. Also see A Confederate Soldier in Egypt, and An American Pasha's Neglected Tomb, among others.

Déjà Vu & Physicist Julian Barbour

Déjà Vu & Physicist Julian Barbour

An old woman sits in her wheel chair in a nursing home, a photo album recently on her lap. She has given it to another old lady to show pictures of herself with her first beau on the village green, of herself in bridal gown, of her child sitting on her knee. She looks up at the bare walls, and sees somewhere herself at sixteen, turning many heads, her father carefully screening suitors at the door. It all happened so fast, first that and now this. She opens the album to a new page to show her husband in the year before he died, proudly washing their new Ford in the driveway.

Consume my heart away, sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal. (W.B. Yeats)

In Julian Barbour's world, every first date, every kiss, every senior prom, every marriage, every departing is repeated precisely and endlessly. Every hot dog at a baseball game will be eaten again and again. A teenager's coolness lasts forever. Couples meet and fall in love for the first time and then they become again to fall in love again. They grow old together or become divorced, forever aging, divorcing. Or one watches the other become sick and waste into death. Gew gaws hanging from their crib, they awaken as infants to the bright world and it starts over. Sometimes during the night as middle aged men and women, they dimly recollect something, but life presses them forward and they forget.

It has all happened millions of times before, Earth, the cosmos, hot dogs, the World Series, Caesar's conquests, everything. Nothing changes. Time and motion are illusions, according to Julian Barbour. More



Barbour uses the term Platonia, in deference to Plato's idea of eternal forms. Here is Barbour's website with its URL by that name.

Atheists, Believers, and Buddha

Atheists, Believers, and Buddha

"The magic of ordinary experience. Buddha avoided the tragi-comic debate about God's existence to focus on far more important issues.

"When I first started reading about the Buddha's life, I was disappointed to learn that the existence of God was one of the subjects on which he declined to make a definitive comment.

At the time, this seemed to me either rather unfair or something of a cop-out . . . . More at the Guardian.

Robert H. Frank, Big Houses, & Happiness

Robert H. Frank, Big Houses, & Happiness

All our stuff. We have bunches of it. Stuff here, stuff there, stuff everywhere. We need a place to put all that stuff, don't we? So buy a big house to put it all in. Suppose you do want to buy a house, and suppose its square feet have an impact on public policy. Public policy and big houses?, you ask. What's that have to do with anything? Think about this, then. Here are some interesting scenarios, each with implications for the environment and public happiness:

In Daedalus, (Vol. 133, Issue 2, spring 2004) Robert H. Frank (author of Luxury Fever) casts an interesting light on the subject. He offers two scenarios, one with a people living in 4000 square foot homes, totally isolated from another people living in 3000 square foot homes. He calls each Society A and Society B. Because separated from one another, each people is equally satisfied and does not question the square-footage norm. Further, the larger houses do not provide advantage in terms of longevity or health.

He observes that "it takes real resources to build larger houses." The difference between 3000 and 4000 square feet implies a difference in resources. His question: "Are there alternative ways of spending these resources that could have produced lasting gains in human welfare?"

Society B (smaller home) residents use saved resources for the commonweal. They spend the money and material to promote specific changes in their living conditions. ". . . cost savings from building smaller houses are sufficient to fund not only the construction of high-speed public transit, but also to make the added flexibility of the automobile available on an as-needed basis." (Frank) In short, they don't need a car but can drive it if they want to. They simply don't have one thousand additional feet of floor space.

Because all income goes toward stuff, Society A residents have no excess resources for improvement of their situation. They cannot fund pubic transit and must depend on the automobile. Their cars continue to cause traffic gridlock and high stress levels. Although nicer to live in, is the larger home more valuable in the context of longer commute times, traffic jams, and traffic noise?

These are factors demonstrably correlated to reduction in happiness. When a new, noisy highway was opened, people living next it were studied. Shortly after its opening, 21 percent said the noise did not bother them; a year later, the figure dropped to 16 percent. Prolonged exposure to noise elevates blood pressure lastingly. Auto commuters are subject to various noises. Things are out of their control. They cannot predict bottlenecks or accidents. They get cut off by drivers even more tense. "A large scientific study documents a multitude of stress symptoms" from daily commuting. The stress is known "to suppress immune function and shorten longevity." (Frank) This is aside from the risk of accidents or the inhalation of carcinogenic exhaust fumes.

Frank points out that a rational person would choose Society B in order to promote his own happiness. Rational. Research in cognitive psychology demonstrates people are anything but that. Daedalus in PDF. Here is a very negative opinion of Frank.

Douglas Hofstadter:What Do We Mean When We Say "I"?

Douglas Hofstadter: What Do We Mean When We Say "I"?

Douglas Hofstadter has a vivid recollection of a pig's head on a table in a market. As a teenager he could see the severed neck that once had lines of communication with the body, that had once connected all the outposts of information with the headquarters in consciousness. He asked, "Who once had been in that head? Who had lived there? Who had looked out through those eyes, heard through those ears? Who had this hunk of flesh really been? Was it a male or female?"

He had a mid-life loss. "In the month of December 1993, when we were just a quarter of the way into my sabbatical year in Trento, Italy, my wife Carol died very suddenly, essentially without warning, of a brain tumor. She was not yet 43, and our children, Danny and Monica, were but five and two. I was shattered in a way I could never have possibly imagined before our marriage. There had been a been a bright shining soul behind those eyes, and that soul had been suddenly eclipsed. The light had gone out."

So what does all this mean? He tries to understand. "Deep down, your brain is a chaotic seething soup of particles. On a higher level it is a jungle of neurons, and on a yet higher level it is a network of abstractions that we call 'symbols.' The most central and complex symbol is the one you call 'I.' An 'I' is a strange loop where the brain's symbolic and physical levels feed back into each other and flip causality upside down so that symbols seem to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse.

To each human being, this 'I' is the realest thing in the world. But how can such a mysterious abstraction be real? Is our 'I' merely a convenient fiction? Does an 'I' exert genuine power over the particles in our brains, or is it helplessly pushed around by the all-powerful laws of physics?" From I Am A Strange Loop, by Douglas Hofstadter. Here is A Washington Post book review.

Poppa Neutrino: The Happiest Man In The World?

Poppa Neutrino: The Happiest Man In The World?

Poppa Neutrino is the free spirit (or lunatic according to some) who sailed across the Atlantic with his family on a raft made of scraps.

In his book The Happiest Man in the World, Alec Wilkinson chronicles the life of Poppa Neutrino. Now Poppa is supposedly preparing for a solo journey across the Pacific. You can listen on NPR.

You can check out the DVD featured on the picture above at this site. Here are earlier links in Mind Shadows: Poppa Neutrino: "The road to the mystical is triadic. To get through the doorway is nomadic." and 72 Year Old To Cross The Pacific On A Raft of Scraps as well as Latest on Poppa Neutrino

Below is a video of Poppa.

Theodore Dalrymple: The Politics and Culture of Decline

Theodore Dalrymple*: The Politics and Culture of Decline *(Pen name. Real name Anthony Daniels.)

Theodore Dalrymple has been compared to George Orwell. His German mother fled to Britain from the Nazis; his father had been a communist activist. He has lived as a physician in a ragged, dusty Tanzanian village. He has talked to prisoners locked away from the dizzying spin of daily London life. He has been arrested as a spy in Gabon. South African police sought to arrest him for violating apartheid. He infiltrated an English communist group to attend a youth festival in North Korea. He performed in an Afghan Shakespeare play. He smuggled books to dissidents in Ceaucescu's Romania. He was arrested and beaten by Albanian police for photographing an anti-government demonstration. He ran a psychiatric clinic in the Gilbert Islands. In East Timor police put him under surveillance. Riding with chickens, bouncing on dirt roads, he has taken public transportation across both Africa and South America. In Africa, he treated "children bitten by puff adders," and "adults mauled by leopards."

As a boy he precociously read the classics and studied arguments for and against God. He favors Shakespeare, Chekov, and Turgenev for their insights into the evils, follies, and goodness of human nature. As a doctor he worked in a London slum hospital and saw a side of modern civilization television and newspapers sweep under the carpet.

With his experiences and travels he is equipped to see through the veneer of modern Western civilization. He distrusts contemporary ideas and covert ideologies. He sees an intellectual trend toward elevating the individual at the cost of society. Conventional limits on individual behavior are being eroded. Academics embrace complex and absurd theories that are mindlessly absorbed by popular culture, only to the detriment of the masses who believe that is the way things are. Intellectuals have replaced straightforward explanations of anti-social behavior with such complex theories. For him, these theories are downright stupid.

In Africa, he saw true poverty. Yet people did not lose their work ethic, nor their dignity. Survival was itself an accomplishment to be proud of. By comparison, Dalrymple found that England’s slum-dwellers had lives “as saturated with arbitrary violence as that of the inhabitants of many a dictatorship.” The difference for Dalrymple? In England and in the West “the evil is freely chosen.” People in the West have no despots forcing them into their behavior. What, then, has happened? Western civility and values have declined because the ideas of intellectuals were absorbed willingly, without close examination, into the culture.

Theodore Dalrymple has now moved to France. The British welfare state takes care of so much in personal life that people have few options--television, shopping, sex. He considers the growth of social pathologies and the decline of cultural, moral and aesthetic standards in Britain more far-reaching and alarming than similar processes in the United States. It is happening in the States and is also a juggernaut. He does not deceive himself about France. A sign in the kitchen of his French home evokes the stiff-upper-lip Britain of yesteryear: Keep calm and carry on.

A doctor from Madras worked with Dalrymple at a London hospital. The physician was impressed with the medical care given all patients, the cleanliness, the know-how, but slowly he began to understand something else. A man over-dosed on heroin and was wheeled into intensive care where nurses and physicians cared for him around the clock. When he came to, his first words were "Get me a fuckin' roll-up." No gratitude, no courtesy, just demand for some weed.

The Indian doctor came to realize that a different kind of poverty existed in Dalrymple's country. "The squalor of England was not economic but spiritual, moral, and cultural."

Here is a review of his most recent book, Not With A Bang But A Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline.
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Notes:

Dalrymple says this of John Money, who persuaded David Reimer's parents that the boy should be "sexually reassigned" and raised as girl because of genital damage during circumcision: "By 1994, John Money, perhaps the most influential academic sexologist of the last third of the twentieth century, was still able to write in all seriousness that we live in an anti-sexual and taboo-ridden society. Get rid of the remaining taboos, he implied, and human unhappiness will take care of itself." A creature of his era and its sexual revolution, Money "insisted on the 'infinite plasticity' of gender identity."

As to the sexual revolution, he says this: "A schoolteacher friend recently told me how she had comforted a seven-year-old who was in tears because a girl in his class had insulted him, calling him a virgin. She asked whether he knew what the word meant.

'No,' replied the little boy. 'But I know it's something horrible.' "

On Kinsey's famous sex survey: "A survey of the kind [Kinsey] conducted into financial probity would surely have revealed that there is hardly a person in the world who has never in his life been dishonest—who has never taken so much as a paper clip or overestimated expenses on a tax return. No sensible person would conclude from this that the striving for honesty is a sham, that it is pointless to have any laws regarding financial conduct, that it is perfectly all right for shopkeepers to shortchange their customers and for their customers to steal from them. And yet this is precisely what the sexual revolutionaries, Kinsey foremost among them, have argued in the realm of sex."

(Variously from City Journal.)

Potpourri: Laughter, Cannibalism in Europe, Maria Doria Russell- God, Evil & Free Will, Why Does Music Affect Us?, Miles Davis & Theology

A Potpourri Today:

Why Do We Laugh?

Medical Cannibalism in Europe

On God, Evil & Free Will

Why Does Music Affect Us So Powerfully?

Miles Davis and Theology

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A big mystery: Why do we laugh? Contrary to folk wisdom, most laughter is not about humor. Read about it here.

The rhinoceros faces extinction partly because in Asia its horn, when ground into powder, is believed to promote virility, or act as an aphrodisiac. In Europe, a different species was once regarded as having curative powers. Consider this by Johann Schröder, a German pharmacologist, who wrote these words in the 17th century. His recipe was to cut the meat into small pieces or slices, sprinkled with "myrrh and at least a little bit of aloe" and then let it soak in wine for a few days. The meat specifically required was the "cadaver of a reddish man ... of around 24 years old." More in Spiegel.

Mary Doria Russell, a paleoanthropologist turned novelist has grappled with large moral and religious questions on and off the page--about God, evil, doubt, and free will. Listen at Speaking of Faith.

Why does music affect us so powerfully? Like language, are there universal interpretations of the emotions that various pieces of music expresses? Is it like art in that a community of appreciation gives its importance to us? Listen at Philosophy Talk

Jon Michael Spencer says that When he listens "to the cool jazz cuts on Miles Davis' Kind of Blue," he senses "that the music has something to do with the spiritual-realm." They aren't "like the bebop Davis was moving away from after a stint with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie 'Bird' Parker." Read at Theology Today. Look for January 1996 and "Miles Davis' Kind of Blue."

Why Smart People Do Dumb Things

Why Smart People Do Dumb Things

Dysrationalia—"the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence." Let's see, Bobbie Fischer and his mouth, Bill Clinton and his zipper, Richard Nixon with his White House Plumbers, and William James Sidis and his obsession with street car transfers. . . . It is a "disorder" affecting some of the smartest people you know.

Natural selection evolved the brain to enable the human species to survive. In shorthand, aptitude as shown by an IQ test is not a measure of street smarts. (Include emotional intelligence with that.) To be sure, in a technologically advanced society, IQ can foster success despite relatively less street smarts. But bear in mind we're not talking CEOs here. They have to think on their feet. (At least that's the theory, and a theory that gives us pause after learning that John Thain gave bonuses amounting between $3 and $4 billion to his Merrill Lynch executives after getting a $15 billion dollar bailout for Bank of America from TARP, the Troubled Assets Relief Program.)

As for IQ, the social class in which you were raised is claimed to affect your score by 12 to 18 points. But here is another term for you: intellectual capital. According to some, it is better than IQ as a predictor of academic success. Intellectual capital results from stimulation and support from the home, school and neighborhood for exploration and achievement. More at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Here is an explanation of dysrationalia and of intellectual capital.

The list below reminds us of IQ and street smarts. In terms of dumb business practices have you heard of these?

• The Heidelberg Electric Belt for the modern era of 1900. Think of it as a low-voltage jockstrap. It was supposed to cure what ailed you. Wife complained? Buy it to to cure impotence. Kidney stones? It was claimed to fry them. Insomnia? Well, I'm not quite sure how voltage jolts would put you to sleep.
• Then there was the drink Beech-Nut sold as "100% pure apple juice." Beech-Nut's nose became beech wood. Like Pinocchio's, it grew long for that lie. The product had absolutely no apple juice.
• Midas had a memorable ad. An old woman ripped open her blouse to show her "mufflers" to the shop mechanics.
• Our dearly beloveds need your help. In London a video game maker had a stroke of brilliance. The company asked for volunteers to let the company advertise on the headstones of loved ones dead and gone.

Do Parents Have The Right To Name A Child Adolph Hitler?

Do Parents Have The Right To Name A Child Adolph Hitler?

As you have perhaps read, recently authorities took a young child and siblings from his parents. The boy was named Adolph Hitler. A grocery store bakery refused to inscribe a birthday cake for the boy with that name on it. The father made a great fuss in the media about individual rights being trampled on. At about that time the authorities stepped in. The father was a former member of a pro-Nazi, extreme right-wing group. He had a wire or two loose; that is obvious.

Here is a news snippet: "New Jersey Division of Youth and Family Services took into protective custody Adolf Hitler Campbell, 3, and his younger sisters JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell, 1, and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell, 8 months, according to the Holland Township Police Department. "

In Germany, parents do not have the right to name a child anything they want. The government can reject names it considers inappropriate. There is wisdom in this. Parents are guardians, not owners, of their children, and therefore have no right to saddle them with names that are sure to expose them to ridicule, if not physical danger. More