Father Dearest

Toxicities, perversions and archetypes around the father role. Based on Raised Right by Jeffrey Dudas, and Toxic Parents, by Susan Forward.

The father archetype looms large over our personal and collective lives. Fathers are inescapable, for better or worse, in their shaping of our identity, meaning, and purpose. Most cultures, including all those of Indo-European descent, are patriarchial. Father figures are central to our political lives and mythology. God is a father.

Our current political divide is steeped in the father archetype. Democrats are the mommy party, Republicans the daddy party. Never has that been clearer than with the current occupant of the White House, who seems to think that his orange patriarchial aura should suffice to get the entire country to fall in line behind every tweeted emission. But it is nothing to make light of- the psychology of these polar tendencies is fundamental to humanity and probably many other beings. Perpetual contrasts exist between competition and cooperation, risk and security, discipline and forgiveness, war and love, yang and yin.

A recent book about icons of the right argues that father mythology pervades the personal and political conceptions of the right. Fathers only have authority in the family if the state moderates its nanny-ish tendencies. CEOs only have proper authority if the state does not meddle in their companies. And the country is properly run only when a father figure lays down the law on standards of morality and behavior, however much that conflicts with the first two aims. Many prominent figures on the right have frought, to say the least, relations with their own fathers. Newt Gingrich comes to mind, but the author Jeffrey Dudas profiles William Buckley (absent, though overbearing, father), Ronald Reagan (drunk, weak father), and Clarence Thomas (deserted father, replaced by totalitarian grandfather). Each found a personal and political mythology in constructing a new image of the father figure, mostly drawn on the founding fathers.

It is the usual authoritarian / patriarchal story- what ails the world (read- the self, or the early self) is lack of discipline, and masculine modeling, which is supplied by the authoritarian leader who will restore order, law, and the scope for other elements of the patriarchy down the line (corporate, police-state, and family) to do likewise, will heal the society. This resolves the chaos resulting from lack of boundaries and discipline, and lack of social hierarchy. All this is claimed in the name of freedom- the true freedom of the orderly citizen, not that of the malcontent and rabble-rouser. Reagan provided an especially clear vision of this condition of the state, set in contrast to the hippie protesters on whom he cut his teeth as governor of California. And he justified it in terms of the American dream of freedom and equal opportunity for all- all virtuous and deserving citizens, that is.

All is well with this nuclear family, enjoying its driverless car in 1957.  Each person's role is well-defined and secure.

The problem is that, while the patriarchial virtues certainly have merit, they are hardly the only virtues. Worse, they tend to paper over a great deal of presumption about the fairness of the current starting conditions, and the ability of its stated virtues to afford the promised success, not to mention the sterling virtues and talents of those currently at the top of the heap. That is why Horatio Alger stories are such a staple of the right. If Clarence Thomas can make it, or Steve Jobs, or Jack Kemp, or .. fill in the blank... then anyone can, with enough gumption.

That is, however, a sucker's game, as likely to raise up the masses as is the local Indian Casino. Not only should success or even a decent life not depend on such extraordinary efforts and talents, but it clearly does not for the well-to-do, who bequeath countless social, material, and political advantages on their offspring, resulting in the remarkable lack of social and wealth mobility that we see in the US today. The starting blocks are starkly different for different people, and it is absurd to preach individual morality tales when material and other forms of inequality are so tragically and obviously responsible for the lack of freedom and prosperity for most citizens. Where are the reparations for slavery, for example? Also missing is any model or justification for communal, public goods. Life becomes a competition of atomized individuals, with family structure and discipline separating the wheat from the chaff, but without a rationale for wider social cooperation and institutions, such as public schools or anti-corruption mechanisms in government, or business regulation, that render the level playing field which the patriarchial myth assumes and depends on, but refuses to address.

Which is not to say that personal virtues, just saying no, stick-to-it-ive-ness, discipline, and the like, are not good things. The wise and benevolent father figure is also a very good thing. Yet, as Susan Forward points out, toxic, abusive, and even incestuous, parents are all too common. One in ten families, by her estimation, experience incest. It is shocking and horrifying, yet preaching from on high is not going to help, particularly as the perpetrators are often the very ones, through the magically empowering nature of the archetype, doing the hypocritical preaching.

Indeed, it is the damaged children who seem to end up on the right, latching on to the one certainty they have learned, that their own efforts avail them something in the rough-and-tumble of life. Desperate for good parenting, they seek father figures and a father mythology that will heal. And one is naturally ready to hand, in the patriarchy, the founding fathers, orginalism. Virtually every religion furnishes the same tale- a father who is both loving and strict, giving commandments and boundaries with one hand, while providing hope of temporal and supernatural power with the other. Most people don't take it too seriously, but if the need is intense enough, if the child within is damaged enough, this patriarchal solution seems to become a template for everything- how to live one's own life, and how the nation should be run as well.

As Dudas writes:

"Not exclusive to modern American conservatism, this longing for stability, for an end to what Willam Connolly calls the 'homesickness' of the human condition, is a hallmark of modern living. Modern times, Connolly argues, are defined by the widespread loss of belief in transcendent purpose (in 'myth') and, accordingly, by an eruption of nihilism. But this nihilism, and the felt loss of meaning that accompanies it, (of Kristeva's 'melancholia'), is so upsetting that it has been the subject of an astonishing range of ameliorative attempts. Hence the feverish devotion to those human projects that attempt to establish the sorts of 'antimyths' that Fitzpatrick locates at the heart of modernity: projects of science, reason, and the state, for example, with which human life might be organized and infused with the noncontingent foundations that existed before (to paraphrase Nietzsche) humans killed off God.
...
But as with all other modern attempts to forestall nihilism, it turns out that the melancholic's desire is 'impossible'. ... The desire for the stable object is impossible and magical because the object (Father) is oversaturated with meaning; it is itself a floating signifier that is purposed and repurposed according to the endless demands of desire rather than to the rigors of logic or intellectual coherence."

Our current president is a damaged child, from a totalitarian father, who reproduces the same parenting style with his own children, and now towards the rest of us as well. Add in desperate narcissim, and the result appears to be pathological lying and manipulativeness, as well as complete blindness to the perspectives of those not on his favorite cable news channels. We have all become victims of bad parenting, and need to redouble our efforts to break the cycle.

• Back when the government ran finance, not Wall Street.
• Too many old savers leads to persistent low interest rates and inflation.
• The market is quite high.
• North Korea has very effective deterrence.
• The rich are still getting richer.
• Getting a PhD is not so great for your job prospects.
• Annals of feudalism, cont... workers are about to be stripped of legal recourse for abuse.
• Economic graph of the week. Robbing the poor to give to the rich, under the proposed tax "plan".

Who pays what under the new plan?

Profiles in Greed

Ulysses S Grant, Carl Icahn, and the character of capitalism.

Listening to a long podcast series about the Civil War, I was struck once again by the unusual character of our 18th president. Every one who knew him agreed that he had no sense for business. Yet he led the US army to a series of strategic victories, and wrote one of the great military autobiographies, and clearly did not lack intelligence. What makes the difference?

To contrast, a recent profile of Carl Icahn, paragon of US business and hero of Donald Trump, paints a character of quite a different color. Highly intelligent, yes, but with the added characteristics of intense greed and minimal scruples- apparently a modern-day Ebenezer Scrooge.

Grant was a forthright person, in love and war. Indeed, the archtypal story of his childhood was about a negotiation for a horse where he told the seller straight out what he was willing to offer, which thus became what he paid. Grant was very good with horses, possibly a mark of a character with less guile than normal. People, with their less scrupulous machinations, were more difficult, which clearly led to many of the disasters of his presidency. Does warfare require guile? On some, very strategic level, yes. But generally, clarity, consistency, attention to detail, and courage are more significant virtues. I don't think his Civil War campaigns were marked by strategic cleverness or deceit, but more by sound military reasoning, siezing strong points, deploying overwhelming numbers, fighting doggedly, and pursuing advantages opportunistically.

Ulysses Grant, colorized

Many of these virtues are relevant to business, but evidently one needs something more to succeed. The profile of Icahn describes in detail how he tried to use his influence with the president and his position as a semi-official economic adviser for personal gain- to rescind a rule requiring oil refiners, one of which Icahn owns, to blend ethanol or else buy offsets on a special market. His refiner could not blend ethanol, so was subject to a quite volatile market in RIN offsets. While unsuccessful, the effort was flagrantly unethical and illustrated Ichan's intense greed, his great skill in manipulating others, and his consistent practice of skirting the law whenever possible and advantageous. What a contrast to Grant! And something of a contrast to our current president as well, who isn't smart enough to be in the same league, and looks up to Icahn as a hero who sits on a far larger pile of money.

There was a brief period in the mid-20th century when business leaders were thought of as civic leaders as well. After the period of the robber barrons and Gilded Age, when the business community had been chastened by the great depression and the spectre of communism, (not to mention bitter union fights), and when the whole country had been brought together by the world wars. There was an ethic of fair dealing and paternalism towards workers, and of viewing the corporation as a public, civic entity, not just there to make money, but to play a supporting role in the American way of life. Perhaps I am looking back with rose colored glasses. At any rate, that period, however amicable, is long over. The captains of our current corporate landscape, especially those in finance, are poor models of any kind of ethics; scofflaws who are fined repeatedly, even in our attenuated enforcement landscape, providing models of greed, entitlement, and callousness.

How anyone could imagine that today's celebrity business leaders would make proper and positive civic leaders, particularly someone as twisted as our current president, is unimaginable (Michael Bloomberg excepted, perhaps). So now we are in an insult contest with North Korea, (among others), at an abysmal level of rhetoric which expresses perfectly the level of intellect and ethics our leader is bringing to the table, but which should surprise no one watching his business career or those of his colleages in the contemporary business world.

• I should be very unhappy right about now.
• Enemies bond groups.
• Francis Crick.
• State's rights, but only for crappy policy.
• Puerto Rico brings to mind.. guns and ammo, of course.

Bullets of Poison

Lead, condors, and the toxic legacy of right-wing politics.

Of the many ways we have ravaged our environment, some of the most heartbreaking are the silent killers- DDT, other insecticides, PCBs, trash, CFCs, CO2, PFOA, and lead. The same technologies that have conjured out of our environment the many wonders of modernity have also unlocked demons, like plutonium and other radioactive poisons, which we struggle to control and dispose of.

But our thoughtless dumping of pesticides and other poisons doesn't even rate that kind of drama. It took an especially gifted writer, Rachel Carson, to bring the ravages of DDT to light 50 years ago, and we have since slipped into an amnesia through which other poisons like the neonicotinoids have seeped into astonishingly widespread use, making arthropod wastelands of our most fertile country.

One of the more insidious poisons is lead. Through the Flint water crisis, we have learned once again that lead is pervasive, and an enormous health threat. Why have we tolerated it for so long? It has taken painstaking public efforts to get lead out of gasoline, out of paint, and out of new water pipes. Yet it is still common in old pipes, and in coal ash, killing and impairing Americans continuously. And it is common in firearm ammunition.

Poisoning oneself and one's family by hunting with lead is one thing, and tragic enough. But it turns out that other animals can be even more strongly affected, particularly the California Condor. This magnificent bird, North America's largest, is, naturally, attracted to carcasses and viscera left by hunters, and is not a picky eater when it comes to lead. But even if they were, it would be impossible to avoid lead from such carcasses, since lead bullets leave a wide swath of fragments and contamination in the victim. Condors also have particularly strong digestive juices that mobilize more of the lead they ingest than do those of other predators and scavangers, making lead the leading cause of death among the painstakingly re-established and tiny wild population. Indeed, that population can not grow until lead is eliminated from its food supply.

California has, with great political effort, established a ban on hunting with lead ammunition, to take effect within a couple of years. The Obama administration likewise set up a ban on use of lead ammunition in federal wildlife refuges. But the new administration, in line with the rest of its immoral and mindless policies, reinstated the use of lead ammunition. It is one more example of the sheer meanness and spitefulness that seems to pervade this sector of American politics- a segment of the elite and the electorate that could not care less about nature, about justice, and about the future in general. As long as they are "winning" over their perceived enemies, in a zero sum spiral of death, scientists, truth, justice, and the future of humanity, not to mention the biosphere, can be damned. Even the US Army has recognized that the costs of creating enormous toxic waste dumps out of their firing ranges and conflict zones (not to mention the manufacturing stream) is too high a price to pay, and has switched to unleaded ammunition. (Though uranium- that is a different story!).

A similar story has played out tragically in India, where an antibiotic used in cattle turned out to kill vultures, wiping out the population, and causing some very unpleasant ecological consequences in a country in dire need of efficient trash and carcass collection. While we should not stifle all progress with overly cautious regulation, once a tragic consequence from some technological innovation (or ancient practice) becomes apparent, we should recognize our own power in the role of the government to set rules for the good of our long-term collective interests- interests which surely include preservation of our own health and that of wild animals.

• Defenseless animals are next.
• Krugman: it isn't just science at stake, but civilization.
• The irony of Texas.
• Silencers- as American as apple pie.
• Bias in the biomedical literature.
• Incentives only go so far. Character counts for a lot as well- about half.
• Problems with the upcoming Vietnam War.

A Cosmos of Fear

Not Your Father's Star Trek Federation: Cixin Liu's dark vision in "The Dark Forest". (Warning: Spoiler alert)

After slacking off most of the book, Luo Ji gets down to the business of saving humanity in the last couple of chapters, even as he is spat upon by his beneficiaries as a false prophet. It has not been easy for the wallfacers project, which Earth developed after learning not only that there are extra-terrestrial aliens, but that they are intent on taking over Earth, and are also listening in to everything humans are doing. The idea was to nominate a few super-people to think and scheme in the privacy of their own minds, where the Trisolarians (aka Alpha Centurians), couldn't listen in. Sure, this involves a total lack of accountability. But on the other hand, it is humanity's only hope for secure strategic innovation. Sadly, Luo Ji's three colleagues have either committed suicide or disgraced themselves with schemes bordering on insanity.

Luo Ji's strategic insight is borne of a shockingly negative view of how intelligent civilizations would operate and relate in the greater cosmos. It incidentally offers a fascinating and neat hypothesis to the question of why we have never detected, let alone been visited by, aliens. The hypothesis is that natural selection operates in a particularly brutal way among rapidly developing, and far-distant civilizations. Communication is essentially impossible due to the distances involved. Yet the technological scope of civilizations that have a billion or two years on us is still remarkable, including missiles made of strong-force matter, vastly harder than regular matter, missiles capable of destroying whole stars, star-based amplification of messages that can easily be heard by the entire galaxy, and manipulation of sub-atomic / string theory dimensions to create protons with special computational and communication properties. The upshot is that a civilization can grow to highly threatening capability before others even know of its existence. All civilizations at some far level  of advancement are mortal threats, in principle, to others they know about, and given some with fewer scruples, some of them will simply extinguish any local threats they learn of, before asking too many questions.

Thus the cosmos becomes a very dark place, where announcing your existence is tantamount to a death sentence, there being far, far more advanced civilizations always listening and on the lookout for either room to grow, or just threats to their own comfort and security. Nothing could be farther from the positive vision of Gene Roddenberry, which, admittedly, was developed out of a social agenda rather than a study of galactic sociology and biological imperatives.

What is one to think of all this? Firstly, much of the science underpinning this vision is fictional, such as star-killing technologies, and matter manipulation at theoretical or inconceivable scales. Secondly, insofar as the model is biological evolution, it takes far too dim a view of the possibilities and benefits of cooperation. Evolution has shown countless times that there is room for cooperation even amidst the struggle to survive, and that cooperation is the only way to gain truly vast benefits, such as from multicellularity, eukaryotic organelle specialization, and human sociality. Thirdly, we also know from our strategic games with existentially destructive weapons, such as is presently playing out with North Korea, that deterrence rather than offense becomes the principal goal among those having achieved such powers. Would deterrence work in cosmic game theory? It is a problem, since, given a star-killing capability that takes many years to travel to its target and presumably could not be detected at launch or perhaps even at close proximity, offense might happen with impunity. (The Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across.)

But perhaps the most persuasive argument is simple morality- that despite the cold logic Cixin Liu develops, intelligent beings of such vast sophistication are probably more likely to wish to learn about other civilizations than to destroy them, whether out of boredom or out of a Prime-Directive kind of respect and interest. It is sort of unimaginable, to me at least, that the explicit goal of any advanced civilization would be to sterilize its environment so completely, even if unadvanced human history does offer that as a common, blood-drenched, theme.

• Toles on the maelstrom.
• Noonan, defending the indefensible.
• Do we want open borders? Not if we want a welfare state and other public goods.

PIWI and Friends Fight Zombie DNA!

How tiny RNAs fight the good fight to keep mindless, selfish junk DNA from eating the rest of the genome.

Our genomes are full of junk. Only about 5 to 10% of it has any function at all. Not only is the rest junk, but over half of the genome is made up of transposable elements (also called transposons) in various states of mutational disrepair, mostly fossils and relics. These are selfish DNA "organisms" (about 6500 basepairs long) that when fully functional can reproduce by making copies which insert themselves elsewhere into the DNA. They are like zombies, mindless and simple, knowing nothing other than an implacable desire to reproduce by using the other machinery of the cell to attack the rest of genome with yet more copies of themselves, and continuing to do havoc even when partially diabled. This kind of thing can, naturally, be very damaging. That is why our germ cells have special protection through tiny RNAs called PIWI RNAs, or piRNAs.

piRNAs, at about 26 to 31 nucleotides in length, are even smaller than the transposable elements they defend against. In the typical case, they are encoded by one of thousands of clusters sprinkled around the genome. They are expressed mostly in the germ cells, where it is naturally of particular importance to keep transposons under control. After being processed to their mature size, they bind to partner proteins of the PIWI family forming a guided missile that finds the matching (i.e. complementary) sequence among other RNAs in the cell- those made by its target transposon- and destroys that RNA by chopping it up. We have tens of thousands of these piRNAs, and if their action is inactivated, transposons start jumping around at a hundred-fold the normal rate, and the sperm (this is usually studied in males) is infertile, because of all the damage, though also because of other roles piRNAs have in this process.

Where did this mechanism come from? It seems to be quite ancient, as is the race between parasitic DNA elements and cellular organisms. Sponges have them, and all eukaryotes even prior to animals all have the related miRNA systems which also act to cut up or down-regulate target RNA messages. How did we accumulate so much piRNA, on the order of 6,000 clusters encoding hundreds of thousands of individual units in our genome? That was doubtless driven by the promiscuous and persistent nature of the transposable elements they are fighting against, via natural selection. But do piRNA genes develop directly from transposons in some fashion? Otherwise, the cost from randomly mutating and hitting other parts of the genome by mistake could be quite high.

Indeed, there is something called a ping-pong mechanism that generates extra piRNAs from the remaining fragments of piRNA-cleaved transposon mRNAs. This helps finish the job of defense, but whether such piRNAs can somehow lead, even rarely, to extra units of genomic piRNA, via reverse transcription or other means, is yet unkown. What is known is that the clusters from which piRNAs are expressed are graveyards of old, defunct transposons. These regions seem to be specially marked in the chromosome, in ways again dependent on the piRNA system, so that they get transcribed and processed into piRNAs, rather than other things.

Basic cycle of piRNA production, action, and ping-pong propagation. After production and processing, short piRNAs (red), docked to their PIWI protein partners (Aub), direct the cleavage and destruction of transposable element RNA (blue). Some of the resulting pieces dock with another PIWI protein (Ago3), and get likewise processed to repeat the cycle on the complementary strand, which repeats again, etc. This makes the accuracy of the original targeting critically important, of course.

To do this, piRNAs have another role, which is to direct methylation of the DNA, setting up specialized chromatin zones. While all the other defensive operations of the piRNAs have been in the cytoplasm, this takes place in the nucleus, using different PIWI-related proteins. This process targets transposons as well as the related piRNA-generating clusters, and has a two-fold point. In the first place, it strongly represses normal transcription from transposons, another form of direct defense. Secondly, it seems to switch these regions into the piRNA mode of production, where altered transcription, which is not very well understood yet, generates the long piRNA precursors (rather than the transposon messages) and initiates their processing.

As if that were not all, piRNAs are sprinkled around the rest of the genome in normal genes, which they help to regulate. At later steps of sperm production, after the major role of defense against transposable elements has passed, this other class of piRNAs destroy most of the remaining cellular mRNA, to streamline the cell down to only the essentials. How this dramatic event is controlled and restricted to these times is not understood, however.

There is a great deal more to be said and investigated about this genomic quasi-immune system. However it is already clear that it is a critically important process that mobilizes massive resources, in a quiet arms race that we are running against persistent and ancient enemies that lurk within.

• Trains are the efficient way to travel.
• A history of parochialism in modern Egypt. Is the Brotherhood a nationalist model?
• "Unfortunately half of the violent crime in the United States goes unsolved."
• A nation of laws and justice, or of one race?
• The nation state remains the fulcrum of power, for better or worse.
• Krugman- Zoning in prosperous areas strangles construction and raises housing prices, not to mention fostering homelessness.
• The Russian view of history.
• The Afghan army is not very good.