Postmodernism: License to Lie

A continuation of the Enlightenment project turned around to burn it all down, and our political system went along for the ride.

The discontents of modernism are legion. It is soul-less, rational, scientistic, dehumanizing. And the architecture is even worse, exemplified by the glass box skyscraper. Modernism was the stage after the self-satisfied Victorian age, our last unconscious period when Westerners felt confident in our myths, our cultural superiority, and our untroubled right to all the fruits of the Earth. Modernism came in the wake of Nietzsche and World War 1, which left all those certainties in tatters, followed by an even more destructive World War 2. But from America rose a new unbounded ethos of progress through cooperation and science, leading to the UN, the EU, the conquering of air and space, and the comfortable dispensation of the fossil-fueled late Cold War West.

The long-term theme has been increasing consciousness, from the Enlightenment onwards, adopting ever more realistic views of the physical and social world. Art was first to experience this startling realism. Then politics, with the slow destruction of the myth of monarchical and aristocratic superiority. And finally religion, from the work of Nietzsche and Darwin, among many others. Throughout, science has been steadily dis-enchanting the world, removing Earth from the cosmic center, mystical vitalism from the chemistry of life, and God from among our forefathers and mothers. With modernism, we had reached a new level of consciousness. We could look at ourselves as one among many world cultures, accepting "other" forms of religion, art, and world view as good, perhaps even co-equal, with those of the West. Frills and decoration were out, myth was relentlessly exposed, and we sought to plumb the psychological depths as well, exposing our complexes and deep motivations.

Then in 1970's France, the postmodernist school took it up another notch, trying to show that all our remaining certainties were also questionable, and could be deconstructed. Whatever narratives we live by, even the most attenuated reliance on general progress through the evident workings of civic, capitalist, and scientific institutions, were unmasked as just another forum for power politics, patriarchy, and elite control of the society's metanarrative. Build all the skyscrapers and Hubble telescopes you want, it all boils down to Game of Thrones in the end. All narratives were destabilized, and not only was nothing sacred, nothing had meaning at all, since interpretation is an ever-flexible tool that gives authority to the reader/viewer, with little left over for the author (or for "reality"). Anything can be read in innumerable layers, to mean ... practically anything. The narratives we can not help but to live by are all ripe for deconstruction, but then how does reality relate to our (limited) cognition of it? That gets us right back to the foundations of philosophy in the Platonic cave.

This approach clearly follows the modernist and psychoanalytic line of excavating ever deeper into our sources of motivation, meaning, and narrative. Indeed, other disciplines, like anthropology, psychology, and even economics (in its study of institutions) have long preceeded the postmodernists. But one has to ask two big questions. First, is there some limit of analysis beyond which, even if the analysis is valid, human functioning is so destabilized that, for all the intellectual benefits, we end up inert, stripped of larger motivating narratives and reduced to mere units of immediate consumption, mediated by our TV sets and phones? Second, have they gone too far? Is the postmodernist analysis actually valid in all its implications? An excellent article in Areo chews over some of these problems.

Being scientifically and psychoanalytically inclined, I would have to answer no to the first question, and yes to the second. While unproductive over-analysis can lead some people to inertia, any correct analysis in psychological, cultural, or other terms can not help but illuminate the human condition. This is in general a big plus, and not one to be discarded because it is uncomfortable or destabilizing to our customary life and traditions. We dealt with Darwininan evolution, (well, most of us did), and can still reach for the stars. Sources of narrative and motivation are vast and perpetually self-created. Losing the old gods and myths is not a serious problem if we have new and significant tasks to replace them with. For example, nothing could be more dire than global climate heating- it is the central problem of our time, and tackling it would give us collective, indeed eschatological, meaning. What makes this moment particularly painful and fake is not that we lack an animating myth or center, but that we are dithering with regard to the true and monumental tasks at hand, blocked by a corrupt system and various defects of human nature.

The second question more pointed, for if the postmodernist analysis is not generally true, then we hardly have to worry about the first question at all. This is a very tricky area, since much of the postmodernist critique is valid enough. We live by many myths and narratives. But its earthshaking claims to destabilize everything and all other forms of truth are clearly false. Many fields, not just science, have a living commitment to truth that is demonstrably valid, even if the quest is elusive, even quixotic. Take the news media. While the tendency to endless punditry is lamentable, there is a core of factual reporting that is the product of a great deal of worthy dedication and forms a public good. Whatever the biases that go into selecting the targets of reporting, their products, when true, are immune to the postmodern critique. The school board really did fire its superintendent, or put a bond on the next election ballot. The fact that we have a president who fears "perjury traps", labels all truthful reporting about him "fake news", and allies with propaganda outlets like FOX and RT should not put anyone in any doubt that truth, nevertheless, exists.

Why some religious people have cottoned to the postmodern approach is somewhat mysterious and curious, for while postmodernism has mightily attempted to destablize reigning cultural orthodoxies, particularly those of science, it is hardly more kind to clericalism or religion in principle. At best, it may allow that these are at least honest about their (false) mythos/narrative basis, unlike the devious subterfuges by which science channels its bourgeois interests into claims to the really, really true narrative, which thus have posed the more interesting challenge in the postmodern literature. But make no mistake, if religion were the reigning cultural power, the deconstructionists would make mincemeat of it.

What makes Deepak Chopra so laughable?

But postmodernism has nevertheless filtered down from the academy to popular culture, destabilizing verities and authorities. Did they seek to have Republican policians declare that "we make our own reality"? Did they foresee the internet and its ironic capacity, not to make us all Orwellian drones with the same beliefs, but to let us stew voluntarily in propaganda-laced echo chambers, losing touch with reality all the same? At issue is the nature and status of factual authority, which we are so shockingly confronted with in this political moment. Coordinated assaults on our capacity for reason, from the wingnut right and its unhinged media, the new masters of the internet, the Russians, and the lying sleazebag who found his moment amongst the chaos, have posed this problem in the starkest terms. What is truth? Are there facts? What is an authoritative narrative of leadership, of care for the future and the nation? Should public policy be responsive to facts, or to money and nepotism? What is the point of morality in a fully corrupt world? Why is gaslighting a new and trending word?

The postmodernists insisted, as does our current president, that every category and supposed fact is a mask for power. They saw hobgoblins of social construction and violent dominance in the most innocent scientific facts and institutions. Such an attitude might be provocative and occasionally fruitful, but it has been taken way too far, rendering fields most affected (in the humanities) stripped of coherence, let alone authority. Leaving us with a modern art bereft of ideals other than shock, and the most banal literature and identity-based histories. It is also a sort of zero-sum-ism, needlessly oppositional and Manichaean. In their haste to unmask and tear down all idols and intellectual achievements that unify humanity, they have generated a sort of war against all meaning which is deeply anti-human- not just deconstructive, but destructive.

Yes, our narratives are in perpetual conflict. Different religions, political viewpoints, and cultures have distinct narratives and each seeks to win the hearts and minds in order to rule human soceity. The Reformation offers abundant examples of this, as does our current political scene. But at the same time, reality itself forms another, and very influential, locus in this conflict. For all the other narratives claim to be accurate views of reality, whether claiming that god is real, Catholicism is the true church, or that Republicans have a more accurate and effective view of economics and human nature. Each stakes its claims on discernment of how reality works, including the moral and other aspects of what people really want out of their social system. Do they want a king to look up to, or a representative government that may be more moderate and effective?

So narratives are not just thrashing our their conflicts on an entirely archetypal / mythical / power basis, as the postmodernists seem to assume. Rather, they are negotiating views of reality, including moral and social realities, which can be interrogated in large degree by reason generally and science specifically. Creationism and climate change denialism are just the most flagrant examples of narratives that seek social dominance on the backs of religious delusion and/or simple greed. And for all the equivocation of the postmodernists, they can be definitively dismissed given the knowledge we have outside of these or other narrative claims. The growth of mature consciousness means expanding our abilities to judge the reality-claims of narratives in a dispassionate way, considering both physical but also the psycho-social realities we share, and progressively leaving our psychological baggage behind.

• Coal is dead.
• The long road ahead against Alzheimer's. Though that article oversells our ignorance.
• Do shareholders come first, or workers and communities?
• Who is doing the harassing in the Persian Gulf?
• Rachmaninoff 3, after the instructive intro, ~5:30.
• Sanctity of life.
• Endless corruption.
• Better automatic stabilizers?

What Happened to the Monarchs?

Monarch butterflies are in crisis.

Flying over the Midwest, it is easy to see the impact of humans. The land is neatly tiled into monoculture farms, with hardly a wild spot in sight. Unseen is the chemical crusade that has happened over the same time period, making insects and weeds sparse on this land as well. All this has contributed to a phenomenally productive agriculture, making our food with almost factory-like consistency using a variety of high-tech machinery, chemicals, and plenty of CO2 emissions. But each of these assaults on nature has also multiplied the plight of (among many others) the Monarch butterfly, which eats weeds, is an insect, and migrates over astonishing distances in a multigenerational trek to communal wintering sites. While Eastern populations of Monarchs are in decline and in peril, the condition of the separate Western population, which circulates up the Sierra and back down the Pacific coast, is dire, headed towards extinction.

"... the Midwest lost more than 860 million milkweeds between 1999 and 2014, mostly in agricultural fields" -Entomology Today

Monarch butterflies have a curious method of migration. While birds live several years, and thus may commute several times over their lifespan, (for instance from Northern breeding grounds to Carribean or South American wintering sites), Monarch butterflies live only roughly a month. But they also migrate over long distances, either from Mexico up through the Eastern US and Midwest, or from Coastal California across Central California, to the Sierras, then North to Oregon and Washington, then back down in fall. Like birds, the Monarchs use these routes to move through optimal habitats as the Northern Hemisphere goes through its seasons. But the migration must encoded in their genes, not learned from experience or from others, since it takes several generations to make the trek, somewhat like the colonization space ships of science fiction, which would go through many generations to get to, say, Alpha Centauri.

Now a rare sight.

It also means that Monarchs rely on suitable environments (which is to say, the milkweed) every step of the way. And our technologies of weed, insect and physical habitat extermination are making enormous swathes of their routes uninhabitable, not to say lethal. The Western population is down from millions in the 1980's to 30,000 today. This is not sustainable, and likely to drop to zero unless big changes happen to render the landscape less lethal. Thankfully, there are many milkweed species, many of which can grow widely in the region, if allowed to.

But this is just a small example of the harm humans are doing to the natural world. We are a plague, and have initiated a new age in biology- the Anthropocene, complete with our own mass extinction event. While the process is well underway here in California, it is only beginning in regions like the Amazon and Africa, whose human populations are growing steadily and whose natural environments are being decimated and whose wildlife is declining, including being directly killed and eaten. Climate heating will kill off far more species, until we end up in a world of mega-cities separated by monoculture croplands and nature reserves that will be faint shadows of a vanished, and richer, world.

• A study in lying, corruption, debasement, and character.
• And going back in time, ditto.
• The mess Arthur Burns left behind.
• But is the Fed overly skittish now?
• Should we be giving foreign aid to the Targaryens?
• How about we fly less, and let the Monarchs fly more?

Cancel the National Debt

Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders should stand up and say that they will eliminate the national debt.

National debt clocks seem to go in and out of style with the political fortunes of Republicans. When they are in power, the bond vigilantes are at bay, clocks get put away, and tax cuts and wars blow up the deficit with hardly a finger-wag. But when tables turn, watch out! The debt becomes a national emergency, and think of the children, who will have to pay it all back!

After a few cycles of this nonsense, many have realized the mythical nature of the whole construct, first and foremost the school of MMT economics. Conventional conceptions of the debt are significantly out of date. For one thing, no one is going to have to pay this debt back. It is continually rolled over, and if we attempted to pay it back out of a fiscal surpluses, it would be disastrous, contracting the economy for lack of net spending from the government, which is the source of money for net economic expansion. (Ignoring the banking sector for the moment.)

Back when our money was not made and managed by the government, but rather based on some commodity like gold or silver, the Federal government was as constrained as anyone else- to match spending with income. It had two choices to pull money out of the larger economy for its own needs- taxation or borrowing. Taxes tend to be broad-based and quite unpopular. Borrowing, via bonds, (which were, in a way, the original fiat money), on the other hand, targets quite specifically those who have money to spare - the rich - so is politically efficient. But borrowing also indebts the state to the ongoing interest payments, which may temporarily come from further borrowing, but must ultimately come from taxation (or increased inflation, if the government can influence the monetary system and wishes to abuse its credit). Thus we had war bonds during the Civil War and the World Wars of the last century.

A bond, issued 1936

Now we are in a slightly different world, that of fiat money, where the federal government runs the monetary system completely and explicitly, with the power of printing money, but also the duty of controlling inflation. There is no more scarcity of gold, or scarcity of money, for that matter. It is an elastic system, under conscious control. Now the government creates money via its spending, and that money is meant to supply the expansion of the whole system- our economic growth, our hunger for imports and the matching hunger of foreigners for dollars, our savings needs, etc. Yet we still have a statutory requirement to match net spending (over taxation) with bond issuance- thus the growing national debt. (again, ignoring the banking sector for the moment). That statutory requirement is a relic of the old system and should be scrapped.

Not only that, but we should also end the re-issuance of debt, gradually exchanging it, as it comes due, for regular dollars instead. That way, we could save the hundreds of billions of dollars ($389 billion in 2019) we give to rich people and foreign countries in interest payments on their bond holdings. $30 billion alone goes to China, to reward them for the currency manipulation they engaged in back in the 2000's to take our manufacturing jobs. That is quite a deal! In this way, we could retire the national debt, not by paying it down through higher taxes, but simply by converting it to dollars, which we can create with a keystroke, just as we created the bonds in the first place.

The idea that our practice of bond issuance prevents inflation, by draining dollars from the economy, is problematic in terms of scale. Bonds are hardly a frozen form of money. For individual holders, our debt functions as the equivalent of money. They are savers, and holding dollars or bonds makes relatively little difference- they are not going to go on spending binges over the loss of 3% interest. On the other hand, on the macro-economic scale, the swap of dollars for debt would change the complexion of savings, since this rentier class will still seek income. They will seek to invest this money productively, and if safe government bonds are not available, they will tend to invest in the real economy, such as loans, real estate, companies, etc. This may drive some inflation, so we would have to be on our guard. But it would also drive real investment, which would be a good thing, and would drive down interest rates, also a good thing, especially in view of the troublesomely high rate of interest over time recorded by Thomas Piketty. The implementation would be controllable- if inflation appeared as a result, the program could be slowed down or reversed at any time. Perhaps we should start with a mere trillion dollars exchanged per year.

To get a picture of the overall scale, the US has about $100 trillion of overall wealth, of which about 20% is Federal bonds. But about a third of those bonds are held in the government, such as the Social Security accounting fiction of a "trust fund". And as noted above, the Fed owns about 10% of the debt in addition. So the remaining amount is, in the larger scheme of things, not enormous, and while monetizing it will alter investment practices, is unlikely to be catastrophic.

In conventional economic terms, this proposal would dramatically alter the money supply and bond markets, moving the LM curve (in the IS/LM model) right-wards, increasing output, decreasing interest rates, and causing inflation. The Fed spends much of its time managing the Federal bond market, selling and buying bonds in its efforts to control short term interest rates. After the 2008 crisis, the Fed accumulated $2-3 trillion, about a tenth of all bonds outstanding. It was accused of monetizing the debt by buying so much, lowering interest rates and pumping dollars into the system instead. But inflation stayed very low. We are in a somewhat more normal regime now, but over the last decade, the Fed has never attained its inflation target, so in those terms, one can say that, instead of trying to raise interest rates by selling bonds, as they have been doing over the last year, they should just continue monetizing the debt, until it is all gone, then send those bonds to the shredder.

Are there other ways to manage interest rates and inflation? This is where MMT has some problems, and fails to (to my knowledge) truly grapple with control of the monetary system. Suppose the pool of Federal bonds were 1/10 the size it is now or less, which would be much more manageable in fiscal terms. The Fed might own most of them at any one time, but might not have, in its view, the firepower, or the depth of a market to trade in, to affect interest rates across the board. It might need to trade in corporate bonds instead, which might not be the worst thing. Perhaps it should be using other tools, however, as its ultimate aim is to regulate lending and inflation, towards which control of interest rates is only a (blunt) mechanism. It is lending by banks that creates money in the private system, leading to speculative bubbles, inflation, and contractions and depressions. This money is much more labile (in the form of loans/credit that are subject to being paid back or called in, among other risks) than that coming from government spending. Thus the need for close regulation.

In China, for instance, the state owns the big banks, and can direct their lending explicity. No need to mess with the putatively free interest rate market. Similarly, the Fed regulates the banks, and could, for example, raise underwriting standards or capital requirements in boom times, lowering them in slack times. Another approach, of course, is using the government's fiscal policy. By spending more or less, or altering taxation, (such as changing the withholding rates), the Federal government can easily (if such spending alterations are easy) affect the inflation rate, which is after all the point of the interest rate control policy. In this way, interest rates can generally be kept low, bond issuance be ended, and the value of the money be kept stable. Ironically, despite MMT getting the rap of advocating fiscal profligacy, the real consequence of MMT is that the government would have to be even more disciplined and conscious in its monetary policies, (yet also more democratic), than the current system of leaving all the hard choices to a technocratic Fed, while spending more or less blindly, in policy terms (until a crisis hits, and even then, still shooting in the dark).

Getting back the debt reduction plan, would such a program contribute to the global savings glut? Yes, by discontinuing what is clearly the premier safe investment world-wide. But that is just too bad- we will benefit far more by cleaning up our books and saving ourselves the interest being paid out than we lose. At one stroke, we would free our political discourse from this charade of fiscal probity, free our government of the payment of hundreds of billions in interest- an enormous and seemingly endless stream of subsidies to the rich, and increase domestic investment.

• A contrary view on MMT.
• On the history of debt instruments.
• Baltimore- another kind of student loan.
• Impeachment, yes.
• An online ad tax?
• The academic life.. manuscript hostage negotiations.
• Remember when Republicans complained about executive overreach?

Bloodlines and Bastards: the Genetics of Hybrid Vigor

Why do outcrossed hybrids show "hybrid vigor", sometimes outperforming either parent?

In good archetypal practice, the prince from one kingdom marries the princess from another, bringing two distinct families together to "invigorate the bloodline", and achieve what geneticists call hybrid vigor, or heterosis. On the other hand, royal families sometimes inbreed, either on purpose, as in ancient Egypt, or by accident, as among the fusty houses of Europe. Such inbreeding leads to genetic decline, as recessive traits become exposed. Better to have Princess Diana running through the china shop than be saddled with hemophilia! Or better yet, have the king litter the land with bastards who, in another archetype, are more robust and vigorous than the proper, and sickly, royals.

In the first approximation, the underlying explanation for these outcomes is deleterious recessive alleles, which are common and arise through mutation. The effect of any individual one may be small, especially in the heterozygotic state, thus they accumulate over time in a normal population, and survive in direct proportion to how deleterious they are. If genetically similar people have children, the likelihood is higher that such alleles that are normally hidden by a complementary wild-type allele will come together and show their defect. If A is the wild-type allele, and a is the recessive, defective allele, then the cross Aa X Aa ==yields==> AA, Aa, and aa, of which the latter offspring is defective or dead, assuming that the a allele is important enough to affect survival. That is the simple story of inbreeding depression, and understandable enough. But why are some hybrids even better off than either parent? Corn is notorious for benefiting from hybridization. The genetics of that are a bit more complicated.

Inbreeding or outbreeding?

A great paper from 1934 laid the groundwork of this field. Sewall Wright stated that this effect was going to be explained not by genetics, but by the biochemistry of the individual loci. The hybrid effect is going to be the net sum over many thousands of genes whose variants, whether good or bad, work out their effects in the development and maintenance of the resulting organism. Some researchers have invoked "overdominance", for instance, where a hybrid at a particular locus is better adapted than either parent. The most famous example is sickle cell anemia, where the hybrid or heterzygote is somewhat protected from malaria. But overdominance is not going to be the general explanation, since such finely tuned allele relationships are rare, and because this tuning is naturally specific to a given population and environment. The likelihood of cross-breeding to an outside genome, adapted to other conditions, benefiting this kind of locus is going to be slim.

No, the more general explanation recognizes that the overwhelming majority of recessive and otherwise deleterious alleles are mechanistically missing function- either partially or wholly. And that they are selectively deficient as well, representing not an advantage to heterozygote, but a slight disadvantage, due to reduced amounts of whatever it is they encode and do. For most enzymes and other functions, half the normal amount is far, far better than none (especially when regarded as enzymes, which are often produced in excess). So, assuming that either population has drifted into a condition where they are homozygous for some minor function, mating with an outside group instantly remediates all those fully defective loci, bringing in 50% molecular function and likely much more than 50% selective function. It also works in both directions- making up deficiencies from both partners of the cross.

But such homozygous recessive/defective loci will be rare, if they have significant functions. More common will be a large pool of heterozygotic recessive alleles. The hybrid cross, between partners that are complementary wild-type at such loci, guarantees some function (at least 50%) at each of those loci, and provides a 50% chance of 100% function. Both are significantly higher rates than for an inbreeding cross, where the chances at each locus of this type are 50% (for 50% function) and 25% (for 100% function), respectively. Summed over numerous loci with complementary character, or just a few key ones, this can have dramatic effects on the resulting offspring. This is the fundamental origin of "heterosis", another name for hybrid vigor. The figure below from one of the reading papers shows this effect constituted in the test tube with enzymes.

An experiment hybridizing enzymes in test tubes.  A set of four enzymes from glycolysis was set in various "parental" solutions at some arbitrary concentration value (blues and yellows). Then such parents were "mated" into "hybrid" solutions (one per row here) and assayed for enzymatic flux. The midline denotes the flux of the hybridized (mixed) enzymes, while the blue and yellow balls represent the respective parental values. One can easily see that across the collection, the hybrid value on average exceeds the mean parental value, and never falls below that of the worst parent. And the hybrid value often surpasses even the best parental value, exhibiting strong heterosis. The explanation offered for this is that each parent may have had a different limiting step/enzyme that was complemented by that supplied by its "mate".

How distant can such crosses be? There is a limit, clearly, since with greater distance, genetic incompatibilities begin to arise, (incipient speciation), which begin to strongly impair fitness, usually affecting fertility first, before other traits. So hybrid vigor arrives at a sweet spot of ... distant enough to have a significant number of distinctive recessive and wild-type alleles, but not so distant that the genomes are no longer compatible at those loci which are evolving most rapidly, which tend to be those involved in immunological functions and those involved in reproduction, which are scenes of notorious arms races of pathogenic and sexual selection, respectively.

Hybrid vigor is complemented by a much more insidious process, the concentration and disposal, via the lottery of sex, of bad alleles into unfortunate offspring that either die before birth (miscarriages) or suffer from their deficiencies through life. While outcrossing hides such recessive alleles, the next cross (F2, in the parlance) brings them back, all mixed and matched with each other, some of which are likely to be dead. That is why farmers using seeds from their hybrid corn crop are bound to be disappointed with a motley field of scarecrows. Inbreeding likewise brings out recessive loci, and the more advanced the inbreeding program, the more "pure-bred" a strain is, the more every locus is homozygous, for good or for ill.

Hybrid vigor is thus an evanescent affair, delaying the inevitable reckoning of bad alleles with their grim reaper- natural selection. Some populations (Mennonites, Ashkanazi Jews) are more inbred, and stricken with more dramatic genetic defects that appear for that reason at higher frequency, but all deficiencies are time bombs that, even if they are well-hidden by their recessiveness and rarity, can eventually meet up to form homozygotes and bode ill for their host.

Human heterozygosity decreases with distance from Southern Africa, as predicted by the Out-Of -Africa hypothesis. As populations move, they leave some of their genetic patrimony/matrimony of variation behind (called a bottleneck effect).

Conversely, the rate of predicted deleterious alleles goes up with distance from Southern Africa. This is thought to arise from the relaxation of selection which is the definition of rapid range edge expansion. Genetic bottlenecks with small populations can also fix deleterious mutations, (i.e. bring them to 100% of the population), overwhelming selective effects, and bequeathing them to succeeding populations, no matter how large.

Reading:

• Sewall Wright, 1934 - describing hybrid vigor in enzymatic terms.
• Julie Fievet et al. 2018 - performing the experiments to validate Wright's theory.
• Brenna Henn, et al, 2016 - human genetics vs geography and prehistoric migration.
• Francois Vasseur et al. 2019 - more studies of heterosis in plants, focusing on nonlinear phenotypic effects.

• Trump before the raving gun nuts ... next week one shoots up a synagogue. Does this resemble a well-regulated militia or mind?
• A pervasive lack of character.
• First, the elite lost control of religion, then art. What is next? The economy?
• Where do good jobs come from? From policy, not accidents.
• Losing Afghanistan.. now, we just don't want to know.
• Bill Mitchell on May Day, veils and myths.