The Autism of Politics

Our politics is an inarticulate communal search for expression of emotion.

I recently saw "A Brilliant Young Mind", a British take on growing up with autism. It is one of the most beautiful movies I have ever seen, exploring themes of family, loss, and love with wrenching sensitivity. The challenge of expressing, even feeling, one's own emotions is at the heart, naturally enough, for people on the spectrum. There is a fight by family members to crack that shell, to establish communication that expresses the love they know is there, and which will build warmth and confidence.

One theme is the power of speech- the bullying in school, the words of love from a parent. We may have recited the saying about sticks and stones, but it isn't true. Humans feel and use speech as touch, like Chimpanzees use grooming, to soothe each other. Music functions similarly, to touch others with shared emotions, strengthening essential bonds of trust and empathy. We also use speech also to attack each other, and climb the social hierarchy on the bodies of those cut down by words. 

Well, politics is a natural extension. We feel strongly that there should be someone in charge of each political unit- one person who embodies and expresses our feelings about the whole. It is not just a job, or an executive position, but a strongly archetypal role, which includes the work of binding us together through speech, or not, as our collective mood dictates. We have just been through an administration dedicated to the destructive power of speech, firing off tweets to cut down friends and enemies, formulating cryptic messages supporting inequality, tribalism, and racism. 

But political speech is hobbled by the vast population it addresses. The movie above spoke to me, perhaps because I felt familiar with many of its themes and dilemmas, or happened to appreciate its artistic approach. But it may not speak to you. Politics is about finding the largest possible audience, using the vaguest possible formulations to which listeners can impute their feelings about the body politic. It is thus necessarily painfully awkward, smothered in platitudes, and minimally communicative. In short, a little autistic. 

A still from the movie, with the main character and his mother in a typical pose.

So we as citizens are all in the position of wanting the collective to satisfy a some very deep needs for connection, security, and self-realization and expression. But we are reading a cryptic body politic and leadership for clues of true intention, hidden beneath what may be a voluble exterior of near-meaningless speech, and at the same time confounded by a lack of transparency and radical lack of personal access to those people who are the leaders. Conversely, those leaders are sequestered in their security and network bubbles, wanting (ideally) to understand and share the feelings of their constituents, but unable, simply by the scale of the enterprise, to do so. And anyhow, seeking the average feeling or attitude in a democracy ends inevitably in a muddled middle. Thus leaders are confined to rhetoric that in recent inaugurations, state of the union addresses, and so forth has been bland and weak, as uninspired as it is uninspiring. 

Our political / psychological needs seem to differ along temperamental / party lines, with Democrats forever searching for the healing leader who can reach out across the divide to bring a larger coalition together to accomplish empathetic ends, for the downtrodden, for the environment, and for the future. On the other hand, Republicans seem, since at least the time of Goldwater, to be unhopeful about change, and the future in general, indeed motivated by fear. Their quest is for a leader who will advocate for the hard truths of the inherent and useful infairnesses of life to restore the social hierarchical order, keep out aliens, and keep down the restive and poorly paid masses. The last administration was unusually forthright about the whole program, thus speaking into an intense rapport with its "base", while foresaking the traditional mincing "compassionate conservative" or "city on a hill" gestures that have in the past served to sugar-coat that message.

But speaking to the base turned out to be a disastrous political strategy, losing the House, Senate, and Presidency in turn. However powerful in expressing, even generating, rare emotional responses in that base, it failed to follow the most basic principle of political math. So we are back now to the anodyne stylings of a new Democratic administration, back to a normal relationship, which is to say not much of a relationship, between the leader and the led. Which is a great relief on the national level, even if it would be maddening and unsatisfying on any personal level.

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• Some delightful piano.

There Are no Natural Rights

Rights are always a political construct, which we devise and grant each other.

American politics is drenched with "rights". The Bill of Rights, natural rights, god-given rights, human rights. Both right and left use "rights" language to claim victimization and seek restitution. But the history goes back much farther, to the Magna Carta and beyond, into the heart of being a social species. Sociality means compromise, giving up some powers in return for other things, some of which are called rights. Good civilized behavior and diligent work entitles us to membership in the group, and benefits such as collective defense and shared resources. Since there can be long time lags between service and repayment, even extending over a lifetime or even multiple generations, a way is needed to keep track of such obligations. One way is to proclaim rights, such as a right to communal fields and pastures for members of the group, in perpetuity.

Thus rights are generally keenly felt as obligations and matters of long-standing, even eternal, usage. But all are social agreements, as our proclivity to murder and execute each other makes clear. If one does not even have an inalienable right to life, what are the others worth? They are neither natural nor god-given, but entirely human-given. They are rhetorical constructs meant to structure our communal relations, hopefully for good of all and the durable continuance of the system, but sometimes, not so much. Indeed, rights can be brutally oppressive, such as those of Brahmins in the Indian caste system, among many others.

Gun nuts frequently make a fetish of their rights- to guns, self defense, and in various convoluted ways to religious rights and duties. When rights have been written into the law, such as our constitution, that moves them into another rhetorical level- the legal system. But that just expresses and codifies agreements that exist elsewhere in the social system, and which the social system can, through its evolution, change. Gay rights have been an outstanding example, of the destruction of one rights system- that of normative sexuality and marriage rights- and the rise of a new set of rights oriented to personal freedom in the expression and practice of sexuality. Where in ancient times, fecundity was of paramount importance, that need has naturally fallen away as a societal imperative as our societies and planet creak under loads of overpopulation.

This mutability and social basis of rights leads to a lot of one-upmanship in rights discourse, like the attempts to found abortion rights in presumptively more universal or fundamental rights like privacy, autonomy, or women's rights, versus competing formulations of rights to fetal life with related arguments about the legal and life-like status of embryos and fetuses. All this speaks to the fact that rights are not discovered on tablets handed down by either god or Darwin, but are continually developed out of our feelings about our communities- what is fair based on what is required from each of us to live in them, and what they can reasonably demand and give in return.

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• Cattle are unsustainable.
• Good riddance.

Squeezing Those Electrons For All They've Got

How respiratory complex I harnesses electron transfer from NADH to quinone to power the mitochondrial battery.

Energy- we can't live without it, we can't make it ourselves, and we use all sorts of complex technologies to harvest and store it. Solar power is reaching a crisis as we realize that it isn't going to work without storage. Life faced similar crises billions of years ago, and came up with core solutions that we know now as the chemical transformations of photosynthesis and metabolism. Plants make storage compounds from sunlight, which we in turn eat for energy, transforming them into a series of currencies from short- to long-lived, such as NADH, protons, ATP, glucose, and finally, fat.

Within us, the mitochondrion is the engine, not making energy, but burning it from the food we eat. The core citric acid cycle disassembles the reduced carbon compounds that serve as our food and longer-term storage compounds into oxidized CO2 and energy carriers NADH, FADH. While used widely in the cell for specialized needs, these compounds are not our core energy stores, and are generally sent to the electron transport chain for transmutation into a proton gradient that serves as the battery of the mitochondrion, which is in turn used to synthesize our general energy currency, ATP. ATP is used all over the cell for general needs, including the synthesis of glucose, glycogen, and fat as needed for longer term storage.

The discovery of the proton battery was one of the signal achievements of 20th century biochemistry, explaining how mitochondria, and bacteria generally, (from which they evolved), handle the energy harvested via the electron transport chain from food oxidation in an organized and efficient way, without any direct coupling to the ATP synthesis machinery. The electron transport chain is a series of protein complexes embedded in the innermost mitochondrial membrane that receive high-energy electrons from NADH / FADH made in the matrix through the citric acid cycle and use them to pump protons outwards. Then the ATP synthetase enzyme, which is another highly specialized and interesting story, uses the energy of those protons, flowing back in through its rotary structure, to synthesize ATP. The proton gradient is short-lived, a bit like our lithium batteries, continually needing to be recharged- a key form of storage, but just one part of a larger energy transformation system.

A recent pair of papers from the same lab, capitalizing on the new technologies of atomic structure determination, describe in new detail the structure of respiratory complex I, which is a huge complex of 45 proteins that receives NADH, conducts its two electrons to ubiquinone, and uses that energy to pump out four protons from the mitochondrial matrix. Not all questions are answered in these papers, but it is a fascinating look into the maw of this engine. Ubiquinone (often abbreviated as Q) is then later taken up by another respiratory complex that squeezes out a few more protons, while transferring the electrons to cytochrome C, which goes to yet another respiratory complex that squeezes out a final few protons.  Like in our macroscopic world, a lot of complicated machinery is needed to keep a power system humming. 

The complex hinges literally on the Q binding site, which is at the elbow between the intracellular portion that binds NADH, and the series of proteins that all sit in the membrane. When Q binds, the bend is larger, (called the closed form), and when it leaves, the bend is smaller (called the open form). The electron path through the paddle is reasonably well understood, going through several iron-sulfur and flavin mononucleotide complexes that have special overlapping quantum tuning to allow extremely efficient electron transport. The key to the whole system is how the transfer of electrons from NADH through the paddle domain down to Q, which protonates it to QH2 and makes it leave to travel through the membrane to its other destinations, is coupled with a long-range physical and electrostatic shift through the rest of the complex to run the proton pump cycle. 

Structure of complex I, emphasizing the electron path in the paddle (upper right) and the many possible proton conduction paths in the membrane-resident part of the complex (bottom). The Q binding site is shown in brown at the elbow. Each protein subunit is named and given a distinct color. A conductive "wire" through the middle of the membrane components is isolated from the solvent, but connected to each membrane side with dynamically gated pathways. Whether these gates have more of a physical character or an electrostatic character, or both, remains uncertain.

The membrane domain, made up of several similar proteins all side-by-side, seems to have a sort of wire running through the middle, made up of charged amino acid side chains and water molecules, capable of conducting protons parallel to the membrane. It also has specific proton conduction paths within each subunit that provide the possible entry and exit paths for protons getting pumped from the interior outwards. The authors propose that there is a sort of hokey-pokey going on, where one bent form (the open form, with Q ejected) of the machine exposes the matrix-side proton channels, while the other bent form (closed form, with Q present) closes those channels and opens a corresponding set of four channels on the other side that let those same protons out to the cell. The internal wire, they propose, may possibly redistribute the protons to buffer the input channels. Or it might even allow all four to exit on the last, fourth pump complex. In any case, this in essence is the core of biological pump designs, opening channels in one direction to capture protons from one side, (by diffusion), and then executing a switch that closes those and opens ports to the other side, again using diffusion to let them go, but in a new direction. It is the physical cycle that translates energy into chemical directionality, aka pumping.

Proposed mechanism, with the insertion or ejection of Ubiquinone Q dictating the  proton channel accessibility along the membrane proton pump subunits of complex I. Protons enter from the mitochondrial matrix in the blue structures (closed), and exit via the other side in the green structures (open).

Closeup of one of the membrane proton pump segments, showing the dynamic formation of one proton conduction channel in the "open" state (left) vs the closed state (right, circled). The somewhat dramatic turning of the center protein helix carrying residues M64 and F68 opens the way

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• Table of the week.. Are we as free as China? Are we great yet? A comparison of the US and China in key Covid measures, taken Feb 9.

Rank	Country	Total Cases	New Cases	Total Deaths	New Deaths	Total Recovered	Active Cases	Serious, Critical	Tot Cases/1M	Deaths/1M
1	USA	27,798,163	+93,759	479,726	+3,219	17,631,858	9,686,579	21,446	83,682	1,444
83	China	89,720	+14	4,636	0	84,027	1,057	18	62	3

Competition

Balancing collaboration and competition for a healthy society.

The ongoing discussions about race and caste in America are plumbing the depths of who we want to be as a society, and of the human psychology of hierarchy and competition. As Darwin taught, competition is inherent to life. Winners don't just feel good, they live to fight another day and reproduce another generation. Competition is naturally at the core of human psychology and development as well. We only learn to know our selves against a backdrop of challenges overcome, and people to compare ourselves with. We celebrate the winners in art, music, politics, sports, business. Excellence only exists in comparison.

America was conceived from the first as a winners versus losers project. White Europeans, already sailing all parts of the known world in search of treasure and plunder in competition with each other and the other great Asian cultures, found a virgin land. At least virgin in that it hardly offered any competition, with peoples who were summarily exterminated or enslaved. That this domination was transferred to Africa as a convenient source of losers to be utterly dominated, and ultimately branded as an inferior caste in perpetuity, is at once spiritually shameful and also a natural consequence of the competive drive that inheres in all people.

Idealists then came up with a competing dream of socialism and communism, which was to be a sweeping antidote to all these racial, economic, and social injustices. But competition inexorably reared its ugly head, moving the field of play from its traditional moorings to the political and existential levels, even to the very nature of reality and truth, as seen in the Stalinist systems, and the numerous appalling dictatorial systems that copied it. There was no getting around the need to prove that some are more equal than others.

However we run our formal systems of government and economics, we live in countless competitive settings- socially, economically, sexually, in families and outside. No one loves unconditionally, or serves without reward. So the genius of civilization has been to tame and channel competitive structures and impulses to positive ends. Fairly rewarding work, or setting a standard of one sexual partner in marriage, are examples of rough attempts to forge stable, just, and positive social outcomes out of competitive instincts that if given freer license would destroy us. 

Slavery was a system that, while mostly stable and marginally productive, was also profoundly unjust. One tribe simply declared itself dominant, and used every insidious tool of indoctrination, oppression, and violence to maintain that position. Over time, the original source of the competitive superiority, (whether that was just or not), became irrelevant, and the disparity became as unearned by the oppressors as it was undeserved by the oppressed. It served in no way to expose the natural talents of either in a fair environment of self-expression and actualization through competitive effort. 

So over the history of our country, we have fitfully been waking up to this injustice and expression of erstwhile competitive success, and fighting over how to forge a new social contract. That is perhaps the main reason our political system is so bitterly divided right now. "Freedom" rings from the mouths of both sides. But for one it is typically the freedom to continue enforcing their inherited inequities and privileges. For the other, it is the quest to escape exactly those inequities, which have reified, (as they have similarly in India's caste system, over centuries), into a vast network of debilities, social dysfunctions, ingrained or instinctive attitudes, artistic modes and motifs, economic and geographic patterns.

The new social contract is obviously modeled on modern meritocracy, where all are educated as far as possible, all participate freely in the many markets that pervade our lives, from mating to consuming to job-finding and politics, and all benefit in proportion to their contributions as regulated by those markets. Historical inequities would have little influence in this world, while individual talent and character count for all. This assumes that such a meritocracy is a fair ideal, which many dispute, as the fate of the losers remains uncertain, and in our current version, unbelievably harsh.

But there is no ridding ourselves of competition, however blessed we are with countervailing instincts of empathy and cooperation. It is a rock of human nature, and of our personal development. The best we can do is to regulate it to be fair and moderate. That is, expressing the competitive success of the individual, not her forebears or tribe. And allowing enough benefits to winning to provide motivation towards excellence and success, without destroying the portion of society that necessarily will be losers in various markets. This is the perennial conflict (and competition) between right and left, Republican vs Democrat.

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• FOX- another reason to cut the cable cord.