Psychodrama of the Reformation

Luther's personal demons drove the split of European Christendom. A second post from "Fatal Discord", a double biography of Luther and Erasmus, by Michael Massing.

It is hard to believe, but Martin Luther was ridden with self-doubt. That is what drove him to become a monk, to confess his sins for hours a day, and to search for a way out through the scriptures and other theological writings. When he came across Augustine, he underwent a sort of conversion experience which seems to have led to a decade-long burst of energy, rebelling against the Catholic church and pouring out a prodigious flow of theses, tracts, and books on his new evangelical theology, including a full German translation of the Bible. (It is worth noting parenthetically that in these early days of printing, the pamphlets and books brought out by Luther and his adversaries were easily as intransigent, abusive, and uncivil as our current twitterverse, an atmosphere that may have had something to do with the brutal wars that ensued.)

"Now, in reading Augustine himself, Luther found nothing about free will, good works, or doing one's best. Instead, he found stern pronouncements about human wickedness, divine majesty, and undeserved grace. If Augustine was correct, the selfish urges and prideful thoughts that were continually welling up in him represented not simply his own personal failings, but ingrained features of human nature. As forbidding as Augustine's theology might seem to others, Luther took great comfort in the idea that his fate was not in his own hands."

The issue was free will. If god creates everything, rules all, and sees all time, then how much power do humans have? None, obviously. It was John Calvin who took Luther's position to its full extent, arguing for full pre-destination of everyone's fate, with a decided minority pre-destined (elected) to enter heaven, and all others going to hell. The Catholic church, despite Augustine's influence, took the more practical route of claiming some free will, such that prayer, putting money in the collection plate, feeding the poor, and even buying indulgences, would all be put on the sinner's tab when they got to the pearly gates.

Opening page of Matthew from the Luther Bible, 1534.

It is difficult to run a society without rewards for good behavior, so while the Catholic church did not go the whole way to Pelagianism, it did run a middle course, rewarding (in the next world, at least!) good works, while also holding god to be super-powerful, just not all-powerful. Luther's epiphany that faith alone saves, and that good works count for nothing, solved his personal dilemma, and fueled his world-shaking rebellion. But it also left his parishoners with little incentive to do good works, or even to attend church. Luther was faced with continuing apathy through his later years in Wittenberg, reduced to berating his dwindling flock for its moral and religious laxity.

It was in the peasant's rebellion, starting about seven years after his electrifying theses, that the problems of Luther's theology really became apparent, causing self-doubt and confusion to creep back in, gradually sapping Luther's confidence, productivity, and influence. The peasant's revolt was driven by a new crop of preachers more extreme than Luther. If rebellion against the Catholic church for its worldly excesses and oppression was permissible, why not rebellion against the landowners and lords whose oppression was even worse, and whose theological support far weaker? And if all believers are priests, and all can read and interpret the bible, then why listen to the doctors of theology from Wittenberg? Luther was aghast at what he had unleashed, and turned completely around to support the nobility in this bitter and ugly fight, full of unspeakable tortures and massacres.

Luther continued to collaborate closely with the temporal authorities for the rest of his career, and the Lutheran church became a state-affiliated chuch, ridden with many of the same compromises and theological perplexities that characterize the Catholic church, and which Luther had originally thought he had escaped. The energy of the reformation would re-emerge in the Calvinists, Puritans, Methodists, Quakers, and countless other sects of which there are now many thousands. Purity is always energizing, but neither practical nor defensible in what is, in reality, a godless and complicated world. In the end, the attentive tolerance of humanism regularly turns out to be the better solution.

• Machines are winning.
• Think of the bees.
• Paul Ryan- a fraud, just not a very good one.
• The story of abortion.
• More on Russia and our sleazebag in chief.
• Apparently lying isn't so easy.
• Coding is not for everyone, and is not the same as literacy.

Caught in a Lie

Why does our political system spend decades stuck in states of denial?

I am enjoying an infinitely long podcast about the Civil War. One of its lessons, and of that period in history generally, is that incredibly large numbers of people can, for decades, believe convenient or politically motivated falsehoods. The gulf between the Declaration of Independence and the reality of slavery was there for all to see, particularly in the South. But it took a century for the issue equality to come to a head in the war, and then another century for it to come to a head again in the civil rights movement. And we are far from done with it now.

Decades were spent explaining away the obvious with justifications ranging from the nakedly instinctive and economic to the scientific and religious, that people are not after all created (legally, politically) equal, and even if they were, to the victor belong the slaves. It took a national movement of abolition, and particularly the book Uncle Tom's Cabin, to rub people's noses in the fundamental contradiction and injustice. And even then, half the country, full of perfectly respectable and intelligent people, fought a bitter war to escape the truth of the matter. It is appalling to look back at the time spent, and the lives wasted and lost, in this process of slow awakening.

"You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time." - attributed to Abraham Lincoln, but of uncertain provenance.

Smoking is another, smaller, example. The tobacco companies didn't really need to work very hard to convince people that smoking was safe, since most of the country was addicted to nicotine and didn't want to know the truth. But a concerted campaign of disinformation and unconscious conditioning, through floods of advertising and copious product placements lulled the addicts to somnolence, while continuing to draw in new generations of "rebellious" young customers.

Now our politics seem to be in another decades-long process of denial and division. The racial issue still lives as part of the divide, as does resurgent economic inequality, but more important is the environmental issue. The earth is in peril, and it is our own greed and ignorance that put it there. Half of our political system is dedicated to denial, which is getting more flagrant with each election. Perhaps, like the period before the Civil War, the more endangered one's comfortable lies are, the more vociferously, even militantly, they are defended. At this point we have a chief executive who lies maliciously about everything, as a matter of habit, and we hardly bat an eye. Particularly telling is his advice to men accused of sexual assault - "You have to deny everything"- advocating perjury.

Interestingly, the parties (though not the regions) responsible for these epochs of lying and denial have switched dramatically. The Republican party brought us the clarity of abolition, union, and Lincoln. The exodus of Democrats from congress during the Civil War allowed a fresh wind of progressive legislation, such as fiat money, income tax, and the land grant education system. Now, Republicans are the party of the South and of vested priviledge- racial, economic, and patriarchial. It is for all these fossilized interests that Republicans maintain a policy of denial, shamelessly serving the wealthy and the industries they run, like the Koch conglomerate, and the coal and oil companies. Lies serve as a defense against rational policy and democracy. They serve as a screen against understanding and care for the future by the electorate- especially the vaunted "base", of which it is difficult to say whether it is predominated by ignorance, cynicism, meanness, or worse.

In the Civil War era, the purveyors of lies were mostly conservative social habits and structures that served the powerful- the dominance of the planter elite and the religions which supported them unstintingly. Power ruled nakedly, over slaves, but also over the social system more generally, including its media. Power is again, obviously, the problem today. It is those in power who do not want change, do not want to make the economic system more equal or sacrifice even a pittance for the future of the biosphere. The Supreme Court has pronounced money to be speech, which means the dominance of corporations and the rich. History is a litany of struggle for power between the rich and the poor, conducted by various mythologies and lies. The left has its problems with truth as well, particularly in its Marxist incarnation, which went so far as to claim itself as a science of history, economics, and social justice. Naturally, the lying reached an appalling crescendo when the Marxists gained maximum power under Stalin. Whatever the party, the powerful have the most to hide, and engage in the most habitual and cynical lying to keep it hidden, sometimes via blatant lying, but more often in plain sight via elaborate ideologies of other-denigration and self-justification.

But there are also technological issues. An internet that was supposed to spread truth and information is instead ridden with button-pushing trolls and corporate propaganda, while killing off the professionally edited media. Putin's Russia has refined disinformation to an alarmingly precise science, and Trump has been their most attentive student. Between them and the FOX propaganda channel, Rush Limbaugh and colleagues, independent thought hardly stands a chance. One characteristic of the lying is their loud claims of truth, such as the slogan "Fair and Balanced", and the reflexive denigration of any source of thoughtfully investigated and edited information as "fake news". Unbeknownst to the innocent, what were previously channels of information have transformed into fronts of warfare- class warfare.

"In science, if you stand up and say something you know is not true, that is a career-ending move. It used to be that way in politics." -Bill Foster, physicist and member of Congress 

• Tom Tomorrow on fake news.
• Ten commandments may need a minor update.
• Our system has a problem with minorities.
• Republican reminiscences.
• Weaponizing the dollar.. would be much more effective if we had friends.
• Defunding the IRS for complete impunity... of the powerful.
• "In 2014, an international team of biologists estimated that, in the past 35 years, the abundance of invertebrates such as beetles and bees had decreased by 45 percent."

The Quest For Meaning

We spend our lives searching for something that does not exist. And then realize that we have been fighting over it the whole time.

The meaning of life: 42? Or something more profound? Religions have been founded, and wars fought, over what by definition is most important to us, but on which no one seems able to agree. One advance in the philosophy of meaning was Maslow's hierarchy of values, which starts with basic sustenance, and rises through the more refined social values to self-actualization (possibly a dated concern!). If one does not have enough to eat, nothing else means much. But whether these form a true hierarchy is unclear, since many people have died for some of the more esoteric levels of this hierarchy, indicating that we are mixed-up beings, not always valuing life over some principle or ideology. It turns out that propaganda, social pressure, and decent odds, can make people kill and die for the most arcane propositions. Also, that winning means a lot to us.

Meaning is not given or objective. There is no star or cloud telling us that we mean X, while people in the other tribe mean Y. Quite the other way around. I think we can safely say at this point that we have constructed religions (as one example of indoctrinating human institutions) as complex machinery to propagate meanings that we (or at least some) have devised, using gods as fronts for desirable social hierarchies, idle speculations, melodramatic ruminations, and elevated emotions. That these machineries are passed off as objective and profound is critical to their function, elevating their impressiveness (and oppressiveness). If your meaning and values can be dictated by me, who wins? If god says you should have a beard, how can you complain, and to whom? This is the quest of propaganda generally- to instill meanings into, and thus lead, masses of people.

So we have been fighting over meaning and values all along, through our social relations. There is nothing to seek, but rather a world to win, for as far as others share one's meaning, one gains power. For example, a recent post told the story of Arthur Kornberg, eminent biochemist. One of his leadership qualities was an absolute conviction of the importance of what he was doing. If his team members were not willing to be tied to the bench at all hours and have midnight phone calls for urgent updates, their tenure was short. How much of this was willing? That is hard to say, and is one of the mysteries of personal, charismatic, leadership- the diffusion of meaning to others. Parenting is the same story, naturally, as is politics. Parents promote respect for elders and the elderly as a core societal virtue ... and no wonder! Advertising is another big example in our culture. The alchemical transformation of a natural desire- for status, sex, safety- into a value and meaning structure that renders some product essential. We are far more what we buy than what we eat.

Meaning turns out to be more of a fight than a quest. Meanings are swirling all about us, and are up for grabs. There is no grail to find, but only a social contest between those who seek to tell other people what is most valuable and important, others who promote other, maybe contrasting, values, and innocents in the middle, caught in the cross-hairs of domineering social warfare. Even Buddhism, whose doctrine revolves around the illusory nature of existence, the non-self, and the dampening of one's attachments, seems eager to propagate those very doctrines, promoting the somewhat ironic meaning of meaninglessness.

Returning to Maslow's hierarchy, many of our meanings are objectively based. We need to eat, have room to live, and have the other necessities of our current technological status. Social status is another need, biologically based. Since most of these are subject to scarcity, we are immediately thrust into competition with our fellow humans. These objective necessities can be woven into much larger ideologies of competition and tribalism. On a theatrical basis, they are portrayed in sporting events, game shows, and reality TV. But they become more grounded in the business world- that merciless competition that ends in bankruptcy and homelessness. Which is in turn only a slight step above the level that characterizes the ultimate competitive test of meaning: warfare, massacre, and murder.

We are bombarded from earliest childhood with values and messages of meaning, many of which conflict. The confusion can be difficult to deal with, leading many into the arms of simple solutions- taking meaning from those who shout the loudest, or who simplify most audaciously. It is up to us to choose, though our basis is necessarily the choices we have made already and which have been made for us earlier on in our lives. Meanings build on each other. But they also have a rational aspect. If compassion is part of our value system and self-meaning, that will not sit well with projects of tribal pride and dehumanization. It is complexity that requires careful thought, which is why morality is not just a matter of feeling, but also of reason.

The meaning of life is not hard to find, but it is hard to decide on, from the myriad choices and influences surrounding us. That is why sticking with positive influences and avoiding cesspools like Facebook / Fox news is so important. It is also why "big question" discussions are often overblown, shills for the dissemination of some particular and parochial set of meanings.  The quest is not for some elusive single meaning, but for ways to chose among the vast numbers of them we meet along the way of life.

• Imagine ... if Trump ran Hollywood.
• We are in the middle of propaganda warfare.
• More lies.
• Automatons have long been used to fake the work of gods.

Science is not the Answer

Bryan Appleyard has some complaints about the new priesthood and its corrosive effects on the old verities, in "Understanding the Present: Science and the soul of modern man".

This is a genuinely exciting book (dating from 1993) about modernity- our age where science in all its facets has not only transformed practical existence, but also our spiritual lives, de-mystifying nature and tossing religions, one after the next, onto the scrap heap. Appleyard is not happy about it, however- far from. He is tortured by it, and while he can not stomach going back to religious orthodoxy, whether of fundamentalist or mildly liberal varieties, nor can he accept the new regime, which he views, somewhat mistakenly, as scientism. That is the belief, fostered (in Appleyard's view) by the gushing popularizers like Carl Sagan, Jacob Bronowski, and Richard Dawkins, that science can not only solve all our questions of knowledge, but forms a new technocratic morality of reasonable-ness and tolerance which, if properly worshipped, could resolve our social, political, and spiritual problems as well.

The first half of the book is far better than the second. Setting up the problems of modern spirituality is far easier than solving them. In broad strokes, humanity used to be at home in heavily archetypal religious realities. While actual reality did intrude from time to time, the fables of Christianity, to take the main example in the West, were (and for some, still are) magical tales which gave us hope of a benevolent meta-reality and a pleasant afterlife. But intellectuals kept trying to make sense of them, until they "sensed" them completely out of existence. Appleyard cites Thomas Aquinas as perhaps the finest of these intellectuals in the theological tradition. His main work was to reconcile Aristotle, the pre-eminent scientist of antiquity, with Christian orthodoxy. This was taken as the height of theology, not to mention truth in general. But it planted the seed of modernization and logic- if something is logically or empirically true, it must necessarily be consonant with the Catholic religion, which is by definition true. Thence downwards through the enlightenment, Newton, the  industrial revolution, existentialism, liberal theology, to the plague of atheists we see today. The Catholic church tried to draw the line with Galileo and the heliocentric model, but that did not go well, and a few hundred years down the road, they gave up and said they were sorry.

"Science was the lethally dispassionate search for truth in the world whatever its meaning might be; religion was the passionate search for meaning whatever the truth might be."

All religious pretensions to scientific truth have been exploded, and the only choices left, as Appleyard sees it, are regression into fundamentalism, continuation to the endpoint of modernist anomie where humans are morally worthless or even negative destroyers of pristine nature, an acceptance of science itself as humanity's triumphalist project, which through its powers and gifts can give us all meaning, ... or something else. Appleyard spends much of the second half of the book on the fourth option, discussing quantum weirdness, chaos theory, computational incompleteness theories, and related fields which put the lie to the determinist dreams of nineteenth century science. Science does not know everything, and can not know everything, thus there is some gap for us as humans to be free of its insidious, deadening influence- a humanist space.

There are many things wrong with Appleyard's take on all this, some of which are contained in his own arguments and writing. Science has long held to the fact/value distinction, as he discusses at length. Even such a solidly scientistic enterprise as Star Trek recognizes regularly that Spock can neither supply all our values, nor even on his own terms operates without idiosyncratic values and meaning. The world of Star Trek is morally progressive and rational, but its motivations and meaning come from our human impulses, not from an algorithm. Exploration, skimpy uniforms, and great fight scenes are who we are.

"The key to the struggle, it cannot be said too often, is the way in which science forces us to separate out values from our knowledge of the world. Thanks to Newton we can not discover goodness in the mechanics of the heavens, thanks to Darwin we cannot find it in the phenomenon of life and thanks to Freud we cannot find it in ourselves. The struggle is to find a new basis for goodness, purpose, and meaning."

But then Appleyard frequently decries the new scientistic regime as having destroyed morals in general.

"... all moral issues in a liberal society are intrinsically unresolvable and all such issues will progressively  tend to be decided on the basis of a scientific version of the world and of values. In other words they will cease to be moral issues, they will become problems to be solved. The very idea of morality will be marginalized and, finally, destroyed."

This makes no sense, as he himself concludes by the end of the book. It seems to be a matter of looking for morals and meaning in all the wrong places. After a long excursion through the death of scientific determinism, he consoles us that science doesn't, and can't know everything. Thus we can go about our lives with our own values, desires, and dreams without paying much mind to any moral teachings from the scientific priesthood, which didn't exist anyhow. Whew! Determinism is a complete red herring here. Science studies all of reality, whether complicated or simple. If broad swathes can be subsumed into the master equation of gravity, that is wonderful- empowering on practical and psychological levels. But sometimes the result of all this study is a large database of genes and their properties, whose complicated interactions preclude easy prediction or codification (harkening back to the cataloguing of Aristotle and Linnaeus). Or sometimes it is a prediction system for weather which, despite our best efforts, can only see a limited distance into the future, due to inherent limitations to any model of a chaotic reality. That is OK too. Such pursuits are not "not science", and nor does such ignorance furnish us with free will- that comes from adaptability. The results of our studies of reality do not imply much about our meaning and values in any case, even as they defang the oddly materialistic superstitions and totems of yore. Our powers of understanding may be amazing, and fetishized by the educational system and science popularizers, but are not the foundation of our moral humanity.

Scientific studies of ourselves have, however, been enlightening, uncovering the unconscious, Darwinian designs, ancient urges, and a great diversity of ways of being. They have also clarified the damage we are doing to our environment via the wonders of modern life. This has informed our self-image and hopefully our values, but hardly determined them. Humility is the overall lesson, as it has been from all the better religious traditions. Appleyard decries relativism, the liberal tendency towards excessive humility- suspicion of one's own culture, and excessive regard for those of others. But isn't that merely a slight overshoot / correction from the madness of colonialism, slavery, genocide, rampant technology, greed, and war that has been the Western history over the last couple of centuries? Isn't it a spiritually healthy step back? In any case, it is an example of human values at work, perhaps more influenced by our prosperous condition than by any dictates from science.

Appleyard's fundamental complaint is against the new priesthood that has taken over management of the wonders of creation, but has at the same time failed to address our human needs for solace and meaning. Indeed, some of its high theologians delight in telling us that the universe, and ourselves, are utterly meaningless. Appleyard constantly weaves god into the discussion, while taking no exlicit pro-god position. He can not bring himself to bite that bullet, but rather is content to complain about being thrown out of Eden for the sin of too much knowledge. Well, it was always a cheap trick to read our fate in the stars or in goat entrails, and to read our meaning in ancient wonder-tales. These methods were merely externalizing values that came from within. The patriarchial systems of theology express most clearly the interests and desires of the men who run them. So we are, in the modern dispensation, merely reduced to a state of honesty about stating what we want, without the false veils of magic, authority, and supposed moral objectivity. And that change seems, at least to me, beneficial for our moral situation, overall.

• Can morality be reasonable? Which animals are worth helping?
• Typical enviro screed about saving space for nature...
• Forest loss continues apace.
• Roubini forcasts disaster, as usual. With details.
• We saved the wrong people in the last financial crisis.
• Financial sleaze.
• Who cares about truth anymore?
• Our common economic statistics are not cutting it.
• Japan is doing very well, thank you.

Work-a-Day Addiction

We are all addicted to the normal hormones of motivation.

I am watching the World Cup from time to time, and wonder- why? Why do we get so involved in competition, why are men particularly motivated to participate and watch, why do whole nations believe themselves to be "represented" by a sporting team, and feel emotional loss or gain by their fate? It is all very odd, from logical perspective- even a grand waste of effort, money and time, second only to that wasted on religion!

Naturally, one has to look at our biology and evolutionary history. A recent article in Salon outlined an interesting contrast between hormones that drive men to their characteristic activities- testosterone and oxytocin. Success gives us a testosterone boost, while social bonding gives us an oxytocin boost. Both are powerful drugs that give us highly conditional, precise motivation. If one's success serves the group, such as a successful hunt, (or war), both systems reinforce, and we are maximally happy. If the two systems are in conflict, such as a bar brawl, civil war, or domestic intrigue, we take our bonding resources were we can- from whichever group will have us, or do without, becoming loners or outcasts living on testosterone alone, if that. That really isn't much fun, and one gets the distinct impression that oxytocin is ultimately the more significant motivator. Winning only works if you have someone to share it with.

Another recent experience was going to a concert. It was transporting, highly socially bonding, and its happy effects lasted long, long after, surely involving something like a surge of oxytocin. One might even call it "religious", a related activity carefully engineered to bring people together to get positive hits of social bonding, though with a veneer of pompous folderol. These are in some ways the poles of our culture- the incessant competition in sports, business, and politics, which divide us, versus bonding experiences that bring us back together. The latter are getting, perhaps, pushed to the margins as live music becomes rarer, religion dies a slow death, and our arts turn into violent superhero extravaganzas. Granted, that in competitive situations, we bond with our team, our party, our religion versus their religion. But the mixture of testosterone-fueled competitiveness makes such group-i-ness a mixed blessing, easily turning to mean, if not violent ends. Just look at our political system, where civility has turned into blood sport. We need to find a more consistently positive and unifying way to be.

The drugs we abuse follow a similar pattern. Cocaine is probably a fair testosterone analog, making one feel invincible- ready to take wing. On the other hand, there are downers like alcohol and opioids- what's up with them? One can speculate that they give an oxytocin kind of buzz- the comfortable, disinhibited state of reduced social anxiety, which melts barriers to some degree, though quickly becomes destructive in excess. The opioid epidemic is, as many have observed, a direct index of social malaise and atomization. One might add that 12-step programs to treat alcoholism attempt (mostly unsuccessfully) to supply the missing social bonding with a sort of regimented friendship. Most people, with robust lives and brain chemistry, don't fall for the fake pleasures of either drug, but get their fix from actual accomplishments and actual social connections, which generate the internal rewards which are just as chemical, but much more subtly, finely, and productively regulated.

(All this is terribly reductive, of course, and misses all kinds of details of how our motivation systems work. Yet it is clear that in a broad brush way, positive and negative feelings are strongly influenced by these and other chemicals that form the internal motivation and reward systems, for which drugs of abuse and recreation are blunderbuss versions. Whether we add in serotonin, dopamine, and others, to make more accurate models of the internal workings does not alter this picture. There is also no law that cognition can not generate emotions. But it seems to make sense that our general emotional tenor is shifted in rather gross ways, over many cognitive (and bodily) systems at once, which dictates the use of hormones and hormone-like neurotransmitters to create such wide-spread regulatory effects.)

But many forces are set against our happiness and bonding, sending us toward competition instead. Traditionally, the (testosterone-addled) patriarchy has been a major culprit, as we have experienced so clearly in the traditional setting of the society of Afghanistan. Scarcity in general, of course, generates warfare and competition, to which primitive cultures are far more prone than our own, despite their otherwise idyllic nature.

But our current version of modernity may be even worse. Society-wide bonding experiences, like patriotism, universal religion, and traditions in the very general sense, are all being corroded. Some of the corrosion comes from competitive market forces, which are invading every aspect of our lives with the retreat of public services, civic responsibility, and family structure. Some comes from our very prosperity, which allows us each more independence and freedom- which is to say, an escape from close, maybe suffocating, social ties. Some of it comes from sheer population growth, which makes everything more competitive, particularly space- the space to live, to not be homeless, to find a country in which one can make a future, instead of being crushed under poverty and corruption. And some of it comes from environmenal degradation, another consequence of population growth and rampant capitalism, which makes agriculture and subsistance more difficult in already-poor areas and degrades the spiritual balms of nature. The internet, which was supposed to bring us all together, has instead balkanized us into ever-smaller tribes, enabled anonymous flame-throwing and rampant bullying, including from the highest offices. And into the bargain, it has grievously wounded the music industry- that keystone of positive social bonding.

What is going to put all this together again? How will we re-establish healthy lives and communities against all these forces? Clearly, Scandinavian countries, which have followed a less strictly capitalistic model, with less testosterone and more social awareness and conscience, have succeeded in building happier societies. It takes a change in emphasis, and a renunciation of the imbalanced invasion of competition in every nook and cranny of our lives, where few win and most lose. Otherwise our only recourse is the artificial versions of social bonding reward.

• A depressing withdrawal from opioids.
• Trump is a bad drug.
• Remember that 81% of evangelicals support Trump. Because they are white and pure.
• The supreme court is the next domino to fall for our creeping Nazi-ism.
• Death of the middle class, cont.
• And the decline is gathering speed.
• Science takes a theory, and sometimes a little PR.
• Love ...

mm-Hmmm ...

The critical elements of conversation that somehow didn't make it into the "language". A review of How We Talk, by N. J. Enfield.

Written language is a record of elision. The first written languages were hardly more than accounting symbols, and many early forms of writing lacked basic things like vowels and punctuation. The written forms are a shorthand, for those practiced in the art of spoken language to fill in the blanks, and they still hide a great deal today. For example, the same letter, such as "a" can stand for several vowel sounds, as in ate, art, ahh, am, awe. Another rich part of the language left on the editing room floor are completely unrecorded (except by authors of dialog looking for unusual verisimilitude) sounds, like um, ah, huh, mm-hmmm and the like. N. J. Enfield makes the case that, far from being uncouth interjections, these are critical parts of the language, indeed, part of an elaborate "conversation machine" which is one behavior that distinguishes humans from other animals.

Arabic, a language commonly written without vowels.

When we are in conversation, time is of the essence. We expect attentiveness and quick responses. It is a relationship with moral aspects- with obligations on each side. The speaker should repeat things when asked, not take up too much of the floor, provide clear endings to turns. Enfield describes a very disciplined timing system, where, at least in Japan, responses begin before the first speaker has stopped. Other cultures vary, but everyone responds within half a second. Otherwise, something is discernably wrong. One thing this schedule indicates is that there is a sing-song pattern within the speaker's production that signals the ending of a speaking turn well before it happens. The other is that there is an serious obligation to respond. Not doing so will draw a followup or even rebuke from the speaker. Waiting more time to respond is itself a signal, that the response is not what is desired.. perhaps a "no". It can also be softened by an "uh" or "er" kind of filler that again signals that the responder is 1. having some difficulty processing, and 2. paving the way for a negative response.

Likewise, "mm-Hmm" is a fully functional and honorable part of the language- the real one used in conversation. It is the encouraging sign that the listener is holding up her part of the bargain, paying attention to the speaker continuously. Failing to provide such signs leads the speaker to miss a necessary interaction, and interject.. "Are you listening?".

Finally, Enfield deals with "Huh?", a mechanism listeners use to seek repair of speech that was unclear or unexpected. When a response runs late, it may switch to "Huh?", in a bid to say that processing is incapable of making sense of what the speaker said, please repeat or clarify. But at the same time, if something of the original speech can be salvaged, listeners are much more likely to ask for specific missing information, like "Who?", or "where was that?" or the like. This again shows the moral engine at work, with each participant working as hard as they can to minimize the load on the other, and move the conversation forward in timely fashion.

Huh is also a human universal, one that Enfield supposes came about by functional, convergent evolution, due to its great ease of expression. When we are in a relaxed, listening state, this is the sound we can most easily throw out with a simple breath ... to tell the speaker that something went off track, and needs to be repeated. It is, aside from clearly onomatopoeic expressions, the only truly universal word among humans.

A conversation without words.

It is a more slender book than it seems, devoted to little more than the expressions "uh", "mmm-Hmmm", and "Huh?". Yet it is very interesting to regard conversation from this perspective as a cooperation machine, much more complex than those of other species, even those who are quite vocal, like birds and other apes. But it still leaves huge amounts of our face-to-face conversational engine in the unconscious shadows. For we talk with our hands, faces, and whole bodies as well. Even with clothes. And even more interesting is the nature of music in relation to all this. It is in speech and in our related vocal intimacies and performances that music first happens. Think of a story narration- it involves not only poetry of language, but richly modulated vocal performance that draws listeners along and, among much else, signals beginnings, climaxes, endings, sadness and happiness. This seems to be the language of tone that humans have lately transposed into the free-er realms of instrumental music and other music genres. Analyzing that language remains something of an uncharted frontier.

• Machines can do it too.
• Varieties of technoreligion.
• Monopoly is a thing.
• Appalling display of religious fundamentalism: The US ambassador to Israel refers to old testament and 3,000 year old rights of Israel. If other 3,000 year old land claims were to be honored, the US would be in substantial peril!
• In praise of Jimmy Carter.
• Collapse or innovation.. can we outrun the Malthusian treadmill?
• Truth and Rex Tillerson.
• Sunlight makes us feel better.
• We still have a public sector pension crisis.
• Economic graph of the week. Worker quit rates are slowly rising. Will that affect pay?

The Right Wing Mind: Lost, Revealed, or Manufactured?

A review of How The Right Lost Its Mind, by Wisconsin conservative talk show host Charles Sykes.

Oh, where are the decent Republicans? The Ronald Reagans, the Newt Gingriches, the Paul Ryans? Thus goes the lament of Charles Sykes, who writes a searching and impassioned book decrying the moral and intellectual collapse of Conservatism into right-wingnut demagoguery and authoritarianism. Like any theologian, he is not willing to go the whole distance and question the fundamental nature of American conservatism and its pieties (which he refers to as "truths" with some frequency). But he is remarkably honest about the rot that characterizes the party, even as it is ascedent politically. I recommend his work, though obviously he remains staunchly (if nicely) conservative. Being from Wisconsin, and all. He had, indeed, played a central role in denying Trump the Wisconsin primary, from his talk show perch.

There are many threads that lead from there to here, and I will break out a few of them below. The arc of his story is that the sainted William Buckley exiled the wingnuts from the Republican party, preparing it for several decades of intellectual growth and political dominance. Now they are back with a vengeance. Sykes spends most of the book describing the many ways this happened, but explaining *why it happened in any deep way is another matter altogether. One might also ask why they were there in the first place, and where did they go in the meantime?

Media: from responsible to clickbait

The fact that Trump, after all we have seen, still has a solid 35 to 40% of the population on his side indicates that America is up to its gills in wingnuts. Have they always been there? No, to a large degree, we are responsive to our social environment. People can be led. The soothing chamber of commerce environment of past Republican generations did a great deal to dampen nuttiness. Now, the spittle-drenched ravings of FOX and its analogs are doing the opposite, driving otherwise pleasant and reasonable people to embrace the very worst devils of their nature.

What is equally bad, the new media has comprehensively replaced careful, professional curation of news with a downward spiral of virality and clickbait. Facebook's business model is explicity to reward clicks. "News" that gets clicks gets paid in ad money, and wins, which means replication over the platform and from its content providers, be they basement trolls or foreign operatives. No worse information system could be designed. Facebook is sort of a machine to bring out the worst in people, mistaking titiliation for news, let alone thought. For Google search, the analysis of linking and clicking is a valuable feature, winnowing the internet down to the most significant sites. But for news, this practice has obviously disastrous consequences, given human proclivities and weaknesses. That is why news organizations came to be in the first place, over the last century.

Propaganda exhibit A. The dossier was created by one of the world's leading experts on Russia, and no significant revelation from it has been disproven. It continues to be corroborated by, and serve as the spark for Muller's and the FBI's investigation.

One example of this problem, which Sykes should have delved into, but didn't, is the villainization of Hillary Clinton. When you sit down and compare the relative merits of Trump and Clinton, in terms of experience, aptitude, scandalous behavior, poor judgement, family stench, and corruption, there is no comparison. Yet because of the totally unhinged nature of the right-wing media, which the mainstream media could not help but cover (calling it "controversial", and other normalizing locutions), the vitriolic wingnut narrative seeped into the public consciousness, to the point that "jail her" was publically acceptable as a mantra by Trump himself and his campaign.

Is conservatism authoritarian?

This leads to Sykes's most significant insight and claim, that conservatism is not the same as authoritarianism. It was the wingnuts who were and are again, authoritarian, while true conservatives do not look to a maximum leader to deliver them from political impotence, but value compromise, core values, and legal and civic norms. Here I disgree strongly. There is clearly a long and close relationship between the two. The spectre of left-authoritarianism is certainly possible. But as a rule, authoritarians are right-wing. Conservatives, as Sykes describes, work long and hard to keep this id under control, not always successfully. Law and order, xenophobia, traditionalism, religion- all these tend to be shared themes which animate both strands of the right, and of which the Trumpists are merely a more extreme manifestation. Republicans have been cultivating the "Southern Strategy" for decades, and what is more authoritarian than this concerted effort to maintain the white terror of the South?

Patriarchy is the point

Similarly, manliness, strength, and similar macho themes are very much conservative touch points, as are anti-abortion, hostility to birth control, and other measures to keep women subjugated. The Trumpist trolls are merely more open about it than their patrician forebears. We owe Sykes and his (few) colleagues in the never-Trump section of the party a great debt for their resistance, both during the campaign and ongoing. But they should not kid themselves that their cherished pieties are somehow different in policy terms than the crudities now on display in the White House.

In this respect, as in so many others, FOX has lead the way in normalizing and activating the basest instincts of the right, whether conservative or authoritarian. And now, with social media, Trump appears to have not only FOX and friends, but also legions of trolls on his side, ready to visciously attack any Republican who utters anything less than complementary. I used to think that Trump did not have his own paramilitary, so he could not get very far in subverting our establishment. But these social media forces seem to be his Brown Shirts, and have brought the rest of the Republican party to a whimpering state. Politicians who stray are subjected to relentless attacks, which for some reason they pay attention to, as though the trolls on facebook and twitter are somehow representative of the public interest. As if the thorough-going financial corruption of both parties were not bad enough!

 Or is it stupidity?

Choosing to listen to the very worst that America has to offer is a sin of legislators, but they are observing, as do we all, that these propaganda and troll armies are having an effect on the electorate, influencing the easily led. This raises the question of why, in a country whose educational system was supposed to be the envy of the world, and whose people are, on the whole, the richest. What happened? Sykes certainly does not delve into that conundrum, confining himself to the mantra that as long as we stick to conservative verities of small government and high tax cuts, all with be well. But the basic fact is that human nature is to a great degree conservative, and the unthinking position is in favor of the status quo. Reform is the business of intellectuals, which some Republicans may have been, briefly, at one point. But now, dumb is their brand, and they are increasingly proud of it.

Pot calling the teacup black.

But I think there is one further hypothesis that might be considered. A recent New Yorker article mulled over the steep drop in crime over the last two decades, not only in the US, but in all developed countries. It did not come to any particular solution or explanation, other then aggressive policing policies. But I have one- lead. Our cities were drenched in lead from gasoline for decades, peaking in the 1970's before lead was banned from gasoline. Lead is known to affect cognitive development, meaning that we had demographic cohorts from that time who were likely heavily damaged by exposure to lead. While crime is a pursuit of the young, and the crime wave in the US tracks the rise and fall of lead in gasoline quite closely, politics is a more mature pursuit. Thus one can theorize that the lead-affected cohorts of the 70's peak might be the ones now responsible for the political and media system, both as voters and as participants. This would be a somewhat shocking hypothesis, yet also a hopeful one, as we are assured of a return to normalcy in a few decades, at least.

A problem of compassion

At any rate, conservatism is the unthinking choice in politics, the dedication to keeping things as they are, to stasis. While liberals express hope in the future and compassion for others, conservatives (not to mention right wingnut trolls) express fear- of others, of social innovation, of change in general, and of the state and its role in antagonizing traditional power centers like the church, the corporation, and the patriarchy. Indeed, one might paint conservatives as the faction of fear, which turns into hate on the authoritarian end of the spectrum. The mantra of small government is implicitly a mantra of big power elsewhere- of big and bullying companies, of monopoly, financialization, unemployment, and all the other ills that the modern state stands ready to remedy and regulate. Can the ideals and compassion of the left get carried away? Communism certainly proves that. But broadly speaking, the concept of a compassionate conservative is an oxymoron, and that informs both the thesis Sykes is trying to sell, and also the larger question of why this moment has brought out the Trumpist shadow.

Population pressure

One issue that seems also to get short shrift is overpopulation. The culture in the US has changed from one of hopeful frontier values with land for anyone who wanted an independent existence, to an intensely urbanized one. Most urban areas have also reached a sclerotic state of development, having "built-out" decades ago, and now find it virtually impossible to even imagine building new interstates or other substantial infrastructure that would be required to relieve (in some areas) incredible traffic problems and housing shortages. Thus we experience an increasingly zero-sum game where the 1%, instead of thinking about the future of the country and growth, are instead grabbing what they can from the system as it exists, with little thought for tomorrow, or for others. In such a frustrating environment, the appeal of rage- of blowing things up, burning it down, and starting from scratch is somewhat understandable, but only as an impulse, not a policy.

Is inequality the American way?

This hardly needs expansion in this post.

The culture war

The long-standing left-right culture war over recent decades has many fronts, and conservatives generally feel that they have lost on most of them. Abortion has been fought (so far) to a draw, outside of the reddest states where it has been exterminated in practice. The gay rights fight has be excruciatingly disasterous, however. Liberal compassion was really flying its freak flag there, and it has made the traditionalist conservatives, and their troll shadow army, outraged. The culture has moved relentlessly on, and yelling stop has had little effect in most precincts. There is one front, however, where the right has clearly won, and that is guns. This is where the most rabid partisans have occupied and expanded their ground, providing the model for scorched-earth, vitriolic, irrational, feed-the-worst-instincts propaganda. Is it fascist-inflected? Authoritarian? Or just conservative? Whatever it is, it certainly occupies the most right part of the spectrum, and it is no surprise, after its signal success in cowing legislators and advancing its agenda that this community has been taken as a model for success on the wider field of right-wing causes.

A little light relief, courtesy of Colbert.

The South

Enough said.

Ideas, shmydeas

This is perhaps the most important thread, especially in considering Sykes's work. He is tirelessly admiring of William Buckley and Paul Ryan, as substantive, thoughtful conservatives. His arc is from serious conservatism of yesteryear, and of Wisconsin, to the degraded Alt-right petulance of today. But what if the ideas were no good to start with? What if these have always been convenient and irrational fronts for serving the rich and the powerful? The Republican's attitude towards deficits has shown, as nothing else can, their shameless hypocrisy about their so-called "ideas". When Democrats are in office, deficits are disastrous and spending evil. When Republicans are in office, quite the reverse. Nor have any of the tax cuts generated Laffer-ian economic growth, merely Keynesian growth, along with deficits. The record of conservative "ideas" has been abysmal, and the new Trumpians merely recognize that this was always the case, and dispense with ideas altogether, in favor of e-motivated politics like trade bashing, immigrant-bashing, and tweeting. Then they do what they want, which is evidently to make the rich much richer, and screw everyone else, workers, the poor, the environment, the world at large.

Likewise with small government. When it comes to compassion and equality, cuts and small government are in order. But when abortion comes up, or a bloated military, the sky is the limit. No, the ideas were never more than a cover than support for patriarchy, property, and hierarchy- conservatism of the oldest kind, whether in patrician clothes, or something more swastiky. Indeed, the media issues raised above, and the lead issue, gross inequality, and all the other issues that have causal relevance for the decline of our political system, come back to a role for government itself to regulate and improve our physical and social environment. Government is our means to solve big problems, and frequently has to be big to do so.

In the end, Charles Sykes is likable and thoughtful. And his urgency in turning the Republican party back towards civility and a concern for institutions, law, and other people, is heartfelt and important. However, the idea of putting the crazies back into the closet, and reverting to the platitudes of God, Tax Cuts, and Small Government, is not viable. Sykes says so himself, urging new ideas to be developed, whose nature, however, he leaves in great obscurity. My suggestion? Join the Democratic party.

• Sinclair is another fair and balanced network.
• Bactra is back, however.
• After capitalism.
• The corruption is just endless.
• And it would be nice if our president weren't a Russian asset.
• If police want respect, they need to earn it.
• Ignorance of MMT would be better for everyone!

Americans, Plain and Simple

How about doing away with the term "African-American"?

It has taken me a while to realize that African Americans are far, far more American than I am. I am a naturalized citizen and immigrant. Yet the Protestant, white, suburban Boy-Scout culture fit like a glove- I was assimilated into 60's-70's America with plenty of personal and family issues, but no larger political or cultural issues.

How different that is from the black experience, where whole political parties remain dedicated to keeping black Americans down! A small part of that social antagonism and "othering" is furthered by the distinct names that have been applied to the black community. While the term "African American" is about as neutral as can be, in strict analogy to the many other ethnic terms like Irish-American, Jewish-American, German-American, Chinese-American, etc., there have in practice been some distinctions.

First, "Irish-American" is not frequently used. Most ethnic groups, especially those of such long vintage, have simply melted in to the pot of generic Americans- have assimilated or had America assimilate to them. So the continued intensive use of the term "African American" does not flow from a lack of assimilation, at least not from an African originating culture, but something quite different. Second, why is "African" lumped together so promiscuously, as if a continent as large as three Europes contained only one culture? "Latino" suffers from the same syndrome, hiding vast differences and diversity for the convenience of the dominant culture. It is a natural problem with naming and grouping of any kind, but is another sign that the "African" in "African American" doesn't really refer to Africa.

What all this does signify is continued segregation in all sorts of dimensions- social, physical, economic- based on a long cultural history of fear, disgust, hate, and social and economic oppression/powerlessness. Pride in an African heritage is admirable, but that seems so distant as to be mostly contrived; there is very little such heritage afoot in contemporary America, in any way that is distinct to one community, beyond genetics. (Though Wakanda may change all that!) A more accurate designation might be "formerly enslaved Americans", though that hardly trips off the tongue either. There have been many attempts at labels, more or less successful, (Negro, colored, minority, Urban, Afro-American, ghetto, racialized people, diverse, people of color). I would suggest the preferred usage just be "Americans" when and where possible, without further ado or elaboration.

A word-cloud of my own creation, text drawn from Wikipedia and other history sites focusing on the back experience. This  appears to militate against the thesis presented, showing "African" with high usage, and as perhaps the primary locus of identity. But the corpus was a very backward-looking, perhaps not reflective of the current cultural setting.

Obviously, from the very nature of this very article, some term is needed to refer to Americans descended from those were formerly under bondage and even more formerly kidnapped from West Equatorial Africa. "Black" seems to fit that best, if still very uncomfortably. Despite all the etymological / symbological freight, simplification, and label-i-fication, it is simple and widely used. It is also part of a deeply unifying symbology. The Ying/Yang symbol is an example, showing light and dark as part of all things, and all cycles and processes. Ebony, Jet, Black power, Black is beautiful... all have been ways to rectify the dominant-culture valence of this term.

• Another view of police.
• Worse than collusion.
• Why do we have a new nobility & feudal system?
• UBI is a symptom, not a cure.
• A network of deranged people.
• Social conformity is (partly) genetic.
• Consumer protection? Not us!
• Watch Bill Mitchell in lecture.

Shape-Shifting: The New Phrenology

Anatomical and connectivity patterns in brains correlate with behavior patterns.

Remember phrenology? This was the reading of people's traits and destinies in the shape of their skulls. While the motivation made sense, the brain being the seat of our traits and character, along with consciousness and all other mental functions, the science didn't. It turns out that the brain is far more plastic within its vault than we ever see from the outside - a skull that hardens during early childhood, long before the rest of brain and mental development is complete.

Brain visualization methods have long battled with variability. To do studies using many subjects to find some area of the brain that is "activated" during some task, the brains of those subjects need to be correlated, even though they may be shaped differently. The major landmarks of human brains are quite uniform, but on smaller scales they are not, making comparisons difficult.

But what if that variability is functional, and reflective of our capabilities and personalities? That is the subject of a recent paper, which used a style of MRI called resting state fMRI, which compares brains when they are not doing anything in particular, to see how different areas fire in relation to each other. We have what is called a "default network", which hums along even when we are consciously not doing anything. As any meditator knows, emptying the mind is virtually impossible.. there is always something going on, and these stray activities, not to mention the vast amount of unconscious processing, is the target of this rfMRI. And not just the activity per se, but the correlations between activity in different locations, which, when suitably processed, can tell us about the actual locations of functional modules of brain anatomy, and the strength of their connection.

An illustration/map of the author's data, showing variable and behavior-correlating regions by color. For example, the yellow region bottom left/right, rear of the brain, is in the parietal-occipital sulcus, associated with visually-guided behavior and planning. 

The authors devised measures of variation of region size, and correlated them with behavioral measures. Some of these were remarkably strong, indicating that small increases in a particular brain areas can have strong association with phenotypes like susceptibility to addiction and other vices, intelligence, and self-discipline. The authors focus on the technical implications of their work, which shows that inter-individual variation in functional brain structure is substantial, and makes merging/averaging for many kinds of brain studies more perilous than previously realized. It also implies that previous conclusions about variations in "coupling strength" between regions might be better interpreted as a signal of mass action caused by physically larger regions devoted to a given function.

Functions correlated with anatomical variation in the brain.

It is not surprising that, as we understand the brain better, its evident variations in effect will start to be reflected in corresponding variations in its structure and function. But it is rather disturbing as well, as this work implies that, someday down the road, brain scans may be able to tell others significant secrets about our personal lives and prospects. A "pre-crime" kind of scenario, indeed. It is, of course, one more reason to definitively separate health care from employment. It is also part of a general trend making of our lives, inside and out, an open book.

"Our results indicate that spatial variation in the topography of functional regions across individuals is strongly associated with behaviour. ... Furthermore, recent work has shown that resting state spatial maps can be used to predict task activation maps from individual subjects very accurately, and that interdigitated and highly variable subnetworks can be identified within individuals."

• TED talk on Russian information warfare.
•  ... which becomes our contemporary intelligence test.
• Arming teachers? Right.
• Why not mix a little political corruption with your business corruption?
• Supreme court says it is OK.
• Want a free AR15?
• Some people are naturally more important than other people.
• When reasonable people become socialists....
• Where do tax cuts go? Into stock buybacks.
• Our new feudal reality.

"Taken together, this evidence casts doubt on the idea that more rapid technological progress alone has been the primary driver of rising inequality over recent decades, and tends to lend support to more institutional and structural explanations."

School of Hate

13 Reasons and the dark side of high school.

Why all the hate? Hate has elected a president, and is his tireless message over the twitter-waves. Hate is loose in the Muslim world, in a campaign to instill fear in its enemies. We seem to be prone to it, and can be consumed by it, unawares.

I have been enjoying a Netflix series, thirteen reasons why, which incidentally was partly shot in my city. The titular reasons are ones for suicide, of the main character Hanna. And they are recounted by her in tapes being played after the fact, as the series progresses, by her best friend, Clay. Generally, the production is not very innovative, but the flashbacks and dream sequences are done with great care and style.

Its topic is how horrible high school is in America. Leaders of Britain may be formed on the playing fields of Eton, but American leaders are formed in the hallways and locker rooms of our public high schools. Which are not a pretty sight. The series is a very frank, if lavishly dramatized, look at how teens jockey for power and status, mostly by running down and terrorizing their schoolmates.

Most obvious are the jocks. Having bought into the official / corporate / archetypal system of status through athletics, they are children of privilege, loved by the administration, confident that even if they are not liked, they will be popular anyhow- that is just the way the social system works. They don't come off well in this show, giving in to every amoral whim from booze to bullying to social media meanness, thoughtless when they are not being mean.

From there, we go on to other dramatic dilemmas, of closeted gay students, stalking photographer, catty ex-girl friends, and so forth, salted by a variety of subplots among the adults, like the big-box "Walplex" taking over the town and the school administration covering its ass from Hanna's parents' lawsuit. Hanna was evidently failed, if not terrorized, by a fair proportion of the student body among others. I have not gotten to the end, but she will clearly have plenty of reasons when we get there.

Clay in class

But why is hate so easy? Is hate fun? Is it natural? Yes on both counts. Fascists know well that crowds and hate are a potent, even easy, combination. But it is also one of the most primitive, selfish, and useless emotions. Children hate quite easily, and have grievances that erupt into towering emotion. Growing up means putting a lid on them, so that we can work with all sorts of people, and work effectively without getting side-tracked by emotional baggage. We have created a emotional petri dish for teens by concentrating them in schools, with lots of leisure time, and little serious work. No wonder that the devil finds them such easy prey. Which is to say, their childish emotions, not quite under control or under moral direction. That we elected such an immature person as president speaks to a larger failure of our educational system- that it has failed to advance not just one, but far, far too many US citizens to an emotionally healthy and insightful adulthood.

All religious traditions have technologies of controlling hate, even if they then channel it to their own ends. Buddhists take the most uncompromising approach, decyring all such emotions as false, and engaging in lengthy love-inflected meditation to expunge such thinking. Yet Buddhists have had their wars and hate speach all the same- pacifists have a problem when faced with adversaries more willing to hate than to love. Christians have an ethic of love, yet hatred of Jews (how ironic!) flourished for centuries all the same. Muslims have the Sufi branch, their relatively pacifist brethren. But on the whole, Muslims have a simple and straighforward relation to hate- a deeply tribal approach where infidels are hated, and believers are loved. Except when they are of other sects, in which case they are hated anyhow. The Middle East is about to blow up again, along the Saudi Arabia - Iran axis of hate. So religions are a useful source of ideas and methods of human cultivation, but by no means the or a general answer to moral teaching.

Is it good that American school students go through an education in bullying, hate, and power politics? Most make it through OK, and many find highly positive environments where they find support and direction towards a happy adulthood. Does sobering, even terrorizing, interaction with the dark side build maturity, as it does in fairy tales and dreams? Perhaps so, but the costs are enormous, since many children do not make it out whole and unscathed. Simply put, children do not make a mature society when left to themselves. The under-adulted structure of public schools leaves quite a bit to be desired, in that it does not sufficiently occupy or guide young people.

• Are all males this bad?
• Mentally limited. Mentally impaired. Corrupt. Treasonous.
• Krugman- have Republicans no decency, or spines?
• A wildfire on Greenland?
• Are protests with guns different from protests without?
• Corporate concentration and lack of competition has contributed to lagging pay.
• Notes on the conventional view of unemployment.
• Summers- monetary policy can not do it alone.

Worried About Truth? Try Programming

Programming as a continual lesson in reality and humility.

The reality principle has been taking a beating recently, with an aged child in the White House throwing tantrums and drama in all directions. Truth itself is under direct assault, as lies big and small emerge shamelessly from the highest levels of our institutions and media. What to do? Reality is still out there, and will surely have its revenge, though that may well drop in another time and place, missing the perpetrators of these outrages while ensnaring the rest of us in its consequences.

For now, you may need a psychological and spiritual cleanse, and what better way than to redouble one's engagement with reality than to drop into a totally artificial world- that of programming? Well, many ways, surely. But nothing teaches discipline in service of the reality principle quite like dealing with a perfectly, relentlessly logical device. Truth is not an aspiration in this world, it is a bread and butter reality, established routinely in a few lines of code. In larger projects, it is a remorseless taskmaster, failing on any misplaced character or weakly developed logic. You get out precisely what you put in, whether that was well thought through or not.

No, it doesn't usually look like this.

One lesson is that every bug has a cause. I may not want to hear about it, but if I want that code to work, I don't have any choice but to address it. I may not be able to find the cause easily, but it is in there, somewhere. Even if the bug is due to some deeper bug, perhaps in the programming language itself or the operating system, and is hard to find and impossible to fix, it is in there, somewhere. Coding is in this way one of many paths to maturity- to dealing honestly with the world. While the profession may have an image of child-men uneasy with social reality, it has its own extreme discipline in the service of realities both formal, in the internal structures they are grappling with, and social, in the needs the code ultimately addresses, or fails to address.

Science is of course another way of dealing with reality in a rigorous way. But, compared to programming, it exists at a significantly larger remove from its subject. It can take years to do an experiment. There may be numerous conscious and unconscious ways to influence results. The superstructures of theory, training, and pre-supposition required to obtain even the smallest step into the unknown are enormous, and create great risks of chasing down fruitless, if fashionable, avenues, such as, say, string theory, or multiverses (not to mention ESP!). The conventional literatures, expecially in drug studies and social science, are notoriously full of false and misleading results. Nor is much of this as accessible to the layperson as programming is, which makes engagement with code an accessible as well as effective tonic to our current national vertigo.

• What happened in 2016? Mainly, lots of lying.
• Trump is hardly alone in not caring about the public good.
• What kind of a democracy is this?