Eco-Economics

Adrienne Buller on greenwashing, high finance, and the failures of capitalism viz the environment, in "The Value of a Whale".

This is a very earnest book by what seems to be an environmental activist about the mistaken notion that capitalism gives a fig about climate change. Buller goes through the painstaking economic rationales by which economists attempt to value or really, discount the value of, future generations. And how poorly carbon taxes have performed. And how feckless corporations are about their climate pledges, carbon offsets, and general greenwashing. And how unlikely it is that "socially conscious" investing will change anything. It is a frustrated, head-banging exercise in deflating illusions of economic theory and corporate responsibility. Skimming through it is perhaps the best approach. Here is a sample quote from Buller's conclusion:

Given this entrenched perspective, it is unsurprising that resistance to the kinds of bold change we need to secure a habitable planetary future for all and a safe present for many tend to focus on what we stand to lose. Undeniably, available evidence suggests that 'addressing environmental breakdown may require direct downscaling of economic production and consumption in wealthier countries'. This is an uncomfortable idea to grapple with, but as philosopher Kate Soper writes: 'If we have cosmopolitan care for the well-being of the poor of the world, and a concern about the quality of life for future generations, then we have to campaign for a change of attitudes to work, consumption, pleasure, and self-realization in affluent communities.' There is a sense that this future is necessarily austerian, anti-progress, and defined by lack. Indeed, the same media study cited above found discussion of economies defined by the absence of growth to focus on bleakness and stagnation. Comparatively little attention is directed at what we stand to gain - but there is much to be gained. Understanding what requires us to ask what the existing system currently fails to provide, from universal access to health case and education, to basic material security, to free time. It certainly does not offer a secure planetary future, let alone one in which all life can thrive. And it does not offer genuine democracy, justice or freedom for most. Absent these, what purpose is 'the economy' meant to serve?

Unfortunately, the book is not very economically literate either, making its illusions something of a village of straw men. Who ever thought that Royal Dutch Shell was going to solve climate change? Who ever thought that a $5 dollar per ton tax on CO2 emissions was going to accomplish anything? And who ever thought that the only reason to address climate heating was to save ourselves a dollar in 2098? All these premises and ideas are absurd, hardly the stuff of serious economic or social analysis. 

But then, nothing about our approach to climate heating is serious. It is a psychodrama of capitalism in denial, composed of cossetted capitalist people in the five stages of grief over our glorious carbon-hogging culture. Trucks, guns, and drive-through hamburgers, please! Outright denial is only slowly ebbing away, as we sidle into the anger phase. The conservative Right, which mixes an apocalyptically destructive anti-conservative environmental attitude with a futile cultural conservatism, is angry now about everything. The idea that the environment itself is changing, and requires fundamental cultural and economic change, is an affront. The eco-conscious left is happy to peddle nostrums that nothing really has to change, if we just put up enough solar panels and fund enough green jobs. 

Objectively, given the heating we are already experiencing and the much worse heating that lies ahead, we are not facing up to this challenge. It is understandable to not want to face change, especially limits to our wealth, freedoms, and profligacy. But we shouldn't blame corporations for it. The capitalist system exists to reflect our desires and fulfill them. If we want to binge-watch horror TV, it gives us that. If we want to gamble in Las Vegas, it gives us that. If we want to drive all around the country, it makes that possible. Capitalism transmutes whatever resources are lying around (immigrant labor, publically funded research, buried minerals and carbon, etc.) to furnish things we want. We can't blame that system for fouling up the environment when we knew exactly what was going on and wanted those things it gave us, every step of the way.

No, there is another mechanism to address big problems like climate heating, and that is government. That is where we can express far-sighted desires. Not the desire for faster internet or more entertaining TV, but deep and far-reaching desires for a livable future world, filled with at least some of the animals that we grew up with, and maybe not filled with plastic. It is through our enlightened government that we make the rules that run the capitalist system. Which system is totally dependent on, and subservient to, our collective wisdom as expressed through government. 

So the problem is not that capitalism is maliciously ruining our climate, but that our government, representative as it is of our desires, has not fully faced up to the climate issue either. Because we, as a culture, are, despite the blaring warnings coming from the weather, and from scientists, don't want to hear it. There is also the problem that we have allowed the capitalists of our culture far too much say in the media and in government- a nexus that is fundamentally corrupt and distorts the proper hierarchy of powers we deserve as citizens.

The US games out in 2012 how various carbon taxes will affect emissions, given by electricity production. These are modest levels of taxation, and have modest effects. To actually address the climate crisis, a whole other magnitude of taxation and other tools need to be brought to bear. The actual trajectory came out to more renewables, no growth for nuclear power, and we are still burning coal.

Let me touch on just one topic from the book- carbon taxes. This is classic case of squeemish policy-making. While it is not always obvious that carbon pricing would be a more fair or effective approach than direct regulation of the most offensive industries and practices, it is obvious that putting a price on carbon emissions can be an effective policy tool for reducing overall emissions. The question is- how high should that price be to have the effect we want? Well, due to the universal economic consensus that carbon pricing would be a good thing, many jurisdictions have set up such pricing or capping schemes. But very few are effective, because, lo and behold, they did not want to actually have a strong effect. That is, they did not want to disrupt the current way of doing things, but only make themselves (and ourselves) feel good, with a slight inducement to moderate future change. Thus they typically exempt the most polluting industries outright, and set the caps high and the prices low, so as not to upset anyone. And then Adrienne Buller wonders why these schemes are so universally ineffective.

Carbon prices in California are currently around $30 per ton CO2, and this has, according to those studying the system, motivated one third of the state's overall carbon reductions over the current decade. That is not terrible, but clearly insufficient, even for a forward-thinking state, since we need to wring carbon out of our systems at a faster pace. Raising that price would be the most direct way for us as a society to do that. But do we want to? At that point, we need to look in the mirror and ask whether the point of our policies should be addressing climate heating in the most effective way possible, or to avoid pain and change to our current systems. Right now, we are on a sort of optimal trajectory to avoid most of the economic and social pain of truly addressing climate change, (by using gradualist and incremental policies), but at the cost of not getting there soon enough and thus incurring increasing levels of pain from climate heating itself- now, and in a future that is measured, not in years, but in centuries. 

The second big point to make about this book and similar discussions is that it largely frames the problem as an economic one for humanity. How much cost do we bear in 2100 and 2200, compared with the cost we are willing to pay today? Well, that really ignores a great deal, for there are other species on the planet than ourselves. And there are other values we have as humans, than economic ones. This means that any cost accounting that gets translated into a carbon price needs to be amplified several fold to truly address the vast array of harms we are foisting on the biosphere. Coral reefs are breaking down, tropical forests are losing their regenerative capability, and the arctic is rapidly turning temperate. These are huge changes and harms, which no accounting from an economic perspective "internalizes". 

So, we need to psychologically progress, skipping a few steps to the facing-it part of the process, which then will naturally lead us towards truly effective solutions to get to carbon neutrality rapidly. Will it cost a lot? Absolutely. Will we suffer imbalances and loss of comforts? Absolutely. But once America faces up to a problem, we tend to do a good job accepting those tradeoffs and figuring out how to get the results we want. 

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• Thoughts on the drug war.

Science Fiction as Theology

Let's look higher than the clouds. Let's look to the stars.

I have always been rather dismissive of theology- the study of something that doesn't exist. But if one takes it in a larger sense of a culture of scripture, story telling, morals, and social construction, then sure, it makes more sense. But then so do alot of other stories. I have been enjoying the Foundation series via streaming, which is at best "inspired" by the original books, yet takes its premises reasonably seriously and grows a complex and interesting set of story lines to what by the end of the first season is a positive and promising conclusion. I would ding it for excessive adherence to Star Wars-style action and simplistic morality, compared with the more cerebral original, but that is only to be expected these days.

Science fiction is having a golden age, as a way to tell important, probing stories and consider alternative futures. The Star Trek franchise generally sticks with hopeful futures, which I certainly favor. Their world is post-money, post internal conflict, post-disease. But philosophically alive through contact with other civilizations. The theological implications are momentous, as we envision a culture very different from our own, and blessed with various magical means of deliverance, like transporters, replicators, and warp drives. Where the "science fiction" books of the Bible were mostly dystopian (Job, Revelation, Genesis), Science fiction in our era straddles the line, with plenty of dystopian offerings, but also hopeful ones. Whether Star Wars is hopeful might be a matter of debate, since bad guys and bad empires never seem to go away, and the position of the resistance is always impossibly dire.

White male mathematician Hari Seldon takes on the role of god, in the Foundation series. He calculates out the future of the galaxy, clairvoyantly predicting events, and then comes back from beyond the grave to keep guiding his flock through crisis after crisis.

Are Star Trek futures any more realistic than those of Revelation? Are they theologically more sound? I think yes on both counts. Revelation is a rather unhinged response to the late Jewish era in its apocalyptic relations with Rome, as it headed into exile and the diaspora. There is a welter of reworked Old Testament material and obscure references, turning into florid visions that have misled Christians for centuries. Star Trek and the other science fiction franchises, on the other hand, are a bit more restrained in their visionary quests and escatologies, and more hopeful, for abundant futures where some problems have been solved while other forms of politics and history continue to call for strong moral values. This is quite different than the bizarre and ecstatic culmination of Revelation at the end of history, in the last days.

We also get to live out the visions, on a small scale, as technology advances in the real world. Smart phones have transformed our lives, for instance, one promise kept from the early science fiction days. And our only real hope for dealing with climate change is to harness better technologies, rather than going down dystopian roads of degrowth, famine, and war. So there are real futures at stake here, not just visions of futures.

While our current physics totally bars the adventures that are portrayed in contemporary science fiction epics, their theological significance lies in their various visions of what humanity can and should do. They, as Revelation, are always keyed to their historical moment, with America ascendent and technologically advanced over other cultures. But they do not use their magical elements and story arcs to promote quiescence and slack-jawed wonder at the return of the son of god, who will make everything right and mete out judgement to all the bad people. (Or do the opposite, in the case of Job.) No, they uniformly encourage resistance against injustice, and hopeful action towards a better world, or galaxy, or universe, as the case may be.

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Myth and Science

Stories we tell about how things work.

I am reading an ancient book about ancient myths, covering some of what was known of the ancient world's stories circa the mid-20th century (that is, the "developed" ancient world of Egypt, the Near East, China, India, etc.). The authors occasionally seem exasperated that their colleagues- the ancient authors of these stories and myths- do not always take their stories as seriously as scholars themselves do, after having so painstakingly learned the relevant languages, unearthed the precious tablets, papyri, inscriptions, and other sources, compared different versions, and interpreted them in light of the historical setting. No, ancient myths can be playful affairs, evolving in dramatic complexity, freely mutating to serve the needs of the moment in their mutable oral traditions. This is especially true the farther back you go into ethnographic history, such as into the stories of the Inuit and other First Peoples of North America. It is evident that ancient societies varied widely in their theological and mythological sophistication, and particularly how closely entwined these were with the centers of power.

Inuit mythologies and their custodian, the shaman.

The scholarly apparatus around myth studies has a very earnest and modernist cast, which derives from two sources. First is Christianity, which as an extreme political and social elaboration of ancient religions has progressively reified and codified its myths. Inheriting a grab-bag of disparate ancient myths and stories, Christianity shored up its social position and theological bona fides by insisting that it was all true. The more sclerotic and far-reaching its bureaucratic structure, the more tightly it held to the absolute truth of its dogmas. A second aspect was the enlightenment and the rise of scientific modernity. That world view was not interested in playful myths of psychodrama, but in hard truths of how the world really works, stripped of the colorful trappings. Competition with this world view helped to further push religious dogmas in an absolutist direction, to that point where today, both Christian Evangelicals and fundamentalist Islamists insist that their scriptures are literally true, handed down from an all-powerful god who really exists and is not fictive construct meant as a playful expression of our scientific ignorance on one hand, and our love of social drama on the other. Anthropologists took their cues from all this, assuming that the precious myths they were studying had to be expressions of a society's absolute truths, organizing principles, and deepest motivations. But perhaps they were originally ways to pass the time and enchant a few youngsters.

Science is telling stories, too. Are they really so different? On the one hand, our need to orient ourselves in the world remains unchanged from ancient times, so the core purpose of explaining reality and society through complicated tales of causes and effects remains. And to a lay person, the explanations of quantum mechanics or cosmic inflation are no less impenetrable than myths about gods and dragons. Thus the scientists who are the custodians of these stories find themselves in the ironic position of a new priesthood, cultivating the cultural narrative around origins, natural phenomena, biology, and the like, while extending these stories in systematic ways that the priests (and alchemists, and shamans, and druids) of yore could only dream about, if they could even conceive of such reliable beliefs untethered from social drama and social control. But today's scientists can't and won't inject ancillary drama into these stories, so they will remain split off from their traditional roles and uses.

So the telling of dramatic stories and the consequent management of society through the narratives of origins, myths, and meaning- if ancient myths really did fulfill these functions, which is perhaps an anachronistic construction on our part, or at least varied widely with the nature of ancient societies- are skills having nothing, really, to do with the scientific enterprise of today, and thus nothing to do with this new priesthood. Who takes these roles?

Theology would seem the natural place for the living and socially relevant myth. But theology has split definitively from science, from history, and indeed from reality, nurturing narratives that are absurd while claiming they are true, and which in their antiquity and provincialism are impossibly remote from our current concerns, morals, and social ability to relate even allegorically. Theology has thus become lost in a sterile wilderness, doomed to be cut off from its mythical and social power. Even the more liberal and elastic precincts, if they do not insist on absolute literal truth, adhere to the crusty old stories of the Bible, which while occasionally artistic, are mostly a maddening hodgpodge and, frankly, boring. What was riveting in antiquity about lengthy ancestor lists, angry gods, virgin births, and ascending into the clouds is ridiculous today. 

The story-telling mantle has obviously been taken over by Hollywood- by the Marvel series, Star Treks, Star Wars, Potter series, and similar epics of modern fantasy. They bend reality in classically mythical ways, make up their own theology as they go along, (and throw it away as casually with the next installment), and communicate constantly updated social mores. The graphics are otherworldly, the stories and morals are updated, but the fundamental sophistication of these stories can't really be said to have advanced much. They are speaking to human nature, after all- a conversation between our inborn archetypes and the social and technological conditions we find ourselves in.

The key point is that Hollywood myths are taken as intended- as fertile and mind-expanding fantasies with social and moral lessons that are (hopefully) beneficial and relevant for our times. They are not trying to claim their myths as true- that would be absurd. Thus they do not collide with either scientific or theological claims, and use myth as it was originally and truly intended- as the dreamlike realm of symbolic human drama, full of lessons, yes, but not scientific ones, or even pseudoscientific ones.

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• Some nice piano.

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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• Bill Mitchell on inflation and other historical matters.
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The Parables of Octavia Butler

Review of Parable of the Sower, and Parable of the Talents, about earily familiar dystopias and the religions they call forth.

Octavia Butler is having a moment. The late science fiction author published the parable books in 1993 and 1998, not even knowing of the coming G. W. Bush administration, let alone that of Donald Trump. But her evangelical-supported right wing presidential candidate issues a call to "Make America great again". Her insight and prescience is head-spinning, in books that portray an America much farther gone into division, inequality, corporate power, and chaos (all owing to climate change(!)) than we in actual reality are- yet only by degrees. That is only the window dressing and frame, however. Her real subjects are religion and human purpose. I will try to not give away too much, since these make dramatic and interesting reading.

The books introduce heroine Lauren Olamina, who is totally together and possessed of a mission in life. She grows up in a neighborhood compound walled off from the chaos outside, but quite aware of the desperate conditions there. Her father is a pastor, and both she and her brother become, through the books, preachers as well. The brother in a conventional Christian mode, but Lauren founds a new religion, one maybe tailored for the generally skeptical science fiction audience. God is change. That is it. Lauren emphasizes empathy, usefulness, education, and the shaping of change, but there is no god as traditionally conceived. It is a sort of buddhistic philosophy and educational / communal program rather than a supernaturalist conjuring, and love (or fear), of imaginary beings.

One question is whether such a philosophy would actually gain adherents, form communities and function as a religion. I get the sense that Butler would have dearly loved for her ideas to gain a following, to actually ripen, as did those of fellow science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, into an actual religion (however horrible his escapade actually turned out to be!). But their difference is instructive. Hubbard's Dianetics/Scientology is a floridly imagined narrative of super-beings, secret spiritual powers, and crazy salvation. Absolute catnip to imaginative seekers wanting to feel special and purposeful. On the other hand, Olamina's system is quite arid, with most of the motive force supplied, as the book relates, by her own determination and charisma. Her philosophy is true, and therein lies a big, big problem. Truth does not supply purpose- we already knew that scientifically. Natural selection is all about change, and makes us want to live, flourish, and propagate. Change is everpresent, and while it might be healthy to embrace it and work with it, that is hardly an inspiring and purpose-filling prospect, psychologically. As the books relate in their narrative of Lauren's life, change is also often quite terrible, and to be feared.

But the more important question is what role people such as Lauren play, and why people like her followers exist. People need purpose. Life is intrisically purposeless, and while we have immediate needs and wants, our intelligence and high consciousness demands more- some reason for it all, some reason for existence, collectively and individually. An extra motive force beyond our basic needs. We naturally shape our lives into a narrative, and find it far easier and more compelling if that narrative is dramatic, with significance beyond just the humdrum day-to-day. But such narratives are not always easy to make or find. Classic epics typically revolve around war and heroic deeds, which continue to make up the grist of Hollywood blockbusters. Religion offers something different- a multi-level drama, wrapped up in collective archetypes and usually offering salvation in some form, frequently a hero, if not a militaristic one. Last week's post mentioned the life of Che Guevara, who found purpose in Marxism, and was so fully seized by it that he bent many others, possibly the whole nation of Cuba, to his will / ideology. Lauren Olamina is a similar, special person who has, through her own development and talents, discovered a strong purpose to her life and the world at large that she feels compelled to share, pulling others along on her visionary journey. Are such people "strong"? Are their followers "weak"? 

Human social life is very competitive, with the currency being ability to make others think what you want them to think, and do what you want them to do. Our ideology of freedom was built by a founding class of dominant, slave-holding rich white men who wanted only to come to a reasonable accommodation for political power within their class, not extend freedom to women, blacks, or the poor. This ideology was highly successful as a sort of civic religion, coming down to us in two traditions- the "winning" tradition of native American extermination, ruthless capitalism, and growing international empire- all set within a reasonably stable elitist political system. And the second "freedom" tradition, which gave us abolitionism, the civil rights movement, and the modern Democratic party, which takes Jefferson's ideals at their word, however little he actually meant them.

Religion is a particularly powerful engine of political and social ideology, making people go through ridiculous rituals and abasements to keep on the safe side of whatever the powerful tell them. So yes, domineering social personalities like Lauren and Che, (and Trump), are very powerful, deservedly treated as larger-than-life, charismatic figures. Their powers are archetypal and dangerous, so it falls to skeptics and free-thinkers to offer antidotes, if their charisma goes off the rails. Butler offers a hero who is relentlessly good and positive, as well as charismatic and strong, so the only competition comes from ignorance, conventional wisdom, and from the competing religious powers like traditional Christianity. But the power of artificial purposes, and of the charismatic figures who propound them, is almost uniformly corrupting, so Lauren's opposition is, in the end, far more realistic as a portrayal of what we are facing, now and in the future.

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• Obstruction of justice, in a continuing saga of impeachable offenses.

Atlas of Political Correctness

An appreciation of Cloud Atlas. (Spoiler alert!)

I recently happened across the 2012 film "Cloud Atlas", which must be one of the baggiest films ever made. Even reading the plot on the Wikipedia page leaves one befuddled. Yet it was great fun to watch, clearly an actor's feast and treasury of tropes and cultural references, six films packed into one. It is typical for science fiction films now to have huge ambitions and let plots go wild, sacrificing coherence for short-term motivation and effects. No reference to 2001 here- that would have been a harsh comparison, and overly optimistic.

The ensemble of actors get to play many roles, some have parts in each of the six stories set in different time periods. But no one crosses type. The good characters are always played by one set of actors, the bad guys by the other set. Nurse Noakes of the prison-like nursing home, in an inspired bit of cross-dressing, is played by Hugo Weaving, who also plays the killer Bill Smoke and the future executioner Boardman Mephi, among others. This helpfully keeps at least the good-guy/bad guy valence coherent, even as the rest of stories hop-scotch about wildly in time and place.

And what places! There is a matrix-like high-tech future dystopia, and even more dystopian low-tech lord-of-the-flies future beyond that, a seventies streets-of-San Francisco, Victorian shipping, wartime England, and the present. A grab-bag of well-worn settings, vivified by enthusiastic acting and propulsive, if perforated, plots.

Everything is confused. This DVD cover hints at the sprawling mess the Wachowski brothers attempted to bring to the screen.

So what is it about? Each story has a basic good versus bad armature, whether of vast world-spanning oppression countered by a Zion/Keanu Reeves-style resistance, an oil industry plot to blow up a nuclear reactor, countered by a journalist, or an evil Hugh Grant who tries to lock up his brother in a nursing home, which the latter escapes in a crazy escape and chase sequence. The various worlds / times are tenuously linked by readings from their respective pasts. The farthest future uses a climactic speech from the Zion-like resistance as its scripture. The Zion resistance watches the nursing home caper for entertainment. And so forth. The real connections, however, are the politically correct tropes of contemporary movie making. The heroes are all good, the villains are all bad, and each is ready identified (cue music) whatever the age we may be in.

The relentlessness of this good/bad dichotomy easily knits the whole thing together even without an identifiable plot, yet is also a glaring philosophical weakness. We watch movies to be uplifted and gain some hope in a difficult world, and generally expect and deserve a happy ending. But films such as these prompt the question of why... Why are bad people so common throughout the ages? Why do they dominate epoch after epoch, world after world, when every single person in the audience is cheering for the good characters, not the bad? Isn't there something deeper to be said? Indeed, isn't this easy, Zoroastrian / Manichean dramatic dichotomy damaging to a mature understanding of the world and of ourselves?

If we simply cheer for the good, and from such flacid moral exercises believe we are good, doesn't that lead right to the moral blindness that these movies try so strenuously and earnestly to "address"? Doesn't it contribute to various unwoke blindnesses like white priviledge and American exceptionalism? Unless we interrogate our own involvement in evil, the needs and compromises we routinely make, which lead through the many white-washed, green-washed, and theo-washed institutions of greed and tribalism to all the bad effects we decry in the world around us, we have not gotten very far.

• Language of fascism.
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On the Origin of Facts

Bruno Latour tours the Salk Institute, finds science taking place, and has a hard time deconstructing it.

There is a production process in science, by which the educational background, institutional setting, funding decisions, social accidents, and happenstances that form directions of research, hunches, hypotheses, and insights are stripped away, intentionally and systematically, to produce "facts" in a form ready for publication. This de- / re-contextualization serves to obfuscate the process and shamanize the practitioners, but more importantly it serves to generalize the resulting fact and put it into its scientific rather than social context. And it is the scientific context- the fact's objective existence- not the social context, that makes it powerful and useful for further construction of other facts. The social context forms part of the essential background / input, but the produced facts and insights are not by nature social, nor should they be received as such.

Experiments are instrumental in this transformation process, which goes from a hunch, to a collegial suggestion, to an hypothesis, to a testable hypothesis, to the hunt for alternative hypotheses and thus for experiments designed to exclude them and to support the main hypothesis, (if true), followed by group presentations and critique, outside peer review that adduces more alternative hypotheses and possible experiments, and finally to publication and collegial acceptance (or rejection and refutation). When all this is done, the murky origins of the hunch necessarily fall away and become trivially unimportant, (other than in memoirs and reminiscences), and the fact stands alone as supported with all the armament that science can bring to bear, both in its technical testing capabilities and its social structure of critique. It thence, if lucky, becomes a sentence in a textbook. In Bruno Latour's words, it is "freed from the circumstances of its production"

The above was a recounting of the conventional (and scientist's) perspective on the evolution of scientific facts. Whether this is the case is contested by social constructivism, a movement in philosophy that adheres to antirealism, which is to say that all of what we regard as outside "reality" is socially constructed, and thus science is likewise a social institution that generates conventions that by its social power it is able to foist onto a naive public, who in turn, like sheep, contribute their taxes to keep the scientific community wallowing in money and social power, cranking out yet more obscure and artificial "facts". Indeed, the very status of truth that is given to facts is fundamentally a social construct made up of a community of believing people, whatever their reasons and supposed evidence.

A few of Latour's works over the years. He declines to be post-modern, because he disagrees with the whole frame of modernity, as being somehow different from or non-continuous with the rest of history. And this attitude comes back to his dismissive attitude towards science and the enlightenment as being a break in kind from prior ways of understanding the world. It has just been fetishes all the way down.

Bruno Latour (along with his co-writer Steve Woolgar) waded into this controversy back in the 1970s with a French philosophical and anthropological background, to investigate what really goes on in a laboratory. He embedded himself into a leading laboratory and learned how it operated, informally and formally. This is recounted in the book "Laboratory Life" (1979; recent review), which, as usual for continental philosophers, is challenging to make sense of. The authors tend to straddle the two perspectives, both respecting and recounting the normal scientific activities and perspectives, (if rather laboriously), and then also persistently suggesting their contrary viewpoint and program that they bring to the project.

"Despite the fact that our scientists held the belief that the inscriptions could be representations or indicators of some entity with an independent existence 'out there', we have argued that such entities were constituted solely through the use of these inscriptions. ... By contrast, we do not conceive of scientists using various strategies as pulling back the curtain on pregiven, but hitherto concealed, truths. Rather, objects (in this case substances) are constituted through the artful creativity of scientists. Interestingly, attempts to avoid the use of terminology which implies the preexistence of objects subsequently revealed by scientists has led us into certain sylistic difficulties. This, we suggest, is precisely because of the prevalence of a certain form of discourse in the description of process. We have therefore found it extremely difficult to formulate descriptions of scientific activity which do not yield to the misleading impression that science is about discovery (rather than creativity and construction). It is not just that a change of emphasis is required; rather, the formulations which characterize historical descriptions of scientific practice require exorcism before the nature of this practice can best be understood."

Exorcism indeed! One might posit a simpler explanation- that science is, in fact, in the business of discovery, though with the caveat that what is to be dis-covered is never fully known beforehand, sometimes not even suspected, and thus there is a great deal of intutition, creativity, variation, and social construction involved in the process, and uneven and unpredictable results coming out. While the status of the resulting fact is never perfectly secure, and is supported by another social process of conventional agreement, that agreement is routinely granted once the preceeding critical hoops have been surmounted and leads generally to the vast pool of factual and "objective" information that finds its home in the academic literature, textbooks, college instruction, Wikipedia, etc. A pool that is further confirmed routinely by succeeding work and technical developments that depend on its objective factuality.

Latour does not, in the end, adhere to the hard program of social construction, for the simple fact that the object of the scientific story he recounts, the thyrotropin releasing hormone (TRF), was found, was found to be a specific and real substance, and went on to a respected place in medical practice and the textbooks, not to mention later earning a Nobel prize. There is real comedy in the attempt, however, as the anthropologist takes on the scientists at their own game, analyzing and plumbing their depths for structures and paradigms that they themselves hardly suspect, complete with diagrams of the laboratory, pictures of the roof and other apparatus, graphs of publication trends, and verbatim interviews with protagonists, underlings, etc. It is a sort of depth-psychology of one laboratory.

"But it would be incorrect to conclude that the TRF story only exhibits the partial influence of sociological features. instead, we claim that TRF is a thoroughly social construction. By maintaining the sense in which we use social, we hope to be able to pursue the strong programme at a level apparently beyond traditional sociological grasp. In Knorr's terms, we want to demonstrate the idiosyncratic, local, heteregeneous, contextual, and multifaceted character of scientific practices. We suggest that the apparently logical character of reasoning is only part of a much more complex phenomenon that Auge calls 'practices of interpretation' and which comprises local, tacit negotiation, constantly changing evaluations, and unconscious or institutionalized gestures. ... In short, we observe how difference between the logic of scientific and non-scientific practices of interpretation are created and sustained within the laboratory."

Granted, most of this is overwrought, but the true worth of this work was that these observers came into an eminent lab and paid minute attention to what was going on, and emphasized that what comes out of the sausage machine in publication and other products is far different than the materials that go in. While the conventional approach would emphasize the preceeding scientific observations and technical developments that led the leader of this lab to even contemplate that the purification of TRF from millions of dissected brains was possible and desirable, Latour emphasizes instead, and with some success, the social contingencies that surrounded the original uncertainties, the slow progress, the false leads and constantly discarded "bad results", the huge amount of money and effort required, and other nitty-gritty that forms the day-today of laboratory life. The latter emphasis is useful in accounting for how science gets done, but discards other crucial inputs, and is ultimately not at all convincing as a general theory of what science accomplishes or is.

I think the confusion arises fundamentally (apart from professional jealousy) from the fact that social constructivism is perfectly valid for some areas of our lives, such as arts, fashion, religion, morality, and to some extent, politics. Many problems do not have an objective criterion, and are socially constructed on an ongoing basis with criteria that boil down to what and who is thought good, whether for the individual, family, collective, etc. And the insistant denial of the total social construction of one's own field- as is understandably routine among scientists- is particularly vehement (and unfounded) in the case of religion and has lent the latter bizarre and extraordinary power through the centuries, which the deconstructivist project is entirely appropriate and well-prepared to investigate. And it should be said that many forms of primitive and pseudo-science partake of this form as well, if not of outright fraud. So the line is hardly stable or absolute. But when it comes to science as practiced in the enlightnement tradition, with a variety of safeguards and institutional practices that feature competition, peer review at multiple levels, and final public transparency, the approach falls flat.

• A contemporary accounting of this scientific race, last of a 3-part series.
• TRF is one of a series of "releasing hormones", operating between the hypothalamus and pituitary. Or should the word "is" be put in quotes?
• A critique of the critique.
• Mankiw takes on MMT, and obsesses about inflation, along mainstream lines.
• MMT replies.
• Limited liberty at Liberty University.
• Notes from the Taliban.
• Birds: who cares?
• A cult is exposed.

The Problem With Atheism

Bernard Mandeville and the impossibility of getting along without lying.

We live in a little cloud of lies. From the simplest white lie and social protocol for hiding unpleasantness, to the universal belief that one's own family, city, country are better than the other ones, untruth is pervasive, and also essential. Vanity, optimism, a standard set of cognitive biases.. are opposed to the reality principle. The economic commonplaces which are, as Keynes noted, unknowningly derived from some defunct economist. Our unconscious is resolutely irrational. Euphemism, humor and swearing are ways to refer to truths that are difficult to bring up in straightforward fashion. But more serious truths are the more deeply hidden. Such as death, the final stop on everyone's trip. Full-on honesty and truth? No one wants that, or could live with it.

Many thinkers have plumbed these depths, from Machiavelli to Freud. Bernard Mandeville was one, profiled in a recent BBC podcast. His most enduring (and brief) work was the Fable of the Bees, which portrays a society much like Britain's, rife with greed, ambition, corruption, and crime. Due to moralist complaints, god decides to make this hive moral and good, upon which everything promptly goes to pot. The economy, previously held up by a love of luxury, collapses. Courts and lawyers have nothing to do, clothing fashions fail to change. The traders leave the seas for lack of demand, and the military succumbs for lack of population. The hive ends up resembling one truly composed of bees, and goes to live a hollow tree, never to be heard from again.

"Those, that were in the Wrong, stood mute,
And dropt the patch'd vexatious Suit.
On which, since nothing less can thrive,
Than Lawyers in an honest Hive."
... 

"Do we not owe the Growth of Wine
To the dry, crooked, shabby Vine?
Which, whist its shutes neglected stood,
Choak'd other Plants, and ran to Wood;
But blest us with his Noble Fruit;
As soon as it was tied, and cut:
So Vice is beneficial found,
When it's by Justice lopt and bound;"

His point, naturally, was that vice is both natural and to a some extent the underpinning of national greatness and economic vitality (given some beneficial management). Greed is good, as is irrational optimism and ambition. Mandeville was also a famous anticlericalist in his day, but that is another story. It was a classic contrarian point, that what we fight tooth and nail to vanquish or hide has, in reality, a role to play in the national character and success, for all its embarrassment. And that we routinely lie, to ourselves above all, to hide the truth of reality so that we can go on our way from one day to the next.

"My aim is to make Men penetrate into their Consciences, and be searching without Flattery into the true Motives of their Actions, learn to know themselves."
- Bernard Mandeville, in Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church, and National Happiness.

What is our most florid and communal lie, but religion? This is the salve of social togetherness, moral self righteousness, and imaginary immortality. It is the finely tuned instrument that addresses alike our private fears and social needs. And atheists know it is completely, utterly wrong! But what is the point of saying so? Religions have been corrupt, abusive, greedy and murderous from time immemorial- they have many faults. But untruth is not a flaw.. it is the reigning feature of this imaginative confection, providing the credulous a full belief system to support a positive and hopeful self-image, (not to mention conventional authority!), so important to happiness, providing the more skeptical an endless labyrinth of theological puzzles, while providing even the most skeptical or apathetic a social institution to call home.

So why go around ripping the clothes from believers, crying that their cherished narratives of meaning are senseless- that they should go forth theologically naked? It is a serious question for atheists, going to the heart of our project. For Freud, after all, repression had a positive function, and was not to be comprehensively cleared away, root and branch, only pruned judiciously. Lying is indeed integral to mature social functioning. Clearly, untruth is not, by itself, an unacceptable portion of the human condition. This implies that atheists need to be generally gentle in approach, and selective in what they address directly- the most significant outrages and injustices perpetrated by religions, of which there is no shortage. When religions invade the territory of science, making bone-headed proclamations about biology and geology, that clearly crosses such a line. And likewise when religions insinuate themselves into governmental institutions, bent on seeking power to foist their beliefs and neuroses on others.

The so-called arrogance of atheists consists of their opposing / exposing the cherished verities of others as false. Such arrogance is of course not unknown among religious believers and zealots either, and for much more modest cause. The secular state settlement of the West has forced religions to forego armed conflict and state violence in the pursuit of their truths and enemies. Atheists should take a page from this success to lead by example and humor, rather than frontal assault, even rhetorically.

• BBC to continue spouting religion.
• Silicon valley has its religion as well- a sort of Stockholm syndrome.
• But lies in politics.. is there no limit?
• Hate is in the textbooks, in Saudi Arabia.
• Euro countries are not independent.
• 5G to rule them all.
• Heredity counts for a lot.. more than parenting.
• The labor market could run much, much better.

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."

Heroes, Superheroes, and Saviors

What do we see in the hero myth? With apologies to Joseph Campbell.

I was watching the TV version of Dune, which, while much better than the movie, hardly matches the book. Seeing it again made it painfully clear how this story, so gripping to my younger self, is a formulaic hero tale, just as Harry Potter would be for the next generation, Frodo Baggins was for the one before, and Arthur, Beowulf, Jesus, Buddha, Rama, and Odysseus have been since antiquity. What do we see in them, and why are they so riveting?

Obviously, these tales speak to the meaning of life, in a direct and comprehensive way. Though mostly for males- Heroes and their students are, as a rule, male. They go on adventures, lead others, resolve mysteries, and ultimately solve communal problems. What they achieve is status, renown, and perhaps the hand of the princess, who is the typical hero of the female archetypal tale (though see also Dorothy, Alice, Mulan, et al.).

These qualities have relatively little to do with one's purely individual path through life, judged by, say, happiness, or one's success in earning a living, attending to the humdrum affairs of personal life, comfort, and family. Rather, it is a wider social role and service that is the point, and fame is the coin of this realm. The hero slays monsters that have terrified the people and despoiled their crops. Or he retrieves the chalice that gives everlasting life and salvation. Or he uses a mysterious force to lead a rebel alliance against the totalitarian galactic empire.

Horses? This quest needs no horses!

Hero tales are formative for those in formation- the maturing child, who instinctively yearns to accomplish something significant, which is the path to status in the collective, and thus to relative power and reproductive success. But what defines success and significance? It is necessarily the collective that must define what is important, via its bards who recite its problems both perennial and topical, provide the grist of heroic adventure and conflict, and award fame for their successful conclusion. Whether it is raging beasts in the countryside, Orwellian tyranny, taunting goddesses, or a world-wide conspiracy of death-eaters, the threat is not individual, but collective, and thus the hero serves the collective, something "greater than himself", as many people express their seeking behavior. Success of any kind is attractive, but to be truly compelling, success needs to resolve big problems and be valued by others. (Though in fairness, the hero may toil in obscurity and only be recognized in retrospect, perhaps long after his death, to have solved the momentous problem. Such a tale may have additional romance, and happen in reality all too often, but is not typically what a reader wishes to emulate for her or his own life path.)

One characteristic element of the standard hero tale is the reckoning with the father. Luke Skywalker finally meets his maker in a climactic scene. Jesus naturally has mixed emotions about his father, whoever that might be, who has left him up on the cross. The father represents the existing system, which has formed the hero, but which also perpetuates all the problems that he exists to solve. The father must be transcended for the tale to conclude successfully. Paul Atreides has spiritual and temporal powers far beyond his father's, and succeeds where the father had failed. More interestingly, Jesus, while always respectful of the father and putatively acting in his service, ends up totally upending the father's theology and bringing a new dispensation, whether that was "in reality" his intention or not.

Sometimes the goal of a quest is so abstract and theologically attenuated as to be absurd. Maybe the quest was the important thing after all.

More complicated is the role of the special gift. Harry Potter has the mark of the lightning flash, and special powers of leadership and magic. All the Marvel heros have some special power. Heroes are typically born of noble houses, though they may be unrecognized or abused for some of the story. What is the function of all this apparatus? Isn't the point of the hero tale to inspire normal boys to seek glory for themselves from/for their collective? Why start with abnormal heroes? The quest needs to be done in a noble way, morally upright. But that hardly requires a particular form of birth.

I think much of this has to do with the inner quest, which is another aspect of the hero tale. In order to seek outer glory, the hero needs first an inner quest, to find the confidence, knowledge, and personal resources to do extraordinary things. Jesus grappled with satan in the desert, while Paul Atreides grapples with sandworms in the desert (always an epic setting; Lawrence of Arabia grappled there with a recalcitrant, but noble, Arab culture). Each person has some special gifts and skills, and an important aspect of life, particularly adolescence, is to find what those might be. The ability to be clairvoyant, or to accumulate The Force are symbolic of momentous discoveries about the self which happen during growth to adulthood. While few of us will find nirvanna, or that we are the son of god, nevertheless whatever we do find will be the key to our ability to differentiate ourselves from the crowd, while earning its respect. Each person follows this archetypal path, and it is typically a difficult and uncertain one, thus the universal interest it evokes.

The noble house and lineage aspect seems more atavistic. One of the hero's special gifts / typical traits (which is key to the story's cultural and pedagogical significance) is to be naturally noble in deportment, morals, and martial prowess. Given our instinctive racism and appreciation for inheritance of traits, it is then natural to make this occur by having the hero some secret child of the king, or an acknowledged child who breaks out of the mold and takes a different path (Buddha). Or who comes both from a noble family and from the planet Krypton. Surely we could come up with a more modern way to handle this! Even the Black Panther is of noble birth. Tolkein gets points on this score for his low-class heroes in the Lord of the Rings.

But there is also a superstitious element. Luck is one thing the hero needs to have on his side, and this has traditionally been bound up with cosmic forces and mysteries, instinctively (and animistically) personified. Special forms of communication with these forces, or at least encouraging signs from them, would by this primitive instinct, be essential to success. One can take this in more rational way, however, to indicate a certain humility and appreciation before the complex and often inscrutable real forces that form our basis of operations, including the social forces that may not be ready for the hero's revolutionary work and need to be brought along by way of their primitive beliefs, whatever their nature and value.

Maybe a little self-flagellation would help?

It is particularly pathetic when a hero is so venerated and his boons are so attractive that his devotees make a fetish or even religion of him, employing a priesthood to retail third-hand boons of a studiously invisible nature. Generally, the emulation of nobility, and inner quests modeled on that of the hero, are not a bad thing. But the whole point of the tale was to find and develop one's own self and one's own resources- one's unique gifts and path in life- rather than to adopt another's wholesale, or worse yet, to fantasize about fictional powers and benefits that can be cadged via supplication and abasement. That would be to fundamentally misunderstand the point of the hero archetype, going so far as to reverse it as an engine for the most unheroic behavior. Thankfully, such overblown renditions have been relatively rare over the recent centuries (though Scientology, and before that, Mormonism, stand as significant and unfortunate counter-examples). Yet overall, absurd hero-religions, mostly stemming from more distant epochs, remain all too common.

The quality of the hero story plays an important role in its society, of which it is a gauge and exemplar. Just think of the pervasive influence of Homer's epics, or of Christianity. It defines not only the archetypal problems to be faced, but the standard of morality / nobility the aspiring hero must have to engage in its quest / solution. Star Wars cast the enemy as a Stalinist totalitarianism, while Buddhism cast the enemy as Maya and attachment to outer and fleeting things. While moral good and bad are perennial problems of the human condition, other aspects can change. The balance between inner and outer quests is a key indicator of a tale's maturity and spiritual content. Our current tales seem to center on the Marvel universe, of which I know very little. But it seems generally dedicated to extravagant violence and justice, with a somewhat infantile/regressive tone, overall. There is limited inner focus. They seem on the level of the Bond franchise, but without the understatement or style. It was extremely disturbing when, after 9/11, there was a rash of corner-cutting hero tales that supported the use of torture.

John Cleese strikes a heroic pose.

At this time when the actual culture is run by those fitting an antihero archetype, (technically, the heel), and the planet truly in peril, it is even more imperative that the stories that form our hero mythology and guide our questing youth be well-constructed, compelling, positive, and timely in their selection and portrayal of problems. Vietnam was a watershed in this regard, sending us from the morally simple comforts of the old Westerns and Hollywood classics, into self-lacerating work like Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, and most recently, Game of Thrones. This depressing trajectory reflects changes in American culture, which has become more complicated and self-doubting, (perhaps mature), even mean. Realistic? That is hardly the point of the hero tale, frankly. Many recent film-makers have tried their hand at the saving-the-planet story, surely the one we need most of all, (from Avatar to Independence Day), but none seem to have become canonical. Someone needs to do a better job painting the deep challenges of the day for tomorrow's heroes.

• Unfit to serve on a sewer board. But then, who helped elect him?
• In praise of curated data. Sort of the opposite of Twitter, Facebook, and the other new news, but not cheap to do.
• New tech, same as the old tech.
• Liberals sometimes can't help drinking the right-wing economic koolaid.

A Cosmos of Fear

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

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

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

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

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

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

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