Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label psychology. Show all posts

Saturday, January 6, 2024

Damned if You do, Damned if You Don't

The Cherokee trail of tears, and the Palestinian conundrum.

History is a long and sad tale of conflict, interspersed with better times when people can put their animosities aside. Just as economics deals in scarcity and its various solutions, history likewise turns on our inevitable drive towards overpopulation, with resulting scarcity and conflict. Occasionally, special technological, spiritual, organizational achievements- or catastrophes- may allow periods of free population growth with its attendant bouyant mood of generosity. But more commonly, groups of people covet each other's resources and plot ways to get them. This was one of the lessons of Malthus and Darwin, who addressed the deeper causes of what we see as historical events.

The "New World" provided Europeans with an unprecedented release for their excess populations, especially the malcontented, the desperate, and the ambitious. They rhapsodized about the "virgin" lands that lay open, generally dismissing the numerous and well-organized natives present all over these lands, as "savages", occupying a lower technological and theological level of existence. There were plenty of rationalizations put forth, like Christianizing the natives, or "civilizing" them. But the hypocrisy of these formulations becomes clear when you consider the fate of the Cherokees, one of the "five civilized tribes". 

By the early 1800's, a couple of centuries of contact had already gone under the bridge, (as narrated by Pekka Hämäläinen in "Indigenous continent"), and native Americans were all integrated to various degrees in trading networks that brought them European goods like guns, pots, knives, and novel practices like horse riding. The Cherokees, occupying the lower Appalachians and piedmont between what is now Georgia and Alabama, were more integrated than most, adopting European farming, living, schooling, and governing practices. They even owned African American slaves, and wrote themselves a US-modeled constitution in 1827, in the script devised the scholar Sequoya.

Did this "progress" toward assimilation with the European culture help them? Far from! Their excellence in farming, literacy, and government raised fears of competition in the white colonists, and the Georgia state government lobbied relentlessly for their removal. Andrew Jackson finally obliged. He pressured the Cherokees to re-open their status as a settled nation, devised a removal treaty with a minority party, and then sent all the Cherokees in the region (about 16,000) off on the Trail of Tears, to the barren lands of Oklahoma. These Cherokees lost roughly a quarter of their population along the way, in a brutal winter. Compare this with the partition of India, where about twelve percent of the refugees are thought to have perished, out of roughly 16 million total.

A small part of the annals of ethnic cleansing, US edition. Needless to say, the "Indian territory" ended up a lot smaller than originally promised.
 

Georgia was thus ethnically cleansed, and does not seem to experience a great deal of regret about it. The logic of power is quite simple- the winner gets the land and spoils. The loser is lucky to not be killed. That the Europeans were significantly more powerful than their native antagonists doesn't change the logic, though it might appeal to our empathy and nostalgia in retrospect. The Cherokees and other Native Americans might have been accepted into US society. They might have been given one or two states for their sovereign governments, as the Mormons managed. There were a lot of possibilities that might have made us a more interesting and diverse nation. But at the same time, most Native Americans participated fully in the politics of power, terrorizing each other, making slaves of each other, and killing each other. They were not innocents. So the fact that they came up against a stronger power was hardly a novelty, though in this case that power was blundering and cruel, shared very few of their cultural coordinates, and was highly hypocritical about its own.

All this comes to mind when viewing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel won the major Middle East wars that so dramatically emasculated the Palestinians, first in the civil war that left Jordan and Egypt in charge of the Palestinian areas, then in the 1967 war that left all these areas in Israeli hands. But what to do with them? On founding, Israel was a liberal, New Testament kind of country, with humanist values and lefty kibbutzim. The then-recent Holocaust also caused a bit of hesitance when it came to either killing or exiling the losing Palestinians. Indeed, given that its neighbors Jordan and Egypt lost these wars, it would have made some sense at that time to deport all the Palestinians, of which there were about one to two million. But rather than do that, or make a firm border, Israel immediately started encroaching into Palestinian territory with security areas and "settlements", and has set up an ever more elaborate, though selectively porous and self-serving, security and boundary system.

Both sides have a schizophrenic reaction to the other. On the Palestinian side, the psychology of losing has meant quietism and acquiescence by some, but resentment and militantcy by others. Both lead to a spiral of worse treatment, the weakness of the former inviting abuse, and the desperate depredations of the latter inciting revenge, "security" measures, and tighter occupation. The provocations by each side are unendurable, and thus the situation deteriorates. Yet, in the end, Israel has all the power and the responsibility to come up with a long term solution. Over the decades, Israel has morphed from its founding ethos into something much more conservative and Old Testament, less beholden to the humanisitic ideals of the post-WW2 period. The wanton killing, starvation, and collective punishment of Gaza makes visible this moral breakdown.

The Palestinians can't win either way, either through Hamas's implacable hatred and impotent attacks, nor through the acquiescence of the Palestinian National Authority, which, in thanks for its good behavior, has received the creeping expansion of Israeli "settlements" on its land. These now take up, according to a detailed map, about 1/3 to 1/2 of the land of the West Bank. Overall, the options are: 1) to expel the Palestinians outright, which appears to be, for Gaza at least, where Israeli policy is heading, (made more ironic by the realization by historians that the Biblical Exodus never actually took place), or 2) to continue to muddle along in a torturous occupation with creeping dispossession, or 3) to grant Palestine some kind of autonomy and statehood. Assimilation, (4), long dreamt of by some, seems impossible for a state that is fundamentally an ethnic (or theological) state, and whose whole raison d'etre is ethnic separation, not to even mention the preferences of the Palestinians. Though perhaps assimiliation without voting rights, in sort of semi-slavery or apartheid, is something the Israelies would be attracted to? Perhaps insignia will need to be worn by all Palestinians, sewn to their clothing?

Map of the West Bank of the Jordan, color coded by Palestinian marginal control in brown, and settler/Israeli control in red.

What should happen? Indigenous Americans were infected, decimated, hunted down, translocated, re-educated, and confined to a small and very remote system of reservations. Hopefully we have have progressed a little since then, as a largely European civilization, which is putatively shared by Israel. Thus the only way forward, as is recognized by everyone outside Israel, is the two-state solution, including a re-organization of the Palestinian territories into a final, clearly demarked, and contiguous state. Israel's current political system will never get there. But we can help the process along in a few ways.

First, it is disappointing to see our current administration shipping arms to Israel at a furious pace, only to see them used to kill thousands of innocent, if highly resentful, civilians. Israel has plenty of its own money to buy whatever it needs elsewhere. We need to put some limitations on our military and other aid relationships, to motivate change. (Though that raises the question of Israel's increasingly cozy relationship with Russia). Second, we should recognize Palestine as a state, and bring forward its integration into the international system. This will not resolve its borders or myriad security and territory issues viz Israel, but it would helpfully motivate things in that direction. Israel has constantly cried wolf about the lack of a credible partner to negotiate with, but that is irrelevant. Israel is perfectly capable of building the walls it needs to keep Palestinians at bay. But then it wants pliant workers as well, and a peaceful neighbor, security viz Jordan and Egypt, territorial encroachments, and many other things that are either destructive, or need to be negotiated. 

By far the most constructive thing that could be done is to freeze and re-organize the Jewish settlements and other periphernalia that have metastasized all over the West Bank. There is no future without a decent and fair solution in territory, which is the third big thing we need to press- our own detailed territorial plan for Palestine. For one thing, Israel could easily vacate the whole corridor / valley facing Jordan. That would give a consolidated Palestine a working border with a country that is now peaceful, quite well run, and friendly to both sides. There are countless possible maps. We just need to decide on one that is reasonably fair and force it on both sides, which are each, still after all these years, apparently unwilling to imagine a true peace. This means principally forcing it on Israel, which has been the dominant and recalcitrant party the entire time.

The Cherokees are now one of the largest indigenous populations in the US, at roughly a quarter million, with their own territory of about seven thousand square miles in Oklahoma. They have internal and partial sovereignty, which means that they deal with their own affairs on a somewhat independent basis, but otherwise are largely subject to most laws of the enclosing governments. The Cherokees could easily have been assimilated into the US. Only racism stood in the way, in a mindset that had long descended into a blind and adversarial disregard of all native Americans as "others", (the irony!), competitive with and less than, the newly arrived immigrants. We could have done much better, and one would like to think that, a hundred or a hundred and fifty years on, we would have.

In the end, the West (read as European civilization, as developed out of the ashes of World War 2) is either for or against wars of aggression, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and human rights. Israel has won its wars, but never faced up to its responsibilities to the conquered Palestinians, and has tried to have it both ways, to be viewed by the world as a modern, enlightened state, even as it occupies and slowly strangles the people it defeated decades ago. 


  • Slovenly strategic thinking. But really, visionless long-term politics.
  • One Gazan speaks.
  • Settler colonialism.
  • Who's the victim?
  • Shades of Scientology ... the murky networks of the deep evangelical state.
  • In California, solar still makes sense.

Saturday, October 7, 2023

Empty Skepticism at the Discovery Institute

What makes a hypothesis scientific, vs a just-so story, or a religious fixation?

"Intelligent" design has fallen on hard times, after a series of court cases determined that it was, after all, a religious idea and could not be foisted on unsuspecting schoolchildren, at least in state schools and under state curricula. But the very fact of religious motivation leads to its persistence in the face of derision, evidence, and apathy. The Discovery Institute, (which, paranthetically, does not make any discoveries), remains the vanguard of intelligent design, promoting "skepticism", god, alternative evolutionary theories, and, due to the paucity of ways to attack evolution, tangential right-wingery such as anti-vaccine agitation. By far their most interesting author is Günter Bechly, who delves into the paleontological record to heap scorn on other paleontologists and thereby make room for the unmentioned alternative hypothesis ... which is god.

A recent post discussed the twists and turns of ichthyosaur evolution. Or should we say biological change through time, with unknown causes? Ichthyosaurs flourished from about 250 million years ago (mya) to 100 mya, with the last representatives dated to 90 mya. They were the reptile analogs of whales and dophins, functioning as apex predators in the ocean. They were done in by various climate crises well-prior to the cometary impact that ended the Cretaceous and the reign of dinosaurs in general.

Bechly raises two significant points. First is the uncertain origins of Ichthyosaurs. As is typical with dramatic evolutionary transitions like that from land to water in whales, the time line is compressed, since there are a lot of adaptations that are desirable for the new environment that might have been partially pre-figured, but get fleshed out extensively with the new ecological role and lifestyle. Selection is presumably intense and transitional fossils are hard to find. This was true for whales, though beautiful transitional fossils have been found more recently. And apparently this is true for the Ichthyosaurs as well, where none have been found, yet. There is added drama stemming from the time of origin, which is right after the Permian exinction, perhaps the greatest known extinction event in the history of the biosphere. Radiations after significant extinction events tend to be rapid, with few transitional fossils, for the same reason of new niches opening and selection operating rapidly.

Ichthyosaur

Bechly and colleagues frequently make hay out of gaps in the fossil record, arguing that something (we decline to be more specific!) else needs to be invoked to explain such lack of evidence. It is a classic god of the gaps argument. But since the fossils are never out of sequence, and we are always looking at millions of years of time going by with even the slimmest layers of rock, this is hardly a compelling argument. One thing that we learned from Darwin's finches, and the whole argument around punctuated equilibrium, is that evolution is typically slow because selection is typically not directional but conservative. But when selection is directional, evolution by natural selection can be startlingly fast. This is an argument made very explicitly by Darwin through his lengthy discussions of domestic species, whose changes are, in geological terms, instant. 

But Bechly makes an additional interesting argument- that a specific hypothesis made about ichthyosaurs is a just-so story, a sort of hypothesis that evolutionary biologists are very prone to make. Quite a few fossils have been found of ichthyosaurs giving birth, and many of them find that the baby comes out not only live (not as an egg, as is usual with reptiles), but tail-first. Thus some scientists have made the argument that each are adaptations to aquatic birth, allowing the baby to be fully borne before starting to breathe. Yet Bechly cites a more recent scientific review of the fossil record that observes that tail-first birth is far from universal, and does not follow any particular phylogenetic pattern, suggesting that it is far from necessary for aquatic birth, and thus is unlikely to be, to any significant extent, an adaptation. 

Ha! Just another story of scientists making up fairy tales and passing them off as "science" and "evolutionary hypotheses", right?  

"Evolutionary biology again and again proves to be an enterprise in imaginative story-telling rather than hard science. But when intelligent design theorists question the Darwinist paradigm based on empirical data and a rational inference to the best explanation, they are accused of being science deniers. Which science?" ... "And we will not let Darwinists get away with a dishonest appeal to the progress of science when they simply rewrite their stories every time conflicting evidence can no longer be denied."

Well, that certainly is a damning indictment. Trial and sentencing to follow! But let's think a little more about what makes an explanation and a hypothesis, on the scientific, that is to say, empirical, level. Hypotheses are always speculative. That is the whole point. They try to connect observations with some rational or empirically supported underlying mechanism / process to account for (that is, explain) what is observed. Thus the idea that aquatic birth presents a problem for mammals who have to breathe represents a reasonable subject for an hypothesis. Whether headfirst or tailfirst, the baby needs to get to the surface post haste, as soon as its breathing reflex kicks in. While the direction of birth doesn't seem to the uninitiated (and now, apparently to experts with further data at hand) to make much difference, thinking it does is a reasonable hypothesis, based on obvious geometric arguments and biological assumptions, that it is possible that the breathing reflex is tied to emergence of the head during birth, in which case coming out tailfirst might delay slightly the time it takes between needing to breathe and being able to breathe. 

This argument combines a lot of known factors- the geometry of birth, the necessity of breathing, the phenomenon of the breathing reflex initiating in all mammals very soon after birth, by mechanisms that doubtless are not entirely known, but at the same time clearly the subject of evolutionary tuning. And also the paleontological record. Good or bad, the hypothesis is based on empirical data. What characterizes science is that it follows a disciplined road from one empirically supported milestone to the next, using hypotheses about underlying mechanisms, whether visible or not, which abide by all the known/empirical mechanisms. Magic is only allowed if you know what is going on behind the curtain. Unknown mechanisms can be invoked, but then immediately become subjects of further investigation, not of protective adulation and blind worship.

In contrast, the intelligent design hypothesis, implicit here but clear enough, is singularly lacking in any data at all. It is not founded on anything other than the sentiment that what has clearly happened over the long course of the fossil record operates by unknown mechanisms, by god operating pervasively to carry out the entire program of biological evolution, not by natural selection (a visible and documented natural process) but by something else, which its proponents have never been able to demonstrate in the least degree, on short time scales or long. Faith does not, on its own, warrant novel empirical mechanisms, and nor does skeptical disbelief warrant them. Nor does one poor, but properly founded, hypothesis that is later superceded by more careful analysis of the data impugn the process of science generally or the style of evolutionary thinking specifically.

Imagine, for example, if our justice system operated at this intellectual level. When investigating crimes, police could say that, if the causes were not immediately obvious, an unnamed intelligent designer was responsible, and leave it there. No cold cases, no presumption of usual natural causality, no dogged pursuit of "the truth" by telegenic detectives. Faith alone would furnish the knowledge that the author of all has (inscrutibly) rendered "his" judgement. It would surely be a convenient out for an over-burdened and under-educated police force!

Evolution by natural selection requires a huge amount of extrapolation from what we know about short time scales and existing biology to the billions of years of life that preceeded us. On the other hand, intelligent design requires extrapolation from nothing at all- from the incredibly persistent belief in god, religion, and the rest of the theological ball of wax not one element of which has ever been pinned down to an empirical fact. Believers take the opposite view solely because religious propaganda has ceaselessly drilled the idea that god is real and "omnipotent" and all-good, and whatever else wonderful, as a matter of faith. With this kind of training, then yes, "intelligent" design makes all kinds of sense. Otherwise not. Charles Darwin's original hypothesis was so brilliant because it drew on known facts and mechanisms to account (with suitable imagination and extrapolation) for the heretofore mysterious history of biology, with its painfully slow yet inexorable evolution from one species to another, one epoch to another. Denying that one has that imagination is a statement about one's intelligence, no matter how it was designed.

  • Only god can give us virulent viruses.
  • The priest who knew it so well, long ago.
  • A wonderful Native American Film- Dance me outside.
  • With a wonderful soundtrack, including NDN Kars.
  • We need to come clean on Taiwan.
  • Appeasers, cranks, and fascist wannabes.
  • Vaccines for poor people are not profitable.
  • California is dumbing down math, and that will not help any demographic.

Saturday, February 18, 2023

Everything is Alive, but the Gods are all Dead

Barbara Ehrenreich's memoir and theological ruminations in "Living with a Wild God".

It turns out that everyone is a seeker. Somewhere there must be something or someone to tell us the meaning of life- something we don't have to manufacture with our own hands, but rather can go into a store and buy. Atheists are just as much seekers as anyone else, only they never find anything worth buying. The late writer Barbara Ehrenreich was such an atheist, as well as a remarkable writer and intellectual who wrote a memoir of her formation. Unusually and fruitfully, it focuses on those intense early and teen years when we are reaching out with both hands to seize the world- a world that is maddeningly just beyond our grasp, full of secrets and codes it takes a lifetime and more to understand. Religion is the ultimate hidden secret, the greatest mystery which has been solved in countless ways, each of them conflicting and confounding.

Ehrenreich's tale is more memoir than theology, taking us on a tour through a dysfunctional childhood with alcoholic parents and tough love. A story of growth, striking out into the world, and sad coming-to-terms with the parents who each die tragically. But it also turns on a pattern of mystical experiences that she keeps having, throughout her adult life, which she ultimately diagnoses as dissociative states where she zones out and has a sort of psychedelic communion with the world.

"Something peeled off the visible world, taking with it all meaning, inference, association, labels, and words. I was looking at a tree, and if anyone had asked, that's what I would have said I was doing, but the word "tree" was gone, along with all the notions of tree-ness that had accumulated in the last dozen years or so since I had acquired language. Was it a place that was suddenly revealed to me? Or was it a substance- the indivisible, elemental material out of which the entire known and agreed-upon world arises as a fantastic elaboration? I don't know, because this substance, this residue, was stolidly, imperturbably mute. The interesting thing, some might say alarming, was that when you take away all the human attributions- the words, the names of species, the wisps of remembered tree-related poetry, the fables of photosynthesis and capillary action- that when you take all this this away, there is still something left."

This is not very hard to understand as a neurological phenomenon of some kind of transient disconnection of just the kind of brain areas she mentions- those that do all the labeling, name-calling, and boxing-in. In schizophrenia, it runs to the pathological, but in Ehrenreich's case, she does not regard it as pathological at all, as it is always quite brief. But obviously, the emotional impact and weirdness of the experience- that is something else altogether, and something that humans have been inducing with drugs, and puzzling over, forever. 

Source

As a memoir, the book is very engaging. As a theological quest, however, it doesn't work as well, because the mystical experience is, as noted above, resolutely meaningless. It neither compels Ehrenreich to take up Christianity, as after a Pauline conversion, nor any other faith or belief system. It offers a peek behind the curtain, but, stripped of meaning as this view is, Ehrenreich is perhaps too skeptical or bereft of imagination to give it another, whether of her own or one available from the conventional array of sects and religions. So while the experiences are doubtless mystical, one can not call them religious, let alone god-given, because Ehrenreich hasn't interpreted them that away. This hearkens back to the writings of William James, who declined to assign general significance to mystical experiences, while freely admitting their momentous and convincing nature to those who experienced them.

Only in one brief section (which had clearly been originally destined for an entirely different book) does she offer a more interesting and insightful analysis. There, Ehrenreich notes that the history of religion can be understood as a progressive bloodbath of deicide. At first, everything is alive and sacred, to an animist mind. Every leaf and grain of sand holds wonders. Every stream and cloud is divine. This is probably our natural state, which a great deal of culture has been required to stamp out of us. Next is a hunting kind of religion, where deities are concentrated in the economic objects (and social patterns) of the tribe- the prey animals, the great plants that are eaten, and perhaps the more striking natural phenomena and powerful beasts. But by the time of paganism, the pantheon is cut down still more and tamed into a domestic household, with its soap-opera dramas and an increasingly tight focus on the major gods- the head of the family, as it were. 

Monotheism comes next, doing away with all the dedicated gods of the ocean, of medicine, of amor and war, etc., cutting the cast down to one. One, which is inflated to absurd proportions with all-goodness, all-power, all-knowledge, etc. A final and terrifying authoritarianism, probably patterned on the primitive royal state. This is the phase when the natural world is left in the lurch, as an undeified and unprotected zone where human economic greed can run rampant, safe in the belief that the one god is focused entirely on man's doings, whether for good or for ill, not on that of any other creature or feature of the natural world. A phase when even animals, who are so patently conscious, can, through the narcissism of primitive science and egoistic religion, be deemed mere mechanisms without feeling. This process doesn't even touch on the intercultural deicide committed by colonialism and conquest.

This in turn invites the last deicide- that by rational people who toss aside this now-cartoonish super-god, and return to a simpler reverence for the world as we naturally respond to it, without carting in a lot of social power-and-drama baggage. It is the cultural phase we are in right now, but the transition is painfully slow, uneven, and drawn-out. For Ehrenreich, there are plenty of signs- in the non-linear chemical phenomena of her undergraduate research, in the liveliness of quantum physics even into the non-empty vacuum, in the animals who populate our world and are perhaps the alien consciousnesses that we should be seeking in place of the hunt through outer space, and in our natural delight in, and dreams about, nature at large. So she ends the book as atheist as ever, but hinting that perhaps the liveliness of the universe around us holds some message that we are not the only thinking and sentient beings.

"Ah, you say, this is all in your mind. And you are right to be skeptical; I expect no less. It is in my mind, which I have acknowledged from the beginning is a less than perfect instrument. but this is what appears to be the purpose of my mind, and no doubt yours as well, its designed function beyond all the mundane calculations: to condense all the chaos and mystery of the world into a palpable Other or Others, not necessarily because we love it, and certainly not out of any intention to "worship" it. But because ultimately we may have no choice in the matter. I have the impression, growing out of the experiences chronicled here, that it may be seeking us out." 

Thus the book ends, and I find it a rather poor ending. It feels ripped from an X-Files episode, highly suggestive and playing into all the Deepak and similar mystical tropes of cosmic consciousness. That is, if this passage really means much at all. Anyhow, the rest of the trip is well worth it, and it is appropriate to return to the issue of the mystical experience, which is here handled with such judicious care and restraint. Where imagination could have run rampant, the cooly scientific view (Ehrenreich had a doctorate in biology) is that the experiences she had, while fascinating and possibly book-proposal-worthy, did not force a religious interpretation. This is radically unlike the treatment of such matters in countless other hands, needless to say. Perhaps our normal consciousness should not be automatically valued less than more rare and esoteric states, just because it is common, or because it is even-tempered.


  • God would like us to use "they".
  • If you are interested in early Christianity, Gnosticism is a good place to start.
  • Green is still an uphill battle.

Saturday, November 12, 2022

The Politics of Resentment

Ann Applebaum has seen where all this Trumpism is going ... in Eastern Europe.

Liberals in America are baffled. How could anyone vote for Republican candidates at this point? How could anyone, let alone half the electorate, vote for Trump? We are befuddled and anxious for the future of America, which, far from becoming great again, is turning into a banana republic before our eyes, if, hopefully, not worse. We in California are particularly dissociated, as Democrats run the whole state, and Republican voter registration continues to decline year after year and is now under one quarter of the electorate. What does the rest of the country see that we do not? Or vice versa?

Ann Applebaum has written a trenchant book on the matter, "Twilight of Democracy". She lives in Poland, so has had a front-row seat to the illiberalization of a political system, both in Poland and in nearby Hungary, which seems farther advanced. Eastern Europe has more reason than most, perhaps to be disillusioned with the capitalist orthodoxy, after their rather rough transition from Communism. But this is a world-wide phenomenon, sweeping fringe rightists into power from Brazil to Sweden. What is going on? Applebaum posits that the whole structure of meritocratic representative democracy, with its open competition for (good) public policy, and use of educated expertise over vast areas of state interests from foreign affairs to monetary regulation and education policy, have come under fundamental critique. And this critique comes partly from those who have been shut out of that system: the not-well-educated, not-bicoastal, not-rich, not-acronymed-minority, not-hopeful about the American future. It is, in short, a politics of resentment.

How have the elites done over the post-world war 2 period? They won the cold war, but lost virtually every battle in it, from Vietnam to Afghanistan. They let the lower classes of the US sink into relative poverty and powerlessness vs business and the well-educated classes, in a rather brutal system of collegiate competition, de-unionization, off-shoring and worker suppression. They have let the economy fester through several crushing recessions, particularly the malaise of the 70's and the real estate meltdown of 2008. While the US has done pretty well overall, the lower middle and poor classes have not done well, and live increasingly precarious lives that stare homelessness in the face daily. In the heartland, parents at best saw their children fly off to coastal schools and cultures, becoming different people who would not dream of coming home again to live.

America is heavily red, geographically.

And the elite-run state has become increasingly sclerotic, continually self-criticizing and regulating its way to inaction. A thousand well-meaning regulations have paved the way to a bloated government that can not build a high-speed rail line in California, or solve the homelessness crisis. Everyone is a critic, including yours truly- it is always easier to raise objections, cover one's ass, and not get anything done. So one can sympathize with evident, if inchoate, desires for strength- for someone to break the barriers, bring the system to heel, and build that wall. Or get Brexit done. Or whatever the baying right wing media want at the moment.

The elite party in this sense is the Democratic party - capturing the coastal and well-educated, plus public employee unions. The Republican party, the party of money and the rich, (not the elite at all!), has conversely become the party of the downtrodden, feeding them anti-immigrant, anti-elite, anti-state red meat. It was a remarkably easy transformation, that required only shamelessness and lying to make hay out of the vast reserves of resentment seething in middle America. 

But Applebaum's point is not that the elites have messed things up and it may be time to do things differently. No, she suggests that the new protofascists have reframed the situation fundamentally. The elites in power have, through the hard work of meritocratic institutions, set up pipelines and cultures that reproduce their position in power almost as hermetically as the ancien régime of France and its nobility. That anyone can (theoretically) enter this elite and that it is at least somewhat vetted for competence and rationality is disregarded, or actively spat upon as "old" thinking- definitely not team thinking. The path to power now is to stoke resentment, overturn the old patterns of respect for competence and empathy, discard this meritocratic system in favor of one based on loyalty and fealty, and so bring about a new authoritarianism that brooks no "softness", exercises no self-criticism, has no respect for the enemy or for compromise, and has no room for intellectuals. 

But Hungary is way ahead of us, in the one-party rule department.

A second angle on all this is that conservatives feel resentful for another good reason- that they have lost the culture war. Despite all their formal power, winning the presidency easily half the time, and regularly running legislative branches and judicial branches in the US, their larger cultural project to keep progress at bay, fight moral "decadence" and all the other hobby horses, have gone nowhere. The US is increasingly woke, diverse, and cosmopolitan, and the "blood and soil" types (including especially conservative Catholics and Evangelicals), are despondent about it. Or apoplectic, or rabid, etc., depending on temperament. Their triumph in overturning Roe may allow some backwater states to turn back the clock, but on the whole, it looks like a rearguard action.

This is what feeds disgust with the system, and with democracy itself. Republicans who used to sing the praises of the US government, the flag, and democracy now seem to feel the opposite, that the US is a degenerate wasteland, no better than other countries, not exceptional, not dedicated to serious ideals that others should also aspire to. Democracy has failed, for them. And Applebaum points out how this feeling licenses the loss of civility, the lying, the anything-goes demagoguery which characterizes our new right-wing politics. Naturally the internet and its extremism-feeding algorithms have a lot to do with it as well. Applebaum is conservative herself. She spent a career working in the Tory media in Britain, but is outraged at what Tory-ism, and conservatism internationally, has become. She sees a dramatic split in conservatism, between those that still buy into the democratic, liberal system, and those who have become its opponents, in their revolutionary, Trumpy fervor. In the US, the fever may possibly have broken, after a very close brush with losing our institutions during the last administration, as election after election has made losers of the far right.

Over the long haul, Applebaum sees this as a cyclical process, with ample precedent from ancient Egyptian times through today, with a particularly interesting stop in the viciously polarized Drefussard period in France. But I see one extra element, which is our planetary and population crisis. We had very good times over the last few centuries building the human population and its comforts on the back of colonization, fossil fuels, and new technologies. The US of the mid to late-20th century exemplified the good times of such growth. Now the ecological bells are ringing, and the party is coming to an end. Denial has obviously been the first resort of the change-averse, and conservatives have distinguished themselves in their capabilities in that department. But as reality gradually sets in, something more sinister and competitive may be in the offing, as exemplified by the slogan "America First". Not first as in a leader of international institutions, liberal democracies and enlightenment values, but first as in looking out for number one, and devil take the rest. 

Combined with a rejuvinated blood and soil nationalism, which we see flourishing in so many places, these attitudes threaten to send us back into a world resembling that before world war 1 or 2, (and, frankly, all the rest of history), when nationalism was the coin of international relations, and national competition knew no boundaries- mercantile or military. We are getting a small foretaste of this in Russia's war on Ukraine, which is a product of precisely this Russia-first, make Russia great again mind-set. Thankfully, it is accompanied by large helpings of stupidity and mismanagement, which may save us yet. 


Saturday, October 1, 2022

For the Love of Money

The social magic of wealth ... and Trump's travel down the wealth / status escalator.

I have been reading the archly sarcastic "The Theory of the Leisure Class", by Thorstein Veblen. It introduced the concept of "conspicuous consumption" by way of arguing that social class is marked by work, specifically by the total lack of work that occupies the upper, or leisure class, and more and more mundane forms of work as one sinks down the social scale. This is a natural consequence of what he calls our predatory lifestyle, which, at least in times of yore, reserved to men, especially those of the upper class, the heroic roles of hunter and warrior, contrasted with the roles of women, who were assigned all non-heroic forms of work, i.e. drudgery. This developed over time into a pervasive horror of menial work and a scramble to evince whatever evidence one can of being above it, such as wearing clean, uncomfortable and fashionable clothes, doing useless things like charity drives, golf, and bridge. And having one's wife do the same, to show how financially successful one is.

Veblen changed our culture even as he satarized and skewered it, launching a million disgruntled teenage rebellions, cynical movies, songs, and other analyses. But his rules can not be broken. Hollywood still showcases the rich, and silicon valley, for all its putative nerdiness, is just another venue for social signaling by way of useless toys, displays of leisure (at work, no less, with the omnipresent foosball and other games), and ever more subtle fashion statements.

Conversely, the poor are disparaged, if not hated. We step over homeless people, holding our noses. The Dalit of India are perhaps the clearest expression of this instinct. But our whole economic system is structured in this way, paying the hardest and most menial jobs the worst, while paying some of the most social destructive professions, like corporate law, the best, and placing them by attire, titles, and other means, high on the social hierarchy.

As Reagan said, nothing succeeds like success. We are fascinated, indeed mesmerized, by wealth. It seems perfectly reasonable to give wealthy areas of town better public services. It seems perfectly reasonable to have wealthy people own all our sports teams, run all our companies, and run for most political offices. We are after all Darwinian through and through. But what if a person's wealth comes from their parents? Does the status still rub off? Should it? Or what if it came from criminal activities? Russia is run by a cabal of oligarchs, more or less- is their status high or low?

All this used to make more sense, in small groups where reputations were built over a lifetime of toil in support of the family, group, and tribe. Worth was assessed by personal interaction, not by the proxy of money. And this status was difficult to bequeath to others. The fairy tale generally has the prince proving himself through arduous tasks, to validate the genetic and social inheritance that the rest of the world may or may not be aware of. 

But with the advent of money, and even more so with the advent of inherited nobility and kingship, status became transferable, inheritable, and generally untethered from the values it supposedly exemplifies. Indeed, in our society it is well-known that wealth correlates with a decline in ethical and social values. Who exemplifies this most clearly? Obviously our former president, whose entire public persona is based on wealth. It was evidently inherited, and he parlayed it into publicity, notariety, scandal, and then the presidency. He was adulated, first by tabloids and TV, which loved brashness (and wealth), then by Republican voters, who appear to love cruelty, mean-ness, low taste and intellect, ... and wealth. 

But now the tide is slowly turning, as Trump's many perfidies and illegal practices catch up with him. It is leaking out, despite every effort of half the media, that he may not be as wealthy as he fraudulently portrayed. And with that, the artificial status conferred by being "a successful businessman" is deflating, and his national profile is withering. One might say that he is taking an downward ride on the escalator of social status that is in our society conferred largely by wealth.

All that is shiny ... mines coal.

Being aware of this social instinct is naturally the first step to addressing it. A century ago and more, the communists and socialists provided a thoroughgoing critique of the plutocratic class as being not worthy of social adulation, as the Carnegies and Horatio Algers of the world would have it. But once in power, the ensuing communist governments covered themselves in the ignominy of personality cults that facilitated (and still do in some cases) even worse political tyrannies and economic disasters. 

The succeeding model of "managed capitalism" is not quite as catastrophic and has rehabilitated the rich in their societies, but one wouldn't want to live there either. So we have to make do with the liberal state and its frustratingly modest regulatory powers, aiming to make the wealthy do virtuous things instead of destructive things. Bitcoin is but one example of a waste of societal (and ecological) resources, which engenders social adulation of the riches to be mined, but should instead be regulated out of existence. Taking back the media is a critical step. We need to reel back the legal equation of money with speech and political power that has spread corruption, and tirelessly tooted its own ideology of status and celebrity through wealth.


Saturday, July 23, 2022

Why Did we Have a Civil War?

It is still a hard one to figure out.

One of the dividends of winning the Cold War was internal division. With no outside enemies or competing ideologies, we were left to become irritated with each other, Newt Gingrich leading the way. It is a general feature of humanity that we are competitive and find points of irritation with each other if there are no supervening projects or conflicts to bind us together. One would think large projects like climate change might be such an overwhelming common challenge and project, but no, it doesn't seem have the immediacy and social drama we need. Thinking and caring deeply about the biosphere is a specialized affair. 

No, our divisive dramas are much more trivial. But in the US there is a pattern, and that is the role of the South as a political / cultural block. It is reminiscent of the process leading up to our first Civil War, where a morally progressive North irritated and alienated a traditional and depraved South. Not that both sections of the country were not fully complicit in slavery, dispossession of the native peoples, and other forms of oppression. It was a matter of degree. But at some point of cultural and moral advancement, it becomes untenable to express our greed and competitiveness in terms of slavery. Slavery requires, as Harriet Beecher Stowe illustrated, a comprehensive deadening of moral sensibility, even while one's senses of honor, greed, religion, not to mention social propriety, may remain fastidious. Dedication to social competition rather than social justice is the order of the region. 

I have been listening to a lengthy podcast narrating the events of the Civil War, which is particularly strong on the introductory phase, explaining various proximate and deep causes of the conflict. What strikes me again and again is the contingency of the whole thing. And its nobility, in a way. The North could easily have washed its hands of the whole conflict, and let the South secede and go its own way. That is what the South was counting on, and many foreign countries, and many (Democrats) in the North as well. As the Union was battered in battle after battle, the mood in the North came perilously close to letting go. 

It took two converging arguments to hold the Northern coalition together- union and abolition. Each one was somewhat abstract and each one alone would probably not have been sufficient to force a war. Abolition was a minority position all the way through the war, and evidently afterwards as the South slid back into de facto slavery. Yet it fired a key segment of the Northern population with great fervor, to take an active interest in what the South was doing, and force an end to slavery rather than let it continue in an independent breakaway nation. There were religious arguments, and arguments of simple humanity, but why young men from Maine should kill those in Virginia about it was not entirely obvious.

The case for union was even more abstract. The union of the states was ostensibly a voluntary affair, and while no mechanism was offered to secede, no formal bar to secession was enshrined in the constitution either. The logic of union was that a nation made up of voluntary associations that could crumble at will was no sound nation at all, and not the kind of country that the prosperous, growing, Manifest Destiny United States was supposed to become. Lincoln labored long and hard to articulate this argument, in his debates and other speeches, including eventually the Gettysburg Address. 


But I think it remains difficult to grasp, even in retrospect. The Southern states felt understandably snookered into a constitutional deal that did not explicitly say it was a one-way trap, but turned out to be one, depending on the (military) willingness of the North to keep them in chains, as it were. The Northern states had many commercial, cultural, and other reasons to regard the South as an indissoluble part of the nation, (most Founders were Southern, for one thing), but fighting a war over it? That was a lot to ask, especially when the result would be at best the forced subservience of half the states and population- what kind of union is that? On the other side, the South didn't fully realize that once you start a war, positions harden and emotions heighten, such that the North felt increasingly bound to see it through to the bitter end. A bit like Ukraine today.

Which feeling was stronger, that of Southerners for preservation of their independence, prerogatives, and economic basis, that of Northerners in their revulsion over the retrograde moral environment of slavery? Or that of Northerners over the preservation of the unique constitutional / democratic experiment as a precious, indissoluble inheritance? The motivations of the South were clear enough, however base. But the motivations of the North, while understandable, seem insufficient to fully justify an extremely bloody war (not that they imagined that extremity at the outset). Thus I see the Northern policy as in some degree idealistic and noble, going far beyond the minimum needed to keep its business going and people happy. 


The North could never have kept the union together and abolished slavery without a war. Some in the North were more abolitionist than pro-Union, and some more pro-Union. Despite the manifest breakdown in North-South relations and the various ante-bellum compromises that kept the union together, keeping those factions aligned was very difficult, before the war, during the war, and through the endless aftermath of reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights movement, and now Southern Republicanism (of all things!) and Trumpism. 

Was the outcome beneficial, in any historical sense? It is very difficult to know how the counterfactual would have turned out. The South might have become a vast banana republic, incorporating Cuba and other territories to its own south. The North would doubtless have continued its ascent to be an industrial collusus and leader of the next century. They might well have remained at peace, despite many points of competition and contention, and traded so that the North would have retained effective access key raw materials from the South. Slavery would have continued, and it is very hard to tell for how long and in what form.

This is where the diplomatically inclined would jump in to say.. it would have been better to negotiate a deal and avoid war. There is always a deal out there that is better than war, which is an ultimate failure and disaster. Compromise after compromise had been made before the war, and shattered by increasingly divergent views on states rights, voting rights, and human rights. If every party had clairvoyance about the future course of events, they might have seen a better way. But we are not clairvoyant, and war is a way to change the conditions of the future rather than to split differences. Wars are certainly the last resort, but remain the final way to decide fundamental existential and power issues, and to change the basis of the future. That is the simple fact of the matter, in a world that is fundamentally competitive. In the words of Vegetius, "Let him who desires peace prepare for war".

Do we today have the capacity to conceive of and adhere to such esoteric and high principles as actuated the North in the last civil war? Our recent president tried to stage a coup, and we can hardly bestir ourselves to care about it. The Supreme Court is impersonating the Taney court, finding that our constitution does not, in fact, protect elementary human rights, such as privacy. We are facing climatic catastrophe that is leading to mass migration, war, and challenges to our fundamental basis of existence, (farming, and addiction to fossil fuels), not to mention imperiling the biosphere at large. And we can hardly bestir ourselves to care about it. Again, half the country, centered in the South, feels morally condescended to and responds with spite and revanchism. Again, the rich fight with every tool to keep things the same and shut our eyes to the dangers ahead. 

While the political dramas of today will likely pass away without taking to arms, despite the militant recklessness of the Southern end of the political spectrum, it is hard to be as optimistic about our other challenges. When the US looks ahead today, it sees change, constraint, and decline. It is a hard future to face, and many quail from doing so, (whatever their vacuous and delusory slogans). But face it we must, lest it turn from a challenge into a rout.


  • The polycrisis of capitalism.
  • Krugman on pessimism and division.
  • Such a deal!
  • Either a carbon tax or a crypto tax.
  • We have not even hit peak oil yet.
  • The war we really don't need. Not that I generally agree with Chris Hedges.

Saturday, July 2, 2022

Desperately Seeking Cessation of Desire

Some paradoxes, and good points, of Buddhism.

I have been reading "In the Buddha's Words", by Bhikkhu Bodhi, which is a well-organized collection / selection of translations of what we have as the core teachings of Buddhism. It comes from the Pali canon, from Sri Lanka, where Buddhism found refuge after its final destruction in India after the Arab invasions, and offers as clear an exposition of the Buddhist system as one can probably find in English. A bit like the scriptures of Christianity, the earliest canons of Buddhism originate from oral traditions only recorded a hundred or so years after Buddha's death, but as they are slightly less besotted with miraculous stories, the collection has more of a feeling of actual teaching, than of gnomic riddles and wonder stories, not to mention Odyssean mis-adventures.

Both prophets make audacious claims, one to be god, or its son, the other to have attained a perfectly enlightened state with similar implications for everlasting life (or lack of rebirth, at any rate). Each extends to his followers the tempting prospect of a similarly exalted state after death. Each teaches simple morals, each attracts followers both lay and career-ist, the latter of whom tend to be rather dense. Each launched an international sensation that bifurcated into a monastic/ascetic branch of professional clerics and a more popular branch that attained a leading role in some societies.

But Buddhism has attained a special status in the West as something a bit more advanced than the absurd theology of Christianity. A theology that could even be deemed atheist, along with a practice that focuses more relentlessly on peace and harmony than does what Christianity has become, particularly in the US. It is congenial to seekers, an exotic and edgy way to be spiritual, but not religious.

But how much sense does it really make? For starters, much of the Buddhist mythology and theology is simply taken from its ambient Hindu environment. The cycle of rebirth, the karma that influences one's level of rebirth, the heavens and hells, all come from the common understandings of the time, so are not very particular to Buddhism. Buddhists did away with lots of the gods, in favor of their own heros (Buddha, and the Bodhisattvas), and developed a simplified philosphy of desire, suffering, and the relief of suffering by controlling desire, optimally through advanced meditation practices. Much of this was also ambient or at least implicit, as Buddha himself began as a normal Indian ascetic, trying to purify himself of all taints and mundane aspects. For his Buddhist Sanga, he dialed things back a bit, so that the community could function as a social system, not a disconnected constellation of hermits.

Bodhisattvas floating in heaven. These are Buddhists who have attained enlightenment but not entered permanent heaven, choosing rather to have compassion on humanity in its benighted state.

As a philosophical system, it seems paradoxical to spend so much effort and desire in seeking nirvanna and the benefits of lack of desire. To sit in meditation for years on end demands enormous discipline. To submit to a life of begging and poverty takes great will and desire for whatever is promised on the other side. This is not evidence of lack of desire, much less the kind of wisdom and knowledge that would license its practitioners to advise lay people in their mundane affairs (or politicians in affairs of state). And the ethical system that Buddha promulgated was simple in the extreme- merely to be and do good, rather than being and doing bad, all staked on the age-old promise that just deserts would be coming after death.

No, Buddha was clearly a charismatic person, and his insight was social, not philosphical. Remember that he was a prince by birth and education. I would suggest that his core message was one of nobility- of idealism about the human condition. In his system, nobility is not conferred by birth, but by action. All can be noble, and all can be ignoble, regardless of wealth or birth. For the mass of society, it is control over desire that allows virtue and prosperity- i.e. nobility. Those who are addicts, whether to power, to drugs, to bitterness, to sex, or innumerable other black holes of desire or habit, are slaves, not nobles. This is incidentally what makes Buddhism so amenable to the West- it is very enlightenment-friendly kind of social philosophy.

The monks and Sanga of Buddhism were to be the shock troops of emotional discipline, burning off their normal social desires in fires of meditation and renunciation, even as they were on the hook for a whole other set of desires. Which are, in my estimation, wholly illusory in their aim, despite the various beneficial effects of meditation, in this world. They provide the inspiration and template for the society at large, modeling a form of behavioral nobility that any and all can at least appreciate, if not aspire to, and model in their own circumscribed lives and ethical concerns. I think that is the real strength of the Buddhist system. The monks may be misled in philosophical terms, but they fulfill a critical social role which governs and moderates the society at large. 

The monks provide another benefit, which is population control. One of the greatest pressures on any society is overpopulation, which immiserates the poor, empowers the rich, and can ultimately destroy its resource base. While the monastic institutions are a great burden on their societies, they also help keep them sustainable by taking in excess males who might otherwise become brigands and parents. This is particularly evident in traditional Tibet, despite the corruption of the monastic system by clan rivalries and even occasional warfare.

The fact of the matter is that desire is the staff, even essence, of life. Those who lack desire are dead, and Buddhist monks sitting in endless renunciation are enacting a sort of living death. Nevertheless, they have an important function in their societies, which is one we see replicated in the priests of Orthodox and Catholic Christianity (most of the time) and other ascetics and clerics around the world. Buddha was right that the management of desire is absolutely critical to individual and communal social life. Compare his system, however, with the philosophy of the Greeks, which arose at roughly the same (axial) time. The Greek philosophers focused on moderation in all things- another way, and I would offer, a healthier way, to state the need for discipline over the desires. They additionally fostered desires for knowledge and as complex ethical investigations, which I would posit far outstripped the efforts of the Buddhists, and gave rise, though the Greeks' continuing influence over the Roman and ensuing Christian epochs in Western Europe, to a more advanced culture, at least in philosophical, legal, and scientific terms, if not in terms of social and political peace.


Saturday, June 11, 2022

God Save the Queen

Or is it the other way around? Deities and Royalties in the archetypes.

It has been entertaining, and a little moving, to see the recent celebration put on by Britain for its queen. A love fest for a "ruler" who is nearing the end of her service- a job that has been clearly difficult, often thankless, and a bit murky. A job that has evolved interestingly over the last millenium. What used to be a truly powerful rule is now a Disney-fied sop to tradition and the enduring archetypes of social hierarchy.


For we still need social hierarchy, don't we? Communists, socialists, and anarchists have fought for centuries against it, but social hierarchy is difficult to get away from. For one thing, at least half the population has a conservative temperament that demands it. For another, hierarchies are instinctive and pervasive throughout nature as ways to organize societies, keep everyone on their toes, and to bias reproduction to the fittest members. The enlightenment brought us a new vision of human society, one based on some level of equality, with a negotiated and franchise-based meritocracy, rather than one based on nature, tooth, and claw. But we have always been skittish about true democracy. Maximalist democracies like the Occupy movement never get anywhere, because too many people have veto power, and leadership is lacking. Leadership is premised naturally on hierarchy.

Hierarchy is also highly archetypal and instinctive. Maybe these are archetypes we want to fight against, but we have them anyhow. The communists were classic cases of replacing one (presumably corrupt and antiquated) social hierarchy with another which turned out to be even more anxiously vain and vicious, for all its doublespeak about serving the masses. Just looking at higher-ranking individuals is always a pleasant and rewarding experience. That is why movies are made about the high ranking and the glamorous, more than the downtrodden. And why following the royals remains fascinating.

But that is not all! The Queen is also head of the Anglican Church, another institution that has fallen from its glory days of power. It has also suffered defections and loss of faith, amid centuries-long assaults from the enlightenment. The deity itself has gone through a long transition, from classic patriarchial king in the old testament (who killed all humanity once over for its sins), to mystic cypher in the New Testament (who demanded the death of itself in order to save the shockingly persistent sinners of humanity from its own retribution), to deistic non-entity at the height of the enlightenment, to what appears to be the current state of utter oblivion. One of the deity's major functions was to explain the nature of the world in all its wonder and weirdness, which is now quite unnecessary. We must blame ourselves for climate change, not a higher power. 

While social hierarchy remains at the core of humanity, the need for deities is less clear. As a super-king, god has always functioned as the and ultimate pinnacle of the social and political system, sponsoring all the priests, cardinals, kings, pastors, and the like down the line. But if it remains stubbornly hidden from view, has lost its most significant rationales, and only peeps out from tall tales of scripture, that does not make for a functional regent at all. While the British monarchy pursues its somewhat comical, awkward performance of unmerited superintendence of state, church, and social affairs, the artist formerly known as God has vanished into nothing at all.


Saturday, April 16, 2022

Love Beauty Truth

Book review of "Finding your Feet after Fundamentalism", By Darrell Lackey. With apologies to the other book.

An old friend has published a book. We had an epistolary relationship, fretting about creationism, intelligent design, and related topics back when those were livelier issues than today (and it directly inspired the birth of this blog). He was on his way out of Christian fundamentalism, and into something more liberal, even post-modern. His new book is a somewhat autobiographical account of the problems of fundamentalism, and of leaving fundamentalism as one's tradition. Naturally, evangelism dies hard, and takes this new form of broadcasting the good news of a more moderate and decent Christianity.

The book hits hardest on the issue of Donald Trump. No scandal has so thoroughly demonstrated the ultimate hypocrisy of fundamentalism than its allegiance to Trump. The transaction has given religious conservatives control of the Supreme Court, (though perhaps that owed more to Mitch McConnell), but in return, they showed their support for the most morally vile and incompetent person ever to hold the job. Lackey relates how he was fully in the FOX news orbit in the 90's, happily imbibing its bile. But then something snapped, and by the time of the Trump election, he had fully left fundamentalism and its communities behind. Living in California might have something to do with it, since liberalism, at least of a lip-service sort, is the dominant way of life here. Something that Republicans have learned the hard way

Yet the interesting part is how strenuously Lackey hews to Christianity, proclaiming that liberal versions are not gateway drugs to atheism. Quite the contrary- close attention to the actual New Testament provides ample justification for things like supporting marginalized communities, helping the poor, afflicting the rich, and viewing one's enemies as possibly reasonable human beings, if not friends in the making. He mentions how false it is for evangelicals to be so eager to spread the good word, but at the same time so deaf to the words of others that actual relationship is impossible- an evangelism of a closed-off community. 

For what are the fundamental values? Lackey cites love and beauty. Love is clear enough, (and damning enough regarding the FOX- driven culture of conservative Christianity), but the role of beauty needs a little more explaining. Religious thinkers have spared no effort in extolling the beauty of the world, but in the current world, serious artists are rarely Christian, let alone make Christian art. Why is that? Perhaps it is just intellectual fashion, but perhaps there is a deeper problem, that art, at least in our epoch, is adventurous and probing, seeking to interrogate narratives and power structures rather than celebrate them. Perhaps it is a problem of overpopulation, or of democracy, or of living in late imperial times, or of modernism. But whatever the framework, contemporary Christian communities have become the opposite of all this- anti-intellectual, tone-deaf, and art-hostile (not to mention power-mad). It must be exasperating to someone with even the least appreciation for finer things and for art that is "interesting".

Jean-Michel Basquiat- too messy for insensitive temperaments.

Beauty has deep Christian connotations. The world is god-made, good, and thus beautiful, as indeed we all feel it to be. But life is also messy, competitive, and dark. Death and suffering are part of it as well. If we refuse to own those aspects of the world, and of ourselves, we become blinded to the true nature of things, and expose ourselves to unintended and invisible expressions of the dark side, as we see in the deep hypocrisy on the subject of Trump, on sexual morals, and countless other areas within fundamentalism / evangelicalism. Lackey ticks off a lengthy list of subjects where conservative Christians have become blind to the obvious teachings of Jesus while fixated on relatively minor cultural flashpoints and red meat- symptoms of a general moral blindness borne of, arguably, flaccid aesthetic and intellectual habits.

So I would like to offer another value, which is truth. As a scientist, it is a natural place for me to start, but I think it is both illuminating of, and interrelated with, the other virtues above. What modern artists seek is to express truths about the human condition, not just ring out positive affirmations and hallelujas. Truths about suffering as well as truths about beauty. What scientists seek to do is to find how this world we find ourselves in works, from the cosmos down to the gluon. And they do so because they find it beautiful, and, like addicts, would like to unlock more of that beauty. Beauty inspires love, and love ... can only survive on truth, not lies. So I think these values live in a reinforcing cycle.

All that implies that there is another step to take for someone who has left fundamentalism. That is, to re-evaluate Christianity as a whole. While the achievement of decency (and better taste) by the renunciation of FOX and its religious satellite communities is an enormous step, indeed a momentous one for the preservation of our country's sanity, grappling seriously with the value of truth would suggest an extra leg to the trip. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Christianity as a whole is a questionable proposition, philosophically. As a narrative and moral system, it clearly has positive as well as negative potentials. But as a "truth"- with its miracles, resurrections, triune deity, and salvation at the end of the line, (whether for the elect, the saved, the good, or for all)- well, it is impossible to take seriously without heavy doses of tradition and indoctrination.

For his part, Lackey has headed in another direction, into the Eastern Orthodox church, finding a place that richly satisfies the fundamentalist urge to return to one of the most traditional and historically continuous churches in existence, and also one that does not tie itself into intellectual knots about literal truth, living biblically, and the like. Orthodoxy accepts mystery, and cherishes its ancient rites and structures as sufficient theology. It is not modernist, or goaded by the enlightenment to make a rational system of something that so obviously resists reason. 

For there is a fine line between lies, illusions, and truths. As anyone who is married will understand (or a citizen of a country, or part of a corporation, or part of any social structure), truth is not the only or necessarily best virtue. A bit of illusion and constructive understanding can make a world of difference. Narrative, ideology, framing, etc. are essential social glues, and even glues of internal psychology. So, given that illusions are integral, the work to identity them, bring them into consciousness, and make positive choices about them is what matters, especially when it comes to social leadership. Do we choose narratives that are reasonably honest, and look forward with hope and love, or ones that go down the easy road of demonization and projection? And what role should the most traditional narratives in existence- those of the ancient religions- have in guiding us?


  • Beautiful? You be the judge.
  • Kasparov on freedom and evil.
  • Kids should be able to navigate neighborhoods.
  • Lies and disinformation are a public health crisis.
  • More variants are always coming along.
  • We are not doing enough against climate heating.

Saturday, April 2, 2022

E. O. Wilson, Atheist

Notes on the controversies of E. O. Wilson.

E. O. Wilson was one of our leading biologists and intellectuals, combining a scholarly career of love for the natural world (particularly ants) with a cultural voice of concern about what we as a species are doing to it. He was also a dedicated atheist, perched in his ivory tower at Harvard and tilting at various professional and cultural windmills. I feature below a long quote from one of his several magnum opuses, Sociobiology (1975). This was putatively a textbook by which he wanted to establish a new field within biology- the study of social structures and evolution. This was a time when molecular biology was ascendent, in his department and in biology broadly, and he wanted to push back and assert that truly important and relevant science was waiting to be done at higher levels of biology, indeed the highest level- that of whole societies. It is a vast tome, where he attempted to synthesize everything known in the field. But it met with significant resistance across the board, even though most of its propositions are now taken as a matter of course ... that our social instincts and structures are heavily biological, and have evolved just as our physical features have.

Saturday, October 30, 2021

Genetics and Non-Genetics of Temperament

Some fish are shy, some honeybees are outgoing. What makes individuals out of a uniform genetic background?

Do flies have personalities? Apparently so. Drosophila have a long and storied history as perhaps the greatest model organism for genetic research. They have brains, intricate development, complex bodies and behaviors, but also rapid generation time, relatively easy handling, and mass rearing. A new paper describes a quest to define their personalities- behavioral traits that vary despite a uniform genetic background. Personality is a trait that may be genetically influenced, but may just as well have environmental or sporadic causes (that is, not determined by outside factors). Importantly, this kind of trait tends to recur in a population, indicating that while it may not be determined, it follows certain canalized pathways in development, which might themselves be amenable to genetic investigation. Human personality studies have a long history, with various systems trying to make sense of the typical forms and range of variation.

A recent paper did a massive screen of uniformly inbred flies for personality variations. Computerization and automation have revolutionized the animal screening field, as it has so many others, so now flies can be indivually put through a battery of tests with minimal effort to humans, looking for their individual responses to light, to maze choices, spontaneous activity, circadian preferences, sensitivity to odors, etc. These tests were compiled for hundreds of genetically identical flies from birth to death, followed by sequencing of their mRNA expression to see which genes were active. Another batch of more diverse wild-type flies were tested as well to compare what variable genetic influences might be afoot.

Firstly, the differences they observed in these flies were stable over time. They represent true "types" of behavior, despite the lack of genetic input. Secondly, they are limited in landscape. Those flies more active in one test tend to be more active in other tests as well. So the variations in behavior seem to flow from deep-seated categorical types that follow typical patterns within fly development. Which tests should yield correlated scores, and which other ones are more orthogonal, is a little hard to figure out and a matter of subjective taste, so these conclusions about wide-spread correlations in disparate behaviors reflecting personality types is based largely on these researchers knowing their flies on a pretty intimate basis.

A matrix of videos of flies just strolling along, captured by these researchers. Not all flies walk the same way.

For example, they emphasize correlations where they would not have expected them- between, say light sensitivity and overall activity- and non-correlations where they would have expected correlation- say between activity measures of maze walking and free activity. The main observation is that there were a lot of variations among these identical-twin flies. So, just as identical humans can have different personalities, sensitivities, and outlooks, so can flies. 

Is there anything one can say about this genetically? The behavioral variations were themselves not genetically based, but rather due to alternate paths taken down developmental pathways, via either sporadic or experience-based differences. The flies were raised in the same homes, so to speak, but as we know from humans, however similar things may seem on the outside, the individual subjective experience can be very different. At any rate, the developmental pathways leading to the variations are themselves genetically determined, so this exercise was really about learning about how they work, and what range of variation they support/allow.

This analysis of course boils down to how informative the behavioral traits are that the researchers are testing. And obviously, they were not very informative- how does one connect a propensity to turn left when going down a maze with some developmental process? These researchers threw a bunch of statistics at their data, including from the gene expression analysis performed in the sacrificed flies after their mortal trials were over. For instance, among known molecular pathways, metabolic pathway gene expression correlated with activity assays of behavior- not a big surprise. Expression of photo-transduction related genes also correlated with response to light. The biggest correlation was between oxidative phosphorylation gene expression (i.e. mitochondrial activity) with their various activity measurements, which were, after all, the essence of all their assays. In humans, some people are just high-energy, which informs everything they do.

"We found that in all cases, behavioral variation has high dimensionality, that is, many independent axes of variation."

In the end, they conclude that, yes, flies of identical genetic background grow up to have distinct behavioral profiles, or one can say, personalities. Many of these behavioral profiles or traits are independent of each other, indicating several, or even numerous, axes of development where such differences can arise. The researchers estimate 27 dimensions of trait variability, in fact, just from this smattering of tests. But others vary together, forming a sort of personality type, though the choice of assays was obviously very influential in these cross-correlations. These results give a very rough start to the project of figuring out where animal development is less than fully determined, and can thus give rise to the non-genetic variation that provides rich fodder for environmental and social adaptation / specialization. While genes are not directly responsible for this variation, they are responsible for the available range, and thus set the parameters of possible adaptation.

It is sadly typical that these researchers disposed of about 1/3 of their flies at the outset of the study for being insufficiently active. While they are surely correct that these flies would continue to be less active through the rest of the assays, thus giving less data to their automated tests, they did not ask themselves why some flies might choose to think before they leap - so to speak. Were they genetically defective? The flies were identical to a matter of a handful of single nucleotide variations. If inbreeding was a problem, all the flies would have been equally affected. So it is likely that one of the most significant personality traits was summarily excluded out of raw institutionalized bias against the more introverted fly, conveniently veiled by claims of technical limitations. Hey hey, ho ho!

  • Yes, they have a brain.
  • Technical talk on SARS COV2 evolution, which has been, obviously, rapid and devastating.
  • And a story about its endemic fate as a regular cold virus among us.
  • Manchin isn't a slouch in the corruption department either.
  • We need a lot more electricity.
  • The price of fish.
  • If you thing facebook is bad here, it is worse for other countries.
  • I was thinking about oculus. But now, maybe not.
  • A little bit of wonderfulness from the Muppets.