Students Deserve Mentors

The best form of education is personal mentoring. More of our educational and work system should get back to that model.

We learned some important things from the Covid pandemic. One is that fiscal stimulus really works. Another is that mRNA vaccines are highly effective, and their rapid and flexible development cycle makes them a superior platform for future vaccines. And another is that social interaction is deeply important, especially for young people. We all got used to Zoom, but for school children, that was a poor substitute, when it was even possible. Children were left significantly behind both academically and socially.

A recent segment on the PBS NewsHour touched on this in a discussion of adolescent development. Its message was that learning requires challenging opportunities and human relationships. Adolescents are going on a heroic quest to become adults. They thrive on active engagement with the world and need models of successful adulthood to learn from. How to provide these key functions in an optimal way? We know how to do this- by apprenticeship and mentorship. This model has been understood forever, from the schools of Athens to the medieval trade guilds to the graduate schools of contemporary academia. My grandfather was a baker in Germany, and in his turn trained many apprentices and journeymen to be bakers. I went to graduate school, which turned out to be a glorified apprenticeship under a renowned researcher, then went on to a journeyman position (aka post-doc) with another mentor. This model is an education in many dimensions- the technical ingredients of a craft, the management practices that make a successful organization, how to participate in a larger community that pursues socially important goals, and the discipline and moral integrity it takes to be a competent adult, capable of leadership.

Example of a certificate of attainment of mastery, 1927, for a bricklayer, attested by his mentors and examiners.

However, as a society, we are reluctant to make these kinds of investments in children and adolescents. Efficiency demands that class sizes be large, colleges impersonal, and money squeezed out of the system. Companies clamor for fully trained job candidates, expecting students to go into debt in trade schools before being hired into a paying job. Few young people get the kind of lengthy, personal training that they would most benefit from. Mentorship becomes a hazard of chance, if a boss in an early job takes an interest, or a teacher decides to make extra time.

Principally, I fault the corporate system, which has sloughed off its civic responsibilities to train people and propagate cultural knowledge. The economy is full of interesting and important jobs representing exquisite technical knowledge and other expertise. As a culture and economy, we are not going to maintain a high standard if we keep losing these skills and knowledge with every generation. Just look what has happened to the industries we have ceded to China. Innovation hubs like Silicon Valley are successful in part because training becomes a shared enterprise. New companies benefit from a large pool of experienced workers, who can switch between organizations with ease. No individual company carries the whole burden of training, but as companies become larger and more specialized, they have to take on the costs of training a larger proportion of their incoming employees. Yet they still benefit from the cross-fertilization of being in a highly skilled employment ecosystem.

To better serve young people, we need to make integration into corporate skills training more accessible and normal. The idea that students should be battling for unpaid internships is absurd and insulting- all internships should be paid, and they should be longer as well. The German trades system is an example, where companies and government cooperate in providing training to young people. The companies get a much better familiarity with future hires, who are also better trained. Many trades/sectors have a communal "training tax", which all companies pay, and which funds salaries to trainees and other training costs. This is one accomplishment of the union system in Germany, which is much stronger and better integrated into their industries than that in the US.

This model could be made more general in the US as a federal program, crossing all organizations in the public and private sector, funding internships and training for more students than is now done, setting up a more lengthy and regular apprenticeship system. The training/salary costs would grade over the first few years of employment from tax-supported to company-supported. Lowering the burden of a young first hire, both in financial terms and terms of knowing the candidates better, should encourage more hiring and more training by employers. 

Companies are often citadels of hermetic wisdom, when they are not going off the rails as predatory enterprises. Integrating more young people and an additional purpose of training into US corporate culture would counteract both of these problems, while helping the youth and preserving / propagating cultural knowledge more effectively.

• Mentoring, Shanghai style.
• Surrender Dorothy!
• Mini-me and the future of Ukraine.
• Free buses work.
• Crypto, on the other hand, remains a criminal enterprise.
• Biology is not so easy. Really.

The Submission Drive

Humans have a drive for social and intellectual submission, which is extremely dangerous.

There was a time when psychological "drives" were all the rage. The idea that humans have instincts much as other animals do was just entering the scientific consciousness, so finding and classifying them was an important task- the great work of figuring out the human unconscious, or subconscious. Drives for food, security, sex, dominance, and much else were found. Freud even elaborated a "death drive". But our current political epoch suggests another one- a submission drive.

To an independent minded scholar and skeptic, the behavior on the Republican side of the political spectrum is revolting. Falling all over themselves to fawn over a narcissistic megalomaniac? Check. Thinking nothing of flagrant corruption that makes Warren Harding look like a choir boy? Check. Explaining away gross incompetence and pointless cruelty across the entire policy space from economics to foreign policy? Check. What causes people to join and defend what amount to cults? For that matter, what causes people to join religions?

At one level, submission is eminently rational. Groups are always more powerful than individuals. The American archetype of the loner, the Clint Eastwood or John Wayne character riding alone to mete out justice and bucking the system- that is a fantasy. It is powerful precisely because it is so romantic and unrealistic. It is compensatory psychic food for the hemmed-in and submissive. In reality, the system always wins. Militaries win when they can gather up a bigger army than the other guys. Corporations win when they have bought all their competition and become the biggest on the block. Our social instincts lead us to join groups to gain power. 

But the submission drive seems to go way beyond this, allowing us to swallow alternate realities and even seek domination by others. An interesting form is when whole cultures convert their religion. Many times, such as during the colonial era, during the Christian conquests of Northern Europe, and during the Muslim conquests, the winning power foists its religion on another culture, a culture that grows quite rapidly to accept and adopt it as its own. Was one religion true-er or better than the other? Not at all. The new one is often significantly worse in many dimensions than the old. This is purely a power transaction where those who had submitted themselves to one archetype and narrative of cultural and supernatural power find themselves convinced that social and military coercion is a pretty important form of power too, perhaps signifying a new narrative that they should submit to. But once converted, the same psychic events happen. Leaders are idolized, scriptures are memorized, vestments are accessorized. In return, those who submit seek safety and guidance, buying into a (new) father figure archetype.

Joining a group inserts you into a hierarchy of domination. There are rewards for working your way up the ranks, being able to get others to serve you, having more influence and status. This most obvious in the military, with its obsession with colorful gradations, decorations, and uniforms. But it is true everywhere- in corporations, politics, organized crime, families. Submission is the price of entry, and it seems that to properly submit, one has to take on the a great deal more than just a signed contract. Members of organizations are constantly being tested for their loyalty, their buy-in to the ethics and goals of the organization, and its wider world-view. At IBM, they used to sing the company song. Modern corporate life is a complex compromise where some of the submittee's personal life is allowed to be separated from corporate control, and many boundaries are set by legal regime to prevent the organization from turning into a criminal entity and bar total domination of its employees, customers, business partners. 

However, other organizations are not so limited. Religion and politics are a bit less hemmed-in, and demand sometimes extraordinary kinds of fealty for the rewards on offer. In their variety of styles and cultures, they attract different temperaments of devotee. Overall, one has to say that people more prone to submission and participation in hierarchies tend to go to right-wing political, military, and religious organizations. Contrary to the cultivated image of hard-headedness and independence, conservatives turn out to submit more readily to domination by others. It is notorious that organizing Democrats is like herding cats. Likewise, university faculty tend towards independence and disorganization. Liberal churches are notoriously light on discipline and free with their theology. 

Conversely, Republican and conservative organizations spring up like weeds and have, aside from gobs of funding, remarkable discipline. The MAGA swoon for the current president is just one example of the lengths to which thought patterns can be bent in favor of the dominant leader of the moment. The corollary of greater mental submission by the followers is greater rewards and wider scope of action for the leaders. Making it to the top of such disciplined heap seems to turn psychology on its head, from submission to domination. Napoleon is a case study, working his way up the ranks, literally, to a position of ultimate power. Which promptly went to his head, causing him to veer in a conservative direction, and to wreck half of Europe. Cult leaders have time and again shown how poorly adapted we are to this much-sought after, but rarely successful, psychological transition.

The fascist/authoritarian moment that is glowering around the world has reactivated these extreme domination/submission dynamics, such as between Russia and Ukraine, and within so many far-right movements and the poitical systems they target. Fortunately, there are just fundamental temperamental barriers to the attractiveness of such movements, forcing them to take extra-legal measures if they are truly dedicated to overcome the resistence of the less submissive members of their societies.

• Much of this is drawn from a classic book, "Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War".
• Report card on the courts.
• Waymo is hitting the highway.
• Plastic.

The Role of Empathy in Science

Jane Goodall's career was not just a watershed in ethology and primate psychology, but in the way science is done.

I vividly remember reading Jane Goodall's descriptions of the chimpanzees in her Gombe project. Here we had been looking for intelligent alien life with SETI, and wondering about life on Mars. But she revealed that intelligent, curious personalities exist right here, on Earth, in the African forest. Alien, but not so alien. Indeed, they loved their families, suffered heartbreaking losses, and fought vicious battles. They had cultures, and tools, deviousness and generosity. 

What was striking was not just the implications of all this for us as humans and as conservationists, but also what it overturned about scientific attitudes. Science had traditionally had a buttoned-up attitude- "hard science", as it were. This reached a crescendo with behaviorism, where nothing was imputed to the psychology of others, whether animals or children, other than machine-like input/output reflexes. Machines were the reigning model, as though we had learned nothing since Descartes. 

Ask a simple question, get a simple answer.

This was appalling enough on its own terms, but it really impoverished scientific progress as well. Goodall helped break open this box by showing in a particularly dramatic way the payoff possible from having deep empathy with one's scientific object. Scientists have always engaged with their questions out of interest and imagination. It is a process of feeling one's way through essentially a fantasy world, until one proves that the rules you have divined actually are provable via some concrete demonstration- doing an experiment, or observing the evidence of tool use by chimpanzees. It is intrinsically an empathetic process, even if the object of that empathy is a geological formation, or a sub-atomic particle. 

But discipline is needed too. Mathematics reigns supreme in physics, because, luckily, physics follows extremely regular rules. That is what is so irritating and uncomfortable about quantum mechanics. That is a field where empathy sort of fails- notoriously, no one really "understands" quantum mechanics, even though the math certainly works out. But in most fields, it is understanding we are after, led by empathy and followed by systematization of the rules at work, if any. This use of empathy has methodological implications. We become attached to the objects of our work, and to our ideas about them. So discipline involves doing things like double-blind trials to insulate a truth-finding process from bias. And transparency with open publication followed by open critique.

In the 20th century, science was being overwhelmed by the discipline and the adulation of physics, and losing the spark of inspiration. Jane Goodall helped to right that ship, reminding us that scientific methods and attitudes need to match the objects we are working with. Sure, math might be the right approach to electrons. But our fellow animals are an entirely different kettle of fish. For example, all animals follow their desires. The complexities of mating among animals means that they are all driven just as we are- by emotions, by desire, by pain, by love. The complexity may differ, but the intensity of these emotions can not possibly be anything but universal.

• "He will pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government."

Dopamine: Get up and Go, or Lie Down and Die

The chemistry of motivation.

A recent paper got me interested in the dopamine neurotransmitter system. There are a limited number of neurotransmitters, (roughly a hundred), which are used for all communication at synapses between neurons. The more common transmitters are used by many cells and anatomical regions, making it hazardous in the extreme to say that a particular transmitter is "for" something or other. But there are themes, and some transmitters are more "niche" than others. Serotonin and dopamine are specially known for their motivational valence and involvement in depression, schizophrenia, addiction, and bipolar disorder, among many other maladies.

This paper described the reason why cancer patients waste away- a syndrome called cachexia. This can happen in other settings, like extreme old age, and in other illnesses. The authors ascribe cachexia (using mice implanted with tumors) to the immune system's production of IL6, one of scores of cytokines, or signaling proteins that manage the vast distributed organ that is our immune system. IL6 is pro-inflammatory, promoting inflammation, fever, and production of antibody-producing B cells, among many other things. These authors find that it binds to the area postrema in the brain stem, where many other blood-borne signals are sensed by the brain- signals that are generally blocked by the blood-brain barrier system.

The binding of IL6 at this location then activates a series of neuronal connections that these authors document, ending up inhibiting dopamine signaling out of the ventral tegmental area (VTA) in the lower midbrain, ultimately reducing dopamine action in the nucleus accumbens, where it is traditionally associated with reward, addiction, and schizophrenia. These authors use optically driven engineered neurons at an intermediate location, the parabrachial nucleus, (PBN), to reproduce how neuron activation there drives inhibition downstream, as the natural IL6 signal also does.  

Schematic of the experimental setup and anatomical locations. The graph shows how dopamine is strongly reduced under cachexia, consequent to the IL6 circuitry the authors reveal.

What is the rationale of all this? When we are sick, our body enters a quite different state- lethargic, barely motivated, apathetic, and resting. All this is fine if our immune system has things under control, uses our energy for its own needs, and returns us to health forthwith, but it is highly problematic if the illness goes on longer. This work shows in a striking and extreme way what had already been known- that prominent dopamine-driven circuits are core micro-motivational regulators in our brains. For an effective review of this area, one can watch a video by Robert Lustig, outlining at a very high level the relationship of the dopamine and serotonin systems.

Treatment of tumor-laden mice with an antibody to IL6 that reduces its activity relieves them of cachexia symptoms and significantly extends their lifespans.

It is something that the Buddhists understood thousands of years ago, and which the Rolling Stones and the advertising industry have taken up more recently. While meditation may not grant access to the molecular and neurological details, it seems to have convinced the Buddha that we are on a treadmill of desire, always unsatisfied, always reaching out for the next thing that might bring us pleasure, but which ultimately just feeds the cycle. Controlling that desire is the surest way to avoid suffering. Nowhere is that clearer than in addiction- real, clinical addictions that are all driven by the dopamine system. No matter what your drug of choice- gambling, sugar, alcohol, cocaine, heroin- the pleasure that they give is fleeting and alerts the dopamine system to motivate the user to seek more of the same. There are a variety of dopamine pathways, including those affecting Parkinson's and reproductive functions, but the ones at issue here are the mesolimbic and mesocortical circuits, that originate in the midbrain VTA and extend respectively to the nucleus accumbens in the lower forebrain, and to the cerebral cortex. These are integrated with the rest of our cognition, enabling motivation to find the root causes of a pleasurable experience, and raise the priority of actions that repeat those root causes. 

So, if you gain pleasure from playing a musical instrument, then the dopamine system will motivate you to practice more. But if you gain pleasure from cocaine, the dopamine system will motivate you to seek out a dealer, and spend your last dollar for the next fix. And then steal some more dollars. This system shows specifically the dampening behavior that is so tragic in addictions. Excess activation of dopamine-driven neurons can be lethal to those cells. So they adjust to keep activation in an acceptable range. That is, they keep you unsatisfied, in order to allow new stimuli to motivate you to adjust to new realities. No matter how much pleasure you give yourself, and especially the more intense that pleasure, it is never enough because this system always adjusts the baseline to match. One might think of dopamine as the micro-manager, always pushing for the next increment of action, no matter how much you have accomplished before, no matter how rosy or bleak the outlook. It gets us out of bed and moving through our day, from one task to the next.

In contrast, the serotonin system is the macro-manager, conveying feelings of general contentment, after a life well-lived and a series of true accomplishments. Short-circuiting this system with SSRIs like prozac carries its own set of hazards, like lack of general motivation and emotional blunting, but it does not have the risk of addiction, because serotonin, as Lustig portrays it, is an inhibitory neurotransmitter, with no risk of over-excitement. The brain does not re-set the baseline of serotonin the same way that it continually resets the baseline of dopamine.

How does all this play out in other syndromes? Depression is, like cachexia, at least in part syndrome of insufficient dopamine. Conversely, bipolar disorder in its manic phase appears to involve excess dopamine, causing hyperactivity and wildly excessive motivation, flitting from one task to the next. But what have dopamine antagonists like haloperidol and clozapine been used for most traditionally? As anti-psychotics in the treatment of schizophrenia. And that is a somewhat weird story. 

Everyone knows that the medication of schizophrenia is a haphazard affair, with serious side effects and limited efficacy. A tradeoff between therapeutic effects and others that make the recipient worse off. A paper from a decade ago outlined why this may be the case- the causal issues of schizophrenia do not lie in the dopamine system at all, but in circuits far upstream. These authors suggest that ultimately schizophrenia may derive from chronic stress in early life, as do so many other mental health maladies. It is a trail of events that raise the stress hormone cortisol, which diminishes cortical inhibition of hippocampal stress responses, and specifically diminishes the GABA (another neurotransmitter) inhibitory interneurons in the hippocampus. 

It is the ventral hippocampus that has a controlling influence over the VTA that in turn originates the relevant dopamine circuitry. The theory is that the ventral hippocampus sets the contextual (emotional) tone for the dopamine system, on top of which episodic stimulation takes place from other, more cognitive and perception-based sources. Over-activity of this hippocampal regulation raises the gain of the other signals, raising dopamine far more than appropriate, and also lowering it at other times. Thus treating schizophrenia with dopamine antagonists counteracts the extreme highs of the dopamine system, which in the nucleus accumbens can lead to hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, and manic activity, but it is a blunt instrument, also impairing general motivation, and further reducing cognitive, affect, parkinsonism, and other problems caused by low dopamine that occurs during schizophrenia in other systems such as the meso-cortical and the nigrostriatal dopamine pathways.

Manipulation of neurotransmitters is always going to be a rough job, since they serve diverse cells and pathways in our brains. Wikipedia routinely shows tables of binding constants for drugs (clozapine, for instance) to dozens of different neurotransmitter receptors. Each drug has its own profile, hitting some receptors more and others less, sometimes in curious, idiosyncratic patterns, and (surprisingly) across different neurotransmitter types. While some of these may occasionally hit a sweet spot, the biology and its evolutionary background has little relation to our current needs for clinical therapies, particularly when we have not yet truly plumbed the root causes of the syndromes we are trying to treat. Nor is precision medicine in the form of gene therapies or single-molecule tailored drugs necessarily the answer, since the transmitter receptors noted above are not conveniently confined to single clinical syndromes either. We may in the end need specific, implantable and computer-driven solutions or surgeries that respect the anatomical complexity of the brain.

• Thoughts about corruption.
• The Fed is extraordinarily powerful.
• But our Stable Genius is going downhill.
• The real deal with autism.

Gold Standard

The politics and aesthetics of resentment. Warning: this post contains thought crime.

I can not entirely fathom thinking on the right these days. It used to be that policy disputes occured, intelligent people weighed in from across a reasonable spectrum of politics, and legislation was hammered out to push some policy modestly forward (or backward). This was true for civil rights, environmental protection, deregulation, welfare reform, even gay marriage. That seems to be gone now. Whether it is the atomization of attention and thought brought on by social media, or the mercenary propaganda of organs like FOX news, the new mode of politics appears to be destructive, vindictive spite. A spiral of extremism.

It also has a definite air of resentment, as though policy is not the point, nor is power, entirely, but owning the libtards is the real point- doing anything that would be destructive of liberal accomplishments and ideals. We know that the president is a seething mass of resentments, but how did that transform alchemically into a political movement?

I was reading a book (Deep South) by Paul Theroux that provides some insight. It is generally a sour and dismissive, full of a Yankee's distain for the backwardness of the South. And it portrays the region as more or less third world. Time and again, towns are shadowed by factories closed due to off-shoring.  What little industry the South had prior to NAFTA was eviscerated, leaving agriculture, which is increasingly automated and corporatized. It is an awful story of regression and loss of faith. And the author of this process was, ironically, a Southerner- Bill Clinton. Clinton went off to be a smarty-pants, learned the most advanced economic theories, and concluded that NAFTA was a good deal for the US, as it was for the other countries involved, and for our soft power in the post-world war 2 world. The South, however, and a good deal of the Rust Belt, became sacrifice zones for the cheaper goods coming in from off-shore.

What seemed so hopeful in the post-war era, that America would turn itself into a smart country, leading the world in science, technology, as well as in political and military affairs, has soured into the realization that all the smart kids moved to the coasts, leaving a big hole in the middle of the country. The meritocracy accomplished what it was supposed to, establishing a peerless educational system that raised over half the population into the ranks of college graduates. But it opened eyes in other ways as well, freeing women from the patterns of patriarchy, freeing minorities from reflexive submission, and opening our history to quite contentious re-interpretation. And don't get me started on religion!

So there has been a grand conjunction of resentment, between a population sick of the dividends of the educational meritocracy over a couple of generations, and a man instinctively able to mirror and goad those resentments into a destructive political movement. His aesthetic communicates volumes- garish makeup, obscene ties, and sharing with Vladimir Putin a love of gold-gilded surfaces. To the lower class, it may read expensive and successful, but to the well educated, it reeks of cheapness, focusing on surface over substance, a bullying, mob aesthetic, loudly anti-democratic.

Reading the project 2025 plans for this administration, I had thought we would be looking at a return to the monetary gold standard. But no, gold has come up in many other guises, not that one. Gold crypto coins, Gold immigration card, Oval office gold, golden hair. But most insulting of all was the ordering up of gold standard science. The idea that the current administration is interested in, or capable of, sponsoring high quality personnel, information or policy of any kind has been thoroughly refuted by its first months in office. The resentment it channels is directed against, first and foremost, those with moral integrity. Whether civil servants, diplomats, or scientists, all who fail to bend the knee are enemies of this administration. This may not be what the voters had in mind, but it follows from the deeper currents of frustration with liberal dominance of the meritocracy and culture.

But what is moral integrity? I am naturally, as a scientist, talking about truth. A morality of truth, where people are honest, communicate in truthful fashion, and care about reality, including the reality of other people and their rights / feelings. As the quote has it, reality has a well-known liberal bias. But it quickly becomes apparent that there are other moralities. What we are facing politically could be called a morality of authority. However alien to my view of things, this is not an invalid system, and it is central to the human condition, modeled on the family. Few social systems are viable without some hierarchy and relation of submission and authority. How would a military work without natural respect for authority? And just to make this philosophical and temperamental system complete, one can posit a morality of nurture as well, modeled on mothering, unconditional love, and encouragement.

This triad of moralities is essential to human culture, each component in continual dynamic tension. Our political moment shows how hypertrophy of the morality of authority manifests. Lies and ideology are a major tool, insisting that people take their reality from the leader, not their own thoughts or from experts who hew to a morality of truth. Unity of the culture is valued over free analysis. As one can imagine, over the long run of human history, the moralities of nurture and authority have been dominant by far. They are the poles of the family system. It was the Enlightenment that raised the morality of truth as an independent pole in this system for the culture at large, not just for a few scholars and clerics. Not that truth has not always been an issue in people's lives, with honesty a bedrock principle, and people naturally caring whether predicted events really happen, whether rain really falls, the sun re-appears, etc. But as an organizing cultural principle that powers technological and thus social and cultural progress, it is a somewhat recent phenomenon.

It is notable that scientists, abiding by a morality of truth, tend to have very peaceful cultures. They habitually set up specialized organizations, mentor students, and collaborate nationally and internationally. Scientists may work for the military, but within their own cultures, have little interest in starting wars. It is however a highly competitive culture, with critical reviewing, publishing races, and relentless experimentation designed to prove or disprove models of reality. Authority has its place, as recognized experts get special privileges, and established facts tend to be hard to move. At risk of sounding presumptuous, the morality of truth represents an enormous advance in human culture, not to be lightly dismissed. And the recent decades of science in the US have been a golden age that have produced a steady stream of technological advance and international power, not to mention Nobel prizes and revelations of the beauty of nature. That is a gold standard. 

• The theme does strike a nerve.
• In the name of free speech, thought crime will be punished.
• The war against propaganda.
• How fun it is in a culture of cruelty.
• A great drying is taking place.
• Is there no limit to the corruption?
• 200 years of trains.

My Religion is Star Trek

Denial of death and the origin of evil- Ernest Becker on religion.

I have always wondered about the purpose of clothes. Nudists obviously do as well. Sometimes you need to keep warm. But most of the time, clothes are a cultural convention full of signifiers of taste, status ... and something else. That something else is the illusion that we are not animals. Positively, absolutely, something wholly different and on another plane of existence. Not animals. 

Even a century and a half after Darwin explained that we are animals, there are plenty of people who cling to various stories of denial. But these stories have purposes that go well beyond this ontological illusion. Because not only are we animals, but we are animals without meaning. Animals that will die. That is, no meaning is given objectively. So just as we clothe our bodies with fabric, we clothe our spirits with illusions of meaning, for otherwise we could not live. 

I have been following a provocative podcast series, which spent a couple of episodes on Ernest Becker, a mid-20th century philosopher in the US. He posited that we all follow a religion, in the anthropological sense that we live in cultural structures that give us meaning. Structures that are fundamentally illusory, because there is no there there. Meaning has always been generated by us, for us, subjectively by our psychological proclivities for social connection and drama. We are psychologically adapted to make and seek meaning, though in the final analysis, however powerful they feel, these are all conjured, not given. Take Disney as an example. Many people get highly involved with, and take solace from, the narratives Disney puts out, in its parks, cruise ships, movies, merchandise, and other channels. Relentless provision of mechanically assembled archetypes and other psychological triggers that activate / soothe, inspire, and motivate apparently has a substantial market. 

While atheists take no end of potshots at the absurdities and hypocrisies of formal religions, they also live (and must live) in some sort of illusion themselves. The idea that learning and science makes for a more "objective" value system and life of meaning may be less absurd, but is no more objective. These values come with a rationale and a story, one of service to ultimately human ends of knowledge and betterment. But that doesn't make them true- just another set of values that must be gauged subjectively. And when measured by the ironic criterion of Darwinian success in promoting reproduction, they often turn out to be lacking. At the most basic level, getting through the day requires some kind of motivation, and that motivation, when it goes beyond the most animal requirements, requires meaning, which requires us to have some story that narrates a purpose to a life whose end is otherwise irredeemably meaningless. 

There is a problem, however, to Becker. The more enveloping and functional the narrative of meaning, the more any competing narrative becomes alien and threatening. Indeed, threatening narratives become evil. Thus Judaism became the nemesis of Christianity, and Catholicism that of Protestantism. If the meaning of our lives, in a spiritual and eternal sense, is devalued by another story that has competing status, there is no limit to our horror at its doctrines or our dehumanization of its adherents. Thence to crusades, religious wars, pogroms, and the delicately named "communal violence". The management of narratives of meaning thus is perhaps the most critical aspect of human affairs, as all religious leaders have known forever.

One can see the US civil war through this lens. The people of the South, wedded to slavery, justified it through their theology and culture. They were mortally offended by the busybodies of the North who dared cast aspersions on their moral narratives and justifications, not to mention their economic basis. Where "Uncle Tom's Cabin" may have broken through the indifference of Northern culture, it was met with outrage in the South- a stout defense of their powerful cultural and religious narratives. The conflict was spiritual and existential.

Becker did not have terribly novel solutions to the problems of meaning and counter-meaning. Just the meta prescription that arose in the enlightenment, secularism and in all the branches of modern psychology. Which is that understanding this dynamic and taking one's stories less seriously is the path to social peace. It may not be the path to optimal personal meaning, however. How do you compare the smorgasbord of Disney, mainline religion, Western Buddhism, science, and a thousand other sects and value systems to a traditional society with one church, one story, and one universe? The power of social and spiritual unity must have been tremendously validating and comfortable. So there has been a big tradeoff to get to our current state of social and spiritual innovation, plurality, and anomie. It is evident that our political moment is one of deep spiritual revanchism- of revulsion (by the more traditional-minded) against all this plurality, back towards a more benighted unity.

• Only Catholics go to heaven.
• Religious zealots have no clue whatsoever.
• Homelessness as a problem of affluence, gentrification, and too-good policing.
• But crime in DC? We know where that is.
• Cutting off our health to spite our libtards.
• The state of cars.

Money For Nothing: Two Views of Crypto

Is crypto more like gold or a simple scam?

I have to confess some perplexity over crypto. Billed as currencies, they are not currencies. Billed as securities, they are not securities, either. They excite a weird kind of enthusiasm in libertarian circles, in dreams of asocial (if not anti-social) finance. From a matter of fringe speculation, they are migrating into the culture at large, influencing our politics, and becoming significant economic actors, with a combined market cap now over three trillion dollars. For me, there are two basic frames for thinking about crypto. One is that they are like gold, an intrinsically worthless, but attractive object of fascination, wealth storage, and speculation. The other is that they are straight Ponzi schemes, rising by a greater-fool process that will end in tears.

Currencies are forms of money with particular characteristics. They are widely used among a region or population, stable in value, and easy to store and exchange. They are typically sponsored by a government to ensure that stability and acceptance. This is done in part by specifying that currency for incoming taxes and outgoing vendor and salary payments. They are also, in modern systems, managed elastically, (and intelligently!), with ongoing currency creation to match economic growth and keep the nominal value stable over time. Crypto entities would like to be currencies. However, they have far from stable value, are not easy to work with, and are not widely used. Securities, on the other hand, have a basis in some kind of collateral (i.e. the "security" part) like business ownership, a contract of bond interest payments, etc. Crypto does not have this either. Crypto has only its own scarcity to offer, a bit like cowrie shells, or gold. Crypto entities are not investments in productive activity. Indeed, they foster the opposite, as their only solid use case has been, at least to date, facilitating crime, as demonstrated by the ransomware industry, which asks to be paid in Bitcoin.

So how about gold? Keynes railed against gold as the most useless, barbaric form of wealth, inducing people to dig holes in the earth and cause environmental degradation. And for what? A shiny substance that looks good, and is useful in a few industrial applications, but mostly was, at the time, held by governments in huge vaults, notionally underpinning their currency values. Thankfully we are past that, but gold still holds fascination, and persists as a store of value. Gold can be held in electronic forms, making it just as easy to hold and transfer as crypto entities, if one is so-inclined. Critically, however, gold is also physical, and humanity's fascination with it is innate and enduring. Thus, after the apocalypse, when the electricity is off and the computers are not connected anymore, gold will still be there, ready to serve as money when crypto has evaporated away. 

Bitcoin barely recovered from an early crisis. 

How durable is the fascination with crypto, as a store of wealth, or for any other purpose, under modern, non-apocalyptic conditions? Bitcoin is the grand-daddy of the field, and seems to have achieved dominance, certainly the field of criminal money laundering and transfer, as well as libertarian speculation. It appears to have a special mystique, whether from the blockchain, its "mining" system, or its mysterious pseudonymous founder. The other forms of crypto range from respectible to passing memes. There is a fascinating competition in the attention space that constitutes the crypto markets. Since they do not have intrinsic value, nor governmental buy-in, they float entirely on buyer sentiment, in a greater-fool cycle of rises and falls. Crashes in the stock market are halted by fundamental value of the underlying asset. As the speculative fervor wanes, vultures step in to, at worst, liquidate the assets. But for crypto, there are no assets. No fundamental value. So crashes can and do go to zero.

There are also external factors, like the fact that many crypto entities have been outright scams, or the environmental costs of Bitcoin, or their facilitation of criminality, which may eventually draw popular and regulatory scrutiny. Boosters have been trying to get the Federal Reserve and other validating entities to buy into the crypto craze, and political contributions from newly crypto-riche holders and exchanges have transformed the landscape to one that seems increasingly sympathetic, especially on the Republican side. Thankfully, the smaller memecoins have market caps in the low millions, so do not present a threat as yet to the financial system, in the almost certain event of their evaporation once each meme passes. This blasé acceptance of "securities" that are pure schemes of speculation is a sad commentary on our current age. The sophisticated investor of today would not study corporate efficiency, market prospects, or finances. He or she would be conversant in current memes on social media, ready to jump on the newest one, and sensitive to the withering of older memes, in an endless conveyor belt of booms and busts. 

It is weird how people fail to learn the lessons of the past, from the tulip craze and other speculative booms. Where there is no value, there is likely to be a very deep crash. The libertarians among us, who may have been gold bugs in the past and now have flocked to the new world of crypto, may represent a psychological type that is ineradicable, so motivated to ditch the humdrum official currency for anything that offers a whiff of notional independence, (though being tethered to the new crypto infrastructure of exchanges and wallets is not for the faint of heart or independent-minded), that they can float these crypto entities indefinitely. But in the absence of deeper value, might their psychologies change to those of hawkers who get in at the ground floor and make out, while the schlubs who buy at the top are left holding the bag? It comes down to human psychology in the end- what is personally and socially valuable, who you think your counterparts are on the other ends of all these trades, and who (and what sort of motivation) is making up the institutions and communities of crypto.

• Star Trek was fighting the cold war.

To the Stars!

Reviews of "Making it So", by Patrick Stewart, and "The Silent Star" from DEFA films.

When I think about religion, I usually think about how wrong it all is. But at the same time, it has provided a narrative structure for much of humanity and much of human history, for better or worse. It could be regarded as the original science fiction, with its miracles, and reports of supernatural beings and powers. Both testaments of the Bible read like wonder tales of strange happenings and hopeful portents. While theology might take the heavenly beings and weird powers seriously, it is obvious these were mere philosophical gropings after the true gears of the world, while the core of the stories are the human narratives of conflict, adversity, and morality.

In our epoch features a welter of storytelling, typically more commercially desperate than culturally binding. But one story has risen above the rest- the world of Star Trek. From its cold war beginnings, it has blossomed into a rich world of morality tales combined with hopeful adventure and mild drama. The delightful recent autobiography by Patrick Stewart brought this all back in a new way. Looking at the franchise from the inside out, from the perspective of a professional actor who was certainly dedicated to his craft, but hardly a fan of the franchise- someone for whom this was just another role, if one that made him an international, nay galactic, star- was deeply interesting. Even engaging(!)

As a Shakespearean actor, Stewart was used to dealing with beloved, culturally pivotal stories. And this one has become a touchstone in Western culture, supplying some of the models and glue that have gone missing with the increasing irrelevance of religion. It is fascinating how heavily people depend on stories for a sense of what it should, can, and does mean to be human, for models of leadership and community. Star Trek, at least for a certain segment of the population, has provided a hopeful, interesting vision of the future, with well-reasoned moral dramas and judgments. Stewart embodied the kind of leadership style that was influential far beyond the confines of Starfleet. And his deeply engaged acting helped carry the show, as that of Leonard Nimoy had taken the original series beyond its action/adventure roots.

Where the narrative of Christianity is obscurantist, blusteringly uncertain how seriously to take its own story, and focused on the occasional miracles of long-ago, Star Trek values the future, problem solving and science, while it makes little pretense of realism. On the other hand, it is fundamentally a workplace drama, eliding many important facets of humanity, like family and scarcity. Though in the Star Trek world money is worthless and abundance is the rule, posts on starships remain in short supply. There always will be shortages of something, given human greed and narcissism, so there is always going to be something subject to competition, economics, possibly warfare. Christianity hinges on preaching and conversion, based on rather mysterious, if supposedly self-serving, personal convictions. Its vision of the future is, frankly, quite frightening. Star Trek, on the other hand, shows openness to other cultures, diplomacy, and sharing in its eschatological version of the American empire, the Federation. (Even if they get into an inordinate number of fights with un-enlightened cultures.)

The Star Trek story is so strong that it keeps motivating people to make spaceships. Just look at Elon Musk, who, despite the glaringly defective logic of sending humans to Mars, persists in that dream, as does NASA itself. It is a classic case of archetypal yearnings overwhelming common sense, not to mention clear science. But that is a small price to pay for the many other benefits of the Star Trek-style world view- one where different cultures and races get along, where solving problems and seeking knowledge are the highest pursuits, where leadership is judicious and respectful, and humans know what they stand for.

In a similar vein, the Soviets, who led humanity into space, had their own fixations and narratives of space and the future. I recently watched the fascinating movie from the East German DEFA studios, The Silent Star, (1960), which portrays a voyage to Venus. It strikingly prefigures the entire Star Trek oeuvre. There are the scientists on board, the handsome captain, the black communications officer, the international crew from all corners of the earth, the shuttle craft, the talking computer, the communications that keep breaking up, and the space ship that rattles through asteroid fields, jostling the crew. While there are several pointed comments on the American bombing of Hiroshima to set the geopolitical contrast, there is, overall, the absolute optimism that all problems can be solved, and that adventuring to seek the truth is unquestionably the most exciting way to live. One gets the distinct sense that Star Trek was not so original after all.

It was time when technology had pried open the heavens for direct investigation, and what humanity found there was stunningly unlike what had been foretold in the scriptures. It was a vast and empty wasteland, dotted with dead planets and lacking any hint of deities. We had to create an alternative narrative, with warp drive and M-class planets, where humans could recover a sense of agency and engagement with a future that remains tantalizing, even if sober heads know it is as wishful as it is fictional. It is the story, however, that is significant, in its power to give us the fortitude to go forth, not out among the stars, but into a better, more decent community here on earth.

• The long Soviet fixation on Venus.
• The Star Trek that could have been.
• Some atheist cinema is, however, not so great.
• Biden's economic policies have been very good.
• Wrong. Vaccines did the work.
• We could have really stood with Ukraine.

Jews Demand Signs and Greeks Look for Wisdom, but We Preach Christ Crucified

Review of God of the Mind, by Rob Haskell

This blog had its start in a religious discussion, pitting a Christian perspective against an atheist one. That discussion never ended because these viewpoints inevitably talk past each other, based as they are on fundamentally different epistemologies and axioms. Is truth facts, or is it a person? Does it have a capital "T", or a little "t"? Does reality come first, or does faith? With this election, this conflict, usually politely ignorable at the cultural sidelines, has come front and center, as half the country has transferred a Christian style of reasoning to politics, with catastrophic consequences.

I very much wish I had had this book by Rob Haskell back in the day. It lays out in a concise and thorough way all (well, let's say many of) the philosophical and psychological deficiencies of god-belief. It is hands-down the best discussion I have ever read on the subject- well-written, with humor and incisive insight. For example, he provides the bible quote that I have used to title this post, in a discussion of Christianity's approach to reason and intellect. While reams of theology support Christianity with reasons, at the end of the day, any honest theologian and Christian thinker will say that reason doesn't get you there. Faith needs to come first. Only then does all else follow. And this "all" is laced with superstition, suspension of normal rules of evidence, submission to authority, and a need to convert the whole world to the same system of belief. It is, implicitly, a preference for unity and power over truth. No wonder they were marks for the charismatic authority of Donald Trump.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the whole debate is the moralism that creeps into what is ostensibly a reasoned discussion of viewpoints and philosophy. If one does not accept god, Christians have been taught to believe that there is a reason. Not a logical reason, but a moral reason. Depravity is a word that comes up. Lack of belief betrays a moral failure, because god is the foundation of all moral law (those twelve commandments!). Those outside the fold merely want their false freedom to enjoy debauchery and crime, without the nagging conscience, which is apparently implanted not by god at birth, (let alone by evolution, or by moral reasoning), but by regular sermons, loudly professed faith, and bible reading. A bible, we might note, that is full of militarism, sexual abuse, deceit, and political authoritarianism. The whole proposition is absurd, from the ground up, unless, of course, you are of the religious tribe, in which case it has an irresistible logic and allure.

No wonder Christians feel good, right, and justified. And feel a birthright to rule over all, to claim that the US is (or should be) a Christian nation. One where resistance to its moral imperatives would, at last, be futile.

But here we are, getting off track! Rob Haskell is a former protestant missionary and minister, graduate of Regent College, and came to his new positions through deep personal engagement and turmoil. He knows intimately of which he speaks. An interesting aspect of his book is that he is almost more focused on psychology than on philosophy. For it is psychology that drives religious conversion, drives people to prostrate themselves before the void, and drives a faith that calls itself truth. Without the indoctrination by families, for example, no religion would amount to much- certainly not Christianity. And indoctrination of the young is obviously a highly irrational process, combining the most powerful psychological forces known- peer pressure, parental pressure, authority, tradition, community, repetition, fancy costumes. Who could resist? And yet Christians have no problem claiming that the result of all this is belief in truth, with a capital T. 

Haskell recounts an educational experience he had inviting Mormon missionaries to an extended discussion of why he should take up Mormonism. They tout the book of Mormon, which Haskell knows very well is a absurd fabric of early nineteenth century prejudices and speculations. They tout the archeological work a few believers have undertaken to prove their scripture, which is highly dubious, to say the least. But at last, when reason fails and argument slackens, Haskell is urged to pray. Pray hard enough, and the light is sure to shine. And for Mormons, brought up with all the pressures and templates ready-made for their belief, such prayer is very likely to work, activating the archetypes and feelings conducive to agreement with their culture. Will the story or the prayer work for others? Rarely, but occasionally it does strike a nerve, especially in the psychologically vulnerable. Haskell recognizes, uncomfortably, that while the stories are different, the psychological methods used by the Mormons and by him as a missionary are eerily similar.

"This points back to what I've already described, namely that in evangelical thinking, and possibly in all religious thinking, the acceptance of certain crucial and non-negotiable ideas comes first. Then, after that acceptance comes the search for evidence that supports it. But that evidence always gets the short end of the stick. Evidence is great when it affirms the things that are accepted by faith. But here isn't a lot of interest in evangelical circles in evidence itself, or in thinking clearly about evidence. And when the evidence falls short, the believer goes back to where it all started: not evidence but faith. So, it's really a matter of wanting to have your cake and eat it too. There's a built-in permission to be sloppy. 'We like evidence!' says the evangelical, 'so long as it proves our point. but when the evidence brings up difficult questions, we reserve the right to toss it out and appeal to faith.' ... How can you have a serious conversation with someone who thinks like this? It's like talking with your teenager."

Rationalization and confirmation bias are fundamental aspects of human psychology. Science has developed an organized and reasonably effective way to address it, but other institutions have not, notably the echo chambers of current news and social media. We do it all the time, (I am certainly doing it here), and it is no wonder that Christians do it too. The problem is the lack of humility, where Christians revel in their fantastical story, impugn anyone so dense (if not evil) as to not get it, and twist the very vocabulary of epistemology in order to declare that "Truth" comes, not out of reality, but precisely out of unreality- a faith that is required to believe in things unseen and tales thrice-told.

• And he writes a blog, too.
• Example of typical religious condescension, by J D Vance's mentor, James Orr.
• The Discovery Institute will try anything...
• Then there is the no true Scotsman defense.
• The Supreme Court lowers itself still further.
• What makes a human brain?
• We continue speeding ever faster to disaster.
• Poisonous propaganda + AI = our future.

Oh, to Be Normal

It is a greater accomplishment than commonly appreciated.

The popular media make a fetish of condemning normality. Chase your dream, dare to be different, don't settle for average. Well, that is laudable, and appropriate for the occasional genius, but militates against much larger forces toward uniformity. Just look at styles in clothing, cars, architecture. "Keeping up" with fashions and the times is a marker of, not just normality, but of being alive and part of the larger social community. Achieving normal means not being fossilized in wig and breeches, or bell bottoms. The period of middle school and high school is when these pressures are most acute, as children find places in the wider society, staking their claim with clothing and all the other markers of being "normal". Especially against parents, who have by this time fallen a little back in their ability or desire to keep up with current standards.

But the point I am more interested in is genetic. In genetic terms, normal is typically stated as "wild-type", which is the opposite of mutant. Any particular gene or trait can be construed as normal or defective, with the possibility of being improved in some way over the "wild-type" being exceptionally rare. But summed over an entire genome, one can appreciate that not every gene can be normal. We all have mutations, and thus deviate from normal. In this sense, normality is an impossible, unattainable standard, and as anyone can observe, we all labor under some kind of deficiency. The only question is how severe those deficiencies are, relative to others, and relative to the minimum level of competence we need to survive.

That is where these two threads come together. Young people are continually competing and testing each other for fitness, gauging each other's ability to keep up with the high standard that constitutes "normal" for a culture. It is the beauty queens, and the popular kids, who find themselves at the top of the heap, shining standards of normality in a sea of mediocrity and deficiency. At least until they find out that they might have other, less visible weaknesses, like, perhaps, alcoholism. 

So, not to be all conformist about it, but for all the praise showered on diversity and innovation, there is a lot to be said for standards of normality, which are rather higher than they seem. They actually set significant challenges for everyone to aspire to. They represent, for example, a wide gamut of competencies that undergird society- the ability of people to get along in professional and intimate settings, and the basic knowledge and judgement needed for a democratic political system. Making up for one's deficiencies turns out to be a life-long quest, just as significant as making use of extraordinary gifts or pursuing competitive excellence in some chosen field.

• Ruin here, ruin there.
• The ins and outs of negotiating a large credit bill.
• Notes on early Darwinism.
• "The vast amount of Taiwanese have nothing to fear."

Welcome to Lubyanka!

Another case of penal systems illuminating their culture.

Most of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's In the First Circle is a desultory slog, at least if you have already read the Gulag Archipelago. But there are a few glorious set-pieces. One is the mock trial of Prince Igor of Kiev that the prisoners stage in their free time, a bitter satire of the Soviet judicial system. The second is a meticulous description of how prisoners are brought into and introduced to the Lubyanka prison- the central prison of the KGB/FSB/Cheka/GPU/OGPU/NKVD/NKGB, etc.. the frequently renamed, but never-changing organ of the Russian government.

The character is Innokenty Volodin, a Soviet diplomat who has recently had second thoughts about the rightness of the Soviet system, and has placed a call (around which the book's plot, such as it is, mostly revolves) to the Americans to prevent Russia from obtaining certain critical atomic secrets. Solzhenitsyn carefully prepares the way by portraying Volodin's rarified position and luxurious life. As was customary, Volodin is lured into his arrest under false pretenses, and finds himself driven to the prison almost before he knows what has happened. Then, with almost loving detail, Solzhenitsyn describes the not just systematic, but virtuosic process of degradation, step by step, shred by shred, of Volodin's humanity, as he is inducted into Lubyanka.

One cardinal rule is that prisoners must have no contact with other prisoners. Even to see others is forbidden. As they are conducted from one cell to the next, they are shoved into mini phone-booth cells if another prisoner is being conducted in the opposite direction. Their possessions are gradually taken away, down to buttons, belts, and steel shoe shanks. They are shorn. They are sleep deprived. They are relentlessly illuminated by glaring bulbs. They are spied on constantly. They are moved relentlessly from place to place and disoriented. In the middle of the night, the building is abuzz with activity, as though this were the very nerve center of the Soviet empire. 

While the rest of Russian society is mired, or cowed, in mediocrity, this is a shining point of competence. The purest expression of its obsessive leader, and the product of decades of careful study and accumulated wisdom. It is also a deeper expression of the nature of Russian society- its reflexive despotism and its strange infatuation with suffering. The closest thing we have is mafia culture, with its honor codes, brutality, and constant battle for dominance. Chess, the emblematic game of Russia, expresses this view of life as a pitiless contest to crush one's opponent. There may be a lot of historical reasons for this nature, such as the long centuries of Mongol rule, the many invasions, both ancient and modern, and the perceived success of leaders such as Ivan the Terrible and Stalin, but it is a deep and disturbing aspect of the Russian psyche. 

Should we have expected anything else, in the long road of declining relations after the cold war? Should the Russian people give thanks to the ruthlessness of their national leadership and psyche for the current position of relative power they wield in the world, far out of proportion to their population or economic strength? Other countries with larger populations peacefully mind their own business, avoid outside entanglements, and eschew invading their neighbors. It is the bullies, the intransigent, and the cruel, who appear to account for most of the drama in the world. Should we understand them, or fight against them?

• Another way to crush spirits.
• It is good to be outside.
• AI is not helping job seekers.
• On paying the devil his due.
• Why have kids anymore?

The Impossibility of Morality

We have dark sides and do bad things. How come we all think we are good people?

Part of our political, and temperamental, divide revolves around how seriously to take morality. How idealistic to be about goodness, how hard to try, or whether to be more realistic to be about our dark side. For all the platitudes and commandments, the sad fact is that morality is impossible, so the question is perhaps more how intensively we blind ourselves to darkness rather than how dark we will actually be.

Weird, right? But the closer you look, the more impossible it is to follow any system of morality. There are Jains who will not hurt a fly, let alone eat meat. But plants have feelings too. And our guts contain astronomical numbers of organisms in a roiling dance of macabre death. What about them? Existence as a human is unavoidably destructive. Simpler moral systems preach kindness to others. But again, existence requires feeding one's own fire, and that must come at cost to something, or someone. Every trade is unequal, even if voluntary. Employees are notoriously exploited to give more than their fair share. The Earth is relentlessly exploited. There is no end to our appetites, as long as we are alive.

Psychologically, we build up defenses to say that we are no worse than others, that we are good people. Even if we are bad people, we say that we have been driven to crime, and it is no worse than the rich people who thoughtlessly abuse others. Or if we are a presidential candidate, we say that we are saving the world, and making America great, and the subject of cruel witchhunts. Self-defense is one more essential part of living, even if it comes at the expense of seeing the world clearly. Unflattering visions of our way of life are rejected and repressed, the more so if they come as criticism from others.

Defensive blindness is integral to "modern" life. The agriculture and food processing industry keeps the slaughterhouses hidden, the feedlots and inhumane poultry coops under wraps. The less we know, the better we feel. Money is the ultimate screen against the squeems and qualms of existence, shielding us from the rapacious mining that our electronics drive in tropical forests, the slave labor that makes our clothes, and countless other immoral and destructive processes we are ultimately responsible for. Clear consciousness of all this would make the whole system collapse.

Protesters carrying the pine tree flag of Christian nationalism. While doing good things for the country.

Religions offer their own forms of defense. Confession in the Catholic church is a classic way to touch the darkness, but then to be absolved and feel good again. Exorcisms are offered as well. Protestant approaches tend to focus more on works, like community service, or in fringier precincts, on sermons of self-glorification. Everyone who is reborn in Christ is part of the club, and though a sinner, is also good, glorious, and heaven-bound. Possibly, even, in the Mormon system, himself a god. How they engage with moral darkness varies tremendously by religion, but the common need is to control it, in ourselves and others, sufficiently that our self-image of goodness and light can be preserved.

The extensive repression of moral darkness leads to the countervailing temptation to take another peek at it, under controlled conditions. It is the inspiration for much art- the detective thiller, the horror movie, the general apparatus of drama. Without darkness, there is no interest or light. And people differ markedly in their approach to such material. The more liberal and optimistic tend to focus on the light side, not the dark side, and do so politically as well. They have more moral idealism and hope, which means they have more repression of darker tendencies. Kumbaya is sung. Conversely, the more "realistic", conservative attitude scoffs at the do-gooder idealism of the left, and sees darkness around every corner- in foreigners, in sexual transgression and expression, in fluid social systems, in change itself. They recognize that moral aspiration is futile- such as the woke trend of recent times .. the bending over backwards to every minority group, micro-aggression, every insect and animal, and the climate.. is putting up an impossible and futile bar. That sticking to basics and tradition is going to get us further than such refusal to recognize the dark reality of human existence. 

These valences are apparent in the Palestinian dilemma. As the Palestinians were expelled from Israel during its establishment, the Jews proclaimed a right for Jews all over the world to come to Israel. Meanwhile, the UN created a right of return for Palestinians, to the very same land that formed Israel. It was the ultimate expression of bleeding heart unrealism, and has led (in part) to the existentially stuck misery of Palestinians for all these decades, as the UN took it upon itself to nurture an absurd dream of return and set up a now-permanent refugee apparatus of feeding, schools, and health care, all of which fuels the seething anger and terrorist dreams of ever-growing generations of Palestinians.

Another example is the US war in Vietnam- a curious and tragic mix of blindness, idealism, and realism. We wanted to help the (South) Vietnamese defend themselves from communism. In light of what happened in North Korea in the ensuing decades, this was not a bad goal. North Korea is moral darkness incarnate- a cruel and criminal dictatorship. But once the enormity of the task became clear, the moral realists took charge, with the aim of bombing Vietnam and its neighboring countries into submission. But even such extreme measures failed, leaving us with the ashes of horrible means used in the service of a futile goal. The US media was increasingly unwilling to hide the horrors, bringing into American consciousness all this darkness, which turned out to be unbearable.

So, is it better to blind ourselves to the darkness, and risk destruction and error, or better to be realistic, explore it, even celebrate it, as the Homeric epics do, and gird ourselves to deal with it, and deal it out to others? As in most things, societies are probably best off with a mix of perspectives. This mix is perennially expressed in our political spectrum, though of late the right seems to have gotten caught up in a peculiar reaction against the pieties of the left. As the left has gained the cultural and governmental high ground, as shown by the triumph of gay rights, ever-increasing concern for racial minorities, and a rising tide of official movement on environmental concerns, the right has turned apoplectic. They seem to be saying ... "We love our trucks, we won the continent fair and square, and we won the racial contest as well.."- leave us to our spoils, and don't be so concerned about "fairness" .. life isn't fair or moral, but goes to the darkest, baddest winner. (One can hear echos of the Confederate South in all this clearly enough.) Those on the left who are besotted with woke-ness and fairness will be singing a different tune when they are not at the top of the heap anymore, in their well-gentrified, rich and safe neighborhoods.

Perhaps this portrayal is extreme, but extreme concern for the moral fairness within a society can blind us to other issues, such as the competitive underpinnings of life, both within and verus other societies, and the ultimate impossibility of being totally fair, or moral, as historical actors. A balance of moral idealism and realism about unavoidable dark aspects is needed, but not in a conflict that tears the society apart. That depends on communication between the two sides, and less totalizing certainty from each side's respective mechanisms that repress doubt and screen (or valorize, in extreme cases) various different aspects of darker morality. Religion is notorious for reshaping its adherent's realities and protecting them psychologically from their own evil actions. But left wing certainty functions similarly, with its echo chambers and pieties. So, as usual, deeper insight is needed, mostly of our own blind spots and what they are hiding, but also of how such mechanisms work across the spectrum.

• Eating animals and loving them.
• Ready to be gouged more efficiently?
• Is your car really worth it?
• Corals are dying.

The Shadow War

We are in a new world-wide cold war. And ironically, the many new technologies from the West have given autocratic states extraordinary new powers. 

Paul Theroux had a remarkable passage in one of his travel books, as he was passing through Myanmar, a military dictatorship then and now, that illuminated attitudes towards China and from China. 

"I heard lots of praise for the United States in distancing itself from the regime, and lots of blame for China and Russia and Singapore in supporting it- China especially. But China's prosperity, its need for oil and wood and food, had created a new dynamic. China had no interest in any country's developing democratic institutions; on the contrary, it was a natural ally of repressive regimes. When the World Bank withheld funds from an African country because it was corrupt and tyrranous, demanding that it hold an election before it could qualify for aid, China would appear with money- 'rogue aid,' with no strings attached, and got the teak, the food, and the drugs." - Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, 2008

The world seems headed into another cold war, definitely rhyming with the last cold war. It is highly unfortunate, and testament to some defects in US management of the post-cold war era, to the surprising durability, even attractiveness, of authoritarian systems, and to the many weaknesses of democratic systems. This new cold war, which I will call the shadow war, features Russia and China as the main poles of opposition to democratic and developed countries, mostly in the West, but including many others. This time around, China is the stronger power by far, and both Russia and especially China are quite advanced in their development, so that the West no longer has a monopoly in any particular technology or kind of organization. China has adopted all the magic of capitalist market mechanisms to grow its wealth, and stolen (or forced the transfer of) huge amounts technology and knowledge to make itself a leader in all sorts of industries.

The West has lately begun to wake up to the problem. Our hope that capitalism was somehow related to, or a leading wedge for, democracy has been dashed several times over. Instead of China turning into Hong Kong, it is Hong Kong that is turning into China. Not only is capitalism, as has been tirelessly pointed out from the left, amoral and indifferent to human rights, (as we already knew from slavery in the US), but democracy is also far more fragile than we had hoped, requiring a wide range of civic understandings, media practices, and forms of education that are far from universal, or natural. We had, in the windup to the cold war, seen many countries make slow and fraught transitions to democracy (Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, and Eastern Europe), but have more recently seen countries backtrack into autocracy (Russia, Hungary).

Naturally, the war in Ukraine has put the most urgent point on this conflict, where Russia, which is to say its autocratic leader, felt that the existence of an independent and democratic Ukraine next door was too much to bear. Now, China also tells us that it loves its brothers in Taiwan so much that re-unification will come, no matter what the Taiwanese themselves might want. Love certainly takes some strange forms!

But it is a much broader issue, spanning the globe, and the depths of human psychology. On one list of countries ranked by democratic governance, the median country is Armenia, with a "hybrid regime" and scores of roughly five out of ten. This is not a great situation, where half the world, in rough terms, lives in various states of miserable, oppressive government. And as the quote above suggests, the authoritarians have in some ways the stronger hand. What happened?

We in the West had thought that democracy was the natural harbor of all peoples- the end of history, indeed. But in the first place, people power is a very limited power, if whoever has power is authoritarian enough to use tanks against it. And in the second place, democracy is not natural in many cultures. The Muslim culture, for instance, for all its virtues, has a fundamentally patriarchal and tribal governance model, with little room for democracy, though there are, traditionally, various forms of freedom, for men at least. So however attractive democracy is in theoretical terms, and as a model in the West that people from authoritarian countries like to vacation to... as a cultural pattern, it is not universal. And authoritarian patterns are hardly foreign to the West either. The Catholic church is an example of the preserved archetypes of patriarchy and authoritarian strong-man rule.

The Chinese dream is highly militaristic, and rather threatening.

But more deeply, the archetypes we have of leadership and politics are authoritarian.. the king, the hero. Jungian psychology, aside from its focus on archetypes, deals in the shadow, which is our real needs and instincts, insofar as they run counter to our surface goodness and conscious ego construction. A person like Donald Trump exemplifies all these trends. Why on earth are we still saddled with this sociopath after a decade of drama-queenity? He clearly touches a lot of people's archetypal conceptions of strength and heroism. His powers of psychological projection, reflectively rejecting his own shadow, are immense. He is rubber, others are glue. And his fundamental bond with the followers, by licensing their shadow sides of hate and violence, makes his every pronouncement right no matter what. We in the US are facing a cataclysmic political season, trying to repress the shadow of humanity, which is so amply expressed around the world in political / power systems that follow the logic of strength, ending up in states of terror.

Modern technology hasn't helped, either. After a brief flush of excitement about the ability of social media to amplify people power, especially across the Muslim world, it all went to pot as the shallow-ness and disorganization of such movements became apparent. The powers of databases, personal identification, surveillance, and media manipulation have been much more useful to authoritarian governments than to their antagonists, making state terror more effective than ever. Authoritarian countries now control their internet and media environments with great precision, increasingly project their twisted narratives abroad, and even hunt down dissidents outside their borders using the new information tools. So while information may want to be free, it doesn't really have a say in the matter- those with power do.

What to do about it? We in the West have lost control of our media environments. While we are waking up to some extent the the malevalent media from abroad, domestic media is controlled by money, which in the current environment of yawning wealth inequality, political fissiparation, and clickbait "business models" is just as crazy and corrupt. So there should be two approaches to this. One is to strengthen quality media, like PBS and its cohorts, with more offerings and deeper reporting. The other is to restrict how corporations can control media. The right to individual free speech can be preserved while making corporations more sensitive to social goods. The Dominion case against FOX was a small example of the powers available. Liability for lying should be a broader effort in the law, specifically against corporations, which are creatures of the state, not natural persons. We need to recognize the deep psychological powers we are up against in preserving enlightened, respectful civil government and discourse.

Obviously getting our own house in order, against the atavistic forces of political authoritarianism, is the first order of business. Abroad, paradoxically, we need to project strength as a democratic and developed community, holding the line in Ukraine and Taiwan, and against all sorts of authoritarian encroachments, until temperatures are lowered, and the current nationalist fevers abate. For what China has right now is an imperialist fever. It has been weak for so long and surrounded by so many unfriendly countries, that one can understand that it sees its recent economic prosperity as a special opportunity to recover a leading position in its neighborhood, militarily and politically as well as economically. That would be fine if it were not also trying to subvert free political systems and prop up tyrannical ones. There are good reasons why its neighbors are fearful of China.

Like in the last cold war, I think time plays a key role. We have to believe that democracies, for all their weaknesses, are better, and are seen as better, by people around the world. While today's authoritarian powers may have greater durability than those of the communist era due to their embrace of, rather than flouting of, market principles and modern technologies, they are ultimately fragile and subject to the opinions of their own people. Putin will not last forever. Xi will not last for ever. (The Kim regime of North Korea may, however, last forever!) Change is the achilles heal of authoritarian conservatism. So we are in for a very long haul, to keep spreading people power and peace internationally.

• Trade theft and IP warfare.
• Myanmar is a typical case of China's influence and values.
• Religion and war.
• Food oligopoly.
• Ghost roads and the end of nature.
• What, exactly, is the problem?