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.

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!

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Myth and Science

Stories we tell about how things work.

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

Inuit mythologies and their custodian, the shaman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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All Facts are Theories, But Not All Theories are Facts

Are theories and facts different in kind, or are they related and transform into each other?

During the interminable debates about "Intelligent Design" and evolution, there was much hand-wringing about fact vs theory. Evolution was, to some, "just" a theory, to others a well-attested theory, and to others, a fact, whether in the observation of life's change through time (vs the straight creationists), or in the causal mechanism of natural selection (vs the so-called intelligent design proponents). Are theories just speculations, or are they, once accepted by their relevant community, the rock-like edifice of science? And are facts even plain as such, or are they infected by theory? Our late descent into unhinged right-wingery poses related, though far more complex, questions about the nature of facts and who or what can warrant them. But here, I will stick to the classic question as posed in philosophy and science- what is the distinction and or relation between facts and theories? This follows, but disagrees with, a recent discussion in Free Inquiry.

The official scientific organs (NCSE) have generally taken the position that theories are different from facts, making a pedagogically bright line distinction where things like tectonic plate theory and evolution are theories, while rock compositions and biochemistry are facts. In this way, science is made up, at a high level, of theories, which constantly evolve and broaden in their scope, while the facts they are built on arrive on a conveyor belt of normal scientific progress, via lab experiments, field work, etc. Facts help to support or refute theories, which are such abstract, dynamic, and wide-ranging bags of concepts that they can not rightly be regarded as facts.

All very pat, but what are facts? It turns out that nothing we observe and call a fact escapes some amount of interpretation, or the need to be based on theories of how the world works. We grow up with certain axiomatic and built-in conditions, like gravity, vision, and physical cause and effect. Thus we think that anything we "observe" directly is a fact. But all such observations are built on a history of learning about how things work, which is in essence starting with a bunch of theories, some instinctively inborn, which are gradually satisfied by evidence as we grow up ... to the extent that we take many things for granted as fact, like being able to count on gravity as we are walking, that the sun comes up every day, etc. Facts are not automatic or self-attested, but rather are themselves essentially theories, however simple, that have been put to the test and found reliable.

And therein lies a clue to how we, and especially scientists, evaluate information and use the categories of fact and theory in a practical and dynamic way. Lawyers often talk of coming up with a theory of the case, which is to say, a story that is going to convince a jury, which has the job of finding the facts of the case. When the jury finds the theory convincing, and vote for the lawyer's side, the facts are found insofar and the law is concerned. Their determination may come far short of philosophic rigor, but the movement is typical- the movement from theory to fact. 

On the other hand, what is a theory? I think it can be described as a proposed fact. No one would propose a theory if they didn't think it was true and explanatory of reality. Whether broad or narrow, it is a set of interpretations that seek to make sense of the world in a way that we limited humans can categorize, into our store of knowledge. For instance, Freudian theories of repression, Oedipal complexes, castration fears, etc. would have been, if borne out, facts about our mental lives. Being rather vague, they may have needed a great deal of refinement before getting there, but all the same, they were proposed facts regarding what we feel and do, and the psychic mechanisms that lead to those feelings. 

In science, it is the experiment and its communication that is the key event in the alchemy of transforming theories into facts. Science is unusual in its explicit and purposeful interaction with theories that are unproven. Tectonic theory was once a mere theory, and a crackpot one at that. But as observations came in, which were proposed on the basis of that theory, or retroactively appreciated as support for it, such as the lengthy hunt for mid-ocean ridges where tectonic plates separate, and other faults where they converge, that theory gained "fact-ness". Now it is simply a fact, and the science of geology has gone other to other frontiers of theory, working to transform them into fact, or back off and try some others.

The mid-Atlantic ridge, straining to be understood by observers equipped with the theory of plate tectonics. Also, a video of the longer term.

Another example is the humble molecular biology experiment, such as cloning a gene responsible for some disease. The theory can be so simple as to be hardly enunciated- that disease X is in part genetic, and the responsible mutation must occur in some gene, and thus if we find it, we can establish a new fact about that disease as well as about that gene. Then the hunt goes on, the family lineages are traced, the genetic mapping happens, and the sequencing is done, and the gene is found. What was once a theory, if an unsurprising one, has now been transformed into a fact, one perhaps with practical, medical applications.

But the magic of experiments is usually only discernable to the few people who are sufficiently knowledgeable or interested to appreciate the transformation that just happened. The boundary between theory and fact depends on the expertise of the witnesses, and can be sociologically hazy. Does homeopathy cure disease? Well, hemeopathic practitioners regard that as fact, and have gone on to an elaborate practice and pharmacopeia of dilute solutions to effect various cures. Others disagree and regard the whole thing as not only a theory, but a stunningly wrong-headed one at that- as far as can be imagined from having gained fact-hood. Real science revolves around experiments done to what is essentially a standard of philosophical proof. Techniques are reported and consistently applied, controls are done to isolate variables of interest, materials are described and made publicly available, and the logic of the demonstration is clarified so that readers knowledgble in the arts of the field can be confident that the conclusions follow from the premises. And the practitioners themselves are culturally vetted through lengthy apprenticeships of training and critique. 

The practice of peer review is a natural part of this series of events, putting the experiment through a critique by the (hopefully) most knowledgeable practitioners in the field, who can stand in for the intended audience for whom the experiment is supposed to perform this alchemical transformation of theory. The scientific literature is full of the most varied and imaginative efforts to "factify" hypotheses, hunches, and theories. Very few of these will ever be appreciated by the lay public, but they lay the ever-advancing frontier of facts from which new hypotheses are made, new theories tested, and occasionally, some of their resulting facts are discovered to be useful, such as the advent of gene therapy via the Crisper/Cas9 gene editing system, liposomes, and associated technologies. 

Another aspect of the public nature of science and peer critique is that if a knowledgeable observer disagrees with the theory-fact transition purported by some experiment, they are duty-bound and encouraged to replicate those experiments themselves, or do other experiments to demonstrate their counter-vailing ideas. On a cheaper level, they are welcome and encouraged to ask uncomfortable questions during seminars and write tart letters to the editors of journals, since pointing out the errors of others is one of the most enjoyable activities humans pursue, and doubles as a core of the integrity that characterizes the culture of science. In this way, facts sometimes reverse course and travel back into the realm of theory, to sweat it out in the hands of some disgruntled grad student and her overbearing supervisor, destined to never again see the light of day.

Experiments crystallize most clearly the transition from theory to fact. They create, though careful construction, a situation that banishes incidental distractions, focuses attention on a particular phenomenon, and establishes a logic of causation that forms (hopefully) convincing evidence for a theory, transforming it into fact, for knowledgeable observers. They create controlled and monitored conditions where knowlegeable people can "see" the truth of a theory being put to a decisive test. Just as we can now see the truth of the heliocentric theory directly with the use of spaceships sent out across the solar system, the observation of a fact is a matter of the prepared mind meeting with a set of observations, either tailored specifically in the form of an experiment to test a theory, or else taken freely from nature to illuminate a theory's interpretation of reality. Nothing is intrisically obvious, but needs an educated observer to discern truth. Nothing is completely theory-free. Nevertheless, facts can be established.

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American Occupations and Preoccupations

Douglass North on the role of institutions in our society, part 2. "Understanding the process of economic change". Also, "Violence and Social Orders". American occupations of Germany, Japan, and Afghanistan and Iraq are case studies of institutions at work. 

In part 1, I discussed the role of ideology and thought patterns in the context of institutional economics, which is the topic of North's book. This post will look at the implications for developmental economics. In this modern age, especially with the internet, information has never been more free. All countries have access to advanced technological information as well as the vast corpus of economics literature on how to harness it for economic development and the good of their societies. Yet everywhere we look, developing economies are in chains. What is the problem? Another way to put it that we have always had competition among relatively free and intelligent people, but have not always had civilization, and have had the modern civilization we know today, characterized by democracy and relatively free economic diversity, for only a couple of centuries, in a minority of countries. This is not the normal state of affairs, despite being a very good state of affairs.

The problem is clearly not that of knowledge, per se, but of its diffusion (human capital), and far more critically, the social institutions that put it to work. The social sciences, including economics, are evidently still in their infancy when it comes to understanding the deep structure of societies and how to make them work better. North poses the basic problem of the transition between primitive ("natural") economies, which are personal and small-scale, to advanced economies that grew first in the West after the Renaissance, and are characterized by impersonal, rule-based exchange, with a flourishing of independent organizations. Humans naturally operate on the first level, and it requires the production of a "new man" to suit him and her to the impersonal system of modern political economies. 

This model of human takes refuge in the state as the guarantor of property, contracts, money, security, law, political fairness, and many other institutions foundational to the security and prosperity of life as we know it. This model of human is comfortable interacting with complete strangers for all sorts of transactions from mundane products using the price system to complex and personal products like loans and health care using other institutions, all regulated by norms of behavior as well as by the state, where needed. This model of human develops intense specialization after a long education in very narrow productive skills, in order to live in a society of astonishing diversity of work. There is an organized and rule-based competition to develop such skills to the most detailed and extensive manner. This model of human relies on other social institutions such as the legal system, consumer review services, and standards of practice in each field to ensure that the vast asymmetry of information between the specialized sellers of other goods and services that she needs is not used against her, in fraud and other breaches of implicit faith. 

All this is rather unlike the original model, who took refuge in his or her clan, relying on the social and physical power of that group to access economic power. That is, one has to know someone to use land or get a job, to deal with other groups, to make successful trades, and for basic security. North characterizes this society as "limited access", since it is run by and for coalitions of the powerful, like the lords and nobility of medieval Europe or the warlords of Afghanistan today. For such non-modern states, the overwhelming problem is not that of economic efficiency, but of avoiding disintegration and civil war. They are made up of elite coalitions that limit violence by allocating economic rewards according to political / military power. If done accurately on that basis, each lord gets a stable share, and has little incentive to start a civil war, since his (or her) power is already reflected in his or her economic share, and a war would necessarily reduce the whole economic pie, and additionally risks reducing the lord to nothing at all. This is a highly personalized, and dynamic system, where the central state's job is mostly to make sure that each of the coalition members is getting their proper share, with changes reflecting power shifts through time.

Norman castles locations in Britain. The powers distributed through the country were a coalition that required constant maintenance and care from the center to keep privileges and benefits balanced and shared out according to the power of each local lord.

For example, the Norman invasion of Britain installed a new set of landlords, who cared nothing for the English peasants, but carried on an elite society full of jealousies and warfare amongst themselves to grab more of the wealth of the country. Most of the time, however, there was a stable balance of power, thus of land allotments, and thus of economic shares, making for a reasonably peaceful realm. All power flowed through the state, (the land allotments were all ultimately granted by the king, and in the early days were routinely taken away again if the king was displeased by the lord's loyalty or status), which is to say through this coalition of the nobles, and they had little thought for economic efficiency, innovation, legal niceties, or perpetual non-political institutions to support trade, scholarship, and innovation. (With the exception of the church, which was an intimate partner of the state.)

Notice that in the US and other modern political systems, the political system is almost slavishly devoted to "the economy", whereas in non-modern societies, the economy is a slave to the political system, which cavalierly assigns shares to the powerful and nothing to anyone else, infeudating them to the lords of the coalition. The economy is assumed to be static in its productivity and role, thus a sheer source of plunder and social power, rather than a subject of nurture and growth. And the state is composed of the elite whose political power translates immediately into shares of a static economic pie. No notion of democracy here!

This all comes to mind when considering the rather disparate fates of US military occupations that have occurred over the last century, where we have come directly up against societies that we briefly controlled and tried to steer in economically as well as socially positive directions. The occupations of Germany, Japan, Afghanistan, and Iraq came to dramatically different ends, principally due to the differing levels of ingrained beliefs and institutional development of each culture (one could add a quasi-occupation of Vietnam here as well). While Germany and Japan were each devastated by World War 2, and took decades to recover, their people had long been educated into an advanced instutional framework of economic and civic activity. Some of the devastation was indeed political and social, since the Nazis (as well as the imperial Japanese system) had set up an almost medieval (i.e. fascist) system of economic control, putting the state in charge of directing production in a cabal with leading industrialists. Yet despite all that, the elements were still in place for both nations to put their economies back together and in short order rejoin the fully developed world, in political and economic terms. How much of that was due to the individual human capital of each nation, (i.e. education in both technical and civic aspects), and how much was due to the residual organizational and institutional structures, such as impersonal legal and trade expectations, and how much due to the instructive activities of the occupying administration?

One would have to conclude that very little was due to the latter, for try as we might in Iraq and Afghanistan, their culture was not ready for full-blown modernity (elections, democracy, capitalism, rule of law, etc.) in the political-economic sense. Many of their people were ready, and the models abroad were and remain ready for application. Vast amounts of information and good will is at their disposal to build a modern state. But, alas, their real power structures were not receptive. Indeed, in Afghanistan, each warlord continued to maintain his own army, and civil war was a constant danger, until today, when a civil war is in full swing, conducted by the Taliban against a withering central state. The Taliban has historically been the only group with the wide-spread cultural support (at least in rural areas), and the ruthlessness to bring order to (most of) Afghanistan. Its coalition with the other elites is based partly on doctrinaire Islam (which all parties across the spectrum pay lip service to) and brutal / effective authoritarianism. When the US invaded, we took advantage of the few portions outside the existing power coalition, (in the north), arming them to defeat the Taliban. That was an instance of working with the existing power structures.

But replacing or reforming them was an entirely different project. The fact is that the development of modern economies took Western countries centuries, and takes even the most avid students (Taiwan, South Korea, China to a partial degree) several decades of work to retrace. North emphasizes that development from primitive to modern political-economic systems is not a given, and progress is as likely to go backward as forward, depending at each moment on the incentives of those in power. To progress, they need to see more benefit in stability and durable institutions, as opposed to their own freedom of action to threaten the other members of the coalition, keep armies, extort economic rents, etc. Only as chaos recedes, stability starts being taken for granted, and the cost of keeping armies exceeds their utility, does the calculus gradually shift. That process is fundamentally psychological- it reflects the observations and beliefs of the actors, and takes a long time, especially in a country such as Afghanistan with such a durable tradition of militarized independence and plunder.

So what should we have done, instead of dreaming that we could build, out of the existing culture and distribution of power, a women-friendly capitalist modern democracy in Afghanistan? First, we should have seen clearly at the outset that we had only two choices. First was to take over the culture root and branch, with a million soldiers. The other was to work within the culture on a practical program of reform, whose goal would have been to take them a few steps down the road from a "fragile" limited access state- where civil war is a constant threat- to a "basic" limited access state, where the elites are starting to accept some rules, and the state is stable, but still exists mostly to share out the economic pie to current power holders. Indeed the "basic" state is the only substantial social organization- all other organizations have to be created by it or affiliated with it, because any privilege worth having is jealously guarded by the state, in very personal terms.

Incidentally, the next step in North's taxonomy of states would be the mature limited access order, where laws begin to be made in a non-personal way, non-state organizations are allowed to exist more broadly, like commercial guilds, but the concepts of complete equality before the law and free access to standardized organization types has not yet been achieved. That latter would be an "open access order", which modern states occupy. There, the military is entirely under the democratic and lawful control of a central state, and the power centers that are left in the society have become more diffuse, and all willing to compete within an open, egalitarian legal framework in economic as well as political matters. It was this overall bargain that was being tested with the last administration's flirtation with an armed coup at the Capital earlier this year.

In the case of Afghanistan, there is a wild card in the form of the Taliban, which is not really a localized warlord kind of power, which can be fairly dealt out a share of the local and national economic pie. They are an amalgam of local powers from many parts of the country, plus an ideological movement, plus a pawn of Pakistan, the Gulf states, and the many other funders of fundamentalist Islam. Whatever they are, they are a power the central government has to reckon with, both via recognition and acceptance, as well as competition and strategies to blunt their power.

Above all, peace and security has always been the main goal. It is peace that moderates the need for every warlord to maintain his own army, and which nudges all the actors toward a more rule-based, regular way to harvest economic rents from the rest of the economy, and helps that economy grow. The lack of security is also the biggest calling card for the Taliban, as an organization that terrorizes the countryside and foments insecurity as its principal policy (an odd theology, one might think!). How did we do on that front? Well, not very well at all. The presence of the US and allies was in the first place an irritant. Second, our profusion of policies of reform, from poppy eradication, to women's education, to showpiece elections, to relentless, and often aimless, bombing, took our eyes off the ball, and generated ill will virtually across the spectrum. One gets the sense that Hamid Karzai was trying very hard to keep it all together in the classic pattern of a fragile state, by dealing out favors to each of the big powers across the country in a reasonably effective way, and calling out the US occasionally for its excesses. But from a modern perspective, that all looks like hopeless corruption, and we installed the next government under Ashraf Ghani which tried to step up modernist reforms without the necessary conditions of even having progressed from a fragile to a basic state, let alone to a mature state or any hint of the "doorstep conditions" of modernity that North emphasizes. This is not even to mention that we seem to have set up the central state military on an unsustainable basis, dependent on modern (foreign) hardware, expertise, and funding that were always destined to dry up eventually.

So, nation-building? Yes, absolutely. But smarter nation-building that doesn't ask too much of the society being put through the wringer. Nation-building happens in gradual steps, not all at once, not by fiat, and certainly not by imposition by outsiders (Unless we have a couple of centuries to spare, as the Normans did). Our experience with the post-world war 2 reconstructions was deeply misleading if we came away with the idea that those countries did nothing but learn at the American's knee and copy the American template, and were not themselves abundantly prepared for institutional and economic reconstruction.

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Sneakey Eating

An evolutionary perspective on overeating syndromes.

Most animals have a simple problem in life- find enough food to live and survive. But social animals, if they are even slightly advanced, share food, and thus alter this basic equation. They have to find ways to store and share food in a way that sustains the group, whether that is starving the old, or feeding the helpless larvae that can not feed themselves. Humans have always faced this dilemma, but don't have the rigid programming that insects do.

Humans can lie, and steal, and then lie some more. It isn't pretty, but sometimes it gets the job done. Humans can regard rules as optional, a flexibility that is a perpetual threat to institutions, norms, cultural patterns, and ultimately to group success. We recently went through an administration that regarded norms as suggestions, laws as annoyances, and then wondered why their behavior attracted so much hatred, and such low historical esteem.

This dynamic comes to mind more concretely in the case of overeating syndromes, which exemplify the conflict between the individual and the group. In a prehistoric setting, food was almost always scarce and precious. In all native cultures there are elaborate practices of public food sharing and eating, which contribute to surveillance by the community of what everyone is eating. Anyone who violates such social structures must have been severely penalized.

Public, communal eating is a fundamental human practice.

Imagine then that someone feels a compulsion to eat more than their share. Such a compulsion would be highly advantageous- if successful- to enable survival when the others in the group might be starving or malnourished. Some extra weight might well mean the difference of making it through the next winter or not. But being caught could dramatically alter the calculus. Primitive societies had harsh punishments for violating critical norms, including ostracism or execution. What then? 

I would suggest that this background sets the stage for overeating syndromes that commonly combine secret eating, often at night, stealth, and stealing. In a world of plenty like today, it is stigmatized and medicalized, and due to the abundance of food, relatively easy to navigate and thus easy to gain weight from. But pre-historically, it would have been far more fraught, and challenging, probably less likely to result in easily observable weight gains. Like other issues in social life, this conflict would take the form of an arms race between cheaters and rule-enforcers. It would be a cognitive battle between effective surveillance and punishment, vs stealth and the intelligence required to not get caught. So one can view it as one impetus among many other evolutionary forces that shaped human intelligence, and in light of its considerable incidence in modern populations, an arms race that was never resolved. Indeed, it is the type of trait that comes under balancing selection, where a high incidence in a population would be self-defeating, while a low incidence yields a much more successful outcome.

• Satire- not so funny when you are the target.
• Making every home a part of the energy solution.
• Constitution? Who ever heard of enforcing it?

Who Can be a Shaman? Who Must be a Shaman?

Pasaquan and the modern Shamanism of St. EOM, Eddie Owens Martin.

While not religious, I am fascinated by religion. This mode of thought and experience is obviously instinctive, patently irrational, and strenuously defended and rationalized via theology, apologetics, and other formerly respectable modes of thought, not to mention jihad and other sorts of brute power. We are (mostly) in a much better position today than in the old days when every political system had its state religion, and woe betide anyone caught thinking crosswise. Yet in the even earlier days of our species, religion was much more free-form, and while the instinct of religion is/was shared universally, its expression varied widely among far-flung, isolated peoples. We may generally call it shamanism. The first ingredient was an acceptance that some people care a lot more about spiritual matters than others do. Typically this is because they are misfits, maybe mentally disturbed, and have a heightened appreciation of the unreality of this reality that we think inhabit. Mind-altering drugs provide a glimpse of this widened perspective, and naturally comprise a central part of many shamanistic sacraments.

It is striking how the shared appreciation of an alternate reality, whether though official scripture, traditional dogma, or via ecstatic worship practices or mind-altering drugs, contributes to social bonding and personal psychological healing- which are the ultimate positive impacts of religion. Maybe the starkest naturalistic reality, now that we have evolved to appreciate its full horror, is incompatible with psychic health. Maybe an alternate, colorful, humane, and supportive reality is essential, and is particularly binding and healing if everyone shares it, almost regardless of its particular nature or irrationality. But on the other hand, even religions of intolerance, war, human sacrifice and cannibalism have sustained long-lived cultures, so the binding may take precedence over the humane-ness.

Ideologies and value systems are in play as well. Societies run on particular views of what is right, who counts, what is meaningful, etc. While these touch on empirical reality in some respects, their values and social apparatus are relatively untethered, free to valorize some, deprecate others, and place values on obscure things and odd activities. A misfit will be, by definition, more likely to suffer under the ambient ideology and prone to seek an alternative. Whether the shaman supports the current culture or seeks to subvert it, her work is critical in framing a social ideology that most other members of society hardly even know exists, and are not generally capable of shaping or grappling with consciously.

At its best, shamanism provides more than a narrative or theory about the unseen forces that run the world. It also centers the society with a purposeful narrative of its existence and the essential part each member plays in its continuance. It can heal individuals via the power of this social cohesion- as even medical science is beginning to recognize- since even without any objective medicine whatsoever, the rituals of care, support, and confidence are themselves powerful expressions of our social nature and aids to healing.

But what about today? We are heading into a post-religious world, where neither shamanism nor mainline theology rings true, capitalist ideology reigns, and social atomization is in part the result. It was jarring and intriguing to run across an odd TV program about an autodidactic shaman in Georgia, Eddie Owens Martin, who died in 1986. As a gay man in rural Georgia of the early 1900's, he fled to New York and led an underground life, which led to a career in fortune telling. Eventually he inherited a property in Georgia, and moved back on his own terms, using the proceeds from his fortune telling to build a spiritual retreat / theme park, with ornate decoration throughout.

St. EOM painting from Pasaquan

The connection between fortune telling and other facets of free-form shamanism are obvious. Martin, who renamed himself St. EOM, was obviously a charismatic person, and attracted helpers who attended ceremonies and helped with the painting. There was a hair theme, where Martin thought that he received messages from the gods through hair that had to be pointed upward. After he went bald, he resorted to pointing the ends of his extensive beard to the sky in order to maintain this connection. And what about all the symbology? It seems to consist of benevolent faces and highly colorful geometric designs, as are common in other spiritual and ceremonial settings. It looks like an effort to capture positive and healing material from the archetypes, which are partly eternal, and partly influenced by the culture of the day, where multiracial themes of harmony were coming to prominence.

All this reminded me strongly of two other shamans of the day, Carl Jung and Walt Disney. Where Martin was a spontaneous and demotic shaman, Jung come at it from a scholarly, indeed logorrheic perspective, producing book after book of memories, dreams, reflections, and rationalizations by which he straddled the scientific and credulus approaches to spiritualism. Most evocative was his Red Book, which features highly colorful dreamscapes full of pregnant symbols and meaning, harvested from his forays into the inner world of his own fixations and archetypes.

Lastly, Disney obviously shared the fantasy and dream motivations of Martin, though seemingly without much of the spiritual baggage. Disney was also moved in some mysterious way to make these fantasies concrete by creating theme parks where this positive message of colorful suspension of reality was given relentless and popular expression. These are demotic shamanism on a vast scale, drained of any deeper significance other than the lightest symbology that fleetingly speaks to part of us that hopes for an escape from the humdrum and pressing constraints of reality.

• Another healing fantasy in glorious animation- Secret of the Kells.
• Private schools- the real scandal is that they exist at all.
• Slavery.
• Crytocurrencies are a criminal accelerant- and should be banned. Not to mention being an environmental disgrace.

UFOs, God, and the Evidence of Absence

Sometimes, what you can't see isn't really there. And why you may see it anyway requires some deeper consideration.

A recent New Yorker story resurrects the topic of unidentified flying objects. While drawing quite a bit of well-deserved humor from the field, it also teases some putatively serious observations, and notes that the field has gotten some high-level love from politicians like Harry Reed, Ted Stevens, and Marco Rubio. On the whole, it was disappointing to see mostly uncritical treatmtent of this retread story. Are any UFOs actually objects? The answer to that is almost universally no. Almost all turn out to be optical phenomena, which come in a startling variety that leave observers dumbfounded. The rest are mistaken aircraft, test rockets, balloons, and pranks of various sorts. Reports of UFOs have trailed off over the decades, as their cultural weight has diminished, and people's imaginations drift off to other preoccupations. Yet die-hards remain, finding conspiracies, coverups, and compelling evidence. What is one to say?

It is worth taking a big step back and asking why, over all this time, and over all the people who have been looking for clues, either for or against, nothing concrete has been found. There are no space ships, no alien bodies, no extra-terrestrial materials or technologies. There is nothing- nothing whatsoever to show for all the shocking observations, pregnant hints and leading questions. Nothing for all the political pressure and top-secret investigations.

We'd know if they were really coming.

It shouldn't have to be said, but I will say it anyway, that religion has similar evidence behind it. Namely none. For all the heartfelt convictions, the positive thinking, lovely intuitions, and entrenched tradition, the supernatural remains fugative from observation. Is this by definition? Not at all. Plenty of religious claims, and the ones that are most moving and effective in efforts of proselytization, are very this-worldly- the virgin births, the resurrections, the water from wine, the walking on water, the revelations directly from god, etc. 

While formal logic says that lack of evidence is not positive proof of absence, it is evidence for lack of evidence, which says alot about the momentous claims being made, about UFOs, as well as analogous conspiracies and super-powers. It is absurd to seek, after so many UFO sightings have been resolved as oddities of the atmosphere, of optical, even collective, illusion, innocent projects, or even pranks, for the "real" evidence, the true story behind the coverup, etc. It bespeaks an archetypal imagination, and, philosphically, a grasping at straws. 

Lack of evidence is a serious philosophical condition, in areas where evidence should be readily available and has been fervently sought. If aliens were routinely flying through the atmosphere, we have the technology to detect them. We have countless satellites looking down to earth as well as up into the heavens, at incredible resolutions. We are increasingly using radar to detect birds, in their migrating millions. Surely an alien spaceship would show up with little problem. Naturally, the aliens do not want to be detected, and have the technology to hide themselves from view, allowing only odd glimpses during unusual weather. Did I mention grasping at straws?

What was a scientific problem thus becomes, by process of elimination, a psychological problem. Why do alien and all-powerful beings have such a hold on our imaginations? Could it be that the constellation of childhood is phenomenally durable, causing us to assume/imagine parental figures in political, celestial, and philosophical spheres? We are right now falling atavistically into a renewed kingship psychological complexes with authoritarian figures, not only amongst the Republicans in the US, but all across the world from Brazil to India. After a couple of centuries of shaking off such fixations, it is disappointing how durable our imaginative and affiliative psychology is, and how fragile the discipline it takes to recognize that the parents are not out there, in whatever guise or color, and that we are fully responsible for our world.

• Religion and Q.
• More on aerosol spread of SARS-CoV2, with pictures.
• Notes on qualified immunity.

Where Does Surplus Value / Profit Come From in Capitalism?

Marxists say it is stolen from the worker. Capitalists say it comes from risk-taking and managerial work. Who is really doing the work?

One of the pillars of Marxism is that capitalists steal labor from workers. All profits come from excess labor done by workers by the sweat of their brow, which capitalists, through various nafarious means, appropriate for themselves. The workday, for instance, is an artificial construct. What if all the necessary work could be done in three hours? Well, the labor agreement means that the employer has the right to eight. Therefore, employers extract as much value as possible from that time regardless was really needed to fulfill the actual job- value that ends up as profit in the pockets of owners, who do no work at all.

On the opposite side, Chicago school economists hold to a theory of marginal value, where every factor in production is fairly paid for its individual contribution, through the magic of the various markets- commodity, labor, financial, etc.- that they come from. Each of these markets is assumed to be efficient, thus rendering each input to production fairly bid for its contribution, and leading also to a dynamic re-ordering of production systems when conditions change, such as when some inputs become scarce (and their price goes up), or new technologies expand the availability of other inputs, like, say, computation power.

It should be obvious that each of these theories is a fairy tale, (a panglossian one in the neoclassical case), heavily motivated by ideology, while carrying grains of truth. Labor markets are not efficient at all, and businesses work night and day to keep them that way. At the same time, businesses capture profits from countless other streams than the exploited labor of their workers. And in fact, the whole purpose of business is to exploit miss-priced market opportunities- otherwise profit could not exist.

A recent pair of posts on Bill Mitchell's blog delved into the Cambridge controversy- an economist's spat of the early 1960's which was formative in left-wing economics. Many tangential issues came up, such as whether economic growth is more demand-limited or supply limited. But it also dealt with issues of the value of capital, the source of profits, and the accuracy of marginal value theory. To summarize rather brutally, left-wing economists from Cambridge, England argued that business profits were not market-based, but based on social and power relations, cultural tradition, and many other factors besides the markets. Economists from Cambridge, Massachusetts (MIT) argued a classical theory that profits were based in marginal theory on all the market ingredients, and particularly could be approximated by the current interest rate, representing the default alternative to business investment- that is, the marginal value of capital.

The result of the controversy was that the British school successfully pointed out some flaws in the American analysis, which the Americans admitted, to the effect that the general profit rate does not always follow capital intensity, and nor does the individual firm's investment schedule necessarily follow the logic of interest rate-driven margins either. From this molehill, the left made a triumphant mountain, while the mainstream regarded it as a minor hiccup from their ever-more baroque modeling of perfect markets and ideal economies.

Joan Robinson, principal proponent of the Cambridge England end of the Cambridge controversies.

All that said, it is worth being more specific about where profit comes from, and here I confess to going off the reservation of economic convention. While stealing extra labor is surely one of the time-honored methods of making a profit, it is far from the only way. Indeed, businesses can be seen as miners, always on the hunt for those special gems in the environment that cost less than they should, or can be sold for more than they cost. And the opportunities of this sort are endless in variety and scale. 

• difference between supply and demand
• difference between efficient producers and inefficient
• difference between using family members and paying workers from the labor market
• difference between dumping toxic waste and disposing it properly
• difference between hiring an amoral accountant and a lawful one
• difference between buying lower grade inputs for manufacturing
• difference between lying to customers, or not
• difference between running marketing campaigns, or not
• difference between paying taxes, or not paying taxes
• difference between suing competitors successfully, or not
• difference between buying competitors or competing with them
• difference between doing research to find new technologies, or not spending that money, or stealing that technology
• difference between lobbying the government successfully to make protective laws, or not

The scope for finding  money and making profit goes far, far beyond the conventional notion of arbitrage between capital goods and interest rates. Labor is also only part of the picture. Being a typically large part of most company's costs, its treatment and mistreatment is, however, an endlessly fruitful area for losses and gains, not to mention wider social tension. Money and profit can be found under any number of rocks, which is where the mantra of a "business model" comes from. Everyone and every business has some angle by which they make a living.

Are these gems of profit fairly priced in their factor markets? Don't be ridiculous. A coal company only makes money because coal is free. The earth makes no contracts, and nor does the air for the pollution sent up by the power plant that burns the coal. Turning free things, like enslaved or cowed labor, or personal data, or natural resources, or computer power, or shady accounting, or corrupt laws, into money, is the essence of "business models". Finding a way around markets, by collusion, by substitution, by doing without, by corruption, even by clever new technologies, are a business person's top priorities. So not only are markets, when they are used, hardly "fair" in any financial or social sense, but they do not begin to address all the sources of business profit or return to capital.

We can grant that most of this work of finding profitable gems is done by the capitalist or her managerial minions, thus should be accounted to the returns of capital, not to wages stolen from workers. Only in the classical mass industrial enterprise where the raw material costs are negligible and labor is the overwhelming factor would these converge into the same thing as envisioned by Marx. (Though the modern fast food industry, and gig "economy" come to mind as well.) Some of these gems can be valued financially, and can be regarded as capital, obtained via savings and investment and even competitively priced in a marginal accounting. But many cost nothing, and characterize the pursuit of business as more than a dry exercise in accountancy or economics, but rather as a cultural mode, descended from a long tradition of opportunistic ownership / exploitation / employment of others, of technological innovation, trade, and plunder.

Not to put a fine point on it, business is about greed, and in its natural state reverts to rapine and pillage. The Vikings were consummate businessmen, converting earnings into capital- long-boats and other weapons-, which were the backbone of their centuries of pillage all over coastal Northern Europe. Today, we can see a similar process in Afghanistan. The Taliban leverages ruthless terror into power., plundering as it goes along. They can then tell everyone how to live, collect the taxes, and run their many businesses, corrupt or not. 

Whether their state is "business-friendly", their example points to the intertwined nature of state systems and business systems of exploitation. States set the rules, in the ideal case driving business from brutal mafia and gang activities, which are generally socially destructive, if not entirely zero-sum, towards level and transparent playing fields that are at least somewhat constructive, pulling their profits from the mute vaults of nature and its resources instead of from social oppression. But all this depends on the wisdom and foresight of the state. Many "business model" gems mentioned above involve skirting the law, or engaging in activities the law has not even (or yet) contemplated, to make a buck. There is a constant arms race going on, between the "innovation" of private greed, and the capacity of the state to conceptualize, measure, and legislate against new areas of long-term harm. When the business class and Republicans bleat about taxes and "freedom", they (and their pet economists) are explicitly taking one side of this conflict, the side of irresponsible regression to unregulated, irresponsible, and destructive styles of "business". 

• Ready for the Rapture?
• What's happening in the lumber business.
• Is Facebook a state?

The Autism of Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Are you on the spectrum?
• That music in our heads.
• The true nature of conservative jurisprudence.
• Myths, magic, and gods- right or wrong?
• Hamsterkauf?
• Bill Mitchell on inflation and other historical matters.
• Some delightful piano.

Competition

Balancing collaboration and competition for a healthy society.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• What happens when the poor are concentrated on one place- East Lake Meadows.
• How long Taiwan?
• Fond memories of the Trumpers.
• What will become of our empire?
• Ten days of quarantine is plenty. Even eight would be OK.
• FOX- another reason to cut the cable cord.

How's Your Relationship With Jesus?

Review of American Gospel, Christ Alone- an evangelical hate letter to prosperity- and happy-gospel televangelists.

As an atheist, my relationship with Jesus is not very good. I regard him as historically questionable, and if a real person, then wildly misinterpreted and inflated by the subsequent mythological process that resulted in Christianity and Islam. Oh, and also dead, really most sincerely dead. But just for fun, I watched a film provided by my library- American Gospel, Christ Alone. It features a parade of mostly white evangelical male pastors excoriating the prosperity gospel- the Joel Osteins, Benny Hins and Creflo Dollars of televangelism. They get rather worked up- Why? Aren't there actual atheists and heathens about, or sick and destitute to help? As usual, internecine conflict is the most bitter (remember early Christianity, or the refomation and counter-reformation). It is about an attention market where conventional evangelicals, Baptists, etc. compete perhaps mostly closely and intensely with this other theology that is so uncomfortably close to their own. Though Mormons come in for a few potshots as well, as do Catholics.

For, did Jesus die for your sins, or your happiness? Is faith enough, or would a donation help? It is a fine line, really. Even if one takes the conventional, Lutheran attitude that faith alone, scripture alone, and Christ alone are sufficient for salvation and whatever else is putatively desirable in worshipping and satisfying god, why do we want to satisfy god at all, or want salvation, or want our sins redeemed? Might that be to make us happy? To be righteous, better than one's neighbor, part of the tribe, and to have that great insurance policy, heading to the big family reunion in the sky? There is no getting around the happy part of the gospel. It is supposedly good news, not bad. And the parts that are difficult, like giving up one's family and possessions, and waiting in penance for the end of the world? Well, who takes that seriously? Not the evangelicals.

Creflo Dollar freely misinterprets the Bible. "Provision" is no part of the original. Rather, the kingdom is heaven, and the very next verse is.. "Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will not be exhausted". But do the Evangelicals take this rank communism seriously either? Hardly.

The prosperity gospel may be gauche and low class, aimed like a heat-seeking missile at the downtrodden who need something a little more concrete to hope for than snooty biblical correctness and heavenly rewards. But it is not so far from the original message of Christianity, which offered a tight-knit community along with the sugarplums of heaven in return for the acceptance of Christ as one's totem in opposition to all the other totems available, particularly the official ones of the Roman Empire. And those early Christian communities were no monastaries. They were full of normal people, including merchants, who benefited from the commercial networks and moral creeds taking shape in this church. While the creed had an ideal of communism and anti-materialism, in practice it quickly came to an appreciation of money as a beneficence, for clergy, and for alms and other good works. Does that make money good?

There was a long tangent in this film about health and sickness. The prosperity preachers generally have a sideline in faith healing. Which is likewise low-class and disreputable. Evangelicals, in contrast, portray themselves as demurely thanking god for everything good that happens, and if in the mood, thanking for the trials and tribulations as well, all without expecting that prayer is going to help. Nothing so gauche as a transactional prayer! But lo, what happens after every tragedy and in every evangelical church? Thoughts and prayers go out to those in hardship, with a wink-wink that god presumably must be paying attention, big as "he" is. It may not be as callous as selecting the not-very sick for dramatic faith healings and speaking in tongues, but the principle is exactly the same. We pray, and someone should listen, and all that should lead to results, in a the world we want to see, hopefully here, but if not, then hereafter.

So, high or low, it is all equally nonsense in the service of personal comfort and mass psychotherapy, whether one has the fancy degrees to go with one's Biblical references or not. The film is positively crawling with citations- cherry picked quote after quote, to say (among many other things) that faith alone is sufficient, no dollars required to enter into heaven. But the televangelists have plenty of quotes too, and so do the Jews! Rather contrasting belief systems can all draw from the same well, and all the rhetorical hellfire and brimstone isn't going to resolve these endless contradictions. Second, and more important, what on earth does god want? That is what this whole drama is about. But after a god treats his originally chosen people with derision and scorn, then issues himself in human form to conduct some rather cryptic repentence preaching, and then has himself killed in grisly fashion in order to show the world that he is the soverign king of all creation... Well, no wonder there are various interpretations.

It is not a focus of this film, which is full of self-righteous pastors, but religious people often proclaim the inscrutability of god. And that would be a good place to leave the subject, rather than saying in one's next breath what god wants, how we miserable sinners are both so important to him (always him!) that we have to do what he or she says, but at the same time how complete he or she is, great, omnipotent, and omniscient, needing nothing whatsoever. The sheer idiocy of these contradictions and paradoxes are generally meant to cow the humble sinner under the eagle eye of the charismatic pastor. Heaven forbid that a thought enters one's head. For, back in the day, pastors used to be the most educated and intellectually capable members of society. Similarly, American protestantism has settled on having a "personal" relationship with Jesus, or, if one wants to be ambitious, with god. The therapeutic value of meditation, mantras, and lucid dreaming are real enough. But communing with dead people, voids, and imaginary friends? Really? It is a method of mass and self-hypnotic propaganda- pure nonsense.

So, spew vitriol on each other as much as they like, but what we are seeing here is simply upper-class versus lower class charlatanism at loggerheads. Conventional pastors uphold conventional (reformed) understandings, like our sinning depravity and undeserving natures that can only be saved by faith and repentence - that is what god wants. Since their parishioners tend to be well-to-do, conservatism is quite sufficient for this world, and faith can be directed mostly at the next. (Plus, the collection plates fill up without any crass appeals to transactional prayer.) But the unconventional pastors speak to a more downtrodden demographic. Sure, they prey on their hopes and dreams, but they also strengthen those hopes by saying that god is not the disinterested, damning character you hear about in mainline churches. No, he is powerful, and healing, and helpful.

The film ends with the wife of the producer proclaming that despite her many health woes, (which she wouldn't dream of asking god to fix!), she knows Jesus is in her heart, and that makes her super-happy. That, and having a delightful house, husband, and kids. Oh, and a tube sticking out of her nose, presumably for oxygen, and some more tubes out of her insides, for feeding. But thankful for all the clever people who researched the feeding mixture, and invented the tubes, and manage their sterility, and who performed the operations, and who serve her at the hospital? Not a word about all that. It is Jesus in her heart that she is thankful for. And by the way, they could use some money.

• Enter your prayer request here, and god will answer.
• BBC looks askance.
• Christianity Today is alarmed. And no, God does not want you to be happy.
• Treatments for Covid-19 will probably save us before a vaccine does.
• People who know, know creeping fascism.
• Recessions are damaging and unnecessary.
• What it is like working for a weasel. Or being an idiot.
• History and Henry Wallace.
• Why aren't the gun nuts equally vociferous about women's rights against state interference on their most personal and significant actions?