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.

The Parables of Octavia Butler

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• "China is about to bring 21 gigawatts of coal fired power online."
• Stocks are euphoric, headed for a fall.
• Obstruction of justice, in a continuing saga of impeachable offenses.

Domineering Freeloader Decides Communism is the Answer

General, executioner, economic development czar, and head of the national bank of the Cuban revolution: the biography of Che Guevara, by John Lee Anderson.

Ernesto Guevara began life as a reckless, adventurous, and very intelligent kid. His first inspiration was medicine, indeed medical research on leprosy and other diseases common in South America, and he got a medical degree. But toiling away on small problems in the lab didn't fit his temperament, and he decided to bum around South America instead, living off the generosity of others, running up debts, fast-talking his way out of jams, and building up an implacable hatred of the US. A common thread through his travels from Argentina through Chile, Bolivia, Peru, and points north was the overwhelming influence of the US, usually corrupting the local political system for the benefit of mining interests in the south, and for the benefit of agricultural interests in Central America. Eventually he got caught up in the liberal quasi-socialist reforms of Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, later fleeing to Mexico after a US-supported right wing coup.

It was there that he fell under the spell of Fidel Castro, eventually becoming, despite his evident non-Cuban origins, Castro's right-hand man at the head of the communist revolution in Cuba. Not that it started as communist. No, Fidel was a master politician, and started as an anti-communist, currying favor with the Cuban population and the US. But both his brother Raul and Che were dedicated communists by that point, in thrall to Stalin and Mao, and their influence, combined with the logic of perpetual, one-party / one-person power, brought Fidel around to a gradual process of revealing, after the revolution had already gained power and Che had executed resistent elements of the army and police, their new (red) colors. Then came feelers to Moscow and the rest of the eastern bloc, the Cuban missile crisis, and that is pretty much where things stand still today.

Che and Fidel, when times were good.

Anderson's biography is definitive- fully researched, well written, and judiciously argued. He portrays Che as a seeker- a youth on the prowl for good times, but also for a purpose, which he ultimately found in full-on socialism. He found himself most fully during the early fight in the hills of Cuba- a trial by privation, exhaustion, and blood- where he put revolutionary principles to work organizing his men, making alliances with the local peasants, and executing deserters and traitors. Che's socialism was a pan Latin-American Bolivaran ideal, where all the countries of Central and South America would band together- possibly even unite- under state socialism as inspired by the peasant revolutions of Russia and especially China. It was both austere and visionary- a whole continent escaping from under the yoke of the great oppressor- the US.

It is clearly a religious conversion- the epiphany of a wholly captivating ideal. Che became Castro's second in command by his great intellectual and leadership talents, but even more by his absolute dedication to the cause- the cause of liberation from oppression. Unfortunately, after cleansing the army and securing Fidel's rule, Che was assigned to make the economy run, and here he came up against the immovable obstacle- reality. Socialism is healthy in small doses, but communism has not, in Cuba as elsewhere, been able to run an economy. Motivation to work needs to be supplied somehow, and if it is not by the lash of money and its lack, then terror will have to do the job, and poorly at that. Che did what he could, but the system he had fought so hard to establish was impossible to operate, and his thoughts turned back to his first love- revolution.

It is here that we see mostly clearly the religious nature of Che's motivations and of communism generally. If he were a rational researcher in the template of medical or other research, he would have sat back and realized that communism was not working in economic and social terms, let alone in terms of personal individual liberation. And then he would have adapted intellectually and tried to figure out a middle way to preserve Cuba's independence while running a realistic economic system. Possibly even elections. Unfortunately, by this time, Cuba had settled into a dependent relationship with Russia, which bought its sugar and gave aid, preventing either economic or political independence. Cuba is today still relatively poor, in the middle to lower ranks of GDP. Not as poor as Haiti, however, (or North Korea), and therein lies a message, which is that the Cuban revolution remains relatively humane, despite its many debilities and lack of political, social, and economic freedom. The collapse of the Soviet Union shocked the communist government into slight openings for private business and a heavy dose of tourism from Europe, which sustain it today.

But instead of recognizing the errors and failures of his dream, Che fomented more revolutionary cells all over Latin America and Africa, paying special attention to one sent to infiltrate Argentina, one that he was to join himself and die serving in 1965. One can not fault his dedication or consistency, but one can question the intellect that took him and so many other idealistic freedom fighters over the twentieth century into communism only to author monumental disasters of political and economic mismanagement. To think that dictatorship would resolve the class struggle, and produce washing machines and military might ... it had to be a religious movement, which unfortunately, once in power, became incredibly difficult to dislodge.

The motive force obviously was the US. We, through our callous and greedy treatment of our backyard over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and our betrayal of the paternalistic impulse of the Monroe Doctrine, not to mention similar failures of principle in the Middle East and Vietnam, motivated the intense anti-Yankee hatred of idealistic men such as Che Guevara, and the peasant resistance that, at least in Cuba, gave him and Castro support. It is a fascinating history of what the US has wrought, and how our failure to hold to our own ideals has come back to haunt us over and over again.

• It has been abusive, unnecessary, toxic, and we will need some time to work it out of our system.

Science Says ...

What are facts, and how can we respect them?

The recent and prevalent locution of "science says ..." is grating to everyone- scientists, civilians, red, and blue. We get the shorthand meaning, but it has unpleasant, domineering overtones. Yet, sadly, something needs to be said, if facts can not make themselves heard. The "science says ..." mantra means that not only is something a fact, but it is widely, perhaps unanimously, recognized as a fact by experts who know where such facts come from and what they mean. Lately this usage has been in flood due to the pandemic, a way for data-driven people to criticize their more negligent neighbors.

The problem is that facts are not always totally clear or secure. So we have to fall back on arguments from authority, to support what we believe are important actions, based on other values. Masks were originally denigrated - by scientists! - as not very useful for protection against viruses that were small enough to easily pass right through typical cloth. But as more data came in, it became clear - to scientists - that even partial filtering and simple dispersion of infectious aerosols was quite helpful, not only for others facing a possible asymptomatic carrier of SARS-COV2, but to mask wearers themselves, by reducing the infecting dose. This is especially true in a setting with decent ventillation. Evidence piled up from epidemiological studies as well as mechanistic studies of mask wearing, that even lax masking is better than none. Now a shorthand for all that is "science says...". 

But the evidence is hardly 100%. Small studies and suggestive trends in disease data from well and poorly-masked populations make for important public health recommendations, but not quite facts. More detail and mechanism will be helpful, including the relative amounts of virus capture and dispersion by masks, and the role of the infectious dose in the severity of disease- the race that is run between viral replication and immune defense. Few people are themselves directly conversant with all this work, which means that most have to appeal to the authority of those that are. But then any blogger can claim to be an authority, and declaim a different set of conclusions and thus facts. 

We seem to have mostly settled down about these facts, tentative as they are, when it comes to the coronavirus, even though actually respecting them and changing habits comes hard to some. But climate change has been a different matter, being so economically important and implicated in everyone's current way of life. One's conservatism is directly related to resistance to changing one's way of life, which necessarily implies denying and disbelieving the once-subtle, now overwhelming evidence that "science says" assigns blame for accelerating climate change to us and our production of heat-trapping gasses.

Facts? What facts?

This is where the "science says ..." mantra becomes politically fraught and adversarial. If reality is knocking on your door and telling you to repent, confess your sins, and change your ways, experience tells us that is has to knock extremely hard. Addicts tend to change only after they have hit rock bottom, and see death in the eye. Listening to a bunch of pointy-heads and libtards go on about the biosphere, arctic ice, and obscure species is just not compelling. Quite the opposite- it is often taken as offensive and completely out of touch with a fossil fuel addict's immediate struggles and attachment to basic habits and ways of being.

And who cares about facts anyhow? Not the modern Republican party, not our president. Whether "science says" those facts or their own eyes behold them, the social facts of political control in grossly unfair setting of US power structures, and continuing support from the morally unmoored rich and their corporations, are far more significant than any global risks that all will bear with increasing pain over the coming decades. The social facts of the right wing media's blizzard of propaganda are likewise shaping a totally different world, in both values and truths and facts, than what scientists are perceiving. The mantra of "science says" then comes to mean a set of values rather than just facts, that we should perhaps attend to non-human species and ecosystems instead of worrying about a war on Christmas; that expertise is more valuable than con-jobbery and lying propaganda; that worrying about the vastly excessive human population on Earth might be more important than saving every fertilized egg for the patriarchy. For science is a value system, both in its methods and its objects. It is largely and generously funded by society, but naturally has its own agenda, which seems far-sighted and logical enough to its practitioners, but is, in the end, a set of values, which themselves will be judged by society as worthy of propagation, or not.

• An example of how the science has to be parsed pretty carefully, by expert observers. Masks, planes, and time.
• Our degraded country.
• That tired Taliban, ready to take over all of Afghanistan.
• Medicare advantage, or disadvantage?
• Are we great again, or what?
• Climate action and inaction.. still highly insufficient.

Genetics and the Shahnameh

We have very archetypal ideas about genetics.

Reading a recent translation of the Persian Epic, the Shahnameh, I was impressed with two things, among all the formulaic focus on war and kingship. First was what it did not say, and second was its attitude, which is shared with all sorts of traditional societies, towards blood, nobility, and what we now understand as genetics. This epic, which transitions from wholly myth in the first half to quasi-history in the second, stops abruptly at the Arab conquest. Not a word is uttered past the overthrow of the last Persian pre-Islamic ruler. Not a word about Islam, not a word about the well over three hundred years of history of Persia under the Arab yoke by the time this was written circa 1000 AD. That says a lot about what the author, Abolqasem Ferdowsi, regarded as the significant boundaries of Persian history. Not that he was opposed to narrations of decline and suffering. The final era of the Sassanian Empire was one of chaos and decline, with regicides and civil war. But apparently, that history was still Persian, while the Arab epoch was something else entirely- something that Iran is still grappling with.

The epic is full of physical descriptions- kings are always tall as cypresses and brave as lions, women are always thin as cypresses, their faces like full moons and their hair musky. True kings radiate farr- glowing splendor that they show from a young age, which marks them as destined rulers. But farr can also be lost, if they turn to the dark side and loose popular support. The Chinese have a similar concept in the mandate of heaven, which, however, is not portrayed as a sort of physical charisma or halo. Children are generally assumed to take after their parents, for good or ill. The concept of the bad seed comes up in the Shahnameh, especially in the saga of Afrasyab, king of Turan and long-time antagonist of Persian kings and their champion, Rostam. Persian king Kavus has fathered a great (and handsome) champion, Sayavash. Through several plot twists, Sayavash must leave Persia and is adopted by Afrasyab, even marrying his daughter. But then the drama turns again and Afrasyab kills Sayavash. Thankfully, Sayavash had already fathered a future king of Persia, whom the Persians suspect of bad lineage, due to his descent from Afrasyab- a suspicion that they are slow to overcome.

"By the time the boy was seven years old, his lineage began to show. He fashioned a bow from a branch and strung it with gut; then he made a featherless arrow and went off to the plains to hunt. When we was ten he was a fierce fighter and confronted bears, wild boar, and wolves. ... Seeing the boy's noble stature, he dismounted and kissed his hand. Then he gazed at him, taking in the signs of kingly glory in his face."

Ancient peoples have generally taken nobility and bloodlines very seriously, for several reasons. First, obviously, is that children do take after their parents, for good and ill, just as ethnic groups similarly have some distinctive characteristics. Second is that, for practical as well as psychological reasons, people always seek good rulers and stable ruling systems, which in the aristocratic, patriarchial setting means an orderly transition from king to prince. The fairy tale (archetypal) ending is that the prince and princess take over the kingdom, and everyone lives happily ever after. Third, is that hierarchy of some sort seems to be part of our cultural DNA. Someone or group is always up, others down. Whatever the group or organization and whatever its professed principles, hierarchy re-asserts itself. Those on top want naturally to stay on top, and bequeath that position to their future replicas, i.e. their offspring. To do that they will generate all the practical advantages they can, and into the bargain foster a mythos of just distinction, based on their glorious bloodline, if not outright divine sanction from god. Thus genealogical trees, heraldry, etc.

The Shah is not like you or me...

The ruling houses of Europe over the whole post-Roman Era were infested with these archetypes and mythologies. Marrying "up" or "down" was a vast game carried out across the continent. And what has it gotten us? Prince Charles. It is obvious that something went awry in this genetic exercise of assortive mating, as it did ultimately in the tragedies of the Shahnameh as well. The behavior of royals generally fails to select for all the positive traits that are ultimately needed. Their training fails frequently as well to expose those good traits that do exist. But most of all, genetics is far more of a crapshoot than the archetypes allow. 

Children do take after their parents, but there are stringent and interesting limits. A child gets only half of each parent's genes, and those genes may be from either copy in each parent. That copy might have been totally silent- recessive vs the other dominant allele. Two brown-eyed parents can have a blue-eyed child, if they are heterozygous for eye color. Multiply this over thousands of loci, and the possibilities are endless. This is why traits of the grandparents sometimes are thought to come up unexpectedly, or novel traits entirely. The genetic mixing that takes place on the way to new life is carefully engineered to replicate, but with wide variation on the theme, such that any child is as much a child of its wider lineage and environment as of its particular parents. Genetic defects remix during this process as well, concentrating in some children, and leaving others fortunately free to realize greater potentials. The obsessive concentration of lineages that characterize royalty systems, such as was taken to an incestuous extreme in Egypt, leads to inbreeding, which means the exposure of defective alleles due to excessive homozygosity. We all have defective gene alleles, which are typically recessive, and thus get exposed only when they pair up with an equally defective partner. Thus an extreme focus on lineage and purity leads to its own destruction.

The differences between ethnicities are far less than those between families. Human lineages may have some strongly selected and differentiated traits, such as skin color, but such traits are exceedingly rare. Otherwise, our genetics are a cloud of variation that crosses all ethnic lines. Humans were a single lineage only a few hundred thousand years ago, or less, so broadly speaking, we are all the same. Indeed compared to most species, such as chimpanzees, we have much less genetic variation overall, and are virtually clones, due to the relatively recent bottlenecks of extremely low population that reduced genetic diversity. Our current population size relative to those of the other great apes certainly does not reflect conditions in the past!

Education was another ingredient in the traditional systems of nobility and aristocracy. Only the rich could afford an education, so only the upper crust were educated, thus gaining one more credential in addition to their genetic credentials, over the middle and lower classes. Such notions of aristocracy died perhaps hardest in military circles, where officers were long an aristocratic class, selected for their connections, not their ability. It was one of the great American innovations to establish a national military college to which admission was distributed liberally to deserving candidates, (at the same time as similar academy was set up in revolutionary France by Napoleon). It is obvious that the capacity for education was far more widespread than originally conceived, and we benefit today from the very active diffusion of education for everyone. Yet not all are college material. Some children are bright, some less so. Genetics and early development still count for a great deal- but good (and bad) genes can come up anywhere. That means that in the end, the American system of meritocracy, for all its defects, of which there are many, and despite its significantly unfulfilled promise to many, is a huge advance over the hidebound traditions, archetypes, and injustice, of aristocracy.

But back to genetics- what are we finally to make of genetics, eugenics, and noble bloodlines? It is clear that humans can be selectively bred, just like any other animal. Twins and twin studies make it abundantly clear that all sorts of traits- physical and mental- are gene-based and heritable, to striking extents. It is also clear that historical attempts at eugenics have not turned out well, whether through systems of nobility or more modern episodes of eugenics. The former were largely self-indulgent and self-serving ideologies designed to keep power and status among an elite, within which poor choices in mates and inbreeding consistently led to genetic doom. The latter were ideological exercises in frank racism, no more anchored in positive values, genetic or otherwise, than the aristocracies of yore. There have been occasional successful genetic experiments in human breeding, such as the Bach family, Yao Ming, and Stephen Curry, which show what can be done when one puts one's mind to it! (The Trump brood may also be cited as another, if negative, example.)

But generally, selective breeding implies a single set of values that constitute its goal. Our values, as a society, are, however, diverse in the extreme. We celebrate some people more than others at a political or social level, but have been heading in the direction, since our country's founding, of recognizing the dignity and worth of every person without exception, along with their freedom to form and express their own values. We can neither agree on a society-wide set of specific values that would shape any form of selective eugenics, nor allow individuals to go beyond the bounds of normal mate selection to plunge into cloning, genetic alterations, and the like, to inordinately expand their genetic influence on succeeding generations. All that would strike at the heart of the social project that is America- to foster individual opportunity and merit, while at the same time respecting the rights and worth of each individual- indeed, each way of life. It is likely that, given the technology, we might come to a general consensus to eradicate certain genetic diseases and syndromes. But beyond that lies a frontier of genetic engineering that the US is particularly poorly suited to cross, at least until we have made America great again, so to speak, and become another society entirely.

• Some calming piano.
•  Oh, yeah- remember the tax cut? That went to the rich.
• Some people are prepping for war.
• Maybe low-dose infection is one way to approach Covid-19.
• International fisheries are not just environmental disasters, but human rights disasters.
• The difference between being a con man and being a president.
• Some possible futures for Earth. RCP 8.5 takes us (in a matter of 80 years) to conditions last seen 40 million years ago.
• Followup quote from Frederick Douglass:

"Color prejudice is not the only prejudice against which a Republic like ours should guard. The spirit of caste is malignant and dangerous everywhere. There is the prejudice of the rich against the poor, the pride and prejudice of the idle dandy against the  hard-handed workingman. There is, worst of all, religious prejudice, a prejudice which has stained whole continents with blood. It is, in fact, a spirit infernal, against which every enlightened man should wage perpetual war."

Cliques of Civilizations

Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations", twenty five years on.

Is America great again, yet? Well, that didn't turn out quite as promised. China is ascendent as never before, having vanquished a virus that we simply can not get our heads around. China is also putting the screws on its neighbors, assimilating Hong Kong, building island bases in the South China sea, ramping up soft power efforts in its Belt and Road and other diplomatic initiatives, and slowly building the sphere of influence that it merits as the largest nation in the world. In comparison, we are a laughing stock, our incompetent leadership high and low exposed for all to see.

It is quite a different world from that of Francis Fukuyama's "End of History", which imagined that international conflict would disappear with the close of the Cold War and the march of liberal democracy across the globe. Instead, while democracies did advance significantly in the first post-cold-war decade, progress since has stalled. An alternate model of governance has taken root out of the communist ashes- an authoritarian capitalist fusion of the Russian and Chinese types.

Numbers of democracies rose after the Cold War, then plateaued.

Samuel Huntington wrote his "Clash of Civilizations" in response to Fukuyama, offering a conservative, realist view of history as continuing apace in the post-cold-war era on a very traditional basis- that of civilizations, rather than of ideologies. Donald Trump seems to have read (or skimmed, or heard about, or heard about "people" talking about) Huntington with some attention, since his instincts hew quite closely to Huntington's views. Rather than liberal democracy resplendent and ascendent, Huntington proposes that the new world order will be a traditional sphere-of-influence model, centered on the core civilizations of the world- Western, Chinese, Orthodox, Indian, and Islamic. Africa is so far behind that it does not count seriously in Hungtington's scheme, though that may change a few decades on. The Catholic/Hispanic cultures of Central and South America also do not count for very much in his scheme. These civilizations are based on different religions and ethnic histories, and are centered on core states. The US is the core state of the West, (though the EU may take over that role sooner than anticipated!). Russia is the core state of the Orthodox / Slavic civilization, India is virtually the only Hindu state, and China clearly leads the Sinic or East Asian world.

The Islamic world lacks a clear core or leading state, with Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan all in contention, a contest that is still nowhere near resolution, and involves starkly different visions for the future of Islamic culture. Islam is a special case not only for its lack of a central or core state that can lead and moderate its civilization at large, but also for its general lack of effective governance, and its peculiar historical position of having had its golden age almost a millenium ago, after which the West gained progressive, and eventually overwhelming, superiority. The bitterness this engenders has not been channeled, as in the Asian tigers, into competition and often superior performance vs the West, but rather into regression, grievance, fundamentalism, and a rededication to its own cultural superiority. Thankfully, Huntington forecasts that by about now, the demographic bulge of Islam, which had been fueling much of its internal discontent and violent lashing-out, would moderate and lead to a less combative general culture- a prediction that I think is slowly coming to pass.

One of the most interesting themes of Huntington's thesis is the clique-like banding together of nations with similar civilizations. Unlike the American ideal of international affairs, where all people everywhere just want democracy and plenty of shopping, Huntington sees nations aligning on cultural terms, like people do in many other settings, like high schools, religions, neighborhoods, and so much else. The Balkan wars are, for Huntington, exhibit A. Each contestant was backed by its cultural kin among the larger countries, with the Muslim Bosnians supported by a variety of Muslim states from Saudi Arabia to Iran, the Orthodox Serbs supported by Russia, and the Catholic Croats supported by Germany, particularly the German Catholic church. Likewise, in the first Gulf war, Huntington writes that, while several Muslim countries were, under Americal pressure, part of the military alliance against Iraq, the Arab street was uniformly anti-West and pro-Saddam. His description of these sentiments and how they sapped their government's respective resolve about the war and its aftermath was sobering, and should have given the next Bush administration pause in its headlong rush into its own crusade against Iraq.

Another corollary of the civilizational world as Huntington sees it is that some cultures are odd nations out. Japan is a prime example. Clearly, Japan exists in the Chinese general sphere of influence. But Japan has been closest to the US since its defeat in World War 2, has adopted many Western attitudes and practices, a highly functional democracy among them. It also, through its wartime and pre-war imperialism, has earned the virtually undying hatred of China and Korea, among other countries in the region. What will its future be like in a world where China takes prime position over all of East Asia? Can it band together with anti-Chinese fellow coutries like Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, and Australia to create a balancing anti-Chinese bloc? That looks generally unlikely, partly due to negative US leadership, and partly due to the obvious problems it entails, ending in some kind of vast war.

China's sphere and local conflicts.

What China wants as the regional, even global, leader, is actually quite unclear. The history of Korea is instructive in this regard. China has been Korea's big neighbor for at least 2,000 years, and has repeatedly enforced vassalage, favorable trade, and cultural exchange. But it never took over and tried to exterminate Korean culture the way the Japanese did before World War 2. China clearly seeks control over some of its fraternal cultures, like the Tibetan and Uyghur, and now Hong Kong and ultimately Taiwan. But Vietnam? What China wants out of other nearby cultures such as Vietnam, Korea, and Japan is not entirely clear, and some kind of vassalage relationship may suffice. Perhaps seeing the Yuan as the reigning currency, along with other clearly friendly military and trade relations would be enough for long-term stability.

More darkly, some nations in Huntington's system are "torn", in that they partake of more than one culture and therefore face diffcult conflicts, internally and externally. Yugoslavia was an obvious example, but there are many others. Turkey is one, in that it has for decades tried to enter the EU and be a Western country. But with increasing Islamization, this is increasingly off the table, and Turkey is moving towards leadership as a modernizing influence within Islam rather than being a little fish in the EU and lapdog of the US security establishment. Russia has also made its definitive choice, after centuries of conflicting sentiments about the West, turning against a possible turn to NATO and the EU in the post-Soviet moment, and retrenching as leader of the Orthodox civilization. Was it ever realistic to think that Russia might become a normal, Western parliamentary democracy, after its communist collapse? Perhaps not, though our wretched economic advice surely didn't help.
 
Huntington closes on very Trumpian themes, warning that increasing Hispanic immigration to the US may make us into a "torn" culture, less cohesive in international and other terms. Multiculturalism is clearly the enemy. He spins a truly bravura dystopian scenario towards the end of the book, where China and Vietnam spark a world war (with some blundering US intervention) that spirals out of control, Russia and India allying with the West. The US is hobbled, however, by Hispanic dissention, which causes a lack of fighting resolve, and we settle for negotiation! Yikes!

Much of what Huntington wrote was quite precient, especially in the turns that both China and Russia have taken against the West and towards rebuilding their traditional geographic and cultural spheres of influence in clearly civilizational terms. He warns against American universalism- the idea that everyone wants what we want, we just have to invade their countries and give it to them. That way lies imperialism, pure and simple. And his warning about unity in the US is significant. We need to continue to expect and encourage assimilation of immigrants, not social and political balkanization. But it turns out that the principal risk of disunity in the US comes from the native rich, not the foreign poor. The logic of hyper-capitalism and its related ills of political and media corruption has created a plutocratic class that treats the rest of the country as a vulture capitalist project- a place for tax breaks, pet politicians, flagrant propaganda, and walled compounds served by a feudal workforce. That is what is killing our institutions and destroying our standing in the world.

• Sunk costs and lost souls- Trump's enablers.
• Such as Sessions. But GOP voters are just as complicit.
• Should Australia be independent?
• Man or woman?
• The rich getting richer...
• Small steps in the right direction.

A Crisis in Public Management

What is the common thread between the US SARS-Cov2 crisis and the Black Lives Matter movement? Dysfunctional public management.

It is curious how the George Floyd crisis came up during the Covid 19 pandemic. Were people a little stir-crazy? Perhaps. Were people fed up with the callous culture war being waged from the White House? Definitely. But I think there is more to connect these crises- deep problems in American public management. Our problem with the pandemic speaks for itself. While many other countries, large and small, have eradicated this virus and proceeded to re-open their economies, (Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, China, Taiwan, to name a few), we obviously have not, and continue to lead the world in new cases, day in and day out. What is wrong?

I think the main thing that is wrong is that our public health officials do not know what they are doing, and do not even conceive of the problem correctly. Their ambition has been to flatten the curve to reduce hospital congestion. This sentences us to, at best, a continous slow burn of viral cases, spiraling up when people get too careless, and quieting down after lockdown rules are re-instituted. It is clear that public officials completely lacked the ambition to fully contain and eradicate the virus. Doing that would require mobilizing an army of contact tracing and containment deputies, and enforcing quarantines on traced contacts, possibly with phone-based apps. We in Northern California had an ideal opportunity during the April-May time frame to fully control the virus. But did we? Not at all. The public officials contented themselves with testing and publicizing the daily trickle of cases, and having the police close public parks and other venues of congregation. Never was eradication even in the conversation, nor the appropriate powers and staff contemplated, as far as I can tell. Then, when the economic cost of even these half-hearted lockdown and distancing measures became too much, we re-opened, with the natural result of a rising tide of cases.

By not even conceiving that they should and could mount a total eradication campaign, our officials, from the local to the national levels, gave up before the game even began. And why was there this complete lack of ambition? First, we have not been used to this kind of disciplined, society-wide activity. Our social, not to mention political, system, is so atomized and uncohesive, dedicated to individualism, that an actually effective Chinese-style lockdown seems to have been inconceivable. But still, Canada has managed it at least partially- our closest neighbors, geographically and culturally.

Another obvious issue is the lack of a coherent health care system. The public health portion of it is an atrophied vestige, devoted more to bureaucratic stasis and policy quibbling than to actual intervention, uncertain whether it is a safety net for the poor, or a guardian for everyone. Higher officials should have realized that the given infrastructure would be and remains completely unable to mount the effort needed- which is thorough testing, contact tracing, and enforced isolation of contacts. A new organizational infrastructure needed to be built immediately, which was done in other countries, but not here. This is an obvious failure of public management, both in imagination and in execution.

In China, green means go.

Just as the pandemic shines a ghastly light on our public health organizations, the death of George Floyd, and the many prior cases of brutality and murder shines a similar light on another sector of public management- the police. Most police do great work in difficult conditions. Problems arise from a (large) sub-culture of callous disregard, inherited from Jim Crow and other authoritarian elements, combined with weak public management. One issue is unionization. Public employee unions have been toying with the electoral system for decades, running influential campaign ads and altering local elections and public policy to suit their interests. No wonder that we now have a public pensions crisis, absurdly early retirements, double dipping, secrecy for key records, and a litany of other abuses of the public purse and trust. Policies that make it virtually impossible to fire public employees are only one part of the problem, but one that is most central to the George Floyd case. Unlike the situation in public health, the rogue policemen are overzealous, rather than under-zealous. But the management issue is similar- who runs these organizations, do they have the full public interest in mind, whom do they serve, and do they have effective control over their employees? Answers to these questions are not pretty.

We are faced with two brands of corruption when it comes to public management. One is the Republican brand, which hardly cares about the public interest at all, only private interests. Anything they can do to drown the govm'nt in the bathtub, and allow natural feudalism to reign, giving social and economic power to the powerful, is OK with them. This means supporting white power and a traditional racial hierarchy, attracts sympathetic authoritarian types to police forces, and then winks at their indiscretions in enforcing the "natural" order.

The other is the Democratic brand, which cares so much about public service that it gladly ties itself up in knots of bureaucracy and procedure (and pensions, and consultants, and politically correct meetings, due process, and translators, and environmental review, and...) ending up incapable of accomplishing anything, or holding anyone to account. The Democratic brand is also pro-union, adding a whole other level of dysfunction and mismanagement to an already difficult situation. To bring in yet another example, the California high speed rail project is an object lesson in this style. Tens of billions of dollars have been poured down a bureaucracy dedicated to good pensions, due process, poor land acquisition practices, and continual underestimation of the fiasco they are participating in. The expected path of this train now looks more like an amusement park ride than a bullet train, and will only go from Los Angeles to somewhere in the central valley. As a citizen, it is incredibly frustrating to watch this waste and ineffectiveness.

The countries that have been most successful against Covid-19 have been the most cohesive societies, either by nature or by authoritarian force. Cohesiveness correlates with good public management, since it represents shared objectives and understandings about values and ways of doing things. Cohesiveness helps smooth the way between ideals and implementation. The US stands, clearly, as one of the least cohesive societies in the world, particularly after the trauma of the current administration. Is there strength in diversity? Up to a point. But there is more strength in unity.

• We are not good at collective action, at least these days.
• Public health.. what is that? Is it safety net care for the poor, or is it health for everyone?
• Thoughts on building better public institutions.
• Happy thoughts on the current administration.

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?

Atlas of Political Correctness

An appreciation of Cloud Atlas. (Spoiler alert!)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Language of fascism.
• Our position as most feudal country in the developed world.
• Lessons in Ebonics.

We Live in Each Other's Heads

Family, faith, abuse, and gaslighting- review of "Educated", by Tara Westover.

Memoir can be a powerful form, combining truth with the most personal urgency. Westover's coming of age saga tells of a prepper childhood spent far away from any school or doctor, in an isolated Mormon family in Idaho- a patriarchy of one. It was also idylic, with a mountain to themselves, horses, seven children, and the freedom roam and explore. The children, though not taught formally, were also free to roam intellectually, if they could do so on their own. The trajectory of Tara's childhood appears distinctly downhill, however, as she matures from carefree child to a girl who needs to be squeezed into the appointed role of a Mormon woman, wife, mother. The story revolves most strongly around the social pressures that she gradually comes to realize are choking her- love that curdles into control, so that time-honored roles are fulfilled, and life can go on as always.

The family eventually splits into two halves- three children who escape into the larger world, get educations, live independently, and are forced, because the family can love only those who are obedient, to break ties. And the four children who not just stay behind, but work for the family business. Tara has the most spectacular escape, getting a PhD in history at Cambridge, and using her scholarly skills to write this book which lays so much bare. She also learns a lot of philosophy ... and is no longer a Mormon.

Oh, how things have changed- the Oprah interview.

But it took a lot of agony, and some therapy, to get there. The core of the book is really about physical and mental battles with the male patriarchs- the father, Gene, and the brother, Shawn. The father is one of those cranky autodidacts who figure everything out for themselves, and then insist they are right (even writing blogs about it!) and speaking on God's behalf. He runs a junk yard, salvaging copper, iron, and other materials from junked cars in the most unsafe ways, getting various family members injured in the process. Finally, he manages to get himself half-incinerated by taking a blowtorch to unemptied gasoline tank, and, while surviving by the grace of his wife's diligent care, is hobbled for life. More striking, however is his prediction that the Y2K crisis will bring on the Days of Abomination. He is convinced that the end-times are near, society will break down, and they, on their mountain will happily be both safe and vindicated. Lectures on these themes go on endlessly. But as he and Tara watch TV that millennium night, nothing happens, and she sees him visibly diminish, brought down by a cruel reality.

The father provides the baseline fundamentalism and ultimate leadership in the family dynamic. But Shawn brings the muscle. His relationship with Tara has mostly been very close and positive. But it is also clear that he is a psychopath, and Tara's maturation brings out a dark, controlling and vindictive side. He makes a practice of calling her a whore for any transgression of the patriarchal code, then nigger if she has gotten dirty in the junk yard, then abusing her in cruel and physical ways. Afterwards, he says it was all in good fun, and she can just tell him to stop any time, right? We now call this gaslighting, though no one had a name for it back then. For a teen age girl, it was shameful, degrading, and confusing. And it is fully backed up by the family, since the father doesn't see anything wrong with a bit of horseplay and role enforcement, and the mother- well, the mother can not cross the father.

Years on, after some degree of consciousness raising, Tara has the temerity to call Shawn on his behavior. The father goes on an extensive campaign to close the family ranks, and finally comes to Tara to give he the climactic choice of the book- accept his priestly blessing, which is to say accede to the patriarchal hierarchy and squelch her own memories and growing self, or else be ostracized. Westover has told this story in excruciating detail in order to make sense of this moment, to show how powerful social control can be, capable of turning people against themselves and against their very knowledge of reality.

Why? The evolutionary argument is reasonably clear- people, living in social systems, need to have some shared understandings of each other and reality. These understandings are tied up with power and who gets to run these systems- whose interests are served. And it is historically clear that those who are disagreeable enough to buck the established narrative very often end up dead- burned at the stake, forced to drink the hemlock, run out of town, ostracized. The line between justice in some necessary civic sense, and totalitarian measures against deviance, impiety, and disobedience is not a clear one. It is a modern innovation to separate the state from religious conceptions of the social order, now leaving each religious community to police its own congregants with other tools. But over the long arc of human history and pre-history, these were closely intertwined, indeed indivisible. Being trapped in one's family and tribe meant getting along with its reality, whatever that might be.

Tara is almost crushed by the choice, and the dissonance of being loved by people who increasingly seem both untethered from reality, and intensely controlling of their communal version of it. She goes through years of depression and doubt, torn to the core between loyalty to family, and loyalty to what she is shaping as her new self, fostered on intellectual adventures that go unimaginably beyond what her former (and alternate) self could have achieved. Is it worth it? That is the frequent problem of waking up from a religion (or a family) - that one has to lose its comforts and support in order to understand it more fully and overcome its glaring limitations.

• You don't have to be smart to run a cult.
• Thanks, Tea Party.
• Stupidity is generally not the answer.
• How many times does this president need to be impeached?
• Bill Mitchell on the job guarantee, and on bandwagons.
• How's your sky?
• Some more nice piano.

Atheism, or Archetype?

Religion is built on a series of inborn archetypes and intuitions. Does that mean it is inevitable?

Religion is natural, but is it right? Increasing numbers of people in the US are giving up the practice and belief, if polls are to be believed. Hellfire and damnation is sure to follow, according to those left in the pews, at least those of the farthest evangelical congregations. As a student of Carl Jung, I appreciate the psychology of religion, seeing its processes as deeply reflective of our individual and communal psychologies, as well as the consequence of a complex evolutionary process whose aim has been as much social solidarity and reproduction as much, or more than, philosophical truth. At base, we are not rational beings, and follow a variety of themes and images, termed archetypes in the Jungian system, which persistently guide our dreams,  motivations, and cultures. We are not just economic units driven by profit and loss, but have richer dramatic lives and needs.

Father

What could be more obvious? We grow up in households with father figures who are unimaginably powerful. Food just appears, housing, furniture, love, care, and power and discipline. It is no wonder that, once we grow up, there is a father-shaped hole in our view of the world. In the usual patriarchial culture, the father stands alone, at the top, as both creator and moral disciplinarian, in an archetype that is expressed over and over again in cultures throughout the world, from Zeus to Allah, as it is in our political systems naturally as well. But the mother archetype is also in play, especially in Catholic and Hindu cultures, in the Marys and various powerful devas. Is it possible to see the world without using these instinctive lenses? That is what the scientific revolution and enlightenment attempted, in a cognitive revolution that remains, evidently, incomplete. Take prayer. In the form of requesting something from the father in the sky, it is pathetically immature and retrograde, however understandable in primitive conditions of complete existential mystery. On the other hand, some meditation, joy, and gratitude for the wonders of existence are surely healthy and consistent with mature knowledge of where we stand in the universe. Involvement with this archetype reflects quite directly how far one has gotten along the developmental road from childhood to maturity.

Heaven

The afterlife used to be a rather drab, depressing affair, in the classical Greek and Jewish systems. Then it was progressively gussied up into a lottery jackpot, in the Islamic and Christian systems. Buddhists and Hindus also find life after death, in the form of reincarnation, to be absolutely central to their philosophies. The magic of consciousness is incredibly hard to give up, and hard to get rational perspective on. It takes stringent dedication to naturalism and the evident facts of the world to accept, deep down, that death is really going to be the end- of everything. One need only think about animals- they are obviously conscious, and there are levels of consciousness all the way down the scale of evolution, to infinitesimal, then finally to nothing at all. How does that work, other than in direct proportion to their physical, brain-based endowments? What could be more clear, and in stark contravention of our intuitive and (weirdly) hopeful dream of life after death?

Tribe

We are not just endowed with intellect, but with a social nature, which focuses our striving and loyalty on the tribe. Our tribe is right and good, theirs is bad and wrong. Tribalism founds and plagues every new religious sect or philosophical school, which strains to show how it is right and its predecessors wrong. Jung vs Freud, Analytical vs Continental, Shiite vs Sunni, in endless profusion. Religions lack even the veneer of factual basis which characterize other divides like political polarizations or academic disputes. Doctrine, orthodoxy, and heresy are freely defined by whoever has social power. If one's village is Evangelical, woe to Catholics. If one's family is Seventh-Day Adventist, mere contact with outsiders is forbidden. Tribes have totemic symbols and artistic traditions as part of their identification / bonding apparatus, tokens of the archetypal processes at work.

Magical or zodiacal symbols in an Islamic Book of Wonders, circa 1400. 

Magic

Living in an enchanted word is natural, and wonderful. We all start there in childhood and treasure the dramatic, humanistic power of seeing the world through archetypal lenses- in animals with special totemic powers, crystals that heal, trees that listen. This is truly where traffic with archetypes is most fluid and explicit- bringing dreams to narrative life. Religious superstition raises this drama to existential levels, putting the magic on a celestial level of god(s), all-powerful father figures, and alternatives of eternal hell-fire or bliss. The chances of all this actually describing any kind of reality is nil- we are talking total fantasy. But its evident grip on billions of people shows just how powerful magical thinking is and how far we are from being rational.

Truth

All claim truth, but few prove it. Religions are notorious for splitting into sects, each possessing the final truth, the real story. Interestingly, atheists do not splinter in this way. There is plenty of bickering, about what humanism entails or is, how liberal humanists should be, etc., but there are no Seventh-Day atheists, or Twelver atheists, or other miscelleneous schools. Communism was atheistic, but was in truth a quasi-religious, authoritarian cult all its own. Once one has discarded attachment to these archetypes and the theologies they underpin, and to the need for truth as a matter of self-identification, why then it is easier to agree on what is actually true, as well as on the many areas where we just don't know, without the need to make up stories. This need, a dire need, for answers, especially to "big" questions, is a tipoff that we are dealing with archetypal energies, not with a rational level of thought.

One could compare atheism to the concept of nirvana in Buddhism and Hinduism- the release from the cycle of rebirth, from attachment to the archetypes, and escape to a level of intellectual / emotional freedom. Escape from rebirth is implicit, since the atheist doesn't believe in rebirth, heaven or afterlife at all. It focuses attention on this life, this moment, and compassion here rather than later. But to escape the causes of suffering, (especially the infliction of suffering upon others!), by regarding the archetypes intellectually and skeptically, and by distancing one's self from them, is far more important. To leave behind the seductive entanglements of archetypal belief and the often-abusive social relations they entail is personally momentous, and a healing balm for a planet full to the brim with faithful dogmatists.

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