The women are at fault

Bernard  Lewis offers an hypothesis about Muslim cultural development.

Just before 9/11, Bernard Lewis published a provocative book about the Islamic world titled "What went wrong? The clash between Islam and modernity in the Middle East." There is very little discussion about the causes, but a great deal of historical detail showing that the muslim world has indeed fallen behind the West, (or North, or however one wants to term it), and is bitter and has long been perplexed about the situation.

To recap a bit from his conclusion:

In the course of the twentieth century, it became abundantly clear in the Middle East and indeed all over the lands of Islam thta things had indeed gone badly wrong. Compared with its millennial rival, Christendom, the world of Islam had become poor, weak, and ignorant. In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the primacy and therefore the cominance of the West was clear for all to see, invading the Muslim in every aspect of his public and-more painfully- even his private life. 

Modernizers- by reform or revolution- concentrated their efforts on three main areas: military, economic, and political. the results achieved were, to say the least, disappointing. The quest for victory by updated armies brought a serious of humiliating defeats. The quest for prosperity through development brought, in some countries, impoverished and corrupt economies in recurring need of external aid, in others an unhealthy dependence on a single resource- fossil fuels. And even these were discovered, extracted, and put to use by Western ingenuity and industry, and doomed, sooner or later, to be exhausted or superdeded ... Worst of all is the political result: the long quest for freedome has left a string of shabby tyrannies, ranging from traditional autocracies to new-style dictatorships,  modern only in their apparatus of repression and indoctrination.

He makes the additional point that even while the Muslim world has been so bitterly conscious of falling behind, other countries, especially in Asia, such as Korea and China, have zoomed past them into modernity. What is the problem?

Lewis offers only the most off-hand comments to this question in his conclusion, but one of them caught my attention in the most riveting way:

"For others, the main culprit is Muslim sexism, and the relegation of women to an inferior position in society, thus depriving the Islamic world of the talents and energies of half its people, and entrusting the crucial early years of the upbringing of the other half to illiterate and downtrodden mothers."

This knits up so many threads that one's head spins. For instance, one issue is that Islam was once the most advanced culture, at least in the hemisphere, if not the world- open to Greek and Roman learning, building on it, and passing it on to others. For its time, Islam gave high regard to women, with rights to inherit and have their own property. Even polygamy was not originally formulated as an excercise in male dominance and competition, but of caring for widows and other isolated women (of whom there were many after the wars of Muhammed) who might otherwise become beggars or prostitutes.

So one might say that Islam was at one time in a leading position with regard to women's rights, and as long as that held, it also held relative cultural leadership in the broadest sense. One can well imagine the influence that educated and civically engaged women have on their children, and the converse effect that a relentless confinement to family, clan, and tradition have. As previously noted, our parents give us meaning, and they also provide us with horizons and ambitions, whether small or large minded.

Another issue is the relative development of different countries, especially within the Islamic world. Why is Afghanistan saddled with the Taliban, while Egypt has the more moderate, though still a bit crazy, Muslim Brotherhood? Could the relative oppressiveness of the burkha and the veil (and all that they signify about the position of women) have something to do with it?

The fight for women's rights in the Islamic world is not just a matter of goo-goo feelings and Western domination, but addresses the very core of cultural development in the long term. One can hypothesize that every gain that women make in education, cultural engagement, and rights, yields, a generation down the road, a society less prone to blood feuds and more engaged in further education and higher cultural development, built by men and women inculcated with the ideals of their mothers.

• End times and climate heating.. or is it just historical myopia?
• The dismal science.. not a science, at least not yet.
• But yes, we have plenty of money.
• Can you say "age discrimination"?
• Climate heating denial, in full swing over at the WSJ.
• China vs Earth.
• A review of Morsy's role in the Egyptian mess.
• Ural accordion (bayan) trio, sounding like an organ. (Minute 6+)
• Bach on accordion- no kidding!
• Evidently, hunting, killing black people is OK, particularly if they defend themselves.

Our plastic memory process

Dynamic and adjustable memory associativity in the brain.

A funny thing about memory is that it bleeds. It takes on schematic properties that allows other concepts to associate with it, notoriously as free association, but also during learning, trauma, metaphor, and creativity. PTSD is a problem where too many things trigger bad memories and those bad memories generalize to mean far more than the bare incidents in question. If the memory of one distasteful event is to be useful, its core elements need to be recognized and generalized to enable avoidance not just in that exact setting again, but of future patterns that are similar to some regulated degree. So how similar is similar?

Surprisingly, memory generalization can be studied, and a recent paper described connections between the hippocampus, frontal cortex, and an intermediary structure called the nucleus reuniens, showing that some of these connections affect the degree of memory generalization when either destroyed or enhanced. The nucleus reuniens is part of the thalamus which is smack in the middle of the brain, with important roles in consciousness and alertness, among much else.

This is all done with mice, using cutting edge techniques. The test was to have the mice experience a shock in combination with an alert sound in one cage, and then to test response to the same sound (tone condition) or to no sound in various settings, like the same cage, or similar cages, or a somewhere completely different. Normal mice do not show fear outside the original cage context, unless you ring the same tone that was  associated, Pavlov-style, with the original fear training. But mice that have had their medial prefrontal cortex areas ablated (mPFC), or their nucleus reuniens ablated (N. reuniens), show continued fear in new cages. I could not tell how universal this fear expression was ... were the mice just totally frozen now, fearful of all conditions? That was not clear.

Genetic ablation of various mouse brain structures specifically affects the degree of fear memory generalization, as tested by fear expressed in an altered context, relative to the original context (cage) or the original tone sounded during fear training. The role of the medial prefrontal cortex (PFC) had been known previously, but the equally important role of the nucleus reunions had been unknown.

At any rate, the coup de grace was for the researchers to use some clever molecular technology to ablate only the neurons connecting the PFC with the N. reuniens, by injecting the mice with one genetic element of a lethal cocktail (a gene for tetrodotoxin hooked up backwards to a promoter of expression) in the mPFC, and the other element (a recombinase that flips the toxin cassette into the expressing orientation). Each was labeled with a fluorescent protein to show where the injections took place:

Locations of injection of two genetic constructs, in a mouse brain section, whose products combine to destroy connected neurons. Green shows the medial prefrontal cortex, injected with the flipped toxin gene, and pink shows the N. reunions, injected with the recombinase gene that activates toxin expression.

Neurons transport this kind of expressed protein through their cell bodies, even out to the farthest axons. They also let some into the synaptic vesicles that send neurotransmitters across the gap between neighboring neurons (axons and dedrites). This means that a small amount of the recombinase would be transported from the injected region into the target area where its projections go, and be able to induce expression of the toxin in those target neurons that received the complementary injection, killing them. The figure shows the result, where control mice with non-expressing injections show normal fear-context dependence, while mice that got the full treatment in the nucleus reuniens and prefrontal cortex show more generalized fear, like mice that had their whole nucleus reuniens ablated.

Specific ablation of neurons connecting the mPFC and N. reuniens results in expanded memory generalization (TetTox bars, green), while neuronal activity enhancement (NL2KD bars, blue) in the same neurons generates the reverse effect of lower memory generalization. Response to the tone or the whole training context remains normal in all cases.

They even were able to do a converse experiment, using the recombinase to induce, instead of a toxin, a repressor of neuroligin 2 which represses neuronal transmission, essentially enhancing transmission between the two injected areas (the blue bars, above). These show the (modest) opposite response of lower fear response in the altered context (than control mice with sham treatment), with similar response in both the original cage and the trained tone. This provides quite a strong argument for the specificity of what they are seeing- that the nucleus reuniens is a critical way-point for signals from the prefrontal cortex that tell the hippocampus that a memory is relevant to more specific conditions than it might be inclined to apply them to otherwise. As in most things, the prefrontal cortex refines and inhibits our deeper brain processes.

Lastly, they used the very latest technology to convert the nucleus reuniens neurons to be light-inducible in their firing (optogentics), by injecting a gene for channel rhodopsin, which converts light into membrane potential which in the neuron can induce action potentials. This method allows researchers to run the affected cells at any firing rate they wish, up to 50 times per second, driven by a light guide directed right into the structure in the brain they are interested in.

Optogenetic experiment, where light is conducted into the site of an injected channel/rhodopsin gene which allows researchers to use strobed light to fire neurons at will, and also fluoresces red.

They used two driving methods, one a constant 4Hz (4 firings per second; tonic) and the other bunched in fifteen firings within a half-second, at five second intervals (phasic). The experimenters evidently came up with these patterns through trial and error, and they had opposite effects, when run while training the mouse to the fear condition (shocks to the feet in a cage). Running the tonic pattern during training yielded lower fear later in altered contexts (lower generalization), while the phasic pattern yielded higher fear. Neither one affected the response of the mice to the true fear condition of the original training context and/or tone.

Optic driving of the N. reuniens during memory training yields opposite effects on ultimate memory generalization, depending on the pattern of neuronal firing driven- phasic or tonic.

The idea from this work is that while the hippocampus stores specific memories, other connected areas allow those memories to be generalized to *similar situations, accounting for allegory and much else about our mental operations. There is a two-way circuit from the hippocampus to the nucleus reuniens and on to the medial prefrontal cortex, where memories exist in more abstract form. Here, the researchers show that for at least one type of memory, the obscure nucleus reuniens links the two, with an active role in whether a mouse's memories flood in during distantly related situations, or only in the more restricted context of the original experience.

Related mechanisms are likely to be relevant to the binding problem of how separate features of an experience or scene are linked by our minds into a unitary experience with various possible abstractions and composite or derived properties, i.e. consciousness. The way we associate new experiences with prior memories and knowledge, either freely or sparingly, should work similarly and be intimately connected with the degree and quality of our creativity.

• Ode to small business- the ones that care about people.
• A less romantic take on our revolution.
• Some comforts and discomforts of religion.
• And Hitchens ... OK after all.
• Just the facts, at the Zimmerman trial.
• Perhaps drugs should be made the old-fashioned way, in academic labs.

Myth & music

The languages we love.

Claude Levi Strauss wrote an exceedingly brief book, "Myth and Meaning", one chapter of which is titled "Myth and Music". He offers the hypothesis that, compared to the basic core of human spoken language, music and myth each lack an element, forming a sort of coding triangle:

"Now you can compare mythology both to music and to language, but there is this difference: in mythology there are no phonemes; the lowest elements are words. So if we take language as a paradigm, the paradigm is constituted by, first, phonemes; second, words; third, sentences. In music you have the equivalent to phonemes and the equivalent to sentences, but you don't have the equivalent to words. In myth you have an equivalent to words, an equivalent to sentences, but you have no equivalent to phonemes. So there is, in both cases, one level missing. 

If we try to understand the relationship between language, myth, and music, we can only do so by using language as the point of departure, and then it can be shown that music on the one hand and mythology on the other both stem from languages but grow apart in different directions, that music emphasizes the sound aspect already embedded in language, while mythology emphasizes the sense aspect, the meaning aspect, which is also embedded in language."

I can't say I think much of this setup, (indeed his book is but a weak rendition of Jungian concepts), but it does get one thinking about the relations between these languages. I would offer that music is absolutely primary. Its evolutionary roots are extremely deep, expressing and sharing emotions among birds and insects, not to mention all mammals.

The next level up from music is practical language, used for parenting, household organization, hunting parties, and the like. The musical aspects of our phonemes and sentences are weakened in the interests of more finely coded communication, as words take the place of purely musical expressions. Still, poetry (and various onomatopoeias) harkens back to a time when all sentences were more or less musical, more emotionally meaningful, less coded.

From there, languages develop increasing coding capacity, which can be used for many things. Here is where myths come in, as one of perhaps two thematic branches of language use. One branch is the didactic, analytic language, which eventually develops toward Witgenstein and mathematics, where, if the content is not poetic, nothing else about the language betrays any musicality whatsoever.

The language of myth goes in quite a different direction and expresses quite different things- our dreams and emotions. One telltale is that myth is happy to be embedded in a culturally integrated way with strong connections to music, image, and other arts, as a unity of performance. Myths are no more logical than our dreams are; they express an emotional and human logic that is essential to our being, nurturing a sense of self, community, history, hope, and imagination. Why do all our movies & novels have happy endings? Why are the cop show criminals always caught? These myths carry out the elementary function of keeping our spiritual sense of order and hope alive.

This is all to say that one shouldn't confuse the nature or purposes of didactic versus mythical languages. They are fundamentally different, and the weird necessity that modern religions often have of insisting that their myths cover both bases, are perfectly correct, contain all knowledge, and must never be doubted is another case of emotional language being used- some relatively ugly emotions, to be truthful.

• Economic quote of the week:

Alas, in their self-appointed role as purchasing agents in health care, American employers have arguably become the sloppiest purchasers of health care anywhere in the world. The chaotic price system for health care is one manifestation of that sloppiness.
...
Another result has been that ... a decade of health care cost growth under employment-based health insurance has wiped out the real income gains for an average family with employment-based health insurance.

Lucid dreaming

Of dreams, fairy tales, and religion.

Our brains are always going. Awake or asleep, something is always bubbling, until death do us in. Emptying the mind is a hopeless task, as meditators learn to their chagrin, though one can focus on smaller and smaller objects, and increase one's discipline of focus.

Most activity is fully unconscious, wheels turning to support our breathing, blood pressure, vision, etc. But the conscious parts are likewise going virtually all the time, apart from the deepest levels of sleep, and send up a constant stream of drama in the form of dreams, images, plans, regrets, and desires- waking and sleeping.

When we are not making up our own, we like nothing more than to experience in those of others- watching movies, gossipping, reading books. Why is that? Computers do some of the computation we do, (more or less!), but without all this drama. They are not motivated agents. That is the divide between our world and the one where robots take over- as of now, they don't have any motivation ... a drama motor running all the time, putting out dream images, desires, and ambition.

I've been reading fairy tales, and watching the illustrated dreaming of Henry Darger. Tales like Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, and Cinderella are by turns cautionary morality plays and hopeful live-happily-ever-after dreamscapes. Pared down and packed with every archetype, kings come riding over every hill, stepmothers thwart every princess, and big things happen in threes. Fairy tales seem like lucid dreams, with no preamble, context. or excuses- just pure drama dredged right up from our emotional core.

While we all dream, some people are far more gifted (or cursed!) with the ability to experience and express dreams in the waking state. Of the brother Grimm's sources, none was as prolific or precise as Dorothea Viehmann, who contributed many of their stories. But her stories came from other folk sources. She had an extraordinary memory to collect and transmit them.

Henry Darger, on the other hand, was a reclusive product of early 20th century Illinois orphages and asylums who generated an enormous fantasy world, which he spent a lifetime recording in ream after ream of typescript and hundreds of paintings and collage. Probably, we all experience easily this much imagery and drama, in dreams. But very few experience it so clearly in waking, or are so compelled to tell the story, listener or no. Carl Jung was another example.

Art for art's sake, by Henry Darger.

Our cultural life, however, depends on people so gifted, who bind us together in shared fantasies, of movies, novels, ceremonies, and the like. Our humanity is expressed in intense desire and the drama of fulfilling it in world where it often runs directly athwart the desires of others. Thus the epic Glandelinian war of Darger's opus, with its heroes the Vivian girls. Or the latest Superman, Spiderman, Hobbit, Potter, etc.

Which brings, us, as usual, to the topic of religion, which falls squarely into this category of art: enacted fantasy with a head-spinning brew of every conceivable archetype, cosmic-level drama, and the can't-top-this promise of living-happily-ever-after. It is a story. One that has come so naturally to us through the ages in countless guises, rising from the same basic psychological truth and origin. One that has been refined into the crack-i-est of narrative crack cocaine. One that tops it all by not saying "once upon a time", but by claiming truth and demanding belief from its mystified and yearning votaries.

Is it really so hard to tell story from reality? Reality is, to our awareness, just another story, and sometimes a mightily depressing one that pierces our narcissim. One of the great accomplishments of the enlightenment was to begin a definitive separation between nonfiction and fiction across the culture, using immense intellectual discipline, in combination with intellectual accelerants such as printing. The development of science was only one facet of a deeper process. It is a long, long road- indeed never ending, since human nature itself remains unmoved.

• Get the lead out of all ammunition. Not just for birds, but for hunters as well, of course.
• Citigroup now writing our banking laws.
• The Fed starts to realize that it isn't tracking the right numbers; money isn't all it's cracked up to be.
• Krugman comments on rent: "Since profits are high while borrowing costs are low, why aren’t we seeing a boom in business investment? ... Well, there’s no puzzle here if rising profits reflect rents, not returns on investment."
• Solar viability still in question- needs carbon tax to stabilize.
• Shale oil and gas supplies look essentially unlimited. So we can't wait for supply constraints to save the climate.
• How can some workers in the US be paid ¢22 an hour?
• Dennett on closeted clergy.
• A tempest in the atheist teapot- only for the intrepid!
• Green tip: telecommute!
• Economics quotes of the week (NYT editorial): "If a business really needed workers, it would pay up. That is not happening, which calls into question the existence of a skills gap as well as the urgency on the part of employers to fill their openings."
• And, Simon Johnson on too big to fail: "Hank Paulson, then Secretary of the Treasury and former head of Goldman, felt strongly that the continued existence of his firm was essential to the well-functioning of the world economy."
• And, market fundamentalists still at work (Bill Mitchell): "Mankiw’s example assumes at the outset that 'people earn the value of their marginal product'."
• And, at the nexus of government, economics, and Afghanistan: 

More than 170 million pounds worth of vehicles and other military equipment have been shredded, cut, and crushed into scrap metal as the U.S. military prepares to withdraw all combat forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2014 (Post).  Because complicated rules govern equipment donations to other countries, and few would even be able to retrieve it from Afghanistan, military planners have destroyed equipment worth more than $7 billion, turning it into scrap metal the Afghans use in construction projects or as spare parts. 

Where have all the fishes gone?

Can we ever get our ecological act together?

Picking up on last week's theme of fighting against the declining baselines of what humans perceive as "normal" ecology, as they exploit their way down the food chain and wreak various other types of havoc on our world, a prime example is fishing. We have known forever that any body of water has only so many fish, and in lakes it is quite possible to "fish out" a species. But the ocean? Yes, we've known for at least a century or two that ocean fisheries can be fished out too.

An outstanding podcast from the CBC interviewed the author of a new book about this history, who makes the point that fishery depletion was a public and contentious issue in the 19th century, and fishermen where very resistent to the über-exploitative methods like bottom-trawling that, several decades later, left much of the eastern seaboard such an ecological shambles. Time after time, our collective apparatus- the state- proved toothless and cowardly in the face of technological "advancement", private interests, and races to the bottom which wound up as tragedies of the commons.

But I'll turn to something more contemporary- an article about current fisheries management that has similarly depressing messages about the appalling lack regulation, even now, decades, indeed centuries, after all the issues have been crystal clear. If we can not manage our relations to fish in the face of short-term greed, how will we ever deal with CO2?

The paper is a global analysis of overfished stocks, and asks what the optimal policy would be, and how far we (or the relevant governing bodies) are from that policy and why. As is customary with contemporary fisheries "science", they take the most blinkered and mercenary attitude, asking not for ecological health in general, or restoration of fantastic yields seen in distant history, but only for the "Bmsy", or the maximum sustainable yield of fish biomass. The idea that other fisheries might depend in turn on the studied fishery, or that wild animals might rely on it, or that such fish populations might not have as their only end the servicing of human appetites ... that doesn't seem to enter their heads. Nor does the true historical scope of possible fish populations and yields.

At any rate, even on strictly Bmsy terms, which is to say the simplest dollar and cents approach, the fisheries they look at are grievously mismanaged. Species that could be restored in ten years are on trajectories to be restored in 100, if that. (Note that the halibut fishery is completely closed due to virtually none being left, which leads to the coincidence of the business as usual and other curves below.)

Projected recovery times for various collapsed fisheries of the northwestern Atlantic, under business as usual,  no fishing at all, and moderate fishing at the Bmsy (see text) levels.

The Bmsy is typically taken to be 0.3 times the current population of the fish, assuming a typical rate of reproduction, which largely goes into the maw of the fishing fleet. This is why the difference between no fishing and Bmsy fishing in the graph above is so small- that taking merely one third of the population each year is not such a big bite out of a rapidly reproducing species. For a slowly reproducing species, like sharks, the factor is going to be much smaller, but that is not discussed in the paper.

So it is apparent that under the current regulatory regimes, the hunters of these emblematic species and many others are not controlled, and can not control themselves from vacuuming up absurdly large proportions of the already depleted populations of these fish, directly in opposition to their own economic interests, in the long term.

"Regardless of their depletion level, at current fishing mortality rates, recovery to Bmsy remains a distant target for the majority of stocks that are now depleted (n=62 stocks in our analysis)."

The authors go on to make the additional point, which hardly needs making, that the length of time a species has been in a highly depleted state itself affects the time it will take (if ever) to recover. Whether this arises from permanent habitat destruction, (like from bottom trawling), or from ecological reconfiguration of their relation to other species, or gross genetic alterations like reductions in size in response to fishing pressure, or from loss of genetic diversity, or for other reasons, such species have a hard, hard road.

Fish are almost as invisible as CO2- out of sight, out of mind. And this problem also reflects the degradation of our public institutions and quality of public thinking, part of a long tradition of kow-towing to private business and individual "freedom", which authored such epic catastrophes as the dust bowl. We can do better.

• The Fed talks about our conditions- the credit markets are still in bad shape. The Fed's money creation has little effect, as long as banks and other participants are not lending.
• CO2 emissions at all-time high.
• Nicaragua intends to build a canal, with Chinese and Russian help. How serious is it? Hard to tell.
• Some economic history- breakup of the Ruble currency area.
• B of A lied as a matter of course ... shocking! Disclosures about foreclosures.
• Supply side theory ... oops!
• Green tip- foam filler is a great way to weatherize, seal cracks, and insulate.
• Economic image of the week- returns to capital vs labor. The talk turns out to be about inequality, looking into the void of our current public policy, in a TED-style way.

The beauty of the carbon tax

We need that carbon tax, immediately.

Soylent Green was perhaps one of the first true global warming films- a gritty, low-budget Charlton Heston vision of our future where warming has destroyed the natural world, and corporations (combined with overpopulation) have degraded humanity to a soy-based triscuit-eating ragged mob. Images of green and wild nature are so precious and exotic that they are played once and only once to the people of this time- at the moment of their death.

It is set in 2022, so it is safe to say that this specific future is not going to happen on time. Our descent into unrecoverable biosphere loss is happening more slowly. And it is worth saying that humanity should be able to get along decently well. Water will be short, fossil fuels more expensive, productive land in short supply, and inequality sharper. We will face serious issues, but the greater problem is that the riches of the natural world will gradually become a faded memory, an Eden slowly forgotten as the generations march on, each dealing with their particular stresses and shortages.

Farley Mowat's "sea of slaughter" graphically portrayed this process, where the unimaginable riches of the pre-Columbian New World, in sea life, bird life, and forest life, were not just cut down, burned up, and eaten. They were also forgotten, and the (somewhat) impoverished country with ravaged seas and oyster beds, extinct birds and mammals became the new normal- America the Beautiful.

Under our noses, the summer arctic ice is disappearing, with the species that depend on it. Corals are dying and eventually are likely to surrender entirely to a combination of sea level rise, warming, and acidification. Pollinators are dying, frogs are dying, and the list goes on inexorably.

What to do? The most important thing to know is that we have the technical tools we need. For all the hand-wringing about green power, about intermittency, poor storage technologies, and slow progress on solar conversion efficiencies, etc., there is plenty of renewable power and technology out there. It is just a bit more expensive than the fossil fuels we are getting for the price of extraction. This difference is being made worse by the fracking boom, tar sands steaming, and other novel extraction technologies, which rip open new layers of fossil carbon.

But at what cost? At unimaginable long-term cost. And the crying shame is that by just flipping one small switch, we could put ourselves on an entirely different trajectory. That switch is the carbon tax.

Estimates from the US EIA, of the effect of various carbon taxes.

With a modest carbon tax of about $25 per ton carbon emitted, which is about what comes from burning 112 gallons of gasoline, coal-burning power plants would be headed for permanent extinction, since they are the most flatulent of fuels. The breakeven for sustainable energy viability is roughly around $100 per barrel of oil, which we are close to in the current markets. Unfortunately, breakeven is not quite enough to prompt a fundamental switch in the energy infrastructure. Additionally, various market forces, such as the vast capacity of the OPEC countries, tends to keep oil prices just below the point where they would cause a fundamental shift in the West's attitude to its addiction.

This carbon tax, which amounts to about $100 billion per year, or about $1,000 per household, would be substantial, but quite manageable. Compare this scale to the roughly $50 billion of annual subsidies the fossil fuel industry gets from the government, quite apart from the various harms it does indirectly, in the short and long terms. The tax is not meant to fund the government or slow the economy, but rather to change the incentive structure of our energy system from pro-fossil to pro-sustainable. It could all be sent right back to households on a per capita, or even more progressive basis, becoming a simple and far-reaching efficiency incentive.

(Parenthetically, one might ask whether emissions trading regimes are better or worse than carbon taxes/fees. They are more specifically directed, with top-down control of the allowable cap of emissions. They are also a less blunt instrument, since we know that consumer use of fossil fuels like gasoline is relatively insensitive to price, over the short term, at least. But the directed-ness of cap-and-trade systems is also a weakness, since the imposed cap may not be ambitious enough compared with what is technically feasible. In any case, either system would be better than doing nothing, which is our current, shameful, and short-sighted policy.)

Once sustainable energy becomes economically and consistently viable on the large scale, via this textbook use of the economic tool of taxing a clear public danger, then the incentives for future development and innovation will turn significantly. Right now, it is the oil and gas industry that makes the greatest revenue of any industry, and has the resources to fund absurdly complex oil rigs in the middle of nowhere, (i.e. the oceans and the arctic), amazing oil drilling methods into the jaws of hell, and pump-it-up schemes to loosen "tight" gas. Imagine what sustainable technologies could develop with that kind of money. The rampant burning of fossil fuels would eventually become a dimly remembered image, but an ugly one.

• And, speaking of Pigovian taxes, we need a financial transaction tax as well.
• San Onofre nuclear plant to close. This is not such good news for CO2 emissions.
• Participate in making carbon policy for California.
• The fascinating tale of what goes on inside FOX.
• A natural form of money, for thieves.
• Fraud and abuse in loan servicing, modification, defaulting, redefaulting.
• Not all Nobel prizes are made equal.
• Yes, we can afford it.
• But households have been put through the wringer.
• Even Forbes has to admit that the employment situation remains grim.
• The conservative mind.
• Economic quote of the week:

"Why should professional economists working for the IMF, the EC and the ECB be above the professional standards and accountability that apply throughout the professional world?"

• Green tip: LED replacements are available for MR16 50W track lights, but look carefully at lumens, temperature, and dimmability with your particular dimmer.

Science always wins

Review of Michael Ruse: Can a Darwinist be a Christian?

A correspondent suggested this book as a sophisticated statement of how Christianity and science are not really at loggerheads, and so the new atheists should just shut up. Michael Ruse is well known in the creationism debate, and this book dates from its heated heyday, a decade ago. To his title (and more importantly its inverse), his answer, needless to say, is a definite "yes"- Christianity, despite a few problems here and there, and naturally depending how fundamentalist one is, can, with a bit of jiggering and sawing, be brought into reasonable alignment with Darwinism in its current state. Take that, Mister Dawkins!

As the blurb at Amazon says: "Adopting a balanced perspective on the subject, Michael Ruse argues that, although it is at times difficult for a Darwinian to embrace Christian belief, it is not inconceivable."

Ruse tries to give equal time to both sides, but the book really seems more oriented to wading through Christian dogmas and trying to find some way to shoehorn them into agreement with Darwinism, than the reverse. Indeed, despite the rhetorical and formal symmetry, the key to my reading of the book is his rather blunt statement here and elsewhere that Darwinism is true:

"We are not asking the question, Is Darwinism true? Rather, having assumed the truth of (some version of) Darwinism, we are asking, Can a Darwinian be a Christian?"

Elsewhere he is even more definitive about the truth of Darwinism, since, as he has testified in court, it really is true. But never does he apply the same judgement to Christianity. He is thorough (if brief) in laying out the major beliefs Christians have, and the degrees to which various Christians have them, but never once says that one or another of them is actually true. Which is of course because he can say no such thing.

Not one of the key dogmas has the character of fact, in the modern sense of being well-attested in rigorous fashion through empirical and/or logical means. The holy ghost is not a fact. The resurrection of Jesus is not a fact. The transubstantiation of bread and wine is not a fact. The efficacy of prayer is not  fact. Life after death is not a fact. The second coming is not a fact (though grievously overdue). And on and on. The factuality of Jesus himself hangs by a thread, with no direct evidence, but such a volume of hearsay and secondary effects that historians class it as a historical fact, not without a good deal of controversy and hand-wringing.

"I doubt that evolutionism has much to say about the Trinity, for example."

So, tucked within this even-handed argument is the worm of decisive asymmetry, in that one doctrine is a well-attested field of empirical research with inescapable logic and evidence, while the other, to put it in technical terms, is a bunch of fairy tales. Often very nice and uplifting, but stories & myths none the less.

Ruse therefore couches his ultimate arguments in a rather telling way, which is to tell the religious reader that she or he had better get with the program:

"In fact, most Darwinians- and here I speak of all shades, from ultras like Dawkins through qualifiers like Gould- would argue that the evidence for evolution and for some significant role for selection is sufficiently strong that Christians ought to be Darwinians. Our powers of sense and of reason are given to us by God- they are crucially involved in what it means to say that humans are made in God's image- and to turn on back on such firmly established science is theologically unacceptable.
...
Indeed, it is worrisome to think that- because of a literal reading of the Bible- we could have the live option of rejecting such established science as Darwinism."

Ruse then goes on to lambaste Alvin Plantinga for doing just this in philosophically vacuous ways, and repeats several times through the book (in more polite terms) that insofar as Christian god grants human reason, please do not be idiots.

Thus the reconciliation that Ruse dredges out of his comparison of these systems is rather one-sided. Darwinism is true, so in any point of fact, science wins and religion really has to suck it up and retreat from its fairy tales by whatever means necessary. The typical method is to re-read the scriptures "metaphorically" to the necessary extent.

This leads naturally to the question of whether everything about religion is metaphorical- salvation, life after death, god- the whole ball of wax. The obvious answer is yes, after which we can all come to a true reconciliation, where we exist on the same planet, in the same universe, reading a diversity of narratives and myths as such, and can attend to more important problems than whether god is omnipotent, omniscient, and all-good, three-in-one, present in the wafer, and has his cell phone turned on.

The two systems are doing complementary things, in a way. The Darwinists / naturalists have a truthful account of reality, and struggle to make of it a humanistic meaningful narrative. Many have had a crack at that project, from the existentialists to E. O. Wilson (even Shakespeare, I dare say). It is a difficult project and stretches modern thought to its utmost.

Conversely, religionists (of the more traditional sort, at least) start with a powerfully meaningful, or at least psychologically effective, narrative of the world's origins, workings, and humanity's place in it, and struggle to rationalize that story into concordance with reality, via exercises in theology, deflection, bare assertion, leaps of faith, authority, fancy costumes, and the like. While the former task is difficult, the latter is, as far as I can see, impossible. For all of Ruse's valiant efforts, if science always wins, then there is no solidity to the religious world view, in any traditional sense. Even the barest deism exists in fear that advances in cosmology and physics may someday find that everything comes from nothing, or some other such properly mystical, (yet true!), solution to the ultimate problem of origin.

The meanings that religion provides always depend on a contra-scientific view of reality, since that reality must be imbued with some mechanism of caring about us in order to provide hope and comfort. And it must have some consciousness in order to properly care about us such that our efforts in return provide some meaning within the pleasing-the-parent psychological template. And that just isn't the case.

• Religion as bare emotion.
• True reality, false reality, and denial.
• Some out atheists.
• The psychology of time.
• Frontline on the 401K: a disaster from all angles, except if you are a corporation providing a minimal match, or a rich person who doesn't need it.
• US society grows less fair, less just, more poor.
• Joblessness kills.
• Yes, we can afford it.. the median wage should be >90K.
• Cut that cable ...

The limits of money

Money is a socially ambivalent institution.

I was reading an anthropological study of a rural Russian village, which made an interesting point not always appreciated in our market-mad society. Which is that the smaller the social unit, the less relevant is money in its economy, down to the family, where money is distinctly repulsive as a form of exchange. Within this village, people were always helping each other- planting potatoes, sharing preserves, visiting, gossipping, giving health care. But virtually no money changed hands.

The expression "your money is no good here" expresses this phenomenon neatly, implying that a relationship has passed from the level of anonymous money to the familiar one of in-kind exchange and social warmth. Which is not to say that accounts are not kept. In any relationship, there are quid pro quos- no love is unconditional. But the values exchanged are so personal, emotional, and idiosyncratic as to be impossible to quantitate or put in the common currency.

My father used to pay me for good grades. I don't think his heart was in it, but this was in the days of Milton Friedman and Young Americans for Freedom, so his ideology made it necessary to bring market forces to bear on my scholastic motivation. It is not a method with a good track record. The money had no role at all, other than as a token of his interest and support, which could be far more effectively communicated in other ways. Sometimes, we are tongue-tied.

It is well-recognized that people do not really work for money, either. One expects pay as a necessary part of a job, but being paid twice as much doesn't double one's output or really increase one's enjoyment. Motivation comes from the people we work with and the interest of the work. And even in terms of pay, its importance really boils down to its relative social value- are we getting more banannas than the guy in the next cubicle?

Likewise, money also makes a poor gift.  It can be sort of appropriate from higher to lower members of the social hierarchy, but definitely not the reverse. Grandmothers who have given up on the interests and pursuits of the young might resort to a money gift, but the reverse would be unthinkable.

Money is a powerful tool to enable exchange among anonymous people in vast societies, and the invention of minted/printed money with elastic supply has been two of the greatest advances of civilization, almost up there with writing and printing. But anonymity is dangerous; the accounts we keep as social beings are far more complex and significant than those kept in a ledger. A reputation is a holistic judgement that broadly informs what we can ask of others and what they deserve in return. It is a multidimensional measurement of human value, while money is resolutely one-dimensional.

Money exists in part to prevent cheating, since its value is evident on its face and agreed by convention. But under this guise, any amount of other cheating can still take place, since the other half of each transaction is necessarily non-monetary- the product bought, the service expected, etc. While money resolves some of the information asymmetry in a transaction, plenty remains, especially when amplified by anonymity, leading to vast amount of misvaluation, inefficiency, and fraud that continues on in our monetary systems.

One of those misvaluations is, obvously, of what people are "worth". Another is the quality of national life, as embodied in the hallowed GDP. Any exchange ripped from the social sphere, like child care, or elder care, becomes part of the GDP, not to mention horrifically damaging activities like fraudulent loans, environmental rape, and government lobbying / corruption.

All this is to say that money, like markets, are a tool which we need to continually desacralize and regulate so that we can employ it towards our true ends, which are, for instance, full employment and good employment. Throwing millions of workers on the scrapheap of unemployment so that the sacred dollar can be kept from the sin of inflation (putatively) is anti-human policy. Similarly, bailing out the biggest and most destructive financial institutions so that the sacred markets can keep producing profits for their pathological executives (even paying the most culpible mortgage financiers for another round of fraud in the form of foreclosure management and chimerical mortage adjustment schemes) is anti-human policy. Letting money leak into our political systems to control its own regulation in a vicious cycle of corruption is anti-social policy.

The answers to these issues of human value do not lie in more markets or technical tweeking of money supplies, but in our communal, i.e. political, decisions of human value, which have themselves been so corrupted by money and class in recent decades. One of my blog friends is an libertarian / anarchist of the right sort, whose ideal is a world with no government, where private enterprise runs everything, from police to roads. He looks forward to buying his police services from the lowest bidder (baddest bidder?). This is the Murray Rothbard / Ron Paul vision, and it is appalling in its celebration of monetized values for every particle of our existence, not to mention its quixotic impracticality.

• More than a "liquidity trap", we are in a savings & inequality trap.
• And our governing trajectory is into the third world. Is convergence with Mexico the right wing goal?
• Should corporations pay taxes at all?
• Not only do companies not pay taxes while running our lives and political system, but use the legal system to keep their wrongdoing secret.
• And commit ecocide.
• Yes, a zero-E building can be done and done well.
• A short guide to tornadoes.
• Blitz theology from CNN.
• The Pope- flirting with atheism?
• Word, from Kanye West.
• Economic quotes of the week, from an academic blog commenter:

"Markets always operate within some framework of laws and enforcement, and the claim that greed is good implicitly assumes that the legal framework is essentially perfect. To the extent that laws are suboptimal and enforcement is imperfect, greed can easily enrich some market participants at the expense of total surplus. All of this seemed sufficiently obvious to me that at first I wondered if the paper was even worth writing, but the referees were surprisingly difficult to convince."

• And Bob Cringely, on the bankruptcy of GM, and corporate looting in general:

"So while the function of the public corporation is supposed to be increasing shareholder value, there are evidently other underlying values that are even greater. In the case of General Motors circa 2009, that greater value lay in continuing to service the company’s debt while also rewarding GM management."

• And Bill Mitchell:

"The reality is that Argentina, in part, provides a model for all nations that have surrendered their currency sovereignty courtesy – either via a peg of some sort of outright use of foreign currencies (as in the Euro case). 

That is why the elites are working hard to disabuse us of the notion that Argentina is broadly applicable. They know that the nation effectively got away with a major default, enjoyed renewed FDI [foreign direct investment] and have been growing more or less continuously ever since. 

They don’t want anyone to get any ideas!"

War on cancer: update from the front

Some promising, and frustrating, data from the genomics revolution.

We might each very soon get our genomes sequenced, and this will provide a wealth of information about our ancestry as well as our susceptibility to many diseases and other conditions. This is quite static data ... get sequenced once, and your medical file is set for life- those basic facts are not going to change, even if our ability to interpret those genetic sequence facts is growing by the day and will continue to grow for decades, if not centuries.

But cancer is different- it is a genetic disease, a matter of mutations that waylay the normal course of cellular management from its what's-best-for-the-organism discipline to a descent into a mad Darwinian greed. To really tell what is going on, each cancer would have to be sequenced. Like HIV, whose mutations continue as the disease progresses, evading each drug hurled at it in turn, cancer mutations accumulate over time in cancer cells as well, making a dynamic genomic landscape.

Science magazine recently ran a magisterial, long, and unusually clear, review of cancer genomics. While sequencing individual cancers is not yet routine clinical practice, (other than for a few select markers), for research purposes it has been going on for some time, and we now have mountains of data. The authors made quite a few interesting points.

Sequence any cancer, and you get a mess. The tissues are heterogeneous, full of normal and mutated cells. The cancerous cells are a dog's breakfast of early and late cells, with some people theorizing that relatively few "cancer stem cells" are the real replicating drivers, and most of the other cells in the tumor in various stages of stasis or death. Even when you isolate the real, core, fastest-growing cells, they are again a mess, full of mutations that have nothing to do with the problem of cancer.

Indeed, the authors mention that genome sequences from highly mutagenized sites like lung cancers of smokers have ten times the number of mutations as those from lung cancers from non-smokers. Which gives you some idea of the incredibly mutagenic drive that smoking constitutes, and how much mutagenesis it takes to dramatically increase cancer incidence. It takes a lot of hits, and even then some smokers live to a ripe old age.

Tumors vary tremendously in their scale of gross mutation, from only a handful in an entire genome (common in pediatric cancers) to ten to a hundred in most types of tumors, up to a thousand or more in the most mutation-rich tumor of all, colorectal cancer.

So after a great deal of work, researchers have screened out all the noise and the garbage and come up with the genes that really drive cancer, out of our genomes of 23,000-odd genes. And this is the good news- there are only, roughly, 138 "cancer genes" responsible, in some mutated or altered state, for every known case of cancer that has been analyzed. Each tumor typically has a handful of these, which it has accumulated extremely slowly, over many years.

These genes tend to encode master controllers of the cell cycle, cell survival, cell differentiation, and DNA damage repair. For instance, ATM encodes a protein that senses DNA damage and halts the cell cycle in response. Obviously the kind of gene you want on your side, but one that gets in the way of cancer progression. It is frequently mutated in leukemias and lymphomas.

The 12 general classes of the 138 genes whose mutation or overproduction drives cancer growth. Some positively drive growth, while most are inactivated from their normal function of inhibiting cell growth.

The bad news is that few of these genes are easily targeted by drugs. The majority of these 138 drive cancer by virtue of being mutated into inaction, which is to say that they are tumor suppressors in their normal state. The typical gene mutation truncates these proteins- the remnant folds badly when it is made and is promptly tossed into the cellular recycling bin. There is little a drug can do for (or against) a protein that is not doing anything or is absent. Only when we have true gene therapy reliably injectable into these (highly inaccessible) cells would such a defect be truly fixable.

The ones that can be effectively targeted by drugs are oncogenic enzymes which are overproduced or specifically mutated into overactivity. The Ras kinase is a classic example, where a specific mutation of codon 12 or 13 from glycine to another amino acid renders this signalling protein deaf to upstream pathways that turn it off, by inactivating an enzymatic function that constitutes its "reset" switch. It becomes an always-on signaller, telling its cell (falsely) that external growth factors are always there, so go ahead and grow, grow, grow.

This is the kind of thing that can be targeted with drugs, not to turn the protein's reset switch back on, but to block its other actions so that it no longer does harm. This KRAS gene is mutated in about 30% of human cancers, so one can appreciate the usefulness to a cancer cell of having a good deal of mutagenesis going on, perhaps via another mutation in the DNA repair machinery, since this specific defect would otherwise be extraordinarily rare- much harder to come by than a truncating mutation.

The authors hold out hope that, since each of the un-druggable tumor suppressor gene products function in larger cellular pathways of control, other proteins can be found downstream from these inactivated tumor suppressors that might be usefully targeted by drugs:

"All of the known driver genes can be classified into one or more of 12 pathways (Fig. 7). The discovery of the molecular components of these pathways is one of the greatest achievements of biomedical research, a tribute to investigators working in fields that encompass biochemistry, cell biology, and development, as well as cancer. 

... 

We believe that greater knowledge of these pathways and the ways in which they function is the most pressing need in basic cancer research. Successful research on this topic should allow the development of agents that target, albeit indirectly, defective tumor suppressor genes. Indeed, there are already examples of such indirect targeting."

Unfortunately, the fact that there are so few core driver genes for cancer, itself militates somewhat against this view. If there were so many pressure points in the pathways of cellular control, we would see more of them reflected in oncogenesis. By all means, we need to gather all the knowledge we can, but magic bullets are going to be hard to come by.

The bottom line is that cancer, while far more complicated than the singular word naively indicates, still has an underlying "muta-genetic" pattern that can be used for definitive diagnosis in the coming molecular age, where genomes and individual cancers will be sequenced as a matter of routine. Once we devise maybe a couple hundred magic bullets to various oncogenes and related pathways, we may be able to treat cancer on an individualized basis much like HIV- with a customized cocktail of several drugs that, in combination, will forestall recurrence indefinitely. Currently, there are maybe twenty such drugs, many of which have poor efficacy or other issues, not to mention astronomical expense, so we have a long way to go.

A related point from this paper is that metastasis does not seem (at current knowledge) to involve novel or special mutations. The authors observe that cancer takes decades to develop, slowly accumulating its growth-promoting mutations, and that cancers slough off circulating cells in prodigious numbers, more so the larger they are. Thus a careful diagnosis of the original tumor, or any decendent, should suffice to characterize a cancer completely, and to stop it no matter how disseminated, given the specifically tailored and combined drugs that are envisioned above.

• Is the middle class a "natural" class?
• North Carolina- not such a great state.
• As usual, passive / index investment allocation wins in the end.
• We are exceedingly rich, even if we don't know it. The question is: who gets the loot?
• An important note on climate heating. And another.
• On Benghazi, some classic obfuscation at foggy bottom.
• A few questions for atheists.
• Ben Bernanke- "proof of a higher power"?
• Regulatory cowardice and class war at the IRS.
• Bill Mitchell on the job guarantee- employment as a right and as an economic stabilizer.

Bellah 5: Equality before the rite

How egalitarian are humans, and do our rites express or create social structure?

In this last rumination on Robert Bellah's book, "Religion in human evolution", I consider some of the interactions between human social and religious structures.

One theme of Bellah's book is the varying levels of social hierarchy humans have experienced over history and pre-history. The primitive system he takes to be common before, say, 10,000 years ago, is strongly egalitarian, with small groups of families wandering the land with little wealth among them and an enforced equality of sexual and material resources- among males- based on a mutual conspiracy against power-grabbing upstarts as well as the option of relatively easy escape from overly oppressive leaders. Whether women shared in this equality is doubtful, despite the matriarchial cults and practices found in some instances. The gender difference in physical size alone indicates mild but longstanding biological and social inequality on this front.

Prior even to that, if one takes chimpanzees and most other mammals as our guide, societies were far more hierarchical, with an alpha male who more or less terrorized the rest of the group and took sexual possession of available females. So Bellah marvels a bit at the egalitarian turn that humans took in their evolutionary path, (cue bonobos as an analogous linage), and portrays the religious practices of prehistoric societies as commensurately egalitarian, centered on the land, ancestors, and vaguely healing powers of the mysterious cosmos, rather than on some totalitarian hierarchy projected out from their oppressed social situation. There were wars over women and land, but internally, the bands had little hierarchy and a great deal of democracy.

"When Boehm describes the essential basis of hunter-gatherer egalitarianism as the emergence of moral community, he is pointing to what mimetic and mythic culture made possible. In this moral community, powerful norms negatively sanctioned despotic behavior and protected the family. Although culture is the key resource in making such a reversal possible, Boehm insists that the reversal is not quite what it seems. Despotic tendencies in human beings are so deeply engrained that they cannot simply be renounced. We did not just suddenly go from nasty to nice. Reverse dominancy hierarchy is a form of dominance: egalitarianism is not simply the absence of despotism, it is the active and continuous elimination of potential despotism.
...
The tendency of upstarts to try to monopolize females and undermine the family is illustrated by the ancient Hebrew upstart David, who took Bathsheeba to wife and had her husband killed, although Machiavelli warned potential upstarts not to fool with other men's wives as that can spark instant rebellion. For an upstart to become a legitimate ruler there must be a reformulation of the understanding to moral community and new ritual forms to express it, so that despotism become legitimate authority and therefore bearable by the resentful many who must submit to it, a consideration that leads to the next step in my argument."

The loss of equality began when we discovered agriculture and the charms of a denser, rooted existence. Hierarchy became possible, even necessary, leading to enormous tension between long-ingrained ideals of freedom and the more or less oppressive structures of new/old-old state organization. A particularly remarkable example was in pre-contact Hawaii:

"Even in Hawai'i, which was an early state or very close to becoming one at the time of Western discovery, there was an annual alternation of rituals. During the period of the year belonging to Ku, the war god, rituals took place in walled temples where the general populace could not enter. There the priests undertook sacrifices, most significantly human sacrifices, to magnify the power and prestige of the paramount chiefs on the verge of becoming kings. But for the rest of the year, the Makahiki season, especially beginning with the New Year rituals, a very different kind of ritual prevailed. Significantly in this period the gates of the temples of Ku were closed. As we saw in Chapter 4, no one worked during the four days and nights that follow the hi'uwai rite. People of all classes devote themselves to feasting, mockery, obscene and satirical singing, and above all, to dancing. Laughter overcomes kapu [tabu], and sexual advances during the dancing cannot be refused. Valeri writes that 'these marvelously coordinated dances' realize 'a perfect fellowship' that reconstitutes society itself. All of this takes place in an atmosphere of 'hierarchical undifferentiation'. For a while at least, the old egalitarianism reappeared."

Our own time is no different, with the hierarchical structures of monarchy and Catholicism overtaken by that of business and "the market", prompting periodic revolts like the 60's and the Occupy movement. Half of our political system fetishizes "freedom" from government tyranny and worships CEOs, while the other half fetishizes "freedom" from economic reality, and worships politicians. Needless to say, this tension exists internally within each person and within each tradition, not just between alternate visions of man, society, and nature. Even in Islam, one has Sufism and Salafism.

Does religion merely express these tensions, or does it manage them or even resolve them? Looking back with the broadest view, Bellah seems to say that religion largely reflects the ambient social and cognitive structures. Perhaps in markedly imaginative and comforting ways, but it requires quite rare revolutionary activity and individual creativity to make it into something productive of new visions of reality. Whether the question makes sense at all, society being a complex, interacting system, the point is that religious conceptions can not be characterized as arriving from some extra-cosmic plane and reforming people at the point of a crucifix, as it were. Religions are always ways to address ambient problems, and express deep seated human questions (with artistic, psychologically-driven answers). Speaking again of his theories about the axial age, Bellah says:

"My point is that the power of Plato is his reform of the whole of what [Merlin] Donald called the cultural 'hybrid system', the system that includes mimetic, mythic, and theoretic in a new synthesis, but not the replacement of the mimetic and the mythic by the theoretic alone. Such a replacement is an experiment that no one central to the axial transition in any of the four cases undertook; that awaited the emergence of Western modernity in the seventeenth century."

One of the higher theoretic accomplishments of the current age is its casting off of thralldom to illegitimate hierarchies political and religious, in tandem with systematic enforcement of the ancient instinct of equality (using the language of "natural rights" and the like) by suppressing upstarts and despots, at least in the political sphere. So ironically,  I have hope that the future evolution of religion will likewise take us back to the past. The current axial questioning of traditional myths, hierarchies, and mythical history (termed by some "mythistory") means that the hierarchical functions with which traditional religions have been weighed down during the last few thousand years of despotism in various flavors are on their last legs, and giving way to spiritual as well as political egalitarianism. Even economic egalitarianism finds some basis in past religious & cultural practices, as periodic debt-cancellation was part of some ancient cultures' solutions to the creeping despotism of economic inequality. Occupy is only the beginning!

• Boohoo for Mr. Tebow.
• A sleazy payoff that sells out US workers.
• Corruption, fraud, price rigging- OK for banks. Because their customers are dumb.
• Start Trek enters the legal lexicon.
• Science, religion, and Templeton.. not a happy mix.
• Public services actually do serve the public ... we like libraries.
• Economic quote of the week, from Keynes, via Krugman, on the many sources of aggregate demand:

"During the nineteenth century, the growth of population and of invention, the opening-up of new lands, the state of confidence and the frequency of war over the average of (say) each decade seem to have been sufficient, taken in conjunction with the propensity to consume, to establish a schedule of the marginal efficiency of capital which allowed a reasonably satisfactory average level of employment to be compatible with a rate of interest high enough to be psychologically acceptable to wealth-owners."

Bellah 4: A new axial age

The one we are in.

Robert Bellah's wonderful book, "Religion in Human Evolution" ends with the axial age, and a major theme is- what made that age axial? The axial age is the period of about 700 to 200 BC when most of the advanced cultures experienced a dramatic religious re-orientation that offered critiques of the statist / tribal myths that had gone before, arriving at (typically) more universalist moral positions. Confucius in China, the writers of the Upanishads, Ramayana, and Mahabharata in India, not to mention the Buddha, Socrates and Plato in Greece, the prophets of Israel, and Zoroaster of Persia are the main axial happenings.

It is an enormous topic, but he makes the case that as societies became more complex and prosperous, doubts arose about the given myths, especially about the archaic identification of the state with the priesthood and deity/pantheon. In Israel, the Deuteronomic prophets moved the theology of might is always right to a new morality whose main covenant was directly between the Jews and God, cutting the state out of the action, so to speak (similar to what Protestantism was to do again, much later). The state could be bad, and behave immorally, even if it had a leading role in the classic temple worship system. Likewise, in China, the concept of the mandate of heaven arose, where again, might didn't always make right, but sometimes right made might, by the mysterious workings of right action, the Dao, good government, a similar concepts edging dangerously close to one of popular legitimacy, though cast in very elitist terms.

India saw the most thorough renovation of its religious landscape, where Buddhism particularly renounced virtually all aspects of the old rites, old theology, and even the social caste system. Even though Buddhism eventually withered in the face of enormous Hindu conservatism and inertia in India, it had dramatic effects on Indian philosophy and practice, implanting an enduring strain of pacifism, as well as spreading widely through East Asia.

I had never thought of Greece as part of this story, but Bellah proposes Plato and his Athenian milieu as one of the purest and most interesting of the axial revolutions. In his Republic and elsewhere, Plato offers a dramatic reformulation of Greek society, from governance to religion. Naturally, philosophers are to be in charge! But more importantly, the religious myth system was almost completely discarded, in favor of Plato's fixations on ideal forms, and more intellectual mysticism, which was to be so enduringly influential in the later schools of Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, and Christianity. Bellah notes interestingly that the movement was embodied just as starkly in Greek tragedy, which subjected its ambient culture to the most searching critiques. So deep, in Bellah's view, that the people of Athens eventually couldn't take it anymore, made a scapegoat of Socrates, and retreated into superstitious mediocrity, outside the academy.

"What is truly remarkable is what the plays that followed [the rest of the religious festival in which they wer embedded] were about: they were neither patriotic propaganda, nor bland moralistic tales; rather they called into question everything in heaven and on earth. A Vernant puts it, 'tragedy could be said to be a manifestation of the city turning itself into theater, presenting itself on stage before its assembled citizens,' and doing so without fear or favor, showing its self-destructiveness as well as its grandeur." 

"And it is perhaps the tragic consciousness of the depth and confusion of the self and the need for self-understanding, however difficult, that is the axial moment provided by Greek tragedy, one almost completely missing in Homer, where things are, by and large, what they seem. It is here that Eric Voeglin finds the tragic 'leap into being,' his terminology for what I am calling the axial moment." 

"Probably only a democratic city could subject itself to such searching self-examination, and we must remember that the city never faltered in its pride and respect for its tragic poets, but the city did not heed what they were attempting to teach. Athens did gradually turn a self-defensive alliance into an oppressive, at moments brutal, empire. Though insisting on justice at home, it willingly behaved tyrannically to its subject cities. ... The voice of Plato's Thrasymachus was the voice of imperial Athens."

The resonant note for our present day is unmistakable.

But the axial philosophies, while creating enormous advances in views of the self, morality, state relations, and the role of myth, did not in general do away with religion or theism entirely. Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism came the closest, but still held onto precious mystical kernels that informed their respective systems. The final turn towards rationalism and deep psychological self-examination had to wait out an almost two thousand year haitus through a very dark age, which in the West, at least, held all fundamental criticism in thrall to the paradoxical, totalitarian Greek-Jewish theological blend of Christianity.

But finally, Western culture resurrected many precious texts of antiquity, threw off its blinders, discovered printing, and re-entered the critical plane of existence that had flourished so brightly, if briefly, in ancient Athens. Now we are in a second axial age- one with far more staying power and deep change than the first one, or so it seems. One where god is dead, and tragedy, myth, and criticism over all topics are produced as a matter of course by our novelists and other artists. One where religion continues to slink around the edges, and perpetually erupt in new age and other cultic forms, but where analytic understanding takes precedence over the ravishments of mystery.

Clearly, we are still working out the social consequences of the enlightenment. The new system of state legitimacy, by way of money popular vote by an propagandized educated populace, on Godly Christian  completely secular principles, was off to a very shaky start a couple of hundred years ago, but has taken the world by storm over the last generation, and is making inroads into even the most recalcitrant precincts of that final word of Axial monotheism- Islam.

Will a new religion seize the reigns, after this cosmopolitan age? Right now, the world is, in historical terms, a very peaceful place. The only serious trouble spots are associated with either the religion of Islam, (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Mali, Nigeria, Israel, Syria), or with drugs, as in Mexico and points south. An interesting connection, I might add.

But a crisis is certainly coming, as the resources on which our populous and peaceful world are built gradually run out. Unless we keep ahead of fossil fuel depletion with sustainable energy development, there is little doubt that the human population of earth will decline precipitously, though whether the culprit will be climate change or simple lack of fuel remains up in the air. Otherwise a new dark age is in prospect, this time taking not only humanity back into the depths of conflict, privation, and religious unconsciousness, but taking the entire biosphere with us.

• Krugman on the truly awful depths of Bush's lying.
• Atheists still get off on religion. Even off on church.
• Still in search of the historical Jesus ... ... still searching ... ... ...
• The future of oil production and consumption. Not a promising trend.
• And we need to get off "kill-them-all" insecticides as well.
• We could really use a health system.
• Big Brother ... is finally here.
• Entitlements for CEOs are OK.
• Economics quote of the week, from long-ago paper by Paul Krugman, on the curious case of Japan:

"Thanks to a declining birth rate and negligible immigration, it faces a steady decline in its working-age population for at least the next several decades while retirees increase. Given this prospect, the country should save heavily to make provision for the future–and lacking the kind of pay-as-you-go Social Security system that allows Americans to ignore such realities, it does. But investment opportunities in Japan are limited, so that businesses will not invest all those savings even at a zero interest rate. And as anyone who has read John Maynard Keynes can tell you, when desired savings consistently exceed willing investment, the result is a permanent recession."

• Bonus quote from Joseph Stiglitz:

"Markets are not stable, efficient, or self-correcting"