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"

Bellah 3: The birth of god

When did god arrive? Turns out, that's not such a hard question.

One would think that the historical moment of our discovery of god as the eternal and creative being of the universe would be a little hard to pin down. In our hearts, we always knew he (she? it?) was there, pulling the strings, blowing the winds around, and separating the wheat from the chaff after death. Right?

But while primitive societies know of "powers" responsible for each of the mystifying aspects of their lives, they do not as a rule make of these powers a well-worked out hierarchical pantheon, let alone unify them into the kind of mind-blowing monotheism that became so popular in later societies. Robert Bellah, in his wonderful book "Religion in human evolution" devotes quite a bit of time to characterizing such non-systems:

"Aboriginal Australia has been cited, notably by Mercea Eliade, following Pater Schmidt, as an important case of Urmonotheismus, primeval monotheism, because of the 'High Gods', or 'Sky Gods' to be found there. But among the central desert peoples that I have focused on [because of their relatively low contact with missionaries and Western culture] there are no High Gods, indeed no gods at all. The Ancestral Beings, like the powerful beings of the Kalapalo, are not worshipped, but identified with in ritual enactment. It was the absence of gods, worship, and even prayer, that led early Western observers to declare that the Aborigines had no religion at all, thus missing entirely the rich web of belief and practice that in fact characterize Aboriginal life. So where are these High Gods, this primeval monotheism?"

After which Bellah launches into a discussion of how contact with the religious concepts of Westerners as well as the attendant existential catastrophes, prompted a kind of desperate millenialism, similar to the incredibly sad ghost dancing of Native Americans, which involved some worship, prophetic relationship with god, moral prescriptions, etc.

Turning to native American religions, specifically the Navajo, Bellah adds:

"Several writers have attempted to reconstruct the hunter-gatherer religion of the early Apacheans by looking for comparative material among the Northern Athabascans and the groups through whose territory the Southern Athabascans must have passed before reaching the Southwest [becoming the Navajo]. Luckert posits the idea of a 'prehuman flux' as a kind of baseline for hunter beliefs, not only in North America, but perhaps everywhere. By this term he points to a 'time' when all things were interchangeable; not only powerful beings, humans, animals, but insects, plants, and features of the natural environment such as mountains, were all 'alive', and could take the form of one another. Eventually some of the powerful beings shaped the earth and separated the 'peoples' (including animals, plants, mountains, and so on) into their present forms. However the primordial flux is not really in the past, but can be returned to through ritual and the trance states that accompany ritual."

Clearly the garden of Eden story is a faint flicker of this conception in the Judeo-Christian tradition, turned into a jeremiad of sin & misogyny, and then succeeded by countless other mythical developments. But native versions express an egalitarianism and direct participation- religious democracy, one might say- that reflects their cultural setting and practices.

But then agriculture appears, bringing the possibility of wealth accumulation, settlement and the impossibility of escape from the group, magnified levels of status, intensified warfare, and the state.

In a discussion of pre-contact Hawaii, with its transition from a kinship/tribal system to a primitive state system run by a king with so much power that human sacrifice was part of the menu, Bellah notes that this is where gods are (or more specifically, God is) born.

"If we think of Hawai'i, the distinction between the ali'i and the commoners is just such a clear class distinction. Another way of making the same point without focusing quite so centrally on class is to say that the key distinction is between the state as a secondary formation and the rest of society. That this is close to what Trigger means is clear when he writes, 'wealth tended to be derived from political power far more frequently than political power was derived from wealth.' So it is not class as defined in terms of relation to the means of production that is critical in these societies, but class as defined in relation to political power. 

Also important for Trigger is the point the kinship, although remaining significant in different ways for both the rulers and the ruled, no longer, as in tribal and chiefdom societies, is the 'basic principle governing social relations.' He adds one further point of great importance: 'Just as class has replaced real and metaphorical kinship as a basis for organizing society, so religious concepts replaced kinship as a medium for social and political discourse.' Of course, symbolic action and expression that can be called religious appear at every level of social organization, but something new on the religious realm appears in archaic societies: gods and the worship of gods. My reading of Trigger's study reinforces my sense that what makes archaic society different from its predecessors is a complex religio-political transformation that gives rise to two ideas that are essentially new in the world: kingship and divinity, in many ways two parts of a single whole."

In another section, he discusses this transition from tribal to state organization in more detail:

"I have referred to the despotic founders of early states, who came to power through blood and terror as they almost always did, as upstarts of the kind that tribal society usually managed to repress. As opposed to Girard's theory, it would seem that the first killing among culturally organized humans was not the killing of scapegoat, but the killing of an upstart who genuinely threatened to revive the despotism of the old primate alpha male. We have argued that hunter-gatherer egalitarianism is not the abandonment of dominance, but a new form of it, the dominance of all against each other. effective dominance, however, brings on not only submission but resentment, and a desire to resist dominance. That is why upstarts wishing to re-create despotism can be found in every society. We do not ned to go to sociobiology for an understanding of upstarts: modern philosophy has had more than a little to say about this human proclivity. Hobbes spoke of the 'desire to be foremost,' Hegel of the fundamental human dialectic of 'master and slave,' Nietzsche of the 'will to power.'
...
The warrior band, however, can turn out to be a self-defeating project if all it does is stimulate the creation of other warrior bands leading to an ever escalating increase in violence (a real possibility- the 'nightmare of history' of which James Joyce spoke). Chiefdoms are notoriously ephemeral, but early states are also quite fragile. It is only when a successful warrior can fashion a new form of authority, of legitimate hierarchy, that he can break the cycle of violence and hope for lasting rule, perhaps one to be inherited by offspring. But this involves a new relation between gods and humans, a new way of organizing society, one that finds a significant place for the disposition to nurture as well as the disposition to dominate. This is the task that archaic religion and societies have to complete if they are to be even briefly successful. In doing so they elaborate a vast hierarchical conception of the cosmos in which the divine, the natural, and the human are integrated."

and ...

"Both tribal and archaic religions are 'cosmological,' in that supernature, nature, and society were all fused into a single cosmos. The early state greatly extended the understanding of the cosmos in time and space, but, as Thorkild Jacobsen argued, the cosmos was still viewed as a state- the homology between sociopolitical reality and religious reality was unbroken. As we have seen the establishment of the early state and the beginning of archaic society destroyed the uneasy egalitarianism of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years of hominin evolution, but in so doing made possible much larger and more complex societies. A dramatic symbolism that combined dominance and nurturance produced a new sense of divine power combined with social power, enacted in entirely new forms of ritual, involving, centrally, sacrifice- even human sacrifice- as a concrete expression of radical status difference."

So religion appears to be the metaphorical and archetypal expression of the gestalt people find themselves in, projecting their society into their cosmos, rather than the reverse, let alone studying the cosmos on its own terms. If the society has an omnipowerful god, so does the religion. If the society is an egalitarian community of interdependent family and tribal units, so are the beings and gods of their imagination. Bellah also goes through the experience of Israel, where the whole Moses story was cooked up out of whole cloth, as a nostalgic reflection on the Davidic state, probably during exile in that other great state of Babylon / Assyria.

Does this give religious people pause? Probably not. Every religion posits as it first rule that it is correct, and if it recognizes antecedent forms and doctrines at all, poses as the final, correct, and inerrant culmination of a, let us say pseudo-scientific process of discovery / revelation by which its prophets gained the current dispensation.

But, not to put to fine a point on it, that view is precisely backward. It is social setting and ideology that calls forth the religious metaphor, however earnestly elaborated in vast scriptures and schools of theology. For all the standard religions, which use a corpus of myth to intimate a reality with which we are now far more familiar by scientific means, the whole story, including god, is logically, if not artistically, dead. The myth, as discussed in the last post, may remain a sagging sociological artifact, but its many claims to be "true" about "reality" in some critical way that endows its community and especially its priests with mystical knowledge, including powers of healing, historical insight, prophecy and salvation ... well, that couldn't be more absurd, beyond a bit of psychological acuity and placebo effect.

But it wasn't the pointy-headed attacks of the philologists, historians, and scientists that did it in. No, that was only part of a larger social retreat during the enlightenment from state-centered kingship and totalitarianism, towards a utilitarian, domesticated state, that slowly strangled the monotheistic god. Communism was a fascinating detour on this road, installing mundane despotism while denying its celestial equivalent- not a very successful experiment! It has been a long road from terrestrial democracy to democracy in the sky, but we are slowly getting there, whether through the pathetic watering-down of Christian dogma (goodbye hell!), or through the simple exodus of apathetic unbelievers.

And what does the future hold for religious ideology, now that totalitarian kingship is going out of style and with it, the monotheisms of totalitarian kingship? Tune in next week!

• A few problems with Islam, when one loves too much. But then some help, too.
• Outstanding interview with far-North anthropologist Jean Briggs.
• Inequality increases relentlessly.
• Economic growth is doomed- we have picked all the low-hanging fruit, at least until the robots take over. On the other hand, perhaps we should better tend to ecological catastrophe than worry about a few points of growth here or there.
• Some serious problems with Obamacare.
• Fraught identities of immigrants.
• There is no tech worker shortage.
• Reality as a religious identity.
• Bitcoin- the perils of an inelastic currency.
• The curious case of Japan, heading for resolution?
• Economics quote of the week, from Paul Krugman:

"And this makes one wonder how much difference the intellectual collapse of the austerian position will actually make. To the extent that we have policy of the 1 percent, by the 1 percent, for the 1 percent, won’t we just see new justifications for the same old policies?"

Bellah 2: What is a true myth?

Myths are metaphors for what we don't know. Their truth is expressive, not analytical.

Robert Bellah's wonderful book on Religion in Human Evolution has an overarching schema, which is that humans progress (or at least move over evolutionary and cultural time) from a mimetic (ritual) mode of social existence, to a mythic mode, to an abstract, theoretical mode of social development. None of these is lost, but new modes are added onto the prior ones. Thus we enact rituals in our daily lives and in our most meaningful events at the same time that we find meaning in various myths- religious, civic, professional, or familial, etc., at the same time that we in the modern age are obsessed with the analytical quest to find the optimal economic system, the most just state structure, and the most fulfilling personal life.

Being human turns into a rather confusing project, richly deserving all the perplexed attention that the arts have devoted to it.

It is one reason why telecommuting and online education are not as popular as one would have thought at the dawn of the internet age- that face-to-face ritual remains very important to most people, and while we can not always articulate what it is about physical interaction and enactments that is so important, doing without them feels quite empty to many people.

And likewise- following last week's blog on the functional continuity of religious practice in the most unlikely settings of science and atheism- with myth, which continues to shape our lives even in this secular, post-modern age. An example is American exceptionalism- the conviction that we, for some obscure reason having to do with boundless frontiers, liberal / enlightenment founders, and ethnic mixture, have some god-given right or duty to tell the rest of the world how to do things. It couldn't just be that we are more powerful than they are, due to pretty much unrepeatable cultural pathways of economic and technological development. No, we are better people, more good and moral, whom others should recognize as their natural superiors. Or something like that.

All this is buttressed by our various civic cults and stories. However vociferously those pesky lefty historians try to tear down our forebears and tell the stories of those who were oppressed, we are going to just keep on flying that flag anyhow. Even the stars and bars, if it comes right down to it, dagnabbit.

So, as Bellah maintains, myths are not about truth. They tell a story that functions in forming our various emotional and cognitive archetypes into a well-peopled narrative that says who and why we are. They metaphorically represent our position in the world:

"Chaisson would have avoided this error had he been clear about this: myth is not science. Myth can be true, but it is a different kind of truth from the truth of science and must be judged by different criteria, and the myth he tells, [the modern scientific story of the cosmos with a positive inflection, which Chaisson terms a true myth], though it draws on science, is not science, and so cannot claim scientific truth. I would agree that the myths told by the ancient Israelite prophets, by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, by Confucius and Mencius, and by the Buddha, just to stay within the purview of this book, are all true myths. They overlap with each other and with Chaisson's myth, but even in their conflicts, which are sometimes serious, they are all worthy of belief, and I find it possible to believe in all of them in rather deep but not exclusive ways."

and ...

"To put it bluntly, there is a deep human need- based on 200 million years of the necessity of parental care for survival and at least 250,000 years of very extended adult protection and care of children, so that, among other things, those children can spend a lot of time in play- to think of the universe, to see the largest world one is capable of imagining, as personal."

and ...

"The Kalapalo [natives of Brazil] use the very recurrence of mythic time as a subtle way of understanding their reality. What happened "in the beginning" can always happen. Strange behavior on the part of an individual can be likened to some action of a powerful being in a myth, and is so interpreted. An eclipse of the sun or moon recalls stories in which the sun or moon are "being killed", but also reassures in that in the stories they do not die, but return to their normal state. Basso argues that Kalapalo myth is not a kind of "charter", as Malinowski thought, that provides a model or rule to be followed. Instead myth is an account of the way things are, a reference frame for understanding the world. She points out that Westerners, even anthropologists, are used to explanations that take a didactic, logical, or evidentiary form, and so think of mythic "explanation" as irrational, failing to note the subtle and complex uses to which narrative thinking can be put. We will see that this condescending attitude toward mythic explanation is typical of the theoretic mind, which is at best incipient among the Kalapalo."

and most interesting of all ...

"If we compare [Polynesian] Tikopia beliefs as expressed in ritual and myth with those of the groups we described in Chapter 3, we will see some significant differences. Powerful beings among the Kalapolo, Australian Aborigines, and Navajo were often, though not always, alpha male figures, who could be terribly destructive when crossed, even inadvertently, but with whom people could identify if they followed the proper ritual, and through identification, their power could become, at least temporarily, benign. Some powerful beings were viewed largely as nurturant mothers, as in the case of Changing Woman, but this is hardly the norm in tribal mythology. If the myths do describe a moral order, a Law, as the Aborigines put it, it is not because powerful being are always reliable or even moral. The myths are an effort to understand the nature of reality. Their narrators must use the analogies that lie at hand, analogies from their own social experience, with all its inner tensions and inconsistencies."

So, there we are. Myth uses the metaphors and heavily social cognitive apparatus which is at hand to describe in a very impressionistic way the reality that a culture finds itself in, especially the inferred powers that lurk beneath the surface and above in the heavens. Just as contemporary folk philosophers ("truthers") see malign conspiracies behind every adverse event, our forebears rarely wavered from the conviction that "something", or more likely "someone", was behind every phenomenon, good or bad.

Myth describes our psychological contents far more than it does the external world. It is like hearing a 3-year old describe some complex topic like where babies come from, or what the sun is. You will learn far more about the child than about what is being described. Which is not to say their description is not "true", but that depends on what truth you are looking for.

• Pagan ritualist photoblog.
• Hell tourism.
• Reinhart and Rogoff- not only theoretically wrong, but using bad data.
• The long term unemployed are hosed. But who cares?
• The regulators could hardly care less about foreclosure fraud.
• Our unfair tax system and faith in democracy- Stiglitz.
• Brains at work.. criticizing the brain initiative.
• E-readers- not so great, yet.
• When to cancel debts, and whose debts to cancel.
• Economic quote of the week: Krugman on the fatally and lazily misleading language of editorialists and pundits, with regard to government debt and the R&R scandal.

"Yet the VSPs not only grabbed hold of the alleged result, they wrote again and again as if this highly disputed claim was a known fact. Thus just a few months ago the Washington Post, attacking those who wanted to reduce the focus on deficits, wrote,
'If [debt projections are] even slightly off, debt-to-GDP could keep rising — and stick dangerously near the 90 percent mark that economists regard as a threat to sustainable economic growth.' 

Not “some economists”, let alone “some economists who have been sharply criticized by other economists with equally good credentials”, but “economists”. 

This is deciding what you want to believe, finding someone who tells you what you want to hear, and pretending that there are no other voices. It’s deeply irresponsible — and you can’t blame Reinhart-Rogoff for that mistake."

Bellah 1: The religious atheist

An extended series of reviews of Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution. In this first post, atheists are religious, after all.

Robert Bellah coined the term "civic religion" for the system of rituals, saints, feast days, deities and the like that characterize America's civic (i.e. putatively non-religious, secular) life, and doubtless the life of every cohesive human culture. The founding fathers take on the role of deities, Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July make up the major holidays, with minor deities and holidays sprinkled elsewhere in the pantheon and calendar. The president takes on a heavily archetypal role, residing in the symbolic center of the nation, communing with past presidents and protected by phalanxes of soldiers, agents, and wizards of all kinds. We look upon him (or maybe someday her) with awe, as all primates gaze at higher-status individuals. And we participate in the various cycles of election and debate, however hollowed out they may have become by the money power, which so nearly overwhelms every other influence and legitimacy.

His latest book is a magnum opus, turning to the past and taking a broad brush view of the origins and development of religion from the deepest prehistory to the end of the axial age. It is an extremely rich (and long) book, provoking me into several blog entries.

Bellah scoffs at the new atheists, and provides a dry analysis of Steven Weinberg's particular version, which winds up ... "The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.":

"However, Weinberg can no more evade the search for meaning than the rest of us can. Like Jaques Monod, he has opted for cosmic pessimism as his meaning.  

Not quite, though. He does find consolation: 'But if there is no solace in the fruits of our research, there is at least some consolation in the research itself ... The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.' In these closing remarks of his book The First Three Minutes, (scientists frequently allow themselves rhetorical riffs in their final remarks, which are often most revealing), what Weinberg has really done is to move from science as a cultural system to religion as a cultural system, and affirm the practice of science as his religion; fair enough, if it weren't quite so condescending to the rest of us who are left at the level of farce. But then religions are often exclusive."

Touché!

So, one can be without theism, but one can not be without religion, which Bellah seems to define as some system of meaning, personal and collective, which motivates whatever one does and thinks, beyond the immediate imperatives of survival.

This seems fair enough, despite the commonly interchangeable usage of theism with religion. There really are differences- for instance, Buddhism is a religion but has in some of its "vehicles" virtually no theism.

The way of science (which I will have stand in for the atheist attitude in general) clearly has its rituals and religious aspects. A scientific community typically has its weekly gathering, in the guise of a seminar where some dominant member of the larger community beyond the immediate institution is invited to retell the story of how they battled with intransigent reality to find a precious jewel of knowledge. Afterwards, audience members can step up to battle hand-to-hand, as it were, asking incisive questions of the speaker, to display their own powers and confidence, and perhaps to wrong-foot or even fatally embarrass the speaker.

And science contains an exacting moral system as well, which is perhaps not so well appreciated by theists, who think that without god, all is permitted. Not so! Truth is at the very center of this system, leading to an atmosphere of habitual and pervasive integrity. All results are checked and discussed, and if one has shaded anything, reality will make sure it comes out in the end anyhow, so no one gains from ethical breaches in the long run. It is a bit like working under the eye of a truly, and terrifyingly existing god. But one who is in the end scrupulously fair and mechanically impartial. We are Spinozists, of a sort.

Humanity and charity is less of a virtue here, and indeed one can hardly become a leading scientist without somewhat cavalierly churning through student after student, post-doc after post-doc, few of whom are destined to succeed in the career one is educating them for. It is a competitive system, where one must take with a grain of salt the constant refrain of "we need more science students". We may need more hands in the labs, and we may want plenty of candidates wending and weeding their way through the system, but that is not the same as ending up with more scientists.

The scientific pursuit is also a leading form of shamanism in our time, (competing only with that of economics and the mysteries of money), providing dramatic revelations of occult powers and secret realms beyond all imagining. From nuclear power and E=mc2, to wheeling galaxies and moon landings, the priesthood has shown itself the master of esoteric knowledge and vast powers. The knowledge is true, which presents some difficulty for the narrative-maker, who always seeks to tell a human story, rather than an inhuman story. Nevertheless, it can still be fashioned into a serviceable story, if one revels in the vast scales involved, as a wan substitute for actual drama.

It gives us power and knowledge, but does it give us meaning? As Weinberg says, no it does not. We always have to make up meaning for ourselves. And that is where the religion of science or atheism is deficient. Its project is precisely to drain psychological projections, i.e. meanings, from things so that they can be dispassionately investigated, reduced, and analyzed. After everything is broken down, what is left?

Meanings, then, tend to creep into the community of science from unconscious sources, if they do not arrive through an explicit ideology or mythology. Pride, hubris, greed, tribal identity, ambition- all have their place, as do better motives of helping others and seeking novel and pure truths. These are not amplified by a mythical narrative, which is, in my view, a good thing. But at the same time, they are present implicitly as human nature, and it falls to self-analysis, self-awareness, and mutual criticism to limit their dangers even while they propel the whole enterprise forward.

So, yes- we all have rituals and motivations that lend meaning to our lives and pursuits. Indeed, as above, we can have and typically do have, many gods. But that doesn't make all religions equivalent or equally "true". History is littered with narratives that worked for a time, then failed, succeeded by others and yet others. The axial age, which will come up in future posts, consisted of a growing self-awareness and criticism of these narratives, improving their moral implications while bringing them closer, inch by inch, to something we might call true in an analytical sense.

• PhD- not always such a great idea.
• The origin of science and scientist.
• Inequality is not just an income and tax issue, but is baked into where we live.
• Legalize pot, so we can deal with the real epidemic.
• Fiddling while the planet burns.
• The sequester- killing with a thousand cuts.
• Working people don't get a break.
• Are we sleeping with the digital enemy?
• Basic insurance lifts African farmers out of bare, unstable subsistence.

Passing of the pandemic epoch

Don't worry about pandemics ... evolution isn't quite that fast.

One of the great fears among catastrophists, to go with meteor strikes and robots run rampant, is pandemics. Human history is littered with horrible epidemics that decimated (or worse) populations all over the world. Recent episodes like Spanish influenza and HIV are pretty fresh in mind, as is SARs and the ongoing fear of new super-influenza strains coming from the livestock pens of Asia.

One thing all these epoisodes have in common is the movement of pathogens into a new population with relatively little past exposure or resistance. The source of the Spanish influenza is unclear, but HIV clearly jumped the species barrier from chimpanzees to humans roughly in the 1950's, and other plagues and pandemics, such as those that swept through the post-contact Americas, or the black plagues of Europe, came from external sources.

But by this point we have so thoroughly homogenized the world, both in human travel between all points of the compass, and by human invasion of all corners of the natural world, that one can assume that there are no sources of novel pathogens left. That leads me to the conclusion that we have relatively little to fear from future pandemics. A dangerous prediction, to be sure, so I make it with some trepidation. Perhaps it would be better to call it an educated guess.

Future novel pathogens would have to be newly constructed, a far more difficult barrier than one of simple contact between previously remote populations or species. Surely, evolution is always hard at work recombining viral and bacterial genomes to create the next super-bug. But the drama of pandemic is typically counter-productive for the intelligent pathogen. That is why the most feared pathogens, like HIV or plague, are zoonoses- pathogens that inadvertently jumped from the species they were happily adapted to into a different one (us) they were not adapted to and whom they killed in wanton fashion, destroying their own little homes.

Influenza, likewise, comes from birds and / or pigs (as did SARS, from bats), and the same argument applies- that we have been exposed to all accessible wild variants by this time, and the probability of new and dangerous variants arising in these same reservoir species is far lower than the prior chance of contact with existing, host-adapted pathogens.

Another possible source is human inventiveness, now that we can engineer genomes and organisms with some skill. But unlike something like the stuxnet computer virus, a real virus would not be so easily contained, and makes a truly abysmal weapon for anyone but the masochistic psychopath.

Lastly, the growing drug resistance of well-known pathogens like Staphalococcus aureus, malaria, STDs, and tuberculosis are quite a bit more likely to return as public health issues in the future than any exotic pandemic. That medically useful antibiotics or their relatives are still allowed to be used in routine animal feed is appalling, though the problem stems more acutely from overuse in humans, and lack of hygeine in hospitals, of all places.

• The new atheists ... a bit rude!
• Oh, those pagan peeps.
• NCAA players- hung out to dry.
• Religion pokes its head into economics.
• Corruption continues, cozily. Lessig on corruption: "we have lost our republic". Yes, our legislative process is completely broken.
• The real retirement problem? Crappy 401k's, and not enough Social Security.
• Austerity / neoliberal economics is wrong, wrong, wrong.
• But for the GOP, shame is not a word in the dictionary.
• "But employers hope the guest-worker program will also prevent low-wage Americans from getting a raise."
• Tuna laundering on the high seas.
• Economic quote of the week, from Jim Chanos on the pervasiveness of fraud in business and corruption in government, in the US:

"One of things we like to say is that in virtually all cases of major financial market fraud over the past 20 years, the only people who really brought forth the fraud into the light were either internal whistleblowers, the press, and/or short-sellers. It was not the normal guardians of the marketplace – regulators, law enforcement, external auditors or people like that — that did it."

• Economics graph of the week, from JP Morgan (slide 12). Interest rates vs stock performance, indicating that the sweet spot of inflation is about 5%. Below that rate, rising interest rates/inflation correlates with economic growth, while above, it negatively affects the stock market.

Making the web pay, one cent at a time

The internet has killed arts & media funding, just as we need more of it. What to do?

What do we want an economy for? Isn't it to give us more of what we want, and less of what we don't? But somehow through the last few decades, our collective aims have devolved into providing the financial gambling industry more money and keeping the poor down. It doesn't have to be that way.

We are a very rich country with lots of unemployed people. More and more of our basic needs are filled ever more efficiently. Wouldn't you think that arts and other forms of culture would be a bigger part of our lives than they currently are? Yes, there are industries of film, TV, and music, but they are being hammered by the disappearance of their gatekeeper functions, replaced by the wide-open, share-everything internet.

One would think that one form of employment we could all agree on is the performing, teaching, and propagation of music and other arts- some of the most positive experiences possible. But ironically, just as digital technology made spreading music and visual art (and recipes, and cranky opinions) easier than ever, the same process has rendered it economically perilous. When there is no gatekeeper, no restrictions, no scarcity, there is no income, by the typical business model. The same applies to the news media, likewise being destroyed by free information.

Music hasn't become less culturally important or desirable, but it has become markedly less profitable. The only franchise really left is live performance, which has undeniable scarcity.

Other countries make much more generous government-sponsored provision for the arts. Yet in the US, the measly amount sent to the National Endowment for the Arts and the public broadcasters is perpetually under threat from what Bobby Jindal calls "the stupid party". Certainly one option is to expand those avenues for funding.

But I think a more powerful way is to finally implement a concept that has been knocking around the internet for a long time- micropayments. If every download, every listen, every view, and every complete pageview were worth a cent, then the economics of our media lives would be transformed.

Bob Cringely recently wrote a post about how the economics of his own blog were just not working out. Even with 10 million page views on a typical posting, his ad rates are miserable. When was the last time you clicked on an internet ad? But if each of his readers contributed one cent after reading a full posting, he would be rolling in money, at very little individual cost to his readership. Heck, even I could earn a couple of beers out of such a scheme!

We have been addled by the advertising model of media funding. It is an appalling way to conduct our media lives in aesthetic terms, and inefficient, and has empowered some of the most socially destructive actors, culturally and politically (think of all those greenwashing ads by oil companies). Even public broadcasting is being gradually eroded by its exposure to advertising, since its model of having its viewers/listeners pay voluntarily (after relentless hectoring) doesn't work very well either.

If a heavy web surfer looks at, say, 200 sites per day, and reads fully, say fifty pages per day, that amounts to fifty cents spent. Add to that thirty songs listened to and ten videos watched, and it all adds up to a dollar, which seems like a very acceptable cost structure to the user.

Likewise, hooking up iTunes to a micropayment scheme on a per-play basis could fully unleash the internet for music, allowing all music to be open everywhere, and paid on the basis of actual use and enjoyment. The same for Youtube. Viral videos would be paid in appropriate fashion, by the masses who enjoy them.

So, rather than complicated and imprecise pay walls as they currently exist, a much better solution would be to reconstruct the internet on a broad micropayment foundation. Providers would choose whether to demand standard micropayments for their content (and thus be part of a very low-threshold paywall). Users would be blocked from those sites if they had not enabled an overall micropayment system on their browser with an associated account. If the rate is set low enough, i.e. one cent, I think it would be a no-brainer for everyone to participate. I think that the buy-in would be rapid and universal, and would transform our media landscape.

One benefit would be that advertising would be subject to new pressures. If providers only get paid after a user reads their post fully (scrolling down to the end, or paging to the end, or watching to the end), then having ads which clutter up the page and slow down readers would be selected against, and would only survive if they paid more than the users being turned away. Multi-page posts might be a thing of the past, among many other sins of design.

It is time to take back the internet for its users, and away from the corporations that are muddying its waters while inadvertantly bleeding so many other industries dry. Micropayments did not take off at the beginning of the internet, since the network was so small, and advertising seemed an easier method. But now might be a better time to bring that idea back.

• And playing music is good for your health.
• Another thing we could do if congress weren't constipated.
• And yet another thing- super easy taxes.
• Corruption is pervasive- "rent", in economist's lingo.
• Workers being abused and killed- what century are we living in?
• What's a free market?
• The mortgage actors were irrational, not rational.
• Evolution, feelings, love, and pain.
• Religion- kicking the addiction.
• A rough road out of Afghanistan.
• Economics graph of the week. Median income is the lowest it has been in a decade or more. So while corporate profits are at an all time high, and jobs are trickling back, it looks like those jobs don't pay very well. More on the same...