Year: <span>2019</span>

Books I Finished in September

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It’s once again time for the monthly round up of the books I read:

Savage Worlds: Adventure Edition

By: Shane Lacy Hensley

208 pages

Thoughts

This is the latest edition of a well known universal Role-Playing game system called Savage Worlds. I’m a big fan of the system, but for my money there weren’t enough changes to justify putting out a new edition.

Who should read this book?

If you love, love, love Savage Worlds and run it all the time, it’s probably worth picking up this book. If you’re like me and you collect RPG systems, and you already have a Savage Worlds rulebook in your collection this is not different enough from past editions to be worth picking up.

Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea

By: Steven Callahan

234 pages

Thoughts

There’s a little old lady who used to be in my ward (that’s the Mormon version of a congregation) and in addition to being a voracious reader she’s exceptionally cunning. The first attribute led her to have an Audible subscription, the last bit led her to offer to share it with me when she realized she could have up to five connected devices. I was going through some financial difficulties at the time (a lawsuit) and so I took her up on the offer. I have since gotten my own Audible account, but she still let’s me know when she’s listened to something she particularly likes. She has a fondness for survival stories, and so I end up listening to quite a few of them. (Two this month.) This is good because I am also a fan of them, but they’re not the kind of thing I would seek out normally.

As you can probably tell from the title Adrift is one of these survival stories. Most survival stories get into the mechanics and the logistics of survival, and Adrift is no exception, in fact if anything it may partake of more of this sort of thing than most books in the genre. If that’s your thing you’ll probably really enjoy this book. For me, listening to it as an audiobook I had a hard time picturing everything he was describing. Nevertheless, Callahan was great at surviving, and is mentioned as one of the best examples of a survivor in another book I read in September. 

Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence

By: James Lovelock

160 pages

Thoughts

This was kind of a weird book. (There were a couple in that category this month.) Lovelock is best known for his Gaia theory, which basically holds that organic and inorganic matter work together to create the perfect living environment. (Examples include global temperature, seawater salinity, and atmospheric oxygen.) I haven’t ever read that book but I remember being skeptical when I heard about the premise, what about Snowball Earth or the Great Oxygenation Event? I assume that Lovelock would say that despite how hard they were on the ecosystem which existed at the time that both events were necessary stepping stones to the world we have now. He appears to be making a similar argument here, that everything which has come so far has all been in service of the next stage of evolution, what he’s calling the Novacene. From the book jacket:

In the Novacene, new beings will emerge from existing artificial intelligence systems. They will think 10,000 times faster than we do and they will regard us as we now regard plants. But this will not be the cruel, violent machine takeover of the planet imagined by science fiction. These hyperintelligent beings will be as dependent on the health of the planet as we are. They will need the planetary cooling system of Gaia to defend them from the increasing heat of the sun as much as we do. And Gaia depends on organic life. We will be partners in this project.

Wait, what? Maybe I’m overlooking something huge, but there are lots of cooler places in the universe, to say nothing of in the solar system, than the surface of the Earth. (Check out the aestivation hypothesis as an explanation for Fermi’s Paradox.) And even if, for some reason, the coming hyperintelligence were restricted to Earth (say because of the tyranny of the rocket equation) then, however “cool” the Earth is right now, there are probably lots of ways to make it much cooler that require very little human involvement. 

Who should read this book?

As I said, maybe I’m missing something gigantic, but if not this is a seriously flawed book, which no one should bother reading.

Bronze Age Mindset

By: Bronze Age Pervert

198 pages

Thoughts

Around this time last year a friend of mine visited from out of town, and we had a conversation about incels (mostly those who were literally involuntarily celibate, not those who had adopted the label). At the time I thought the conversation was interesting enough to do a post about it.

As part of the conversation we both agreed that there are lots of young men who lack meaning and feel abandoned by society, women or the world in general. What we disagreed on was what to tell these young men, though we both felt it was a very important question. Well Bronze Age Mindset is one answer to that question, and it’s a doozy. (This is the other weird book I read this month.) 

To begin with, at one point this self-published book, which seems to be written in a vague stream of consciousness fashion with little regard for verb conjugation or indefinite articles cracked the top 150 books on Amazon. This is out of all the books on Amazon, not merely in some specific category. Meaning whatever else you want to say about the book it’s an answer to the question I posed that has resonated for a lot of people. 

What about the book itself? Well if you really want a full review I would recommend the one Michael Anton did in the Claremont Review of Books: Are the Kids Al(t)right? For my own part I could sense how the book might be appealing, but it’s hard to point to anything specific, there’s little direct advice in the book. Rather, I think most of the appeal comes from the transgressiveness which suffuses the book. It probably goes without saying that the book is homophobic, misogynist, racist and anti-democratic, but he doesn’t spend much time or speak very strongly about any of these items. They just appear in support of the larger tapestry of transgression he weaves. I think Anton does a great job of distilling all of that into a short description of the book’s appeal:

This book speaks directly to young men dissatisfied with a hectoring vindictive equality that punishes excellence.

These exhortations towards excellence take the form of urging readers to attempt fantastic feats of military prowess to set themselves apart from the vast masses of people, the “bugmen” as he refers to them. Going so far as to say that life appears at its peak in military state, which he feels is inevitable.  Which would be alarming if true (I don’t think that’s the way things are going.)

Having said all that I’m still surprised that it has sold so well. I was particularly alarmed by what Anton describes as:

…the book’s most risible passages, [where] BAP wonders aloud whether history has been falsified, persons and events invented from whole cloth, centuries added to our chronology, entire chapters to classic texts.

But in the age of conspiracy theories it’s entirely possible all of this was an asset rather than a liability. As I keep pointing out we live in strange times.

Representative passage:

The distinction between master races and the rest is simple and true, Hegel said it, copying Heraclitus: those peoples who choose death rather than slavery or submission in a confrontation that is a people of masters. There are many such in the world, not only among the Aryans, but also the Comanche, many of the Polynesians, the Japanese and many others. But animal of this kind refuses entrapment and subjection. It is very sad to witness those times when such animal can neither escape nor kill itself. I saw once a jaguar in zoo, behind a glass, so that all the bugs in hueman form could gawk at it and humiliate it. This animal felt a noble and persistent sadness, being observed everywhere by the obsequious monkeys, not even monkeys, that were taunting it with stares. His sadness crushed me and I will always remember this animal. I never want to see life in this condition!

Who should read this book?

I think the people who are inclined to read this book are going to read it regardless of what I say. For those who aren’t in that category, I would not recommend this book to anyone, except as an anthropological exercise.

Why Are The Prices So Damn High?

By: Eric Helland, Alex Tabarrok

90 pages

Thoughts

This book is an attempt to explain rising prices in health care and education by tying them to the Baumol Effect. Here’s how Helland and Tabarrok describe it:

In 1826, when Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 was first played, it took four people 40 minutes to produce a performance. In 2010, it still took four people 40 minutes to produce a performance. Stated differently, in the nearly 200 years between 1826 and 2010, there was no growth in string quartet labor productivity. In 1826 it took 2.66 labor hours to produce one unit of output, and it took 2.66 labor hours to produce one unit of output in 2010.

Fortunately, most other sectors of the economy have experienced substantial growth in labor productivity since 1826. We can measure growth in labor productivity in the economy as a whole by looking at the growth in real wages. In 1826 the average hourly wage for a production worker was $1.14. In 2010 the average hourly wage for a production worker was $26.44, approximately 23 times higher in real (inflation-adjusted) terms. Growth in average labor productivity has a surprising implication: it makes the output of slow productivity-growth sectors (relatively) more expensive. In 1826, the average wage of $1.14 meant that the 2.66 hours needed to produce a performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 had an opportunity cost of just $3.02. At a wage of $26.44, the 2.66 hours of labor in music production had an opportunity cost of $70.33. Thus, in 2010 it was 23 times (70.33/3.02) more expensive to produce a performance of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 than in 1826. In other words, one had to give up more other goods and services to produce a music performance in 2010 than one did in 1826. Why? Simply because in 2010, society was better at producing other goods and services than in 1826.

Scott Alexander also did a couple of posts on the book, and as you might expect his posts go into more depth (in fact I borrowed the above selection from one of them.) I largely agree with his general assessment, which is that the Baumol Effect explains quite a bit, but it doesn’t seem to explain as much as Helland and Tabarrok claim. In particular it can’t seem to explain why subway systems cost 50 times as much to construct in New York as in Seoul, South Korea

Who should read this book?

If you have a deep desire to understand the arguments around the why costs in some sectors are growing much faster than inflation then you should read this book. Otherwise, it’s main contribution is to more fully popularize the Baumol Effect which is easy enough to understand without reading an entire (albeit short) book.

An Introduction to the Book of Abraham (Religious)

By: John Gee

196 pages

Thoughts

Within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) the Book of Abraham is canonized scripture, and members of the Church (myself included) believe that Joseph Smith translated the book from some papyri. Smith purchased the papyri from a gentleman with a traveling mummy exhibition in 1835. Critics of the church feel that that the circumstances of the translation, along with advances in Egyptology which have occured since Smith’s translation, the most important being the ability to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs, all combine to provide a fruitful avenue for attacking the church. Accordingly, a significant amount of criticism has been leveled towards the Book of Abraham. An Introduction to the Book of Abraham designed to examine this criticism from an apologetic basis.

For obvious reasons I am not objective on this topic. Nevertheless I feel that Gee did an excellent and credible job. His approach seemed both rigorous and scholarly. I know that there are many people who feel that some criticisms Book of Abraham are impossible to refute, but this book provided many avenues of refutation, none of them were ironclad anymore than the criticisms were ironclad, but neither did they require any handwaving.

Who should read this book?

Anyone who is even moderately interested in LDS apologetics in general and the Book of Abraham in particular should read this book. I quite enjoyed it, and had the book been twice as long I wouldn’t have minded it.

The Lies of Locke Lamora (Gentleman Bastard #1)

By: Scott Lynch

736 pages

Thoughts

My habit of starting new fantasy/scifi series while completely ignoring series I have already started continues with this book, which is part of yet another fantasy series. This particular book came highly recommended by frequent commentator Mark (see his excellent science/etc blog) and I was not disappointed, it was a thoroughly enjoyable read with a great ending. That said I do have several quibbles.

Criticisms

For some reason, and I’m not blaming Mark, or the blurb on Amazon, I had the impression when I picked up this book (metaphorically, I actually downloaded it from Audible) that it was going to be sort of a fantasy Oceans 11, and there was quite a bit of lighthearted capering in the book, but it was also pretty dark. I don’t recall anyone dying in Oceans 11, but lots of people die in Locke Lamora. The combination of the two made the tone a little schizophrenic.

Additionally, and I’ve mentioned this before, There are a class of fantasy and science fiction authors who write all of their characters as “sassy”. John Scalzi is the worst offender here, and as I think back on my misspent youth, David Eddings may have pioneered the genre, and it turns out Lynch is also an offender but a minor one.

Finally there is one bit of world building that drove me absolutely nuts. I don’t want to say much more than that for fear of spoiling things, but there are implications to this thing which he entirely fails to consider. But if you can overlook this one thing (which is what I eventually decided to do) or if you don’t notice the problems it would cause, then, as I said, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable read.

I think going forward I’m going to try to finish some of the series I’ve started rather than beginning anything new. Time will tell.

No More Mr Nice Guy: A Proven Plan for Getting What You Want in Love, Sex, and Life

By: Robert A. Glover

208 pages

Thoughts

You may recall my review of Wild at Heart. Well one of the things people do after reading that book is go on a retreat with a large group of other Christian men. I was one of those people, and last month I went on just such a retreat, and it was awesome, and not merely because it was in Alaska. In essence, that book, the retreat, No More Mr. Nice Guy and Bronze Age Mindset are all attempting to answer the same question. What advice should you give to men who feel alienated and abandoned, particularly by women? The retreat, in addition to being one of those answers was also where I heard about No More Mr. Nice Guy, and it’s answer to the question should be pretty obvious from the title, though it’s less antisocial and misogynist than you might imagine.

Glover asserts that a large part of the problem is that a significant portion of men have responded to these feelings of abandonment by assuming that if they just make themselves completely subject to the needs of the women in their life that they will be embraced rather than abandoned. As you can imagine, deriving the entirety of your validation from someone else is a disaster basically regardless of the philosophy you subscribe to. 

Beyond that, there are numerous additional details, but there’s nothing in the book which advocates cruelty, which probably puts it ahead of BAM, and if I were to go on from that and rank all four of these vectors on the quality of their answer to “the question” I would put the retreat first, followed by Wild at Heart followed by this book with BAM last of all. But as the first two come with implicit Christian overtones, No More Mr. Nice Guy might end up at the top of the list for a lot of people. That said, I wouldn’t recommend it unreservedly, or blindly. I’d want to know quite a bit about a person’s situation.

Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

By: Laurence Gonzales

336 pages

Thoughts

As you might have surmised this is another recommendation from the little old lady. Though I guess it must be popular among the 70+ set because I just discovered that both of my parents have read it as well.

This book, rather than being the story of a single instance of survival, collects numerous survival stories, looking for commonalities; for what makes someone good at survival. The book spends a lot of time on Steve Callahan, who I mentioned above (this is the book that declared him to be one of the best survivors). It also includes the incident chronicled in the movie Touching the Void which I talked about previously in this space.

Of course, you’re probably less interested in what stories it includes and more interested in the qualities which are going to keep you alive when the zombie apocalypse comes. If you’ve read the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman then Gonzales’ framework will probably seem familiar. Kahneman talks about things we do more or less instinctually and things we do rationally. Gonzalez has the same basic division, but he further divides the instinctual part of things in two. Giving him three categories:

  1. Built in instinctual behaviors, like trying to grab onto something if you start to fall.
  2. Learned instinctual behaviors, i.e. adrenaline junkies, people with PTSD.
  3. Behaviors you have to think about.

At various times survival requires alternatively ignoring or emphasizing some or all of the above behaviors, depending on the circumstance. You may need to use humor to overcome your instinctive fear of death (category 1). You may need to develop an instinctive love for certain dangerous things (category 2) but not to the point that it overrides your rationality (category 3).

Allow me to illustrate what I mean. First off, it’s interesting to note that some of the best survivors are children under the age of seven. In part because their behaviors are almost entirely from category one. Which means that they sleep when they’re tired, try to get warm when they’re cold, and drink when they’re thirsty. They are also unlikely to use more energy than necessary. Contrast that with the story Gonzalez includes of a volunteer firefighter who got lost while backpacking and nearly died. He had a learned instinct of not wanting to admit when he was lost. As a firefighter he knew it was illegal to light a fire, so he avoided doing so for several days (some from column two some from column three) and he spent lots of time trying to get to the tops of nearby peaks so he could see better. Exhausting himself in the process.

From the preceding it might seem that you mostly want to avoid category two behaviors and even category three, but if soldiers in World War I didn’t learn to instinctively jump for cover when they heard the whistle of an artillery shell than they weren’t going to survive very long. And Steve Callahan only survived by making lots of very rational decisions. As you might imagine surviving requires doing a lot of things right, and some luck on top of that as well.

Who should read this book?

As I mentioned earlier, those aged 70 and over apparently really like this book, probably because they sense the steady encroachment of death, if you also sense the steady encroachment of death (whether because your 70+ or otherwise) then you’ll probably also enjoy it.


If you haven’t guessed that last bit was in part a joke at my parents’ expense. (Hi Mom!) If my blatant lack of filial piety appeals to you consider donating


How Does the Bloodshed Start?

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A couple of posts ago I made something of a snarky aside about violence.

Some of my readers have questioned where I expect the blood to come from; who I expect to take up arms. And it is a subject which deserves a deeper dive, and one where they probably have something of a point. Nevertheless, it’s important to remember how civilized everyone thought things were before World War I…

I was on the verge of putting in another, similar snarky aside in my last post, when talking about violence in the early 70s, but I ignored that urge, not because I don’t like snarky asides, or because the topic isn’t important, but because, as I said, what the subject really needs is a deeper dive. The question of “How does the bloodshed start?” is a complicated one, and not something that can be answered by a few asides here and there. And it’s possible that Pinker and some of my readers are correct and the answer is, “It doesn’t.” In any event, it’s something which definitely deserves a full post. 

This is that post, and any discussion of the potential for future violence has to begin by taking into account past violence. How did it start? How bad did it  get? How did it end? Are there any similarities between it and what we’re going through now?

All of which leads me to the idea of historical cycles, another topic I’ve been dancing around over the last several posts. In fact, in several cases I’ve had long sections about them which I ultimately decided to cut because they didn’t quite fit, but I think it’s finally time to dig into the idea that there might be cycles to history, particularly cycles of violence. And if that’s the case to examine where we are on that cycle. Is our current period of political strife a high point in some identifiable cycle? Or is it something new and different?

As is so often the case, I’ll start with Scott Alexander over at Slate Star Codex, who spent a few posts recently reviewing Peter Turchin’s theory of secular cycles. In particular I want to focus on his review of Ages of Discord because as part of that review he mentions two previous periods of massive unrest which have largely been forgotten.

The first of these periods was around 1920 and it included bombings by Italian anarchists, racial violence, and the Mine War. To give you a sense of the scale of the unrest, the anarchist bombings culminated with an explosion on Wall Street which killed 38. The racial violence included the Red Summer and the Tulsa Race Riot, two events, which combined to produce 1,300 fatalities and the destruction of entire black neighborhoods. I had heard of some of these things, for example I knew there was a wave of terrorism by anarchists (in particular the assassination of McKinley) and I had some familiarity with the Tulsa Race Riot, but I confess to being entirely unaware of Mine War. From Alexander’s review:

Although it started as a labor dispute, it eventually turned into the largest armed insurrection in US history, other than the Civil War. Between 10,000 and 15,000 miners armed with rifles fought thousands of strike-breakers and sheriff’s deputies, called the Logan Defenders. The insurrection was ended by the US Army. While such violent incidents were exceptional, they took place against a background of a general “class war” that had been intensifying since the violent teens. “In 1919 nearly four million workers (21% of the workforce) took disruptive action in the face of employer reluctance to recognize or bargain with unions” 

The first important point I want to draw your attention to is how unaware most people are of incidents of past unrest, even an extreme example like the Mine War. You might think that this ignorance wouldn’t be as bad with more recent events like those occurring during the unrest of the late 60s/early 70s, but Alexander includes a couple of quotes to point out that people are relatively ignorant about these events as well:

People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States. 

— Max Noel, FBI (ret.)

Puerto Rican separatists bombed NYC like 300 times, killed people, shot up Congress, tried to kill POTUS (Truman). Nobody remembers it.

Status 451’s review of Days of Rage

Of course this is not to say that people have entirely forgotten the turbulence of the late 60s and early 70s, but it does appear that most people have forgotten just how violent it got. For one thing, I’ve certainly never heard any mainstream pundits bring it up when discussing current violence or future potential violence. 

These incidents are included in Alexander’s review because Turchin is primarily a student (and advocate) of cycles, and in Ages of Discord Turchin makes the claim that these violent periods, with the first around 1920 and the second around 1970, were part of a 50 year cycle of unrest and violence. Which, if true, would mean that one explanation for the “carnage” we’re currently experiencing comes because we’re nearing the next peak in that cycle. Turchin expects this to be a particularly bad peak, so while the idea of a cycle would imply that things will return to normal after the peak, it’s by no means certain that this will happen. In fact, coincidentally (or maybe not?) after I started writing this post I came across the following letter to the editor in The Economist from Paul McVinney in Accokeek, Maryland:

The most compelling explanation for the rise of today’s populism can be found in the sociological study of structural-demographic theory. In the “Ages of Discord”, Peter Turchin described how America is going through a “disintegrative phase”, last seen in the 1860s. In this phase, political fragmentation grows, social democracy declines, elites take greater economic and political power (and seek more positions than the country offers), workers suffer from stagnant wages and inequality, authoritarianism grows, and the state is headed toward fiscal crisis. Mr Turchin’s book fully explains the dynamic factors at work and is supported by much empirical data. You actually described the disintegrative phase without recognising it for what it is. This phase may not be the end of some democracies (or democracy in general), but as Mr Turchin says, there is no guarantee a country will survive it.

Whatever the utility of Turchin’s theory, and whatever it’s specificity as far as time, it doesn’t seem to be very specific on how this unrest will manifest. To be clear, I’m actually a big fan of the idea of historical cycles, and in general I think we should pay more attention to the possibility that something like that is going on, but I don’t think, even if Turchin is on to something, that his theory does much to answer our central question, “How does the bloodshed start?” It may tell us to expect it’s arrival, but it doesn’t do much to pin down what direction it’s arriving from.

The examples from the 20s and the 70s are useful guideposts, even if we end up rejecting the idea of historical cycles, but these examples only get us so far since it’s already clear that the discord we’re currently experiencing is different in many important respects. In both of the past situations you had a lot more violence than we’re currently experiencing but the unrest itself was confined to a much smaller space. You might say the discord was very deep, but not particularly wide, and as I pointed out in my last post, current political unrest appears to be exceptionally wide, but not particularly deep, at least not yet, a fairly large difference.

The other difference which occurs to me might best be understood by referring to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow imagined that people worked first to satisfy physiological needs like air, food and water before moving on to needs related to safety like shelter, and from there to “higher level” needs like love and belonging or esteem. It appears that throughout history, not merely in the 20s and 70s, that unrest has generally been creeping up this hierarchy. Giving us a difference not only between those periods and our own situation, but between each other

During the unrest of the 1920s, most of the unrest revolved around people who legitimately feared for their lives, or at a minimum were losing access to shelter. For example here’s how Wikipedia describes the Mine War:

Striking miners and their families were prohibited from using company bridges and roads, as well as utilities like running water. Company guards killed several miners over the first few months of the strike, and constructed a machine gun equipped armored train known as the “Bull Moose Special”, which they used to fire upon the tent camps of striking workers.

If we move forward from there to the unrest of the late 60s and early 70s the grievances appear to be higher on that hierarchy. I agree that fear of dying in Vietnam complicates things, but domestic terrorism and Puerto Rican separatism would appear to have very little to do with that, and additionally very little to do with physiological needs or even anything related to safety. Unlike what we saw in the 20s.

This takes us to our own day, and I fear I’ll get into trouble if I spend too much time talking about the relative merits of the injustices underlying whatever current unrest exists, but I will venture to say that by any objective criteria it would fall even higher on the hierarchy than the injustices of the 70s. And much much higher than the injustices of the 1920s

I began by saying that we needed to take into account past violence, and thus far you could be forgiven if you thought my survey of past violence has been overly narrow, but I wanted to focus on more modern violence because that’s the form any violence which might erupt in the near future is likely to take. Also, I don’t think anyone questions that there was a lot of violence historically, but they do seem to forget how recent and extreme some of that historical violence was. Both of which speak to the question of how new bloodshed might start.

With all of the above out of the way I think it’s time to make a list of four possibilities for how things could go in the future:

1- There are cycles of unrest and violence and currently we’re nearing the peak of one of those cycles. However, since it’s cyclical, while there will be problems, they’ll go away (similar to the 60s/70s) and “politics” will go back to “normal”.

2- There are cycles and this one will be a doozy. So much so that things will never completely return to “normal”, and the country might not even survive. (See the letter to the editor above.)

3- There aren’t cycles, but neither is bloody political unrest a thing of the past, and sooner or later we’ll have something similar to the 70s or the 20s or heaven forbid the 1860s, it’s just a matter of time.

4- We have, for the first time in history, passed beyond violence and bloodshed. And either politics and disagreement will never get so acrimonious that people feel the need to resort to violence and bloodshed or somehow everyone has (off the record) mutually forsworn mass violence in pursuit of political ends.

Going forward we’ll spend the most time on possibility four, since that’s the basis of the original question, but the other three are interesting from the standpoint of mitigation.

Starting with possibilities one and two the answer to the question of how the bloodshed starts is the same, it starts because civilizations, in particular the United States, go through relatively predictable cycles and we are nearing the point in the cycle of peak unrest. From a mitigation standpoint the fact that unrest is cyclical is good news. Any trend is easier to deflect if you can see it coming, and if this is truly part of a cycle one might hope that we can use that knowledge and the various elements people like Turchin have identified to lessen the impact of the cycle’s peak. 

This question of mitigation is also why I separated possibilities one and two because while the cause is, in theory, the same, the outcomes are vastly different. One might be considered “tolerable” for the majority of people, while I don’t think the same can be said of possibility two. If we think the country may legitimately end we might be willing to make bigger sacrifices to prevent that, than if we assume the unrest will only be temporary. If the past is any guide you can imagine people adopting the idea that things are cyclical, and then using that as an excuse to not do anything because it will “go away on its own”. I have no strong opinion on which possibility is more likely, but I would like to discourage the idea that we can “wait it out”.  And people will be less inclined to do that if they accept the possibility that the US might not survive this latest round of unrest.

In any case, the point of this post is not to get into whether Turchin’s theory is correct. (If you’re interested in that discussion I would direct you to Alexander’s review of Ages of Discord, which I already mentioned, along with his previous review of Turchin’s book Secular Cycles.) The point is to answer the question “How does the bloodshed start?” And if you think Turchin’s ideas are plausible, then we have our answer. However, I suspect people who are inclined to believe that large scale political violence is a thing of the past are even more inclined to dismiss Turchin’s theories, which is one of the reasons why spending any more time on them is of limited utility, but let me end with this quote from Steve Sailer about Turchin (which Turchin himself approved of.)

I think Turchin doesn’t get much attention because his books are too reasonable to be easily debunked and too enormously detailed to be easily digested and too ambitious to be easily trusted.

Moving on from Turchin and his cycles we have the third possibility. There has always been large scale political violence and there always will be. And anyone arguing otherwise is mistaken, or at the very least should be forced to bear the burden of proof. As the default position, this still seems to be the safest bet and beyond that, I’m not sure what else needs to be added. The advantage Turchin has is that he has all manner of theories for how it happens, and consequently, many recommendations for what should be done. If, on the other hand you’re in the “bloodshed happens” camp, then we probably still have a lot of theories, they’re just less likely to be of any value, particularly when it comes to specific mitigation strategies.

If specific mitigation strategies are unavailable that just leaves general mitigation strategies. And one of the things I want people to take away from this post is that we seem to be undermining these general mitigation strategies right as we need them the most. When mitigation might mean the difference between a temporary state of unrest and the permanent dissolution of the nation. 

Of course it could be that this is precisely why unrest is increasing, that the lack of compromise and civility are both the symptoms and the cause of the unfolding crisis. That people have actually started viewing policies and customs which serve this mitigating function as obstacles. It’s also possible that it’s all part of the cycle I already mentioned. But, regardless, as I said just barely and in previous posts. If people were aware that violence on the order of what happened in the 20s and 70s is still on the table, perhaps they would be more willing to both compromise and exercise civility. That’s my hope at least, but perhaps I’m wrong, perhaps I’m worried about nothing. Perhaps violence isn’t on the table, that I don’t need to be worried about “How the bloodshed will start?” because it won’t. That there is either some upper limit on the kinds of emotions that could lead to violence or some limit on violence itself. Which takes us to possibility number four.

Let’s start off by covering the first half of this possibility, the possibility that there is some upper limit currently on the kinds of emotions which might lead to violence. That externally the government and technology, etc. are no more capable of stopping violence than they were during any previous period, but that people just don’t experience hate and anger to the same level they once did, and therefore would never get worked up enough to be violent. Based on the level of vitriol you see in an average day on twitter this would appear to be false on its face. Perhaps it was true at some point, that there was some historical era of good feelings, but the trend has been moving away from that for a long time, and I don’t think it’s true any longer. At a minimum I would argue that the burden of proof for this claim would be entirely on the other side, with those arguing that there is currently some cap on anger and hate.

After exhausting the other options, all that’s left is the possibility that the modern world has managed to eliminate violence and unrest in some systematic way. And the best candidate for this system would be Hobbes’ Leviathan, or as you and I refer to it, the state. I am not the only one to point out this possibility. As I mentioned in my review of his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, Steven Pinker also believes that the modern decrease in violence has a lot to do with the modern increase in the power of the state. As I pointed out in my review, even if this is the case, are we sure that trading political bloodshed for an oppressive government is a trade we’re willing to make? In other words, yes, it’s possible that there will be no bloodshed because one side ends up being able to use the power of the state to completely quash dissent, but is that preferable? Is that somehow success?

I’d be willing to bet that not everyone or even a majority is willing to make that trade. And even if they were it’s still not clear it works over the long haul. Most people, whatever their other feelings about China would have used it as an example of a nation which decided to make this trade, and yet just recently there’s been 16 weeks of protests in Hong Kong, and apparently it’s only getting more violent.

If it is undesirable or unworkable to have the Leviathan eliminate violence, Pinker and his ideological brothers assert that the modern world eliminates violence in other ways as well. In particular conditions in the modern world are so great that there’s really nothing to be violent about. Insofar as this is similar to saying that there will be nothing to be angry about, this is another assertion that would appear to be false on its face. But on top of that, the violence of the 70s does not appear to be that much different than the violence of the 20s, and yet living conditions were dramatically better during the former period than the latter. It has always struck me (and I go into more detail in my review of his book) that the level of violence and the level of material comfort are not as closely correlated as Pinker would have us believe.

All of these issues aside, in the end I always come back to this quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes:

Between two groups that want to make inconsistent kinds of world[s] I see no remedy but force.

Whatever else you may say about the modern world it seems obvious that there is no universally agreed upon vision of the future, or of what constitutes morality for that matter. That we have at least two groups and probably a lot more who want to “make inconsistent kinds of worlds” and that their commitment to their particular world is only growing more intense with each passing year, if not each passing day. How do you resolve an otherwise unresolvable conflict? I am aware that to a certain extent this is why we have laws, but when you observe how acrimonious supreme court nominations have become, how confident are you that our laws will continue to serve in that capacity? Recall that Holmes himself was a justice of the Supreme Court, and even he thought the law was inadequate. Or to put it another way, how confident are you that if Ginsburg dies while Trump is still in office (and recall he could be re-elected) that the Democrats will calmly say, “Well Ginsburg died, I guess you get to nominate another justice. We’ll just try to do better in the next election”? 

Yes, it’s true that as of yet, thank goodness, we haven’t had any significant violence, but I am not convinced that this is because there’s something special and different about the modern world. In closing, I want to emphasize that last point one more time. We have multiple ideologies all on a collision course with each other, and at some point that collision is going to happen. And unless we’re very, very fortunate, when that collision inevitably happens, that’s when the bloodshed starts.


I’ve definitely fascinated by Turchin’s theories on cycles, though I have my doubts that it could be so neat and tidy. (I understand that may be the wrong phrase for periodic violence.)  But you know one cycle you can count on? That at the end of every post I’ll make some appeal, of dubious cleverness, for donations.


The Solution to Conflict is More Conflict

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A few weeks ago I read the book American Carnage by Tim Alberta. Alberta is the Chief Political Correspondent for Politico, and the book was a fascinating look behind the scenes of politics since the 2012 election. If you’re like me, you might expect the book to answer the dominant question of the day, which might be stated “Why has politics gotten so nasty recently?” But, to my surprise, after reading it, I ended up wondering about almost the opposite. “Why isn’t it always this nasty? What kept it civil for so long?” As I considered those questions, in the light of everything else I know (or at least suspect) I came up with a theory. A theory that answers those questions and also the question of why it’s gotten so nasty recently. A theory I’m going to share with you in this post, but before I get to it I need to lay some groundwork first.

To begin with, we’re a nation of nearly 330 million people. We have farmers, tech workers, hunters, inner city gang members, entrepreneurs and factory workers. And while we’re unlikely to have 330 million distinct political ideologies it seems equally unlikely that we would end up with just two. This is part of what I mean when I ask, why wasn’t it always this nasty? Or to borrow from Alberta, why didn’t the “carnage” start sooner? 

Coincidently there’s been a couple of different articles written recently which have touched on this very subject, and while I think both has touched on some part of the puzzle, I don’t think either has put things together in quite the same way I intend to do, but reviewing the pieces they have contributed will help provide the foundation for the theory I’m proposing.

To begin with, I’m obviously not the first to question whether something deeper is going on. Whether something fundamental has shifted in the way modern democracies operate. Frequent commenter Boonton pointed me to a story on Vox, The Anti-liberal Moment by Zack Beauchamp which is probably worth reading in its entirety if you have time, but for the moment I want to just review the author’s starting point because it very much describes the same problem I’m seeing.

Beauchamp starts off by talking about the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler. 

One contemporary observer, a legal theorist in his mid-30s named Carl Schmitt, found the seeds of the crisis within the idea of liberalism itself. Liberal institutions like representative democracy, and the liberal ideal that all a nation’s citizens can be treated as political equals, were in his view a sham. Politics at its core is not about compromise between equal individuals but instead conflict between groups.

“Even if Bolshevism is suppressed and Fascism held at bay, the crisis of contemporary parliamentarism would not be overcome in the least,” he wrote in 1926. ”It is, in its depths, the inescapable contradiction of liberal individualism and democratic homogeneity.”

As I mentioned the question I was left with after reading Carnage was not why it was happening now, but why it hadn’t happened sooner, and in effect Beauchamp is offering the same observation, when he says, “Politics at its core is not about compromise between equal individuals but instead conflict between groups.” The natural state of politics is not compromise, it’s conflict, and that is precisely what’s happening currently between Democrats and Republicans. Further, as the quote from Schmitt points out there is an “inescapable contradiction of liberal individualism and democratic homogeneity.” With that in mind, my question might be reframed as how did we achieve democratic homogeneity for so long and why has it disappeared recently?

As part of the answer to that let’s turn now to the other article I recently read, though in this case it’s more a series of articles. After an exceptionally long hiatus, Tim Urban over at Wait but Why? has started posting what he’s calling the Story of Us. He’s already on chapter six, so I’ll obviously be touching only on a small part of what he says, and once again, I would recommend reading the series in its entirety, but here’s the small part that directly speaks to my theory. 

To begin with, he mentions an old Bedouin proverb (I actually heard that it was a Pashtun proverb, but regardless.) 

Me against my brothers; my brothers and me against my cousins; my cousins, my brothers, and me against strangers.

This proverb makes frequent appearances across the whole series, and for Urban it speaks to the formation of individuals into tribes and tribes into nations. At each stage order emerges based on external threats. Threats where whatever conflicts you have with your brother are set aside if you end up in conflict with your cousins, and those conflicts are in turn set aside if you end up in a conflict with strangers. He likens this to an elevator which move up to higher levels of cooperation and then back down when those higher levels aren’t necessary:

If you pay attention to the world around you, and to your own psychology, you’ll spot the elevator in action. Ever notice how countries in one region of the world will often despise each other, focusing most of their national dickishness on each other—until there’s a broader conflict or war in play, at which time they put aside their differences? How different sects of a religion in fierce conflict with each other will suddenly find common ground when a rival religion or other outside entity insults or threatens their religion as a whole? How about when rivalries in the world of club soccer become less heated during the World Cup? Or when political factions with differing or even totally contradictory ideologies start marching in the street, arm in arm, during a national election or mass movement? I saw the elevator shoot upwards in the days following 9/11, when millions of New Yorkers who normally can’t stand each other were holding doors for each other, showing concern for each other’s well-being, and even hugging each other in the street. I remember thinking that while an alien attack would suck overall, it would do wonders for species solidarity.

With all of the above in mind, here’s my theory:

The chief reason for the current level of conflict within the nation is the lack of external, unifying threats to the nation. 

After reframing, the question I started with was how did we achieve democratic homogeneity for so long and why has it disappeared recently? With this theory in hand, the answer boils down to: war.  Or to look at it from the other direction, the Long Peace, the lack of wars between the great powers since the end of World War II and the development so beloved by people like Steven Pinker, has, somewhat paradoxically, led to another kind of war, the current internal political war. Just as Pashtun Tribesmen will stop fighting their cousins in order to fight the Americans, Republicans will stop fighting Democrats in order to fight the Nazis. But go back to this fight once those external enemies are defeated.

You may argue that the problems with unity didn’t start in 1946, and that’s a fair point, but even though the Cold War didn’t feature any direct hostilities between great powers, there were lots of proxy wars and as someone who grew up while the Soviet Union still existed, I can tell you it definitely felt like they were a threat. As further evidence of unity I offer up the Cold War policy that politics stops at the water’s edge. Something which definitely is not in effect now, and which can’t all be blamed on Trump either.

Moving forward in time, even after the Cold War ended there was 9/11 which brought a brief period of unity as well. Though given the relative mildness of that attack (from a historical perspective) and the weakness of the supposed enemy, that unity didn’t last very long. But taken together in the past these threats have necessitated the unity we’re currently missing. That the natural state in politics, as I intuited while reading “Carnage” and as Beauchamp and Urban point out, is deep divisions and in-fighting, but these impulses are periodically checked by external threats, which have the effect of resetting relations between the internal factions.

Once this theory occurred to me several other observations and questions immediately followed. The first was the natural impulse to check it against other instances of historical internal unrest, and of course the 800 lb gorilla in this category is the Civil War. Much has been written about the severe fractures between North and South, including, above all slavery, but I don’t know if I’ve ever seen any mention that as far as external threats the mid 1800s were unusually quiet. The only countries capable of posing any threat to the US were all in Europe which was largely convulsed by revolution (the numerous revolutions of 1848) or busy in their own backyard (the Crimean War of the mid 1850s) also recall that Germany, the country destined to be the future antagonist in all the major conflicts of the next century wasn’t even unified until 1871. I find it interesting to speculate on whether the Civil War would have happened when it did if the War of 1812 had instead been the “War of 1840”…

Moving closer to our own day there was the political instability of the late 60s, early 70s, and I’ll admit that the connection here is not as clear. That, in fact, not only were we engaged in a war at the time, but most people feel that the existence of that war was a large contributor to the unrest of the time. On the other hand I don’t think that anyone considered Vietnam an actual threat. In fact I would go so far as to argue that by distracting people from the threat of the Soviet Union that the overall perceived threat level may have actually dropped. Additionally while the violence was greater than we’ve seen currently, the unrest as a whole seemed more confined, which is to say that the unrest of Vietnam was deeper, but not as wide as what we’re experiencing now, a non-trivial difference. Finally, I think there’s a case to be made that Reagan brought us out of things by placing a lot of focus on the threat of the Soviet Union, and creating a narrative that we were the good guys and they were the “Evil Empire”, precisely what you’d expect from my theory.

There is of course the other side of the theory. That in addition to telling us how a nation might split apart it also suggests how one comes together. To adapt the Pashtun saying, forging a nation would appear to involve something which turns strangers into at least cousins if not brothers. And once again the theory points to some interesting possibilities. There have been lots and lots of revolutions, and by and large, all of them have failed. Either through being overtaken by another revolution a short while later, or by being co opted by a dictator and losing sight of their original principles. Except the American Revolution. Off the top of my head I can’t think of another successful revolution where the revolutionaries said “these are our principles” and hundreds of years later those principles remain, largely unchanged in the nation created from that revolution. Can you think of any other examples? 

Why is this? Well, the other thing that appears to make the American Revolution unique (again I’m open to counter examples) is that it’s the only revolution which took place in the face of a strong external threat. Based on my theory this is precisely the sort of unique condition that would yield a similarly unique outcome.

To return briefly to Urban, as his metaphorical elevator goes higher it represents cooperation from a greater number of people, he calls these large groups of cooperating people giants, because of their power. We have lots of these giants, though we generally call them nations. Some would argue that reverence for these giants is what we call nationalism, a term that’s pretty controversial at the moment. 

But what if the only way to get the power of a giant is by way of the nation? (It’s true that other ways have been tried, mostly in the form of multinational organizations, but they’ve largely been unsuccessful.) If that’s the case nationalism starts to seem pretty important. 

And what if the only way to get a nation is through putting a group of people into a life or death struggle against some external threat? Then war starts to appear fairly important as well. 

What then happens if there are no more suitable wars or existential threats? 

One assumes that the number of people willing to cooperate would steadily decrease. That the giants would become more numerous, but also smaller. Resembling less vast colossuses, bestriding the Earth with the power to do amazing things, and more squabbling children. Which, unfortunately, is what appears to be happening, at least in the West.

I realize this all boils down to a defense of war, but this would not be the first time I’ve come to its defense. And certainly, as I pointed out then, it’s not inconceivable, given it’s historical ubiquity that things might have adapted to benefit from the presence of war and that nations might be included on that list. It is worth noting that in most civilizations and even the US until very recently it was expected that leaders would have served in the military and even better fought in one of these wars. Thus not only were nations forged by the external threat of wars, but it was presumed that leaders were as well.

If I’m correct that external threats are necessary to maintaining cooperation, for maintaining the alliance of cousins and brothers against strangers than you would expect that actual politicians would have figured this out as well, even if they don’t end up stating it in the same terms, and indeed I think we can see that happening. There are of course two ends this effort could be conducted from. You could either try to strengthen the feeling of brotherhood, or intensify the perception of threats. I want to say that in the past the former was more common (probably because there were already plenty of threats and they didn’t need any artificial boost) but these days it’s all about intensifying perceived threats. As you might imagine based on their ideologies this intensification takes different forms depending on that ideology.

To begin with, arguably the neo-cons vastly intensified the threat posed by radical Islam in the wake 9/11, and as I already said it did have the effect of, temporarily at least, uniting the country. However, when one considers the toll of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s hard to imagine anyone saying that it was worth it.

Moving to more recent examples, the Republicans are clearly working to intensify the threat posed by immigration. How much you think they’re intensifying it probably depends on your own ideology. I would personally argue that while there is definitely some exaggeration at play, that there is also an actual threat underlying it all as well. Also, at least the Republicans have chosen to focus on a threat external to the country. I’m going to argue that the Democrats are also intensifying perceived threats, but in their case the threats they’ve chosen to focus on are largely internal e.g. racism and inequality (among others). 

I’m sure your own ideology will provide a ready answer as to the actual threat level these things pose, I’m more interested in the consequences of deciding to focus on internal as opposed to external threats. At first glance it would appear to be very, very bad, particularly in light of the theory I just put forth. If it’s impossible to maintain cohesion and cooperation with the lack of external threats how much more difficult will it be to maintain cooperation if, on top of that lack, you also decide to focus on threats coming from within the entity you’re expecting on cooperation from!

None of this is to say that the Republicans aren’t also engaged in intensifying internal threats, or that the threats the Democrats point out aren’t real, most of them are real and potentially very serious. Neither am I suggesting, if this focus on internal threats does result in the nation breaking up into small factions, that this is necessarily a bad thing. But if for some reason you are trying to maintain national togetherness and cooperation, I am suggesting that you should take all of the above into account as you decide what sort of things are going to help or hinder you in that effort. 

I am one of those people who think we should try to maintain as much togetherness and cooperation as possible, and my big worry in all of this is that if, in the forge of a life and death struggle, we can go from strangers to brothers, then it’s also possible to go in the other direction as well, particularly in the prolonged absence of any such struggle. And this is precisely what appears to be happening. Now I know that the Pashtuns go back to fighting their cousins as soon as the strangers are gone, and maybe that’s just what we’re seeing with Republicans and Democrats, and that if a sufficient threat emerges they will once again join forces, but such a threat might not emerge, at least not soon enough, because it also seems possible that if things go long enough and get bitter enough, that reconciliation will no longer be on the table. That, past a certain point, the ties of nationhood could be permanently severed. That it doesn’t matter how big some future threat ends up being, the many sides in the country will never again be one. In fact, there’s a lot of evidence that we may already be past that point.


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Are Modern Deviances Innovative or Catastrophic?

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The last couple of posts (not counting my monthly book review post) have covered the evolution of systems over time, though, as I’m sure you’re aware, the word “systems” covers a lot of territory. Over the last several decades and perhaps longer, there’s been a lot of attention paid to small interpersonal systems. This has led to whole industries devoted to ensuring safety in the workplace, or productivity in the office, and my first post drew on that side of things. But while I’m interested in these sorts of systems, I’m worried (like most of the rest of the country) about much larger systems. Particularly our system of government. 

Certainly we can hope and maybe even expect that improving our system of government should be similar to improving any other system. That the same tactics which work to improve airplane safety might also work to improve government effectiveness as well. But despite whatever optimism we might bring to the process it’s clear that improving a system of government is going to be vastly more difficult than improving any other system. Let’s start with a simple example:

In both of my past posts I used the example of a checklist. A checklist is one of the simplest ways for preventing deviance in a system and it requires a few things to be effective.

First, you have to have some idea of actions which need to be taken or items which need to be reviewed. And ideally, these are things where the answer is a definite “yes” or definite “no”. Either the gust-lock has been removed or it hasn’t. Either the oil is above the fill line or it isn’t. And if the answer is “no” the process for rectifying it should be straightforward. For example removing the gust-lock or adding oil, respectively. 

Second, the process for creating and updating the checklist has to be straightforward, and not prone to disagreement or ambiguity. Everyone should basically agree what goes on the list and what doesn’t and it shouldn’t take large amounts of time to reach agreement or to add the item.

Third, checklists should rectify the mistakes of the past. If a plane crashed because a cargo door was incorrectly secured, then a checklist item saying “Ensure cargo doors are correctly secured” should be added. This way at least you’re not making the same mistake again.

Looking over this list it’s obvious that each of these things becomes much more difficult when you’re talking about a government. If we go back through the list:

First we need a list of actions and the actions need to be definitive. There’s problems on both sides of that mandate. You can imagine an action item “Is there a healthy debate about the issues affecting the nation?” Probably most people agree that that item should be on the list, but even if that’s the case answering the question with a straight yes or no becomes very difficult. If by some miracle there is a consensus, for example if we can definitively answer “no”, as increasingly appears to be the case at the moment. At that point, we still have a problem with the other side of the mandate. Adding “healthy debate” is not as straightforward as adding oil. It doesn’t come in convenient containers at any gas station.

Second on the list was the process of adding to our checklist. Once again this is (understandably) difficult when you’re talking about a system of government. For example, some people feel very strongly that giving women an absolute right to choose whether to continue a pregnancy should definitely be on our checklist. But there are a lot of people who think it’s equally important for that item not to be on the list or for it to be on the list, but in a limited fashion. As we have seen coming to any certain conclusion has been very difficult. And this difficulty pervades everything about systems of governments, from making necessary changes to recovering from deviations, as we will soon see.

Third on our list was rectifying the mistakes of the past. Here we have at least two problems. To begin with, there’s a real lack of data. Nations and systems of governments don’t fail nearly as often as planes crash, and even if we’re talking about minor failures like financial crises they’re still relatively rare events. And when failures do occur the causes of an economic crash are much more difficult to pinpoint than the causes of a plane crash, which is the other problem. Take the Great Depression as an example. Despite decades of study, there’s still considerable disagreement about what caused it, and whether FDR’s policies helped or hurt. It would certainly be nice if there was some “secure cargo door” equivalent we could add to our economic checklist that would prevent the economy from crashing in the same way it did in 1929, but I don’t think there is, or there are many items, and not everyone can agree on them.

The point in going into such depth on this one example is that it’s the simplest example, the one most easily understood and implemented, and yet even this most basic method for preventing  deviance in a system of government ends up being riddled with potential problems. But perhaps having a governmental checklist seems silly to you or perhaps it’s hard to imagine how it would work, so let’s turn to something more concrete, the Amendments to the US Constitution. 

In essence the amendments are a checklist, or at least as close as we’re likely to get when you consider a governmental system in its entirety. And if you consider them in this fashion then the failures I listed above are immediately obvious. To start with, while the amendments are admirably clear, particularly when compared with previous attempts at this sort of thing, they’re not unambiguously clear. What does “freedom of the press” mean in an age of social media. What precisely constitutes “cruel and unusual” punishment? 

Moving on, perhaps the most obvious issue is that we have largely lost the ability to add to this checklist, at least when it comes to anything important or anything which is the tiniest bit controversial. Instead of adding amendments, the current method for changing the constitution mostly involves the Supreme Court broadening the interpretation of what’s already there. I would assume that we can all agree that this is happening, but once you get beyond the mere fact of its existence, deciding whether or not it’s a deviance or how things were always supposed to work, and further, if it is a deviance, whether it’s been normalized, and whether that might actually be a good thing, probably depends a lot on your political ideology. A subject we’ll return to momentarily

Finally there’s the issue of using the amendments to rectify mistakes. Anyone looking at the list of amendments, will quickly realize that while some of them are incredibly farsighted, others, for example the Third Amendment, are targeted towards rectifying very specific mistakes from the time just before the Revolution. And of course the 21st amendment is the greatest example ever of this process, and when combined with the 19th amendment represent the ideal of how this whole thing should probably work. But, if, as I argued above, the process of adding amendments is beyond repair, how do we go about rectifying mistakes which have only been uncovered more recently? Here again the Supreme Court comes into play but to an arguably even greater extent because now the ideology of the court becomes a factor, with some things viewed as unassailable rights or fantastically awful mistakes depending on which judge is speaking. A situation which goes a long way towards explaining why the last few nominations have been so contentious. And also, in my opinion at least, further evidence that this state of affairs is a deviation from how things were originally intended to operate.

As I have argued all of this represents a deviance in the system, particularly if we use the most neutral meaning of the word, i.e. doing things differently from how they have been done in the past. Given this, what are our options for dealing with a given deviance? Broadly speaking there are two we can correct it or we can normalize it. Unfortunately, as I’ve just spent several hundred words demonstrating, correcting it appears to no longer be an option, absent some fairly sweeping changes (for example a constitutional convention.) Which leaves normalizing it. 

This is where we connect the first post in this series with the last one. If you’ll recall in the first one I argued that the normalization of deviance is generally a bad thing, and something you need to continually guard against because, unless checked, it will gradually creep into whatever system you’re using and fatally undermine it. On the other hand, in the second post I showed that, occasionally, normalization of deviance leads to an altogether better system. Certainly you could imagine that as the English parliament grew stronger in the years before the revolution and things inched towards greater democracy, that this could have also been labeled a deviance from how the monarchy was supposed to work. And that further each time one of parliament’s new powers was solidified through usage that it could have been viewed as normalization of that deviance.

Several points jump immediately to mind. The first and perhaps the most petty, is that based on the events of the last few weeks and months I don’t think the UK parliament is the thing that comes to mind for anyone when asked to summon forth examples of well functioning systems of government.

Next, when you get into the history of these deviations to the English system of government you immediately realize how gradual they all were. I don’t think the same can be said of the deviations we’re currently experiencing. Not only are they comparatively rapid, but they’re numerous. A point I’ll return to.

For most people of a conservative bent it’s the rapidity of the change rather than change itself that raises concerns. It is possible to change a system of government suddenly, but it rarely works and it’s always bloody. Some of my readers have questioned where I expect the blood to come from; who I expect to take up arms. And it is a subject which deserves a deeper dive, and one where they probably have something of a point. Nevertheless, it’s important to remember how civilized everyone thought things were before World War I…

Still, there are many people who are probably not comfortable in using deviance, even in its most neutral sense, to describe what’s happening. Everything is just progress, and the faster we progress the better. That most of our attempts to metaphorically keep planes from crashing is better understood as being equivalent to refusing to move from propellor driven engines to jets. This is a valid point, how do we distinguish between harmful deviance and innovative deviance? How can we tell whether our current course will lead to civilizational catastrophe or a communal utopia?

As I alluded to previously, introducing numerous deviances all at once seems particularly fraught if you’re trying to make this evaluation. As has been pointed out, the modern world is fantastic by most measures, but which recent deviation accounts for the innovations we see? Does science or women’s suffrage explain the current technological bounty? I lean towards the first, but it could easily be both, or neither. And if the modern world has problems, which it clearly does, even if these problems don’t pose an existential risk it would be nice to know their source. Is the current increase in suicide cultural? Entirely the fault of the opioid epidemic? Or something else?

The argument people are making is that we’re now smart enough to only deviate in ways that make sense. We’re not doing the equivalent of going into an upside down loop in order to lock our wheels, we’re only doing things that are clearly good ideas. Well, as both I and the original author pointed out, all deviations seem sensible initially, until you’re 300 feet off the ground and about to crash. And frankly even if we are going to go by that standard, do our current deviations actually meet this criteria? Does having completely open borders make sense? Does the increasing number of transgender people make sense? Does Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) make sense? (Probably not, if even Krugman thinks it’s ridiculous.)

It seems worth spending some time on that last one, since it would appear to be something of the platonic example of normalizing deviance. Under any normal financial system one of the checkboxes would be “Do you spend less than you make?” Now I can certainly see an argument that for the government the standard might be somewhat different, perhaps “Is the budget deficit percentage less than the rate of inflation?” But MMT goes way beyond that to “Is inflation at a reasonable level? This would appear to be both a gross deviation from how things have normally been done, and also, by wrapping it in the MMT ideology, one of the more bald faced attempts at normalizing a deviance I’ve ever seen as well. All that said, as I pointed out in the previous episode, there is some chance (I would argue a very small one) that they’re right, that it will in fact work better. That this is one time when we’re not headed for destruction, but when we’re actually pushing through to a new and better system on the other side. But how likely do you actually think that is? And not just with MMT, with any of the things I’ve mentioned?

Still you may have noticed that while I’ve danced around things, I still haven’t answered the fundamental question of how can you tell? How can you know whether the deviance you’re normalizing will lead to civilizational catastrophe or a communal utopia? And I’ve avoided answering it largely because it’s very difficult to tell. However, in closing I will offer some pointers for some things you might want to consider:

  1. Generally, it’s probably not going to lead to catastrophe, but on the other side, it’s NEVER going to lead to a utopia.
  2. Trying numerous radical changes all at once never seems to work. For example, we seem to be combining radically different immigration norms, with extreme changes in culture and extreme government spending all at the same time.
  3. The best deviations are one’s where the benefits are massive and straightforward. For example ending slavery. 
  4. Related to that, it’s also great if they’re easy to understand. In particular I think MMT, whatever its brilliance absolutely fails this test.
  5. Is there an asymmetry between failure and success? Is failure catastrophic, even if it’s unlikely? Is success only marginally better even if it’s nearly certain?

Should you have any other points you feel I should add to this list, or any considerations you think I’m missing I’d be happy to hear about them. But if we take just this list, I don’t see any reason to consider current deviance as anything other than dangerous.

To end where I began, we’ve got an old broken down aircraft. There’s a checklist for keeping it running, but people can’t agree on what the items on the checklist mean. We can’t change the items on the checklist even if we could agree. And there’s a huge debate on what things constitute mistakes and what things constitute progress. The plane is still flying but increasingly the pilots are focused less on flying and more on debating the condition of the plane, and whether the duct tape on the rudder is a bad thing or the latest in aircraft technology. And as one of the passengers, I gotta tell ya, I’m pretty nervous.


This is not the first time I’ve introduced an extended metaphor involving planes. If you want to ensure that these metaphors continue (and I mean really who wouldn’t?) Consider donating


Books I Finished in August

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I lied when I said the next post would be the wrap up to the discussion of systems. I forgot that since it was the beginning of the month that I needed to do the post where I review all of the books I read last month. Though “need” is probably too strong of a word, as I mentioned the last time I did my monthly review post, I’m still experimenting with the format, and the option of not doing it at all is still very much on the table. This time around, I’m going to try only including the sections of my review where I have something genuinely interesting to say. So some books may just get the one section. While others will get the whole enchilada as they say. We’ll see how it goes:

Extremes 

By: Various

186 pages

Who should read this book?

If you’re the kind of person who might enjoy a collection of academic presentations, and you’re interested in the idea of “Extremes” you’ll probably like this book.

Thoughts

I forget why I picked this up, or where I heard about it, but it had an essay from Taleb, and that might have been enough all by itself, but also I’m interested in the topic of “extremes” anyway. The Taleb essay was good, though I don’t recall him bringing forth anything I hadn’t already come across in his books. Beyond that there were essays on extreme rowing and extreme weather, which were pretty good (though the rowing one seemed kind of out of place). But the essays I enjoyed the most were on political extremism. Definitely the extreme that seems most likely to cause problems in the short term.

The first was titled “Dealing with Extremism” by David Runciman, and dealt with the rising disaffection which has lead to extremism, as well as the difference between an extremist and a conspiracy theorist. I both cases I think he presented a balanced and interesting view of things. In particular I think conspiracy theorists are becoming, to everyone’s bafflement, a bigger deal, and this was the first really serious examination I’ve seen of how they might fit into the political landscape as something other than a weird fringe.

The second was titled “Extreme Politics: The Four Waves of National Populism in the West” and it covered three separate historical waves of western populism, before arriving at the fourth wave which is what we’re seeing now. Given how powerful this most recent wave has been, from the election of Trump to Brexit to Alternative for Germany receiving their largest number of votes ever just on Sunday, identifying how it’s different is incredibly useful. As you might imagine the current wave has put quite a bit more emphasis on the issue of Islam, but this has also led to some populists to voicing strong support for LGBT communities. Truly it’s an interesting mismash.

The Lazy Dungeon Master

By: Michael Shea

123 pages

Who should read this book?

No one should read this book. Which is not to say it wasn’t good, just that I would say Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master by the same author (see my review farther down) will give you everything you would have gotten in this book and a lot more

Blood Song (A Raven’s Shadow Novel, Book 1) 

By: Anthony Ryan

592 pages

Thoughts

Somehow I ended up starting another fantasy series. At some point I’m going to have to stop starting new series and finish all the series I have already begun. However this came highly recommended and as they say there’s no time like the present. In particular this is one of those fantasy books that mostly takes place at a school, and as readers of J.K. Rowling can attest, there’s something about fantasy schools. They never fail to be interesting. 

Who should read this book?

If fantasy trilogies are your thing, then this is probably worth checking out. As I said I’ve only ready the first one, but so far it was quite good.

The Last American Man

By: Elizabeth Gilbert

288 pages

Thoughts

A friend of mine said that my review of Wild at Heart reminded him of this book, so I thought I’d check it out. It’s by the author of the book Eat, Pray, Love. (Which probably doesn’t tell you as much as you might think about The Last American Man, but it does tell you something.) 

The Last American Man is essentially a biography of Eustace Conway, and truly if you have to do everything Conway does to be considered a man, then he is indeed probably the last one. Conway lives almost exclusively off what he can grow, kill, or forage (which includes dumpster diving). He has a thousand acres in North Carolina, where he runs courses on getting back to nature, and by all accounts he works his staff so hard that people rarely last longer than a year.

As a biography it’s reasonably entertaining, but as a question for society it’s fascinating; the question of what do we make of Conway? Is he crazy? Or if he’s not crazy is he just a man who was born 100 years too late? Both of those answers are possible, but it’s also possible that he demonstrates what’s been lost, that even if we can’t all be exactly like him that most people, especially men should try to be living a lot closer to Conway’s example than they currently are. In other words, does Conway represent some kind of masculine ideal that all men should be doing their best to emulate, even if that emulation is partial at best

Certainly, and this is a topic that comes up in another book I read in August, we can’t all live as Conway does. There’s not enough space, there’s not enough wildlife and perhaps most tellingly if we all lived that way who would fill dumpsters with discarded food for us to retrieve? Nevertheless as you can imagine I’m sympathetic to the idea that we’d be a lot better off moving in Conway’s direction than in the direction of narcissistic materialism, which seems to be the other choice. Unfortunately there’s not a heck of a lot of advice on how to do that in this book. Or at least how to do it in a less extreme fashion than Conway.

Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master

By: Michael Shea

96 pages

Who should read this book

This is the book you should read instead of the aforementioned Lazy Dungeon Master. If you’re running a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, or any role-playing game this has some great advice.

Once upon a Time in Russia: The Rise of the Oligarchs and the Greatest Wealth in History

By: Ben Mezrich

288 pages

Criticisms

I picked up this book really hoping to get a deep dive into the years immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In particular, as I mentioned in my last post, I wanted to know why the market reforms Yeltsin and his people implemented in the immediate aftermath of the collapse worked so poorly. And how did these reforms actually work to permit the oligarchs to snatch everything up. Or rather that’s what I heard had happened and I was looking for confirmation and more detail. Unfortunately, this book did not provide that. It did tell the very interesting story of the rise and fall of one particular oligarch, Boris Berezovsky, along with the tragic death of Alexander Litvinenko from polonium poisoning, which you may have heard of. 

In any case, as the story of a certain period in Russian history as told through the eyes of a handful of individuals, it was pretty good, but as documentation for how not to change systems of government (which you may have noticed is a recent interest of mine) it falls woefully short.

The Iliad

By: Homer Translated by Richmond Lattimore

528 pages

Notes on this translation

I am not an expert on different translations of the Iliad. This one was recommended by Harold Bloom in his book The Western Canon. It seemed good, perhaps accurate to a fault. The big annoyance was that he used a different spelling than what you commonly see, so it’s Aias, instead of Ajax and Achilleus rather than Achilles, which bothered me more than it should have. I’ve read the Iliad at least once before, but it was a long, long time ago and I don’t remember much about that translation. I hope to read other translations in the future and maybe then I’ll have something more to say about this one.

Representative passage

Indeed, Hippothoös, glorious son of Pelasgian Lethos,

was trying to drag him by the foot through the strong encounter

by fastening, the sling of his shield round the ankle tendons

for the favour of Hektor and the Trojans, but the sudden evil

came to him, and none for all their desire could defend him

The son of Telamon, sweeping in through the mass of the fighters,

struck him at close quarters through the brazen cheeks of his helmet

and the helm crested with horse-hair was riven about the spearhead

to the impact of the huge spear and the weight of the hand behind it

and the brain ran from the wound along the spear by the eye-hole,

bleeding. There his strength was washed away, and from his hands

he let fall to the ground the foot of great-hearted Patroklos

to lie there, and himself collapsed prone over the dead man

far away from generous Larisa, and he could not

render again the care of his dear parents; he was short-lived,

beaten down beneath the spear of high-hearted Aias.

Thoughts

I’m not sure what thoughts one should have on completing a classic like the Iliad. One of the reasons I selected the passage I did was to illustrate how gory it was. That’s probably the part that surprised me the most, and which I didn’t remember from the last time I read it. 

Other than that, knowing that it was the foundational myth of Greek Civilization, and therefore, by extension something of a foundational myth for Western Civilization in general, I came into it hoping for some insight into what made the two civilizations different from the other great civilizations of the world. I know it’s not considered polite, or even correct, to point out that Western Civilization is special, but I still think it is, and if you can’t grant me that it’s special, then you should at least be able to grant that it’s different, and I came into the Iliad hoping to uncover the source of that difference, and I don’t know that I did. I have a few ideas, but they’re not very concrete.

1- My sense is that the Greeks viewed their gods very differently from other civilizations. Yes, there were lots of civilizations whose gods had many human-like qualities. As just one example, out of many, there are the stories passed down about the Norse gods, but is there any other civilization where the gods are right in the middle of things to quite the same extent as the Iliad? 

2- Following from the above did the proximity of their gods make the Greeks more attentive to their actions, particularly their actions against co-religionists? Mostly the sense I got from the Iliad was that it was very biased towards the Greeks. Achilles and Ajax (or if you prefer Aias and Achilleus) were unstoppable, and dominant, while Hector was definitely a step below, and yet it wasn’t as biased as it could have been. And of course there’s the classic ending where Priam and Achilles share a meal and Achilles returns Hector’s body. A noble gesture which you don’t see in other ancient works. (That I’m aware of.)

3- From all of this I wonder if their mythology and legends led to a greater interest in investigating what it might mean to be virtuous. If the gods are right there and ready to step in at a moments notice if you did something bad, there’s an incentive to figure out what sort of things are bad and what sort of things aren’t. An attitude that may have come to fruition much later when the actual philosophers came along?

These are just half-formed ideas. As I said, I feel like there should be something distinctly “Western” in the Iliad, I’m just not entirely sure what it is.

Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle 

By: Daniel L. Everett

320 pages

Criticisms

This book recounts the author’s time living in the Amazon as a Christian missionary among the Pirahã tribe. And I’m not alone in finding it a difficult book to categorize. Just now I came across the review of the book in The Guardian, which opened thusly:

There is no easy way to categorise this story of a Christian missionary’s linguistic adventures in the Amazon forest. It’s a little as if Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast had been rewritten by Steve Pinker, but only a little.

That’s not a bad way of describing, but as the review says, it still doesn’t do it justice. The book is part travel log, part a challenge to Chomskian linguistics, part an extensive ethnographic examination, and part the story of someone losing their religion.

The travel log part was interesting enough, though far too short to be gripping in the way you expect out of this sort of thing

The linguistics part might have been the part I found the most novel. But it seemed to assume a certain familiarity with the subject that lessened the overall impact, since the time spent trying to get up to speed on the uniqueness of his linguistic discoveries detracted from the time and energy available to appreciate the subtleties of those same discoveries.

The ethnographic angle took up the bulk of the book, but, in my opinion, Everett idolized the Pirahã to such an extent that it fatally undermined his objectivity. As an example I offer up the following story:

One of the women of the tribe had died in childbirth, leaving a very sickly child behind. Everett and his wife adopt the child and manage to nurse it back to health, finally reaching a point where it was clear that the baby would survive. Having worked non-stop to get to this point they decide to take a short break and go for a jog. While they are gone they leave the baby with its (I don’t think Everett ever specifies the gender) father, who promptly kills it.

Everett goes to great length explaining why the father killed the baby. And yes, I understand, there might be reasons, if you’re on the cusp of survival, for doing something like that. And. normally, the father would have been correct in his assessment that a baby born under such circumstances wasn’t going to survive, but in this particular case the father was wrong. He made a mistake, he may have done it for reasons which are normally understandable, but in this case it was still clearly a mistake, yet Everett goes to great length defending the act.

Which takes us to Everett’s loss of faith. Part of the reason he defended the infanticide is that he claims that the Pirahã are the happiest tribe on Earth. To begin with, there’s the problem I mentioned above with The Last American Man. It appears that a great part of the Pirahãs happiness is tied up in their traditional foraging lifestyle. Even if we did decide that this was the ultimate way to live, how many people can this lifestyle actually support? (Estimates of Pirahã population range from 400 to 800.) Even if it could support 1,000 times the current number that only gets us to 600,000 people or about the population of Luxembourg…

Further, I think this is a large bit of evidence in favor of my argument that he’s not particularly objective, but even if it were the case that the Pirahãs were objectively the happiest people on Earth, does that necessarily mean that they have the best culture? (This is the big reason Everett abandoned Christianity.) As I have repeatedly pointed out, choosing happiness as your ultimate value is not the same as choosing survival as your ultimate value. And on this count, with, best case scenario, 800 total Pirahã, they are unlikely to survive for much longer. To say that they’re in a cultural dead end is an understatement. Does it matter how happy they are if 100 years from now they no longer exist as an independent tribe?

Do people ever think through these things?

American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump

By: Tim Alberta

688 pages

Rating: A

Who should read this book?

I think anyone interested in the current state of politics should read this book. 

Representative passage

Suddenly, Priebus [the chairman of the Republican National Committee] was reminded of his nightmare scenario. Ever since Romney’s loss to Obama, he had labored to get the Republican party out of it’s own way—not just on policy, but on process. The 2012 primary had stretched on nearly five months and featured upwards of twenty debates and forums, an atmosphere of anarchy that took a brutal toll on the party’s general election readiness. Priebus had affected sweeping changes to the primary structure, most notably a condensed nominating calendar and half the number of debates. It was all in the service of producing a quality nominee as quickly as possible with minimal intraparty damage done.

And then along came Trump.

Thoughts

I have lots of thoughts on this book. In fact, it led me to a realization/epiphany, which I’ll be writing a whole other post about. But outside of that one narrow realization, at 688 pages, there is a lot of other stuff going on. Just to hit a few high points. 

  • As you can tell from the subject it covers the Republican Civil War, but when I look at what’s going on in the primaries and between Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez I feel like basically the same thing is happening on the Democractic side of things.
  • Obama was a good president, and he did a pretty good job, but it’s clear that if he had been just a little bit more conciliatory to the Republicans and a little more moderate that we could have avoided a lot of what has happened since then. I don’t blame him for it, it would have been tough to pull off, but I do regret how close we were.
  • Republicans gaining control of the Senate in 2014 was huge, it allowed the Supreme Court to be in play, and if you think the Supreme Court question didn’t play into Trump’s victory, you may be part of the problem.

Criticisms

I don’t have a lot of criticisms. Perhaps he could have done a better job distinguishing amongst the various actors. Maybe include the non-fiction version of the Dramatis Personae list. (What ever happened to those anyway? I really found them useful.) Also, while this book was pretty objective, it did seem a little bit harder on Trump than the Democrats, and maybe that’s precisely how it should be, but some of the criticisms seemed less substantial and more juvenile, which again is probably understandable.

If you were going to take only one thing from the book:

Members of congress are less evil than you think. But things are still really messed up.


Once again, I’m trying something different with reviews. Let me know what you liked and what you missed. And as always slipping a couple of bucks into my palm when you make a request ensures the promptest service.


Is There a Utopia out There After All?

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For those people who are just joining us, I’m an active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or “Mormons” as most people know us. And deep in its heart of hearts this blog is built around Mormon apologetics, though much of the time you have to squint quite a bit to see it. Last week I said I was going to talk about how communism might be implemented, which makes this a weird time to remind people I’m a Mormon, since, at first glance, Mormonism and communism would appear to have absolutely nothing in common. Rather, if anything, the recent past is full of well known Mormons who were extremely anti-communist. Ezra Taft Benson, the thirteenth president of the Church had a particularly strong reputation for being opposed to communism, penning such books as An Enemy Hath Done This as well as being (for awhile) a big supporter of the John Birch Society. But once you go farther back in Church history, the picture looks different.

In the early days of the Church, on and off starting in 1830, but reaching a peak between 1874 and 1877, Brigham Young (the second president of the Church after Joseph Smith) implemented something called the United Order. Now, since that time, the Church has taken great pains to clarify that this was not Marxist communism, and indeed there are many differences, some subtle, some less so. But it was a collectivist arrangement as well as an attempt to practice Christian communalism (the Christian part is one of those less subtle differences), so it had lots of elements in common with communism. But all that aside, it was nevertheless an attempt at creating a society which worked better than the one they already had in place. Of moving from one system to a better system, but whatever its aspirations and whatever its differences, similar to communism, it failed. 

Based on these failures and other similar failures it’s easy to assume that communalism/socialism/communism will never work. Indeed there’s a meme going around, where they take the list of 7 things every kid needs to hear, initially created by Josh Shipp, which is full of advice like telling your kid you love them and you forgive them, and replacing one of the items with “Communism has failed every time it was tried.” And to be fair, perhaps every kid does need to hear that. I’m certainly no fan of Communism. I would even go so far as to argue that it’s worse even than most people realize, but as I have previously pointed out, this fact wasn’t apparent at the beginning. Nor was it apparent at the beginning of our own republic that it was going to be a success, and yet in the intervening years it clearly was.

In all these cases (and there are many more) people were trying to move to a new system, one which fixed some of the weaknesses of the old system. And most of the time when people make this attempt, it fails, somewhat unusually the American Revolution succeeded. A group of people did move to a different system, and whatever your complaints about the founding and the founders it was definitely a better system as well. You might label this system democratic capitalism, and while the United States was the first to try it on a large scale (a point we’ll get to) many nations, though not all, have gone on to adopt it. When one sees how successful it’s been, it’s worth asking why no one did it sooner and why some nations still haven’t done it.

Starting with the first question, people had tried democracies and republics before, but the conventional wisdom at the time of the revolution was that democracy could only work on a small scale, in places like Switzerland or Ancient Athens. This thinking explains why we ended up with a republic and not a democracy and is one of the reasons why the battle between Jefferson and Hamilton was so fierce, but regardless of the measures they took to mitigate the perceived failures of democracy or the passion they brought to the task of ensuring the success of the new country, it was still a huge risk. So why did it work in North America, but not in Afghanistan, or Venezuela, or for that matter Russia in the 90s?

Speaking of that time period in Russia, I just got done reading the book Once Upon a Time in Russia: The Rise of the Oligarchs―A True Story of Ambition, Wealth, Betrayal, and Murder. (I’m still playing around with how I’m going to do book reviews, so I may or may not end up doing a full review later.) The book discusses the chaotic time right after the fall of the Soviet Union and what came out of that chaos. In a very real sense, the Russians were trying to accomplish the same thing that the early Americans did. They were attempting to transition from one, obviously broken system to a presumably new and better system. In this effort they had lots of people willing to help, and the citizens really wanted to make the transition. Beyond that, there were lots of successful countries to copy from. And despite all of these factors very few people would look at Russia today and consider it a fully functioning constitutional democracy. What happened? Why did they fail?

On one level the failure to successfully transition came from numerous sources:

  • Yeltsin tried to reform the economy too quickly. 
  • The West offered a lot of useless advice, but not much actual help
  • Rather than creating prosperity for everyone the reforms made most people poorer while creating vast wealth for a few oligarchs. 

And if the economic problems weren’t bad enough, there was also:

  • Corruption
  • Terrible infrastructure
  • Weak respect for the law
  • And the general hangover of 70+ years of Soviet dysfunction. 

But considered from another angle the failure was caused by just one problem: Transitioning to a new system requires more than just ideology, it requires an enormous web of systems to support the ideology.

If we consider Russia and Eastern Europe, based on the things I read both at the time and since then, they would have liked nothing more than to have transitioned to mature capitalism, with public corporations, investors and a stock market. Instead they ended up with oligarchs and Ponzi schemes. Why? Because, among other things, they didn’t have a robust legal system, with things like contract enforcement, or a justice system free of corruption. And even if they had possessed all those things the actual logistics of a fully operational stock market are not trivial either. And this takes us to the answer to the second question I posed above, if democratic capitalism is so successful why hasn’t every country transitioned to it?

Certainly there are some countries where it’s not in the leader’s best interest to make the transition. (See my review of The Dictator’s Handbook.) And accordingly they prevent it from happening, but by all accounts Yeltsin and Gorbachev desperately wanted to make this transition yet were unable to because they didn’t have the necessary institutions, customs and attitudes in place. 

Thus far most of what I’ve said is not particularly original, though given how much blood and treasure we’ve spent failing in exactly this fashion in Iraq and Afghanistan, perhaps these ideas are more obscure than one would think. Or perhaps those people trying to move from one system to the next recognize that supporting institutions are necessary, but feel that they should be easy to create. In any case at some level people have dramatically misjudged things, and as a consequence caused all kinds of problems. But, while that is definitely an interesting subject, it is not the subject of this post. No, in this post I want to approach things not from the perspective of what’s possible now, but from the perspective of what might be possible in the future.

I started off talking about communism and communalism, and asserting that attempts to implement them had repeatedly and spectacularly failed. But couldn’t the same thing be said about large scale democratic capitalism before the creation of the Constitution? What was different in 1788? The argument I’ve presented thus far is that the necessary framework of supporting institutions, cultural systems and laws finally existed which would allow it to succeed. From this it follows that it’s possible that there is a similar combination out there, waiting to be implemented which would allow communism or communalism to actually succeed as a system of government. 

I stole this idea from friend of the blog Mark over at Pasteur’s Blend. Here’s the paragraph where he explains the core idea

But what if there’s another way to look at it?  If it’s true that any system of government requires specific institutions to be successful, we should apply this same understanding to communism.  Certainly the Russian experience demonstrated that capitalism requires certain institutions or it won’t work well. We might look back to attempts at establishing communism through this lens and say, “Of course it didn’t work, they didn’t have the institutions required for making it work.”

To be clear, I’m not asserting that there are definitely institutions out there which would make communism/communalism work. (And specifically work better than democratic capitalism.) Only that there might be. There are still several reasons that such a system of government might be impossible.

For one, while this is an interesting possibility, it’s not even clear that this is how it normally works. The founding of the United States may be a unique exception. As I said above, we have lots of examples of failed attempts to dramatically transition from one system to another and very few examples of where it succeeded. Most of the time when we look through history it seems clear that most systems “evolved gradually” rather than “changed suddenly”. And I see very little evidence that this is the way things are evolving.

Speaking of which it should be pointed out, additionally, that there is no reason to limit this to communism/communalism, if progress and technology are going to create the culture, institutions and systems necessary for a dramatic shift to a new system of government it would seem that libertarianism is at least as likely as communalism, if not more so. 

Finally, you’ll notice that when I talk about the “web of support” required to make a certain system work, that I go farther than Mark’s original idea and toss in culture as well. Certainly culture played a huge part in the successful formation of the United States, and equally it has always been the biggest problem with the successful implementation of any form of communalism. Or as Madison put it, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

All this said, it is possible that a communist utopia will arrive as soon as we have the appropriate institutions and the right attitude. But, more broadly, it has to be acknowledged that even if we’re unlikely to transition to some dramatically better system of government after the fashion of the American Revolution, technological innovation is continually providing us with lots of tools to make our current system better. And this is the point where, finally, as promised, this post ties into the last post. This post is an argument against my last post. On one hand, as we saw in that last post, if system goes on long enough, it starts to accumulate deviations and those deviations end up being normalized. This leads to cycles where greater deviations eventually lead to catastrophe followed by retrenchment around improved norms. On the other hand technology gives us ways to mitigate system deviations, and may in fact provide a completely new and better system which will replace the old system before it fails catastrophically. Which would have the effect of breaking the cycle.

As a brief example, the last post spent quite a bit of time talking about plane crashes. One of the key methods for preventing these crashes is the checklist, and while the core technology for maintaining a checklist has been around since the invention of writing, it’s clear that even in the case of a simple system like this that technology has made things easier to implement and maintain. Consequently, there is less incentive for deviation because not-deviating requires only minimal additional effort. All of this then presumably pushes back potential catastrophes.

As is so often the case, all of the above takes us back to the same question we return to again and again, “Will technology save us?” And as usual, my answer (and I believe the safest way to bet) is, “We are not saved.” Nevertheless, as I repeatedly point out, I could be wrong. (That’s why I mention betting.) 

There is no way to know how the future will turn out, but I think it is safe to say, as I did in my very first post, that we’re in a race between technological salvation and technological catastrophe. Meaning that, at least at first glance, there’s nothing particularly new about the topic of this post. I’ve been talking about this exact issue since the very beginning. It’s therefore reasonable to ask what this latest twist adds to the discussion. To begin with, I spend a lot of time in this space discussing different ways for catastrophe to occur, but not very much time on how it might be avoided. How the cycles of civilization, which have been present throughout all of recorded history, might be broken. Part of the reason is that there are always more ways to fail than there are to succeed. But part of it is also probably a genuine bias on my part. Thus, when I encountered this idea I thought it was worth investigating as a counterweight to that bias. 

Beyond that, the key difference between this discussion and what I’ve written before, is that lots of people imagine that technology alone might save us. Particularly something like fusion, or superintelligence. I think there were a lot of people who thought the internet might even fill this roll. In contrast, the current discussion involves things which are helped by, but don’t require technology. Just institutional and cultural changes which might be brought about by sufficiently motivated individuals, allowing us to imagine “salvation” in a form which doesn’t hinge on one dramatic technological development. Technology is still very important, perhaps the most important element of the modern world, but many of the most impactful systems, as we saw with the checklist example (but also democratic capitalism) don’t necessarily require any specific technology. And, with technology appearing ever more destructive to systems, particularly political systems (think the polarization brought on by social media) this sort of salvation starts to appear more and more like our best hope.

However, in order to take this hope seriously you have to assume that we’re going to break out of the cycles and patterns that have defined human existence for thousands if not tens of thousands of years, that this time really is different. That, despite recent evidence to the contrary, technology will assist rather than hinder setting up the institutions and culture required to finally make the leap to a dramatically better system, a communist or a libertarian or a “something else” utopia. Or that, at a minimum, we’ll create something less earth shattering, but which nevertheless manages to save humanity from itself. Because that’s looking like an increasingly difficult task.

In my next post I’m going to finish out the series by examining that challenge, in particular the practical difficulties of implementing new systems, the historical cycles such systems would have to contend with, and the conflict between the new and better ways we’ve developed for managing those systems and the inevitable temptation to deviate from them, and to call those deviations “normal”.


Perhaps we will push through to a communist utopia where money is meaningless, but until that time we’re stuck with the next best system, democratic capitalism, which requires exchanging money for things you want to see more of. On the off chance this blog is in that category consider donating.


Normalization of Deviance and the Modern World

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I recently read an article titled How I Almost Destroyed a £50 million War Plane and The Normalisation of Deviance. The article opens with the story of a multinational military exercise, which the author, Tim Davies, participated in back in the mid 2000s. As part of this exercise, everyone was assigned to a specific jet, and if your jet was having problems you couldn’t switch. This is, unfortunately, exactly what happened to the Davies.

Our jet had a problem with the undercarriage or landing gear – it wouldn’t lock up under normal flight conditions; the wheels couldn’t be stowed away.

The engineers had found significant and unfixable wear to the mechanical uplock. It would only lock up under 0g and this would mean that I would have to bunt the aircraft, nose down, towards the ground whilst selecting the gear ‘up’.

(For those unfamiliar with the term, a bunt is half an outside loop, meaning you start out straight and level, then dive in a curve, eventually ending upside down.)

With this “solution” in hand and not wanting to be grounded for the remainder of the exercise Davies (and his Weapons Systems Officer) decided to try it out. And lo and behold, it worked. They’d have to do it every time they wanted to fly, right after takeoff, at the point when they had the maximum amount of fuel (five tons), but they had figured out a way to keep flying. So that’s what they decided to do. And this, if you haven’t guessed, was a deviation from the normal guidelines for safely flying a £50 million war plane.

Despite comments from other pilots, and the concerns of their Programme Director, who Davies managed to avoid, they continued performing this maneuver, and everything went great until the last day of the exercise when the weather was worse than expected. It was then, while performing the maneuver, that they entered a cloud, and when they finally emerged from that cloud Davies realized he was in a very bad place.

We were low on energy and the nose was rising too slowly to recover the aircraft before we would hit the ground.

The Ground Proximity Warning System sounded.

‘WOOP, WOOP – PULL UP, PULL UP!’

‘7, 6, 5 – that’s 400 ft Tim!’, called my WSO.

The jet was shuddering against my demands, it just didn’t have the performance to pull out of the dive.

The cockpit was silent. To make things worse, due to our high rate of descent, we were well outside of any ejection option.

I quickly selected full flap and slats to increase the lift over the wing.

The sudden increase in lift meant that the nose started to pitch faster towards the horizon.

A bad picture was starting to look better.

Eventually I levelled the jet at around 2-300 ft above the ground and gradually I climbed us back up into cloud.

The gear had never locked up. It was going to be a long, and a very quiet, journey home.

Why had all this happened? How had it come to pass that in addition to almost destroying a £50 million war plane, he had almost killed himself and his Weapons Systems Officer? It happened because they had taken that initial deviance and normalized it.

I was an experienced pilot but in the bracket where my over-confidence could well have been my downfall. The longer we’d continued performing the manoeuvre the more confident we’d become at doing it.

We had convinced ourselves that the rule breaking was for the benefit of the exercise and that what we were doing was essential.

But I’d almost destroyed a £50 million aircraft.

My actions in performing a zero ‘g’ bunt after take-off, in order to secure the gear, as outside of the rules as it was, had become the normal way to get airborne – I thought that what I was doing was right.

But I was wrong.

Knowing what happens it’s obvious he was wrong, but it’s also easy to see where it might not have been quite that obvious the first time he tried it. And it’s equally obvious where this problem might not be limited to flying. Life is full of very important rules for how things should be done, but it is also full of situations where it would be convenient and seemingly harmless to violate those rules. The initial violation almost always appears to be minor and in any event it will obviously be only temporary, but once we’ve done it the first time it becomes even easier to do it again and again and again… Until, before you know it, we’ve “normalized the deviance”. 

That article offers this formal definition for the normalization of deviance, from Diane Vaughan:

Social normalization of deviance means that people within the organization become so much accustomed to a deviant behaviour that they don’t consider it as deviant, despite the fact that they far exceed their own rules for elementary safety.

Vaughan coined the term “normalization of deviance” in the course of reviewing the organizational and management failures which lead to the Challenger and Columbia disasters. This is yet another example where it’s easy to identify which choices were wrong in hindsight, but apparently more difficult to avoid making those ultimately fatal decisions in the absence of such foreknowledge. And while there is some utility to identifying the problem after it’s happened it’s vastly preferable to identify it before the disaster. With that in mind I’m going to attempt some identification in advance. Also while the examples I’ve offered thus far, and most of the examples you’ll find, deal with small scale “deviance normalization”, as you might imagine I’m far more interested in whether we have any deviance normalization going on at a societal level.

Let’s take the last point first, what would it look like to normalize deviance at the level of a whole society? 

Let’s start by dipping back into the article. One of the things Davies mentions is how it can be very difficult to define what deviant behavior is at the extreme ends of things. While he admits that his take off maneuver was very obviously deviant, what if you’re trying to perform that evaluation on one of the military’s flight demonstration squadrons? In America we have the Blue Angels and the Thunderbirds, in the UK they have the Red Arrows, and Davies was involved in an inquiry after two of his friends were killed. As part of that he spoke to other people tasked with assessing the standards of the Red Arrows, one of them:

…told me that, when assessing a Red Arrows pilot, he found himself upside down at 100 ft over RAF Scampton’s runway in formation with two other jets only a couple of feet away.

How on earth was he supposed to know if this was normal?

How indeed? Davies doesn’t say except to point out that no organization is ever so specialized that it’s beyond needing external assessment. But the question of evaluation at the extremes is an interesting one, since that appears to be where modern society has ended up. In the same way that there’s not a lot of flight data for going hundreds of miles an hour, 100 ft off the ground with other aircraft only a couple of feet away, there’s not a lot of historical data about being able to form ideological echo chambers with anyone on Earth, with the ability to instantly communicate to any of those people, all while having less and less ability to know if that communication is actually truthful. That seems kind of abnormal or deviant, but how do we know?

To take another more recent, and perhaps more concrete example. News recently broke that Facebook paid contractors to transcribe it’s user’s audio chats. (Most of the other tech companies have been similarly accused.) Is this just a cool thing we can now do which well help Facebook deliver content people will appreciate more? Or is it a horrible invasion of privacy? Regardless of your answer to that question, it shouldn’t change when we get to the point where the transcription doesn’t require contractors; when there’s an AI that can do it. But I think it will. Perhaps more importantly, to get back to Davies’ point about needing external assessment, what do you think Facebook’s answer would be to these questions? (Spoiler: They think it’s awesome, particularly if they could get an AI to do it.) Pulling all this together, my first stab at spotting a normalization of deviance before it happens it to point out that technology is going to create a lot of “deviance” and that it’s going to be difficult to recognize, particularly if we don’t demand external assessment.

From there let’s move on to politics. To start, one imagines that deviations from the norm accumulate the longer an organization is around, and that this would apply at least as much to governments as it would to corporations, and probably much more so. As I have pointed out in the past, the United States and its government is older, relative to other nations, than most people think. All of this means that there should be plenty of examples of accumulated political deviations which have been normalized, and indeed I can think of several. I intend to provide a couple of examples of what I mean, but before I do, it’s important to point out that each could easily be the subject of its own post, and that by necessity, I am going to be leaving a lot of things out. Also, I’m sure that whether you view something as a deviation which has been normalized depends on your core political leanings.

With those caveats aside let’s start by talking about criminal justice. There are lots of things I could talk about in that space, but I’m going to focus on plea bargaining. Currently over 95% percent of federal cases end in a plea deal rather than a trial, and it’s not much better at local level. My sense, when I first thought of this as a potential deviation that has been normalized, is that it had only gotten this high recently, but when I looked into it I discovered that as long ago as 1945 it stood at 70%, and that it actually dipped to 63% in 1982 before starting a steady rise to where it is now. 

(I just gave two links to what appear to be the same statistic from the same governmental report, but while they agree on the general trend there’s a lot of variation in the statistics. For example, the Washington Post has it at 85% in 2000 while Albany University has it at 95% in 2000. Strange, but it doesn’t matter very much to the point I’m trying to make.)

Despite the fact that I was wrong about the increase in plea bargaining being a recent phenomenon, it was nevertheless definitely not a part of normal jurisprudence at the time of the Constitution. Once you start to dig into the history of it, it turns out that it wasn’t practiced with any frequency until “well into the nineteenth century“ and it didn’t come to the “attention of the public” until the 1920s. When “the general reaction-of scholars, of the press, and of the crime commissions themselves [which had publicized the practice]-was disapproval.” On top of this, apparently as late as 1958 it looked like the Supreme Court might declare the practice to be illegal, and while it didn’t, it didn’t formally sanction the practice until 1970. And while it seems normal now, this is all a deviation. The original guidelines for “safe jurisprudence” (similar to the rules for safe flying) included lots of rules about trial by jury, how the jury should work, the rights of the accused, what was and wasn’t permissible evidence, etc. But, at some point, after the system had been working well for possibly as long as a century, someone came along and said, “Wouldn’t it be easier if we skipped the trial and you just agreed to plead guilty to X, and in exchange we’ll make sure that your punishment is only Y?” And it was easier that once. In fact it was probably eminently sensible. But now, a century or more later, the original concept of trial by jury is used, at most 5% of the time (here’s yet another set of numbers from the NYT saying it’s 3% of federal cases and 6% of state cases) and the deviation has been made into the norm.

Why hasn’t this deviation been corrected? Probably because it only harms (or is perceived to harm) the powerless. Insofar as plea deals (and the associated practice of charge stacking) are bad they’re only bad for potential criminals. Not necessarily a coalition which is essential to anyone staying in power (see my review of The Dictator’s Handbook) and possibly a coalition whose support you would actively avoid.

The question of who the deviation harms is an important one, and comes up again when discussing my other example, though in a more complicated way. What is this example, you ask? It’s the current and growing practice of ignoring immigration laws. As with plea bargaining it’s somewhat difficult to tell exactly when or how this deviation started, but it’s easy enough to imagine why. Immigration enforcement is difficult, with lots of areas of questionable morality, and hard choices that have to be made. Still the current state has not existed for all that long. While the first sanctuary city was Berkeley in 1971, and a few other cities adopted that designation in the 1980s, most cities and states didn’t get serious about it until the 2010s. Meanwhile in the 90s there was serious concern about the state of US immigration policy. From Wikipedia:

The U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, led by former Rep. Barbara Jordan, ran from 1990 to 1997. The Commission covered many facets of immigration policy, but started from the perception that the “credibility of immigration policy can be measured by a simple yardstick: people who should get in, do get in; people who should not get in, are kept out; and people who are judged deportable are required to leave”. From there, in a series of four reports, the commission looked at all aspects of immigration policy. In the first, it found that enforcement was lax and needed improvement on the border and internally. For internal enforcement, it recommended that an automated employment verification system be created to enable employers to distinguish between legal and illegal workers. The second report discussed legal immigration issues and suggested that immediate family members and skilled workers receive priority. The third report covered refugee and asylum issues. Finally, the fourth report reiterated the major points of the previous reports and the need for a new immigration policy. Few of these suggestions were implemented.

The yardstick mentioned in the article could be used in a Trump campaign ad, and indeed last year Trump put out a presidential message honoring Barbara Jordan, which upset numerous people since Jordan was a black female Democrat. It would certainly be hard to imagine someone similarly situated today being a Trump supporter, or even making similar recommendations. Indeed these days, many people consider it inappropriate to even use the word illegal. But, beyond what I’ve said so far, I don’t think it’s worth going into a deep dive on how this is a deviation which has been normalized, since I suspect you either already entirely agree with me or are never going to agree, but I would like to look at who it harms.

I said earlier that the harms of this normalization are more complicated. In particular there are a lot of fairly powerless people who are helped, and indeed that’s a good argument for the continuance of the practice. But beyond that there are also a lot of powerful people who benefit as well, and that, more than the powerless people it helps, is why it continues. As I pointed out in a previous post, other than Trump and a handful of other politicians, the lax enforcement of immigration is something which is supported by nearly every member in congress despite a majority of actual voters being against it.  The harm, or perceived harm, all falls, once again, on a group of people who have largely been without power, that is until Trump came along. Which is to say even if you don’t see any other harms from this particular normalization of deviance, it probably pushed Trump over the top in the last election…

Finally when we’re talking about deviations being normalized it’s hard not to turn our minds towards behaviors formerly classified as deviant. The entire culture war revolves around this process, and obviously there are quite a few people who believe that quite a few activities should not have been normalized. That “progress” is just another word for the greatest “normalization of deviance” of all. There are of course an equal if not larger number of people (depending on the country) who think this is ridiculous. It would be nice if sheer numbers could decide the issue, but I don’t think they can. All of these issues remain contentious, but, for the moment, let’s assume that in addition to being (at one point) labeled as deviations, that they are actual deviations. What would this mean? In the story I started with, that deviation almost led to a fatal crash. Is that also what we should be worried about here? Perhaps, perhaps not. The modern world is very different from the world of even 50 years ago, accordingly I would never claim that the normalization of these particular deviations will inevitably result in a “crash”. They may in fact be desirable in our current situation. Still, as I have repeatedly pointed out, there just might have been a reason for declaring these behaviors “deviant” beyond just massive historical bigotry. 

If we were to systematize all of this, you could imagine that things might operate in a cycle. Some “bad thing” happens, and as a result rules are put into place to ensure that particular “bad thing” doesn’t happen again. Initially, when the memory of the “bad thing” is still very fresh, those preventative rules would carry a great deal of weight, people would be eager to follow them, and they certainly wouldn’t be viewed as a burden. Gradually, however, the connection between the rules and the “bad thing” would fade in the minds of those forced to follow the rules. These rules would start to appear more onerous and less necessary. As this process continues, eventually rules start being broken. Initially this rule breaking wouldn’t cause any harm, and the longer things went without any harm the more the process of rule-breaking accelerates. All of this would continue until eventually, the “bad thing” the rules were trying to prevent, happened again. Naturally the rules would be reimplemented (and perhaps strengthened) and the cycle would begin anew. 

I’m obviously not the first nor the last to suggest that history, behaviors, and events might be cyclical, but my particular suggestion would be that while this is certainly true, it is also horribly complicated. Yes, history does move in cycles, many, many cycles which overlap, feed on one another and are weak or strong at various times and places. For the next couple of posts I’m going to examine a couple of other cycles and look at which might be strong or weak in our own day and age. As a teaser, in my next post I’m going to talk about how a nation would successfully implement communism. 


There might be some who argue this entire blog is a normalization of deviance! 

*Something*

*Something* 

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The Rise of a Civic Religion

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I.

If you’ve been following along for any length of time, you know that I live in Utah, a state which has a number of interesting qualities, particularly when it comes to politics. To begin with, as you’re all probably aware, Utah is not a swing state, its electoral votes have gone to the Republican Presidential candidate in every election since 1968. Now, Trump may change all of that (though based on the current crop of democractic nominees I’m guessing that he won’t) but Trump’s standing in Utah is a topic for another time. As an additional peculiarity, and something that most people don’t know, Utah is the only state where Clinton came in third place to Perot in 1992. But of all the political oddities peculiar to Utah, the one I want to focus on is lawn signs.

If I’ve done my job right, you are now overcome with curiosity and wondering what possible peculiarity there might be when it comes to Utah and lawn signs. Well to begin with, after considering everything I’ve already said, one would naturally assume that if there was any place where you would expect to see lawn signs for the Republican Presidential Candidate it would be in Utah. And yet, at least in Salt Lake, I not only don’t remember any signs for Trump in 2016. I very clearly remember there being no signs for McCain in 2008 when he was running against Obama. Why, in one of the most reliably Republican states in the country, would there be no lawn signs for the Republican Nominee? 

One possibility is that I’m just wrong, there were lawn signs and I just didn’t see them or don’t remember them.

Or perhaps, knowing how solidly Republican Utah was, the campaign didn’t bother to send any lawn signs to Utah. But if that’s the case why were there plenty of Obama and Clinton lawn signs? Wouldn’t the same not-worth-fighting-over logic apply?

Maybe it’s the fact that I’m in Salt Lake, which is actually pretty blue. Sure, the state is pretty Republican, but perhaps Salt Lake City might as well be San Francisco. Well, if we look at the actual numbers we find that Obama did in fact win Salt Lake County, by the massive margin of 0.1%, 49.2% to 49.1%. In 2016 the margin was greater, 41.99% to 32.96% but that’s still a fair amount of Trump supporters, for there to not be a single yard sign.

As you can tell, none of these three theories seems very compelling, at least to me, but there is another theory that I like better. A theory which combines signalling, with what it’s acceptable to signal. If we start from a very naive view of things, we might expect that the number of yard signs would be proportional to the percentage of eventual voters, but this is obviously not the case. In San Francisco, of those who voted for either Clinton or Trump, one in ten voted for Trump, but I would be willing to bet a very large sum of money that one in ten election signs in San Francisco were not similarly in support of Trump.

If visible signs of support are not proportional to eventual vote totals what does determine people’s desire to signal and the acceptability of such signalling? You might think that if each candidate will eventually get a roughly equal number of votes, that the visible signs of support would also be equal, and that from this point of rough equilibrium, visible support would drop off faster than actual support as one candidate ended up in the minority. That basically, as one candidate’s majority becomes greater and greater, signalling support for the minority candidate has less and less utility. But in the example I just gave from Salt Lake City, McCain and Obama’s eventual support was as close to even as you can get, and yet I would swear that I didn’t see a single McCain campaign sign. Is it possible that it’s disproportionately beneficial to signal support for a Democratic candidate and disproportionately harmful to signal support for a Republican candidate? 

I’m well aware that this is mostly based on a single observation, so one point of this post is to see if anyone else has a similar experience to mine, where you live in a city with lots of Republican voters, but very little visible evidence of these voters? I suspect there are a lot of examples of this. I would even go so far as to say that I’d be surprised if anyone’s experiences didn’t match my own. That is, the percentage of visible support being less than the percentage of actual support given as votes. Beyond the reluctance of people on the right to visibly signal, even while in the majority, as I described above, I have also noticed the opposite situation with those on the left, actual eagerness to signal, even while in the minority, and I would be curious to hear about other people’s experiences. Assuming that all of the foregoing is correct, why might this be?

II.

As part of my answer I’d like to start by relating yet another observation, this one much more recent. As I mentioned in the post just before this one I spent the first few days of August at a gaming convention. (Which convention is probably easy enough to figure out, but I shall leave it unnamed for a variety of reasons.) I’ve been attending the same convention for many years, and for as long as I can remember people have been attaching ribbons to the bottoms of their badges. Generally these ribbons represented one or the other niches at the convention. As an example, a fan of Settlers of Catan might have a ribbon each for brick, lumber, wool, grain, and ore. Last year I noticed some new, rainbow colored ribbons. (You can probably already guess the nature of the ribbons.) One said “Gaymer”, and for those who weren’t actually gay, there was an “Ally” ribbon. Somewhat subconsciously I added these as another niche. There were fans of Settlers of Catan and there were people who wanted to combine LGBT advocacy with their gaming. 

When I attended this year, I quickly realized that I had been wrong. Last year, I saw just a few people wearing these ribbons and while I hesitate to put forth any hard numbers, my guess would be that, at most, 5% of badges had one of these ribbons last year. And, as I said, I subconsciously added it as another niche.

This year, the number was much higher, again I’m reluctant to put forth a hard number, but it could have easily been 25%, and perhaps higher. Also this year a new variety of ribbon had been added which allowed people to announce their preferred pronouns. (I was surprised by the number of They/Them ribbons I saw.) Once again I’m dealing with only a small amount of data, but at a minimum I’m already curious about what this percentage is going to look like next year. 

All of this is to say that it seems unlikely that the actual number of gay gamers and their allies has quintipled since last year. No it’s more likely that the phenomenon of rainbow ribbon badges and republican candidate lawn signs are actually similar, that both come down to signalling, and what it’s acceptable to signal, or more accurately what it’s unacceptable to signal. As an example of what I mean, imagine that I printed up some ribbons that said “Straight” or “Not an Ally” or “Gamers opposed to Same Sex Marriage”. (That last one wouldn’t fit on a badge, and I think the difficulty of signalling opposition illustrates my point.) But to return to my point can you imagine how unacceptable it would be to signal opposition to LGBT tolerance? And, in fact, I think this leads to the point I’ve already noted, that not only would it be entirely unacceptable to wear any of the ribbons just mentioned, that it’s becoming increasingly unacceptable to not have an “Ally” ribbon showing your support. 

It’s not hard to imagine that this might happen at a gaming convention which mostly skews younger and “woker”, but I believe it’s happening more widely, and that’s why I started out by talking about the lawn signs. This is not only, I would submit, an example of the same thing, but furthermore an example illustrating how long this has been going on for and in places you wouldn’t expect. To be clear, what I’m arguing is that just as it is becoming increasingly unacceptable to not signal support for LGBT issues, that it was already unacceptable for many years, even in very conservative states to visibly signal support for Republican Presidential Candidates. Once again, why might this be?

III.

On one level the answer to this question is that both stories are just examples of the ongoing social progress that has been happening for decades if not centuries, but I find that particular answer lacking. In the first example, it’s not that people are changing how they vote it’s that they’re changing what they’re willing to visibly signal. In the second example, we see a trend (which to be fair, may or may not continue) where once again people expect certain signalling above and beyond someone’s actual behavior. In other words, in both cases, we’re not seeing “progress” in behaviors or progress in what’s allowed, in part because both of these have just about topped out, we’re seeing “progress” through an increasingly unified idea of what attitudes and beliefs it’s acceptable to display openly. That most individuals have moved beyond expecting to be allowed to do and believe certain things, to fashioning a set of attitudes and beliefs which they expect everyone to adopt.

Thus far none of this is particularly new or surprising. Conservatives and other people worried about overactive political correctness have long warned about this transition from allowing people to do certain, previously taboo, things to demanding that everyone enthusiastically support people doing these certain things. But I want to go beyond just identifying the trend, or expressing short-term alarm to categorizing the trend as something specific, consequential and long-term.

A few posts ago I touched on Scott Alexander’s idea that social justice might be a new civic religion. For this to be the case, if social justice is going to supplant the old civic religion of patriotism, it has to be growing. It has to be vibrant and powerful. It has to be able to sweep the old civic religion away. It has to be able to dominate the “signaling space”. In both of the examples I provided this is what appears to be happening. That what people support has decoupled from what people decide to signal. That these examples illustrate not a change in inner beliefs or behavior, but the rise of a different public dogma or in other words a new civic religion.

Now perhaps you think I’m going to far, and certainly there’s a lot of discussion about what makes something a religion, and wading into that is way beyond the scope of this post, but the expectation that everyone will outwardly display specific beliefs has to be a big part of it, particularly in the case of civic religions.

Pulling everything together, I increasingly agree with Alexander that social justice is a nascent civil religion, that the lawn signs and the badge ribbons should be considered as evidence that something new is dominating the signalling space and that these are examples of the presence and growth of this religion, a different, more extreme, and more cohesive phenomenon than the generic social progress we’ve seen previously. 

Before moving on, I should mention that I’m fully aware that just as one swallow does not a summer make, neither does two examples a civic religion make. But my guess is that at this point you’re in one of two categories. Either you can think of a dozen other examples of this and you’re nodding along in agreement, or you’ve completely dismissed my point as conservative paranoia. And in neither case will providing more examples move the needle very much. Assuming that you’re one of the people who’s nodding along, the next question, once we’ve figured out why it’s happening, is to ask what happens next?

IV.

If you are in the “conservative paranoia” camp, and you’ve made it this far. I’ll start off with the possibility you might actually like. It’s possible that what happens next is that, by degrees, we enter a social justice utopia. That all the things people hope for come to pass as people “join” the new religion. That systemic racism is done away with, along with all other forms of bigotry. That gaps in pay and education between minorities and genders vanish. That when everyone is an “Ally” there are no LGBT issues because that distinction no longer makes any sense. That everyone is treated with fairness and kindness and as a result global peace and prosperity will reign. That, in essence, I end up being wrong about everything. This would be great. I could stop writing, buy a nice recliner and finally catch up on all the TV shows people keep recommending to me. Unfortunately, despite my desire to finally watch all six seasons of the Sopranos, nothing about how events are playing out leads me to believe that this possibility has any chance of happening.

Another possibility would be some kind of fusion between the new civic religion and the old, that patriotism and the 4th of July meld with social justice and gay pride to form some hybrid civic religion, better than the old civic religion, or maybe just able to thread whatever needle we’re going through now, and get us to something resembling normality after Trump, but if anything this seems less likely than the previous possibility, given how irreconcilable the differences between the two sides appear to be. Also while I’m not an expert on the rise of new civic religions, I don’t get the sense that “peaceful fusion with the old religion” is something that ever happens. Part of the problem is a relative paucity of examples. I think historically actual religions were the norm and that replacing an actual religion with a civic religion is a relatively new innovation, but insofar as we have examples, most of them have been bloody. Which takes us to the next possibility.

Having talked a lot about possibilities which are unlikely, let’s turn to a possibility that seems more and more likely. Widespread and perhaps even bloody conflict between the two civic religions, old and new. Obviously on some level this is bad, but an argument could be made, that on net, the outcome in its totality might be good. I was having a discussion with a friend recently on this very topic where he made just such an argument. In the course of the discussion, I had brought up previous upheavals which occurred as countries switched civic religions. In particular the decades of revolution that France went through as it, arguably, switched from the civil religion of the monarchy (or the empire) to the civil religion of liberté, égalité, fraternité. Revolutions in which hundreds of thousands of people died (millions if you include the Napoleonic Wars). My friend argued that as bad as all this was that in the long run the French were better off going through all of it than remaining under the monarchy as it stood in 1788. Perhaps this is true, though I’m not the best person to ask. I have a tendency to give fewer points for historical wrongs than other individuals. Also this imagines that there were only those two options, but in reality there were lots of options, and among all the various options I suspect that there were several which would have given them the same amount of liberté, égalité, fraternité with less violence. 

Which is to say, even if conflict is inevitable, it would be nice if we could minimize the actual bloodshed and violence. Given that conflict seems to have already begun this is the course I’m continually advocating for, pointing out that this may require us to end up with two civic religions, which are separated in some fashion. To me this seems markedly better than re-enacting any of the revolutions of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. But in order to do this, I think it’s necessary, first of all, to slow down the pace of change, something the adherents of social justice seem disinclined to consider.

Of course, as I alluded to just now, all conflicts eventually end, and usually (though not always) one side is victorious. What happens if the religion of social justice is eventually victorious? It is certainly possible that conflict, even very violent conflict, could end up being a roundabout way to arrive at the first possibility, the social justice utopia. That in the end, just like the French (if my friend is to be believed) we’ll be better off, despite whatever blood that gets spilt. But we should also consider the possibility that if social justice is triumphant we will end up with something closer to a dystopia instead. Recall that both facism and communism were essentially civic religions. And that communism, at least (but perhaps facism also) promised justice. It wasn’t social justice, it was economic justice, but how sure are we that if the civic religion of social justice ends up triumphing (with or without conflict) that it won’t fail in a similar fashion? In other words, one possibility is that the new religion does wipe out the old one, but that this ends up being a very bad thing.

V.

In the end, the question of whether we’re witnessing the rise of a new civic religion is an important one. Because if we are then the best historical evidence would indicate that such transitions are rarely accomplished without extreme upheaval. Looking back, I probably should have spent more time discussing historical examples of religious transitions, rather than spending so much time on a couple of marginal examples of the current evidence. (Though I find both examples fascinating.) And perhaps I will dive more into the historical record in some future post. Though I can already tell that it will offer very little comfort.

As one final possibility, there is, as always, a very good chance that I’m wrong, that we aren’t currently in the beginnings of a conflict between the old civic religion of patriotism and a new one of social justice. But if I am wrong about things, my guess is that it’s because I’ve vastly undercounted the number of new civic religions, that rather than one new civic religion we might actually end up with dozens, all in competition. Certainly we’ve seen evidence of that happening in the past when the previous civic religion began to run out of steam. Toss in the internet and social media this time around and we might end up with a lot more of it. And while I personally think that one in particular deserves most of the attention, it’s hard to say what will happen.

I guess the one thing I didn’t spend a lot of time was the weakness of the old civic religion, so let me share one brief, final anecdote. On Sunday I happened to be rewatching The Avengers. (Yes, I know I could be watching the Sopranos instead, but I can rewatch The Avengers while doing something else.) And there’s a scene where Agent Coulson mentions to Steve Rogers that they have a new uniform for him, and Rogers responds by asking, “Isn’t the Stars and Stripes a little old fashioned?” I remember being struck by this question, since it gets to the root of the problem. When even Captain America is questioning the power of the flag you know that the current civic religion is getting near the end of its lifespan. And it’s imminent death leaves us with some very important questions to consider, perhaps the most important facing our country right now:

  • How will it die?
  • Is that death going to be violent?
  • And, what comes after? Will it be a utopia or a dystopia?

As you can probably guess, going to gaming conventions to make sweeping predictions about colored ribbons is not cheap. If you’d care to assist me in that endeavor consider donating.


Books I Finished in July (With One Podcast Series)

If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast here. Or if you want to listen to just this post:

Or download the MP3


I was off at a gaming convention all of last week, so I’m somewhat behind on things, but here are reviews of all the books I finished in July (with one podcast series). I started the month with:


The Blade Itself (1 of 3 First Law Trilogy)

By: Joe Abercrombie

560 pages

Format: Audiobook

Rating: A

Who should read this book?

If fantasy novels are your thing you should check out this series.

If you like George R. R. Martin’s a Song of Ice and Fire, and despair of it ever being completed this is a pretty good substitute.

Representative passage:

I’ve fought ten single combats and I won them all, but I fought on the wrong side and for all the wrong reasons. I’ve been ruthless, and brutal, and a coward. I’ve stabbed men in the back, burned them, drowned them, crushed them with rocks, killed them asleep, unarmed, or running away. I’ve run away myself more than once. I’ve pissed myself with fear. I’ve begged for my life. I’ve been wounded, often, and badly, and screamed and cried like a baby whose mother took her tit away. I’ve no doubt the world would be a better place if I’d been killed years ago, but I haven’t been, and I don’t know why.

He looked down at his hands, pink and clean on the stone. “There are few men with more blood on their hands than me. None, that I know of. The Bloody-Nine they call me, my enemies, and there’s a lot of ’em. Always more enemies, and fewer friends. Blood gets you nothing but more blood. It follows me now, always, like my shadow, and like my shadow I can never be free of it. I should never be free of it. I’ve earned it. I’ve deserved it. I’ve sought it out. Such is my punishment.

Thoughts

I quite enjoyed this book, it reminded me of all the reasons why I continue to read fiction, despite the fact that it doesn’t help me with my writing at all. In other words, most of my reasons for reading fiction are selfish, things like escapism and enjoyment, that said, I fancy there are some noble or at least productive reasons in there as well, they just escape me at the moment.

This novel inevitably gets compared to A Song of Ice and Fire, or more likely Game of Thrones, since that’s how most people refer to the series these days. I can entirely see why that is. It has a similar feel, though, at least in the first book, there is significantly less sex, and the violence is probably tamer as well. Outside of that though, it has the same great characterization of very flawed individuals set in a gritty fantasy world. I particularly like the character of Sand dan Glokta, the former dashing swordsman, who was captured and subsequently tortured during a previous war and is now crippled, and, perhaps ironically, a torturer himself.

It’s been quite a while since I read Game of Thrones (which is actually just the first book in George R. R. Martin’s, A Song of Ice and Fire series) so it’s hard to say which book I actually enjoyed more, probably Game of Thrones, but given that Martin is probably never going to finish his series and Abercrombie is already done with this one, I think I’d be more likely to recommend Abercrombie over Martin to someone who had read neither, even without having finished the second and third books.

And I guess as long as we’re on the subject I should stick in my George R. R. Martin rant…

Since time immemorial, when a book was being turned into a movie, or a tv show. You could read the book and be ahead of the game. Not only would you get to the end faster, but you almost certainly knew about things that would never get included in the screen translation. To be frank, by reading the book you were better than all those poor schlubs who only watched the TV show. And Martin, by allowing the TV show to get ahead of the books, has broken this sacred pact, a pact that has existed since the dawn of time. Now I’m sure HBO bears some responsibility for starting the show before the series was done (much to the detriment of the final season as I understand it) but mostly I blame Martin.

Criticisms

I don’t have a lot of criticisms, what I mostly have are worries. He introduces quite a few mysteries and hints at a far deeper world than what gets shown in this first book. Whenever you encounter something like this you hope that these mysteries are eventually explained, and that when that happens the explanation is satisfactory. While it’s pretty rare for there to be no attempt at an explanation, it’s very common for the explanation to be unsatisfactory. Star Wars is a great example of what I’m talking about, where an amazing and mysterious universe is hinted at in “A New Hope” only to be revealed as kind of lame and boring in the prequels. As far as this series, I guess we’ll have to see. 

Books I would read before this one:

I’m always going to say that, if you haven’t already, you should read Tolkien before reading anything else in the fantasy genre. But beyond that this is a pretty good place to start if you’re interested in seeing what an epic fantasy series looks like.


Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War

By: Wilfred Reilly

256 pages

Format: Audiobook

Rating: B

Who should read this book?

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that most of the people who should read this book won’t. In particular I think college administrators should read definitely read this book.

Representative passage:

Probably the most famous Trump-related “hate crime” took place on December 1, 2016, when a young Muslim student claimed that she was attacked on a New York City subway train by “drunken, hate-spewing white men shouting, “Donald Trump!” As we have already seen, she made the whole thing up.

Thoughts

Interestingly enough this book was evidently written and sent to the publisher before that most famous of all hate crime hoaxes, the Jussie Smollett hoax, but it does a great job of showing that Smollett is just the most famous of recent hoaxes, but not even close to being the first. In fact the list of hoaxes and their description is kind of insane, and you come away with two somewhat conflicting thoughts. First, that the perpetrators of these hoaxes should be punished more harshly, and second, that a significant number of them probably have severe mental problems.

For those who hang around certain corners of the internet the fact that there are hate hoaxes is not news (though if you get your news exclusively from the New York Times, it might be) but still the sheer number of hoaxes Reilly ended up covering was impressive. As you might imagine many of these hoaxes took place on college campuses, and one of the chief morals of the book would be that if some dramatic act of hate is reported on a college campus, you can be almost certain it’s a hoax, and that the perpetrator is either the person reporting it, or that it will turn out to be some kind of art installation. (That’s not a joke several of the hoaxes fall into that category.)

Looking at all reported hate crimes, Reilly estimates that probably 15-50% will turn out to be hoaxes. That’s a pretty big deal, and even at 15% it would make sense to start out skeptical anytime you hear about a reported hate crime. Particularly since it would seem (though there was no data on this specifically) that hate crimes you hear about are more likely to be hoaxes than the set of all reported hate crimes.

As I already said, I was familiar with the fact that many reported hate crimes end up being hoaxes. I was not familiar with how high the percentage was, or much variety there was, indeed the most interesting thing Reilly brought to my attention was that individuals on the right end of the political spectrum are getting in on the action as well. That despite the books subtitle, “How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War” increasingly both sides are selling a fake war. If anything this makes the subject more alarming. If it’s just one side then you would think it would be more easy to identify and counteract. If both sides are doing it, then it begins to appear that this is just the way the game is now being played. Which is not a good development

Criticisms

Reilly has kind of a snarky writing style, and that began to wear after a while. Additionally given that the subject is likely to be controversial, I feel like being snarky is going to give people an easy excuse to dismiss it out of hand as being unserious. This would be unfortunate, because it appears clear that it’s a very serious subject and a very serious trend.

Also, this is probably one of those books that could be a long article without losing very much. So much of the content is reciting the details of the individual hoaxes, and while these are titillating, after the first 10 or so, the utility of each additional description starts to go down. But perhaps it takes a mountain of evidence to overcome the default assumption that hate hoaxes are rare to non-existent. 

If you were going to take only one thing from the book:

When you hear of some dramatic hate crime, with no witnesses other than the victim, it’s understandable, even rational to be suspicious that it might be a hoax.


The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics

By: Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith

352 pages

Format: Audiobook

Rating: B+

Who should read this book?

If you’re at all interested in political science, you’ll definitely enjoy this deep dive into the mechanisms of power.

Moreover, if you’re just cynical in general this book is right up your alley.

Representative passage:

The czar fell once there was no one to stop the revolution. Louis XVI suffered much the same fate in the French Revolution. Successful leaders must learn the lesson of these examples and put raising revenue and paying supporters above all else. Consider Robert Mugabe’s success in staying on as Zimbabwe’s president. The economy has collapsed in Zimbabwe thanks to Mugabe’s terrible policies. Starvation is common and epidemics of cholera regularly sweep the country. Mugabe “succeeds” because he understands that it does not matter what happens to the people provided that he makes sure to pay the army. And despite regular media speculation, so far he has always managed to do so and to keep himself in office well into his eighties. He has reduced a once thriving agricultural exporting nation into one that depends on foreign aid. Mugabe is certainly horrible for what he’s done to the people he rules, but he is a master of the rules to rule by. Where policy matters most, when it comes to paying off cronies, he has delivered. That is why no one has deposed him. 

Thoughts

This book is basically a modern day version of Machiavelli. In The Prince, Machiavelli holds up Cesare Borgia as an excellent example of someone who embodies the principles he’s espousing. In The Dictator’s Handbook, as you can see from the passage I just quoted, they appear to offer up Robert Mugabe as one of the best examples of someone who understands their principles. Which is tragic, but no less an accurate description of the world, for all its tragedy. The question which follows from all this and which the book attempts to answer and also its subtitle: Why is bad behavior almost always good politics?

The framework which underpins their answer, and most of the book, consists of dividing people into three categories:

The nominal selectorate, or interchangeables: These are the people who in theory have some say in choosing the leader of a country. In the US it’s every person of voting age. And it ends up being a fairly large group in most countries, given that even fairly extreme dictators generally cloak things with an air of popular legitimacy. But this group only selects leaders in theory, in practice they’re mostly powerless.

The real selectorate, or influentials: In the US this is the people who actually vote rather than just being eligible to vote. In China it’s all the voting members of the Communist party. In some countries it’s more fuzzy and frequently shifts.

The winning coalition, or the essentials: This is the minimum number of people the leader needs to stay in power. In the US it’s pretty big, though as we’ve seen it often ends up being less than a majority. In dictatorships where the only thing required to maintain power is to keep a few high level military leaders happy, the essentials may consist of only a small handful of people.

This is a fairly simple framework but from it, all sorts of bad behavior can be described. I can only scratch the surface, but one of the most common examples is the bad behavior enabled by a large supply of natural resources. The Handbook points out that if you have abundant natural resources, it’s easy to extract the money necessary to keep your essentials happy, and you can therefore keep the number of truly essential people small. On the other hand, if you don’t have a source of money that you can easily control you still need money to keep the essentials happy, but in this case you have to resort to taxation, which means you have to have a productive populace, and this is best accomplished by giving them a certain amount of freedom. Accordingly market reforms often happen not because a dictator is particularly enlightened, but because there’s no other way for him to get the money necessary to keep the essentials happy.

This framework is pretty powerful, and as I said, it’s only possible to scratch the surface, particularly in a blog post, but I would argue that, despite writing a whole book about the model, the authors ignore some of its implications, particularly as it applies to modern democracies. Which takes me to the next section.

Criticisms

Having a framework for understanding why dictators behave badly was useful, but mostly in an academic sense, given that you already know they’re going to behave badly even without understanding why. It’s when the framework is applied to our current situation that I think it becomes interesting. As one example, Democrats and liberals are adamant in claiming that they support immigration and oppose voter ID laws for entirely moral reasons, but after reading Dictator’s Handbook it seems more likely that they’re doing it to shift the percentage of “influentials” in a way that favors them. Republicans are fighting these things for exactly the same reason, only they’re trying to protect the percentage of influentials currently in their camp.

Despite that fact that the underlying motivation for both parties is to say in power, the Democrats have, cleverly, made their motives seem pure and altruistic while the Republicans have ended up being labeled as horrible racists.

If you were going to take only one thing from the book:

People in power don’t care about ruling well they care about staying in power.


Fall of Civilizations (Podcast)

Hosted By: I’m actually not sure

8 hours (so far)

Format: Podcast

Rating: A

Who should listen to this podcast?

Given the importance of the subject material I honestly think everyone should listen to it. Plus it’s fascinating. 

Beyond that if you like tales of disaster and collapse, and imagining the end of civilizations, this is a great podcast.

Representative passage:

A cascading failure can occur in any system of interconnected parts when one part of the system fails. Other pieces of the system must compensate and this in turn overloads them. Nodes throughout the system fail one after another. Until the whole infrastructure grinds to a halt. One bridge leading into the temple complex of Angkor Thom tells a chilling story of what must have happened during that time. The first thing we notice is that this bridge appears to have been hastily constructed. With none of the refinement of the nearby constructions and when we look closer we see that it was built out of building material, recycled from nearby temples. Some of its stones show the intricate carvings of a temple wall, but mismatched and jumbled in this new structure. The fact that the Khmer people had to hastily build this bridge shows that something had gone terribly wrong with their water control system and the fact that they had to reuse stones from their most sacred and revered buildings shows that the situation was desperate.

Thoughts

Thus far the podcast has covered six civilizations. I’ll just briefly talk about the first two:

Roman Britain: I think a lot of people are familiar with the basic outline of this collapse, but it’s a story with a fair amount of surprises. Perhaps the biggest thing people are unaware of is how gradual the collapse was, but then how deep it went before things started turning around. My question is, at what point did people realize that they were on a downward trend, one that was going to last for hundreds of years? I assume that at some point they did, but that it was well after the collapse had started. 

The Late Bronze Age Collapse: This happened around 1100 BC, and if you haven’t heard about it, it’s one of the great mysteries of the ancient world. If you were only going to listen to one episode it should probably be this one. The historical record is tantalizingly thin, we know there was a massive invasion by the “sea people” but why they invaded, and from where continues to prove elusive. But at the time these invasions caused the complete collapse of every nation existing at the time except for two, Assyria and Egypt, and Egypt was badly weakened.

Beyond these first two the podcast has so far covered:

  • The Mayan Collapse
  • The Greenland Vikings
  • The Khmer Empire
  • Easter Island (here he says there was no collapse they were just devastated by European contact.)

Criticisms

This is one of those rare cases where I kind of wish it was longer. Also he seems to mostly be going for an overarching theme that civilizations collapse because of climate change, I would prefer that he either make it less a morality fable about modern problems or that he go in the other direction and make as many connections between the past and now as possible.

If you were going to take only one thing from the podcast:

As civilizations advance they accumulate complexity, and eventually that complexity is their undoing.


The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing

By: Mario Kondō

224 pages

Format: Hardback

Rating: B

Who should read this book?

If you’ve heard of Mario Kondō or the Konmari method, and wanted to try it, but need an inspirational speech before you do, this is that speech.

If you want to see what all the fuss is about you should also read this book.

Representative passage:

One of the homework assignments I give my clients is to appreciate their belongs. For example, I urge them to try saying, “Thank you for keeping me warm all day,” when they hang up their clothes after returning home. Or, when removing their accessories, I suggest they say, “Thank you for making me beautiful,” and when putting their bag in the closet, to say, “It’s thanks to you that I got so much work done today.” Express your appreciation to every item that supported you during the day. If you find this hard to do daily, then at least do it whenever you can.

Thoughts

I’d be a little bit surprised if you hadn’t heard of this book. It’s been quite the phenomenon, and I’m not sure what I can add to the discussion at this point. Personally I enjoyed the book, but for me reading it was less about learning how the system worked and more about being talked into trying the system out. And indeed the system itself is pretty simple. 1) Gather everything you have in a particular category. 2) examine each item in turn, if the item doesn’t give you a feeling of joy, get rid of it. The rest of the book consists of cheerleading for the system. Which takes me to…

Criticisms

This is another book which probably could have been shorter. As I pointed out the actual system is pretty simple, and the rest of the book is taken up with long passages of minutiae, interspersed with bits that essentially describe Kondo’s spirituality. The top review on Amazon describes it pretty well:

Here’s what the book says: touch every item in your home and if you “love it” then keep it. If you don’t get that warm and fuzzy feeling of love, throw it away. There. Now you don’t have to read it. Seriously, de-cluttering and organizing can have a huge positive impact on life. But the way this book approaches the topic is so silly and juvenile that I don’t understand why it’s a best seller. People: use your common sense and toss the things you don’t use that are cluttering up your life. Ok?

I wouldn’t be that harsh, and I would replace the word “silly” with “simple” and the word “juvenile” with the word “spiritualistic” but beyond that, it’s a decent summary.

If you were going to take only one thing from the book:

Organization and tidying work best when you do everything in a category all at once.


Wild at Heart Revised and Updated: Discovering the Secret of a Man’s Soul (Religious)

By: John Eldredge 

272 pages

Format: Audiobook

Rating: B+

Who should read this book?

If people frequently describe you as a nice guy, and you think that might be a bad thing, but you’re not sure what to do instead, then this would probably be a good book for you.

If you’re a Christian male, looking for advice on being a better man, this is a pretty good place to get that advice.

Representative passage:

One more thing, don’t even think about going into battle alone. Don’t even try to take the masculine journey without at least one man by your side. Yes, there are times a man must face the battle alone in the wee hours of the morn, and fight with all he’s got, but don’t make that a lifestyle of isolation. This may be our weakest point. As David Smith points out in the Friendless American Male, “One serious problem is the friendless condition of the average American male. Men find it hard to accept that they need the fellowship of other men.” Thanks to the men’s movement the church understands now that a man needs other men, but what we’ve offered is another two dimensional solution: accountability groups, or partners. Uh! That sounds so old covenant, you’re really a fool and you’re just waiting to rush into sin so we’d better post a guard by you to keep you in line.

We don’t need accountability groups. We need fellow warriors, someone to fight alongside, someone to watch our back! A young man just stopped me on the street to say, “I feel surrounded by enemies and I’m all alone.” The whole crisis in masculinity today, has come because we no longer have a warrior culture, a place for men to learn to fight, like men. We don’t need a meeting a really nice guys. We need a gathering of really dangerous men! 

Thoughts

It seems like everyone agrees that men have a problem. But beyond that the two diagnoses seem to end up drawing exactly opposite conclusions: One side thinks there’s too much masculinity in the world and one side thinks there’s too little. This book is firmly on the side of there being too little, and if you’re not ready to at least entertain the idea that this is in fact the case, you should definitely not read this book. For myself I am not only willing to entertain the idea, I actually embrace it, particularly when it comes to the importance of fathers. 

Beyond that the book says that men need three things:

  1. A battle to fight
  2. An adventure to live
  3. A beauty to rescue

Toss in a strong dose of Christianity, and that’s pretty much the whole book. I imagine most people are either going to love it or hate it.

Criticisms

As you may or may not have gathered, I’m fairly Christian myself, though of a different denomination (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints vs. evangelical) than the author, and despite that I came away feeling that the book may have benefitted from fewer overt references to theology and the devil, but some of that may be because of the differences between my theology and the author’s. 

If you were going to take only one thing from the book:

The modern world is at war with masculinity, and that’s a bad thing.


A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History

By: Nicholas Wade

288 pages

Format: Audio w/ physical book for reference

Rating: A-

Who should read this book?

If you genuinely have an open mind, I think you would benefit from reading this book. 

Representative passage:

…On the basis of Pinker’s vast compilation of evidence, natural selection seems to have acted incessantly to soften the human temperament, from the earliest times until the most recent date for which there is meaningful data.

This is the conclusion that Pinker signals strongly to his readers. He notes that mice can be bread to be more aggressive in just five generations, evidence that the reverse process could occur just as speedily. He describes the human genes, such as the violence-promiting MAO-A mutation mentioned in chapter 3, that could easily be modulated so as to reduce aggressiveness. He mentions that violence is quite heritable, on the evidence from studies of twins, and so must have a genetic basis. He states that “nothing rules out the possibility that human populations have undergone some degree of biological evolution in recent millennia, or even centuries, long after races, ethnic groups, and nations diverged.”

But at the last moment, Pinker veers away from the conclusion… since many other traits have evolved more recently than that, why should human behavior be any exception? Well, says Pinker, it would be terribly inconvenient politically if this were so… 

Thoughts

This is one of those books that you can get in trouble for reading, and definitely get in trouble for writing. (Just ask Charles Murray.) Accordingly, I’m not going to go into a lot of detail. Briefly, this is one of those books that posits a genetic component to racial differences in intelligence. It’s a book that is very critical of the idea that race is a social construct. Beyond that Wade goes even farther to theorize that much of culture is genetically based. Which is not that crazy of an idea if you also accept his assertion that evolution has been recent, copious and regional. But this leads to the distressing conclusion (among many distressing conclusions) that it’s possible that some ethnic groups may be genetically better at things like democracy and the rule of law than other ethnic groups. In just a few sentences I’ve assembled a whole bucket of fairly incendiary claims, so I’ll leave it at that.

Criticisms

I don’t have a lot of criticisms of this book, I’m glad it was written. It was, perhaps, a little dry, but also it’s yet one more work, where I felt it actually could have benefited from being longer, particularly given how controversial the subject is. But for those inclined to criticize it, I doubt even a thousand more pages would make much of a difference.

If you were going to take only one thing from the book:

Evolution has been recent, copious and regional. Also race is real.


The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumphs

By: Ryan Holiday

224 pages

Format: Kindle

Rating: B+

Who should read this book?

If you’re looking for an introduction to Stoicism, you could do a lot worse. 

If you believe in the power of books to change your attitude and you need a better attitude, this book might do exactly that.

Representative passage:

Our perceptions determine, to an incredibly large degree, what we are and are not capable of. In many ways, they determine reality itself. When we believe in the obstacle more than in the goal, which will inevitably triumph?

Thoughts

From where I stand these days stoicism seems to be very much back in vogue, and Ryan Holiday has managed to maneuver himself into a position of being its chief evangelist. There’s a reason for this, he writes very compellingly on the subject. Also, while I imagine that Holiday, himself, might recommend going to the original sources first, like Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. Holiday is probably nearly as effective, and a whole lot more accessible. 

Criticisms

All of the above aside, you get the feeling that most of the things Holiday talks about have been well known for quite a while, and appeared in a lot of past self-help books. I think you’d be hard pressed to find something Holiday talks about which wasn’t also touched on in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. It just wasn’t specifically labeled as stoicism. All of which is to say that I think what’s going through a surge in popularity is the stoic label, but that stoic philosophy has never really been out of fashion. And that most of the stuff Holiday advocates is less revolutionary than people might think.

Also while the numerous anecdotes are nice, and a good way of imparting principles, I think the book leaned a little too much on the anecdotes, and could have done more to illustrate how someone today would apply stoic principles. I’m a big advocate of the position that ancient philosophy is still useful, but it may not always be immediately apparent how to make use of it in a modern context.

If you were going to take only one thing from the book:

Life is full of difficulties and we can only learn how to overcome those difficulties if we confront them and master them. Avoiding difficulties is the worst way to solve them.


Having tried this experiment for a few months I think going forward I’ll just review some of the books I read each month, rather than trying to review all of them. Also I may play with the formatting as well. If you disagree with this decision, let me know, And if you really disagree with the decision consider donating.


Leaving the Earth: 50 Years After Apollo

If you prefer to listen rather than read, this blog is available as a podcast here. Or if you want to listen to just this post:

Or download the MP3


Knowing that the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing was this month, I felt a strong compulsion to say something about it, but what exactly? There is definitely no shortage of commentary related to the occasion. Obviously the most interesting part of the anniversary is the fact that we haven’t been back since the end of the Apollo Program, nearly 47 years ago. Perhaps I should wait and say something when the 50th anniversary of the last man on the moon rolls around. (Does anyone think we’ll make it back before then?) But I’m definitely not the only one to have noticed this distressing fact, most of the commentary surrounding the anniversary mentions the fact that we haven’t been back. What can I say on this occasion that would be unique?

I do think there’s something interesting to be said about the connection between space travel and human salvation, but I’ve already covered that connection and however unique that observation is, I don’t want to just rehash what I’ve said previously. So what can I bring to the table that isn’t being served in dozens of different locations by hundreds of other commenters? Well, as I survey the commentary I think there’s a definite dearth of extrapolations. Sure, humans will probably make it back to the moon. (I assume that if no one else gets around to it China will, at least, if only for reasons of national prestige.) But if we extrapolate things out and look at the trends, when are we likely to be there permanently, and what about Mars? And, perhaps most important of all, if current trends continue when would humans actually leave the solar system? Obviously this exercise will produce only the crudest of numbers, but I expect that whatever comes out will be pretty depressing even if I end up off by a factor of 2 or more.

To start, though, for those who never read or can’t recall my post on the connection between space travel and salvation, and who don’t have the time or inclination to go back and read it, I should briefly explain my point, which is: If you want to ensure that humanity continues for as long as possible, and you don’t believe there’s any external force capable of helping with that (religion, aliens, vaguer forms of spirituality, etc.) then, ultimately, this is going to require getting off the planet in a sustainable and ongoing fashion. In that post, I further pointed out that most of the large scale goals we’re pursuing at any given moment have very little to do with this endeavor and in fact work against achieving it, if for no other reason than opportunity cost. 

It’s upon considering this last point that branching off into an extrapolation of trends starts to look like an important next step. Yes, occasionally when a technology becomes available, things can change dramatically, and trends before this change become meaningless, a great example of this is the internet. But in the case of space travel we’ve had all the relevant technology for at least 50 years (and yes, I’m aware of the EMDrive) but yet so far there’s been no dramatic upward spike in space travel, particularly if we view the Apollo Program as an outlier (as I am inclined to do, see my post about S-Curves). Accordingly if our salvation depends on getting off the planet, and we have 50 or more years of data on the rate at which that’s actually happening, and every expectation that this rate is unlikely to change very much, then, it would definitely appear to be worthwhile to extrapolate out these rates and see where they get us. 

None of this is to say that the rate of space exploration and colonization isn’t increasing in an exponential fashion. In fact, for all of my trend extrapolation, I’m going to assume that there’s some underlying law along the lines of Moore’s Law, where a given quantity doubles every X years. Meaning that we merely have to decide what a reasonable rate of doubling would be, using the last 50 years worth of data. I’m not actually saying that there is a parallel to Moore’s Law when talking about space, I’m more saying that there had better be, because the distances from one destination to the next are already exponential. Meaning that we’d better hope things are growing exponentially because otherwise space colonization is definitely doomed. Also something that doubles every two years is going to already assume significant ongoing technological advancements. Meaning that if you do think something like fusion or the EMDrive is going to come along and drastically change things, those advances are probably already built in to the model

For our first example, let’s start off by making the hugely optimistic assumption that the current trend is for the distance humans are capable of travelling to and returning from to double every 10 years. And if we then take 1970 and travelling to the Moon as our starting point, we wouldn’t make it to Mars until sometime in the 2040s, Jupiter would be about 2075, Neptune around 2100 and Alpha Centauri would not be reached until the year 2230. And If we, instead, made the more reasonable, but still fairly optimistic assumption that the distance only doubled every 15 years, then we’d get to Mars around 2075, Jupiter would slot in at  2120, Neptune would be 2180 and Alpha Centauri wouldn’t be until sometime around the year 2360…

That last one may not seem especially optimistic, but recall if we’ve decided that space travel is important for our long term salvation it’s not enough to get there once. Surely some nation can massively divert resources for a single moonshot, which is what the word came to mean, and possibly put people on Mars a half dozen times and bring them back, but in order for it to assist with our salvation we have to be able to do it on an ongoing, perpetual basis. And, of course, not only is all of the above optimistic, but based on a single data point: putting a man on the Moon. Not only have we not gotten any farther than that, we haven’t even been able to do it on the ongoing and perpetual basis I’m talking about. But before we leave this example, let’s conduct the exercise one more time, and assume that, as he has predicted, Elon Musk manages to put someone on Mars in 2024 (and by the way here we would appear to be in the realm of the insanely optimistic). This would finally give us a second data point and putting that into the crude model I’m using it would mean a doubling approximately every 7.5 years. Which gets us to Jupiter in 2045, Neptune in 2075 and Alpha Centauri in the year 2165. Not bad, but still a lot slower than most people imagined 50 years ago, and here we touch on one of the problems.

In many respects we’re living in a science fiction world more incredible than anything anyone imagined in 1969, and in other respects, particularly when one looks at space travel, someone reading Heinlein, Clarke or Asimov would be profoundly depressed by how little progress we’ve made. And yet the idea that any day now things will change and suddenly we will be living in that world is hard to shake. Certainly there could always be some dramatic new invention that would change whatever curve we’re currently on, but at the moment there’s good reason to think that, absent some massive space exploration/colonization inflection point in our future, the current rate of plodding along isn’t going to get us anywhere very fast. Now it may be that it doesn’t matter how long it takes, as long as we get there eventually, but a lot can happen between now and even 2024, to say nothing of 2040, 2075 or 2360. Recall that there’s good black swans and bad black swans, and while the former may be exactly the positive inflection point we were hoping for, there are a lot more things which could happen that would make this whole project much more difficult rather than less.

Moving on, what other trends are there that we can extrapolate? Above I talked about something being continuous, and we have had continuous human presence in low earth orbit (with occasional gaps) since 1973 when Skylab was launched and occupied. All of this has occurred at around 250 miles from the surface, but I’ll be generous and round up to 300. With this as our new starting point we can once again imagine this distance doubling every so many years, only this time it gives us the distance from Earth where humans will be able to sustain a continuous presence. If we once again start with, what I feel, is an incredibly optimistic doubling time of 10 years, we will have a continuous human presence on Mars in 2140, Jupiter (or one of its moons) in 2175 and a continuous presence at Alpha Centauri around the year 2300. If we instead assume a more realistic trend of doubling every 15 years, then Mars is 2225, Jupiter is 2280 and Alpha Centauri is not until the year 2500. 

Now I understand that certain things might get easier, for example just getting out of the gravity well of the Earth is a major hurdle, and perhaps we should take that into account, but when you’re talking about a continuous presence, I would argue that getting out of the Earth’s gravity well, is perhaps the least of your worries. Also recall that to a certain extent productivity gains are built into the model of exponential growth we’re already using. Finally, these extrapolations are not meant to be especially precise, but rather to illustrate that even using some fairly generous assumptions space colonization is going to be a lot harder than I think most people realize. Particularly given how spectacularly unimpressive our manned efforts have been since the end of Apollo. But, perhaps that’s where I’m going astray, by so far only focusing on manned efforts. 

Unmanned exploration really is the easiest way to explore space. And while unmanned probes do not directly accomplish that “salvation of humanity” I keep coming back to, they are at least a reasonable potential stepping stone along the path to that. With that in mind, what kind of Moore’s Law might we extract if we turned our focus to unmanned exploration? Here, at least, we have multiple data points, one for each celestial body, and if you graph it, it looks like a pretty nice exponential curve:

 

There are a couple of things to note about this data. First given that Uranus and Neptune were both first visited by Voyager 2, I’m not sure if Neptune should count as a separate milestone from Uranus (or perhaps it’s the other way around). Also you’ll notice that I didn’t include Pluto, if I did you’d see that nice exponential curve flatten out into something that looks a lot more like a plateau, since, at the time New Horizons visited it, Pluto wasn’t that much farther out than Neptune and we didn’t get to it until 2015. 

Mapping this to our simple model of deciding on a doubling rate is messier with actual data, but after fiddling with it a little bit it looks like seven years fits fairly well. Taking that and anchoring it around Voyager 2, I came up with an arrival time for the first probe to Alpha Centauri of around 2110. Which is almost exactly NASA’s current estimate of a 2113 arrival for the probe they plan to launch in 2069. (You’ll have to take it on faith that I came up with my number before I found the number from NASA). These estimates might be pessimistic, given that Yuri Milner, the Russian billionaire, is proposing to launch a probe by 2036, which might arrive as early as 2056. But when you get into the details of that proposal there’s reason to question whether it should necessarily be placed in the same category with all of the other probes. The probe proposed by Milner’s team weighs only a few grams and would enter the Alpha Centauri system at 20% the speed of light. Which means the probing part is going to end up being some infinitesimal fraction of the entire trip.

Of all these trends, the trend in unmanned probes is the only one that seems a little bit promising, and even there, it’s going to take quite a while to get anywhere we haven’t already been. 

Fifty years ago everything seemed so promising. What happened? What happened to the science fiction dreams I grew up on? Instead the best way to describe space exploration over the last 50 years, is vaguely depressing with occasional all to brief glimpses of triumph here and there. And perhaps even worse than that, there is no sign that the future is going to be any better. Instead most of our energy seems focused inward, and the Great Silence of the universe becomes less and less paradoxical.

The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.


Space: the final frontier. These are the writings of a slightly unhinged blogger. His five-year mission: to explore strange new topics. To seek out new controversies and new weirdness. To boldly go where no man should ever go period! If you’d like to help with this mission consider donating.
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