Potential Metaphors about Something or Other

Behold the only orchid I have ever gotten to rebloom after it dropped the flowers it came with. This was the work of my wife and our cats. My wife read somewhere that to keep orchids blooming you have to give them very little water. So we have been keeping it thirsty. I had to take this outside to get a decent photograph but most of the time it lives in our dining room window, which it shares with the cats, who have repeatedly – through either clumsiness or malice, depending on who you ask – knocked it onto the floor. And lo, it blooms.

Education, Inequality, and Race

American blacks are much better educated than they were a generation ago:

In 1968, just 54 percent of young black adults had a high school diploma. Today, 92 percent do. In 1968, about 9 percent of young African-American adults had completed college. Today, roughly 23 percent have.

However, their incomes have not gone up by as much as this might predict: 

The median income for a white head of household with a college degree is $106,600. The median income for a comparable black college graduate is only $82,300.

As David Brooks says,

It turns out that increasing educational opportunities does not by itself reduce income disparities. 

I think this is one of the most important discoveries of the past 30 years: that investing in education has little effect on inequality, and that while educated people still make more money than others, we have entered the realm of diminishing returns in terms of education's economic payoff. There are only so many good slots in the system, and creating more college graduates than there are good slots just leads to credentials creep and falling wages.

I think this is highly relevant to the current political climate. If the stagnating incomes of working class people are driving protests worldwide, as I think they are, then it could be that the failure of African American incomes to rise might be one of the reasons for the restlessness and anger we are seeing all around us. The system tells you that all you have to do is get education or training and get a job and work hard and you will be ok – which to us means security and a middle class lifestyle – and many people clearly feel that they have been lied to, that billionaires keep rising while they keep being kicked down. I do think police violence is a big problem in America, but I also think that rising incomes and a sense of a shared national fate are great tonics for reducing violence of all sorts.

In this sense I absolutely agree with angry people on the left that the system isn't working as it should.

But while I think are some things we could do to make life better for working people, black and white (remember that American police shoot more white people than black people, almost all of them from the working class), I do not think we have even a faint notion of what sort of system would solve these problems and get us back on the path to a middle class life for everyone rather than Gilded Age extremes.

If you listen to what people are saying in Seattle's "autonomous zone" about how they are going to live without capitalism, it's laughable.

I think some cities ought to abolish the police forces they have and start over, as Camden did, but I think it's just silly to believe that a modern society can survive without a police force.

The system we have is violent, heartless and unfair, but the ideas for radical change I have seen are pathetic. I just don't see any viable path but to keep struggling along within the system we have to make life better one small measure at a time.

Links 19 June 2020

I don't know what these are, but a small patch of them is all that remains from an old 

flower garden in my neighborhood, otherwise overrun by grass

Ezra Klein imagines a state and society founded on nonviolence.

You may or may not be able to buy John Bolton's memoir, but the NY Times has a review. Doesn't sound like much of a book.

Long essay on the intertwining of Ireland and Britain; there are 800,000 Irish-born people living in Britain now, about the same number as in 1860, and they seem to include a majority of Irish celebrities.

The NY Times interviewed several veterans of Civil Rights protests in the early 1960s about contemporary events.

Birth of a meme: the Obelisk of Wokeness

The new growth industry in the US rust belt is making plastics from fracked natural gas, which is providing jobs and revenue but combines two words environmentalists hate. 

This paper argues that the 1918 flu pandemic caused a severe recession everywhere, and that the cities that adopted tough quarantine measures did if anything economically better than those that remained more open.

MIT ends negotiations with the journal conglomerate Elsevier, saying that the company refused to comply with its "open access principles." I think the end of expensive journals that limit access is in sight, but it is not yet clear what will replace them.

Unilever, an Anglo-Dutch conglomerate, has decided not to move its headquarters to the Netherlands in the wake of Brexit. As we saw with the Amazon HQ2 thing, big companies are most concerned about access to talent, an advantage London will keep for some time.

I was a police officer for nearly ten years and I was a bastard. We all were.

Slate reports from Seattle's "autonomous zone." 

Today's unsung hero is Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, a Soviet biologist who fell afoul of Lysenko's purge of Darwinian believers and died in prison in 1943. Vavilov is now famous for his theory that rye was domesticated accidentally; it was growing as a weed in wheat fields and the more closely it resembled wheat, they more likely it was to be missed by weeders and thus survive. This general process is called Vavilovian mimicry.

A Royal Elite in Neolithic Ireland?

The results have just been published of DNA studies on bones from Neolithic tombs in Ireland, dating to between 4,000 and 2,500 BC. The burial that is getting the most attention was buried in the heart of Newgrange, the largest Neolithic tomb in Britain, around 3.200 BC. Science News:

A man buried in a huge, roughly 5,200-year-old Irish stone tomb was the product of incest, a new study finds.

DNA extracted from the ancient man’s remains displays an unusually large number of identical versions of the same genes. That pattern indicates that his parents were either a brother and sister or a parent and child, a team led by geneticists Lara Cassidy and Daniel Bradley of Trinity College Dublin reports June 17 in Nature.

That new DNA discovery combined with the monumental tomb suggests that ruling families who wielded enough power to direct big building projects emerged among some early European farming communities, the researchers contend.

This is quite fascinating. It's hard for Americans to understand how large these Neolithic tombs and temples loom in the historical imaginations of many people in Ireland and Britain. There has been an industry of study and speculation about the tombs and the people who built them for 350 years. Every sort of theory has been proposed, from purely egalitarian societies to rule by priest kings to aliens.

A single case of an incestuously bred leader does not prove anything, but it does suggest a hereditary elite with religious associations. This could be our first bona fide Neolithic priest king.

Then again, it could just be a priest. In ancient Egypt and among the Inca it was the rulers who went in for incest, but among some Polynesian and African societies the practice was limited to priestly orders which did not have great political power. Other then the tombs themselves, there is not much sign of a ruling elite in Neolithic Ireland: no houses bigger than others, not much in the way of luxury goods. The tombs themselves were communal affairs within which many people were buried, or in some cases stashed until they had moldered to bones before being taken somewhere else.

But then again maybe the tombs were so important to these people that being buried in the core chamber was all the sign of status anyone needed.

Anyway this is fascinating, and another way that the study of ancient DNA has shed new light on questions that have been argued over for centuries.

Patterned Poem

This patterned poem is by the Danish poet lacobus Nicholae de Dacia, otherwise Jakob Nielsen, who wrote around 1363 to 1379. It is from his Liber de distinccione metrorum, which was later bound into a big manuscript in the British Library called Cotton Claudius A.  (X iv, folio 25 E, to be precise), which does not seem to have been scanned and put online yet. It made its way onto the web when it appeared on the cover of a periodical called Visible Language.

Abolish Jaywalking Laws

Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian:

Police in Tulsa, Oklahoma, made headlines this week when they violently detained two teenage African American boys, and arrested one, for walking down a quiet street that didn’t have a sidewalk. When one of the teenagers asked what they had done wrong, he was told: “You were jaywalking; you broke the law.”

But why is jaywalking even against the law? There is no such offence in much of Europe, including in the UK – although Ken Livingstone apparently proposed making jaywalking illegal while he was mayor of London. In the US, however, you can get a hefty fine and even go to jail for it.  . . .

Jaywalking laws are not evenly applied: enforcement disproportionally targets people of colour. In 2019, for example, 90% of illegal-walking tickets issued by New York police were to black and Hispanic people. 

I've always hated jaywalking laws, and at this point anything we can do to reduce friction between the police and minority Americans seems like a good idea to me. I mean, I don't think the British have any more trouble with people blocking traffic while they amble across the street than we do.

Claude McKay: Two Sonnets

If We Must Die

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

America

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate,
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.

Festus Claudius McKay was born in Jamaica in 1889, came to the US in 1912 to attend college, eventually ended up in New York in and became one of the lights of the Harlem Renaissance. He was a militant atheist and flirted with communism, joining the IWW in 1919 and making a trip to the Soviet Union in 1922, but never joined the CPUSA. He wrote several novels as well as poetry. He died in 1948.

The Self-Perception of Poor White Americans

The latest from the social science journals:

Poor White Americans report feeling “worse off” than poor Black Americans despite the persistent negative effects of racism on Black Americans. Additionally, some health issues are rising among White but not Black Americans. Across two representative samples, we test whether White = wealthy stereotypes lead White Americans to feel relatively worse off than their racial group and whether these perceptions have health consequences. Across both samples, White Americans perceived their own status to be significantly lower than the status of the majority of White Americans. In contrast, Black Americans perceived their own status to be significantly higher than the majority of Black Americans. Critically, status comparisons between the self and one’s racial group predicted the experience of fewer positive emotions among White, but not Black, Americans, which mediated reduced mental and physical health. We conclude that race/class stereotypes may shape how poverty subjectively feels.

I can't read the whole article, but I wonder about the role of shame in this. White Americans seem to feel more ashamed about losing a job or other setbacks then black or Hispanic Americans, so they are more likely for example to stop going to church after losing a job or getting divorced. This is usually interpreted as showing that white Americans believe more in the ideology of "standing on your own feet" etc., while minority Americans are more likely to believe that much of what happens is beyond your control. 

More on Pre-Settlement Norse Outposts in Iceland

Work has continued at Stöð, a Norse site in eastern Iceland that I wrote about two years ago. This site was founded around 800 AD, 75 years before the famous first settlement of the island. The excavator of Stöð, Bjarni Einarsson, thinks the site was a seasonal camp, occupied by people who came from Norway to work a couple of months in the summer fishing and catching seals and then went home. Such camps are well known from northern Norway and a camp in Iceland makes perfect sense; after all, people wouldn't have loaded their families into ships and moved to Iceland without having good knowledge of the land.

The discoveries on the site now include two longhouses, one on top of the other, as shown in the photograph above. The larger one is 103 feet (31 m) long, the largest yet found in Iceland dating to before AD 1000. This is the earlier of the two, dating to around 800, so if this was a camp it was a large one sponsored by an important Jarl. Around AD 870 the larger house was torn down and a smaller one built on the same site; this might represent the transition from a large band of men staying seasonally to a farm occupied by one household.

This is quite remarkable, because first settlements have in general been very hard for archaeologists to find or verify: hardly anything has been found at the Roanoke Island settlement or the possible Viking sites in Canada, and as yet there is no trace of the Basque whalers who are known to have visited New England in the 1500s. To find such a rich, well-dated site that might be one of the first Viking settlements in Iceland is amazing.

Will Barnet

American artist, 1911-2012, best known for his lithographs. Reclining Woman.

Silent Season, 1969

Sense of Play

To Life

Atalanta, 1977

Circe II, 1979

The Spanish Inquisition and the Effectiveness of Torture

Trigger warning: evil. If you prefer to keep your mind on pleasant things today, read something else.

*     *     *

When I was in graduate school, I knew people into scoffing at the "black myth" of the Spanish Inquisition. It wasn't really so bad, they said; they had real standards of evidence and proper procedures, unlike some of the witch hunting courts in Germany or England; most people had no fear of the inquisitors and some people openly laughed at them. 

That all depends, I think, on what you mean by "bad." To me the Inquisition reeks of evil because I regard the persecution of people for what they believe as a horrible evil no matter how carefully the judges proceed and how hard they tried to reach the truth. They burned people alive for believing wrongly about invisible things, and that I do not forgive.

But they kept wonderful records, which makes their career of persecution a boon for social historians. If you want to learn about, for example, secret Judaism in Spain or Spanish America between 1492 and 1750, the records of the Inquisition are by far your best source. Consider the torture of Pedro Rodrıguez Saz in Mexico City on 16 May 1596: 

Once he was naked, and his arms were tied, he was admonished to tell the truth. He said that he had already told it and that witnesses who testified against him had testified falsely. His arms were ordered to be tied tightly, and he was admonished to tell the truth and the minister ordered the first turn of the cord. He complained loudly. He said: “Help me Lord, Jesus Christ, help me, I am here because of false witnesses.” Another turn of the cord was ordered and he said: “Oh Christians! I will tell the truth! I beg for mercy! I will tell the truth!” The official who administered the torture was ordered to leave. 

He said: “It is true that, starting six to seven years ago, Luis de Carvajal started keeping the Laws of Moses.” He was told to confess the truth clearly and openly, to satisfy this Holy Office, for the salvation of his soul. He said: “About seven years ago, when Diego Henríquez, brother in law of Manuel de Lucena, and son of Beatriz Henrıquez, La Payba, was arrested by the Holy Office, Manuel de Lucena taught me the Law of Moses, telling me that the Lord had promised to send a great prophet who will save the people. And that Jesus Christ was not the true God, but only God, who was in the highest heaven, will save the world. This God has a great day that the Jews call their Great Feast, on which they celebrate and fast. On this Great Day of the Lord, I was there with Manuel de Lucena, his wife Catalina Henríquez, Clara Henríquez, her daughter Justa Mendez, Leonor Díaz, and a man called Juan Rodrıguez. I don’t remember whether Constanca Rodrıguez was there. We fasted and celebrated in Mexico City at the house of Manuel de Lucena, near the workplace of Juan Álvarez, in observance of the Law of Moses. I and the rest of the people I have listed, we danced and we celebrated, we wore festive clothing. We did not eat all day long until night, when I went to eat at my house, which is the house of Phelipe Nuñez, where I stayed, and I ate in the company of Phelipe Nuñez and his wife Phelipa López. We ate fish, garbanzos, eggs, and fruit. That’s all that happened on the Great Day of the Lord.

This comes from a fascinatingly awful article I stumbled across yesterday, "The Cost of Torture: Evidence from the Spanish Inquisition" by Ron E. Hassner, published in Security Studies.  This begins with a chilling sentence:

The study of interrogational torture has made significant strides in recent years.

Hassner goes on to say that the reason the study of torture has not made more progress is the lack of good data. While entities like the UN HCR and Human Rights Watch have tried to compile statistics, their results are biased in many ways and probably do not represent a real sample of torture in any particular program. Hence, the records of the Spanish Inquisition:

The archives of the Spanish Inquisition provide a detailed historical source of quantitative and qualitative information about interrogational torture. The inquisition tortured brutally and systematically, willing to torment all who it deemed as withholding evidence.

As Hassner says, the Inquisition had centuries of experience and built up a strong institutional knowledge base about how and when torture was effective. Hassner's article is based on two sets of records, a single manuscript that records 1,046 cases from the tribunal in Toledo between 1575 and 1610,  and the investigation of a network of Jews in Mexico in 1596 to 1601.

Of the 1046 suspects in the Toledo manuscript, 123 were tortured. It is important to note that the Inquisition did not immediately put suspects to torture, but did all they could to build up a detailed case before even bringing the suspect before an Inquisitor. The Inquisition generally had no interest in extracting false confessions; their goal was not to trap particular individuals so much as to wind up networks of secret Jews, Muslims, and Protestants, and for that they needed accurate information. This is quite different from the witch hunts going on at the same time, trials in which people were routinely tortured until they confessed to completely impossible things. The Inquisition did not use torture to fish for new information, because they believed that any such data would be unreliable; they were looking for confirmation of what they had already been told. The Inquisition proceeded slowly, taking years if necessary to build up a detailed case. The Inquisitors also understood very well the problem of leading questions, which could get the suspect to tell them "what they wanted to hear." Their usual method was, in fact, to ask no questions at all. 

Imagine: a suspect is arrested and taken to prison, never told anything about the charges against him or her, kept in a cell for days or weeks or months, then brought before a panel of judges who simply say, "Tell us the truth." If the suspect says nothing, he or she goes back to prison. This could go on for years. Eventually, if they had learned enough from other sources, the inquisitors might decide to torture the suspect, again without asking any questions.  The inquisitors were forbidden to draw blood, and they usually inflicted pain by having the suspect's arms twisted with ropes or by a sort of water boarding. The very tough could bear this, and often did, but some suspects who held out for years of imprisonment did break quickly and confess. In the Toledo sample, 29% of those put to torture confessed, and in every case their confessions corresponded closely enough with what the court already knew to lead to a conviction.

By comparison:

The methods of the Inquisition stand in stark contrast to American torture policy. In the aftermath of 9/11, US interrogators quickly formed an interrogational torture program to prevent additional mass terror attacks and dismantle the al Qaeda network. US interrogators tortured rashly, amateurishly, and haphazardly. Amateurs carried out interrogation sessions without bureaucratic oversight or strictly delimited procedures, and the sessions did not lead to an accumulation of organizational expertise. Rather than torturing those believed to withhold crucial information, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) personnel tortured terrorist leaders who had “blood on their hands.” Culpability, not utility, determined who would be tortured. This was hot-blooded torture and it failed, by and large.

According to Hassner, experienced inquisitors would have scoffed at the "ticking bomb" scenario used by some Americans to justify torture. They believed that torture was not a reliable way to extract new information, and that it did not work quickly. It could produce valuable information, but only if it was used systematically and patiently alongside other investigations.

It makes me queasy to dwell on these things, but I feel like we have to. If decent people refuse to learn about how torture has been used and the problems with any information so acquired, we may again end up at the mercy of sinister people who claim that what they are doing is essential to protect us. 

The Spirit Houses of Bangkok

Bangkok is full of what look like elaborate bird houses, most mounted on poles or pedestals. But they are not for birds. These are spirit houses, homes for the myriad spirits of diverse origin and attitude that populate the cosmos of many Thais.

Hannah Beech has a delightful story in the NY Times about honoring the spirits during the pandemic, a habit which some Thais think has kept their nation from suffering badly:

Mr. Kitsana, 47, thinks this may help explain why the coronavirus pandemic has so far largely bypassed the country. Thailand, a nation of 70 million people, has recorded only about 3,120 cases of the virus, with 58 deaths, despite having had the first confirmed case outside of China. 

“Thai people respect ghosts and spirits,” he said. “Everyday we pray and, you will notice, our country has not had many cases of coronavirus. The spirits listen to our prayers.”

People make offerings daily to the spirits that live around them. In the public markets are many stalls that sell only gifts for spirits, such as garlands of marigold flowers. Outsiders writing about Thailand often mention this as one reason the country feels so spiritual.

The spirits come in many kinds. Some are old deities from the Hindu pantheon, or other South Asian mythologies. Some are family ancestors. Some live in mighty old trees, which is why such trees are often festooned with garlands and have lavish meals laid around their feet. Others are attached to the land. Some are honored around Thailand and beyond, while others are known only in a single spot.

Most spirits are generally benevolent, so long as they receive their regular honors. Here is Kuman Thong, a mischievous boy spirit who likes to receive toys as gifts. Thailand also has an extensive folklore of very nasty ghosts out to kill you and drink your blood, but the bad spirits do not seem to figure in the ordinary sort of spirit house.

The spirits who live on the land have to be propitiated when any new building is constructed, and provided with a new home; in the picture above, a house is being consecrated for the spirits who once lived on the site of a new condominium building.

As I have worked on this post, various members of my family have come by and asked what I am writing about. When I explained they all asked, "Do people really believe in them or not?" That, I increasingly think, is the wrong question. The meaning of rituals like this is in the doing of them more than in what people believe about them. Belief, I think, is – at least in our age – a slippery thing, and few people believe in spirits the way they believe in tables or chairs. After all Thais who are serious about religion are mostly Buddhists, and in the cosmos of rigorous monks such spirits are just another trivial thing to be left behind on the path to enlightenment. But many people enjoy rites that transport them, for a moment or a time, to a place where there are spirits, and where they feel tied to something beyond their own small selves: to the cosmos, to their communities, to being Thai. Or the familiar practice – visiting the same stall to buy a marigold garland from the same seller to put on the same spirit house while reciting the same prayers – anchors them in our floating world.

Links 12 June 2020

Otto Piene, Untitled

Interesting little essay on the role of aphorisms in philosophy. He should have cited my favorite aphorist, Don Calacho.

A girl's graffiti may identify the owners of a recently excavated villa in Pompeii.

Interview with Orlando Patterson about racism

The archaeology of London' first theater, built in 1567. To give you an idea of where plays fit in the entertainment ecology of the time, it later became a dog-fighting arena.

Politico got paragraph-length statements form a bunch of politicians and activists in answer to the question, Is it different this time? Many say yes, for a variety of reasons.

A new history of the eruptions of the Yellowstone supervolcano.

Wordsworth, a radical when young, turned conservative as he aged.  So did most of the other Romantics of that generation. It's such a common pattern that I find myself fascinated by the people who moved in the opposite direction, like Ben Franklin and George Washington.

The Dance of the Conquest: Post Cortez Maya Art

Back in 2003, workers restoring a 16th-century house in Chajul, Guatemala uncovered a series of remarkable wall paintings. They have since been conserved, and just recently a detailed study has published. This was a Maya area, and Maya language and traditions are still strong there.

The paintings include European items and therefore date to after contact with the Spanish; the authors of the new study say they were made over an extended time, beginning soon after the conquest and perhaps extending as late as the 1700s. They are unusual in coming from a private house. Most surviving paintings of the period are in churches, and therefore presumably more under the control of the authorities and the church.

Combining scholarly knowledge of other art from the early colonial period with the insights of local Ixil Maya informants, the investigators conclude that these depict dances. The informants named two dances in particular that they thought were depicted, the Baile de la Conquista (Dance of the Conquest), or the Baile de los Moros y Cristianos (Dance of the Moors and Christians). They also suggested that one panel depicts a dance that no longer survives, which people are calling a Lost Dance; apparently the church banned several dances for theological reasons now obscure.

The Dance of the Conquest, as you might imagine, depicts the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. According to what I have found tonight, this may have been developed already in the 16th century by savvy priests as a way to convey the European version of events to those who did not understand Spanish. However, some articles suggest it may have later evolved into forms that were much darker and more critical of the conquistadors.

The Dance of the Moors and the Christians depicts the Spanish reconquest of the Iberian peninsula from the Muslims, the key event of Spanish history as it was understood until recently. It boggles the mind to think of Maya dancers in those costumes acting out events in Iberian history of which they can have had only the vaguest idea, and yet such a dance definitely existed and survived into the 20th century.

Most of the Maya dances that were developed under Spanish auspices were religious, depicting the life of Jesus and the like. Interesting that the owner of this houses had no interest in those, but preferred secular tales of war and conquest.

What a delightful little window into things one knew nothing about.

Police vs. Prisons

Alex Tabarrok has been arguing for decades now that the US spends far too much on prisons and not enough on police. Many Americans have the sense that our police forces are bloated and over-militarized, but we spend less per capita on the police than most wealthy nations. Compared to the average wealthy country, we have three times as many people in prison, but 35% fewer police officers (per capita).

There is some data that suggests this is absolutely the wrong approach, and that moving our spending from keeping people in prison to putting more officers on the street would make us safer. We don't do this because, I think, we are savagely vindictive in our urge to punish, and because we have an essentialist view of evil: we think that bad people are just bad and once they have gone definitively bad (if not from birth) there is nothing to be done for them but to make sure they don't trouble us any more.

I am sure Tabarrok posted about this now because of the talk about "defunding the police" and so on, but it is good to remember that our police violence problem does not stem from our having too many officers.

What Might Have Been in Moscow

Images of an unbuilt "Palace of the Soviets." Oh, the giant Lenin. Oh, the people. Via Archi/Maps.

Falerii Novi

Ground-penetrating radar map of Falerii Novi, town about 30 miles north of Rome that prospered during the Roman Republic. The scanned area measures 30.5 hectares, or 75 acres. Big image with lots of detail, via The History Blog.

Closing the Olaf Palme Case

In 1986, Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme was assassinated, shot in the back as he walked down a quiet street in Stockholm. The inability of the police to find the killer spawned myriad conspiracy theories, many of them connected to the Cold War. Palme was a socialist who regularly criticized US foreign policy, so some people thought the CIA got him. But he also criticized the Soviets, so others thought the KGB did it because Palme showed that a much more humane socialism was possible. Palme especially liked to criticize South Africa, so some people thought that either the South African government  killed him, or the gold barons, or just some cranky Boers. Palme also had many domestic enemies.

The police have just announced that they think they know who did it: a Swede named Stig Engstrom, who killed himself in 2000. Engstrom was an unhappy loner and a bit of a right-wing nut, and he had previously been figured as the likely killer by an investigative reporter a few years ago. The police say they did not rely on the reporter's work, so this looks like independent investigations arriving at the same end point.

It's a disappointment to conspiracy buffs, but the police did allow that they can't rule out a conspiracy behind Engstrom; after all if there were other conspirators they had years to cover their tracks. But the police say they did not find any evidence that Engstrom had accomplices.

I still find it weird that in 1986 the Prime Minister of Sweden had no security. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could get back to that sort of world?

Patrick Skinner on the Police and the Protests

I wrote two years ago about Patrick Skinner, a former CIA case officer in the Middle East and Afghanistan who came home and became a beat cop in Savannah, where he grew up. When the latest crisis boiled over Ezra Klein had the great idea to call Skinner and get his take. I recommend the whole interview, but here is the last bit:

Ezra Klein
You said earlier you’re not optimistic a task force will change any of this. So how does it change? What needs to happen?

Patrick Skinner
People need to imagine the end of a war. That’s what they need to accept. Our training is spot on: We’re in a war on crime, and it’s us versus them, and our neighbors are sheep we need to protect. You hear the term civilians. I thought we were all civilians! Our training fits the mindset.

The question we need to ask is: What’s the point? What do we want to see happen? It’s about what we expect the police to do. If I was commissioner of all police on the planet, I’d say there’s a ceasefire in the war on crime. We’re going to work for the 99 percent of people instead of against the 1 percent. Most 911 calls I go to are not crimes. They may become crimes, but our job is to stop it. We’re taught that it’s a war. It’s not. But it’s becoming a war.

We are the action arm for a fucked-up national mindset. This doesn’t exist in isolation. America has the police force that it votes for, that it funds. This system is what we set up. We spent a lot of money and a lot of time over hundreds of years to have this police force. We are trained for what we’re hired for, and what we’re hired for is war.

Eight Can't Wait

"Eight Can't Wait" is a menu of concrete police reforms that has been widely proposed, at least on Twitter. The reforms are aimed, not at the law, but at internal police department guidelines on the use of force. This means that they could be quickly adopted in many cities. This graphic has been making the rounds:

Most of these are self-explanatory, Matt Yglesias offers this description of the rest:

A comprehensive reporting requirement means that officers need to report each time they use force or threaten to use force against a civilian. A duty to intervene rule requires bystander officers to step in if a fellow officer is using excessive force and formally requires police officers to break the blue wall of silence and report such incidents to supervisors. The use of force continuum is a specific set of requirements governing what kinds of weapons can be used versus what levels of resistance. And a deescalation requirement mandates that officers try to secure their personal safety through distance and communication before resorting to force.

As to the evidence that these measures reduce police violence, well, there is some. But it is not iron-clad and it is all subject to a big confounder: maybe these measures are all meaningless in themselves but seem to work because they represent a leadership push to reduce violence somehow. So if they were adopted in the middle of a crisis to calm the situation, without any real commitment from city and police leaders to enforce them, they might not matter at all. Still, a leadership commitment has to be expressed in some concrete rule changes, and these are certainly worth looking at.

Douglas Gordon and Morgane Tschiember

A bit of landscape art from 2016, titled As close as you can for as long as it lasts

Meanwhile in Camden, NJ

Alex Taborrok:

One of the few bright spots over the past week was Camden, NJ where instead of beating protesters the police joined them.

A decade ago Camden had a terrible crime rate and a notoriously ineffective police force; among other things, in 2012 the city payed out more than $3.5 million to settle 88 lawsuits for police misconduct. But in 2013 the whole city-run force was disbanded, which abrogated the union contract, and replaced by a new county-run force.

Since then the crime rate has fallen by much more than the national average and the reputation of the police has soared. The chief, J. Scott Thompson, credits a switch to community policing:

That meant focusing on rebuilding trust between the community and their officers.

“For us to make the neighborhood look and feel the way everyone wanted it to, it wasn’t going to be achieved by having a police officer with a helmet and a shotgun standing on a corner,” Thomson said. Now, he wants his officers “to identify more with being in the Peace Corps than being in the Special Forces.”

A conversation with Thomson about community policing is likely to involve many such catchy maxims. “Destabilized communities,” he told me, “need guardians, not warriors.” He explained the “Back to the Future Paradox”—use technology wisely, but pair it with regular-old “Bobbies on the street.” And he stressed the idea that public safety is about access to social services, economic rejuvenation, and good schools, not just cops: “Nothing stops a bullet like a job.”

It’s policing turned poetry, and his officers, too, have internalized it in their training. “The old police mantra was make it home safely,” Camden police officer Tyrell Bagby told the New York Times in April. “Now we’re being taught not only should we make it home safely, but so should the victim and the suspect.”

Part of the approach is to settle most traffic stops with a warning rather than a ticket:

“Handing a $250 ticket to someone who is making $13,000 a year” — around the per capita income in the city — “can be life altering,” Chief Thomson said in an interview last year, noting that it can make car insurance unaffordable or result in the loss of a driver’s license. “Taxing a poor community is not going to make it stronger.”

This long NY Times piece from 2017 is fascinating in what it shows about the on-the-ground effects of a serious leadership commitment to reducing violence. All officers receive training in de-escalation, with that mantra that the suspect should go home alive, too. You can see this in practice in a remarkable video of officers carefully cordoning off a deranged-looking man with a knife and talking to him until he surrenders it.

One of the chief's standing orders is that if officers do shoot somebody, they should transport him to the hospital in their cruisers rather than waiting for an ambulance. It strikes me that this might not always be the best medical advice, but as a symbol of treating everyone as a human life it might still be a good idea.

The broken relationships between American cities and their police forces is an old problem with deep roots, and fixing it won't be easy, but Camden shows that a lot of progress can be made with the right leadership.

Time, Capitalism, and Philosophy

In America the great battle cry of the anti-capitalists is, "I want my time back." Whenever some young person says, "capitalism sucks," the underlying meaning seems to be a struggle over time: capitalism sucks because it requires people to work long hours to have any kind of decent life. A desire to control our time is at the root of the push for Universal Basic Income, summed up by a squatter I once met as, "Rent is just stealing. You shouldn't have to pay to live." If people had their basic needs met, most would probably choose to work for something better, but that would be their choice; nobody would have to work.

This desire to break the hold of work over our time goes back at least to Karl Marx, who thought the future workers' paradise would feature more leisure and much less work. In 1930 John Maynard Keynes wrote a famous article arguing that by 2020 we should only have to work about 15 hours a week to maintain a middle class standard of living. In 2013 I wrote here about a book by two contemporary economists called How Much is Enough?, arguing that if we could just get off the treadmill of wanting ever more we could focus more on the things that actually make for a good life.

Last year Swedish philosopher Martin Hägglund, who teaches at Yale and was vaguely connected to Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign, wrote a book called This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom that makes the struggle over our time the central concern of philosophy. Hägglund shares the belief of all the young anarchists that capitalism is bad because it forces us to spend our time on things we hate, which spiritually destroys us.

Hägglund starts from the question of what it means to value something:

Whether I hold something to be of small, great, or inestimable value, I must be committed to caring for it in some form. . . . is a question of devoting my own lifetime to what I value. To value something, I have to be prepared to give it at least a fraction of my time.… Finite lifetime is the originary measure of value. The more I value something, the more of my lifetime I am willing to spend on it.

Hägglund extends this argument into both religion and politics. Hägglund is an atheist who accepts the old existentialist argument that belief in god strips our lives of meaning. If we are really going to live forever, then it doesn't matter what we spend our time on, and therefore it is impossible for us to really value anything. It is the finitude of our lives that gives our choices meaning. Therefore, positing anything eternal – god, heaven, life – demeans us rather than exalting us.

What I do with my time can matter to me only because I grasp my life as finite. If I believed that I had an infinite time to live, the urgency of doing anything would be unintelligible and no normative obligation could have any grip on me.

The part of Hägglund's work that has gotten the most attention is his advocacy of socialism over capitalism. To him, having to work at things we do not value is death to our souls, and the very opposite of freedom. Jedediah Purdy summarizes:

To take free choice seriously, he argues, we need a conception of freedom that is not tied to selling our time and talents at the market rate just to go on living. We are in “the realm of freedom,” writes Hägglund, when we can act in keeping with our values. By contrast, we are in the “realm of necessity” when we adopt an alien set of priorities just to get by. A great many of the choices most people face under capitalism fall within the realm of necessity. How do you make a living in an economy that rewards predatory lending over teaching and nursing? Or how do you present yourself in a workplace that rewards competition and often embarrassing self-promotion?

Economic thought treats these choices as if they were just as “free” as Bill Gates’s next decision to channel his philanthropic spending to this group or that. Hägglund sees it differently: Our economy keeps its participants locked in the realm of necessity for much of their lives, draining away their time in unfree activity. In the realm of necessity there is very little opportunity to spend our lives on the things we care for, to devote ourselves to what we think most worthwhile. Economic life may be a tapestry of choices, but as long as it directs its participants toward goals they do not believe truly worthwhile, a life of such choice is a grotesque of freedom.

The market presses some people closer to the bone than others, but it drives everyone, because it is a system for determining the price of things, among them time itself, and substituting that price for any competing valuation. You cannot exempt yourself.

There is certainly a sense in which this is true; if there are things you have to do, you are not really free.

But how, exactly, is that the fault of capitalism? Even the hunter-gatherers we like to imagine living in a lazy utopia had to work. Lions have to hunt; chimpanzees have to search for fruit and fish for termites. I simply do not understand these socialists who think that under a change of regime we could avoid doing things we don't want to do. Does anybody like cleaning bathrooms or repairing tar roofs? Hägglund recognizes that this is a problem, but he waves it away in the maddening style of all anarchists. Under democratic socialism, he insists, we will deliberate about all these things democratically and learn to value each other's needs and end up wanting to do things like rebuild sewers and change bedpans. Even Purdy, who is something of a left-wing utopian himself, finds this dubious:

There is always some work that not all that many people really want to do, unwelcome but socially necessary labor. There is no way around emptying bedpans, caring for the severely demented, sorting recycled goods, providing day care for other people’s children, picking lettuce, cleaning up after concerts, and so forth. Hägglund writes that under democratic socialism “we will be intrinsically motivated to participate in social labor when we can recognize that the social production is for the sake of the common good and our own freedom to lead a life,” making such labor “inherently free.”

Readers who have these doubts, Hägglund writes, “should consider their lack of faith in our spiritual freedom.”

Well, I have considered it, and I find that my lack of faith in our spiritual freedom is entirely justified. It could well be that under a different system we might enjoy our jobs a little more, or dislike them a little less, but I think a world where people freely do all the work that an advanced civilization requires is a straight-up fantasy.

There is an alternative to our way of living, but I think it necessarily involves being materially poorer than we are. If we did not apply pressure to people to work harder, and relied on everyone's spiritual freedom, we would do less materially productive work and end up with less stuff. I think this is so obvious that I cannot fathom how so many anarchists dispute it. We could have a world with more free time and less pressure to to economically productive work, but that world would have to be less posh than this one.

And to me, this world where we have more freedom but less stuff is within our grasp. We could have it if we wanted to; in fact, plenty of people do have it. All over the world millions of people work less than they could and live materially poorer lives because of that choice. I know people who have opted out of the system, live in poor communities where housing is cheap, do just enough work to get by, and devote themselves to what they really enjoy. This is entirely possible for most Americans and Europeans without any change in the system at all.

The fact that most people do not choose to do this, but choose instead to chase more money or more prestige by investing tons of effort in their careers says to me that Marx and Hägglund and all the rest of them are simply wrong about human nature.

Capitalism is not forcing anybody to do anything. It is the basic rules of mammalian life that force us to labor for our livings, and our own ambition that drives to work harder than we have to for nicer stuff and a higher slot on the totem pole.

So to all the young people out there who want their time back I say this: make it happen. Move somewhere cheap, learn a skill that allows you to earn a sustenance in 20 hours a week, and live your dream. Nobody is stopping you, certainly not "capitalism." As for assertions that we could have a world that is as materially splendid as this one without surrendering our time to the capitalist monster, a world in which we could all be both rich and free, I say, baloney.

Links 5 June 2020

Patrick Cabral, Wolf

Dolly Parton as a philanthropist and educational pioneer.

Conor Friedersdorf interviews Tyler Cowen about the regulatory state and its response to Covid-19, very intelligent.

This 425-million-year-old fossil millipede may be the world's oldest land animal

Kevin Drum's very brief history of riots in Los Angeles.

The History Blog's guide to the greatest video hits of Irving Finkel, the British Museum's mad scholar of ancient Mesopotamia.

Scott Alexander's review of an old classic of psychohistory, Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. If you ever wanted to understand Jaynes' argument without reading the book, here is your chance.

Twitter thread on ways to reduce police violence, backed by lots of research. And another.

Data on what happens to coronavirus infection rates after schools re-open.

A true Rube Goldberg contraption: the clams that monitor Warsaw's water supply. Fascinating if true, about which I am withholding judgment.

Long NY Times piece on the CDC and its response to the coronavirus. Even with all the background supplied here, some of their actions remain baffling.

Astonishing video of a mudslide in Alta, Norway.

Huge Maya structure (1400x400 m platform) identified by laser scanning.

Wikipedia's list of culture-bound psychiatric syndromes. For the West, this includes anorexia nervosa; some think PMS should be on the list, since women in most of the world deny experiencing it, but this is "controversial."

The drowned "ghost forests" of Maryland's Eastern Shore

More Americans are Blaming the Police for Violent Clashes

New poll from Morning Consult, via Kevin Drum

The Badianus Manuscript: America's oldest Herbal

The Spanish conquest of Mexico happened so fast that nobody had time to think about what sort of regime or society would emerge afterwards. It would be Catholic, of course, but other than that the Spanish did not agree about anything, and the native aristocracy remained powerful enough for decades to exert their own views.

Church of Santa Cruz, only surviving remnant of the college

The College of Santa Cruz, founded by the Franciscans in Mexico City in 1536, is a good case of how these conflicts played out. The purpose of the college was to train Aztecs from elite families to be Catholic priests. The college had two Spanish Franciscans as teachers, aided by a native assistant, and several dozen sons of elite Aztec families attended. They were taught Spanish, Latin, theology, and "grammar," that is, the basics of Latin literature and composition. But other forces, led by the Dominicans, opposed this whole plan; they kept the school from ever receiving adequate funding and in 1555 banned any native from becoming a priest. By then, our sources say, the school was already a ruin. During its brief life, however, the school did manage to train dozens of Aztec men. One of its instructors was Bernardino de Sahagún, who published several books on the Aztecs and the Nahuatl language and also the famous General History of the Indies, an immense project on which he was helped by students at Santa Cruz.

One of the most notable graduates of Santa Cruz was Martin de la Cruz. De la Cruz wrote, in Nahualt, the manuscript that was then translated into Latin by Juan Badiano as Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis, the first work to document Native American knowledge of plants. Badiano's autograph copy ended up in the Vatican Library, where it languished in obscurity for 400 years. The Vatican Library was infamous until recent times for its habit of hiding important, potentially controversial books under boring titles that nobody would ever ask for, and then sometimes of being unable to find them if they were asked for. Anyway hardly anyone had read this book until 1929 when an American named Charles Clark arrived from the Smithsonian searching for early Latin American manuscripts. With backing from Vice President and Smithsonian board member Charles Dawes, Clark was able to get the Vatican to let him photograph and then publish the manuscript, something almost unheard of in those days.

The Spanish were very interested in Native plants and their properties. In the letter Cortes wrote to Emperor Charles V describing his conquest of Mexico, he mentioned that the market district of Tenochitlan included "a street of herb sellers where there are all manner of roots and medicinal plants that are found in the land. There are houses as it were of apothecaries where they sell medicines made from those herbs both for drinking and for use as ointments and salves." Valuable plants were one of the things Europeans were seeking around the world, and of course cacao, tobacco, corn, potatoes, hot peppers, and other American plants ended up being worth many times more than all the gold in the world.

So plant lore was big business in 1552, when someone got de la Cruz to write this manuscript and then paid Badiano to translate it. The Latin version was written on fine parchment and bound in velvet. It is one of the purest sources for Aztec thinking about the natural world, written by a knowledgeable native in his own language.

Cacao

It describes, among many other things, giving patients hypnotic preparations of datura before surgery, which is pretty much what was done to me when they operated on my wrist. Plants are listed for treating bleeding, skin rashes, headaches, colds, wounds, and so on, including those great stables of pre-modern medicine, laxatives and purgatives. Some of these plants are still used by folk healers in Mexico for the same purposes described by de la Cruz, showing strong continuity within the oral culture.

Anyway I can't recall having heard of this manuscript or its authors until this week, and I got excited about it and wanted to share.

Don't Escalate

Maggie Koerth and Jamiles Lartey at 538:

Watching a peaceful protest turn into something much less palatable is hard. There has been a lot of hard the past few days, as people in dozens of cities have released pent-up anger against discriminatory police tactics. Cars and buildings have burned. Store windows have been smashed. Protesters and police have been hurt. When protests take a turn like this we naturally wonder … why? Was this preventable? Does anyone know how to stop it from happening?

Turns out, we do know some of these answers. Researchers have spent 50 years studying the way crowds of protesters and crowds of police behave — and what happens when the two interact. One thing they will tell you is that when the police respond by escalating force — wearing riot gear from the start, or using tear gas on protesters — it doesn’t work. In fact, disproportionate police force is one of the things that can make a peaceful protest not so peaceful. But if we know that (and have known that for decades), why are police still doing it?

“There’s this failed mindset of ‘if we show force, immediately we will deter criminal activity or unruly activity’ and show me where that has worked,” said Scott Thomson, the former chief of police in Camden, New Jersey.

“That’s the primal response,” he said. “The adrenaline starts to pump, the temperature in the room is rising, and you want to go one step higher. But what we need to know as professionals is that there are times, if we go one step higher, we are forcing them to go one step higher.”

There’s 50 years of research on violence at protests, dating back to the three federal commissions formed between 1967 and 1970. All three concluded that when police escalate force — using weapons, tear gas, mass arrests and other tools to make protesters do what the police want — those efforts can often go wrong, creating the very violence that force was meant to prevent. For example, the Kerner Commission, which was formed in 1967 to specifically investigate urban riots, found that police action was pivotal in starting half of the 24 riots the commission studied in detail. It recommended that police eliminate “abrasive policing tactics” and that cities establish fair ways to address complaints against police.

Of course it's not a simple problem and there are cases where one police response gets great results on one block and leads to an explosion of violence on the next block. But I think it's hard to watch what has happened over the past few days and think that tough policing is generally the way to go.

Serjilla: Dead City

In northwestern Syria are more than a hundred ghost town collectively known as the Dead Cities. They date to between 400 and 700 AD. The best preserved is Serjilla.

These seem to have been ordinary farming towns where some folks got rich after the fall of Carthage to the Vandals cut off supplies of olive oil from the western Mediterranean, leading to an olive oil boom in Syria.

That explains their rise, but their fall is more mysterious. There are no signs of violence, nor any record that the conquering Arabs did much damage. Some speak of changes in trade routes, but these towns were within two day's journey of Aleppo, which remained a great city throughout the Middle Ages, so I am not sure why that would be relevant. Did changes in the weather render the land less valuable?

I have no idea, and so far as I can tell, nobody else really knows either. So a little mystery, a whole rural district that prospered for two centuries and then faded away, leaving these splendid ruins.

Town plan.

Some authorities identify this as a tavern others an an Andron, a meeting place for men.

The town had public baths, which were a lot less common in 500 AD than they had been 200 years earlier, so the elite were a traditional bunch.

But they were of course Christian; this is the church.

So far as I can tell, this place has so far survived Syria's Civil War unscathed. May it long endure.