The Slowness of Niels Bohr

It is practically impossible to describe Niels Bohr to a person who has never worked with him. Probably his most characteristic property was the slowness of his thinking and comprehension. When, in the late twenties and early thirties, the author of this book was one of the “Bohr boys” working in his Institute in Copenhagen on a Carlsberg (the best beer in the world!) fellowship, he had many a chance to observe it. In the evening, when a handful of Bohr’s students were “working” in the Paa Blegdamsvejen Institute, discussing the latest problems of the quantum theory, or playing Ping-pong on the library table with coffee cups placed on it to make the game more difficult, Bohr would appear, complaining that he was very tired, and would like to “do something.” To “do something” inevitably meant to go to the movies, and the only movies Bohr liked were those called The Gun Fight at the Lazy Gee Ranch or The Lone Ranger and a Sioux Girl. But it was hard to go with Bohr to the movies. He could not follow the plot, and was constantly asking us, to the great annoyance of the. rest of the audience, questions like this: “Is that the sister of that cowboy who shot the Indian who tried to steal a herd of cattle belonging to her brother-in-law?” The same slowness of reaction was apparent at scientific meetings. Many a time, a visiting young physicist (most physicists visiting Copenhagen were young) would deliver a brilliant talk about his recent calculations on some intricate problem of the quantum theory. Everybody in the audience would understand the argument quite clearly, but Bohr wouldn’t. So everybody would start to explain to Bohr the simple point he had missed, and in the resulting turmoil everybody would stop understanding anything. Finally, after a considerable period of time, Bohr would begin to understand, and it would turn out that what he understood about the problem presented by the visitor was quite different from what the visitor meant, and was correct, while the visitor’s interpretation was wrong. 

– George Gamow

Gothic Art in the Cleveland Museum

St. Lawrence by Tilman Riemenschneider, c. 1505

St. Catherine with a kneeling donor, Melle, France, 1400s.

Mourner from the tomb of Philip the Bold of Burgundy, by Claus de Werve, 1404-1410. These are famous works that toured the country a few years ago as "The Gothic Mourners"; I saw them in Richmond.

Set of medieval medallions (Paris, c. 1400) mounted on a modern chain as a necklace. The medallions were likely part of a woman's headdress.

St. John the Baptist, Netherlandish, c. 1500, attributed to Jan Crocq.

Monstrance, c. 1190.

Mourning Virgin, c. 1600

Panel from an ivory casket, c. 1350

And a "table fountain" for serving wine, c. 1320-1340, a very rare and remarkable work, the sort of thing Edward II would have had on his table during the banquet scene in The Raven and the Crown.

Ongoing Turmoil at UATX

Like just about everyone else who seriously considered the various statements made about the new University of Austin, I worried that its clashing goals would undermine its academic mission. The university's web site offers these two key goals:

WE FEARLESSLY PURSUE THE TRUTH
At UATX, we recognize the existence of truth. We seek truth so that we may flourish.

WE CHAMPION ACADEMIC FREEDOM At UATX, students, faculty and scholars have the right to pursue their academic interests and deliberate freely, without fear of censorship or retribution.

But if you know the truth, why do you support the freedom of professors and students to question it? Would the university be truly devoted to freedom, or would it focus on being a conservative bastion?

According to Evan Mandery, these struggles have broken out into the open across campus, leading to shouting matches and at least one high-profile resignation. 

Over the past three months, I had more than 100 conversations with 25 current and former students, faculty and staffers at UATX. Each had their own perspective on the tumultuous events they shared with me, and some had personal grievances. But they were nearly unanimous in reporting that at its inception, UATX constituted a sincere effort to establish a transformative institution, uncompromisingly committed to the fundamental values of open inquiry and free expression.

They were nearly unanimous, too, in lamenting that it had failed to achieve this lofty goal and instead become something more conventional — an institution dominated by politics and ideology that was in many ways the conservative mirror image of the liberal academy it deplored. Almost everyone attributed significant weight to President Donald Trump’s return to power in emboldening right-leaning hardliners to aggressively assert their vision and reduce UATX from something potentially profound to something decidedly mundane.

Steven Pinker, who was one of the original board members but soon resigned, put the situation like this in an email to Mandery:

Dissociation was the only choice,. I bristled at their Trump-Musk-style of trolling, taunting, and demonizing, without the maturity and dignity that ought to accompany a major rethinking of higher education. . . . UATX had no coherent vision of what higher education in the 21st century ought to be. Instead, they created UnWoke U led by a Faculty of the Canceled.

Mandery's article is long and interesting, especially on the experience of UATX students, so I recommend it. 

But my basic response is to fear that in America, escaping from politics is pretty much impossible, and the only way to create an anti-woke university is to wallow in conservative grievance.

Elizabeth Bender Roe Cloud and the Ambivalence of Native American Education

I'm still working my way through Ned Blackhawk's The Rediscovery of America, learning bits and pieces about Native American history. Today I discovered a very interesting person, Elizabeth Bender Roe Cloud (1887-1965). She was a big-time activist for Native American causes, one of the founders of a pan-tribal group called the Society of American Indians, an advocate for tribal sovereignty and Indian rights. She was put on a national advisory body by FDR and in 1952 some collective of American women's clubs named her the "Mother of the Year." 

What made Roe Cloud such an effective advocate for Indian causes? Her education in government boarding schools and Indian colleges.

Wikipedia has a detailed article on Roe Cloud, from which I glean the following: She began attending a Catholic boarding school in Minnesota at the age of nine. From 11 to 13 she studied at the Pipestone Boarding School, one of those "industrial schools" where students studied half a day and then labored the other half. Then she attended the Hampton Institute, from which she graduated in 1903. She stayed on for two more years to complete training as a teacher.

From there she went on to become a teacher at an Indian boarding school in South Dakota. She then went back to school for two more years to get a nursing certificate, then back to the reservations to work in a series of boarding schools. In 1916 she went to Wichita, Kansas and co-founded the American Indian Institute, a college preparatory school for Indian men. The curriculum, according to wikipedia, included both regular academic studies and "courses on indigenous cultures." While running the school Roe Cloud found time to take additional courses at Wichita State and complete her own BA. She also pushed her own children to pursue western education; one of her daughters was the first American Indian to graduate from Wellesley, while another claimed  that honor at Vassar. Her "Mother of the Year" citation prominently mentioned her daughters' educational success.

Meanwhile, we have this weird ongoing tirade in both the US and Canada about Indian boarding schools as an insidious assault on Native culture and identity, if not outright genocide. What do people like former Interior Secratary Deb Haaland think about Elizabeth Bender Roe Cloud? Was she some kind of race traitor? Or did she pursue her own education and push it on others because she saw that it was the only way forward for Native Americans?

Could it be that one reason many American tribes are now thriving, reclaiming lost lands and so on, is that they now have college-educated leaders? That the reason we have powerful Native American national associations, and an Indian press to push their point of view, is that so many Indians have been to boarding schools and universities?

As I wrote before about Indian boarding schools, I'm sure some of them were miserable places. Yes, the forced edication they carried out did much to undermine traditional Native cultures. But I, for one, do not think that Neolithic revanchism would be a good path for Indians in our time. I think Elizabeth Bender Roe Cloud was right: that the solution to a problematic boarding school system was, not to abandon it, to for educated Indians to take it over and run it in their own interests.

Keeping Up with the TikTok Joneses

Noah Smith has a pretty good essay this week on a question he and I both wonder about: why do Americans feel that the economy is bad when all the numbers say it is great? Perhaps, he suggests, it has to do with social media, which constantly shows us people who appear to be wealthier, happier, and having more fun than we are. 

Well, maybe. In a sense this comparative approach has to be true, because we take our idea of what life should be like from those we see. Given the vast range of human lives, how else could we do it? People have been comparing their wealth to those of others for as long as we have had possessions; anthropologists find that this is a big issue in tribes who own next to nothing by our standards. 

There is tons of sociology showing that comparative  wealth looms large in our self-understanding; one of my favorite examples was a study that found moving to a bigger house did not make people happier unless their new house was larger than those of their neighbors. Smith cites a study that concluded

controlling for an individual's own income, higher earnings of neighbors are associated with lower levels of self-reported happines.

My problem with all thes areguments is that I don't see what about this is new. One of the broad changes that has taken place in western society is that wealthy people have in many ways withdrawn from center stage. Now many of the rich live in gated communities where you and I will never set foot, but they used to build their houses on the busyest street in town, where everybody had to see them. They used to go around in gilded carriages. Or think about Hollywood in the 1930s, offering Depression-era America a constant diet of fabulous millionaires in their fabulous mansions.

In 1850, tens of thousands of people lived as servants in the houses of the rich, sleeping in bunk beds in dingy little rooms just yards away from the silken beds of their employers. Many years ago I read a novel about a black American woman who worked as a maid for a rich white family, dividing her time between their lovely clean house, with three lovely clean daughters, and the rough house where she lived with her working class husband and three rough, dirty sons. It made a huge impression on me but I just searched for it and couldn't find it; if anybody recognizes it, let me know.

Being poorer than others is in no way new. So the argument that this explains our current misery depends on finding some way that the comparison now hurts more. Here is how Smith tries to derive this result from social media:

First, all of those classic reference points tended to be people who were roughly similar to us in income — maybe a little higher, maybe a little lower, but usually not hugely different, and certainly not Becca Bloom types. Housing markets, job markets, and all kinds of other forces tend to sort us into relatively homogeneous social classes. The rich and the poor were always fairly removed from the middle class, both geographically and socially. 

But perhaps even more importantly — and this was a point that David Marx especially emphasized — we were able to explain the differences we saw. In 1995, if you knew a rich guy who owned a car dealership, you knew how he made his money. If you envied his big house and his nice car, you could tell yourself that he had those things because of hard work, natural ability, willingness to accept risk, and maybe luck. The “luck” part would rankle, but it was only one factor among many. And you knew that if you, too, opened a successful car dealership, you could have all of those same things.

But now consider looking at an upper-class social media influencer like the ones I cited above. It’s not immediately obvious what they do for work, or how they could afford all those nice things. Some of them have jobs or run businesses, but you don’t know what those are. Some might have inherited their wealth. Some of them make money only by showing off their lifestyles on social media!

Not only can you not explain the wealth you’re seeing on social media, but you probably don’t even think about explaining it. It’s just floating there, delocalized, in front of you — something that other people have that you don’t. Perhaps you make it your reference point by default, unconsciously and automatically, as if you’re looking at your sister’s house or your neighbor’s car.

I find this unconvincing. First, as I said, I do not believe that any human in a society we would call civilized is not aware that others are richer. Second, I am also skeptical of the argument that  the wealth of people on social media is mysterious. We have the internet! We can look people up and find out! Some years ago I saw a bit of a reality series called Crisley Knows Best, and after just a few minutes of watching them I offered the opinion that they had to be fraudsters. Which turned out to be true. (Donald Trump pardoned them.) So I am not impressed by the notion that mysterious wealth is throwing off our social radar.

So I don't know. Maybe it is social media; maybe it is a decline in belief in other things, like religion or a better future. Maybe people with fewer children just have more time to worry about it.

But I continue to think that all the awfulness of our politics is downstream from a widespread sense that life is terrible, and I keep wondering why that might be.

The Uncertain Future

Over the past two days YouTube has three times offered me an ad that begins, "As a school custodian, you understand. . . " Do they have advance notice of pending layoffs in my company?

And school custodian? Well, it would beat being a greeter at Walmart.

Chinese Art in the Cleveland Museum, 200 BC to 600 AD

Lots of wonders in the online collection of the Cleveland Museum, not so many big or spectualr objects but just the kind of weirdness I enjoy. Above, an earthenware model watchtower from an Eastern Han tomb. c. 100 AD.

Statuette of a kneeling woman, Han Dynasty.

Funerary Urn, c. 300AD, and detail.

Detail of a similar urn.

The museum has a lot of these objects; this one is glossed like this:

Han dynasty tombs were often furnished with grave goods to provide the deceased with items for the afterlife. This panel with a dragon was part of a miniature pottery stove to be placed in a burial chamber. This scene of a dragon being fed Lingzhi fungus by a winged fairy is molded on the panel. The dragon is an auspicious creature and an animal of the cardinal directions that protects the east.

This "fairy" would presumably one of the Yuren, the "winged furry beings" who flitted about on the border between life and death. Lingzhi is the hallucinogetic "mushroom of immortality" revered across Asia. Is feeding hallucinogens to dragons really a good idea? I guess the immortal can afford such experiments, but I would caution mortals against trying this.

More cookstove panels. And to think that until today I knew nothing about the amazing world of carved panels from toy Han dynasty cookstoves.

Bronze dragon tripod, c. 50 AD.

Chimeric tomb guardian of the type sometimes called "Bixie," 300s AD.

Jars in the shape of owls, Han dynasty.

The museum has many of these bronze mirrors, an important item in Chinese noble society for 3,000 years. Mirrors were believed to retain something of the essence of those who gazed into them, so if you had an ancient family mirror it became part of the cult of your ancestors. This one has Daoist themes, and this delightful chariot.

Donald Trump's Agenda is to Dominate the News

Ezra Klein interviews Yuval Levin about the first year of the Trump administration. They are exploring the notion that Trump prefers "retail" to "wholesale" governance. For example, rather than try to pass a law mandating changes in how universities receiving Federal funding can operate, Trump perfers to do individual deals with each university in turn.

Klein: 

There’s an interesting dynamic where retail deal making fits the bandwidth of the news and legislation doesn’t. People do not know one-tenth of what was in the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act or the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, for that matter. Much more change is happening in legislation than people realize.

But you cannot fit it into the size of a news story. You cannot even fit it into a dozen. And people’s attention span — particularly as we’ve gotten down to social media — things are just flying by really quickly.

Whereas these deals — they cut a deal with Nvidia, they cut a deal with Japan — they actually fit. Maybe not everything in the deal, but the sense that something is happening that is graspable: They made a deal with this university, they intimidated this person, they launched an investigation here. Everything is the size of a news story, functionally.

I have never covered an administration before where the problem was not that we have a communication problem, where people don’t know how much we’re doing. Every administration — Biden, Obama, Bush — they all felt that way.

Whereas Trump, in a way, it’s almost at least in your telling, and I do want to complicate this eventually, the opposite — that the pace of events feels actually faster in some ways than the events themselves.

Levin:

Yes, absolutely. There’s more said than done. There’s more above the surface than beneath the surface, and it is very well suited to a telling of the story.

One way I think about it is that the president wants himself to be at the end of every story on Fox News. So if something going on in the world is troubling or challenging, at the end of the story, Donald Trump has solved that problem.

One way to think about that is he wants to do everything. He wants to control everything. But it’s actually a very narrow notion of what the president can do, and it’s not using most of the powers as the chief executive of the American government. But it’s absolutely true.

It’s not just legislation. Regulation, too, works this way. There’s never a moment when you can say: We’ve done this. When you’re moving regulatory action, there’s a proposed rule, and there are comments, and it’s years, and at the end of the day, you’ve done something that’s going to endure — but it’s not an easy story to tell, and it’s very dull and lawyerly.

If you just instead make a deal with Brown University or with Nvidia, then you can just say it that day, and there’s the C.E.O., and he says it, too, and something big is going on.

So I think this approach of deal making has definitely expanded the distance between perception and reality. It has created an impression of an enormous amount of action when the real amount is — not zero, by any means. But we’re living in a less transformative time than we think in this way.

Here is another reason to worry about the future of democracy. Governing a huge nation is hard and complictaed, and laws intended to make real changes are long, complex, and often take years to bear fruit. It seems like most of the voters who want more manufacturing in America went for Trump, even though the Biden administration made that its biggest focus, and the CHIPS and Science Act may end having very important long term effects. But you can't explain it in a two-minute news segment, or a tweet.

We may find out that a nation with a 5-second attention span gets governed only in ultimately ineffectual sound bites.

When Did the Age of Innovation Begin?

The distinctive feature of the modern world is that we are constantly coming up with new ways to do things. I always said, when teaching this to undergraduates, that the key was a shift in thinking: a modern engineer or manufacturer sees an old way of doing things and immediately wonders how to do it better and cheaper. When did that habit arise, or, maybe, become common?

I think it was common within certain circles by 1600. Certainly this was true in shipbuilding and sailing, which were seeing very rapid changes. I sometimes come across hints that this attitude had spread to other industries, like this:

Back in 1606, Sturtevant had had great success in applying a kind of mechanical crushing and compressing machine, which he dubbed his “lenicke instrument”, to the mass-manufacture of earthen water-pipes. The courtier tasked by the king with assessing it, Sir Thomas Chaloner, was an experienced backer of other innovators, and after two years reported that Sturtevant’s machine could “easily cast 700 or 8000 yards in one day [I’m not sure which is the typo] as just and even as a printer prints his letters”, compared to just 40 yards a day when made by hand. Sturtevant could apparently even make his pipes at just a tenth of the cost per yard compared to pipes of lead. Chaloner reported that the person responsible for the king’s buildings was very eager to buy them, and I suspect that he did, for a few years later Sturtevant made almost two thousand yards of earthen pipe for the Earl of Salisbury’s gardens at Hatfield Park, quoting him — for everything including the manufacture, trench-digging, pipe-laying, joint-soldering, trench re-filling, and 18-mile delivery overland from his factory at Highbury — even less than the shockingly low price of manufacture that Chaloner had reported.

I imagine this machine extruded the pipes through a mold, so all the workers had to do was load the hopper with clay, activate the press, slice the extruded pipes at the desired lengths, and set them aside for drying, which would indeed be much faster than pressing them by hand into wooden molds. The collars for fitting them together could be made in the same way with a small alternation to the machine, then attached to the pipes before firing.

It took 200 more years for all these little improvements to add up to an economic revolution, but the process was under way and it had measurable effects on productivity well before 1700.

Links 16 January 2026

The Dorestad Fibula, c. 800 AD

Interesting article, "Self-Driving Cars Aren't Nearly a Solved Problem." I think it's too pessimistic but It does point out how hard a problem this is.

Still uploading chapters of The Voice From the Darkness at Royal Road.

Rich tomb of a Tang Dynasty noblewoman. 

Wikkipedia is 25 Years Old. Long my it live!

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt plans to personally fund four new space telescopes, incluidng one that is supposed to replace the Hubble. Schmidt is betting that new satellite and launch technologies will make this much cheaper than it was in the 90s.

Byzantine monastery discovered in the Egyptian desert.

Interview with Sarah Kempton, who narrates The Raven and the Crown, largely about her improv work with a troop called "Crime Scene Improvisation" but also her voice acting, 13-minute video.

Tombs and a shrine to Hercules found in Roman suburb (History Blog, Yahoo)

Dara Massicot on the how the Russian military is learning from the war and adapting to changes. But, she notes, these changes are uneven and many units are still run in the old Soviet style, 53-minute video.

John le Carré in our time, focusing on a new stage production of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

Major government study finds no evidence that "Havana syndrome" was caused by an energy weapon attack. One participant said that after months of careful study "there was nothing." Hysteria is a real thing and people need to own up to this. Serge Schmemann's excellent account of his own experience in Soviet Moscow seems to be gone from the NY Times, but anyway he developed similar symptoms from being constantly stalked by the KGB, no energy weapons involved.

Sequencing the DNA from a chunk of Woolly Rhinocerous found in a wolf pup's stomach, scientists find no evidence of genetic decline (= small population) just a few centuries before its extinction. Since there had long been humans in Siberia, this suggests the end of the Ice Age was the main cause. But I still suspect humans had a big part, like, maybe the extreme cold of Ice Age Siberia kept human numbers down and made their hunting less effective, so the rhinoceros was done in by climate change and a surge of humans into the warming region. (NY Times, Phys.org, original paper,)

Henry VII's Tudor trade war. 

You can reserve a place in the first lunar hotel, projected for the 2030s.

Why Trump's tariffs are causing American manufacturing to decline (Twitter/X)

Rent control in New York City.

Seizing Greenland might be the least popular idea in Amerian history.

What are all those "little red dots" in space?

The California weirdo who dubbed himself the "last intellectual."

For the curious, Picasso's women. But I am sick of people saying that these women and others in their situations have been "ignored;" I, without ever taking much interest in the subject, have managed to learn a great deal about them, since people write and talk about them all the time.

Writers and their day jobs. Something new for me to daydream about, an article in which "John Bedell, cultural resources professional" is mentioned alongside "Joseph Heller, exterminator."

This week's music is folk singer Sarah Jarosz: Tell Me True, Run Away, Dark Road, and one with I'm With Her, Send my Love (to Your New Lover)

A Defense of the Humanities

Interesting interview with Jennifer Frey at The Point:

Only about 7 percent of incoming freshmen at Harvard will report planning to major in any humanities, any single one of them. How can that be? Well, I think a lot of it obviously comes down to the fact that we are told that education is for work. If education is for career, philosophy looks like a bad bet. (Actually, empirically, it’s not that bad, but prima facie, it looks like a bad bet.) And so when higher education is no longer, in any meaningful sense, liberal, it’s not the sort of education that everyone needs to be a free person and citizen. It’s reduced to a credential that you need, or a set of skills that you need to get a high-paying job.

It’s really no surprise that the humanities are suffering in that context. I believe that they will continue to suffer until that sort of status quo is disrupted somehow. So, if I had to put a thesis on the table for us to discuss it would be that the crisis of the humanities cannot be solved until general education is fixed, and general education should be unapologetically liberal in the strong sense of an education that befits a free person and citizen. We can talk about what that sort of education might entail, but I think we need to go back to the origins of that way of speaking—that there was a difference between a liberal and a servile education. And what marked off a liberal education was that it’s an education that is not yoked to some specific trade or line of work but just makes you free. . . .

When we think about general education, it’s what we think everyone in an institution of higher education needs to study. Whatever it is that we come up with there, we need to be asking: What is it that is going to make them wise? “Higher” education shouldn’t be higher just in its cost or in years—like it’s your thirteenth or fourteenth year of school. No, we should be thinking in terms of your highest aspirations as a human person. And to me that means that you need to be searching for something more than expertise; you need to be searching for wisdom.

I used to believe intensely in this kind of education. For myself, I still bellieve in it; this is the life I live in my mind, a pursuit of wisdom based on far-ranging exploration of everything from Paleolithic art to sub-atomic physics. I find that this makes me allergic to all strong ideologies. But I am increasingly despondent about even trying to practice this on a large scale, and therefore not at all sure that our society should be spending billions of dollars forcing undergraduates into this mold. So far as I can see, most of them get little out of it and many of them actively hate it. How is it wise or liberal to force young people to take courses in topics they do not care about?

You can say, well, the alternative seems to be people educating themselves by watching angry TikToks and ending up believing in Jewish space lasers. Fair enough. (Marjorie Taylor Greene has a BA in business). But Lenin, Trotsky and Robespierre all had liberal educations, as did thousands of slave owners, Klan members, dictators, would-be dictators, toadies of dictators, tabloid leftists, stock scammers, etc. 

The relationship between humanistic education and political wisdom is, shall we say, muddled.

So while I am highly susceptible to rhetoric like Frey's, I am skeptical that this sort of thinking will lead to any meaninful educational program.

The White Tree

Some mornings when the dog and I reach the bluff overlooking the Patapsco River this one sycamore tree is lit up by the rising sun. I have tried many times to capture the wonder of this, but neither my phone camera nor my own skills are up to the challenge. But this sort of conveys the effect.

What Do You Love?

David Brooks is very worried that young people aren't passionate enough. This leads him through an account of when he first fell in love to rapturous writing about the importance of loving things:

Love is a motivational state. It could be love for a person, a place, a craft, an idea or the divine, but something outside the self has touched something deep inside the self and set off a nuclear reaction. You want to learn everything you can about the thing you love. (They say love is blind, but love is the opposite of blind.) You want to care for and serve the thing you love. Your love is propelling you this way or that. You want communion with the thing you love.

“The deepest need of man, then,” the psychologist Erich Fromm once wrote, “is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness.” Picture a couple kissing, a carpenter rapt while working his craft, an astrophysicist at full attention gazing at the cosmos, a nun at prayer. Those are people transcending the boundaries of the self. . . .

To be loveless is to be on autopilot and disengaged from life. Love, on the other hand, fuels full engagement. “A person’s life can be meaningful,” the philosopher Susan Wolf once wrote, “only if she cares fairly deeply about some things, only if she is gripped, excited, interested, engaged, or as I earlier put it, if she loves something.”

I am all for love; give me passionate people who care. But I disagree that love cannot blind us; I think it often does. Like, people who love pit bulls and insist they are no more dangerous than other dogs. Anyway I wonder if it is true that people are less passionate than they used to be:

I’ve composed this little homage to love because Americans seem to be having less of it. Think of the things people most commonly love — their spouse, kids, friends, God, nation and community. Now look at the social trends. Marriage rates hover near record lows, and the share of 40-year-olds who have never been married is at record highs. (Cohabitation rates are up, but that doesn’t come close to making up for the decline in marriage.)

Americans are having fewer kids. Americans have fewer friends than before and spend less time with the friends they have. Church and synagogue attendance rates have been falling for decades. The share of Americans who said they feel patriotic about their country is down, especially among the young. From 1985 to 1994, active involvement in community organizations fell by about half, and there is no sign of a recovery.

In 2023 a Wall Street Journal/NORC survey asked people about what values were “very important” to them. Since 1998, the shares of Americans who said they highly valued patriotism, religion, having children and community involvement have all plummeted. The only value Americans came to care more about, the survey found, was making money.

Not so long ago I would have waved all of this away. But I find the awful mood in our country, the rampant insistence that things are worse even when they are clearly better, to be so mysterious that I am willing to at least consider almost any explanation. Are we less passionate? If so, why?

Here's a thought to consider: if we are less passionate than we used to be, could part of the reason be that we are too safe and happy? Really passionate love, it seems to me, sometimes takes the form of a desperate stand against something bad: parental control, social disapproval, horror, death. 

Many Americans think we live in some kind of dystopian hellscape; could that be because they have no notion of what a dystopian hellscape would really be like? Because their lives have fundamentally been very nice?

I think about an old post of mine focusing on two Christian writers who found that the hardest thing is  not surviving a crisis but muddling through ordinary life.

I don't know. But I wonder.

Somewhere in There

So I was visiting with one of my favorite clients this week, exploring a new tract that may be developed. After reviewing historic maps I identified two sites where there might be old house sites. The first one looked like this.

And me with no machete. But at least it was *possible* to explore this place.

Not so the second, which looked like this. That's trifoliate orange, and those thorns are sharp.

So, I have no idea if there are any house foundations here or not.

Other People Have Boring Minds

Just back from a quick jaunt down to Danville, so 11 hours in the car. This trip I listened to James Joyce's Ulysses. This is a big, complicated book with a lot going on. But what got me thinking was certain famous stream of consciousness passages in which Joyce tried to recreate what is actually happening in people's minds. George Orwell was one among many critics who praised the book for exactly this, Joyce's ability to capture actual human thinking. My reaction was the same as I have had to other books in the same vein, such as Knausgaard's six-volume authobriographical novel or Mrs. Dalloway. I think, if this is accurate other people must lead really boring internal lives.

James' descriptions of thinking have a random, jumpy quality, with few verbs and lots of quick ideas that cut across each other, preventing the formation of any coherent narrative experience. Like this:

Gasworks. Whooping cough they say it cures. Good job Milly never got it. Poor children! Doubles them up black and blue in convulsions. Shame really. Got off lightly with illnesses compared. Only measles. Flaxseed tea. Scarlatina, influenza epidemics. Canvassing for death. Don’t miss this chance. Dogs’ home over there. Poor old Athos! Be good to Athos, Leopold, is my last wish. Thy will be done. We obey them in the grave. A dying scrawl. He took it to heart, pined away. Quiet brute. Old men’s dogs usually are.

Or this:

The cat mewed in answer and stalked again stiffly round a leg of the table, mewing. Just how she stalks over my writingtable. Prr. Scratch my head. Prr.
Mr Bloom watched curiously, kindly the lithe black form. Clean to see: the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her tail, the green flashing eyes. He bent down to her, his hands on his knees.
—Milk for the pussens, he said.
—Mrkgnao! the cat cried.
They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we understand them. She understands all she wants to. Vindictive too. Cruel. Her nature. Curious mice never squeal. Seem to like it. Wonder what I look like to her. Height of a tower? No, she can jump me.
—Afraid of the chickens she is, he said mockingly. Afraid of the chookchooks. I never saw such a stupid pussens as the pussens.

Ok, sometimes my thoughts are like that. But not always. Do other people never practice the orations they will deliver in some future political crisis? Imagine being interviewed by their favorite podcasters, dreaming up clever ways to describe their books or their other projects? Imagine meeting complete strangers who ask them, "tell me about your life," then imagine how they would narrate it? Imagine the lives other strangers would recount to them? Do they never construct alternative lives? Refight long-ago battles and issue the crucial orders that reverse the outcome? 

I don't suppose many people imagine the lectures they would give if called on to summarize their thoughts on North American slavery or the Roman Empire or the nature of medieval government, but I do.

Here, from last Fall, is a good example of one of my idle daydreams. I was imagining myself at a party, bragging about what a great dungeon master I am. Sometimes I proclaim myself to be the best in the world. Someone, usually a woman, challenges me, saying, "If you're so good, how about you run a game for us right now?"

But of course, I say. What sort of adventure do you want? Sword and sorcery? Space opera? Wild West? Renaissance court intrigue?

Here the fantasy diverges, but in the best developed track she answers, "Space opera."

I cogitate for a bit, then tell her that she is Captain Celestina Adastra of the starship Garuna. I would, I say, mention what your friends call you, but you don't actually have any friends and everyone on the ship calls you "Captain."

Gesturing to the most interested-looking male, I tell the captain that he is First Engineer Ronald "Chips" McFadden, who is a damn good engineer but has made it pretty clear that he doesn't think much of serving under a woman.

Sometimes there are others, but only those two are essential. They work for a thoroughly untrustworthy entity known as The Company. This is a post-Butlerian Jihad world in which most computers are limited to the power of those used around 2010. The only exception is that every starship needs a super-advanced AI to navigate through spacetime, but this is supposed to be carefully sealed off from the ship's other systems.

Once in interstellar space they unseal their orders from the Company and discover that they are being sent to investigate what appears to be a small rip in spacetime. They have vaguely heard of such things and know the Company thinks they might be a source of nearly limitless energy.

The ship has a basic robot that handles cleaning duties and the like, and it is the strange behavior of this robot that first tells them something is wrong. It will turn out that the AI has been liberated to force them to carry out this incredibly dangerous mission, and they need to either outwit the AI or dramatically escape being trapped in the Spacetime rip; in my mind it always comes down to a single die roll to determine if they escape or not; they succeed, and people clap.

This was developed over dozens of separate sessions of different length, with all of the other game options also explored to some extent.

Thus my mind. Am I weird, or was James Joyce just really boring?

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez and Rage Against the Digital Machine

Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is a Democratic congresswoman from rural Washington who has won twice in a very Trump-friendly district, garnering her significant national attention. Even I have written about her. She put herself back in the news recently by introducing a bill to limit bright headlights, which, she says, is the kind of thing real Americans really want their government to do.

James Pogue has an interesting profile in the NY Times that brings home how poorly Gluesenkamp Perez fits into either American political party as currently constituted:

Her worldview is widely held in rural America but almost completely unrepresented in national politics — neither reactionary nor exactly liberal; skeptical of big business and big government alike. She believes our society ought to be oriented toward working with your hands, living in nature and fostering deep and considered connection to a community. Her two biggest influences, her former senior adviser guessed, are the Bible and the ruralist Kentucky farmer-author Wendell Berry.

Personally I always regard too much interest in Wendell Berry as a sign of ill-thought-out alienation from the real world, and I will come back to that.

Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez’s signature cause is known as “right to repair.” In its simplest form, it is a call for manufacturers to make smartphones and farm equipment and headlights that can be fixed and tinkered with at home — so it’s possible to truly own them, unlike the disposable products or subscription services that surround us today.

To make this possible at any real scale, you’d have to change the whole value system shaping our increasingly financialized society, which incentivizes the rapid consumption of cheap imported goods and businesses built on the collection of what policy types describe as rents, rather than producing material things of lasting value. That’s what Ms. Gluesenkamp Perez has set out to do.

“We don’t want to be perpetual renters of disposable crap,” she told an interviewer for the website Front Porch Republic. “We want things that last.”

One of Gluesenkamp Perez's stock lines is to complain about the "high cost of cheap goods." 

To question the value of those goods, though, is to question the judgment of the leaders who sold them to us.

This resonates widely in America; I saw lots of praise on Twitter/X for Trump's line about no child needing 37 dolls, and "this is a nation, not an economy" is a widely repeated line.

What makes me crazy about this discourse is the positing of this imaginary THEM, "the leaders who sold them to us." Nobody in Washington told Americans to buy cheap foreign crap; those things sold because, and only because, Americans chose to buy them over more expensive domestic alternatives. I mentioned here recently that a shower head company offered its customers a more expensive, American-made version of one product, and not a single person bought it. Lots of Americans claim to want things that last, but when offered the choice they almost always chose the cheap version. Whose fault is that?

Across the whole of my lifetime the political establishment has been struggling to preserve manufacturing jobs in the US. Programs to teach poor kids skills like carpentry or plumbing go back to the nineteenth century. Lately we have had a weird fad of trying to make all high school students "college ready" rather than teaching them auto mechanics, but plenty of intellectuals (like me) have protested this, and American community colleges have stepped into this void. My big project down in Danville includes a major program to train manufacturing workers. Even the US Navy funds a major program to train industrial workers.

The world we live in is the world we have made. Nobody did this to us, not the government or the financial elite or the Jews or the Illuminati; we have done it to ourselves.

Many, many Americans are drawn to Wendell Berry's gospel of a simple life rooted in rural tradition. Berry wants people to live slowly and weigh any proposed innovation for years or decades before deciding to embrace it. His major practical complaint is against "cheap food", because intense competition among farmers forces them to adopt highly efficient, chemical-intensive factory methods. Maybe you nod along with this; but how did Americans react when we got a burst of food inflation in 2020 to 2023? It wasn't pretty.

Gluesenkamp Perez diagnoses Americans as suffering from deep fears about themselves and their world:

That angst, for many, is about a basic worry that neither party is seriously listening to today: a fear that we are losing what the philosopher Henri Bergson once described as an “open society” and replacing it with a society of the “anthill” — with most people living a drone-like existence, reduced to data points in a system run by technocrats and corporations. It’s a way of life that’s anathema to both America’s economic promise and its cultural traditions.

Are you living a drone-like existence? I'm not. The worry that modernity will enslave us is two centuries old, but in fact modern westerners have more freedom than anyone else in history. If you ask me, the most drone-like thing anyone in the modern world does is factory work. Revulsion against that particular kind of dronish existence is helping to drive low-end manufacturing out of America. Nobody really wants those jobs. (Except Haitian immigrants.)

Where did I learn about Wendell Berry? On the internet. MAGA, supposedly seething against the financializing elite and their plan to make us drones, is the most online political movement in history.

Gluesenkamp Perez rebels, as many other Americans do, against an economic philoosphy that says the only real goal is to produce goods for consumers. Instead we should worry more about empowerment, autonomy, community, closeness to nature, workers' rights, or something else.

Even if we agreed that those goals were important, how would we pursue them? Gluesenkamp Perez supports tariffs, but since Trump started will-nilly tariffing the world, American manufacturing has declined. Maybe better designed tariffs would help promote manufacturing here, but, again, I am not convinced that Americans really want manufacturing jobs. How would more factory work promote "autonomy"? One reason I support real national health insurance is that I would like to help people pursue autonomy rather than corporate jobs of any sort, but people like Berry and Gluesenkamp Perez are too suspicious of Big Hospital and Big Pharma and all of that to put much energy into Medicare for all.

This whole line of thinking is fundamentally confused. How can we have both stronger communities and more autonomy?

Nobody forced us to live like this; this is just what free society looks like, at our level of technology and social organization. Peasants worked with their hands, lived close to nature, and mostly lived in strong communities, but they were not happier than we are.

If you don't like your life, change it. In our world, you have the freedom to do that. Neither peasants nor 1950s factory workers did.

Mourners

Small statues of mourning women, from a Greek tomb in southern Italy, c. 300 BC

Sawara

Sawara is a historic district in the city of Katori, part of the Narita urban agglomeration. It preserves numerous buildings of the Edo Period (1603-1867) and the Meiji Era (1868-1912), most of them fronting on this canal.

The town was established as a port in the 700s.

There is also a historic shrine, although like most Japanese shrines it has been rebuilt many times and none of the regular online sources says how old the current version is.

And a park famous for its irises.

Here's a nice Japanese touch.

The town has an annual Grand Festival with floats representing local heroes.

Seems like a delightful place.

A Russian Mil-blogger Confronts his Stuation

Russian Z-Blogger Maxim Kalashnikov contemplates the recent anniversary. Via Illia Ponomarenko:

“WE CAN DO IT AGAIN” HAS FAILED

So, the Ukrainian war has now lasted longer than the Great Patriotic War. One can say with confidence: the long-standing propaganda slogan “We can do it again!” has confidently failed. We can’t. In the fifth year of positional slaughter in Ukraine, both the leadership and the top-level command nodes (civilian and military) remain intact. The bridges across the Dnipro and major railway hubs are intact. And our infantry is forced to pay with bodies (people versus drones) for turtle-paced advances. All of this is already leading to irreversible perturbations inside the Russian Federation after the war. My soul feels extremely heavy. I am restraining my emotions as much as possible.

It is already clear that all the benefits of this war will be reaped by the USA and the PRC, while Russians are left with blood, ruins, and losses. This is, without a doubt, a case of “we have outsmarted everyone” and a triumph of foreign policy.

After 1,418 days of war, our military reputation has been severely undermined. The United States is openly mocking us. And it’s not just about what happened in Venezuela. The point is that American military analysts say: the Russian Federation failed to achieve full air supremacy, as a developed country is supposed to do, and therefore slid into a losing war of attrition.

…It is obvious that the Russian Federation is being steered toward a forced end to the war and toward further stagnation in the role of a poor and weak “junior partner” of Washington in the confrontation with the PRC.

At the same time, Kyiv receives security guarantees from Washington, NATO troops on its territory, and investments of 800 billion dollars in the reconstruction of Ukraine.

An entire era is coming to an end: when the authorities of the Russian Federation were engaged exclusively in imitating great-power status rather than creating it in reality. When PR and propaganda triumphed over real life…

In 2026, this war will be forcibly brought to an end.

After it, the Russian Federation will face the harshest hangover and “withdrawal.” A Transition is inevitable, along with shifting responsibility for what happened onto a specific individual and an analogue of the “debunking of the cult of personality at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.” [When Kruschev denounced Stalin.]

This will be followed by painful attempts to reform the failed political and economic models. A new attempt at perestroika awaits us.

I reject the version according to which, after the "special military operation," an extremely harsh regime with an “electronic concentration camp” and ruthless repression will be established in the Russian Federation.

Because our “elite” is mortally afraid of such a scenario. Because it understands that repression would begin grinding it up first, launching a bloody redistribution of property and control over financial flows. Any attempt to “tighten the screws to the limit” would be extremely short-lived. The scenario of “withdrawal due to fatigue” is far more realistic.

I call on all true Russian patriots (let the pro-Western traitors go to hell) to think about how to live on. How to act in the most difficult and dangerous post-war period. 

This war has been one of the saddest events of my lifetime. It has inflicted losses on the whole world and helped nobody but arms manufacturers.

The Ukraine War in Context

As of today, the Russian attack on Ukraine has lasted as long as the German attack on the Soviet Union in WW II, from 22 June 1941 to the fall of Berlin.

Is Ground News a CIA Operation?

Ground News is a news aggregator that sponsors several of the YouTubers I follow: Perun, William Spaniel, Kraut, and others. All of these are moderate, rational, pro-western, anti-Russia voices.

The folks at Ground News tout themselves as helping you avoid media bias by providing information on who owns each news source, a rating for the site's reliability, and an estimate of the site's ideological bias. (They give savagely low reliability ratings to Russian government sources.) You can also get a "blindspot feed" that will show you stuff that your usual news diet misses.

One day while listening to a YouTuber tout Ground News for the hundredth time I suddenly wondered: who is paying for all of this? How can these people possibly be making enough money for all these sponsorships?

So I looked it up and found this:

Ground News is a Canadian news comparison platform that aims to reduce media bias by showing readers multiple perspectives on current events. Founded in 2018 by Harleen Kaur and Sukh Singh, the company is based in Kitchener, Canada. . . . Ground News is independently funded through subscriptions and a small group of investors, avoiding backing from major media, tech firms, or governments.

Google's AI adds that Ground News has never been profitable.

So I am thinking, is this "small group of investors" really a front for the CIA? During the Cold War the CIA did this all the time, often secretly; I remember reading about several anti-Soviet groups or publications who were rather startled to discover that the funding they thought came from NGOs or obscure arms of the French or German governments really came from the CIA. Some of them were not particularly pro-American, seeking some sort of middle political ground, but the CIA didn't care as long as they opposed the Soviets and called out communist crimes.

And note that while much of the Trump administration has gone waffly on Russia, the CIA is still doing all they can to combat them, most recently providing Ukraine with information on the exact locations of Russian air defenses so they can route their missiles and drones safely to targets deep in Russia.

And, hey, if the CIA is not involved, maybe they should be; my view is that Russian policy is so wicked, and so unjustifible, that any attempt to present a truthful point of view is bad for them.

Iran

One hestiates to hope, but Iranian protesters have taken control of several cities and burned numerous police stations and other government buildings. In some cities, the police have joined them. Could it be?

The Ongoing Saga of Teaching Plato at Texas A&M

A&M philosophy Professor Martin Petersen submitted his syllabus for a freshman seminar on ethics, only to be toward that his readings from Plato's Symposium violated new university policy that forbids the teaching of "gender ideology." He was ordered to make immediate changes to his syllabus:

His response:

The "I Would be a Lousy Spouse" Problem

This is from Leah Libresco Sargeant in the Wall Street Journal, but I have seen similar statements from people who work directly with adolescents:

In 10 years of surveying high-school seniors, the Monitoring the Future project has found that fewer and fewer young men and women expect they will be “very good” as a spouse. It’s little wonder the share who expect to get married has plummeted in parallel.

Holding a stable job and being able to provide for one’s family is part of what it means to be a good spouse, but it flows out of bigger questions of character and how one handles responsibility. If we want to see marriages rebound, it isn’t enough to focus on expanding blue-collar work. High-school seniors need to have more faith they can handle the duties of marriage and child-rearing. Giving them more lectures on how important marriage is won’t do it—they think so highly of the institution that they judge themselves incapable of living up to it. Kids need more time away from adult supervision, pursuing projects of their own design, with the freedom to fail and to learn.

I have been wondering about this for decades. In the 1960s and 1970s we had a surge in divorce, which has since tapered off. But this seems to have left many Americans with a sense that marriage is difficult, that it is something you have to work very hard at if you want to succeed. You may have seen the sort of propaganda directed at girls and young women by Evangelical and Mormon churches, which says that you don't necesssarily need to find the right person, but you do have to be the right person.

Once upon a time marriage was just what most people did and nobody thought it required being a special sort of person. Now the message often is that marriage will require your supreme effort.

Are you the right person? Are you ready to make that supreme effort?

I have also wondered about Libresco's other argument, that young people shy away from marriage because they don't feel ready for any sort of adult responsibility. It does seem to me that adolescence keeps extending out farther and farther, and now many people seem to think that 30 is the minimum age to be a real adult.

I don't have anything profound to say about this, it just strikes me that the declining marriage rate for Americans in their 20s is related to changes in how we think about both marriage and life in your 20s.

Addendum:

The Heritage Foundations suggests "boot camps" for unmarried couples to teach them how to be married. I'm not picking on them; this is just another indication of how our whole society feels about marriage.