Conimbriga

Coninbriga is an archaeological site in Portugal mostly known for its impressive Roman ruins.

Plan of the site from Google Earth.

It is an ancient place, first inhabited in the Bronze Age, but it grew greatly under Roman rule and was made a municipium in 70 AD. Archaeologists estimate that its population at that time was around 10,000.

The baths. Excavation of the site began in the late 1800s and it became an archaeological park in 1910. 

The walled garden of a town house.

Mosaic details.

The aqueduct.

At the height of the empire, the site was unwalled, but in the later 200s walls were constructed. They did not, alas, save it from being sacked by the Sueves in 468. It declined thereafter, and the bishop moved away to a different site around 570. The modern town of Coimbra grew up there, leaving the Roman site to decay into these splendid ruins.

The Lonely Soldier

In one of the saddest videos of the war, a lone Russian soldier is sent on a solo march across a kilometer of open, treeless, snow-covered ground toward Ukrainian positions, without any winter camouflage. He doesn't even try to hurry, but just trudges along, knowing he is doomed. 

The Ukrainian observation drone has plenty of time to study his progress, tracking him until an attack drone can fly in to kill him.

One supposes this was some kind of punishment, but given how the Russians are operating, who knows? The whole scene summarizes for me the awful waste and inhumanity of Putin's terrible war.

There is another awful video going around these days that shows a Russian soldier sitting in a shell crater, surrounded by the corpses of seven or eight other Russians. He doesn't dodge or flinch or show any emotion and the drone flies at him, just sits there, staring straight at it, perhaps stunned by whatever killed his comrades, but perhaps welcoming an end to his nightmare.

Is This Good News or Bad News?

Chicago reporter Dan Mihalopoulos on Twitter/X:

We’ve covered lots of losing teams on the back page of the paper. But none with a record as bad as the Chicago DOJ during Operation Midway Blitz:

• 0 conviction
• 11 charges dropped
• 3 no-billed cases
• 1 jury acquittal

And James Queally of the LA Times:

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in L.A. has lost every case it brought to trial against a protester who allegedly attacked a federal LEO last year. A number of other cases were dismissed or rejected by grand juries.

If you want you can find whole collections of videos on TikTok or YouTube Shorts of judges angrily dismissing charges brought by various Trump lackeys.

As these people note, Federal prosecutors usually win most of the cases they bring, and legal insiders like to repeat the old joke that a good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. So this is a remarkably bad record.

Plus, Trump has threatened all sorts of political figures with investigation for their parts in opposing January 6 or other Trump "initiatives," but none of them have been convicted of anything. So far as I am aware, none of the lawsuits he has threatened against news organizations has ever led to a trial and a loss for his opponents, although lots of people have settled out of court.

What are we to make of this? Should we be reassured that Trump's people are so incompetent? Pleased that their clumsy crackdown is generating so much opposition?

If you really wanted to weaponize the law, would you make Pam Bondi the AG and put a complete idiot in charge of the FBI?

Is the point just harassment, intimidating people into silence by the threat of a few days in jail?

Or is it to wear Americans down until we no long react at all when Federal officers commit outrages? To make this into the new normal?

Is it just a reflexive burst of rage against immigrants and people who support them?

It feels like an extremely clumsy move to me, bad enough to generate widespread outrage but not so bad as to really intimidate the country.

Am I missing something? What, really, is this all about?

The Storm

Major storm along thousand-mile front in North America yesterday. It was weird here because a lot of our precipitation fell as sleet despite it being very cold. So we had about 4 or 5 inches of soft, fluffy snow, and then about 3 inches of ice pellets on top of that, leaving us with a crusty mess that is very hard to walk in. The whole region is mostly shut down today. Above and below, the scene at our house last night.

And its going to be very cold all week, so none of this is melting for quite a while.

Sherlock Holmes on Dogs

From “The Creeping Man”:

“You will excuse a certain abstraction of mind, my dear Watson,” said he. “Some curious facts have been submitted to me within the last twenty-four hours, and they in turn have given rise to some speculations of a more general character. I have serious thoughts of writing a small monograph upon the uses of dogs in the work of the detective.”

“But surely, Holmes, this has been explored,” said I. “Bloodhounds—sleuth-hounds—”

“No, no, Watson, that side of the matter is, of course, obvious. But there is another which is far more subtle. You may recollect that in the case which you, in your sensational way, coupled with the Copper Beeches, I was able, by watching the mind of the child, to form a deduction as to the criminal habits of the very smug and respectable father.”

“Yes, I remember it well.”

“My line of thoughts about dogs is analogous. A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a happy one? Snarling people have snarling dogs, dangerous people have dangerous ones. And their passing moods may reflect the passing moods of others.”

Remarkable Zapotec Tomb found in Mexico

Mexican archaeologists announce the discovery of a Zapotec tomb dating to around 600 AD.

Wonderful sculpture over the entrance. The owl was a sacred bird to the Zapotec, representing night and death. Nobody seems to know what it means to show a human lord, perhaps the man buried here, subsumed within that owl mask.

Interior view.

There seems to be lots of sculpture. The announcement mentions "murals," but I haven't seen any pictures, so maybe these are poorly preserved and need both protection and conservation.

Bertrand Russell on Marx, Dogmatism, and Kindness

Fascinating old video clip.

Question: For those of us who reject Marx, can you offer any positive philosophy to help us toward a more hopeful future?

Russell: Well as to that, you see, I think one of the troubles of the world has been the habit of dogmatically believing something or other, and I think all of these matters are full of doubt. The rational man will not be too sure that he is right. I think that we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine. Not even mine! No, I think we should accept our philosophies with a measure of doubt. 

What I do think is this: that if a philosophy is to bring happiness it should be inspired by kindly feeling. Now, Marx is not inspired by kindly feeling. Marx pretended that he wanted the happiness of the proleteriat. What he really wanted was the unhappiness of the bourgeois. And it was because of that negative element, because of that hate element, that his philosophy produced disaster. A philosophy that is to do good must be inspired by kindly feeling, not by unkindly feeling.

Ned Blackhawk, "The Rediscovery of America"

The Rediscovery of America (2023) is a bold attempt to retell American history with a focus on Indians: what they did, what they suffered, and how their choices shaped their own lives and those of the broader nation. Blackhawk (a professor at Yale) makes no attempt to be comprehensive, which is a good thing given how enormous a comprehensive accounty would have to be. Instead he picks certain events, tribes, or invidivudals to receive attention, hoping to convey the overall story through these examples. Most of the time it works quite well – I have already written three posts based on these narratives (1, 2, 3) – and I recommend this book to the curious. It is clearly written, full of fascinating information, and well supported with citiations. For me the most interesting sections come at the end, since many histories of Indians peter out after Wounded Knee, leaving the impression that nothing much has happened to Indians since then. Actually a whole lot has happened, and Blackhawk gives it good coverage.

What really gets my attention, though, is the ambivalence and contradiction that surrounds such a book, and, beyond that, the ambivalence and contradiction that characterizes Indian life in the 21st century.

To begin with, this kind of scholarship is a European invention. Native Americans had their own ways of narrating the past, their own stories. What does it say that Ned Blackhawks thinks the best way to tell the story of his people is in a Germanic language, following the conventions of German scholarship?

This kind of ambivalence suffuses the text, especially the post-1890 chapters. If there is a theme to these chapters it is Indian resistance to "assimilation." Often Blackhawk has a specific kind of resistance in mind, which is the maintenance of Indian nations as separate governmental indentities with defined territories and bodies of citizens; the converse would be Indians giving up their tribal identities, moving to cities and becoming regular Americans, which is what various US government officials and bodies actively sought. But as I said in my post on Elizabeth Bender Roe Cloud, the Indians who were most effective in fighting this kind of assimilation were those who had gone far in a different kind, acquiring western-style educations and learning the intricacies of the American legal and political systems. To write this book, which is itself an act of resistance, Blackhawk assimilated himself deeply into European ways.

Like most Indian activists, Blackhawk devotes much attention to "poverty" on Indian reservations. But this is a western concept, and the measures generally proposed to fight it (jobs, development) are western solutions.

Blackhawk gives some attention to political changes on reservations, and the conflicts these have posed. On the enormous Colville Reservation in eastern Washington, several bands that had never been politically unified were thrown together. Their leaders eventually formed a "confederated" tribe and held an election for reservation leaders. But half the people didn't bother to vote, and several sent letters to the Bureau of Indian affairs protesting this usurpation of their own chiefs' power. The conflict between traditional tribal governance and Americn-style elected leaders has played out across Indian country, and while there is much sentimental attachment to tribal chiefs, whenever people get the chance to vote on this they opt for elected officials. Democracy is one part of American culture that most Indians seem to love. (Pickup trucks seem to be another.)

I also protest the framing that "assimilation" is something that whites have done to Indians. Step back and you see the same process taking place all over the world. Modernity destroys traditional cultures. Everywhere, without exception. Europe's peasant cultures are gone, as are those of Japan and Korea. Especially when we are talking about the Progressive era in the early 1900s, those folks were bent on assimilating everybody: poor whites, poor blacks, immigrants, you name it. 

I am also on record several places arguing that sovereignty is a red herring, far less important than broader concerns like democracy, freedom, and money. If Indians really care about tribal sovereignty, I suppose they have a right to it, and they are welcome to it. But I do not see it as a solution to any problem I care about.

Here's another question to ponder: what alternative history of American Indians would have led to a better outcome than what we have now?

I find it hard to think of one. I am not a fan of Neolithic tribal life, and I feel confident that as soon as they met Europeans, millions of Indians would have tried to give it up and join the modern world. Given that Indian nations were always at war with each other, the need to buy guns and then canons would have driven them into the global economy. The vulnerability of Indians to Old World diseases would have wreaked its awful destruction regardless of what anybody did; especially given that collapse in population, Indians would have had a very hard time preventing mass European immigration. Nobody has been able to keep modernity out. You can think that making that choice for themselves would have been an important step right there, and maybe so, but modernization in Japan and China did not exactly come off without issues. 

Which is not to say that the European conquest of the Americas was not an awful act, rife with atrocity; it was. But history is an awful act, rife with atrocity, and all the alternative paths I can imagine for Native America are also studded with awfulness and atrocity.

I have no interest in judging the choices made by American Indians. Many Americans envy their determination to maintain their own identities rather than being subsumed into the suburban masses. They can, if they wish, go to college and move to cities and get regular jobs, or they can stay attached to their reservations and throw themselves into whatever bits of their traditions remain. In one sense it is enviable, to have that choice.

But in another sense, to be neither wholly within or entirely outside western culture is a kind of curse, one that in the case of Indians leads to poverty, alcoholism, divorce, and sundry other woes. I am not aware of any people anywhere in the world that is making this work well for them. 

Against the forces of history, technology, and culture, all of our choices are limited, and there are no perfect outcomes for anyone. I wish the best to all the Indians trying to make their way in our world, but I am dubious of Blackhawk's supposition that independent Indian nations and strong tribal identities are the right path for all Indians.

American Indians at the Exposition

Indian performers at the St. Louis World's Fair

Ned Blackhawk:

Within most reservation communities, opportunities for travel, employment, and autonomy were so circumscribed that thousands sought work within staged human exhibitions at world's fairs, Wild West-themed traveling shows, and related tourist sites. . . .

The St. Louis World's Fair of 1904 was only the biggest of a long series of grand exhibitions focusing on the American west:

Each held permanent displays of Indians living within the fiar grounds or within "midway" spectacles led by the famed showman William "Buffalo Bill" Cody. Omaha's "Indian Congress" attracted over five hundred Native people from approximately three dozen tribes who spent three months living in a four-acre section within the exposition grounds. . . . While these performers were presented as primitives, complex adaptions characterized their lives. Some came willingly. Other were compelled by government officials or by economic need. As the Apache leader Geronimo recalled about his time selling handmade arrows at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Fair in St. Louis, "I had plenty money — more than I had ever owned." . . .

While performers like Cody and Geronimo attracted attention, many Native participants used their time in these urban spaces to publicize their community's concerns, to critique government policies, and to couteract public misconceptions. Lakota leader Henry Standing Bear, for example, wrote to the commissioner of Indian Affairs that members of his community wanted to attend the fair but "they want to come as men and not like cattles driving to a show . . . they do not wish that anyone will misrepresent our race." Similarly, Medicine Horse, who performed with Cody in Chicago, remained committed to ensuring that fairgoers developed a positive impression of Native people. According to one acount, he displayed "an apparent eagerness to talk. He is very interesting to listen to, and the information he gives . . . is of much interest and value.

Indians at the St. Louis World's Fair, by George Stark

One of the people determined to make the best use of the opportunities presented by the fairs was Potawatomi author Simon Pokagon:

In his manifesto, The Red Man's Rebuke, which he issued in birch-bark binding, Pokagon wrote pointedly, "We have no spirit to celebrate with you."

Pokagon tried to use the attention generated by the Columbian Expostion of 1893 to agitate for the return of Potawatomi lands; he failed in this, but he did succeed in generating much sympathetic press for Indian causes.

The image of Indians performing traditional dances for fair audiences but spending their spare time lobbying for their causes is quite wonderful. The ties they developed with white liberals led to Indians joining the protests against the wave of American imperialism launched by the Spanish American War, putting themselves forward as spokesmen for imperialism's victims.

Unfortunately nobody seems to know if the Indians who performed at the St. Louis World's Fair ever met and talked to the Filipino tribesmen who were also there, in a separate compound. But what an encounter that would have been.

Quotations are from Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America, 2023.

A Thought About Fertility Decline

Jesús Fernández-Villaverde on Twitter/X: 

Perhaps the fastest decline in fertility ever recorded has taken place in Guatemala’s poorest, least educated, and indigenous majority rural areas, where women’s rights are weakest, between 2006 and 2025.

In 2006, Guatemala’s total fertility rate was 3.8, comparable to that of a sub-Saharan African country. By 2025, it had fallen to 1.8, only slightly above the fertility rate of non-Hispanic Whites in the United States (around 1.6). At the current pace, Guatemala will have a lower fertility rate than non-Hispanic Whites in the U.S. before 2030.

Does your preferred explanation (women’s education, feminism, smartphones, or women choosing holidays in Bali over children) fit that pattern? 

Generational Conflict and Taxation in America

Trump at Davos, on housing affordability:

Every time you make it more affordable for somebody to own a house cheaply, you are actually hurting the value of those houses. I don't want to do anything to hurt the value of their house.

If I wanted to crush the housing market, I could do that so fast that people could buy houses. But you would destroy people who already have houses.

This is just one of many ways that our economic questions intersect with generational issues. Trump is saying that protecting existing homeowners, most of whom are over 40, is more important than helping young people buy homes. You see claims like this being thrown around a lot in "affordibility" debates.

The question also comes up over property taxes. If property taxes are assessed on actual valuation, then people who own houses in areas where property values rise can get hit with high tax bills, and they hate this. The most famous response is California's Proposition 13, which drastically limits how much the assessed value of houses can rise under one owner. But that means the tax burden falls much more heavily on those who have bought their homes more recently, that is, the young.

But even that is not enough for some grouchy oldsters, who are campaigning to avoid paying property taxes altogether. According to Google's AI, sixteen states have programs to reduce or eliminate the property taxes of people over 65. I have seem several online comments to the effect that it is "unfair" for people who have paid off their mortgages to have to keep paying property taxes, which strikes me as bizarre; why should you not have to pay taxes on your property now that you actually own it?

All of this seems to assume that old people are poor, which is simply not true. Some old people are poor, but on the whole people over 65 have vastly greater wealth than those under 35. The notion that the nation's richest cohort should have their property taxes slashed strikes me as absurd.

A compromise approach that has gained steam recently is called the "circuit breaker," which limits the property taxes of those over 65 to a certain percentage of their incomes, protecting them if their incomes collapse or their property values soar. Which makes some sense to me, but why should this only apply to people over 65?

But basically I just hate it when people launch campaigns on the assumption that they and people like them suffer in some unique way that demands the government's attention. We are all Americans and we should all ask, first, what is the best policy for everyone.

Links 23 January 2026

Byzantine Mosaic Floor, Turkey, c. 500 AD

Scott Siskind on Scott Adams and "Dilbert," long but extremely interesting.

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

Perun on the US campaign against the "shadow fleet" and the broader legal and strategic implications, one-hour video.

BBC reporting on divisions within the Taliban leadership.

Richard Hanania, White Woman as Race Traitors.

Ethan Mollick asks Claude to design a very werid game. (Twitter/X)

And from Anthropic, an analysis of the personality of the Assistant, which is what most people interact with. (Twitter/X, paper)

An argument that pursuing status is actually a good idea, because status either is or represents something of real value.

Four academics discuss "viewpoint diversity" in the university: good idea, or cover for a right-wing putsch? 

Remembering China's last conquest of Taiwan, in 1683, which also took place in the aftermath of an inconclusive civil war.

People are leaving New Zealand, more than one percent in just the past year. A majority go to Australia, often in search of better pay and job prospects. (NY Times) The GDP is also falling.

Tyler Cowen interviews Diarmaid MacCullough about Christianity, its history, the Reformation, and more, very interesting.

New Japanese minimalist house, stark but impressive.

Pioneering tourists at the battlefield of Waterloo. And the tourists who came to Johnstown to see the aftermath of the famous flood.

Contested American citizenship in 1784: the "Longchamps Affiar".

Matthew Yglesias, The Shocking Collapse of American Vaccination. A good example of what happens when the elite stops pushing back against a common prejudice.

US murder rates falls to lowest level since 1900. I guess that's one good thing about these soft, wimpy kids who refuse to grow up ;-)

Congress pumps new life into the Navy's 6th-generation fighter program, FA-XX, to the tune of $900 million. The White House budget had cut this program by 90%. Budget analysts say we can't afford two separate 6th-gen fighter programs (the Air Force has the F-47), but the Navy says a longer-range stealth fighter is a must-have.

Henry VIII and Donald Trump

Diarmaid-MacCulloch on Henry VIII:

Trouble about that is that a man like Henry VIII is a narcissist. I think we may have seen some in modern politics. The thing about narcissists is that they make good people do bad things. Henry VIII was talented at making good people, such as Cranmer and, I would say, Thomas Cromwell, do bad things. 

Golden Scabbards of the Steppes

The famous Scythian "Boars Head Sword and Scabbard", from a burial mount (kurgan) near the village of Velika Bilozerka, Ukaine. It dates to about 330 BC.

Another.

Details. The top one shows you the degree of Greek influence; most of these were probably made in Greek cities around the Black Sea.

And a Cimmerian dagger found in Bulgaria.

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 arguments 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 spectular 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.