We're All Individuals

Amusing essay by Steve Lagerfeld about one of the perennial paradoxes of the modern age, our insistence that we are all outsiders who hate the mainstream. He begins with a Satanic church event at a nighclub, where

ten speakers lined up to spell out the issues in a series of bullet-point pronouncements. “To invoke Satan is to invoke rebellion, and also to question authority,” declared the first. It is to invoke “the struggle for equal justice and equal rights for everyone,” said another. Others announced the temple’s support for science, the right to “claim your body as your own,” and free inquiry. One spoke of “satanic revolution.” The last speaker sounded the evening’s big theme: “We have each embraced the life of a pariah, cast out for being different. Yet here we are together, hundreds of us gathered in one place. Insiders upending the old paradigms.”

It was a shrewd piece of marketing. Somebody in the Satanic Temple brain trust had plucked the signal from the noise of the American scene. The thing to be today is an outsider, an underdog, a moral outlier and exemplar, a defier and disrupter of the established order. It’s an identity that has never been far from the surface in American society, and it is now reasserting itself in a new form. It doesn’t matter if, like the Los Angeles Satanists, you have thoroughly conventional ideas. Or if, like the nation’s Trump supporters, you number in the tens of millions and have put your man in the White House. One of the more compelling claims you can make in America today is that you are proudly and defiantly outside the mainstream. That you are a contrarian. It’s the claim not just of populists but of professors who style themselves as iconoclasts, climate change deniers, radical environmental groups, libertarian seasteaders bent on creating autonomous floating cities, countless alternative-values and lifestyle groups, and many others. The farther you position yourself from the mainstream, the better. Conservative Christians and their rationalist-humanist adversaries in groups like the Satanic Temple seem to vie for the distinction of being the most unwelcome group in American society.

Once upon a time, Lagerfeld says, you had to actually be somehow different from the mass of Americans to claim this status, for example by refusing to take a corporate job. But now "outsiderness has been democratized," and millions of ordinary-looking suburbanites with ordinary jobs proudly proclaim themselves outsiders.

And why do we do this?

The contrarian’s great temptation is moral vanity, and what a sweet one it is. . . . For some of us, there is nothing like the joy of being a pariah.

Right. To be superior to the herd is one of the most pleasant and powerful fantasies.

I've been wondering for some time we moderns are so obsessed with our petty rebellions. Maybe our society is just so huge that it's very hard for people to identify with. Maybe it's the absence of neighboring tribes bent on carrying off our cattle. Maybe it is the degree of difference within the culture, in terms of tastes and opinions. Maybe we're just bored.

I write about this from time to time mostly because it is the mass social tendency I feel most powerfully in myself. I am aware of how foolish it is for me to feel great superiority over the masses, but I can't help myself; nothing makes me feel smug and happy like thinking I am different from and closer to being right than the mass. Which just proves all the more what a typical citizen of our age I really am.

The Individual vs. the Group

Whenever you use statistical averages to speak about individuals, you run the risk of obscuring more than you reveal. When the data is all over the place, the average can be a meaningless number, and even when there is a normal distribution the outliers may violate all your conclusions.

When it comes to human psychology, things are even worse. This new study found that not only did the averaging statistics hide a lot of variation between individuals, it also masked a lot of variation within individuals, that is, in how they tested from one day to the next.

This study was about depression and anxiety, and it was supposed to measure things like how strongly the two are correlated. What it found was that the standard deviation for individuals, from one day to the next, was eight times greater than the standard deviation for the data set as a whole.

The mean values may still be useful for something, but doing those statistics actually obscures the most fascinating finding of the study, which is about variation: not only do our moods vary a lot, but the correlations between different parts of our moods vary a lot, too. For example, the study tried to determine if brooding is correlated with depression, and the answer was that if you average the data from all 1043 participants, yes, but for you it will depend on what day it is.

For describing human societies, averages are essential, but for getting to know any particular person they are worse than useless. Even the average of one person's behavior may not tell you anything about how he or she will act on any given day.

Greed

The former Prime Minister of Malaysia has been accused of corruption on a grand scale, and not just by his political opponents:

American prosecutors have accused Mr. Najib, 64, of diverting into his personal bank account $731 million from the state investment fund, which he supervised for years. Money siphoned from the fund, known as 1MDB, was then spent on luxury goods, such as a $27.3 million pink diamond necklace that was worn by Mr. Najib’s wife, American investigators said.

The United States Justice Department said that at least $4.5 billion from 1MDB was laundered through American financial institutions and misspent by Mr. Najib, his family and associates.

I find stories like this one shocking because of the lack of limits. Ok, so Najib wanted to be rich; lots of people do. But $4.5 billion? Incuding more than $700 million just transferred to his personal account? What was he thinking? Surely with control of the investment fund he could have made tens of millions in ways that would have been a lot harder to prove against him. Heck, he could have operated in a completely legal way and just steered enough to certain friends to guarantee himself a seat in some Singapore investment bank when he retired.

But for some people being rich is not enough. They have to be mega-rich, giant yacht rich, rich completely beyond reason. Or maybe the taking becomes an obsession in itself; last year I stole $100 million and got away with it, so this year I'll steal a billion. Like this:

The Malaysian police said last week that they had seized cash, jewelry, purses and other valuables worth as much as $273 million from properties of Mr. Najib and Ms. Rosmah. The catalog of seized jewelry included 567 handbags, 2,200 rings and 14 tiaras.

I find it utterly weird.

Implanting Memories in the Prime Minister

Richard Power Sayeed:

Unlike much of what had taken place behind palace gates and Downing Street doors in the week after Princess Diana's death, the content of a telephone conversation between Queen Elizabeth II and Prime Minister Tony Blair about how the Windsors should respond to the fatal car crash in Paris had been leaked only in the broadest terms (they had bickered), and neither the phrases used by the pair nor the exact points they raised were known to Peter Morgan. But when he sat down to write the script for what became The Queen (2006), he had to include the phone call. So he did what was necessary. He wrote the scene, but made it up.

Subsequently, however, the screenwriter noticed something that he recalled, with artful perplexity, at an event in 2017 promoting the first series of his television dramatization of the Queen's life, The Crown. Morgan reported that when, in the years since The Queen was released, Tony Blair has recounted his phone argument with the monarch, he has repeated, unattributed, the artificial lines that his fictional counterpart and Her Majesty's spoke in the film.

Morgan appears to have altered Blair's memory, and historians will likely use the former Prime Minister's recollections as source material, in which case the screenwriter will accidentally have contributed his elegant artifice to the historical record.

Review of The Crown in the TLS for January 19, 2018.

Today's Teenagers: Sex and Drug Use Down, Depression and Suicidal Thoughts Up

From the latest U.S. government survey of high school students:

In 2017, 31 percent of students surveyed said they had feelings of hopelessness, while 28 percent said so in 2007. In 2017, nearly 14 percent of students had actually made a suicide plan, up from 11 percent in 2007. . . .

The report did offer some encouraging trends, suggesting that the overall picture for adolescents is a nuanced one. Compared to a decade ago, fewer students reported having had sex, drinking alcohol or using drugs like cocaine, heroin or marijuana. . . .

Although health disparities still remain among races, some sexual risk behaviors are decreasing across the board. The percentage of white students who’d ever had sex, for example, decreased to 39 percent in 2017 from 44 percent in 2007. Among black students, the rate plummeted to 46 percent from 66 percent in 2007 and, among Hispanic students, decreased to 41 percent from 52 percent.

Overall, the percentage of students who had ever had sex decreased to 39 percent in 2017 from 48 percent in 2007.

The percentage of students who had experienced sexual dating violence declined to 7 percent in 2017 from 10 percent in 2013.

Overall in our world we are safer than ever, but more anxious than ever; we are richer than ever, but no more satisfied with our lives; we have vast technological power at our disposal, but still feel thwarted. Some days this makes me wonder that we have made some terrible mistake and taken our civilization in entirely the wrong direction; other days it makes me think that we are programmed for a certain level of happiness and worry, and short of rewiring our brains we will always find more to worry about and be sad about.

So Many Napoleons in the Madhouse

In 1840, the year of the return of Napoleon’s remains to France, thirteen or fourteen “Napoleons” were admitted to the insane asylum at Bicêtre in the south of Paris. One can imagine that each of them considered the others to be mad. Of course, there had been people suffering from this kind of delusion even while he was still alive. In 1818, at least five people were admitted to Charenton hospital believing they were Napoleon. Now, however, Napoleon was being caricatured, right down to his temperament — ‘imperial’, proud, haughty, abrupt, tyrannical, capricious, choleric. The men (and one woman that we know of) who believed they were Napoleon always fit the same profile: they took themselves seriously, they gave orders and they demanded loyalty; in return they treated people with disdain.

-- Philip Dwyer, Napoleon: Passion, Death and Resurrection, 1815-1849. Via Marginal Revolutions.

Depression

When you feel perpetually unmotivated, you start questioning your existence in an unhealthy way; everything becomes a pseudo-intellectual question you have no interest in responding to whatsoever. This whole process becomes your very skin and it does not merely affect you; it actually defines you. So, you see yourself as a shadowy figure unworthy of developing interest, unworthy of wondering about the world – profoundly unworthy in every sense and deeply absent in your very presence.

– Ingmar Bergman

Cyberbullying Yourself

NPR:

According to a survey published late last year in the Journal of Adolescent Health, teens are bullying themselves online as a way to manage feelings of sadness and self-hatred and to gain attention from their friends. For the study, 5,593 middle and high school students from across the U.S., ages 12 to 17, completed a series of questionnaires that asked about their experiences with digital self-harm and cyberbullying.

"We were alarmed to learn that 6 percent of the youth who participated in our study engaged in some form of digital self-harm," says Sameer Hinduja, co-author of the study and a professor of criminology at Florida Atlantic University. 

An example:

Child psychologist Sheryl Gonzalez-Ziegler of Denver says it's a growing problem among teens whom she counsels. One recent client, an adolescent girl, told Gonzalez-Ziegler that she anonymously cyberbullied herself because, as a gay teen, she felt vulnerable and exposed.

"She set up ghost accounts on Instagram and posted mean comments about herself, saying things like, 'I think you're creepy and gay' and 'Don't sit next to me again,' " Ziegler says.

"She said these things because she feared being mocked by her peers," the psychologist explains. "She thought their teasing wouldn't be so bad if she beat them to the punch."

I don't find this surprising at all. I remember learning back in high school psychology about the two types of hero fantasies, the conquering hero and the suffering hero. And while it's still hard to make yourself a conqueror, it is easy to become a suffering hero by conjuring up a crew of online bullies.

For an example of someone who made herself very popular (for a while) this way, see here.

Incels, Jihadists, and the Problem of Lonely Young Men

Alek Minassian, the "incel" who killed ten people with a truck in Toronto last week, may have had more in common with jihadist terrorists than his anger and his method of attack:

Mr. Minassian is obviously a deeply troubled individual. And mass murder is driven by a variety of psychological factors. But much of Mr. Minassian’s trouble seems to have been fueled or exacerbated by the frustration and shame that accompanied his lack of sexual contact with women. This would have made him feel unfulfilled and indignant, and also weak and unmanly. The sense of shame from not being able to perform a culturally approved sex role may be a key to understanding his murderous rage. It may also be another thread connecting him to other violent actors whose ideology is different from his own, yet whose actions are similar. It is not difficult to spot parallels with the world of jihadism, where women and sex are similarly fixated on to an extraordinary degree.

Among those who identify with the “incel” movement, there is a pathological fixation on sex and women, and there is a self-pitying perception that everyone else, except the community of “incels,” is having sex. Women are craved, but they are also reviled for what the incels believe is their selective promiscuity: They seem to be having sex with everyone but them. This is internalized as a grave personal insult. The function of the “incel” movement is to transform that personal grievance into an ideology that casts women as despicable sexual objects.

The core emotion that animates “incels” is sexual shame. It’s not just that these men are sexually frustrated; it’s that they are ashamed of their sexual failure. At the same time, they are resentful of the sexual success of others, which amplifies their own sense of inadequacy. This explains why they gravitate toward an online subculture that strives to rationalize their shame and redirect the blame for their failure onto women.

Of course this is notoriously true of jihadists, whose veering between naked lust and puritanical religion has excited comment for decades.

In my experience, the fastest way to make a woman angry is to hint that women are somehow to blame for all this: if only some woman had loved this man and taken care of his physical needs, we wouldn't be in this mess. Which, let me emphasize, is NOT what I am going to say.

What I am going to say is that the emergence of a mass class of lonely, angry young men is a serious problem for our society. Young men are dangerous; young men without women in their lives are especially dangerous. Ancient warrior societies (Spartans, Zulus, Comanches) often separated their young warriors from their families and their wives to keep their battle fierceness razor sharp. That fierceness would be refined through group loyalty, competition, and stories of past heroes, the whole generation shaped into a terrible fighting machine for the nation.

The way to domesticate men is to get them married and settled into households where relationships with their wives and children assume the greatest importance. When do young gang-bangers leave their gangs? When they get married.

The danger of our time is that all-male internet groups will fill the role of the ancient war band: providing an echo chamber where male pride and rage can be reflected back on itself until it reaches the level of a scream.

Not so long ago, when a young woman got pregnant, the pressure of the families was exerted to get the couple to marry. This, it was felt, would both solve the immediate problem and provide a path into adulthood for the couple: the responsibilities of parenthood and couplehood would stabilize them, and the father, however dubious he appeared, would be tamed by marriage and apply himself to manhood in a proper way. But if you've ever seen Teen Mom, you know this is no longer the case; these days the teen mom's parents are more likely to recoil in horror from the baby daddy and try if possible to exclude him completely from the picture.

Which is another side of the "incel" problem: we have all these young men that nobody wants to marry or even date, and nobody wants to have as a son-in-law, and who feel economically useless and politically voiceless. Who feel that they are not part of our society or anything else. In them the loneliness of modern mass society is concentrated in its most dangerous members.

I expect a lot more trouble from this disconnect, whether it takes the form of incel terrorism or something else. Because young men without sex, without women, without strong ties to the society around them, are a menace.

Trauma and Life

The latest on humans thriving under somewhat adverse conditions:

Studies of the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19th, 1995, indicate that the traumatic event resulted in people seeking to strengthen their bonds with loved ones: Divorce rates went down, and birth rates went up.

My immediate reaction to the 9-11 attacks was a surge of patriotism; it was the only time in my life I ever felt like waving a flag from an overpass.

Too much trauma is clearly bad for people and can destroy institutions, but sometimes it seems to me that we need a certain amount. Or maybe that our world is set up for a certain amount; we would hardly have invested nation states with so much power if we did not fear attack from dangerous enemies. Maybe marriage also seems more important and more worth preserving under threat of serious loss.

We did not evolve to be safe and comfortable all the time. Wrenching events change us – sometimes for the worse, but maybe sometimes for the better.

Why are graduate students depressed?

A big study made the news recently arguing that graduate students in academic fields suffer from depression at a rate six times the general population. I am not impressed by this study, which is based on surveys that people volunteer to take online, but it is only the latest in a long line of studies with the same general conclusion. Why?

Tyler Cowen suggests possible causes:

1. The ordeal of studying and possibly finishing is extreme, and extreme ordeals depress people. . . .

2. The task of studying and possibly finishing is correlated with a kind of extreme lassitude, and that in turn is correlated with depression.

3. Graduate students become depressed as they realize they have chosen poor life paths.

5. Graduate students are undergoing a transformation of their personalities, and being turned into intellectual elites, but this process is traumatic in several regards, thus leading to frequent depression. The chance of depression is part of the price of admission to a select club.

I find number 5 interesting.

But I think the main cause is in the kind of person who elects for graduate study. People who opt to spend several years of their lives in advanced study of arcane matters are not normal. Their abnormality makes them more interested in theoretical puzzles than most people, and also more prone to depression.

It may also be that a sense of being stuck and not getting on with life as one ought weighs on people; I loved graduate school at first but after three or four years I was ready for it to be over, and yet still it went on.

Other thoughts?

Accused Fraudster Spent His Money on Other Frauds

I just stumbled on this hilarious Matt Levine story from 2015. It reviews the case of James Louks and his company FiberPoP Solutions, which defrauded investors of $4.3 million. But what did Louks do with the money? He invested it in other frauds, most of them much more transparent than his own. From the SEC complaint:

22. In 2004, Defendants pursued funding through a transaction in which, in exchange for an advance fee of $200,000, FiberPoP was to receive at least $20 million. Defendants never received this funding.

23. In 2012, Defendants provided an advanced fee of $10,000 to “Vital Funds, Inc.,” ostensibly toward a two-year lease of a $33 million stand by letter of credit. The individuals involved with Vital Funds, Inc. were found guilty of prime bank scheme-related criminal charges in April 2015 in U.S. v. Holland et al., 3:14-cr-73 (M.D. Fla 2014).

24. In June 2013, Defendants deposited $500,000 into an escrow account as a deposit for a $35 Million stand by letter of credit. The individual with whom they deposited the funds emptied the escrow and was indicted for conducting a prime bank scheme.

25. In 2013, Defendants entered into an agreement with Worldwide Funding III wherein they deposited an advanced fee of $90,000 into an escrow account, purportedly in exchange for a €10 million financial instrument. This instrument was then supposed to be placed into a trading account for FiberPoP’s benefit. The escrow account was emptied in September 2013, and Defendants never received the €10 million financial instrument.

Levine considered that maybe Louks was also somehow part of the schemes he was passing the money to, but apparently not; it really seems that he was just getting repeatedly scammed. Did he even know what he was doing?

The SEC said that Louks "knew or had reason to know that the financing schemes were fraudulent," but that's a big "or." There's lots of reason to know that FiberPoP kept investing in frauds. You or I, if we were the chief financial officer of FiberPoP, would have spotted the frauds. They just sound like nonsense, for one thing; what could "a two-year lease of a $33 million stand by letter of credit" even mean? Louks never "conducted any meaningful due diligence." And he was occasionally warned against getting involved in these transactions, but kept doing it anyway.

But all of that is just logic. I prefer to think that there's a more romantic explanation for how Louks kept getting fooled, which is: Maybe he believed it? Did Louks know that he was being scammed, over and over again? Or each time, did he think he was getting a little closer to the truth, to finally understanding how the complex world of multi-million-dollar finance worked and how he could use it to his advantage?

A few weeks ago I said that the financial industry is "built on the dream of making money for nothing, of arbitrage, of perpetual motion machines, of converting intellect into cash without the annoying interventions of hard work and risk." That is not because financiers are lazy jerks. It's because that really is what finance looks like from the outside (and, once in a while, if you're lucky, from the inside). It is an abstraction, moving around digits that represent real economic activity without actually doing any of that activity. Bankers and hedge fund managers sit at computers and push buttons and money comes out. James Louks has a computer. Why shouldn't he be able to make money come out of it?

The people selling Louks "advanced fee" and "prime bank" schemes weren't just selling him ways to get rich. They were selling him perceived mastery of an alienating system, a way to make the complexities of modern finance tractable and turn them to his own benefit.

If modern finance is astrophysics, these scams are like astrology: They look superficially like the real thing, but instead of a cold indifferent universe, they proclaim a faith in a universe centered around the individual listener. It seems to me that Louks didn't want to hear about Fama-French factors and the tradeoffs between risk and return. He wanted to hear about a financial system that lets a fortunate few initiates create money easily and risklessly, and he wanted to be one of them.

Scott Alexander on Jordan Peterson on What the Humanities are For

Scott Alexander had the same experience with Jordan Peterson's new book that I had with his videos:

I got Jordan Peterson’s Twelve Rules For Life for the same reason as the other 210,000 people: to make fun of the lobster thing. Or if not the lobster thing, then the neo-Marxism thing, or the transgender thing, or the thing where the neo-Marxist transgender lobsters want to steal your precious bodily fluids.

But, uh…I’m really embarrassed to say this. And I totally understand if you want to stop reading me after this, or revoke my book-reviewing license, or whatever. But guys, Jordan Peterson is actually good.

If you're curious about why, read Alexander. I recommend it. Like me, he found that all the political hot air surrounding Peterson has nothing to do with his real message. He is a prophet, come to call us to a better, harder, way.

But I wanted to write about this:

Peterson is very conscious of his role as just another backwater stop on the railroad line of Western Culture. His favorite citations are Jung and Nietzsche, but he also likes name-dropping Dostoevsky, Plato, Solzhenitsyn, Milton, and Goethe. He interprets all of them as part of this grand project of determining how to live well, how to deal with the misery of existence and transmute it into something holy.

And on the one hand, of course they are. This is what every humanities scholar has been saying for centuries when asked to defend their intellectual turf. “The arts and humanities are there to teach you the meaning of life and how to live.” On the other hand, I’ve been in humanities classes. Dozens of them, really. They were never about that. They were about “explain how the depiction of whaling in Moby Dick sheds light on the economic transformations of the 19th century, giving three examples from the text. Ten pages, single spaced.” And maybe this isn’t totally disconnected from the question of how to live. Maybe being able to understand this kind of thing is a necessary part of being able to get anything out of the books at all.

But just like all the other cliches, somehow Peterson does this better than anyone else. When he talks about the Great Works, you understand, on a deep level, that they really are about how to live. You feel grateful and even humbled to be the recipient of several thousand years of brilliant minds working on this problem and writing down their results. You understand why this is all such a Big Deal.

You can almost believe that there really is this Science-Of-How-To-Live-Well, separate from all the other sciences, barely-communicable by normal means but expressible through art and prophecy.

I took dozens of humanities classes, too, but in only one did the professor really try to relate the material to the problems of human life. It was called Freud and Philosophy and it was basically about how everything in Freud's teaching related back to older stuff in western culture, all the way to Socrates and Euripides, and how to shape your own approach to life based on all this old wisdom. It blew my mind. My lecture notes, which I still have, are dotted with stars and exclamation points. And it was taught by a graduate student, which is one reason why I have never been impressed by complaints about having graduate students teach courses.

Why isn't more of this done in college? Are professors too embarrassed and unsure of themselves? (Jordan Peterson, whatever else he may be, is clearly one of the most confident people on the planet.) Do they feel that trying to impart life wisdom is not part of education? Do they not believe in life wisdom? Do they think that their students have no interest in the wisdom they might impart? Do they worry that any discussion of meaning would degenerate into a feelfest? Or a lot of silly politics?

I remember that William and Mary used to have an institution called the "Last Lecture" in which a professor close to retirement would try to distill the wisdom he or she had learned in a whole career of research and study into an hour. The one I attended was pleasant but no more. At the time I was already sure I could do much better, and now I feel certain. But I am not sure if what I would say would be very valuable to 20-year-olds; my own children don't seem to pay much attention to me.

But if we don't share our thoughts about wisdom with each other, how can wisdom grow?

Politics vs. Culture

Barack Obama's time in office seems to have convinced him that solutions to our problems don't lie in politics but in culture. He is said to be negotiating a show for himself on Netflix, but not to talk about politics:

Mr. Obama does not intend to use his Netflix shows to directly respond to President Trump or conservative critics, according to people familiar with discussions about the programming. They said the Obamas had talked about producing shows that highlight inspirational stories.

But the Netflix deal, while not a direct answer to Fox News or Breitbart.com, would give Mr. Obama an unfiltered method of communication with the public similar to the audiences he already reaches through social media, with 101 million Twitter followers and 55 million people who have liked his Facebook page.

“President and Mrs. Obama have always believed in the power of storytelling to inspire,” Eric Schultz, a senior adviser to the former president, said Thursday. “Throughout their lives, they have lifted up stories of people whose efforts to make a difference are quietly changing the world for the better. As they consider their future personal plans, they continue to explore new ways to help others tell and share their stories.”

He seems to feel that the worst things about America right now are in our heads: anger, fear, despair about the future. I recall his advice to liberals after Trump won the election, which was to watch cat videos.

Can the Enlightenment Stand Alone?

Interesting comment from Tyler Cowen, in reference to Stephen Pinker's new book about the Enlightenment:

I believe there is a certain amount of irreducible “irrationality” (not my preferred term, but borrowing Pinker's schema for a moment) in people, and it has to be “put somewhere,” into some doctrine or belief system. That is what makes the whole bundle sustainable. It also means that a move toward greater “Enlightenment” is never without its problematic side, and that a “Counterenlightenment” can be more progressive than it might at first appear. In contrast, I read Pinker as believing that Enlightenment simply can beat ignorance more and more over time.

This is a common idea: that the decline of religion does not mean the decline of irrationality, but a shift of our irrational attachments from the church to the nation, the party, or even the local football team. Cowen's take seems to be that the success of science and democracy in the modern world was possible only because anti-Enlightenment ideas and institutions continued alongside it.

I suspect this is true. I get excited about science, democracy, and human rights and don't need anything else to keep my loyalty, but this does not seem to be true for most humans. The great danger of the post-Enlightenment world has been that with tradition banished our irrational attachments will become truly monstrous – Nazism, communism – leading to worlds worse that what the Enlightenment was supposed to free us from. In practice resistance to totalitarianism is always rooted as much in anti-Enlightenment ideas such as nationalism, love of tradition, religion, or plain cussedness as in devotion to freedom and human rights. We are creatures of emotion, and our politics must always be based there.

Support Animals

To hear flight attendants tell it, people taking their pets on planes by claiming that they are necessary for "emotional support" has become a big problem, and airlines are starting to tighten their policies. David Leonhardt:

This story begins with progress, in the form of a 1986 law forbidding discrimination against handicapped air travelers. The law made sure that physically disabled people could travel with service animals. It also rightly applied to nonphysical disabilities. Some autistic children, for example, function better with a trained dog.

The trouble started when pet owners realized that they could game the system, because airlines did not require much proof of medical need. By claiming one, people could bring an animal on board without putting it in a carry-on bag and without paying a fee that typically runs $125.

It’s true that some people honestly believe they have an emotional condition that an animal solves. But they are often confusing their preferences with actual medical needs. As a recent front-page story in The Washington Post dryly put it, the effectiveness of emotional-support animals “is poorly substantiated through studies but widely embraced by the public.”

Once animals became more common on planes, the trend fed on itself. Pet owners figured that if other people were cheating the system, they might as well too. A cottage industry sprung up in service of low-level fraud. For $30 on Amazon, you can buy a bright-red dog vest that reads, EMOTIONAL SUPPORT. With a quick web search, you can find a therapist to diagnose you long-distance. Fill out a form, and suddenly you’re certified as having an illness that requires animal attention.

All the while, people told themselves they weren’t doing anything wrong. (How often have you heard a version of, “My pet is friendly and harmless”?) But people weren’t thinking about the collective cost of their actions — about the many children afraid of sitting next to a dog, about travelers with serious allergies, about flight attendants charged with keeping cabins safe and, most of all, about truly disabled travelers.

You can buy the "Premium ESA Kit" at the top of the post for $99.95, including the certificate and the official-looking id card.

The travelers who complain loudest about all these emotional support animals are blind people with seeing-eye dogs, who think it cheapens their own legitimate needs, plus there have been incidents in which untrained animals attack seeing-eye dogs.

I find myself ambivalent. On the one hand, who cares if people scared of flying carry their dogs on planes? Lighten up already.

On the other, this confirms the vision of America as a nation of narcissistic weaklings who don't give a damn for anything but our own feelings and need constant emotional support because we can't stand on our own.  Plus, flying is already unpleasant enough without some stranger's dog getting hair in your face.

I guess I don't care much either way, but something about this seems very America right now to me.

Thoughts?

The Forty-Five, or Jacobites and Madmen

John Petite, The Jacobites of 1745, 1873

In the realm of human behavior that needs explaining, I offer you the case of Lord George Murray. On September 3, 1745, Lord George wrote to his brother, the Duke of Atholl, to declare his intention of joining Bonnie Prince Charlie's rebellion, despite having accepted lucrative positions from the government:

I never did say to any person in Life that I would not ingage in the cause I always in my heart thought just and right, as well as for the Interest, Good, and Liberty of my country . . . though what I do may and will be reccon'd desperate . . .  and may very probably end in my utter ruin. My Life, my Fortune, my expectations, the Happyness of my wife and children, are all at stake, and the chances are against me, yet a principle of (what seems to me) Honour, and my Duty to King and Country, outweighs every thing.

Murray was not hungry, or desperate, or oppressed; indeed he had pretty much everything his century could offer. Yet he threw it all away to follow a prince who had never before set foot in Britain.

There is a famous Gaelic song about these events, Mo Ghile Mear, "My Gallant Darling", written around 1750 by Seán Clárach Mac Domhnaill; Sting's version isn't on Youtube but you can hear Mary Black's here. The first stanza, spoken by a sort of goddess who represents the Irish people, translates as:

Once I was a maiden fair
Now it’s widow’s weeds I wear
My husband lies not in the grave
But far from me he ploughs the waves

I have a wonderful book about the folklore of the Island of Skye, and mixed in with all the water horses and selkies are dozens of items about Bonnie Prince Charlie, who passed through the island when he was fleeing after his defeat and seems to have been sheltered by every other family on the island. People treasure these memories and have passed them on for generations.

I've just finished reading a quite good book about the Forty-Five, as Bonnie Prince Charlie's rebellion is generally known, and what lingers in my mind is a puzzle. What is all this about? What explains the enduring appeal of this half-wit royal adventurer and his doomed rebellion, brushed away in an hour at Culloden Moor by a single division of the government's army? Why so many songs about these rebels, and none about the men who in defeating them saved Parliamentary rule and paved the way for British democracy?

This is going to be a long essay, because there is a lot here to unpack.

There is, first of all, the weird human fascination with royal blood. Many Jacobites touched on this in their personal justifications: as far as they were concerned, the 1688 rebellion was a crime and the Stuarts remained the real kings of Britain. Here is Dr. Archibald Cameron to his wife, from the prison where he awaited execution, 8 June 1753:

I thank kind Providence I had the happiness to be early educated in the principles of Christian loyalty, which as I grew in years inspired me with an utter abhorrence of rebellion and usurpation, tho’ ever so successful. And when I arrived at man's estate I had the testimony both of religion and reason to confirm me in the truth of my first principles. Thus my attachment to the ROYAL FAMILY is more the result of examination and conviction than of prepossession and prejudice. And as I am now, so was I then, ready to seal my loyalty with my blood. As soon, therefore, as the royal youth had set up the king his father's standard, I immediately, as in duty bound, repaired to it. . . .

I could go on, but I think you all know what I mean. And I have to say that of all the political principles ever articulated by humankind, none makes less sense to me than the divine right of kings. What possible difference could it make to me who your father was? or your great-great-grandfather? If you go back far enough, all kings are descended from usurpers or conquerors; why is being descended from a grasping thug more noble than being one? You expect me to do what you say because your great-grandfather killed somebody else's great grandfather and took his crown? Really? James II was overthrown in 1688 because he sought to limit the powers of Parliament and impose French-style absolutism on Britain, besides promoting Catholicism in a way that offended many of his mostly Protestant subjects. When his subjects got sick of him, they tossed him out and brought in a king more to their liking. What could possibly be wrong with that?

Yet to millions of humans, past and present, loyalty to the true king has been one of the deepest moral touchstones, something more to be treasured that marriage or family or friendship, second only to devotion to God.

And then there is our fascination with the doomed gesture, the forlorn hope, the men who fight and die because that is what they feel called on to do: the 300 Spartans, the Saxons at Maldon – courage must be harder, our hearts bolder, our minds keener, as our numbers dwindle – the Forty-Seven Ronin, the defenders of the Alamo, the Irish rebels of 1916. Mostly we bend to fate, but sometimes instead people choose to defy it. Instead of surrendering to that which is, they go down fighting against it, and something about that touches us deeply. As Gimli puts it in the movie version of The Return of the King:

Small chance of success — certainty of death — what are we waiting for?

It's a joke, but it sums up one piece of the hero's creed: where the danger is greatest, there is the greatest chance for eternal glory. It impresses me that although the actual Spartan warriors at Thermopylae were sent with a strategic mission, to delay the Persians until the Greeks could fortify the Isthmus of Corinth, the movie version casts all that aside and makes their stand a completely pointless gesture of courage. That is, to some, more noble and more pure.

Some Jacobites had been raised on stories of earlier rebellions – 1689, 1708, 1715, 1719. When they joined Bonnie Prince Charlie, they stepped out of ordinary life and into story. This is another way of explaining the heroic impulse; to live as characters in a legend, not as mortal humans, thinking not of today but of how we will be remembered in a century.

But I think a deeper level of explanation is needed.

Many people feel keenly the sordid, messy, compromising ordinariness of life. Shouldn't there be more to existence than a struggle to survive, or to get ahead; than squabbles with relatives we love but can't get along with; than a string of insults from strangers and dismissals from superiors; than churches full of hypocrites; than sadness and loss and regret? There is in all of us a longing to break free from earthbound life and soar. I see this longing all around me: in fantasies of the apocalypse, in the hope of lottery riches, in the dream of a perfect love that transforms, in the unchained rage of killers.

I see this longing among British Jacobites. They were not united by any particular social or economic grievance, or any single vision of life after the Stuarts had been restored. Some were Catholics, but others were Protestants who assumed the new Stuart king would convert to Protestantism, as Henry IV had converted to Catholicism to become King of France. Some wanted to undo the Act of Union that ended Scottish independence, while others wanted greater and closer union. Some wanted to give up the colonies, others to expand them. What united them was a dream of a different world. Especially among the writers and poets – John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, Walter Scott – Jacobism was part of a disaffection with the existing order of things. They felt a loathing for the money-grubbing, power-grubbing, self-promoting culture of getting ahead and stomping on whoever got in the way, and they associated this order with scheming Whig politicians and their fat Hanoverian kings. They wanted something else, and the King Over the Water provided a focus for these dreams.

Charles Edward Stuart by Allan Ramsay, 1745

Some people are especially put off by the sordid ordinariness of political life. Shouldn't a people's leader be something more than the most talented vote grubber, the most skillful pledger of false promises? Why should getting the most votes matter more than being the best man? There is, it has to be said, a dearth of purity and high-mindedness in democratic politics. Personally I think that is true of all politics, but anyway democracy is just not that inspiring to many people. They want something pure and true, and the one example that comes up most often is to give their loyalty to someone they believe in. In this loyalty they see something noble and clean that transcends mere political intrigue. Combine this with faith in divine kingship, and politics is transformed, in imagination anyway, from something material and grubby into something sanctified. There is a recurring literary image to describe such people and such times: a falling away, a casting off, a shedding of clothes and even skin, leaving behind something noble and pure. As Yeats wrote of a different rebellion:

You that Mitchel's prayer have heard
`Send war in our time, O Lord!'
Know that when all words are said
And a man is fighting mad,
Something drops from eyes long blind
He completes his partial mind,
For an instant stands at ease,
Laughs aloud, his heart at peace

I see all these longings in the followers of Bonnie Prince Charlie. Dissatisfied with the increasingly commercial, increasingly impersonal, increasingly technical world around them, dissatisfied with politics as trading votes for preferment, they sought to cut through all of it with a pure act of sacrifice. In loyalty and courage they sought redemption from the world of compromise and care.

So there is my explanation. It has many parts as, I think, all explanations of human behavior should. There was boredom, restlessness, longing for adventure. There was the fascination of the hero's path, blazing through life on the way to a fiery end that might be long remembered. There was the dissatisfaction of the everyday and the longing to soar above it; there was the longing for pure and noble feeling. There was the desire to shed the skin of an ordinary, compromised, muddled life and to stand for a moment revealed as pure spirit, strong in decision, certain in action, powerful in faith.

What was completing missing from Bonnie Prince Charlie's rebellion, if you ask me, was any kind of politics that made sense. The Jacobites had not a single idea about how to make Britain a better place for the people who lived there. Charles did not proclaim a single policy; he did not question anything about the government he sought to overthrow except the hereditary right of its king to lead it. It is not just modern cynics who find the whole thing ridiculous, but many at the time. The reaction of people who did not feel the attraction of the Stuart cause was generally not anger but eye-rolling. You want what? The savage brutality meted out by the royal army after their victory was motivated by bafflement; if the clansmen were so far beyond reason that they would sacrifice themselves on such mad adventures, then they had to be eliminated for civilization to proceed.

Yet in the Britain of 2018 the people care not a fig for the government's victory, which is seen as oppressive in Scotland and forgotten elsewhere. No, it is Bonnie Prince Charlie and his quixotic rebellion that seized and still holds our imagination.

We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?

I think about this and similar incidents all the time, and they make me wonder about the politics of my own time. My sort of politics is based on rational self-interest plus empathy. I support governments that defend the rights of the people and do their best to care for them and help them get along. I support democracy because although it is sordid and petty and corrupt, it does people the honor of allowing them to choose their own leaders. None of which is legend; none of which is heroic story; none of which inspires the kind of irrational fervor that Bonnie Prince Charlie did.

We rational liberals are often mystified by human behavior. The enthusiasm of millions for dictators like Mussolini or Saddam Hussein leaves us scratching our heads. We don't understand why poor people vote for conservatives who have promised to cut health spending. We can't imagine why people vote without even bothering to find out what positions their candidate holds. But we should not be surprised by any of these things. We humans are irrational, in love with stories, devoted to phantoms. We live only half our lives in the material world. The rest we spend in the Dreamtime, with gods and heroes. If you expect your fellow humans to live sensibly, you are making a grievous error. When you catch yourself in this mistake, think about Bonnie Prince Charlie and his Highlanders: fools, who marched dreaming to the field of their destiny and charged dreaming at the guns that killed them, remembered forever for their folly.

We Fear the Wrong Things

And the best example is the sad truth that unless you are involved in gangs or drug-dealing, your murderer is overwhelmingly likely to be someone close to you. This chart represents all of the women murdered in the US in 2015.

The outsiders you fear are not nearly so dangerous to you as your friends and lovers.

Priming Liberalism

I am not a big fan of "priming" experiments, the sort of thing where you prime your experimental subjects to feel something – nervous, happy, smart – and then give them a test or ask them questions. Some of the results seem ludicrous to me, and many have not replicated. But for what it's worth, several experiments have shown that if you make people afraid they become more conservative:

It has long been known in political psychology circles that people become more conservative and resistant to change when under threat of some kind.

In the November 10 TLS John Bargh of Yale reports on experiments that show what simple stimulus makes people more liberal. In his experiment, the student subjects imagined themselves with a superpower, either being completely safe from physical harm or being able to fly. Imagining they they could fly had no effect on political attitudes. But imagining that they were immune from harm made everyone more liberal:

Satisfying the basic need for physical security through the genie imagination exercise therefore had the effect of turning off, or at least reducing in strength, the need to hold conservative social and political attitudes.

This explains, he says, why liberal rhetoricians from FDR to Obama spent so much energy denouncing fear.

And Now Leon Wieseltier

Pigs, it seems, come in all sorts. We have jet-setting celebrity cave men like Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein, bragging about the models and actresses they lured to their luxury motel suites; we have Roger Ailes, constructing Fox New as a personal fantasy of beautiful but tough women showing their legs under his glass tables, but unable to get any more from them than a too-long hug; we have priests who can't keep their hands off the altar boys and high school teachers unhinged by the youthful sexuality of their students. For me the discovery of new exo-planets was somewhat dimmed when I discovered that astronomer Geoff Marcy, whose team at that point had discovered more distant worlds than any other, sexually harassed his students for decades; investigators found pictures of female students on his cell phone that he took during his own lectures.

We also have men who seem thoughtful and interesting, some of them rooted in old moral and religious traditions, posing as prophets while they reach under their guests' skirts or slip rohypnol into their drinks. Men who have expressed much that is best in humanity in philosophy, politics and art – Picasso, Arthur Koestler, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby – turn out to be monsters when it comes to sex and women.

Which brings me to Leon Wieseltier, who just lost his chance to launch a new magazine called Idea after former employees launched a small movement to expose him:

Several women on the email chain said they were humiliated when Mr. Wieseltier sloppily kissed them on the mouth, sometimes in front of other staff members. Others said he discussed his sex life, once describing the breasts of a former girlfriend in detail. Mr. Wieseltier made passes at female staffers, they said, and pressed them for details about their own sexual encounters.

One woman recounted that while she was attempting to fact-check a column Mr. Wieseltier wrote, he forced her to look at a photograph of a nude sculpture in an art book, asking her if she had ever seen a more erotic picture. She wrote that she was shaken and afraid during the incident.

Mr. Wieseltier often commented on what women wore to the office, the former staff members said, telling them that their dresses were not tight enough. One woman said he left a note on her desk thanking her for the miniskirt she wore to the office that day. She said she never wore a skirt to the office again.

As to scale, so far this looks more like Roger Ailes than Bill Cosby, pathetic fumbling that frightened women mainly because of Wieseltheir's power as their boss and a cultural icon. But, oh, Leon. Why you? You sometimes seemed so wise, as able as anyone in our fallen time to articulate why some people still value religious tradition. Here is just one example of the way Wieselthier brought old Jewish wisdom up to date, from his essay remembering his friend Leonard Cohen:

We sometimes read and studied together, Lorca and midrash and Eluard and Buddhist scriptures and Cavafy. We could get quite Talmudic, especially with wine. In Judaism there is a custom to honor the dead by pondering a text in their memory. Here, in memory of Eliezer ben Nisan ha’Cohen, is a passage on frivolity by a great rabbi in Prague at the end of the 16th century. “Man was born for toil, since his perfection is always being actualized but is never actual,” he observed in an essay on frivolity. “And insofar as he attains perfection, something is missing in him. In such a being, perfection is a shortcoming and a lack.” Leonard Cohen was the poet laureate of the lack, the psalmist of the privation, who made imperfection gorgeous.

Wieseltier has appeared several times on this blog, sometimes because I agreed with him and sometimes because I didn't. He had much to say. When I agreed with him I found his words moving and profound, and when I disagreed I found him interesting to argue with.

Sex often functions as the wild card in human nature and human societies. It leads to the crossing of lines and the breaking of rules, to the mixing of ethnic groups and the violation of class boundaries, because it makes people crazy. Mingled with power, it turns even wise men into thugs.

The good news is that the ancient conspiracy to sweep all these crimes under the rug seems to be breaking up. How much that will protect new generations of women from male predators remains to be seen.