Wednesday, July 9, 2025

An Aging Nation

It's not just politicians getting older:

  1. Business: Starting in 2008, the average age of an S&P 500 CEO has increased from 54 to 59 years old. Nearly 17.8% of Fortune 500 CEOs are over 65. The average age of a board chair in the US is the second oldest in the world.
  2. Law: In the last ten years, the number of lawyers over the age of 65 has increased by 50%, and that group now comprises over 14% of all active lawyers. That’s twice the percentage of workers over 65 in the rest of the workforce.
  3. Academia: In 2017, the average college president was reported to be 62, 10 years older than the average in 1990. The number of tenured faculty over 65 doubled between 2000 and 2010.
  4. Scientific research: Recent data on research investigators at the NIH is scarce, but the average age rose from 39 in 1980 to 51 in 2008. And the average age investigators receive their first grant was 36 in 1990, but had risen to nearly 45 by 2016.

From Ben Krauss.

AI-Related Thought for the Day

A million AI bots trained on a billion Resistance posts couldn’t come up with something as on the nose as “Elon tries to make an anti-woke AI and it immediately starts praising Hitler” 

Benjy Sarlin

Bah to All Theories of Moral Decline

David Brooks wants to know why Americans don't see Donald Trump as a moral monster totally unsuited to leadership. Ok, fine, good question. But Brooks' answer, given in this Atlantic essay, is a nonsensical evocation of the good old days that makes me gag.

Brooks has been reading Alasdair MacIntyre, a philosopher who blamed all our problems on the Englightenment:

Crudely put, the Enlightenment took away the primacy of the community and replaced it with the primacy of the autonomous individual. It created neutral public systems such as democracy, law, and free speech to give individuals a spacious civil order within which they could figure their own life. Common morality, if it existed at all, was based on reason, not religious dogmatism, and devotion to that common order was voluntary. Utilitarianism was one such attempt at creating this kind of rational moral system—do the thing that will give people pleasure; don’t do the thing that will cause others pain. . . .
The result is a world in which nobody knows right from wrong:
Today, we live in a world in which many, or even most, people no longer have a sense that there is a permanent moral order to the universe. More than that, many have come to regard the traditions of moral practice that were so central to the ancient worldview as too inhibiting—they get in the way of maximum individual freedom. 

I do not see how anyone who has spent even ten minutes thinking about history can believe this.

I grant that many past societies were more communitarian and less individualistic than ours. I grant that some of them gave people a firmer model of what it meant to be a good man or woman than our system does. But I submit there is zero evidence that people used to be more moral than we are, or that they held their leaders to a higher moral standard.  I submit that, in general, past people were more violent than we are, more cruel, and more disposed to ignore the moral faults of people in their own tribes than we are. I would argue that most past societies were morally ugly, and the creators of the Enlightenment were right to call for abandonment of traditional morals and a shift to more universal standards.

Most of the traditional moral codes I know about were founded on dividing the world into us and them. For us, some kind of respect might be mandated, but for them, nothing but hate. (See this discussion of the Iroquois for an example.) I would say that many of those firm models required people to act in ways that I find horrifically immoral. In particular, they required people to do violence in defense of their clans, their families, and their personal honor. 

Medieval Europe, the past period I know the best, was riven throughout its history by wars, feuds, riots, pogroms, massacres, and random drunken murders. I may not believe in a universal moral order, but I have reached the cusp of old age without ever doing violence to another man, something that would have been extremely difficult in many human worlds.

There are Iron Age cemeteries in Eastern Europe in which a majority of the people died by violence.

If you look into those societies that Brooks and MacIntyre admired for their moral foundations, you may find that ethical questions were actually much disputed among them. The most obvious example would again be medieval Europe, where many people had two quite separate moralities: a secular code of personal and family honor that esteemed worldly success and often enjoined violence, and a Christian ethic of renunciation and peace. Most people managed this division ok, but we keep meeting people who took Christianity too seriously and ended up renouncing their families. (E.g., St. Elizabeth of Hungary.) Nor was this a uniquely Christian problem; Buddhists also had a long-term problem with important nobles and even kings giving it up to join monasteries, and one theory about the Bhagavad Gita is that it was written to convince kings that it was morally ok to remain in the world and engage in violence when necessary.

Brooks' model also fails when it comes to describing modern people. If believing in a universal moral order makes us more moral, or more disposed to hold our leaders to a higher standard, than why does the Russian Orthodox Church support Vladimir Putin? 

Why do so many fundamentalist Christians support Donal Trump? Do you think they haven't noticed that he is corrupt?

Please.

Donald Trump is bad. I hate him. But he is not worse than thousands of rulers from the age of "shared moral order," from Genghis Khan to Louis XIV. He is not more corrupt than Julius Caesar or Henry VIII. Bah to this whole way of thinking about morality and history.

Brooks also seems to think that our moral issues make our politics more difficult:

One of the problems with living in a society with no shared moral order is that we have no way to settle arguments. We have no objective standard by which to determine that one view is right and another view is wrong. So public arguments just go on indefinitely, at greater levels of indignation and polarization. People use self-righteous words to try to get their way, but instead of engaging in moral argument, what they’re really doing is using the language of morality to enforce their own preferences.

To this I would say that many past societies had problems that went on for centuries without ever being solved. In Medieval Europe, these unsolvables include the relationship between central and local power, between local custom and universal (or Roman) law, between the church and the secular power. Shared moral frameworks did not solve these problems.

It is probably true that we have a wider range of problems than many past societies, because they took more things for granted. For example, slavery, or the subjugation of women. When Enlightenment thinkers started talking about universal rights, this opened up a whole range of questions that many societies had never debated before. But does Brooks think Abolitionists and feminists were wrong?

I submit that the Enlightenment is not the root of the problems with modern America. I say, on the contrary, that our problem is the much more ancient one of tribalism. Our problem is that we insist on dividing the world into us and them, hating them, and justifying the moral failings of the people on our side. What we need is not a return to some imaginary communitarian past, but more Enlightenment: more universal brotherhood, more universal rights, more tolerance, more Reason.

David Brooks may want to live in a village making constant war on the village over the hill, but I do not.

Sunday, July 6, 2025

The Stolen Lily

Last fall I explored an old house site in the Virginia woods, probably abandoned around the time of the Civil War. Growing near the stone house foundation I found a small cluster of blackberry lilies. I wondered if they could possibly have survived on the site for so long, so I asked my paleoethnobotanist friend. She said, absolutely, and she sent me a link to a study of a garden abandoned in the late 1700s where several old ornamental plants were still growing. So this little colony of lilies might have been more than 150 years old.

Since this spot was slated to become a factory within a few years, I dug up three corms and took them home to plant in my garden. One of them survived the winter, and it is now blooming. So this stubborn colony lives on in a new place.

Is there a Fantasy World You Would Like to Live in?

Robin Hanson asked his Twitter/X followers, "Is there any 'fantasy' world where you'd prefer to live there as a regular person, compared to living in our world now? They all seem pretty bad to me."

The most common actual answers were "Star Trek" and "Harry Potter." Several people said, "Any world with an afterlife." One said, "Narnia. God is real, good, and actively involved," and one wanted LOTR if a regular elf counted as a regular person.

Pondering this, I find myself back at the issue of most magic being inherently aristocratic. There aren't many worlds in which everyone has magic, so the cool things about magical worlds are pretty much limited to special people: wizards, heroes, jedi knights, etc. Star Trek is the only world I can think of where ordnary NPCs can have lives both better and more interesting than mine, and you could say that isn't really "fantasy."

Part of what makes "fantasy" "fantasy" is that it creates a fantasy for the reader; yes, I could be the special hero who finds mights magic and saves the world. Often the world-saving is utterly ridiculous (e.g. Brandon Sanderson), but I would say that saving the world is closer to the core of Fantasy than just having cool powers. 

Fantasy is not about imagining places where NPCs want to live.

It is hard even to imagine a world where everybody had powers like Gandalf or Yoda, and to me it doesn't even seem very appealing; if everybody can cast spells then they're just like guns and who cares?

Saturday, July 5, 2025

What I took from the World Bank Protests Back in 2002

Back in 2002, I worked in downtown Washington, DC, a pleasant area which was disturbed twice a year by protesters marching against the annual meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. I attended a couple of these protests (as an observer) but got nothing out of the experience, since the protesters were too busy drumming and dancing to chant slogans. They didn't even have many signs. So I went to some of the web sites of the organizations involved and read about their anarchist philosophy, which led to this post:

Turn on the news these days and you are likely to see black-clad, gas-mask-wearing youths battling the police somewhere near the latest gathering of world political or economic leaders. If you can get any statement of goals from one of these protesters–for demonstrators, they are remarkably short on words–he or she is likely to say, "I just want a world where the rich don't exploit the poor."

A worthy goal, you may think; but what, exactly, do wearing a gas mask and chaining yourself in the path of some finance minister's motorcade have to do with achieving it? And the answer to that question seems to be, although I've never heard a protester put it very clearly, that the existing democratic states are so completely controlled by the rich that they no longer serve the interests of the poor and ordinary at all, but function only to legitimize the dominance of the world by the capitalist elite. We need a radical alternative, a change from the capitalist, patriarchal, techno-globalist, racist order to a new system based on people power. We need, in a word, anarchism.

What, exactly, is anarchism, and does it really have anything to offer the modern world? To find answers to this question one has to turn from the nearly aphasic protesters to sympathetic intellectuals. Anarchists, alas, have trouble agreeing even with each other, so it is not easy to offer a coherent picture of what anarchists believe. I think the core of their principles can be expressed in two simple goals: to reduce the inequalities of wealth and power that characterize existing states, and to reduce the giving of orders in human life – as Robert Dahl put it, to "minimize coercion and maximize consent." Obviously these words cover a wide range of possibilities; most left-wing democrats or democratic socialists could easily subscribe to them in fairly weak forms. Their strong forms, on the other hand, are monstrously incompatible: our historical experience has been that to dramatically redistribute the wealth of a society requires, not the minimizing of coercion, but the application of coercion at a Bolshevik level. In between the vaguely leftish and the apocalyptic there is still a wide range of anarchist thought to consider. What do these somewhat saner anarchists think ought to be done?

It is important to begin by distinguishing anarchists from libertarians. Libertarians, like anarchists, say they want to minimize the power of the state and maximize freedom, but it strikes me that anarchists understand one very important thing that libertarians do not: states are not the only entities in our world with great power. Large corporations have enormous power to, for example, reshape the landscape, invade privacy, create and destroy communities, ruin lives, and poison the earth. If we took the libertarian approach and drastically reduced the power of government without doing anything about the power of corporations, we would, it seems to me, only acquire a new set of masters over whom we had much less control than we do over the politicians we elect. Anarchists take the more honest line of saying that to be truly free we must break the power of both the state and the corporations.

Instead of the capitalist system and the "democratic" state, anarchists imagine a society made up of "voluntary producers' associations" and local popular assemblies.

Anarchists want a society based in direct democracy through popular assemblies—at the workplace, in the community, and in many voluntary associations. The more decisions are made locally, then the fewer are made centrally.

Many anarchists assume that the end of capitalism will require a complete abandonment of our modern, industrial economy (can you imagine several thousand Intel employees debating the design of their next chip?) and a return to more traditional forms:

decentralisation of large-scale industries, reskilling of workers, and a return to more artisan-like modes of production; the use of environment-friendly technologies, energy sources, and products; the use of recycled raw materials and renewable resources; and worker-controlled enterprises responsive to the wishes of local community assemblies and labour councils in which decisions are made by direct democracy.
On the other hand, some anarchists seem to think we could maintain a fully modern economy based on workshops like the ones where Steve Job assembled the first Apple and Bill Gates wrote the first version of DOS – forgetting, it seems to me, that those achievements rest on a vast industrial base where things like ultra-pure silicon wafers and microlasers are made in gigantic factories. But who knows what we may be capable of in a few decades? Maybe we will be able to build computers from scratch in our garages, and maybe a team of a few dozen will be able to assemble an airplane.

There is clearly an element of fantasy in all of this. Some anarchists, most famously Noam Chomsky, say that we have no idea what sort of institutions will develop once we have rid the world of hierarchy and domination, so we would be better not to speculate. I think this is a dishonest dodge; who is going to embark on a revolution without having some sort of goal to work toward? – but at least Chomsky avoids the embarrassment of trying to describe the post-revolutionary world in an appealing way. These visions of direct democracy and worker control are, I guess, supposed to sound pleasant, but they make me think of life as an endless committee meeting. Have any of these anarchists actually sat around a table with dozen or so people trying to reach a consensus? For me the experience has always been horrible. But, according to the authors of the Anarchist FAQ web site, this is just because I am acculturated to life in a hierarchical society:
the daily experience of participatory decision-making, non-authoritarian modes of organisation, and personalistic human relationships in small work groups would foster creativity, spontaneity, responsibility, independence, and respect for individuality – the qualities needed for a directly democratic political system to function effectively. 

Here we are back in fantasyland again – just because, say the anarchists, cooperative decision making is painful for the drones of capitalism doesn't mean it will be for the enlightened citizens of anarchism. This appeal to the great changes that will be wrought by the end of our societies based on dominance runs all through anarchist thought, rendering much of it completely unconvincing. Another anarchist web site (anarchists love the internet) offers this analysis of overpopulation: 

Population growth, far from being the cause of poverty, is in fact a result of it.... If a traditional culture, its values, and its sense of identity are destroyed, population growth rates increase dramatically. As in 17th- and 18th-century Britain, peasants in the Third World are kicked off their land by the local ruling elite, who then use the land to produce cash crops for export while their fellow country people starve.
This is, first of all, factually false. Population growth in 17th- and 18th-century Britain was caused entirely by falling death rates, not rising birth rates. Birth rates were falling in 18th-century Britain, as they are falling in the Third World today, but populations still grew because death rates were falling faster. The values of almost all "traditional cultures" encourage high birth rates –  it is modern capitalist society that has given us a widespread desire for small families. Unless you think low death rates are a bad thing, it is hard to blame population growth on capitalism. Second, how, exactly, is the end of hierarchical power structures supposed to lead to low birth rates? A transition to artisanal modes of production would surely leave the world poorer, not richer, although redistribution might leave many of the world's poorest citizens better off. Do the anarchists have any notion of what degree of wealth leads to what birth rate? They do not. They are simply dreaming that in a better world there will be more of all the things they like, from freedom to wilderness. They make virtually identical arguments about sexism, racism, crime, and, as in this example, the health of our environment: 

effective protection of the planet's ecosystems requires that ordinary citizens be able to take part at the grassroots level in decision-making that affects their environment, since they are more likely to favour stringent environmental safeguards than the large, polluting special interests that now dominate the "representative" system of government. 

Another guess, if you ask me. In my experience ordinary people are eager to espouse environmentalist as long as they think all polluting is done by distant, evil corporations, but extremely unwilling to give up any of their own environmentally destructive habits, from grilling over charcoal to driving SUVs. But maybe that's just because they are unenlightened capitalist drones.

Many anarchists have a fascination, bordering on obsession, with certain short-lived revolutionary experiments that they see as glimpses of the anarchist future. The most prominent are the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Spanish Civil War, but the early days of the French and Russian Revolutions sometimes figure as well.

From the largely medieval peasant wars of the sixteenth century Reformation to the modern uprisings of industrial workers and peasants, oppressed people have created their own popular forms of community association...to replace the oppressive states.... [T]hese associations took the institutional form of local assemblies...or representative councils of mandated recallable deputies.... These examples cannot “prove” the validity of a radically democratic society, but they provide ample evidence of its possibility.

In a simple sense, this is true – in revolutionary situations Europeans, at least, have a habit of forming themselves into community associations governed by committees that try to reach consensus. The historical details, alas, are not so encouraging. All of these examples took place during wars, when most people are more willing to sacrifice for the good of the community than during peacetime. The fascists understood this, and some of them advocated perpetual warfare to mold the people into better citizens, but anarchists can't take this approach. All of these examples were also short-lived, and it has always been easier to get people pulling together in the short term, to overcome some crisis, than to keep them doing it for decades. Over time, the first blush of revolutionary enthusiasm fades and laziness reasserts itself. Troksky imagined defeating human inertia through "perpetual revolution", but Mao's attempts to realize this ambition are hardly encouraging examples for anarchists opposed to coercion in all its forms. All of the committees formed in these Revolutionary situations also excluded large parts of the communities where they were set up, because half the population had gone over to the other side. No conservative aristocrats joined the Jacobin club or signed the manifestoes of the German peasants, and no nuns or priests sat on the workers' committees that ran Barcelona in 1933. It is much easier to get agreement when everyone shares the same basic political goals.

Again, anarchists meet this objection by pointing out that after the Revolution there will be no aristocrats or mill owners, and since everybody will be of the same class, the oppositions that characterize our society will no longer exist. ("Where wealth is evenly distributed and no oppression exists, society is no longer pulled in different directions by competing and hostile forces.") To which I say, taking away their mills won't change the owners' political ideas, so you'll either have to shoot them or live with them. Shooting them would seem to be contrary to the anarchists' most basic principles, so there will be plenty of ex-capitalists around to keep meetings from ever reaching consensus. Not only that, but the most divisive issues in America and Europe today are not economic but moral, and I don't see why the end of capitalism will help us agree about abortion, pornography, school prayer, and the like.

Even among the part of society that was actually represented among our historical workers' communes and political clubs there was a strong tendency for a minority to take control. When organizations meet nearly every night – as they must during times of Revolutionary crisis – only those who have the time and make the effort can participate effectively. These have historically tended to be the angriest and most radical, with the result that the assemblies tend toward ever more extreme measures as their attendance falls. The most famous case is the way the militants took over the Jacobin club in Paris, launching the Terror first against the enemies of the new order and then against their slightly more moderate former colleagues. In a world governed by popular assemblies, power flows to those who most enjoy arguing in meetings all night, and there is no reason to think they are a more benevolent group than the rich or the aristocracy.

Whenever I read about western capitalists colluding with evil regimes to extract copper from Irian Jaya or oil from Nigeria and deny any of the proceeds to those who live near the resulting ugliness, I feel a surge of sympathy for the protesters. I, too, feel that "democracy is the cry of the oppressed for justice," and I, too, wish for a world where the people can control their own destinies. Nor am I such a fool as to imagine that in capitalist democracies ordinary people are completely in charge of their fates. But have any of our black-dress protesters asked themselves why all the hippies eventually left their communes and went back to the capitalist world? In practice, anarchism is a dreary bore, a world without oppression or great disparities of wealth, but also a world without grandeur or greatness, where endless bickering takes the place of politics and meetings crowd out productive activities. I would sooner live in a monarchy than in a world where I would have to spend my evenings arguing with my neighbors about the school budget and the sewer plan.

I have my own ideas about what would happen after an anarchist revolution. Far from enjoying "the daily experience of non-authoritarian modes of organization", most people will be sick of their local assembly within a few months. As more and more people stay home on meeting nights, a few fanatics will take control and pass ever more outlandish laws, which everybody else will ignore. The fanatics in the assemblies will create increasingly authoritarian police organizations to compel people to listen to them. Then either the majority will return to the assemblies and vote a return to the old way of doing things, or the assembly leaders will block them and find themselves swept away by force, crying all the while that such conflicts were not supposed to be possible in a world where wealth is evenly distributed and no oppression exists.

2002

Friday, July 4, 2025

Links 4 July 2025

The good news about America.

500-year-old compass found buried near Copernicus' tomb, might have belonged to him.

The top television network inthe US last week was YouTube, which captured 12.5% of all watchers.

Strange long-term correlation between oxygen and the strength of earth's magnetic field.

On Twitter/X, Tanner Greer ponders the status and possible future of "classics" as an academic discipline. And here is a critical review of the same book Greer was responding to, which argues for the replacement of classics by global ancient history.

Via Scott Siskind's monthly links post, a fascinating little discourse on whether Australian aborigines really did not know that sex leads to conception, and the century-long debate over the question among anthropologists.

Michael Sugrue takes on twentieth-century philosophy, finds it a self-serving dead-end. (45-minute video)

"Reason's Overreach." Robin Hanson says that while technical changes based on reason have generally been successful over the past few centuries, social changes based on reason have often been disastrous. After exploring the great complexity of societies and our difficulty with understanding them, he writes: "All of which should make us quite hesitant to change key features of those macro cultures on the basis of reason. Yet we have not been remotely as hesitant as the considerations above recommend."

Guedelon, the French project to build a new castle from scratch using medieval methods, is largely complete. 4-minute video, 3-hour video, Guedelon web site.

You may have made mistakes at work, but did your new corporate strategy ever cause a 97% fall in sales? 

In India, the massive fall in fertility happened during a period when there was no increase in female labor force participation. (Twitter/X) The main reason fertility has fallen is that people want fewer children.

Primer on the interesting politics of Uruguay.

Using Claude to generate ideas for research (Twitter/X)

Malcolm Gladwell says driverless cars won't work in cities because kids will just play soccer in the street, knowing that the driverless cars won't ever hit them or even honk at them. (Twitter/X)

The president of the University of Virginia resigns rather than risk having his university defunded by the Trump administration if he stayed; they consider him too enmeshed with DEI efforts. (NY Times, CBS News)

Reason: "Americans celebrate Independence Day Less Proud of their Country than Ever."

Tyler Cowen has some thoughts on how to measure AI progress.

The 1974 Asilomar Conference and the regulation of gene splicing technology.

Great collection of vintage photos of London's East End, from Wonderful London magazine.

Remarkable 1915 recording of Taylor Holmes reading Kipling's poem "Boots."

Chinese acupuncture needles 2,000 years old.

The Webb telescope discovers an exoplanet by photographing it.

New thinking about the Permian mass extinction says the collapse of tropical forests was a main reason the crisis lasted so long. (PhysOrgCNN, original paper)

Amusing rant about the contemporary writing scene.

The US tested the Massive Ordnance Penetrator on some of our own old underground nuclear testing sites. (Twitter/X)

Lousy month for the Russian air force:

Thursday, July 3, 2025

A Russian General's Death and a Shift in the Narrative

Multiple Russian news sources have confirmed that Major General Mikhail Gudkov was killed in a Himars strike on a headquarters where he was meeting with about 20 other officers; sources speak of at least ten deaths. Gudkov was the former commander of the 155th Naval Infantry Brigade, which has been heavily committed to fighting in Ukraine since the invasion began. He has lately been serving as the deputy commander of the Russian Navy, which I imagine means that Putin wanted to reward a hard fighting combat officer over the sailors whose main accomplishments in the war have been getting chased out of Crimea and boosting Ukranian morale by losing several valuable ships.

Early in the war, the deaths of senior Russian officers were covered up, and we learned about them via dodgy posts on Telegram. The quick confirmation of Gudkov's death represents, I think, a change in the Russian narrative. The war began as a "special operation" that was supposed to go quickly and with minimal losses. That narrative was sustained domestically by never talking officially about casualties. But as the war went on and the losses mounted that narrative broke down. After all the Russian military, like most major forces, has traditions of funerals and military monuments that are very important to soldiers and their families. So the funerals had to be held, and new names had to be added to the monuments, and it became impossible to ignore the size of the losses.

Instead a new narrative has emerged that yes, men are dying, but it is justified because Russia is involved in a struggle for its survival against the united forces of the west. This is how the creators of the Russian Officers Killed in Ukraine website put it:
It also seems to me that society has shifted over the past 3 years—the tendency to hide the dead has disappeared. It’s hard to justify when propaganda claims that they are dying to protect Russia and are heroes...
I think this narrative has been successful with many Russians, which is one reason why there has been no real opposition to the war.

Wednesday, July 2, 2025

Quotations from Camus' "Sisyphus"

Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation.

I’m filled with a desire for clarity and meaning within a world and condition that offers neither.

Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.

From the moment absurdity is recognized, it becomes a passion, the most harrowing of all.

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

What counts is not the best living but the most living.

There is no noble love but that which recognizes itself to be both short-lived and exceptional.

Integrity has no need of rules... 'Everything is permitted,' is not an outburst of relief or of joy, but rather a bitter acknowledgement of a fact.

If the world made sense, art would not exist.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.  

Christian Fitness

I've been wondering a lot lately how wacky holistic medicine became a right-wing thing. In the NY Times, Jessica Grose writes that some of it comes from the prominence of diet and fitness among evangelical Christians:

Megachurch pastor Rick Warren co-wrote a diet book called The Daniel Plan with Dr. Daniel Amen and Dr. Mark Hyman, which features a blurb from Dr. Mehmet Oz.

The book includes admonitions like “God isn’t going to evaluate you on the basis of the bodies he gave to other people, but he will judge what you did with what you have been given,” “Satan does not want you living a healthy life because that honors God” and “Why should God heal you of an obesity-related illness if you have no intention of changing the choices that led to it?”

As far back as the 1970s, Oral Roberts University had fitness requirements for its students:

If students were determined to be obese, they were “automatically placed on a weight reduction program. They meet with school doctors and sign a contract to lose a pound or two a week until they reach their goal. If a student fails to lose the weight, he or she faces probation and, eventually, suspension.” In 2016, Oral Roberts was back in the news for making its 900 freshmen wear fitness trackers. “Students are required to average 10,000 steps per day and 150 minutes of intense activity (as measured by heart rate) each week.” The data made up a portion of their grades in health and physical education classes, The Washington Post reported.

Fat shamed by Jesus! Fascinating.

Another thought I have had is that medicine is pretty much the pinnacle of the bureaucratic/scientific/caregiving establishment that many right-wing people despise, so it makes a sort of sense that some of them want to proclaim their independence from doctors and hospitals.

I think these ideas are dangerous, but it's hard to argue against them because eating right and staying fit really are good for you. Many of our health problems really are self-inflicted. But not all of them, and the reluctance of people like Steve Jobs to get establishment-recommended health care may be leading to a lot of premature deaths.

Tuesday, July 1, 2025

To Walk with Angels

I've just self-published another book, which I'm calling a metaphysical thriller. Here's the blurb, written to send to agents and publishers so they could ignore it:

David Nessio faced plenty of danger in Syria, doing rescue archaeology in the midst of a civil war. Back in Washington, DC he thinks he is safe and can get back to his graduate studies. But a phone call from a stranger leads him to the scene of a murder, and from there he descends back into violence and peril. Something his team found in Syria is so valuable, or so dangerous, that people would kill for it. As Nessio tries to figure out why, he keeps being pointed back to the period of history called the Bronze Age Collapse. Prayers from that time, around 1200 BC, lament that humans have lost contact with the gods and their messengers. Nessio learns that there is an idea, passed around among believers in secret, that we used to know how to reach the gods whenever we wanted. People call this knowledge the Key. Nessio discovers that while many believers are desperately seeking the Key, so they can bring divine power back into the world, others are equally determined to stop them. Nessio can’t believe in any of this, but since people on both sides are certain he knows something important, perhaps even the Key itself, he is drawn into their shadowy conflict. He travels across the US, then to Germany, and finally back to Syria, where Key believers try to open a door to other worlds in the ruins of an ancient temple, and sinister powers move to stop them.

And this is my explanation of how it came about:

I’ve always been a fan of stories based around ancient secrets, preserved by old and powerful institutions. But I am usually disappointed by the secrets themselves. Treasure maps? Stories about Jesus’ children? Really? That’s all you’ve got? A few years ago I was reading an old book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. Jaynes was a psychologist who believed that most people used to be schizophrenic, or something like it. They regularly heard voices in their heads, and they believed they were hearing the voices of gods or angels. Sometime around 1200 BC there was a change in human consciousness and most of us stopped hearing those voices. Cut off from their gods people made desperate, lonely prayers, many of which survive. I thought, what if people once had sacred knowledge that allowed them to speak with divine beings, but somehow that knowledge was lost or hidden? That would be a secret worth keeping. So I set out to write a thriller based around this premise. I called this secret the Key, and imagined a world built around it. Who would want to keep the Key secret, and who would want to bring it out? Where would people look for information about it, and how would they share it? I made my main character an archaeologist, like me, only a lot more daring and interesting. I imagined that in Syria, during the civil war, his team had discovered something people believe is related to the Key, or perhaps the Key itself, and that as this rumor spreads a circle of violence closes around everyone who had been part of that excavation. It would end, I knew, with spectacular explosions.

That last sentence is a good indication of how my stories develop. I start with a few ideas and images – a dig in the desert, a chase through Washington, an aristocrat in a limousine, an explosion – which slowly grow as I write. I never have a clear idea of the whole plot when I start. That mens a lot of rewriting, as the story evolves, but it is the only way I have been able to do it. 

So, here it is. Paperback is for sale here. Kindle should be up in 24 hours.

The Rise and Coming Fall of the Humanities Industry

I've been reading a book, Best of the Achaeans by Gregory Nagy (1979). It's a relentlessly intense dive into the weeds of scholarship on the Iliad and the Odyssey, with the aim of explaining the ancient idea of the hero. I find it fascinating. Part of the thesis is that the Iliad and the Odyssey, as a pair, represent an ancient debate about whether Achilles or Odysseus was really the best of the Achaeans, and thus whether strength or cleverness was ultimately more important.

But somewhere along the way I began to muse on what an absurd exercise this is. For example, there is a small section in the Iliad in which someone speaks in the dual – Greek had singular, dual, and plural – to a group of three men. There is, Nagy tells us, a "vast scholarship" on this problem. And I can well believe it.

But why? What does this say about our world?

There is nothing new about this kind of scholarship; we have very ancient examples of obsessive nerdiness about old texts from China, India, and the classical west, at least. (Not sure whether to include the Talmud.) One of the Confucian texts, the Spring and Autumn Annals, had by 1100 AD acquired a scholarly apparatus that included at least three different annotated versions, and in all of them the annotations were several times the length of the original text.

But until the 1800s, this sort of scholarship was done by a handful of wealthy gentlemen in their spare time. They understood that they were writing for a small community of other obsessives like themselves and that, far from making any money off this, they would have to pay the cost of publishing their ideas themselves. Emperors and Dukes sometimes had court scholars, but in the cases I know about those scholars actually spent much of their time on other activities, such as assisting with diplomatic receptions, generating precedents for proposed new policies, or producing occasional odes in the proper classical form. 

Then came the modern world. As part of our industrialization of education, we vastly expanded our university systems; there were about 5,500 university professors in the US in 1870, compared to more than 1.5 million today. Many of those professors are expected to produce "research."

And here is where I think things got weird. For the first century of industrial-scale higher education, we continued to follow old models of what students were supposed to learn. The notion was widespread that most students could study whatever they wanted, because it did not matter. And, in fact, there were all sort of bankers and accountants and CEOs in that world who had majored in English or History. Several of my college friends have had successful adult careers in fields completely unrelated to the humanistic disciplines they studied in college. People believed that "education" was a sort of mental discipline detached from any particular field of knowledge, and that an "educated" person could do anything. There was plenty of evidence that this was true.

But this meant that there were thousands upon thousands of professors of English, History, etc. who were supposed to produce "research." The amount of work being done in these disciplines therefore exploded, so that even in a small subfield – say, Pindar studies – there was more being published than anyone could possibly read. I remember one of my graduate school friends crying out for a ten-year halt to all publication on Beowulf so she could have a chance to catch up.

I was musing, as I read Nagy's explications of the exact meanings and connotations of various Greek words for sorrow or glory, that in a century this whole world will seem utterly bizarre. People will read that once upon a time more than 500 academics attended a conference on Jane Austen and Colonialism and think, "Wow, what a weird era that was." Because I believe the era of industrial-scale humanistic scholarship is coming to an end.

It started with students. Students have decided that the old model of "education" in the abstract is bunk, and what they need to have a business career is specialized knowledge, such as economics, computer science, or engineering. I am not sure they are right about this, but anyway they believe it. Enrollments in English, History, Anthropology, and so on have therefore plummeted. This means that there are very few jobs for professors in those fields, which means there is no need to train graduate students in those fields, which means that professors have fewer and fewer students to teach. I believe the number of humanities professors in the US (at least) is about to begin a very rapid decline.

Meanwhile, in politics, populism is surging all over the world. One thing pretty much all populists, whether left or right, agree on is that academia is a swamp pit of elite privilege, arcane bullshit, and scorn for regular folks like them. Online populists delight in skewering the strange interests of academics. The Trump administration is not the peak of anti-academic rage but the harbinger of a coming era in which nobody in politics cares, or wants to be seen caring, about the academy. If you think things are bad now, just wait.

Humanistic scholarship will not disappear; after all it survived through all the Dark Ages and periods of imperial collapse that civilization has endured over the past three millennia. There are millions of people like me who love to read obsessively nerdy books about old things, and many old institutions that very much want to continue these traditions. But I feel certain that we will see a lot less of it.

Personally, I am ambivalent about this. I loved my own humanistic education and I have loved teaching history to undergraduates. Learning about the world and sharing what I have learned is my passion. But even as a graduate student I found the academic world around me strange. I was sometimes bewildered by the entitlement of professors who believed what they were doing was supremely important and deserved even more support from the government, even if, or especially if, their main goal was the destruction of that very government and its replacement by a radically different system. I sometimes feel queasy about my current job for the same reason, because I do not think what I do always benefits the people who are paying for it. I also have had a major intellectual beef with the academic world, which is that most academics write only to impress other people in their own small fields and never bother trying to explain it to dabblers like me. I would like to see much less inside baseball and many more attempts to communicate with the rest of the world. 

But I feel pretty strongly that my feelings are irrelevant here, because the world is moving on from the one I was raised and trained in, and the future will in this respect at least be very different.