Sexual Abuse and Respect for Institutions

The Boy Scouts of America have filed for bankruptcy because they face hundreds of lawsuits for sexual abuse. The underlying problem is the same one that haunts the Catholic church: when they learned about abusive scout masters, the national organization acted first to cover everything up and protect its reputation. This sometimes meant allowing abusers to lead other troops and abuse other boys.

I have been thinking about the abuse crisis rather obsessively for years, and I think that the decline in respect for almost all institutions in our society is closely related to this problem. We now think that lying or hiding the truth to protect your institution may at times be a criminal act, if a child ends up suffering for it. But I very much doubt that any institution can maintain a high reputation under conditions of openness and honesty.

Journalist Rod Dreher converted to Catholicism as a teenager and became very devout and conservative. Then he covered the first five years or so of the sexual abuse scandal. The experience so traumatized him that he couldn't go to church any more. Eventually he converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, which doesn't have the same problem because its hierarchy is very weak. The particular experience that drove Dreher out of Catholicism was being repeatedly, flagrantly lied to by church leaders. I remember in particular one line from his work. Dreher had begun to suspect that a certain bishop was lying to him and expressed his doubts to an acquaintance who was a leading Catholic theologian. Well, the theologian said, you have to believe him. Dreher: why? Everything I have found suggests otherwise. Theologian: "Because he is a Bishop of the Catholic Church!"

This argument did not convince Dreher, and he went on to play his part in exposing the scandal, which led millions of people to drop out of the church.

I think that from his point of view the theologian was right. For the church to survive, it needs people to defend it no matter what. If the existence of the church is humanity's best hope for eternal salvation, doesn't that end justify using any means to preserve it?

Consider what I just posted about people who defend politicians' lies when they care enough about the issues the politicians stand for. Imagine, say Northern Ireland in the 1970s; how would the partisans of either side have reacted to an insider who had exposed a scandal involving one of his or her own leaders? Hatred at least, and quite likely execution. Should the church demand any less devotion than what people often give to petty political factions?

I think that when you stop accepting excuses, justifications and evasions from your leaders because you care more about something else, an important change has taken place. In the West we have decided that the sexual abuse of children is a wrong too profound to be any longer swept under the rug in the name of institutional legitimacy.

Every time we do this, we weaken our institutions. Personally I am ok with that, but then I have never been an institution guy. I suppose the hope is that by "shining a light" on abuses, openness might reduce them and thus in the long run strengthen institutions. I am doubtful. I think any group with thousands of members is going to have its share of criminals and creeps, and I think that our natural bias for paying attention to the dramatic and lurid, reinforced by our news media, means that those cases will continue to do great damage.

How to balance people's need for supportive institutions, and things to believe in, with the demands of justice is a hard problem, maybe one of the hardest we face.

Tradition and Business in Japan

Japan is different:

Back in 2008, a Bank of Korea report found that of 5,586 companies older than 200 years in 41 countries, 56% of them were in Japan. In 2019, there were over 33,000 businesses in Japan over a century old, according to research firm Teikoku Data Bank. The oldest hotel in the world has been open since 705 in Yamanashi and confectioner Ichimonjiya Wasuke has been selling sweet treats in Kyoto since 1000. Osaka-based construction giant Takenaka was founded in 1610, while even some global Japanese brands like Suntory and Nintendo have unexpectedly long histories stretching back to the 1800s.

But what is it about Japan that produces these long-lasting businesses?

It seems to come down to 1) respect for tradition, which among other things gives old companies a sales advantage, and 2) people caring about maintaining their family businesses.

Yoshinori Hara, dean and professor at Kyoto University’s Graduate School of Management, says these long-standing entities, at least 100 years old, are known as ‘shinise’ – literally meaning ‘old shop’.

Hara, who worked in Silicon Valley for a decade, says that Japanese companies’ emphasis on sustainability, rather than quick maximisation of profit, is a major reason why so many of the nation’s businesses have such staying power. “In Japan, it’s more: how can we move [the company] on to our descendants, our children, our grandchildren?” he explains.

At Tsuen Tea, Tsuen says many of his childhood friends in Kyoto also happened to be born into centuries-old family-run companies. To him, picking up the family business wasn’t even a question. “It’s not the business I started – I am operating the business my ancestors started. If I didn’t take it over, [the legacy] would have ended,” says Tsuen. “When you’re little, like in kindergarten and elementary school, you’re asked your dream for the future. I thought I was taking over the business. It was natural.”

Vienna Teng at Mountain Stage

I've been a fan of Vienna Teng for years but I just discovered this video today, something quite different from the lovely sound of Blue Caravan or My Medea. 1) this was recorded live; 2) no prerecorded sounds are used, everything is from the looping you see her doing.

Romantic Kissing is far from Universal

A new finding from statistical anthropology:

From pop culture to evolutionary psychology, we have come to take kissing for granted as universally desirable among humans and inseparable from other aspects of affection and intimacy. However, a recent article in American Anthropologist by Jankowiak, Volsche and Garcia questions the notion that romantic kissing is a human universal by conducting a broad cross cultural survey to document the existence or non-existence of the romantic-sexual kiss around the world.

The authors based their research on a set of 168 cultures compiled from eHRAF World Cultures (128 cultures) as well as the Standard Cross Cultural Sample (27 cultures) and by surveying 88 ethnographers (13 cultures). The report’s findings are intriguing: rather than an overwhelming popularity of romantic smooching, the global ethnographic evidence suggests that it is common in only 46% (77) of the cultures sampled. The remaining 54% (91) of cultures had no evidence of romantic kissing. In short, this new research concludes that romantic-sexual kissing is not as universal as we might presume.

5G Doesn't Mean Anything

When I first heard about "5G" wireless I asked some friends what it meant. I got answers like, "You know, the next generation of technology, like 486 vs 386 or something." But what would that mean in terms of actual performance? Nobody seems to know.

The first country to deploy 5G technology widely was South Korea, and the results are now coming in:

…Samsung, which makes both handsets as well as 5G network equipment, told investors on its own call that it expects its 5G business in South Korea to “shrink somewhat compared to last year.”

That last revelation is sobering. South Korea was the first market to deploy 5G services on a wide basis. Service launched in April 2019, but by year’s end consumers already were complaining that it didn’t live up to the hype. Part of the problem is that services marketed under the 5G label can vary widely in terms of speed and availability. Some aren’t much faster than existing 4G networks. And the fastest—including those using millimeter wave technology—currently are available only in certain dense urban areas due to their signal limitations.

I understand that the actual performance of wireless systems varies a lot more than the speed of a CPU: the speed you get depends on how many other users are tied to the same tower, the geometry of the buildings around you, the weather, and probably a million other things. But the reluctance of tech companies to put any number on their services bothers me. Can't they figure out how much faster the new networks are on average? I suspect they can, and if they aren't saying it's because the number is underwhelming. Would you pay twice as much for a phone that was 20% faster than your old one?

It isn't just wireless. In my neighborhood you can get your internet from the cable company, or you can have Verizon run a fiber optic cable into your house. (They already run down all the streets.) When kids working for Verizon came around trying to sign me up, I asked them how the speed compared. They didn't know. I went online, and neither Verizon nor the cable company was saying.

I find this all puzzling. The only explanation I can come up with is that the technology just isn't that great, so telling people the actual performance numbers would depress sales rather than increase them. Which is a sobering thought.

Amber Sun Disk

Back in 2008, Danish archaeologists excavated a Late Bronze Age (900-700 BCE) cemetery in which the bodies had been cremated and placed in urns. This year they did CT scans of the intact urns and discovered that one of them contained a mysterious disk just over an inch (3 cm) across. Digging it out, they found that it was made of amber. But it was old and dirty and looked like this.

Until they shined a bright light through it. Then they discovered that it is a Sun Disk, carefully made to refract sunlight in this spectacular way.

The Leighton House Museum, London

Frederick Leighton was a famous painter of Victorian England, and one of my favorites. I just discovered that his house in Kensington is a museum mainly devoted to what one critic called "excessive Victorian opulence." Just my sort of thing.

The front facade of the house hardly hints at what lies behind.

The front part of the house is European in style and stocked with paintings by Leighton and his contemporaries.

Leighton's famous self portrait is part of the collection.

After a trip to Syria in 1873 Leighton built a two-room addition on the back of the house in a pseudo-Moorish style. The tiles are antiques from Syria, some of them dating to the 15th century.

I love it when artists leave behind houses that are as much their creations as any of their paintings or sculptures, and this looks like a wonderful place to visit.

 My post on Leighton's life and art is here.

The Strangeness of N.K. Jemisin

I read my first N.K. Jemisin novel several years ago, after grabbing it off the shelf without any idea who she was. I think it was The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (2011), but it didn't move me enough to remember it very well. It was ok, just too weird for my taste.

Then Jemisin's Shattered Earth trilogy – The Fifth Season (2015), The Obelisk Gate (2016), and The Stone Sky (2017) – won the Hugo award three years in a row, which no author had ever done before. People raved about it. So I thought that if I were going to maintain my credentials as an expert on contemporary Fantasy, I had better read it. I just finished.

I plowed through the whole thing in three weeks, so I liked it; some parts I found gripping, and at times I couldn't wait to get back to it. But I didn't love it. Explaining why is going to require an excursus on why I read fantasy in the first place.

Once upon a time, I think it was 1991, I set out to hike across Dartmoor in southwestern England, searching for a stone circle. On a rainy, windy, misty November day I got off the bus near a ruined castle, passed by a 14th-century stone church, and made my way up a lane past stone cottages and an orchard of gnarled apple trees. The lane was deeply sunken, worn five feet into the earth by 500 years of foot and ox cart traffic, and for a while I could see nothing but the stone walls on either side. Then the lane ended and I stumbled out onto the moor, blasted by a bitter wind laced with cold rain.

I started walking across the moor on a vague sheep trail. Between the rain and the mist and having to keep my hood pulled tightly around my face I could hardly see where I was going. I just remembered from the map that I was walking around a big hill, so that if I kept uphill to my right and downhill to my left I would be going in approximately the right direction. And so I walked for two hours, no one around but bored-looking sheep, nothing to see but rocky moorland stretching out on every side until it disappeared into the clouds only 50 yards or so away. I started to wonder if I had wandered off the trail, and whether I might miss the circle altogether. And then, suddenly, the mist cleared in front of me and I was staring at a perfect circle of two dozen waist-high standing stones. The whole thing was about 40 yards across, and when the rain picked up a few minutes later I could hardly make out the farthest stones. But there I was, in a mist-shrouded sheep pasture, by a circle of stones set in place more than 5,000 years ago for reasons we only dimly understand. I was overwhelmed with wonder. I felt connected to the earth, to the mist, to the people of long ago, to their stories and dreams, to the cults of forgotten gods preached in lost tongues by priests who turned to dust long millennia past.

I read fantasy in pursuit of that feeling: of awed connection to ancient mysteries. I am not all that picky, and I can be moved by what are really pretty slight invocations of eldritch marvels. But I like fantasy best when it is rooted in old traditions. Mostly of course this has been the European tradition, but I have also enjoyed fantasies based on the lore of Japan, China, voodoo, the Arab lands, and the Silk Road.

To get back to N.K. Jemisin: she is a capable writer with a wild imagination who cares not one bit about the things that move me. Jemisin's fantasies are set in worlds as far as her mind can reach from the actual human past. I confess that when I first encountered this sort of fantasy I was puzzled; why would anyone want to cut away completely from the wonders of myth and history that are there for the plundering? But some people, it seems, are bored with the mythic worlds we inherited and looking for something new and different. If that is your thing, read Jemisin; the Shattered Earth is the best such world I know.

Jemisin – her name is Nora, incidentally – is African American, and this may have something to do with her rejection of old traditions as a basis for her worlds. She seems to regard the European past as something wholly foreign to herself, where the people she identifies with are oppressed or excluded. Instead of inspiring her to look into African or Caribbean traditions, it inspires her to cast off from the past altogether. I think part of the reason she won all those Hugo awards is that many people in America now feel the same way. The past is not of any use to us, even in imagination; it is only something to leave behind.

The Shattered Earth is set on our planet, thousands of years in the future. Once, it seems, earth had a civilization of vast technological prowess, but then something went wrong. Legends call this event the Shattering. In its wake a reduced humanity struggles to survive on a planet where plate tectonics have gone berserk, with a massive seismic event every generation or so. These are called "seasons," and they usually kill millions, reducing the rest to hard-hearted survivors huddling behind stone walls under ash-darkened skies, chasing away raiders and subsisting on the stores they build up in between. They would not survive at all except that certain people are born with the power to control the earth and still some of its rampages. These are called orogenes.

The main human characters of the story are all orogenes of the highest power, able to do things like split continents in half and change the orbit of the moon. All is not well for them, though, because the rest of humankind mostly hates them; some are hunted exiles, others what amounts to well-treated slaves. The story mainly follows three people: a woman with several names, her daughter, and an older man who serves for a while as her mentor. Between them they have the power either to destroy the earth or to restore it to something more stable, and the tension mainly concerns their struggles over which makes more sense and how either might be accomplished.

The thing is, by the end of the story I empathized more with the orogene haters than the orogenes themselves, because the main characters kept losing their tempers and killing people. If you had to live with people whose moon-orbit-altering power was joined to so much psychological instability that whole cities full of humans were regularly blasted, frozen, or turned to stone, how would you feel? The orogenes have reasons for their anger, I mean, people hate them and sometimes try to kill them. But as far as I am concerned, that gives no one the right to exterminate thousands.

There may be a metaphor about the rage of the oppressed, especially mothers' rage on behalf of their abused children. Still.

The Shattered Earth is an impressive creation: original, complex, entertaining. But between my issues with the main characters and my sense of being cut off from any world I understand, I didn't love it and wouldn't have given it any awards.

Links 14 February 2020

Figurine of a storyteller from Jalisco, Mexico, AD 100 to 800

Ross Douthat thinks the West is "Decadent," by which he means stuck in the doldrums, without much creativity in any dimension.

The George Washington University hired Disney to make the school better, with predictable results.

Pop music has gotten sadder.

Peter Thiel reviews Ross Douthat's book on decadence.

David Brooks contemplates the decline of extended families and recent attempts to bring them back.

Review of two books that blame economists and their style of thinking for many of our woes over the past 50 years.

Mudlarking: exploring the banks of the Thames in London for bits of the city's past.

The Bible says that Kings Hezekiah and Josiah closed all the other temples in Israel and centralized all cultic activity in Jerusalem, but archaeology shows that other temples continued to operate quite close by.

Why have sales of DNA test kits fallen?

New genus of carnivorous dinosaurs named Thanatotheristes, "death reaper."

Things that could have been invented centuries before they were: Kay's flying shuttle (1733), table top role-playing games (1970s). Why? Because "innovation doesn't happen very often."

The Saadi Empire in Morocco, a sixteenth-century success story enmeshed with the rise of England in ways I never knew until today.

New Viruses Killing Few Children

Coronavirus news:

The outbreak of a new coronavirus in China has killed more than 900 people, but one group has escaped with minimal damage: children.

Youth can certainly contract the virus. Among the infected are at least two newborns, according to Chinese health officials. But few children are among those sick enough to be diagnosed with the coronavirus, according to an article published Feb. 5 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. According to the data analyzed in that article — and numbers are changing quickly as the outbreak evolves — the median age of patients skews older, between 49 and 56 years old.

It's not entirely clear why children seem to be escaping the worst effects of the virus, dubbed 2019-nCoV. But a similar pattern holds for many infectious diseases, from the familiar, such as chickenpox and measles, to the newly emerged, including severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), doctors say.

"We don't fully understand the phenomenon — it may be because of differences in the immune responses of children compared to adults," Dr. Andrew Pavia, the chief of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the University of Utah, told Live Science in an email. "One hypothesis is that the innate immune response, that is the early response that is aimed broadly at groups of pathogens, tends to be more active," in children, he said.

Ideology and Mental Illness

Via Slate Star Codex, I found this simple comparison of ideology and mental illness, based on the US General Social Survey:

Percent having had a mental illness
Extremely liberal 30.0
Liberal 11.5
Slightly liberal 12.1
Moderate 4.7
Slightly conservative 7.8
Conservative 5.6
Extremely conservative 5.1

I strongly suspect that this is real, and not just an artifact of the survey, but there are some things to say about it.

First, the results are self-reported, and I am pretty sure that American conservatives have a stronger bias against mental illness than liberals do. In some of the leftist groups I have known you would feel left out if you didn't have a mental illness to talk about. So I think some of this result comes from leftists being more willing to call common sorts of mental troubles "illness" than conservatives are.

I doubt that explains the whole thing, though. I think that statement applies to liberals nearly as much as it does to leftists, and liberals show much less mental illness; I suspect the size of this effect is about the difference between liberals and conservatives, or at any rate no bigger than that.

I think there is a real relationship between far left views and mental illness. The far left people I know are motivated by a sense that life in our society is unsustainable. Our world is too cruel, too unfair, too unsupportive of real human needs, besides which we are trashing the planet and headed for ecological catastrophe.

I think this outlook is strongly correlated with depression and anxiety. The more sensitive you are to human suffering, the sadder you will probably be, and, maybe, the more you long for some kind of radical change to fix things.

That being said, leftists might be functioning as the canary in the coal mine here, at least as regards the psychological trauma of living in our world. If our world were too cruel and unfair for human flourishing, you would expect the effects to show up first in highly sensitive people with a tendency to mental problems.

Plus, crazy people gets votes, too, so in a democracy you can't write off the views of people you think are crazy.

But I also wonder about the relationship between mental illness and politics in other, broader ways. To what extent are political beliefs psychological coping mechanisms? Or, to put it differently, to what extent can political beliefs serve as psychological coping mechanisms?

Consider the ML King/Obama belief that the long arc of history bends toward justice. Might this be a way of remaining hopeful about the future despite current troubles? And wouldn't it motivate you to act, politically, in certain ways? The reverse sort of nostalgic, things-used-to-be better conservatism also seems to me to often function as a psychological mechanism, upholding the possibility of good in a fallen world.

Some people really want to believe that the world is just and not merely randomly good or bad, and I wrote here back in 2015 about the political implications of this attitude:

People who strongly believe in a just world have been shown to be prone to blame sexual assault victims, more willing to malign people suffering from minor illnesses, less compassionate towards victims of spousal abuse. A 1975 study found BJW correlated with a tilt towards authoritarianism, an admiration for political leaders, and contempt for the underprivileged.

A case could be made that tribalism of every sort is a mechanism that protects psychological health. After all we did a lot of our evolution in small groups surrounded by hated outsiders, and I think a sense of belonging to a group that is good and opposed by enemies who are bad does a lot for many people. When I confront people who hate whole groups of others, I often feel that I am staring into an abyss of pain, which has been turned outward to protect a wounded self.

What we do, day to day, is struggle to feel good within a particular technological and social world. Politics, I am convinced, is one of the ways we do that.

A Proposal for the Potomac River, 1945

Here's something that might interest people living in my part of the world, a map from 1945 showing all the different proposals under consideration to build dams on the Potomac River and its tributaries. I don't think anyone envisaged building all of these, but each one of these dams was a real proposal with people behind it.

I have looked into the one that would have been at Chain Bridge in Washington, submerging Great Falls, and it was being actively pushed by important Congressmen and the like.

Other Values Trump Honesty

Thomas Edsall:

In their 2017 paper “Liars, Damned Liars, and Zealots: The Effect of Moral Mandates on Transgressive Advocacy Acceptance,” two psychologists at the University of Illinois, Allison B. Mueller and Linda J. Skitka, cite “transgressive advocacy” — which they define as “norm-violating means, i.e., lying, to achieve a preferred end” — as an critical aspect of contemporary political competition:

People’s perceptions of others’ transgressive advocacy were uniquely shaped by their moral convictions. Although honesty was positively valued by all respondents, transgressive advocacy that served a shared moral end was more accepted, and advocacy in the service of a non-preferred end was more condemned, regardless of its truth.

So if you want to know why people accept Trump, there it is: because they believe that cheating to win is not just ok but admirable when the stakes are high.

Knausgaard on Kiefer

Here's a real treat for me: my favorite writer on art, Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard, writes a long profile of Anselm Kiefer, one of my favorite contemporary artists. On Kiefer's airplane hangar-sized studio::

“That’s great,” I said, following her into Kiefer’s studio itself, which opened up like a canyon before us.

I had never seen anything like it. The hangar-like space was gigantic and filled to the brim with art. It was like a world inside the world. Huge metal slabs were leaning against the walls. Helter-skelter around them, on racks with wheels, stood large paintings of oceans and beaches, rivers and meadows, mountains and forests, some covered with corroded ravines of lead. Vitrines in every size were standing everywhere, filled with the strangest things: the roots of trees, rusty hammers, little clay pigs. Shelves that ran the length of the hall were stacked with balance scales, hooks, rifles, stoves, snakes, torpedoes, piles of bricks, heaps of dried flowers, even whole trees. There were more full-size fighter jets and a cage that was maybe 300 square feet that was filled with golden wheat and what appeared to be the cooling tower of a nuclear power plant with a bicycle dangling down the side.

It was as if our whole culture surged through this hall, raw and wild, like its subconscious. Could all this really come from one person? Who was this man?

And this, from near the end:

He sat on the other end of the table, and I watched him, noticing how he always put his hand on the person he was talking to, a few seconds’ touch only, on the forearm or shoulder, and how he was beaming as he spoke. Then the smile and the enthusiasm could vanish as if cut off by an ax. The abrupt failure of interest — the humming during breaks in the conversation, the laughter that trailed everything he said — all created a kind of bubble around him, a zone of inaccessibility. Somehow this also applied to his home, where there was a remarkable mismatch between the size of the rooms and the furnishings. The effect was a bit like seeing a room on a movie set — up close it looked like any other room, but taking a few steps back, you realize that the room was inside a huge studio that did not relate to it in any way, but was merely a vessel for it and that feeling of “home” was leaking out of it in every direction.

He turned all his studios into artworks themselves, so it was as if he lived in his art, I thought. If Kiefer was similar to any mythological figure, it must be King Midas: All he touched turned into art. If that was a blessing or a curse, only he could know.

Families in Bronze Age Bavaria

This October I wrote about some DNA results from several Copper and Bronze Age cemeteries near Augsburg in southern Germany. Now there is a new paper on more DNA from the same region, but so far as I can tell the two studies are completely separate.

This study deals with two cemeteries, Alburg (18 burials) and Irlbach (24 burials). Useful DNA was obtained from 34 skeletons. The time frame is 2300-2150 BC. All of the burials are related to the Bell Beaker culture.

The results confirm the basic pattern of the earlier study. The males at both sites all came from the same Y chromosome lineage, R1b M269, which is the most common among the invaders from the Steppes who probably spread Indo-European languages. Each site was dominated by a single family in the male line, at one site through six generations.

The women were much more diverse, with 23 different mitochondrial DNA types among the 34 people in the sample. Also, none of the women were closely related to each other, except a couple of mother-daughter pairs. The pattern is clearly women leaving home and moving into patrilineal households. It seems that the marriages were monogamous; there are no examples of a man having children with two different women, nor of two women who might have been co-wives in the same generation. (That doesn't say anything about men having bastards with servants or whatever, it just applies to official offspring who would have ended up buried in the main family cemetery.) These seem to have been nuclear family households, without any cousins in residence.

One of the interesting things about the article is that the authors relate to this marriage pattern to the problem of how Indo-European languages became so dominant, even though the invaders were majority male:

Recent research comparing patrilocal and matrilocal marriage system in traditional societies in Indonesia demonstrated that these two institutions had different consequences for both language dominance and genetic dominance. The results were summarized as follows: “When multiple languages are present in a region and post-marital residence rules encourage sustained directional movement between speech communities, then languages should be channelled along uniparental lines. Over time, these kinship systems shaped their gene and language phylogenies”. Consequently, women marrying into patrilocal communities were forced to adopt their husband’s language. Such a situation could well resemble third millennium BC Europe. If Indo-European speakers were the ones to introduce a system of patrilocal exogamy, women from one or multiple originally non-Indo-European-speaking communities would have moved into Indo-European speaking communities, and adopt their language. Over time this would lead to an increased genetic and cultural dominance and the consolidation of one or more Indo-European dialects.

Fascinating. Think of what we are learning here from decayed DNA molecules in old bones: family structure, marriage patterns, possible insights into how Indo-European languages spread at the level of households.

The Pain of Being Jordan Peterson

Jordan Peterson is sick:

Jordan Peterson is recovering from a severe addiction to benzodiazepine tranquilizers and was recently near death in an induced coma, his daughter Mikhaila said. He is being treated at a clinic in Russia after being repeatedly misdiagnosed at several hospitals in North America, she said.

It seems that he first started taking tranquilizers two years ago after a weird autoimmune reaction to food, then increased his dose when his wife was diagnosed with cancer.

His breakdown is sad news, but to me absolutely unsurprising.

Peterson is a therapist, and while it is an old joke that psychologists are crazier than their patients, it has some truth to it. It is often the experience of psychological troubles, and with being helped through them, that inspires people to pursue careers in mental health.

But more than that, if you have ever watched Jordan Peterson talk, you have seen him frequently on the verge of tears. Part of the power of his message is the pain that seems to loom behind it. Especially when he talks about the redemptive possibility of myth, I see a man desperately searching for something to hold on to, as if he feared he might at any moment be swept away.

It seems that he lost his grip and the waves pulled him under, at least for a while. I hope he finds dry land on the other side.

Here's a note from a description of a documentary film about Peterson:

One of the amazing things you will see in the film is that, wherever the filming takes place, ordinary passersby approach Peterson to tell him how his work has helped them overcome self-doubt and depression. This is the human reality behind the fact that Peterson’s self-help book has sold more than two million copies. Whatever you think about his academic ideas, he is clearly helping people make sense of the world.

Bail

Orem Nimni reviews Alec Karakatsanis’ new book, Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System:

Karakatsanis opens his book with a scene in a New Orleans courtroom, where a man is accused of a crime and ordered held on a $20,000 bail. Because he can’t pay $20,000, the man will stay in jail until trial. That he can’t afford $20,000 is no surprise: about 40 percent of American families can’t come up with even $400 in an emergency, much less $20,000. Most of the criminal punishment system operates to the heavy disadvantage of poor people. If you only have money for silly things like food and shelter you likely won’t be able to pay off a ticket (and the resulting unpaid debt can get you put in prison), let alone your bail. Hundreds of thousands of people are held in cages simply because they can’t “make bail.” That means they are held pre-trial, convicted of nothing, just because they can’t pay the state the amount set by the court.

This wealth-determinate caging system also has harsh downstream consequences beyond the fact of being in jail itself. If you’re imprisoned because you couldn’t make bail, you’re likely to lose your job because you don’t show up, and you’re likely to lose your house because you can’t pay rent. You may lose custody of your kids since you can’t care for them effectively behind bars. Pre-trial detention also results in consequences for the criminal case itself. Those locked up pre-trial are more likely to accept a plea agreement (even a bad one) just to get out of jail, and statistics demonstrate that those held pre-trial, as opposed to those who are released, are more likely to be convicted. It should be troubling to anyone that cares about justice that wealth (and race) is a major determinant of a person’s outcomes in the criminal system.

I’ve actually found discussions of bail to be a good entry point for talking about the cruelty of the criminal punishment system. It’s just so intuitively unjust. “That’s crazy!” most people say upon learning that you can be held for ransom by the state, potentially for years, before having a trial. “That must be illegal!” Most lawyers would scoff at this last statement, because bail is just so central to the criminal system and its existence seems like an immutable fact of nature.

Of course the reason bail was invented was that accused criminals have a habit of not showing up for trial, and I'm not sure what Nimni and Karakatsanis propose to do about that. But I agree that the bail system as it exists is awful.

Modernism, or, Your Feelings are Irrelevant

Brianna Rennix and Nathan Robinson:

The fact is, contemporary architecture gives most regular humans the heebie-jeebies. Try telling that to architects and their acolytes, though, and you’ll get an earful about why your feeling is misguided, the product of some embarrassing misconception about architectural principles. . . .

Another thing you will often hear from design-school types is that contemporary architecture is honest. It doesn’t rely on the forms and usages of the past, and it is not interested in coddling you and your dumb feelings. Wake up, sheeple! Your boss hates you, and your bloodsucking landlord too, and your government fully intends to grind you between its gears. That’s the world we live in! Get used to it! Fans of Brutalism—the blocky-industrial-concrete school of architecture—are quick to emphasize that these buildings tell it like it is, as if this somehow excused the fact that they look, at best, dreary, and, at worst, like the headquarters of some kind of post-apocalyptic totalitarian dictatorship.

Let’s be really honest with ourselves: a brief glance at any structure designed in the last 50 years should be enough to persuade anyone that something has gone deeply, terribly wrong with us. Some unseen person or force seems committed to replacing literally every attractive and appealing thing with an ugly and unpleasant thing. The architecture produced by contemporary global capitalism is possibly the most obvious visible evidence that it has some kind of perverse effect on the human soul. Of course, there is no accounting for taste, and there may be some among us who are naturally are deeply disposed to appreciate blobs and blocks. But polling suggests that devotees of contemporary architecture are overwhelmingly in the minority: aside from monuments, few of the public’s favorite structures are from the postwar period. (When the results of the poll were released, architects harrumphed that it didn’t “reflect expert judgment” but merely people’s “emotions,” a distinction that rather proves the entire point.) And when it comes to architecture, as distinct from most other forms of art, it isn’t enough to simply shrug and say that personal preferences differ: where public buildings are concerned, or public spaces which have an existing character and historic resonances for the people who live there, to impose an architect’s eccentric will on the masses, and force them to spend their days in spaces they find ugly and unsettling, is actually oppressive and cruel.

And why, you have to wonder, has Brutalism somehow become the architecture of the Left?

There have, after all, been moments in the history of socialism—like the Arts & Crafts movement in late 19th-century England—where the creation of beautiful things was seen as part and parcel of building a fairer, kinder world. A shared egalitarian social undertaking, ideally, ought to be one of joy as well as struggle: in these desperate times, there are certainly more overwhelming imperatives than making the world beautiful to look at, but to decline to make the world more beautiful when it’s in your power to so, or to destroy some beautiful thing without need, is a grotesque perversion of the cooperative ideal. This is especially true when it comes to architecture. The environments we surround ourselves with have the power to shape our thoughts and emotions. People trammeled in on all sides by ugliness are often unhappy without even knowing why. If you live in a place where you are cut off from light, and nature, and color, and regular communion with other humans, it is easy to become desperate, lonely, and depressed. 

If it were possible to reform architecture and start creating lovely buildings again, I would feel a lot better about our world.

Assembling "The Kiss"

Putting together a puzzle of a complex, very famous painting turned out to be an interesting experience. (Sorry about the missing piece; I'm convinced the cat did it.) We know this as "The Kiss" but Klimt also exhibited it as "The Lovers."

It's a wonderful painting, one of the masterpieces of the Art Noveau era, somewhat dimmed for many by its popularity–in the 1980s at least it was in every third dorm room in America. This is the original, now in Vienna; note that not just my puzzle but most dorm room posters cut it down to something narrower, shedding some of the starry background. I think this is a fabulous example of what artists in that era (1908) were able to achieve after they shed the limits of academic "realism."

No photograph can really do it justice, because it is textured and speckled all over with gold leaf, but this image still shows you a lot. And as I can tell you from staring it all week, there is a lot to see. Start with the pattern. Notice that the space of the man's body is defined by the patter of black and white rectangles, that of the woman's by flowers, marking off distinctly different male and female spaces.

Klimt loved playing with these patterns; here is another painting of his from the same period, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907.

These are not simple, repeating patterns, but complex arrangements of unique elements.

The lovers are surrounded by a sort of halo of golden ovals and spirals, enveloping them and setting them off from the mundane world. And now that the puzzle is done maybe I'll be online a little more this week.

Links 7 February 2020

David Alvarez, Minotaur

Interview with the author of Young Money, about Ivy League grads who go to Wall Street: why they go, what happens to them, etc.

Review of Adam Gopnik's A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism, a defense of liberalism that the reviewer finds pathetic.

Spitalfields Life explore's the Regent's Canal in London.

Scott Alexander reviews Stuart Russell's book about AI risk.

Jill Lepore on the 1930s, "the last time democracy nearly died."

European reforestation: since 1950, 700,000 sq. km, equal to the area of France, have gone from cropland to forest. Of course that means forest fires are now an increasing problem.

Vivian Gornick's quest for happiness without love.

The perils of being famous.

Smithsonian Magazine article on board games of the ancient world.

The back story of the Ukraine scandal began with documents dumped in a river.

Many political experts think the way for a Democrat to beat Trump is to ignore all the culture war shenanigans and focus on pocketbook issues: health care, raising the minimum wage, etc. But when Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer did that in the SOTU response, she was so boring that even some reporters had trouble listening to her speech.

Donald Trump, Architecture Critic

Donald Trump has finally taken a concrete step to make America great again: in architecture, anyway.  He has issued a draft executive order that makes neo-traditional architecture the government's "default style" and establishes a commission to approve new designs. The Chicago Sun Times has the whole text of the draft order, should you be curious. A sample:

What's a liberal hater of modernism to do? I finally have a friend in the White House, and it's Donald J. Trump?

The people one would expect to complain are complaining. The Sun-Times:

He would demand that the buildings be designed in architectural styles of centuries past, extending his reactionary instincts to the very brick and mortar of government. . . . A state-mandated architectural style that retreats so resolutely into the past is an implicit negation of the best of American and world culture over the last few hundred years. It is also the stuff of authoritarian regimes, which always distrust the new and unexpected. . . . The fear of an open society is palpable.

Authoritarian, my foot. Plenty of dictators have loved modernism, starting with Stalin. And the point here is not authoritarianism but democracy. It's the architects and the critics who are afraid of an open society, because they want to keep building things that everybody else hates.

Roger Lewis, a professor who has written about building in Washington, doesn't like Trump's order:

At the most fundamental level it’s a complete constraint on freedom of expression.

But public architecture is a very different kind of art than painting or music. Nobody has to experience those. Public architecture touches everyone who walks by. I see nothing wrong with giving the people a say in what public buildings look like. Insistence that architects be able to design what they want is elitism, plain and simple.

Marion Smith, who would head to new commission, wrote:

For too long architectural elites and bureaucrats have derided the idea of beauty, blatantly ignored public opinions on style, and have quietly spent taxpayer money constructing ugly, expensive, and inefficient buildings. This executive order gives voice to the 99 percent — the ordinary American people who do not like what our government has been building.

Amen to that.

Of course there are plenty of ugly neoclassical buildings in the world, including some in Washington, and Trump's commission might just end up adding another level to the already mind-boggling review process for new buildings in Washington. There is no guarantee that this will led to anything good at all; follow-up doesn't seem to be Trump's strong suit. I am just thrilled to see somebody stand up and say that public buildings belong to all of us, and our opinions ought to be considered in deciding how they are designed.

When architects stop foisting ghastly modernism on us, I will think about standing up for their free expression. But they insist on assaulting my world with concrete ugliness, and I will fight that however I can, even if it means praising the president.

The Tale of Two Monks and a Woman

An old Buddhist parable, via Kottke:

The story goes that two monks were traveling together, a senior and a junior. They came to a river with a strong current where a young woman was waiting, unable to cross alone. She asks the monks if they would help her across the river. Without a word and in spite of the sacred vow he’d taken not to touch women, the older monk picks her up, crosses, and sets her down on the other side.

The younger monk joins them across the river and is aghast that the older monk has broken his vow but doesn’t say anything. An hour passes as they travel on. Then two hours. Then three. Finally, the now quite agitated younger monk can stand it no longer: “Why did you carry that women when we took a vow as monks not to touch women?”

The older monk replies, “I set her down hours ago by the side of the river. Why are you still carrying her?”

There are Worse Things than Polarization

Ezra Klein:

Things were far worse in the “golden age” of the 1950s and ‘60s than they are today. We often think of midcentury as a time of civility and compromise in our politics, but it was also an era when lynchings were common, Freedom Riders were brutally beaten, urban riots ripped across the country, and political assassinations were frequent. Things today are bad — and we should try to fix them — but nostalgia for our recent past is deeply misguided.

US Education Spending

Despite what you may have heard, per pupil education spending in the US has gone up a lot and after a dip caused by the Great Recession is it rising again. The chart comes from Kevin Drum, who adds,

Total spending per pupil has doubled since 1980 and quadrupled since 1960. Both total spending and instructional spending have increased by a third since 1990. . . . A per-pupil difference of $1,200 between poor and rich schools is small potatoes compared to the average increase of $7,000 across all schools since 1980.

Our schools do worse than those in some other countries, but not because we spend less money; we are second in the world in per pupil spending after oil-rich Norway.

As to why we do worse, I think the answer is pretty simple: because we care less. We just don't value education in America like many other countries do.

Links 31 January 2020

A Taino Zemi (ancestral spirit) from the Caribbean, 1000-1500 CE

Today's mind-stretching exercise: physicists trying to correct errors in quantum computers found that their error-correcting equations seemed to produce space-time as a side-effect.

Earthworms as a destructive invasive species.

The al Shabaab group in Somalia, which the US considers a terrorist organization, has banned single use plastic bags, citing their environmental harm.

The $60 billion stock trading tax scam.

According to this study, legalizing marijuana raises cigarette use by 4-7%.

The Fourth Spy at Los Alamos: Oscar Seborer, who may have showed the Soviets how to make the triggers for implosion bombs.

Bernie Sanders vs. trans rights activists is deontology vs. consequentialism.

Robin Hanson on Parasite, Joker, and class conflict. (Incidentally I thought Joker was good, and Joaquin Phoenix's performance sensational.)

Literature and Self-Help, a long history of mutual suspicion with a few fruitful interactions.

Warren Buffet sells his newspapers, saying he can't find any way to reverse their decline.

A review of “the best and the most thoughtful statement we have of what might be termed the Flight 93 mindset — the feeling, among a certain type of white conservative, that the changes of the past half century have amounted to a war on the country and the civilization that they knew and loved.”

And now Vexit, a plan to have counties in western Virginia secede and join West Virginia.

The terrible "sweating sickness" of 15th- and 16th-century England.

Conor Friedersdorf on  the 1619 Project, the World Socialist Web Site, and different ways of seeing the past.

Tantra

The British Museum has a new exhibit on Tantra, a religious and philosophical movement from India. With a history of nearly 1500 years, Tantra defies simple description, but it often involved horror, shock, pain, sexual passion, and other extreme emotions as ways of reaching the divine. One of the oldest Tantric stories has it that their god Bhairava "decapitated the orthodox creator god Brahma to show the superiority of the Tantric path and used his skull as a begging bowl." Human bones were used in many Tantric rituals, orgiastic sex in others.

Tantra came to include a great tradition of sorcery, and practitioners said they could fly, turn invisible, and kill with their eyes. Many rulers became devotees, convinced that Tantra could enhance their hold on power. This was called the "Yoga of force," and it involved self-discipline through positions and exercises much like those used in western Yoga today.

In the 19th century Tantra inspired some of India's early anti-British revolutionaries, who used images of Kali like this one as emblems of the coming violent uprising against foreign rule.

Tantra came to America and Europe in the early 1900s. It had a great flowering with the 1960s, practiced by those who thought sexual liberation would usher in a new age of peace and harmony; or, for those with a more violent bent, a revolution that would sweep away capitalism and the state alike.

And now, of course, Yoga has become a way that middle class women manage the stress of their families and corporate jobs.

Thus the age we live  in.

Roger Scruton's Conservatism

Conservative English philosopher Roger Scruton, about whom I have written here several times, died last year. His old friend Robert George wrote a piece for the Times to explain what Scruton's "conservatism" consisted of. Scruton was a staunch anti-communist, but he differed in many ways from other anti-communists:

First, he believed that the free-market enthusiasm of Margaret Thatcher and Milton Friedman made economic policy too central, relying on it too much to solve social problems and shape society. In this respect, he thought, it shared an error with its great foe, Marxism.

Second, though Roger believed in market mechanisms and fervently opposed central planning and what he saw as a dependency-inducing welfare state, he denied that the outcomes of free exchanges are automatically just. Liberty, while important, was for him only one important value among others like community and solidarity, order and decency, honor and faith.

And so he thought a variety of regulations may be needed, and therefore justified, to protect persons and valuable institutions of civil society. . . . Here, Roger joined the iconic American neoconservative Irving Kristol in giving capitalism only “two cheers” — perhaps no more than one and three-quarters. . . .

Central to Roger’s disagreement with his more libertarian allies was his belief in unchosen (and in that sense “natural”) obligations — duties we have simply by virtue of being human and born into a certain family, community, or nation. We do not come into the world as bare individuals who can develop an identity entirely from scratch.

Indeed, Roger was the leading philosophical defender of love of home and one’s own, what he called “oikophilia.” . . .

Roger’s oikophilia, and his rejection of “multiculturalism” (which he considered anti-cultural in that it melted the different cultures into a monoculture of contemporary upscale progressive ideology), provoked ignorant and excitable people to accuse him of xenophobia and racism. In fact, Roger respected other cultures a great deal more than most progressives of my acquaintance do. He learned Arabic in order to read the Quran, and he admired the tradition-transcending contributions of the great medieval Islamic philosophers. He made careful, in-depth studies of Hindu and other Eastern traditions of faith precisely in search of the wisdom he regarded them as possessing.

Scruton was also an environmentalist in the same way as Prince Charles or Wendell Barry, with a revulsion against chemical poisons used in the name of greater efficiency, or pouring concrete onto ancient woodlands.

My readers know that I am attracted to this strand of conservative thought but can't embrace it. For one thing it has an impracticality about it that troubles me. I actually agree that economics is not the most important thing, and that people need friends, families, communities, and spiritual succor more than they need extra stuff. But there is something off about rich men tut-tutting when other people worry too much about money. Easy for Roger Scruton to oppose paving over farms or forest for new housing, since he already lived in a lovely old farmhouse on an estate worth a million pounds. Any real vision for human thriving has to balance the desire to preserve against the need to provide decent homes and decent livings for the millions who lack them, and I never got the sense that these conservatives had thought of a way to do so. Indeed they sometimes come across as anti-human, sharing with radical Greens a revulsion against the human mass, and a wish that a few billion people would conveniently disappear.

Scruton's “oikophilia.” also has an appealing side. He really loved traditional rural England, but he also loved other traditions and other places – Morocco, Italy, India. In practice, though, this made him a strong opponent of immigration. He did not want to see those traditions he admired mixed up together; we should all stick to our own and celebrate what we inherited. Like the men of the French Nouvelle Droit (see here and here) he abhorred the corporate sameness of the modern world. I sometimes agree, but when these ideas form policies the victims always seem to be poor immigrants rather than rich capitalists. Although Scruton himself does not seem to have had any feelings against Jews, you can see how easily these attitudes can be shaped into a hatred of those wandering people who insist on their separateness and refuse to join wonderful local communities.

I believe in democracy in a deep sense: that our vision for the world has to be based on giving people what they want. I understand the philosophical, moral, and ecological dangers of such a view, and I have never thought that most humans can really be trusted to choose rightly. The alternatives, though, all come down to some sort of elitism, and I don't think elites can be trusted, either. All people matter. Simply waving ones hand at the billions who are not your sort or your neighbors, wishing they would just go away, will not do.

Ceija Stojka: the Devouring

Ceija Stojka was a Roma woman who survived Auschwitz. For the next forty-five years she mostly kept quiet about it. Then, around 1990, she began to paint. She was untaught but she painted with a frenzied energy, creating well over a thousand works before she died in 2013. She made two sorts of paintings, which curators now call "light" and "dark." The "light" paintings mostly show rural scenes or traditional Roma life.

The "dark" paintings illustrate the Holocaust. Some intellectuals thought the very idea of art that depicts the Holocaust was obscene, but as Primo Levi noted a long time ago, some survivors felt compelled to revisit their experiences.

We call this event the Holocaust. In Hebrew it is the Shoah, that is, “calamity.” In the Romani language, it is Porajmos: the “devouring.”

Despite their crudeness, these move me greatly. And below, one "light" painting that isn't so light.