America in this Moment

 So predictable:

Officials dealing with the catastrophic fires on the West Coast have had to counter social media rumors that the blazes were set by antifascist activists, publicly pleading that people verify information before sharing it.

Despite their efforts, misinformation about the origin of the fires continues to spread on Facebook and Twitter.

Several law enforcement agencies in Oregon said they had been flooded with inquiries about rumors that activists were responsible. On Thursday, several journalists reporting on fires near the city of Molalla, Ore., said they had been confronted by a group of armed people who were worried about unverified reports of arsonists in the area.

The rumors appear to have started on Wednesday night, after the Portland Police Bureau warned people on Twitter about the risk of fire during demonstrations. But there is no evidence that activists have deliberately set fires.

“We’re not seeing any indications of a mass politically influenced arson campaign,” said Joy Krawczyk, a spokeswoman with the Oregon Department of Forestry.

Three law enforcement agencies in Oregon did announce on Thursday that the Almeda Fire, which incinerated neighborhoods and is linked to two deaths, may have been deliberately set. No suspects were publicly identified, but the Ashland police chief told The Oregonian that no information pointed toward the loose collective of antifascist activists known as antifa.

“One thing I can say is that the rumor it was set by Antifa is 100% false information,” Chief Tighe O’Meara told the newspaper in an email.

Links 11 September 2020

Greg Lecoeur, Reefscape

Laid off from their jobs in a Japanese restaurant, Rwandan mothers have found new work babysitting Japanese kids over Zoom. 

The real America: the 24 Hours of Lemons car race, which you can only enter with a car that cost you less than $500 and still has the engine and power train it came with. In the news because the race has started a separate category for electric vehicles. (NY Times)

Australia's changing relationship with China; after decades of courting China to pursue trade, Australia is distancing itself over concerns about its sovereignty.

Hannah Bullen-Ryner makes ephemeral bird "paintings" out of leaves, flowers, and seeds she finds in the forest.

The Album Amicorum, a sort of illustrated signature collection, of international art dealer Philipp Hainhofer (1578-1647).

In France, debate erupts over the word ensauvagement. (NY Times)

Trying to make fitness trackers work for people in wheelchairs.

Have white people gentrified Black Lives Matter?

History and Hedgehogs at Nea Paphos on Cyprus.

NY Times piece on how the Chinese government uses WeChat to monitor and influence conversation among Chinese people all over the world. I think Trump is right and the US should ban it.

Sad NY Times piece about suicide in rural India, which never mentions what is really happening: peasant life is simply not compatible with modernity, and so modernization always involves the destruction of the peasantry. The best-case scenario is that 90 percent move to the cities.

Study Suggests Sturgis Motorcycle Rally Was Responsible for 19% of August COVID-19 Cases

The history of punctuation 

Anxious Americans are grinding their teeth so much dentists are seeing an "epidemic of fractured teeth" (NY Times)

Super-recognizers, who can recognize and remember faces from a tiny glimpse, are now working for the police. I guess they must be better than software, so far.

In despair about the American police, violent and utterly separated from the communities they are supposed to serve? Then read about Brazil and consider how much worse it could be. (NY Times)

The anti-bourgeois: a glimpse into the lives of Americans who live in RVs and travel around the country from job to job, campground to campground. (Washington Post)

Mothers for QAnon (NY Times)

Using AlphaZero to test chess variants, in pursuit of a more "beautiful" game

The Coffin Confessor

 Via Tyler Cowen, an interesting kind of business has made the news in Australia:

Bill Edgar has, in his own words, “no respect for the living”. Instead, his loyalty is to the newly departed clients who hire Mr Edgar — known as “the coffin confessor” — to carry out their wishes from beyond the grave.

Mr Edgar runs a business in which, for $10,000, he is engaged by people “knocking on death’s door” to go to their funerals or gravesides and reveal the secrets they want their loved ones to know.

“They’ve got to have a voice and I lend my voice for them,” Mr Edgar said.

Mr Edgar, a Gold Coast private investigator, said the idea for his graveside hustle came when he was working for a terminally ill man.

“We got on to the topic of dying and death and he said he’d like to do something,” Mr Edgar said.

“I said, ‘Well, I could always crash your funeral for you’,” and a few weeks later the man called and took Mr Edgar up on his offer and a business was born.

In almost two years he has “crashed” 22 funerals and graveside events, spilling the tightly-held secrets of his clients who pay a flat fee of $10,000 for his service. . . .

In the case of his very first client Mr Edgar said he was instructed to interrupt the man’s best friend when he was delivering the eulogy.

“I was to tell the best mate to sit down and shut up,” he said. “He knew the best mate had been trying to have an affair with his wife.” 

“I also had to ask three mourners to stand up and to please leave the service and if they didn’t I was to escort them out.

“My client didn’t want them at his funeral and, like he said, it is his funeral and he wants to leave how he wanted to leave, not on somebody else’s terms.”

Despite the confronting nature of his job, Mr Edgar said “once you get the crowd on your side, you’re pretty right” because mourners were keen to know what was left unsaid.

Original article here.

Respectfully Sheweth

Last week a committee appointed by DC Mayor Muriel Bowser reported back that the city should remove a long list of monuments and change the names of dozens of schools and other city buildings. The list of names includes the usual suspects, like John Tyler, Woodrow Wilson, and Thomas Jefferson. But they also recommended renaming the Franklin School, a landmark institution founded just after the Civil War.

Against that I must protest. There are no better Americans than Benjamin Franklin. None. As exhibit A I offer this, the first petition presented to the US Congress on the subject of slavery:

To the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States:

The Memorial of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery, the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, and the Improvement of the Condition of the African Race.

Respectfully Sheweth,

That from a regard for the happiness of mankind an association was formed several years since in this state by a number of the citizens of various religious denominations for promoting the abolition of slavery and for the relief of those unlawfully held in bondage. A just and accurate conception of the true principles of liberty, as it spreads through the land, produced accessions to their numbers, many friends to their cause and legislative cooperation with their views, which by the blessing of Divine Providence, have been successfully directed to the relieving from bondage a large number of their fellow creatures of the African Race. They have also the satisfaction to observe, that in consequence of that spirit of philanthropy and genuine liberty which is generally diffusing its beneficial influence, similar institutions are gradually forming at home and abroad.

That mankind are all formed by the same almighty being, alike objects of his care and equally designed for the enjoyment of happiness, the Christian Religion teaches us to believe, and the political creed of America fully coincides with the position. Your memorialists, particularly engaged in attending to the distresses arising from slavery, believe it their indispensable duty to present this subject to your notice. They have observed with great satisfaction that many important and salutary powers are vested in you for “promoting the welfare and securing the blessings of liberty to the people of the United States”. And as they conceive, that these blessings ought rightfully to be administered, without distinction of colour, to all descriptions of people, so they indulge themselves in the pleasing expectation, that nothing, which can be done for the relief of the unhappy objects of their care, will be either omitted or delayed.

From a persuasion that equal liberty was originally the portion, and is still the birthright of all men, influenced by the strong ties of humanity and the principles of their institution, your memorialists conceive themselves bound to use all justifiable endeavours to loosen the bonds of slavery and promote a general enjoyment of the blessings of freedom. Under these impressions they earnestly entreat your serious attention to the subject of slavery that you will be pleased to countenance the restoration of liberty to those unhappy men, who alone in this land of freedom, are degraded into perpetual bondage, and who, amidst the general joy of surrounding freemen, are groaning in servile subjection, that you will devise means for removing this inconsistency from the character of the American people, that you will promote mercy and justice towards this distressed race, and that you will step to the very verge of the powers vested in your for discouraging every species of traffick in the persons of our fellow men.

B. Franklin
President of the Society
Philadelphia, Feb. 13, 1790

Of course that is just the beginning of Franklin's contributions. He was his age's most vocal defender of American Indian rights to their land and the sacred nature of treaties made with Indian nations. He was almost the last prominent man working for peace as his American and British compatriots drifted toward war; but once war was joined he threw himself in to the cause of his nation. He helped write both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. He was a steady advocate for democracy and against any sort of American aristocracy, unmovable in his advocacy for freedom of speech and religion. Plus his invention of the lightning rod saved untold thousands of lives. He was even funny.

If he is not good enough for us to name schools after  him, nobody can possibly be good enough. Because there just is no one better.

Tom Friedman on Dignity and Humiliation

Tom Friedman writes that instead of Foreign Affairs Columnist, his official title, he often refers to himself as the Times' Humiliation and Dignity Columnist:

Humiliation, in my view, is the most underestimated force in politics and international relations. The poverty of dignity explains so much more behavior than the poverty of money. People will absorb hardship, hunger and pain. They will be grateful for jobs, cars and benefits. But if you make people feel humiliated, they will respond with a ferocity unlike any other emotion, or just refuse to lift a finger for you. 

By contrast, if you show people respect, if you affirm their dignity, it is amazing what they will let you say to them or ask of them. Sometimes it just takes listening to them, but deep listening — not just waiting for them to stop talking. Because listening is the ultimate sign of respect. What you say when you listen speaks more than any words.

I’ve seen firsthand the power of humiliation in foreign policy: Vladimir Putin’s macho act after Russia’s humiliation at losing the Cold War; Iraqi Sunnis who felt humiliated by a U.S. invasion force that pushed them out of Iraq’s army and government, stripping them of rank and status; Israeli Sephardic Jews who felt humiliated by Ashkenazi Jewish elites, something Bibi Netanyahu has long manipulated; Palestinians feeling humiliated at Israeli checkpoints; Muslim youth in Europe feeling humiliated by the Christian majority; and China questing to become the world’s dominant power, after what Chinese themselves call their “century of humiliation” at the hands of foreign powers. . . .

In a much talked-about new book, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel says “the politics of humiliation” is also at the heart of Trump’s appeal.

“Trump was elected by tapping a wellspring of anxieties, frustrations and legitimate grievances to which the mainstream parties had no compelling answer,” Sandel notes. These grievances “are not only economic but also moral and cultural; they are not only about wages and jobs but also about social esteem.”

Unless Biden finds a way to speak to the sense of humiliation felt by many working-class voters, Sandel warns, even Trump’s failure to deal with the pandemic may not be enough to turn these voters against him. The reason? “Resentment borne of humiliation is the most potent political sentiment of all,” Sandel explains.

Chinks in Time

The little field to the south-east of the lake, where the boreen around it meets the road, is called Garrai Wilson; a garrai is a "garden", which in Aran means a potato- or a vegetable-plot. . . . As for Wilson, nobody remembers who he was, but in the census of 1821 I found:

Robert Wilson, half-pay Lieutenant; Royal Marines, age 36, Head Lightkeeper

Ann, his wife, age 30

Robert, his son, age 5

Ann, his daughter, age 3

Eliza, his daughter, age 1

In those days the only lighthouse was above Eochaill on the highest point of the island, whence its ruins still look down toward the lake. Wilson must have leased this garden to grow vegetables for himself and that young family living up there on the windy skyline in the disused signal tower by the lighthouse. Why was he retired on half pay? Perhaps he had a stiff knee which he allowed to be understood had a Napoleonic bullet lodged in it, but which in fact he broke by tripping over a bollard in Plymouth docks while turning round to look after a passing shop-girl, Ann. I picture him in this field, paunchy, grunting, puzzling ineffectually with his spade of unfamiliar design at the shallow stony soil of Aran. He straightens up, putting his knuckles to his spine, and sees through the reeds a heron swallowing an eel. He stands there open-mouthed, long-dead Lieutenant Wilson, keeper of the long-extinguished light, never suspecting that we are watching him through words, those chinks in time. 

– Tim Robinson, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage (1986)

The Garden on Labor Day

 

A bit of a mess, but I like it this way.

Bourgeois Ambivalence

When I ponder what goes on in America, and in my own family, I keep coming back to one point: our intense ambivalence about the disciplined middle class existence we hold up as the standard of a good life.

The path through life that defines "success" for us looks something like this: study hard for a long time, at least through college and perhaps through graduate school. Then work hard at a demanding job, putting in long hours. Get married and stay married. Don't drink too much or use too many drugs. Shun violence. Keep your lawn neat, your bathroom spotless. Exercise. Eat right. Floss. Do it day after day, all day. Never slip up and say the wrong thing to the wrong person, or do the wrong thing when somebody is watching. Never lose control.

There is in our world a suspicion of ecstasy in any form. We are more likely to practice yoga than go to the sort of church where people tremble and fall on the floor. With us, it's all about self-discipline, even spiritually. Drunkenness, which used to be celebrated in a thousand ways, is now a health threat nobody would dare to laugh about.

I am not saying that this is arbitrary or even wrong; so far as I can tell, we emphasize this way of living because it is the only way we know to make civilization work. For many people, including me, it works pretty well psychologically as well. People who escape from these limits, for example by winning the lottery, sometimes end up wishing they hadn't. People who keep working live longer and more happily than those who retire early. But many people hate our disciplined, tightly constrained way of living and either openly or secretly seethe against the limits it imposes. I think this anger, this restless pushing against the limits of middle class life, drives much of what happens in our world

Something that sticks in my memory is what a county official in Tennessee told Tom Friedman:

Employers want someone who will get up, dress up, show up, shut up and never give up.

Is that the person you want to be, how you want to be remembered? "He showed up and shut up." 

I doubt it. Our popular culture celebrates, almost exclusively, the heroes who refuse to give in to the system, who break all the rules, who insist on doing things in their own way. This is, I think, our rebellion against the constraints we live under.

It may be that I am describing, not my own culture, but all cultures; maybe this ambivalence of order vs. freedom is a defining feature of human life and maybe among other social mammals as well. I don't know. But I do believe that it is one of the central features of our own time, and our own psyches.

What does it explain? Well, why are some people so enraged by the thought of freeloaders who collect welfare or disability checks? It seems to me that if they loved their jobs they would feel sorry for those who can't work, not hate them. The rage, I think, stems from the dark side of our disciplined working lives, the frustration and weariness that builds up over decades of toil. Plus by their very existence such people undermine the principle that everyone has to work, which is one of the motivations that keeps people getting up and going to the office every day. I watched my own very liberal wife turn against old-style welfare when she had to go back to full-time work while her children were still toddlers; if I have to work, she said, then having children is no excuse for anyone else not to work, and I'm not paying for it. 

Why are some conservatives so opposed to things like extending unemployment benefits in a recession or expanding disability? Because they believe that only the threat of hunger and homelessness is strong enough to keep many people working. Because they share my sense that the demands of working life in our age are very great, and they worry that most people just won't do it if they don't have to.

Why were hippies so polarizing? Because they challenged the system of bourgeois discipline.

Why does rising inequality matter? Because the survival of our world depends on most of us knuckling under to the demands of the system, and we only do that because we think the system is in some sense fair. We consider the rewards we get for our efforts to be reasonable. But a world in which most people labor all their lives for less money than insiders can make off a single stock trade strikes many of us as completely unreasonable, as unfair. And if the system is so unfair, why participate? And if people won't participate because they think the rewards they get are not reasonable, the system collapses.

How does racism generate such large gaps between black and white educational and economic success? I don't want to deny that sometimes black people are just not hired etc., but it strikes me that those barriers are not high enough to account for the disparity; after all immigrants from Nigeria and Jamaica also face racism, and they are richer and better educated than native-born whites. I think racism does its damage by intensifying the ambivalence over the bourgeois path through life. Young black kids face the same high mountain to climb as everyone else, along with a sense that this is a *white* mountain, a system designed and constructed by and for white folks – which is true. Not only are they expected to "show up and shut up" for the man, they are supposed to show up and shut up for the *white* man. Every racist slight they face, intentional or not, reinforces a suspicion that this path is not for them. Why keep going when no matter how hard you try you still get harassed by the cops if you walk the street in a sweatshirt? And since, remember, I think this is a very demanding way of life that is hard for everyone, it doesn't take much discouragement to knock people off the narrow path of middle class existence.

I think this is an even bigger issue for American Indians, which is why by the usual metrics they are the poorest group in the country. It also explains persistent poverty among white communities for example in Appalachia; to them the bourgeois path is how city folks live, not them, so to pursue it is to give up their own identities.

Why do Americans, and especially poor Americans, idolize musicians? Because music is a path to success that doesn't require you to knuckle under to the demands of middle class life, a path that in fact encourages you to be wild and crazy and break rules.

What do young anarchists, and even anarchist philosophy professors, want? To be free. And to them (in particular to my sons), if you have to get up and go every day to a job you dislike or school you despise, then you are not free. If you have to work whether you like it or not, then you are actually a slave. (Aristotle, incidentally, agreed with this, and he would have said that those people who can't seem to make it without going to work every day are by nature fit only for slavery.) To people who feel this way about work and school, pointing out that this is the only route to a decent life is met with, "So you want me to become a slave like you?"

This is why I support a more regulated society, along the lines of Denmark or Sweden; a mandated month of vacation does something to rebalance our lives, and things like universal health insurance make the system more fair and more tolerable. This is also why I and many others are intrigued by Universal Basic Income schemes; if there were an out, some of the pressure the system applies might be eased.

Anyway it seems to me that you can't understand the craziness of our time without understanding that many and maybe most of us have serious misgivings about the fundamentals of the way we live.

Emotional Disarmament

 Pico Iyer in the Times:

It’s hardly surprising that so many citizens, unable to find wisdom in the political sphere (which, almost by definition, thrives on either/ors), look to religious figures for a more inclusive vision. Pope Francis, in Wim Wenders’s glorious documentary “A Man of His Word,” stresses the importance of not imposing our views on others and never thinking in terms of simplistic us-versus-thems: Would God, Francis asks, love Gandhi any less than he does a priest or a nun simply because the Mahatma wasn’t a Christian? The Dalai Lama, for his part, points out that to be pro-Tibetan is not to be anti-Chinese, not least because Tibet and China will always be neighbors; the welfare of either depends on the other. He begins his days by praying for the health of his “Chinese brothers and sisters.”

Traveling across Japan with the Dalai Lama a year before the pandemic, I heard him say often that after watching the planet up close as a leader of his people for what was then 79 years, he felt the world was suffering through an “emotional crisis.” The cure, he said, was “emotional disarmament.” What he meant by the striking phrase was that we can see beyond panic and rage and confusion only by using our minds, and that part of the mind that doesn’t deal in binaries. Emotional disarmament might prove even more feasible than the nuclear type, insofar as most of us can reform our minds more easily than we can move a huge and intractable government. By opening our minds, we begin to change the world.

I love the metaphor of emotional disarmament. So long as we respond to hate and anger with hate and anger, there is no path back from the brink. Only by stepping away from our own negative feelings can we take a step toward a better world.

Appeasing the Scholar's Ghost

Kyodo News:

A well-known shrine in Kyoto held a Shinto-Buddhist rite originating in the 10th century on Friday after a 550-year hiatus, as part of its efforts to revive ancient rituals. The Kitano Tenmangu shrine, founded in 947, said it had not held the Kitano Goryoe rite since 1467, when the Onin War, an 11-year-long civil war, broke out. 

The rite was originally to appease the anger of the spirit of Sugawara no Michizane (845-903), a scholar and politician enshrined as a god at Kitano Tenmangu, as people in ancient Japan believed that natural disasters and epidemics were caused by the curse of well-known figures who were tragically killed or died with feelings of resentment. 

On Friday, shrine priests performed the rite jointly with priests from the Enryakuji temple in Otsu, Shiga Prefecture, as the Goryoe rite had been held in a syncretism of Shinto and Buddhism. In addition to praying for the repose of Michizane's spirit, the priests prayed for an end to the coronavirus pandemic and people's good health and safety, according to the shrine.

Here's a new ambition for all you scholars out there: for your ghost to be so feared that someone dreams up a ritual to appease it.

Victoria Falls in 1865, by T. Baines

The Victoria Falls, Zambesi River, sketched on the spot by T. Baines, F.R.G.S. More here.

The Strange Case of Jessica Krug

A woman named Jessica Krug, apparently history professor at GWU, just posted a long confession on Medium saying she was raised Jewish but has been pretending to be black since adolescence. The whole piece is a torrent of guilt and shame, but then she admits she started because of "trauma" and "mental health issues.":

I absolutely deserve to be cancelled. . . . No white person, no non-Black person, has the right to claim proximity to or belonging in a Black community by virtue of abuse, trauma, non-acceptance, and non-belonging in a white community. The abuse within and alienation from my birth family and society are no one’s burden but my own, and mine alone to address. Black people and Black communities have no obligation to harbor the refuse of non-Black societies. I have done this. I know it is wrong and I have done this anyway. 

I have not lived a double life. There is no parallel form of my adulthood connected to white people or a white community or an alternative white identity. I have lived this lie, fully, completely, with no exit plan or strategy. I have built only this life, a life within which I have operated with a radical sense of ethics, of right and wrong, and with rage, rooted in Black power, an ideology which every person should support, but to which I have no possible claim as my own.

Looking around the world at the shootings and the murders and the wars, I have trouble taking this seriously as a crime. So far as I can tell, Jessica Krug has made a decades-long, entirely serious attempt to live as a black person, both socially and intellectually. She clearly thinks this is very wrong, but I am not sure I get it. Consider this:

But mental health issues can never, will never, neither explain nor justify, neither condone nor excuse, that, in spite of knowing and regularly critiquing any and every non-Black person who appropriates from Black people, my false identity was crafted entirely from the fabric of Black lives. That I claimed belonging with living people and ancestors to whom and for whom my being is always a threat at best and a death sentence at worst.

I am not a culture vulture. I am a culture leech.

But don't we all craft our identities from the fabric of other people's lives? Aren't we all culture leeches? How else could we acquire culture?

In a biological sense, race does not exist. People from east and west Africa are more different from each other than Chinese are from Scots. What force race has is entirely a cultural construct. So if you construct your own race culturally, by taking from the living fabric of people of that race, then you are doing exactly what everyone else does. There is no biological basis for the notion of race; race is culture. So what underlying reality is there that Jessica Krug was betraying? That she was "really" white? What does that mean? Who decided that Jews are white? Whiteness has no biological reality. None. So if the argument is that Jessica Krug is "really" white, what could that possibly mean? If you're just saying that she could have "passed" for white if she had wanted to, well, that is equally true of many people who have been considered black from birth. Heck, Kamala Harris could consider herself Indian if she wanted to. Does that make her blackness a sham?

Suppose Jessica Krug had been adopted into a black family and raised black from birth, rather than choosing it during her struggles with trauma and madness; would that be any different?

If you can change your sex – which absolutely does exist, and has existed for a billion years, and is the most fundamental division in almost all animal species and many plant species as well – then why can't you change your race, a concept that has only been around for maybe 400 years?

When I ask people to explain this to me, they just shake their heads, as if it were so obvious that they don't know where to start. 

I simply don't see  how what Jennifer Krug did is some kind of unforgivable crime. In her confusion she sought, through her very identity, to bridge the gap between races that is one of our worst problems. She did this deceptively, but with complete sincerity. I will save my anger for the racists who think that gap is unbridgeable. Because this is what I believe: as long as we think that race is some sort of absolute division between people, more important than sex or nationality or anything else – if the very existence of white people is "is always a threat at best and a death sentence at worst" for black people – if that barrier is so impermeable that no one can ever cross it –then there is no hope, racism cannot be defeated, and in the long run we are doomed.

Links 4 September 2020

Alma Thomas, The Eclipse, 1970

Stainless steel animals by Australian sculptor Georgie Seccull.

Bird Photographs of the Year.

Update on the brain-machine interface being developed by Elon Musk's Neuralink.

Slate on the political results of riots against police violence.

The Sarcophagi of the Termessian Necropolis

NY Times story on re-introducing jaguars to a national park in Argentina.

Review of a new book about London's Mecklenburgh Square between the wars, when it was home to female intellectuals like HD and Dorothy Sayers.

Besides being horrible for individual mental health, the pandemic and the lockdown are playing havoc with a lot of relationships. (NY Times)

Toyota's flying car is flying.

Eight of the 15 Hurricane Laura -related deaths confirmed by the Louisiana Department of Health are attributed to carbon monoxide poisoning from portable generators

Nazi plans for Norway included rebuilding cities and installing a network of maternity centers to encourage Aryan baby making.

Big utilities are building power plants that can run on either natural gas or hydrogen.

Trump Made a Promise to Save Coal. He Couldn't Keep It.

Horseradish, or, How Boring was Medieval Food?

Horseradish

Most accounts of the food Europeans ate before 1600 make it sound pretty dismal: bread, boiled meat, more bread, roasted meat, more bread, or maybe porridge. I have always puzzled a little over the contradictions embodied in the lives of, say, Irish kings: an amazing tradition of myth and story, poetry at the highest level, fabulous golden jewelry, but on the other hand no chimneys or windows and not much to eat but meat and bread. No wonder they cared so much about the ancestry; what else did they have? And this, maybe, is why their descendants were willing to pay so much for pepper or cinnamon, and why the Romans put so much effort into making their ghastly-sounding fish sauce.

I mean, imagine life without: vanilla, chocolate, coffee, tea, black pepper, hot peppers, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, sugar, tomatoes, peanuts, etc., etc.

So I have been wondering about the ways Europeans did have of making their food more interesting. Some are pretty obvious: salt, onions, garlic, honey, cooking in wine or beer. And butter, one of the great blessings of a dairying culture. There are also the standard European herbs, you know, parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme. Weirdly there is not much evidence that anybody used these in cooking –rosemary, for example, appears in old books mostly as medicine, and because the ancient Egyptians used it in preserving mummies – but how can they not have? 

Part of the problem is that most of our written sources deal with elites, and when they describe food it is usually to show how expensive it was, or how much manly hunting went into procuring it. So herbs that grow free around the doorstep would not have rated mention.

A few other thoughts about how ancient folks made their food interesting:

Mint. Grows wild all over northern Europe so was practically free, and was I suspect used to flavor many dishes of the non-rich.

Capers. These are the pickled buds of a bush that grows wild all around the Mediterranean. The history of their use is obscure, but charred specimens have been found on Iron Age archaeological sites. Today's wild plants seem to be hybrids of different ancient species, maybe crossbred with domesticated varieties, anyway such a mess that modern biologists can't sort it out, which bespeaks a long history of human use. These can stand in for a variety of pickled things that may have been used as flavoring, from raspberries to spruce needles.

Mushrooms. Especially in central and eastern Europe, gathering wild mushrooms was a traditional pastime, and I think they flavored many soups etc. But really there is next to no textual evidence until the Renaissance. 

Mustard. This Middle Eastern herb spread to northern Europe with the first farmers, and mustard sauce was one of the standard fancy foods in the north. Viking feasts often included eggs in mustard sauce, more or less what we would call deviled eggs. 

Horseradish. This just occurred to me today, which is how I ended up writing this post.  I thought it was Chinese, but it actually comes from the Balkans and Turkey and was well known in the Classical world. According to some ancient encyclopedia writer, the Delphic Oracle once told somebody that horseradish is worth more than gold. (What do you suppose his question was? Should I go to war? Should I invest all my money in ships? Should I marry the heiress? Answer: Horseradish is worth more than gold.) Anyway this set me thinking that "hot" spices were not a complete novelty to Europeans, since horseradish triggers the same heat sensitive cells on the tongue as capsaicin.

The histories I read of European agriculture, starting when I was a teenager and continuing through graduate school, were all about the major crops: wheat, barley, peas, olives, grapes. You would never guess, from that sort of book, that pioneering Neolithic farmers carried along mustard seeds as well as wheat, or that horseradish was an important commodity. Or how about the interesting fact that our pears are hybrids of varieties from western Asia and China, mingled nobody knows how? Peasants lived as closely with plants as they did with animals, and they surely had a vast lore about them. For reasons of class and so on, the parts of that lore that got written down were about medicine. But if you look hard there is a lot of evidence that the trading, raising, and breeding of plants, and experimenting with their uses, must have been widespread and deeply entrenched.

Monkeys and Parenting Across the Generations:

 Tyler Cowen:

In a new NBER paper, a group of economists, including James Heckman, have joined with researchers who study child development to analyze data from a multi-generational monkey raising experiment. It’s well known from the Harlow experiments of the 1950s that monkeys raised without their mothers don’t do so well. (It’s also from these experiments that the mantra of skin-to-skin mother-child contact comes from.) What’s distinctive in the new paper is that there are two generations of monkeys who are raised by their mothers or in nurseries and in each generation the treatment is randomly chosen. Indeed, I believe this new paper includes the children of monkeys discussed in this earlier paper which also included Heckman. The multi-generational experiment lets the researchers test whether disadvantage is transmitted down the generations and whether it can be alleviated.

The analysis indicates first that being raised by a mother results in better health and higher social status than being raised in a nursery (as measured by who wins disputes and ELO scores similar to those used in chess!). Second being raised by a mother who was raised by a mother is better than being raised by a mother who was raised in a nursery. The latter indicates that disadvantage transmits down the generations. Indeed, being raised by a mother who was raised in a nursery is just as bad as being raised in a nursery. In other words, it’s hard to ameliorate disadvantage in one generation.

The sample is small (about 100 monkeys in generation one and 60 in generation two) but because of random assignment still potentially useful.

File this under both "change is hard" and "bad things can have bad echoes down the generations."

For example I read recently, but couldn't find it again when I searched, that not only do willing African immigrants to the US do much better economically than refugees, but the effect is even more pronounced in their children.

The Small Mystery of Raphael's Egyptian Blue

Egyptian Blue was a coloring agent discovered in Egypt around 2600 BC and well known in Classical times; the Romans called it caeruleum, which is where we get the English word cerulean. The Roman writer Vitruvius included a recipe for it in De architectura, Book VII, Chapter 11: 

Sand is ground with flowers of sulphur, till the mixture is as fine as flour, to which coarse filings of Cyprian copper are added, so as to make a paste when moistened with water; this is rolled into balls with the hand, and dried. The balls are then put into an earthen vessel, and that is placed in a furnace. Thus the copper and sand heating together by the intensity of the fire, impart to each other their different qualities, and thereby acquire their blue colour.

The resulting substance is called by modern chemists calcium copper silicate (CaOCuO(SiO2)4), and the whole process was recreated and scientifically described by British chemist Humphrey Davies in 1815.

But Vitruvius' book had been rediscovered in the 15th century and printed in 1486, which raises the question: did anybody try to recreate Egyptian Blue before Davies? Apparently so:

A new study of Raphael’s fresco The Triumph of Galatea, in Rome’s Villa Farnesina, has found that the Renaissance master recreated Egyptian blue for this work, and as far as we know, this work alone. Using non-invasive macro-X-ray fluorescence (MAXRF), researchers discovered to their surprise that the blue of the sea and sky were calcium copper silicate.

The Villa Farnesina was built for banker Agostino Chigi, treasurer to Pope Julius II and the richest man in Rome, by architect Baldassare Peruzzi. Construction was completed in 1512 but the frescoing of its interior began as soon as the walls were done in 1511. Chigi commissioned the greatest artists of his time for the job.

It would say it is a bit premature to say the pigment was used only in this fresco, since I doubt a very high proportion of Renaissance frescoes have yet been subjected to MAXRF. But Egyptian Blue was certainly not being used in the 1700s when encyclopedic books describing all of Europe's artisanal techniques were put together.

Anyway this is cool because we have this idea about the "Renaissance man" who was equally versed in art, science, and philosophy, but mostly that is a hoax. It seems, however, that Raphael's shop not only produced some of history's most wonderful paintings, but included somebody who was both a classicist and a cutting-edge chemist. (Via The History Blog)

Talk Therapy

A commenter at Marginal Revolutions touts his or her status as an expert on talk therapy and then writes this:

The first thing is that talk therapy is in general not effective for most people. And I know the paper under examination showed that it’s more effective than antidepressants, but in general, most people do not generally stick with talk therapy. They get a benefit at a reasonably low rate for a reasonably short period of time…

Moreover, there’s some pretty strong evidence that talk therapy or at least CBT [cognitive behavioral therapy] is becoming less effective over time – the effect sizes in studies & meta-analyses are going down. And there could be reasons for that that aren’t an indictment of the therapeutic model.

So for example, the modern world could just be becoming more stressful and the therapy is less equipped for it… It could be that as the treatment becomes more popular, rather than the more advanced or cutting-edge therapists using it, it’s used by an increasingly broad set of therapists that include low-skilled or ineffective ones.

So there are a lot of reasons that may not have to do with the merits of CBT as an approach, but the data are reasonably convincing on that front.

I think a lot of people are making a reasonably rational choice that, especially if they’re not going to stick with it for a long period of time, even starting therapy is a low-value proposition.

George Ainslie (the psychologist) has this kind of notion of playing a prisoner’s dilemma with your [future] self… let’s just say I want to start an exercise habit… there are a lot of parallels with exercise and talk therapy.

If I knew for a fact that I was going to stop doing it after one month, it actually doesn’t make sense to start at all. Right, because the benefits of accrued will pretty rapidly deteriorate and it’ll be as if I never did it…

People are not just considering, “Should I try talk therapy?”, they’re considering, “Will I do this for a sufficiently long period of time, or especially can I afford it for a long period of time, to where I will get and maintain the benefits from doing it?”

And many people do in fact have misinformation about how quickly they can experience certain types of benefits, and how much work is involved – it’s clear that there’s a lot of work involved, and many people don’t want to do that work.

From an operant conditioning standpoint, the experience of a therapy session is frankly more punishing than it is rewarding (for many people, a lot of the time). Like any negative stimulus, they’re going to engage in behaviors that cause that stimulus to be experienced at a lower rate.

Sometimes the benefits don’t accrue during the session, they accrue afterwards. It takes a lot of work to experience them and [can] involve emotional trauma to even retrieve them.

It’s not consistent with people’s ROI [return on investment] calculation, or what they would like to see in their ROI calculation. Again, it’s really similar to physical exercise – we know physical exercise works. It works better than antidepressants. It accrues all the benefits that this paper Cowen cited discovered in terms of energy and mood and earnings and so on and so forth.

But people still don’t engage in exercise, and in fact I think the rate of physical activity is actually on the decline, in the industrialized world at least.So, it’s more complex than “Does the behavior accrue benefits if you do it consistently?” It’s also not entirely about access because many forms of physical activity are free, and as the paper examines the seeking of talk therapy is not super sensitive to [price].

So it goes beyond the mere cost of the service, although the cost of the services is definitely prohibitive for a large cross-section of people.

My experience from watching friends and relations is that talk therapy helps some people sometimes, but I know only one person who seems to have been changed in an important way by it and I have seen at least one case it which it clearly made the patient worse. This matches the data as I understand it, which is all over the place.

The history of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy fascinates me. Twenty years ago there were a bunch of what looked like really good, robust studies showing that it worked better than either other therapeutic techniques or drugs, but studies being done now do not find this to be so. Scott Alexander once speculated that maybe this was because the ideas behind it were novel, so 20 years ago they were genuinely new to patients, but now many people have encountered them in a basic way so most of whatever positive effect they might have is already diffused across society.

As I think my readers know, I regard mental health as the most serious challenge facing humanity in our time. I feel this way because I despair about all the ways we try to help people – we have nothing, so far as I can see, that changes the reality that it totally sucks to be crazy or depressed.

Connoisseurship Fails Again

In 1951, somebody gave the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford a postcard-sized oil painting on wood said to be by Rembrandt.

In 1981 it was examined and dismissed as an imitation by the Rembrandt Research Project and hidden away.

“They saw it in the flesh and decided it wasn’t a Rembrandt painting,” Ashmolean curator An Van Camp explained to The Guardian. “They said it might be an imitator painting in the style of Rembrandt and is possibly made before the end of the 17th century, so not even in Rembrandt’s lifetime.”

The painting was placed in the basement

But the painting is now back on display after study showed that it was from the same piece of wood as another, more famous and well authenticated Rembrandt work. (Wooden panels for paintings were made by splitting wood into thin pieces, so you can sometimes line up the irregularities in the wood and show they are from the same tree.)

These people who think they can tell who painted a picture just by looking at it, they are wrong. Of course it isn't a very good painting, but for mysterious reasons that matters not at all compared to who painted it.

Killing Police Reform in California

The Sacramento Bee has an editorial summing up all the police reform bills pending before the California legislature, most of which currently lack the support to pass. They include:

• The Deadly Force Accountability Act (Assembly Bill 1506). This bill by Assemblyman Kevin McCarty, D-Sacramento, would allow local law enforcement leaders and district attorneys to request that the California state attorney general investigate police shootings.
• Police Decertification (Senate Bill 731). This crucial bill by Steve Bradford, D-Gardena, would allow California to decertify police officers who break the law or engage in serious misconduct.
• Police record transparency (SB 776). This bill by state Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, would mandate increased transparency from law enforcement agencies.
• A ban on chokeholds.

A bill that would have required officers to intervene when other officers us excessive force has already been defeated.

These bills aren't passing because Republicans uniformly oppose them, and these Republicans are supported by many Democrats, most of whom are Hispanic. The Democratic coalition that governs California depends on the support of Hispanics who vote Democrat for reasons of ethnic history but who are in fact quite conservative on many issues, including crime and the police. California's black voters also have a history of supporting "tough on crime" candidates (like Kamala Harris).

Democrats who dream of a progressive future driven by racial change need to remember this. In the US, blacks and Hispanics mostly vote Democrat because they think Republicans are racists, but they are not on the whole very progressive about a long list of issues that include gay rights, police reform, the environment, and taxes.

If you can remember back to George W. Bush and Karl Rove, they had a plan to insure the Republican future by somehow toning down the racism, and anti-immigrant feeling and getting Hispanics and immigrants to support them on the basis of religion and attitudes toward crime and government spending. It didn't work because it turned out racism and anti-immigrant feeling were too important to the Republicans' white base, but that doesn't make conservative Hispanics a great fit for a progressive coalition.

Corporate Religion

Weirdly hilarious article by Nellie Bowles in the Times about consultants who advise corporate clients on how to make the workplace more spiritual.

In the beginning there was Covid-19, and the tribe of the white collars rent their garments, for their workdays were a formless void, and all their rituals were gone. New routines came to replace the old, but the routines were scattered, and there was chaos around how best to exit a Zoom, onboard an intern, end a workweek.

The adrift may yet find purpose, for a new corporate clergy has arisen to formalize the remote work life. They go by different names: ritual consultants, sacred designers, soul-centered advertisers. They have degrees from divinity schools. Their business is borrowing from religious tradition to bring spiritual richness to corporate America.

In simpler times, divinity schools sent their graduates out to lead congregations or conduct academic research. Now there is a more office-bound calling: the spiritual consultant. Those who have chosen this path have founded agencies — some for-profit, some not — with similar-sounding names: Sacred Design Lab, Ritual Design Lab, Ritualist. They blend the obscure language of the sacred with the also obscure language of management consulting to provide clients with a range of spiritually inflected services, from architecture to employee training to ritual design.

Their larger goal is to soften cruel capitalism, making space for the soul, and to encourage employees to ask if what they are doing is good in a higher sense. Having watched social justice get readily absorbed into corporate culture, they want to see if more American businesses are ready for faith.

This was my favorite part:

Evan Sharp, the co-founder of Pinterest, hired Sacred Design Lab to categorize all major religious practices and think of ways to apply them to the office. They made him a spreadsheet.

“We pulled together hundreds of practices from all these different religions and cultural practices and put them in a spreadsheet and just tried to categorize them by emotional state: which ones are relevant when you’re happy, which are relevant when you’re angry, and a couple other pieces of metadata,” Mr. Sharp said.

When he had the data, he said, he took a few days and read it all. “This sounds embarrassingly basic,” he said, “but it really reframed parts of religion for me.”

Just imagine this nerdy atheist CEO saying, "I need to get a better handle on this religion thing – can somebody make me a spreadsheet?" Sure, boss.

My serious response is that this is a sad result of the withering of all other forms of community. If your co-workers are the only group of people you associate with, then the only way you can have any sort of shared spiritual experience is with your co-workers. If I didn't play basketball I would regularly go for months during which the only time I was together with a group of other adults would be at work.

The second part of my serious response is that this is doomed to fail, because for me at least the competitive world of corporations is just profoundly unspiritual. Everything I can think of that might make my work more meaningful would cost money and take time and therefore make my group uncompetitive, and it's hard to feel spiritual about losing your job to someone who cuts more corners. One of my corporate employers went a kick for a while about "mindfulness," which I found bizarre, because for me the essence of mindfulness is in taking the time to do things in a satisfying way. For me that would mean more thorough research, more careful analysis, more collaborative work with other smart people, more time spent mentoring new people and generally sharing knowledge with others, and so on, and it would also mean passing on projects that didn't connect to my personal intellectual interests. All of which would mean a straight march to the unemployment line.

The Advice of Flavius Agricola

An epitaph, 2nd century AD;

My home was Tivoli; I was called Flavius Agricola. I am the one you can see lying there, just as I used to lie at dinner, carefully looking after myself for all the years Fate allowed me. I never spared the wine. My darling wife, Flavia Primitiva, died before me, chaste and attentive worshipper of Isis, with whom I spent thirty years of happiness. For consolation, she left me her body's fruit — Aurelius Primitivus, who will tend my grave with piety and will preserve for ever my resting-place. Friends, who read this, heed what I say: mix the wine, bind the flowered garland round your brow, and drink deep. Do not shun the pleasures of love with beautiful women. When death comes, earth and fire devour all.

Lazar Vozarević

Lazar Vozarević (1925-1968) was a Serbian artist. I never heard of him until today, but he seems to have been a pretty big deal in post-war Yugoslavia. Most of his stuff I have found seems like pretty ordinary mid-century modern work, but I love these bronze-colored abstractions.

Syncretism

One thing I love about the Hellenistic world is the mingling of cultures and religions that produced wonderful amalgams like this head from Gandhara in Afghanistan, which scholars say is Herakles-Vrajrapani. Probably 2nd-3rd century AD.

Axes and Keys

Viking warriors were buried with weapons. Women of status were often buried with keys. This is from the description of the grave of a wealthy couple in Denmark who were buried around 950 AD:

The man was buried with a large battle ax. . . . For her part, the woman in the tomb was laid to rest in a wagon, known to be a typical practice for Viking women of noble birth. Intriguingly, the archaeologists also found two keys buried with the woman. Many Viking women were buried with keys, which symbolized their control over the home and the domestic sphere, including the distribution of food and clothing to the family. One of the keys found in the particular woman’s grave served as, in Nielsen’s words, “a symbol of her power and status as a great lady.” 

The association of keys with prominent women was not absolute, and a few men were also buried with keys. Certain skeptical archaeologists have used this fact to undermine the whole symbolic association of keys with women, but keys found with men are actually rare, so the association holds pretty well. And the kind of keys you are most likely to see in a museum, with a decorative handle, are only found with women. They were worn on the outside of the woman's clothing so everyone could see her status.

Chest from the Oseberg Ship Burial

To understand the importance of the key you have to imagine a noble Norse household, a crowded place where there were numerous servants, tenants, supplicants, visitors, and so on. Anything valuable and portable was either worn on the person or locked in a chest. As the holder of the keys to the chests, the woman who headed the household controlled access to its valuables, including the money. No major purchase could be made without consulting her. Among the things kept in these chests was cloth, so the key-holding matron also controlled who received cloth for new clothes.

The power of these noble women was real. Viking marriages, at least at the elite level, seem to have been much more equal than in the Mediterranean world. Plus, this was a maritime society in which important men were often gone for much of the year, leaving the women in charge.

We humans love symbols. It fascinates me that in this world they found complementary symbols for the roles of prominent men and women: an ax to represent the man's prowess in battle, and the key to represent the woman's mastery of the home.

Links 28 August 2020

Sebastião Salgado

Online digital version of Tim Robinson's famous map of the Aran Islands in Ireland.

Classical Monuments covers the Lion Sarcophagus in Pisidia

Interview with Nigerian-American writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie about race, gender and what feminism means around the world.

The "mall short": how hedge funds made a ton of money off the collapse of shopping malls (NY Times)

My Modern Met piece on Petra, with great pictures.

Preserving Australia's ancient Wollemi pines, a relic of the Cretaceous.

Razor blades get dull because sometimes hair can crack steel.

Saul Griffith, a major expert on electricity generation, has a plan to decarbonize America and generate millions of jobs.

A pet cemetery in Roman Egypt: 86 cats, 9 dogs, and 4 monkeys imported from India.

Wreck of a nearly intact 17th-century cargo ship called a fluytschip found on the sea floor off Finland.

Tim Alberta on the "Grand Old Meltdown;" one Republican veteran tells him that all the party stands for now is "Owning the libs and pissing off the media."" But in the same magazine, Rich Lowry has a different view. 

Photographs of London's old secondhand book shops taken in 1971.

In America, Imprisoned by Bureaucracy

Even when one part of our justice system tries to do the right thing, the good is usually undone by some other stupid policy.  Danielle Allen in the Post:

As the nation has come to know, California depends on incarcerated people for the hard, dangerous work of fighting wildfires, a situation that has existed since World War II. Like all firefighters, those who have joined crews while serving prison sentences are heroes. My beloved cousin Michael, now dead, did time in California’s system from 1995 to 2006 and was one of those firefighters. In 2003, he fought what was then the biggest fire in California’s history. It was the best year of his life, I believe. This is so wrong that I weep to write it.

In letters and a journal, Michael wrote about what it meant to him to fight fires. “When I had got up to the front the flames were high and hot. I could feel myself growing stronger instantly. . . . Sometimes I was 3 to 4 feet from the fire and at other times I was two feet away. As I worked I could feel my arms and shoulders become heavy as mortar stones. But that only fueled me.” He took pride in being given one of the toughest jobs on the crew: “Some underestimate the work of using a saw during a fire which is why many don’t last on the saw. To use the saw takes strength, determination, and heart. It is a very grueling task and probably the most important one.” Whereas for most of his time in prison, Michael saw “a hill of years to climb,” in 2003, he wrote, “Time is flying by so fast I can hardly keep up with the days.”

The most painful part of Michael’s reentry was that there was no way for him to be considered for employment on any of the fire crews he’d worked with. He’d gone to jail after committing three robberies and an attempted carjacking in a three-day period. He was 15, and it was his first arrest. Now, 11 years on, Michael had found his calling — tear-inducing, breath-smothering work fighting wildfires. The fire camps, though, were not in Los Angeles, and the law required Michael to be paroled back to the county where he had committed his crimes. The path he’d found during incarceration was no longer available to him.

This is the great wrong of California’s inmate firefighting program. It shows us exactly what offenders need to set their lives to rights: the opportunity for meaningful and recognized work that connects them to society and positive social relationships. Yet the program is based on a system of justice that largely denies people such pathways — mass incarceration.

Years and years in prison inevitably deplete a healthy capacity for social connectedness. Inmates who successfully reenter society must overcome that; they have to do the time and undo the time. Firefighting helped Michael undo the time, but he couldn’t extend that experience after he was released.

The inmate firefighting program has always seemed to me like a great idea; I have read other pieces over the years by men who felt saved by it. But why, oh why, do we have these crazy policies that prevent men the state has trained to fight fires (at considerable expense) from fighting fires after release? The array of rigid rules that keeps everyone from even trying to do the right thing makes me gnash my teeth, and I don't understand why we can't build into the system points where somebody can waive these rules when it would help both the ex-con and the community.

Is the Pandemic Self-Limiting?

Interesting data from Manaus, Brazil, which had a very severe coronavirus outbreak, never did much about it, but has seen the pandemic fade in a way similar to cities which took more severe measures. Other places have relaxed their restrictions and seen second waves, but the second wave is always less deadly than the first.

It really seems like the first wave of this disease is always the worst. Does the first wave just carry off the most vulnerable people? Or is there some sort of "virgin soil" effect that makes the first infection worse? Do the most vulnerable people take measures to protect themselves even when others do not?

It looks to me like the disease is shifting into a sort of chronic mode, still out there, still dangerous, but not the awesome killer it was when it first arrived.

Costly Signaling, or, Why Trump Says Outrageous Things

The political strategy of Trump and his friends might be summarized as 1) divide the country into two warring sides, and 2) pose as the perfect champion of one side. As Thomas Edsall explains, this is why Trump often says things that seem pointlessly outrageous and offensive:

According to Joshua Greene, a professor of psychology at Harvard, Trump is expert at sending “signals that are music to the ears of his base,” signals that ineradicably affirm his membership in the populist right wing of the Republican Party.

Green argued in an email that when

Trump says that a judge of Mexican ancestry can’t do his job, or attacks women for their physical appearance, or makes fun of a disabled reporter, or says that there are good people on both sides of a violent neo-Nazi rally, or that Haiti is a “shithole.” or that the “Second Amendment People” can maybe do something about Hillary Clinton, Trump is very deliberately and publicly excommunicating himself from the company of liberals, even moderate ones.

In Greene’s view, Trump offers a case study in the deployment of “costly signals.”

How does it work? Greene writes:

Making oneself irredeemably unacceptable to the other tribe is equivalent to permanently binding oneself to one’s own. These comments are like gang tattoos. And in Trump’s case, it’s tattoos all over his neck and face.

At the same time, Trump’s “costly signals” make his reliability as a protector of white privilege clear.

John Tooby, a professor of anthropology at the University of California-Santa Barbara, described the signaling phenomenon in a 2017 Edge talk as an outgrowth of what he calls a “coalitional instinct.”

“To earn membership in a group,” Tooby says, “you must send signals that clearly indicate that you differentially support it, compared to rival groups.”

This, Tooby notes, encourages extremism: “Practical and functional truths are generally useless as differential signals, because any honest person might say them regardless of coalitional loyalty.” Far more effective are “unusual, exaggerated beliefs,” including “alarmism, conspiracies or hyperbolic comparisons.”

This phenomenon of “costly signalling”  drives a lot of political behavior in the US right now. Many statements are made all over the place simply from a desire to show everyone where you stand in a powerful way. I think the popularity of something like QAnon is all about this, about signaling that you are such a strong Republican you will consider anything; or, on the other side, talk about Revolution.

Boredom

Margaret Talbot has a long article about boredom research in the New Yorker. 

Fundamentally, boredom is, as Tolstoy defined it, “a desire for desires.” The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, describing the feeling that sometimes drops over children like a scratchy blanket, elaborated on this notion: boredom is “that state of suspended animation in which things are started and nothing begins, the mood of diffuse restlessness which contains that most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for a desire.” In a new book, “Out of My Skull: The Psychology of Boredom,” James Danckert, a neuroscientist, and John D. Eastwood, a psychologist, nicely describe it as a cognitive state that has something in common with tip-of-the-tongue syndrome—a sensation that something is missing, though we can’t quite say what.

In Talbot's account researchers are divided between those who think boredom is a universal human thing, in fact shared by many animals, and those who view it as a particularly modern condition. My reading of history and anthropology is that people have always suffered from boredom, and to the extent that they were less bored than we are it was because they were scrabbling to survive. I do find it interesting that the explosion of amusements – the internet, 500 televisions channels – has not reduced how much boredom people report feeling. I suppose this is because most of what we consume is so unfulfilling as to leave us thirsting 

And this for all the educators in the audience:

A 2016 paper found that, for most Americans, the activity associated with the highest rates of boredom was studying. (The least: sports or exercise.) Research conducted by Sandi Mann and Andrew Robinson in England concluded that among the most boring educational experiences were computer sessions, while the least were sturdy, old-fashioned group discussions in the context of a lecture. Mann, in “The Science of Boredom,” makes worthwhile observations about two tactics that help people feel less bored while studying: listening to music and doodling. . . . The boredom trough of school may also be a matter of age: studies that have looked at boredom over the life span have found that, for most people, it peaks in their late teens, then begins to drop.

Personally I understand boredom in terms of a barrier that has to be climbed to get to something I would enjoy doing. For example, I might really enjoy a backpacking trip with my brother or my sons, but that would involved me in a mountain of planning and organizational effort that I don't feel like getting into right now. Even something simple like a family boardgame involves getting enough of my children to agree to 1) play a game, and 2) agree on what game to play. Working on one of my writing projects requires a level of effort that is often insurmountable but sometimes, for whatever reason, trivial and easily brushed aside. 

This, I think, is the connection between boredom and mild or moderate depression: depressed people find even small obstacles between them and pleasure impossible to overcome, so they spend more time doing nothing. I think this also explains teenage boredom: teenagers are restless but lack the organizational and financial resources to arrange to do the things that might distract or fulfill them.