Gaming Barbarigenesis

Why, for thousands of years, did "barbarian" societies regularly conquer "civilized" societies with much greater populations and resources? Here's an abstract of a new paper in PLOS ONE:

“Barbarism” is perhaps best understood as a recurring syndrome among peripheral societies in response to the threats and opportunities presented by more developed neighbors. This article develops a mathematical model of barbarigenesis—the formation of “barbarian” societies adjacent to more complex societies—and its consequences, and applies the model to the case of Europe in the first millennium CE. A starting point is a game (developed by Hirshleifer) in which two players allocate their resources either to producing wealth or to fighting over wealth. The paradoxical result is that a richer and potentially more powerful player may lose out to a poorer player, because the opportunity cost of fighting is greater for the former. In a more elaborate spatial model with many players, the outcome is a wealth-power mismatch: central regions have comparatively more wealth than power, peripheral regions have comparatively more power than wealth. In a model of historical dynamics, a wealth-power mismatch generates a long-lasting decline in social complexity, sweeping from more to less developed regions, until wealth and power come to be more closely aligned. This article reviews how well this model fits the historical record of late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages in Europe both quantitatively and qualitatively.  

Obviously you can set the parameters of a game to make it come out however you want, but I think there is something to this. In a rich, relatively peaceful society, there are many paths to a decent living, and social norms may discourage violence. (Think of Chinese or Egyptian peasants.) To create armies, these societies have to pull men away from productive work, either by compelling service or paying soldiers decent wages. People hate both compulsory military service and high taxes, so either approach generates hatred of the government and possibly unrest and rebellion. 

But in a poor society near to a rich one, the opportunity cost of becoming a soldier is much lower, and the potential rewards much greater. In such "barbarian" societies, many more men will be soldiers, even without being paid, so they can field armies as large as those of much bigger states. Soldiering will be a bigger part of their culture, and they will be trained from youth in weapons and battlefield courage, making them most likely better soldiers than the average peasant would be. And if a barbarian leader creates a successful, conquering army, it will rapidly swell as all the young men join for a chance at victory and riches. Hence, Attila or Genghis Khan. 

And you just have to love the word Barbarigenesis.

Ba'al Hammon and the Unitarian List of Suggestions

Folks: I let my old web site lapse, bensozia.com; got tired of paying for something nobody visited. I am going to repost my favorite old writing here, so it will live on. Starting with this:

In 300 BC Carthage was attacked by the Syracusans under their tyrant Agathocles. According to the Greek historian Diodorus, the Carthaginians

were filled with superstitious dread, for they believed that they had neglected the honors of the gods that had been established by their fathers. In their zeal to make amends for their omission, they selected 200 of the noblest children and sacrificed them publicly.... There was in their city of bronze image of Cronus (as the Greeks called Ba'al Hammon), extending its hands, palms up and sloping toward the ground, so that each of the children when placed on the arms rolled down and fell into a gaping pit filled with fire.

Other sources speak of an annual ritual in which one or more children were chosen by lot from among all those of eligible age for sacrifice. The mother was required to stand by without weeping, for her tears would dishonor the gods.

Some enlightenment historians pooh-poohed stories of infant sacrifice in Carthage, calling them Greek or Roman propaganda. But when archaeologists excavated in the tophet, the sacred precinct of Carthage, they found there thousands of tiny burned skeletons, placed in urns and capped with grave stones that described these children as offerings to Ba'al Hammon and Tanit, king and queen of the Carthaginian gods. Many of the grave stelae were carved with the solar disk of Ba'al Hammon and crescent moon of Tanit, giving them an eerie resemblance to new age post cards. Most of the victims were less than six months old, but some were as old as three years. In only one way did the archaeology mitigate the harsh picture of frequent baby sacrifice drawn by the Greek and Romans: forensic study of the few well-preserved bones showed that the infants had been dead when they were burned. Most likely, their throats were cut, like lambs, before they were consigned to the sacred flames.

What on earth were the Carthaginians doing? Were they insane? What kind of religion requires such barbarities? Consider, by way of comparison, a little pamphlet I have here in front of me from the Unitarian Universalist Association. The Unitarians do not really have a creed; instead, they have a list of beliefs which members "covenant to affirm and promote." There is in this list nothing that I, a rational agnostic, find in any way objectionable. Indeed, we would probably have to turn to hard-core fundamentalists, or Chinese communists, to find anyone who would object to them. The Unitarians believe in

• The inherent worth and dignity of every person.
• Justice, equity and compassion in human relations
• The goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all. (Note that Unitarians don't have to commit to a world community now; instead, they just have to subscribe to it as an eventual goal. Immediate implementation might be controversial as well as impractical.) 
• The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process, within our congregations and in society at large.
• Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which are a part.

Perhaps the most distinctive thing about the Unitarian faith is their openness to ideas from "many sources." They draw on direct mystical experience of "the forces which create and uphold life", the teachings of prophets, "Wisdom from the world's religions", and even "humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science, and warn us against idolatries of the mind and spirit."

According to my pamphlet, the Unitarians are "grateful for the religious pluralism that enriches and ennobles our faith," but I doubt many of them would feel enriched or ennobled by Carthaginian sacrificial practice. Casting babies into the sacred fire challenges the tolerance of the most liberal-minded Universalist—and, through its very extremity, raises the question of what might be missing from the reasonable, compassionate approach to the world.

Unitarianism is, well, sensible. Yet it seems to me that the most important thing about the world, from the religious point of view, is that it does not make sense. The world is not just a place of reason and compassion, nor is it conveniently divided between people who strive for good and evil empires they can struggle against. The world is full of evil, terror, and disaster, much of it randomly distributed. Why? If God is as reasonable and compassionate as his Unitarian worshippers, why is there so much pain? Why does a good God like that of the Christians turn his back on suffering? Say what you will about Carthaginian religion, they had an answer. Their gods were as terrible as their world, as capricious, as mysterious. Toward their gods they felt the combination of fear and wonder that we call "awe", and their religion was awful in the true sense of the word.

The Carthaginians were not inhuman. They loved their children, and in our sparse sources we can glimpse the struggles they went through, their lapses, the years when times were good and the required sacrifices were forgotten. But then would come the disaster: a plague, a war, a terrible fire. The cry would go up that the Gods were angry, and parents would feel the sick sense of dread and impending loss. Who knows what motivated the ones who volunteered their babies? Perhaps they had already lost other children to disease, or their home towns had just been sacked and half their families snuffed out. Others faced the holy lottery, all of life in a concentrated moment: the worst fear, followed by either the most terrible loss or the greatest relief. They gambled with what they held dearest, and sometimes they lost. But don't we all? And doesn't the Carthaginians' acknowledgment of life's terror make their religion, in a sense, more honest than the sweet reason of modern Christianity, or the cool compassion of the Unitarians?

February 2, 2001

Milk and the Indo-European Expansion

Most archaeologists now think that the homeland of the Indo-European languages was the steppes north of the Black Sea, and that the people who emerged from that region and spread across Eurasia were from the Yamnaya culture. Their remarkable success probably has to do with their mastery of horses, their use of wheeled wagons, and their resistance to Yersinia pestis, the organism that causes the Black Death.

But maybe their adoption of dairying was another factor:

The long-distance migrations of early Bronze Age pastoralists in the Eurasian steppe have captured widespread interest. But the factors behind their remarkable spread have been heavily debated by archaeologists. Now a new study in Nature provides clues regarding a critical component of the herders' lifestyle that was likely instrumental to their success: dairying. . . .

A new study led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany has revealed a critical clue and it might come as a surprise. It appears that the Bronze Age migrations coincided with a simple but important dietary shift -- the adoption of milk drinking.

The researchers drew on a humble but extraordinary source of information from the archaeological record -- they looked at ancient tartar (dental calculus) on the teeth of preserved skeletons. By carefully removing samples of the built-up calculus, and using advanced molecular methods to extract and then analyse the proteins still preserved within this resistant and protective material, the researchers were able to identify which ancient individuals likely drank milk, and which did not.

Their results surprised them. "The pattern was incredibly strong," observes study leader and palaeoproteomics specialist Dr. Shevan Wilkin, "The majority of pre-Bronze Age Eneolithic individuals we tested -- over 90% -- showed absolutely no evidence of consuming dairy. In contrast, a remarkable 94% of the Early Bronze Age individuals had clearly been milk drinkers."

The milk came from cows, sheep, and goats, and possibly also from horses, so they were not picky milk drinkers.

Markland, 1345

Interesting:

The Cronica Universalis written by the Milanese friar Galvaneus Flamma (d. c. 1345) contains an astonishing reference to a terra que dicitur Marckalada, situated west from Greenland. This land is recognizable as the Markland mentioned by some Icelandic sources and identified by scholars as some part of the Atlantic coast of North America. Galvaneus’s reference, probably derived by oral sources heard in Genoa, is the first mention of the American continent in the Mediterranean region, and gives evidence of the circulation (out of the Nordic area and 150 years before Columbus) of narratives about lands beyond Greenland.

Links 17 September 2021

Jeptha Homer Wade, Portrait of Nathaniel Olds, 1837. The glasses

were a fad among people who thought the new whale oil lamps 

were so bright they caused eye damage.

Analyzing Roman humor.

Scott Siskind inquires into semi-heavy water. Real heavy water, enriched with deuterium, will kill you over time, and there is actually some evidence that even the ordinary amount of deuterium is bad for you.

Six-minute film shot on the streets of New York in 1911. Colorized, but in a way that I find enriching rather than distracting. Love the way people are dressed.

Havana syndrome and microwave attacks. I still say it's hysteria.

John McWhorter says the best way to get from basic language knowledge to real understanding is a program called Glossika (NY Times). Tempted to do this for German to get my fluency back.

New archaeological finds from Sanxingdui in China, weird and fascinating. And a post featuring one spectacular artifact, a bronze tree.

Impressive gold hoard from Denmark, dating to the 6th century AD. There is a theory that a lot of sacrificial offerings were made after the volcanic eruption of 535 darkened the skies and led to three years of cold weather, and this might be one of them.

One simple way to increase the value of your home is to build an impressive entrance. (NY Times)

Between 1830 and 1862, thousands of slaves from Florida and elsewhere in the US escaped across the "saltwater road" to the Bahamas.

Vox review of a new reality show about one of TikTok's first celebrities, mainly about the ambiguity of fame and fortune. My take away was, however bad fame and fortune feel, these people still prefer them to the alternative.

Tom Friedman says that during the twenty years we spent trying to make the Middle East more like America – democratic, pluralistic – we have instead become more like the Middle East – tribal, factionalized, unable to work together toward common national aims. (NY Times)

Energy efficient building around the world; the tools needed to construct buildings that produce more energy than they use are now widely available, and many are being built. Most are ugly, but then so are most inefficient buildings these days.

Nikon Small World Micro-Photography Contest winners.

Using ancient DNA to study inbreeding: after analyzing 1785 genomes from around the world, these authors find that second cousin or closer marriage was not common in any period, except on certain islands, and that the rate of inbreeding has generally declined over time. If true, this is a fascinating finding, since we know the stated norms of many historical societies promoted cross-cousin marriage. 

Freaky contemporary Norse pagan music: Wardruna, Lyfjaberg, Helvegen; Danheim, Kala; and the Voluspa, set to music and sung by Einar Selvik, with the Edvard Grieg choir.

A Shield's Journey

This spectacular shield was made around 1535 by Girolamo di Tommaso da Treviso. It depicts the Romans under Scipio Africanus capturing Cartagena in Spain during the Second Punic War. The design is based on an earlier French tapestry and was probably chosen to honor Emperor Charles V, who had recently captured Tunis from the Turks.

The shield seems to have been passed around between various Italian noble families for the next 200 years. In the early 1700s it was acquired by a certain Tommaso, the last marquess degli Obizzi, and kept in the Castello del Catajo outside Padua, part of his vast collection of arms and armor. When he died, all of his lands and property passed to the House of Este, long the rulers of Ferrara. 

The Estes had a very long run as a prominent noble family, more than 600 years, but eventually their last heiress (Maria Beatrice Este) married a Hapsburg, Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, and all of their land and property was absorbed into the Austrian royal family. 

Using the Este fortune, the Archduke built Konopiště Castle in Bohemia into a fabulous Baroque showplace. The shield traveled there and became part of the castle collection. The castle declined in the nineteenth century and was in bad shape by 1889 when a certain Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria purchased it. He went on to be assassinated, thus sparking World War I. After the war Konopiště Castle was in Czechoslovakia. 

In World War II the Nazis came and expropriated everything in the castle–among the many things they hated, the Hapsburg family figured prominently–and it ended up in Vienna, where it was slated to bec displayed in grand museum celebrating Hitler's victories. In 1945 the US Army's art recovery team (the "Monuments Men") seized it, and it ended up in the Philadelphia Museum. Whence it has just now been returned to Czechoslovakia, part of a long process by which objects in that US Army collection have been slowly returned to the people and places from which they were looted.

Via The History Blog, which has a 20 megabyte image of the shield.

Pope Francis on Denying Communion

Asked about the US bishops who have discussed denying communion to President Biden and other pro-abortion Catholics, Pope Francis gave a long answer in which he condemned abortion as murder but also said:

I have never refused the Eucharist to anyone, to anyone. I don’t know if anyone in that condition came, but I never, never refused the Eucharist. As a priest, that is. Never. I have never been aware of having a person like the one you describe in front of me, that is true. Simply, the only time I ever had a bit...an interesting thing, was when I went to celebrate Mass in a rest home and we were in the living room, and I said: “Raise your hand if you want to receive Communion.” Everyone, the old men, the old women, everyone wanted Communion, and when I gave Communion to one woman, she took me by the hand and said to me: “Thank you, Father, thank you: I’m Jewish.” I said: “No, the one that I gave to you is Jewish, too...” The only strange thing, but the woman received Communion first, she said it after.

No. Communion is not a prize for the perfect, no? Let’s think of Port Royal (des Champs), of the issue with Angélique Arnaud, Jansenism: those who are perfect can receive Communion. Communion is a gift, a present; the presence of Jesus in his Church and in the community. This is the theology. Then, those who are not in the community cannot receive Communion, like this Jewish woman, but the Lord wanted to reward her without my knowledge. Why? Because they are out of the community—ex-comunitate—excommunicated they are called. It is a harsh term, but it means that they are not in the community, either because they do not belong to it, they are not baptized or have drifted away for some reason. . . .

Now let’s get to that person who is not in the community, who cannot receive Communion because they are outside the community, and this is not a punishment. No, the person is outside. Communion is uniting yourself to the community. But the problem is not the theological problem—that is simple—the problem it is the pastoral problem: how do we bishops deal with this principle pastorally. And if we look at the history of the church we will see that every time the bishops have dealt with a problem not as pastors, they have taken taken a political stance on a political problem. Think of St Bartholomew’s Night: “Oh, heretics, yes. But it’s a serious heresy...let’s cut all their throats....” No: it is a political matter. Let’s think of Joan of Arc, about that vision, let’s think of the witch-hunt.... Let’s think of the Campo de’ Fiori, of Savonarola, of all those people.

When the church defends a principle in an unpastoral manner, it acts on a political level. And this has always been the case, just look at history. What must the pastor do? Be a pastor. Be a pastor and don’t go around condemning, not condemning.... But is he a pastor for the excommunicated too? Yes, he is a pastor and must be a pastor with him, to be a pastors with God’s style. And God’s style is closeness, compassion and tenderness. The entire Bible says so. Closeness is already there in Deuteronomy where he says to Israel: “Tell me what people has its gods as close as I am to you?” Closeness, compassion. The Lord has compassion on us as we read in Ezekiel, in Hosea. Tenderness was there already in the beginning. It is enough to look in the Gospels and the things of Jesus. A pastor who does not know how to act with God’s style, is slipping and does many things that are not pastoral.

For me, I do not want to specify, since you spoke of the United States, because I do not know the details well of the United States, I will give the principle. You could say to me: “But, if you are close, tender and compassionate with a person, would you give the person Communion?” This is a hypothesis. Be a pastor, and the pastor knows what he must do at all times, but as a pastor. But if he goes out of the pastoral dimension of the church, he immediately becomes a politician: You see this in all the accusations, in all the non-pastoral condemnations the church makes.

Modeling Creative Bursts

It is a well-known theme of intellectual history that creative work often comes in bursts. A classic case is the major advances Newton made on gravity and calculus during the term Cambridge was closed due to the plague. You often read about "miraculous years" in the life of an artist, when one masterpiece after another poured out; Mozart's last year is a famous example.

A bunch of statisticians have just published a paper in Nature using big data, machine learning, image analysis, and a bunch of very fancy statistics to explore this phenomenon, and they find the following:

Across a range of creative domains, individual careers are characterized by hot streaks, which are bursts of high-impact works clustered together in close succession. Yet it remains unclear if there are any regularities underlying the beginning of hot streaks. Here, we analyze career histories of artists, film directors, and scientists, and develop deep learning and network science methods to build high-dimensional representations of their creative outputs. We find that across all three domains, individuals tend to explore diverse styles or topics before their hot streak, but become notably more focused after the hot streak begins. Crucially, hot streaks appear to be associated with neither exploration nor exploitation behavior in isolation, but a particular sequence of exploration followed by exploitation, where the transition from exploration to exploitation closely traces the onset of a hot streak. Overall, these results may have implications for identifying and nurturing talents across a wide range of creative domains.

This makes intuitive sense. Artists experiment with different styles ("exploration"), then settle on one that works for them and throw themselves into work in that vein ("exploitation"). Chaucer, for example, wrote verse in the Italian style, then in the French style, then settled on his own style and poured forth The Canterbury Tales. Young composers often write pieces in the style of some other composer – Mozart's Variations on a Theme by Salieri is one you may have heard mentioned in a certain film – before finding their own voices. Scientists wander around working on different projects, then find a particular kind of research that feels both vital and right for them, throwing themselves into the work.

I have some caveats, though. For scientists in particular institutional support is crucial; if you read what scientists say about their own careers they often emphasize the situation they were in when they did their most famous work, with the right support and the right colleagues. Darwin's career can be boiled down to: voyage on the Beagle, which opened his eyes to biological diversity in a radical way, followed by fifty years of working and reworking the insights gained on that crucial trip. It is hard to imagine his career without the British government sending him around the world.

You can also think of many artists whose careers have nothing in common with this paradigm, e.g. John Singer Sargent who did great work in pretty much the same style for forty years. Novelists, a kind of artist highly important to me, have radically varying career trajectories. One common type is that they have something to say, usually drawn from their own experience, say it in one or two books, and then never produce anything else nearly as good. Others follow a paradigm something like what these authors describe, for example Hillary Mantel experimenting with various sorts of writing before setting on multi-part historical novels, coming to a glorious peak with Wolf Hall and Bring Out the Bodies. The authors of our studies acknowledge this when they say that while the pattern they see is statistically robust, "the overall effect size seems modest."

I find this interesting as an insight into creative careers but also as a glimpse into what sort of studies may become possible as data sets grow and machine learning deepens. So far, though, what can be produced seems like a rather minor contribution, not very new and explaining only part of what makes for a creative, productive career.

Via Marginal Revolutions

Working Class Parents and Government Assistance

Patrick Brown reports today in the NY Times on a series of focus groups held with working class parents. He takes the tone that the findings are surprising, but they are not: they are what any such exercise would have found over the past century. What working parents want is 1) for their jobs to pay them what they consider a living wage, and 2) not to feel like people who are not working are getting things they are not.

The government has a responsibility for boosting families with a worker present, most parents said, even while admitting the frustration that long, unpredictable hours can inflict on a family. Unprompted, parents in all three groups volunteered feeling damned if they do, damned if they don’t, with take-home pay seemingly insufficient to keep up with the bills yet too high to qualify for safety-net benefits.

One Georgia working mother remembered her frustration with finding out her income was slightly too high to qualify for Head Start. Unable to afford any other child care for her then-preschool-age son, she said, “I had to lie and say I wasn’t working.” That incident colors her view of policy proposals now. Sometimes, she said, “it seems like the people who are not working seem like they’re better off, because they get all the assistance.”

It is hard to design government programs that would achieve both of these goals. The EITC, or whatever it is called now, is a strong program in that direction, effectively paying a subsidy to working people whose incomes fall below some threshold. Obamacare subsidies are another approach. But to be affordable all these programs need thresholds toward the bottom of the middle class, which means that some large group of people will feel like working harder has only caused them to lose benefits that go to poorer people.  

Universal all-day preschool is a Biden administration initiative that would help some of these parents. But the cost of that in dollar terms is huge, and I suspect it might not be the best thing for many children.

What I hear over and over is, we don't want a handout, we don't want a bigger government, we just want a living wage, affordable housing, and affordable health care. As if those things could be magicked into being without bureaucracy and taxes.

Raising the minimum wage would help some people, but I suspect most of the people in those focus groups (HVAC installers, social workers) already earn well above any potential minimum wage, yet still feel financially frustrated. 

I am not at all sure that much can be done about this. Our housing is expensive because we keep crowding together into our biggest cities, where land is madly expensive. The only way to provide really affordable housing in New York or San Francisco would be to go Hong Kong-style and build innumerable tall towers full of tiny flats. Americans don't want that.

It may just be a version of the scissors of Malthus operating here: in any society, the expectation of what life should be rises toward what the median family can afford. Anyone who falls below that number, by definition half the people, feels pinched and frustrated. Our society is set up to demand a level of safety and comfort that is just plain expensive. Once things like air conditioning, air bags in cars, cable tv, and smart phones become the norm, just about everyone will want them, and the pressure to have that kind of life frustrates and stresses everyone who can't get there. Some of the countries that American leftists admire, because of their egalitarianism, work because people expect less in certain key ways. (Especially the size of their homes.) 

I still think a more egalitarian world would be better; more even distribution of wealth would certainly help the poorest, and make life seem more fair. But a world in which millions of people don't feel pinched and struggling may not be achievable through politics or economics; only a revolution of spiritual gratitude has any chance of getting to that magical place.

Paul Klee, Short Poems

Last Things Last

In the heart's center
The only prayers
Are steps
Receding.

– Translated by Anselm Hollo

Emerged from the Gray of Night

Now from gray-dark night emerged
Burdened and beloved,
Strong with night's fire
Drunk and staggered with God.
Amidst blue ethereum
Soaring over snowfields
Toward the wise constellations.

John Darnielle, "Wolf in White Van"

Wolf in White Van (2014) is an attempt to explore, intensely and realistically, the twisted depths of a nerdy teenage outcast's mind. It investigates a related pair of mysteries: how he came to be horribly maimed and why he lives entirely in imaginary worlds. It's interesting, and short, so I don't regret reading it, but I am somewhat mystified by the vast collection of rave reviews that decorates the paperback version I read. 

John Darnielle is better known as the songwriter and lead singer of The Mountain Goats. He is famous in that line of work for intense sensitivity to the emotions of social outcasts, and for brutal poetic honesty about everything from love to professional wrestling. I think this book is a sally in the same vein, a brutally honest poetic look at sci-fi nerddom. 

Our narrator, Sean, remembers that as a child he often lost himself in Conan fantasies. His Conan, however, was not the honorable barbarian of the books, but a darker and more demonic figure:

When I became Conan things were different; his new birth had left scars. I ruled a smoking, wrecked kingdom with a hard and deadly hand. It was dark and gory. No one liked living there, not even its king. It had a soundtrack. All screams.

He goes on to make a smoking wreck of his own body, and then to devise a post-apocalypse world in which he has reduced North America to a wasted radioactive ruin.

More than half the book is spent describing the play-by-mail game (this is 1990) Sean created while recovering from his "accident." The world is pretty standard post-apocalypse stuff, but some of the settings are imagined in intense detail: you are lying in the long grass by a certain old concrete overpass under a gray Oklahoma sky, now held by sinister men; what do you do? Approach them? Try to sneak around them? Attack them? So it goes, turn after turn, each response from the player generating a page or two of text that explores the consequences of the choice and carries the story along. The goal of the game is to reach a fortress called Trace Italien, within which civilization endures.

Didn't sound like a very fun game, though, because the choices are so limited. Some players write long letters describing their actions, but each turn boils down to choosing one of those two to four options. Nothing like a real role-playing game with its open world and potential for complete surprise.

And I think that is part of the point here: Sean doesn't want any real input from his players. This is his world, over which he rules like a blood-drinking barbarian king. Everything is completely under his control. The main desire he feels toward his own creation – and, it seems, toward everything else – is to frustrate, grind down, burn up, and ruin. It takes a while for the reader to understand the depths of Sean's fury, because his narrator's voice, speaking from many years later, is flat, calm, and nearly emotionless. But eventually you see.

I was a teenage sci-fi nerd once, and far from popular. I have felt at times something of the rage and delight in raging that animates much of our culture, from Death Metal to The Game of Thrones. But as an exploration of "fantasy and its dangers," as one of the reviewers on the back cover puts it, Wolfe in White Van did not impress me. I lived in my imaginary worlds because I loved them; I write books now partly to experience that same sense of dwelling in a beloved place I got from creating my Dungeons and Dragons world when I was 18. For me world-building is something like gardening. There may be dangers to it, as there is danger in anything taken too far, but there is nothing inherently dark about it. 

Well, except that it is part of human life, and therefore partakes of the shadows that hang over everything we do.

To me the darkness and danger that Darnielle explores in Wolf in White Van do not come from living in fantasy. Living in fantasy can take many forms, of which blasted apocalyptic ruin is only one. The demonic love of ruination comes from somewhere else.

____________

The Mountain Goats, This Year.

Extremists Abroad and at Home

At the 9-11 memorial event in Shanksville, PA, George W. Bush connected the terrorists of the early 2000s with today's insurrectionists:

We have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders but from violence that gathers within. There's little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard of human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit, and it is our continuing duty to confront them.

Amen to that. 

Stepan Kolesnikov

Stepan Fedorovitch Kolesnikoff (1879 - 1955), was a Russian painter who worked most of his life in Serbia. The famous painting above, Church on an Island, is a good introduction to Kolesnikoff's work: spiritual, pretty, with a palate that tends toward winter and mist. 

Kolesnikoff was born in a peasant family, but his talent was somehow recognized and he won a scholarship to  an art school in Odessa. In 1903, Kolesnikoff was accepted into the Imperial Academy of Arts.

He moved to Belgrade in 1919 and lived there or nearby for the rest of his life.  

I don't think these are especially great art, but they are pretty and soothing. And just looking at them makes me feel cool, important during this season of sweltering Dog Days, with forecast highs around 90 all week.

Arigato

Today's linguistic puzzle: why does the Japanese for "thank you" – arigato – literally mean "there is difficulty"? I always thought it was because having to be grateful to another person was seen as a hard thing, or at least a hard thing to acknowledge. Like, "Hard as it is for me to say it, I owe you big time for that."

But I just discovered that this is not the usual interpretation.

Most linguists say it comes from Buddhist practice. One of the goals of Japanese Buddhism is to cultivate an attitude of gratitude toward the world, which is sometimes phrased as believing that all of life is miraculous. Of course, it is difficult to maintain this sense of gratitude. Other people are a particular source of difficulty, always interfering with your desire to be positive about the universe. Hence, arigato. Kaki Okamura:

Arigato means that good things in life are never obvious or a natural human right, but to be able to say thank you is actually a miracle in life. There are so many things that can come in the way of something not happening or manifesting — wrong place, wrong time, wrong person, wrong words — and consequently everything good that happens to us is a combination of many miracles. The ability to say thank you is in fact, something difficult to have.

Victor Mair adds: 

Saying "thank you" in this spirit is the linguistic equivalent of the Japanese aesthetic concepts of wabi-sabi 侘寂, "a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection".

Image is Reiji Hiramatsu, Prayer of Japan/Cherry Blossoms (2012)

Is Chinese Communism Returning to its Dark Past?

One of my children told me yesterday that his part of the internet was lit up with people complaining that the Chinese government's crackdown on "sissy men" in entertainment is "fascism." Sample comment: "now I finally understand the Chinese, they're fascists."

But of course they are nothing of the kind. Communism has its own awful history of oppression for oppression's sake, and it has often been wrapped up with moral crusades. The admiration for communism among young Americans is disturbing, and perhaps ought to be fought more vigorously. But it is not nearly as disturbing as what is going on in China.

I just put this article on the links page for this week but now it seems so important I'm going to give it a longer treatment. This is from an anonymous Chinese writer:

I think the CCP is widening its dictatorship under the veil of / through its social morality cultivation in various aspects these days, and that it bans "娘炮" ["sissy men", but actually a highly vulgar term–jcb] from the entertainment industry functions as one of its schemes to instill the antecedent atmosphere. . . .

In early July, almost all WeChat accounts of LGBT student organizations in China were shut down (including the accounts run by students of Peking University, Tsinghua University, Fudan University, and Nanjing University, among others). Many online feminist groups were deleted. Earlier this year, the Chinese education ministry issued a notice, suggesting that Chinese young men are becoming increasingly "feminine", encouraging schoolboys to be more "manly". Besides its gender ideology, the CCP has been imposing stringent curbs recently on the entertainment industry, showbiz, celebrity fandom, teenager's videogames time restrictions, compulsory education, extracurricular training restrictions, etc. The China Writers Association also issued specific guidelines to "strengthen professional ethics and sense of social responsibility among writers" last week.

I'm afraid a new round of Cultural Revolution, perhaps less obvious, is going on. The CCP's boycott of / clampdown on "sissy men"/ 娘炮 is part of it.

This inspired Victor Mair of Language Log to ponder another term much used in official Chinese circles lately,  "fēi-Dènghuà 非邓化" , which might be translated de-Deng-ization or de-Deng-ification. What would this turn against the memory of Deng Xiaoping signify?

It seems to imply a new view of Chinese history, raising up Mao and glorifying the Cultural Revolution. It certainly implies a more aggressive foreign policy.  More:

Deng de-politicized Chinese social life. Xi is now imposing Mao-style political campaigns onto everyday life. "Political studies" of the Mao era once again have become a daily requirement. Communist party branches are being established in private businesses. The limited social space allowed under Deng has been drastically reduced. . . .

Xi has started the "third redistribution" by suppressing large private businesses and taking / extracting wealth from various rich people, most notably Jack Ma, but there are many others. I personally know several honorable Chinese citizens of moderate wealth in the PRC who have had their entire wealth stripped from them and were thrown into prison on extremely dubious charges (actually no just charges at all) and who are rotting in prison.

In essence, Xi wants to reestablish Mao-style state / party control of every aspect of social life and activity. We all know the economic consequences of this kind of state socialism.

Scary. And this is all within the Han Chinese core, without even getting into what's going on in Xinjiang. I have tried to be sanguine about events in China under Xi, because for all their bluster he and his people seemed basically sane. Now I worry they are headed down a dark road and taking their country with them.

Via Marginal Revolutions

Links 10 September 2021

Edgar Degas, Factory Smoke, 1877

Comedy Wildlife Photograph of the Year finalists.

Bitcoin mining now uses more electricity than Finland, or Washington State. (NY Times)

Beavers return to Scotland, and people begin to fight about furry "ecosystem engineers." (Scholarly article, NY Times story, BBC story)

Pet bird trained to go out and look for cash, then bring it home. Not sure how real this is, but still amusing.

You could own your own 22-acre island off the west coast of Scotland for around $70,000, but you might not be able to build a house on it.

In the "it could be a lot worse" department, two NY Times international stories: In South Africa, after more than 300 died in rioting by mostly black supporters of former president Jacob Zuma, vigilantes in Indian and other neighborhoods have killed dozens of what seem to be random black people. Meanwhile Lebanon is bankrupt, with no money to pay for imports and no government to even try to fix things; without oil, civilization is rapidly collapsing.

Facts about the secret X-37C space plane.

Fed up with men who never listen to you? In Shanghai women can go to a special "butler club" and hire a man to sit with you all night and pay attention to every word you say.

Sadly, the Vinland Map is a 20th-century fake. (Here's a fun intellectual exercise: come up with a document for which it would be a really big deal if it turned out to be fake. Not counting the Gospels, that's too easy.)

Intelligent Vox piece on the complexities of "Gentrification," correctly pointing out that poor Americans move a lot, and those in areas where incomes are rising don't move more than others. The real problem in the US is not neighborhoods that are getting richer, but neighborhoods where poverty is entrenched and nothing has changed in decades.

Long New Yorker article about Kathryn Paige Harden, a young geneticist who considers herself a leftist but believes genes have a major impact on life outcomes: "Building a commitment to egalitarianism on a belief in our genetic uniformity is building a house on sand."

If you want the short version, here's commentary about that article by Kevin Drum.

Polish homosexuality, the secret police, and Foucault's expulsion from Poland in 1959.

At the NY Times, Thomas Edsall takes on the conflicts surrounding wokeness, with comments from a wide variety of social scientists. One tells him, "Amidst this sea of analytical uncertainties, I am increasingly confident of one thing: a backlash is building." I worry that the same is true and the right Republican could lead another Reagan revolution.

Most solar panels rely on silver wires to extract energy from the silicon layers that generate it. This Australian start-up says they can build highly efficient panels using copper wiring, which costs 1% as much as silver. Every little bit helps.

Worried that GPS signals might be jammed on future battlefields, the US military is dusting off older  automated "astro-navigation" systems like the one from the SR-71 Blackbird.

Sane conservative Kevin Williamson reviews ongoing Republican efforts to destabilize the election system; some Republicans in Florida are demanding election audits of Democratic counties, even though Trump won the state (NY Times)

Thoughtful article situating the Chinese government's crackdown on "sissy men" in entertainment within a broader dictatorial program. Very sinister. 

Sweet, pleasant soul by Corinne Bailey Rae: Put Your Records On, Trouble Sleeping, Jersey Girl

The Six Parties Quiz

The NY Times has a quiz up which places you in one of six imaginary political parties. I scored closest to the American Labor party. I think ten years ago I would have scored more socially liberal and more economically conservative, but it happens that on some of the cultural issues taking center stage right now (immigration, police funding) I am fairly conservative, while on the central  economic issues (minimum wage, spending on public transit, higher taxes on the rich) I remain liberal. 

Thinking about this I feel that over the past decade I have stayed the same while the landscape has shifted underneath me. My position on immigration (a good thing in moderation) was pretty liberal then, before the left shifted to open borders and abolishing ICE. Likewise on the police; my readers know I have been complaining about misconduct by cops and prosecutors for decades, which made me a liberal in 2005, but I am completely not on board with defunding the police.

That was not true of the previous decade, when torture and black site prisons and what all drove me to the left in foreign policy and Wall Street madness drove me left economically. I recognize that events then changed my views substantially. But I feel like lately I have been pretty consistent. Does anybody who has been following me for a long time disagree? I'm curious. I'm also interested to hear how anyone else with NY Times access scores.

Frank Gehry's Tower for LUMA Arles

LUMA Arles is an attempt to make the small French city of Arles cool by leveraging the one famous thing about it, its connection to Vincent Van Gogh. It is supposed to be, to quote its own propaganda, 

A place of life, culture, exchange and recreation, Le Parc des Ateliers of LUMA Arles is an interdisciplinary creative campus where exhibitions, conferences, live performances, architecture and design are presented.

The idea is one that has been tried around the world, using art to turn a "post-industrial wasteland" into a hip, happening space that will draw people downtown. Of course, this only works sometimes.

To raise the odds of success, the promoters have engaged a raft of big name architects to design the buildings. Frank Gehry designed the newly opened centerpiece, which is known as "The Tower."

Gehry said the design is supposed to look something like a Van Gogh painting, and I guess I see that. Impressionism in stainless steel. It is also supposed to evoke the nearby mountains, which I don't see at all.

Perhaps you are wondering, what is this strangely shaped building for? A glance into the interior shows a lot of vacant space. Again according to the LUMA Arles web site, "The Tower consists of various multi-purpose public and private spaces, from exhibition halls to work rooms and event venues." It has a small theater, exhibit spaces, a cafe.

Still, from these pictures the place looks like an exercise in spatial inefficiency. But is this space wasted? Non, mon amis, to ask that is to misunderstand the mission here. This building was built to be cool. Its bold strangeness draws attention. The work of the place, all that living, recreating, and exchanging ideas, goes on elsewhere. This is not a building, but a focal point. I imagine it will serve that purpose fairly well.

More photos at My Modern Met.

Stoicism and Mourning

Leon Wieseltier has written an interesting essay in which he mourns two recently dead friends. He begins with an excursus on the Stoics, and their contradictory attitude toward feeling and loss:

How close to the world can one be? How far from the world should one be? Those questions represent two mentalities, two doctrines — the aspiration to nearness, the suspicion of nearness; engagement as a form of strength, engagement as a form of weakness; the hunger for reality, the horror of reality; the nobility of belonging, the nobility of alienation. We begin with the world and we end with it, and we spend our mortal interval ascertaining what to do about the relation, and how to get it right. There are some who draw close because they seek pleasure, or because they seek pain; there are some who fear pain, or fear pleasure, and pull away. Charity, and moral action, demands proximity, but proximity also narrows and deceives and corrupts — and immoral action requires it, too. Beauty enchants, and absorbs, and overwhelms, but it is not obvious that the dissolution of the self is its highest fulfillment, or that sublimity is our best level. And love — does anything imperil the heart more? . . .

One of the greatest satisfactions in the history of philosophy is the inconsistency, even the hypocrisy, of the Stoics. For as long as I have studied them, I have quarreled with them. The Stoics were meticulous students of human breakability and raised it into a subject for philosophy. Nobody in the West ever pondered more rigorously the actualities of pain. The integrity of their ideal — tranquility of mind achieved by the stilling of strong feelings — is incontrovertible. Who lives too serenely? And incontrovertible, too, is their portrait of the assault of the world upon the soul, and of the soul’s consequent dispersal by stimulations and attachments. Experience is the enemy of composure; poise must be wrested from circumstance; we are taught by being troubled. When I encounter equanimity, then, I feel envy. And yet I have always believed that the price of Stoic equanimity may be too high. The virtue that it recommends is achieved by an ordeal of paring down and stripping away and pulling back that looks to me like a process of dehumanization. . . .

Stilpo was a philosopher in Megara in the late fourth and early third centuries B.C.E. and the teacher of Zeno, the Cypriot thinker who founded Stoicism. Seneca relates that “Stilpo’s homeland fell to invaders; his children were lost, his wife was lost, and he alone survived the destruction of his people. Yet he emerged happy; and when Demetrius, who was called Poliorcetes, or City-Sacker, asked him whether he lost anything, he replied: ‘All my goods are with me.’” Seneca extols him for thinking that “nothing is good which can be taken away.” He “conquered even his enemy’s conquest. ‘I have lost nothing’, he said. How amazing is this man, who escaped fire, sword, and devastation, not only without injury but even without loss!” Nothing is good that can be taken away: was this man a saint of indifference or a monster of indifference? 

Consider Pyrrho, the founder of Skepticism:

In the company of his teacher Anaxarchus, he travelled to India with Alexander the Great, where no doubt he encountered Eastern varieties of philosophical quietism. It is said that Anaxarchus once fell into a ditch and Pyrrho walked right past him, without any offer of assistance, as evidence of his immunity to attachment. . . .

The problem with Pyrrho’s extraordinary consistency is not only that it was fanatical, and like all fanaticism intellectually facile. It was also a little fraudulent: Diogenes further reports that “he was kept safe, as Antigonus of Carystus says, by the friends who accompanied him.” A detachment of attached people to protect his detachment. How could they stand him? Places, everybody! Pyrrho needs to be alone! A reputation for holiness is the best protection. The conclusion that must be drawn from Pyrrho’s amusing arrangement is that the values of apatheia, or freedom from strong feeling, and of ataraxia, or tranquillity of mind, the magnificent ideals of the ancient proponents of withdrawal and placidity, are not magnificent after all; or if they are magnificent, they are not practicable; or if they are practicable, they are premised on the worldly involvements of others, on a surrounding population of perturbables. The sight of equanimity should inspire not only envy, then, but also doubt.

Wieseltier goes on the explore how the Stoics struggled with this problem, vacillating between their pursuit of equanimity and their desire to live "naturally"; for are not feelings natural? Having started with the view that we should have no attachments, many ended up saying that some attachments were not so bad. In particular, many were great praisers of friendship. A true friend, they thought, was one of the few really worthwhile things in life. The loss of a friend, Seneca wrote, was like an amputation. And yet even the loss of a friend, they thought, should only be mourned in moderation, with no outward show of grief. Does not a man who has lost an arm go on? It was necessary to find a balance between caring about things that matter and surrendering our dignity and our self control in the face of what life will inevitably throw at us.

This is where I always end up. Many things don't ultimately matter very much, and for me at least it is a distraction to fret over them. But some things do matter, and those we should place at the center of our lives. Friendship is one of them.

The Giant Puzzle of the Frescoes from the House of the Harpist, Arles

The House of the Harpist is a Roman villa on the banks of the Rhone in Arles, Frances. It was built between 70 and 50 BC, so before the town of Arles was founded as a colony for Caesar's veterans, and abandoned by 40 BC.

The site has long been known and there have been multiple campaigns of excavation. During the most recent dig, in 2014-2017, the archaeologists completely cleared two rooms. They discovered that the lowest level of fill in the rooms was composed almost entirely of small fragments of painted plaster from the walls. They collected 80 crates full of this material, enough for about 105 square meters of wall (1100 square feet).

The French government recently announced a campaign to study the fragments and reassemble them as fully as possible, which they estimate will take three years. Quiet a puzzle.

French original at INRAP; English at The History Blog.

Rivera Court, Detroit Institute of Arts

In 1932-1933 Diego Rivera executed a series of frescoes within a covered courtyard at the Detroit Institute of Arts. He once said that it was his greatest work, and many others have agreed. 

The paintings were commissioned by William Valentiner, director of the DIA and considered something of a visionary, and paid for by Edsel Ford, Henry Ford’s son and heir. The only stipulation they made was that the murals address the history of industry in Detroit.

The work is called Detroit Industry. It was based on months of preparatory work that Rivera carried out in 1932, touring Ford plants, making sketches, and taking photographs. This was in the absolute depths of the Depression; the month when the paintings were unveiled saw the highest unemployment rate ever recorded in the US. But Rivera chose to focus entirely on men at work.

What I like best about these works is that they can be appreciated at several scales: the overall effect of the whole courtyard is amazing.

The big paintings are very impressive as compositions.

The individual scenes are delightful.

And some of the details of the brush work and so on are also very fine. Rivera had the help of assistants on this project, but they only did the plastering and preparation; he did all the painting himself.

An amusing note is that while Rivera was a communist and is said to have anguished over whether to take Ford's money, he was not particularly generous with his own assistants.

According to Graham W.J. Beal, DIA director from 1999 to 2015, Rivera had four main assistants, who were paid $12 a week, and other assistants worked for free—ironic considering that Henry Ford was paying $5 a day to the workers Rivera was portraying in his murals. One of Rivera’s main assistants was Ernest Halberstadt. Beal writes: “Eventually, Halberstadt got tired of having no soles on his shoes and asked Rivera for $18 a week, a $6 raise. When Rivera refused, Halberstadt threatened to walk up and down in front of the museum saying that the artist was ‘unfair to labor.’ Rivera gave him the $18, but he didn’t speak to Halberstadt for a long time after that.”

When the murals were first unveiled many people hated them, calling them "coarse" and "vulgar." A movement to have them removed was begun. But it has long been rumored that Ford and Valentiner may have secretly encouraged this movement to drum up publicity, since it absolutely did: the louder the cries for getting rid of the paintings, the bigger the crowds. Ford himself waited for a whole month before announcing that he had no intention of removing them, by which point they were already famous. 

As they have remained ever since.

The Gentrification of Thrift Stores

Vox has a long article up on an issue I know has been keeping all of you up at night, the weird economics of second-hand clothes. What is happening is this: once upon a time, most second-hand clothes were either sold at yard sales or donated to charities like Goodwill. The prices were uniformly low, and the people selling them either didn't know which had "vintage" cachet or didn't have time to think about it. So some people very much enjoyed trolling thrift stores and yard sales, looking for bargains. Some were buying for themselves, but others were full- or part-time professionals who resold their gleanings at vintage stores or flea markets. It was fun and economically marginal.

Enter the Internet. Now people who find "vintage" bargains immediately put them up for sale on EBay or other sites, and everybody can see that they are getting a huge markup. This is big business; Etsy recent bought the vintage retail site Depop for $1.6 billion. But nobody really knows what is a good price for, say, a designer leather jacket in fair condition, because there aren't enough on the market for the price to stabilize. So various resellers charge wildly different prices; some of them rely on their photographic and layout skills to create Instagram or other sites that make their wares seem more desirable and thus prop up their prices. This has generated a lot of anger and many accusations of Neoliberalism and Gentrification.  Which mostly makes me roll my eyes; if you don't like the prices some trendy resellers are charging, don't buy.

But now word of these prices has filtered back to the people at Goodwill and similar entities, and in some markets – especially New York and Los Angeles – they are raising their prices. Some people say the average prices in New York area thrift stores have doubled in a few years. And that, it seems to me, is an issue, if it means poor people (or middle class families with a lot of kids) have to pay more for their clothes.

There is nothing to be done about this: it is simply the Internet in action. Used book sellers have already been tossed on the internet storm, and many of them sunk by it. Many stores only existed because information issues kept people from finding exactly what they want and comparing prices if they did. The free flow of information changes that.

I think in the long run it will sort out. The clothes people with money want will rise in price, but the rest will not, and poor people will not have to do without; after all most donated clothes never even make it to the rack, but are thrown away or shipped to Africa. It will be less fun to haunt thrift stores looking for bargains, but that just seems to be a price we have to pay for having the online world.

Links 3 September 2021

Isis, 2nd Century AD

The Sanger Collection of 19th-century circus photos.

Photos, drawing, and digital reconstruction of the 17th-century Dutch ship found last year on the bottom of the Gulf of Finland.

Hairstyles and social status in Egypt, 1480-1350 BC.

Today's thing that has become problematic: Women's Equality Day. Because not all women could vote.

Impressive NY Times analysis of how that Miami condo building collapsed, with a very clear 3D model.

The US Army plans to deploy a laser weapon that is supposed to shoot down both drones and incoming artillery shells. Should be with the troops in 2022.

The Carnian Pluvial Episode: for two million years, 234-232 million years ago, it rained a whole lot, all over Pangaea: 8-minute video, news article, wikipedia. Most likely caused by volcanic activity. The more we learn about earth's history, the more extreme weather we find, and the clearer it becomes that we have been riding a 10,000-year climate lucky streak.

The vast majority of farmland in the US is used either for grazing or for growing animal feed. This paper argues that plant-based meat products and other coming technologies will slash the demand for both, bringing huge changes to rural America.

California's new building code requires new homes and businesses to have solar panels, batteries, and the wiring needed to switch between energy sources, adding up to $20,000 to the price of the average new home. (NY Times) Some of that would be recouped over time; how much depends on the future maintenance costs for these systems, which nobody really knows. Is this a necessary measure to fight climate change, or another sort of NIMBYism that will drive more poor and ordinary people out of the state? 

And a NY Times article on the fight between advocates of big solar and wind farms in remote areas, which will require major upgrades to the power grid – this includes the Biden Administration – and localist, small-is-good environmentalists who want power to come from rooftop solar and neighborhood wind. I say we need both.

Scott Siskind takes on Long COVID: Much More than You Wanted to Know

Twenty years ago Hispanics were much more likely to be incarcerated in the US than whites, but that is no longer true. In fact last year they were marginally less likely to be incarcerated, despite having a younger population. Also, since 2000 the number of Hispanic police officers has risen 60%.

Long article on gangsterism in old Shanghai.

Ross Douthat on Afghanistan: "Our botched withdrawal is the punctuation mark on a general catastrophe, a failure so broad that it should demand purges in the Pentagon, the shamed retirement of innumerable hawkish talking heads, the razing of various NGOs and international-studies programs and the dissolution of countless consultancies and military contractors. Small wonder, then, that making Biden the singular scapegoat seems like a more attractive path." (NY Times)

It was in a 1978 case concerning the snail darter, a small fish native to the Tennessee River watershed, that the Supreme Court said the Endangered Species Act required the government to protect endangered species "no matter the cost." The Fish and Wildlife Service just announced that the darter is no longer considered endangered.

Can your dog tell the difference between what you do accidentally and on purpose? Maybe.

Russian disruption efforts in western Europe have include aid to British and Italian right-wingers and, according to the NY Times, assistance to Catalan separatists.

This week, music that has been used everywhere, and that may seem tired to you. But it is not tired, because it is perfect. It fits like a socket wrench onto the adjusting knobs of my emotions, and twists them. Aaron Copeland, "Fanfare for the Common Man;"  Vivaldi, "Winter;" Wagner, "The Ride of the Valkyries;" Pachelbel, "Canon in D."