The Murals of a Remarkable Tang Dynasty Tomb

A noble tomb with remarkable murals has been uncovered in Shanxi Province of northwestern China. The tomb dates to the Tang dynasty (618-907), but there seems to be some dispute about the exact date, with online sources mentioning both the exact year 736 and the period around 900. Above is one of the four walls of the main chamber. (Via The History Blog, the proprietor of which regularly posts amazing big images that I cannot find anywhere)

The entrance.

More of the main chamber. You can see that the ceiling panels depict the magical beasts of the four cardinal directions, with multiple panels of more down-to-earth scenes lower down.

In the lower left on this wall is a depiction of two people with camels and horses in the background. According to the conventions of the time, the woman appears to be Han Chinese, the man some other ethnicity. The excavators say these two people appear in other paintings, and they suspect they are the ones buried in the tomb. So perhaps this was a marriage between a Han Chinese noblewoman and a barbarian general. Shanxi was on the borders of the steppes and always had a mixed population, with both Han and nomadic elements, and we know the Tang dynasty employed horsemen from the steppes in their armies. The builders of the tomb seem to have thought the woman was more important. Does that reflect some underlying appraisal, or was it just that the man was dead and she was paying the bills?

My favorite of the paintings is this one, depicting people at everyday tasks. The only description I have found of the image says:

The east wall mural features a mural with multiple scenes of daily life: a man rolling a stone grinder to peel grain shells, a woman working a stone mill, a man making dough balls with an iron pan on a fire, a man stepping on a pestle (a rice pounding tool) with a bamboo basket and a bamboo dustpan next to it, a woman drawing water from a well using a counterweight heavy-lifting device, and lastly, a woman doing the washing elbow-deep in a basin full of water while a large pot steams on the wood-burning stove.

So lets try to match the images with the jobs. This is clearly the woman at the well.

And this is the woman doing laundry.

I suppose this must be the man stepping on a rice pestle, although I don't think I would have guessed that from the image.

Which makes this the man rolling the stone grinder.

And this a woman working a stone mill, although I'm thinking that those are stones there is no way she is rotating them by hand. A millstone that big weighs about 250 pounds.

And this mystrerious image must be "a man making dough balls with an iron pan on a fire," leaving open the question of why there is a bear cub on his fire.

Anyway, what an extraordinary find.

Kobayashi Kiyochika Documents the Sino-Japanese War, 1894-1895

I was so struck by this image, which an art blogger was using as the banner on his site, that I had to look it up. I guessed that it was Japanese propoganda from the 1890s or 1900s, which I have written about here before. And lo! 

This is Scouting Party near Niuzhuang on a Snowy Night, by Kobayashi Kiyochika (1894). There is a lot of stuff by Kobayashi online, but none of his regular Japanese stuff (temples with cherry blossoms, boats on river, etc.) grabbed be like his military works.

Two with the same title, Japanese Forces Capturing the Pescadores Islands in Taiwan (1894)

The Japanese Army has Landed at Weihaiwei and is Marching Onward (1995)

And a panel from a triptych titled, Despite Heavy Artillery Like Rainfall, He Alone Opens the Hyonmu Gate (1894). These are all from Harvard University.

A Bit of Philosophy: Truth and the Modern Condition

I've spent some of this long, blazingly hot weekend huddling inside, playing inane computer games while I listen to people read old philosophy lectures on YouTube. One that grabbed my attention was Bertrand Russell's lecture on Pragmatism, which he published as an essay in 1907. Russell was in many ways a pragmatist himself, but he could not go all the way with them. The Pragmatists discarded any hope of our knowing the capital T metaphysical Truth of the universe. Russell resisted this, not because he thought he knew much about the Truth, but because he very much feared that abandoning our search for the Truth would have terrible effects in the real world.

Here's a brief summary of Pragmatism as formulated by William James and John Dewey; I have more here if you want to know more about Pragmatism's creators.

The Pragmatists held that the real measure of an idea's value is not whether it is "true" in some absolute sense. What we care about is, what good is the idea? How does it benefit us to hold it? Ideas, said James, are tools that we use to get on with our lives. It is easiest to see what this means in science. Science rests, ultimately, on all sorts of unprovable notions like causality and the unity of physical law across time and space, but we mainly just ignore all of that because science clearly works. Even when we know that some theory is imperfect, like Newtonian mechanics, we still teach it in school if we find that it is useful. The real truths of the universe are far deeper and weirder, but when it comes to putting a man on the moon, none of that matters. As my late father-in-law once said, "I believe in science because when I flip the switch, the lights come on."

The Pragmatists had a complicated relationship to religion. They were not strong believers themselves, but they sometimes used their approach to truth to defend religious belief. If believing in God and Heaven makes you happy, and causes no trouble for either your day-to-day life or anyone else's, then why not believe? (Russell hated this; one of the founders of the modern British atheist movement, he despised James' work on religion, and he all but accused James of pandering to the common belief to get a better reception for his books.)

The Pragmatists were proponents of democracy and human rights. Since they held to no absolute political principles – no blood and soil nationalism, no divine right of kings – they all thought that people should be ruled according to their own desires. The best government, they thought, is the one that most improves people's lives. And because they did not think any belief was known sufficiently to justify forcing it on anyone, they all believed in freedom of thought, speech, and assembly. Dewey coined the term "pluralism" to describe his belief that we should be as tolerant as possible toward any belief or social system.

As I said, Russell was quite close to Pragmatism in many ways. Here is a bit of his famous essay, The Will to Doubt:

None of our beliefs are quite true; all have at least a penumbra of vagueness and error. The methods of increasing the degree of truth in our beliefs are well known; they consist in hearing all sides, trying to ascertain all the relevant facts, controlling our own bias by discussion with people who have the opposite bias, and cultivating a readiness to discard any hypothesis which has proved inadequate. These methods are practised in science, and have built up the body of scientific knowledge. Every man of science whose outlook is truly scientific is ready to admit that what passes for scientific knowledge at the moment is sure to require correction with the progress of discovery; nevertheless, it is near enough to the truth to serve for most practical purposes.

But.

Russell was active in politics throughout his life, and his experience led him to think that the Pragmatists' wishy-washy liberalism was insufficient to really promote human flourishing. Russell often took on unpopular causes. During World War I he was jailed for his pacifism, and he was later fined for demonstrating on behalf of Indian independence. He was an early proponent of gay rights. He was also a proponent of world government, one of the authors of the world constitution that was proposed by an association of like-minded dreamers in 1968. Meanwhile his criticism of Soviet communism got him expelled from several left-wing groups. He was attacked by Noam Chomsky for arguing that while American dominance of the world was far from ideal, it was better than either Soviet dominance or an anarchic war of all against all.

So Russell was an expert on holding unpopular opinions, and on the other people who held them. Reading the Pragmatists, he had a strong sense that they were putting the truth up for a vote. If all that matters is what "works," then any mass society will end up promoting the views that seem sensible to the majority. And that, as Russell knew from personal experience, easily slides over into oppressing people whose ideas seem like threats to a working system. Russell had written a book on German politics, and twice in his essay on Pragmatism he mentions that some of James' statements could have been made by Bismarck.

What motivates people to take unpopular positions in public, even at great personal cost? Russell thought they did so because they believed they had had a glimpse of the Truth. Not truth as approximation, or truth as tool, but Truth as moral imperative, as something higher and better than what is debated in Parliaments or newspapers. People like Gandhi and Martin Luther King were not Pragmatists. They laid their lives on the line to fight injustice because they believed with intensity in the Truth. Abandon this, Russell implies, and the world will be a much worse place, with too much compromise and too little real devotion to the good. The philosophical arguments in his essay did not impress me much, but his fear of losing the passion of the activist and the revolutionary shines out.

The Pragmatists did not live in a political vacuum any more than Russell did. However, their experience pointed in a different direction. The movement's founders had lived through the American Civil War, and they reacted against that slaughter by becoming intensely suspicious of intellectual passion that might lead to murder. To people like William James and his friend Oliver Wendell Holmes (a Supreme Court Justice), anyone who believed passionately in the certainty of his political vision was inherently suspect as a likely architect of future bloodshed.

But while it may be true that the first generation of pragmatists espoused a rather bland majoritarianism, that is not true of the next generation. John Dewey was every bit a Pragmatist in his rejection of absolutes ("the ultimate nature of things – God, the Universe, Man, Reason" as he cataloged them) but much more interesting politically. In fact his politics were very similar to Bertrand Russell's.  In his famous essay on Pluralism, he argued that accepting “heterogeneous elements” was essential to democracy, and he himself embraced and advocated for progressive causes like women's rights and racial equality.

I understand what drove Russell to question Pragmatism. It feels like surrender. We must give up the quest, not only for the Truth about God, but final theories in physics, true justice in society, permanent peace between nations, and many other things we would like to have. It feels right that a passionate advocate for a better world should question this surrender.

But it still might be the best, most honest description of human reality.

One Million Check Boxes: The Internet in Nutshell

Last week, a game designer named Nolen Royalty put up a website that consisted simply of a grid with one million empty check boxes. Visitors could click on them, at which point they became checked. He posted a link in his Twitter/X feed. People liked it:

Seven days later, more than 700,000 boxes have been filled in. . . . Users on X describe the project as “strangely compelling” and “torture for people with OCD.” A Washington Post newsletter called it “the most pointless website on the planet” — which it seemed to mean as a compliment. Mr. Royalty has been frantically renting additional server space for about $60 a day to keep up with the site’s check-happy fans. He estimated that there have been at least 400,000 unique visitors, although that data is imperfect because the page has crashed several times under the weight of their enthusiasm.

But, of course:

Steven Piziks, 57, a science fiction author in Ann Arbor, Mich., began checking boxes on Tuesday because he thought it might be soothing. He soon noticed someone else working behind him and unchecking every single one. He started checking even faster, and about half an hour later, the site’s built-in tally said he had checked more than 1,000 boxes.

It was not soothing at all. It felt “like a metaphor for all of social media,” Mr. Piziks said. “We go into it thinking it’s going to be wonderful and collaborative and interesting, and it kind of turns into a fight.”

Some of this is just people being annoying, but some of the annoying people are smart enough to program bots to uncheck boxes at machine speed.

And so another clever little idea brings out the worst in some of us and ends up making everybody mad, sad, and disgusted with each other.

Links 5 July 2024

Works by Greenland Innuit sculptor Liss Stender

Fascinating election in the UK; besides the wipeout of the Tories, who lost 251 seats and now have their lowest representation of the modern era, the Scottish National Party lost 37 of their 46 seats, almost entirely to Labour. The anti-immigrant Reform UK party did much worse than some early polls had predicted – for a while they led the Tories – winning only 4 seats, the same number as were won by independent Muslim candidates running with support for Gaza as their only issue. I wish the new leaders luck but Britain is in serious economic doldrums with no obvious way out, issues over immigration and identity will continue to simmer, and the national mood is bad, possibly even worse than in the US. (NY Times, BBC, NBC)

The National Portrait Gallery acquires an 1846 Daguerreotype of Dolly Madison that is the first known photograph of an American first lady.

Scott Siskind's fantasy presidential debate, very amusing.

What supreme athletic prowess looks like: Femke Bol of the Netherlands wins the women's 400m hurdles at the European championships, leaving everyone else far behind; and it doesn't even look like she's trying. There is not a single sign of effort on her face or in her movements, just fluid grace. (If you want to check out the video, skip to halfway through for the race itself.)

Restoring the spectacular baptismal font of Siena Cathedral, on which several artistic luminaries worked.

Important Denisovan finds from a cave in Tibet (article, NY Times)

Sea levels are supposed to be rising, but this study (NY Times) finds that low-lying tropical islands are not shrinking. We have the same issue in the Chesapeake Bay; the relationship between supposed changes in global sea level and shoreline erosion is complicated, with some places showing major losses but others a few miles away seeming completely unchanged, with no sign that the water has risen an inch.

Amazing rock art discovered in Venezuela.

Tyler Cowen's thoughts on immigration. "I am struck by the fact that immigration critics do not send me cost-benefit studies, nor do they seem to commission them." Because in economic terms there is no argument against immigration. But there is a downside: "Politics is stupider and less ethical than before, including (but not only) when it comes immigration."

Notes and photographs from a recent visit to Tajikistan. Long, but set up so you can read only what you want, or just browse the very interesting pictures.

Major study finds that how happy people are depends mainly on their personalities. And this: "At the nuances level, low life satisfaction was most strongly associated with feeling misunderstood, unexcited, indecisive, envious, bored, used, unable, and unrewarded."

Kraut on the origins of Social Democracy in Denmark (YouTube, 30 minutes). Sadly for fans of diversity, the ethnic and religious unity of the people was one key.

Veratasium follows Enstein's field equations out to their weirdest limits – black holes, white holes, alternate universes. (30-minute video)

Hoard of bronze axes unearthed in the Czech Republic, the latest in a long line of such hoards found by metal detectorists. I suspect more and more that they were as much symbolic as pratical objects, intended more for giving as gifts to gods or important people than for smashing heads.

Two sticks found in an Australian cave appear to have been used in a ritual just like one recorded in the nineteenth century; one is 12,000 years old, so this find is evidence that one highly specific ritual was passed down for 12,000 years.

A claim that the homestead of the African migrant and former slave known as King Pompey has been found in Lynn, Massachusetts. Background here. It's an awesome story but the news accounts of the archaeological work are unconvincing. If I come across a better description of the evidence I will pass it along.

Kevin Drum on the presidential immunity case: "It's a bad ruling. But it's not the end of democracy." I like to make the point that all US Presidents since Teddy Roosevelt have engaged in conduct abroad that I regard as illegal, but in the US we have traditionally used elections to rule on those matters, not trials.

Ben Pentreath in Scotland. (And Orkney, and some other places)

Conservative lawyer Ilya Shapiro offers advice on what to do if you're canceled.

Ethiopia's sacred forests, maintained by monks.

The Jersey Devil as a folktale of forced motherhood.

One theory of why Cahokia was abandoned focuses on drought, but this recent highly technical study finds no support for this model: "We saw no evidence that prairie grasses were taking over [fields], which we would expect in a scenario where widespread crop failure was occurring."

Ukrainian reporter argues that Russia's recent push for a cease fire shows that they are exhausted by the war and need a break to recoup and rearm. The resumption of US weapon deliveries and the easy defeat of the recent Russian offensive toward Kharkiv has many Ukrainians bullish on their chances for military success.

Ukraine's state-owned weapons conglomerate, Ukroboronprom, announces that they have begun serial production of attack drones with a range in excess of 1,000 kilometers. Russian media have lately reported that 10 to 36 Ukrainian drones are being shot down over Russia every night, so Ukraine's claim may well be correct. Which is what I and lots of others expected, that stalement on the front lines would lead to a "war of the cities" fought with missiles and drones. Russia is obviously trying to wear Ukraine down with steady attacks on both military and civilian targets, but in the age of cheap drones two can play at that game.

Fumiya Watanabe

Fumiya Watanabe (born 1985) was raised in a modern district of Tokyo but then decided to throw himself into Japanese tradition. He attended Kyoto Traditional Crafts College, then apprenticed under a master carver in Inami, Japan's "City of Wood." 

Now he lives and works in Gifu Prefecture, a largely rural area north of Tokyo.

But I don't see much of Japanese tradition in his work, which seems to draw on Surrealism and other 20th-century European forms, or in the way he talks about it:

My work is like a diary, like a poem. My feelings appear in various forms. Events in my daily life, things from the past, people around me, and the dogs and cats I live with also come to me…. I am not trying to convey some big message in my works. I just give form to what I feel. I want the viewer to freely interpret and enjoy them.

I find them delightful. More at his web site.

Conservative Sorting

Interesting article by Ruth Graham in the NY Times today. It focuses on conservatives who are tired of just whining about how bad things are and have decided to build communities more to their liking. I have a lot of issues with these folks, but I want to endorse this movement. 

There is nothing I find more irritating than people who whine about the collapse of traditional values while themselves embodying the changes they gripe about. E.g., people who earn big bucks working for think tanks in Manhattan or Washington and constantly bemoan the decline of small towns and their values. People with no children in panic about population decline. People who employ Haitian nannies while they rage against immigration. I would say the odds against these people meaningfully influencing the broader culture are long, as symbolized by their fixing on Donald Trump as their leader. When your moral crusade is led by a man who was convicted of financial shenanigans for making hush money payments to a porn star with whom he had an affair, you've already surrendered the high ground, and most of the other ground as well.

But people with these values shouldn't despair. They should do stuff like this:

Many of the young activists and thinkers who have risen under Trump's influence see themselves as part of a project that goes far beyond electoral politics. Rather, it is a movement to reclaim the values of Western civilization as they see it. Their ambitions paint a picture of the country they want should Mr. Trump return to the White House — one driven by their version of Christian values, with larger families and fewer immigrants. They foresee an aesthetic landscape to match, with more classical architecture and a revived conservative art movement and men wearing traditional suits. . . .

Fed up by what they see as an increasingly hostile and disordered secular culture, many are moving to what they view as more welcoming states and regions, battling for American society from conservative “fortresses.”

Some see themselves as participants in and advocates for a “great sort,” a societal reordering in which conservatives and liberals naturally divide into more homogenous communities and areas.

If you feel like America's old tradition of clubs and social organizations is declining, found a club. If you miss suits, wear one, and start some private events where they are required. If you can't find any place where you feel comfortable talking about your beliefs, create one:

The year Mr. Kressin moved to Idaho, he and Mr. Williams were part of an informal conversation at Claremont about the need for new institutions in what some hope will be a rejuvenated American society. The idea was a “fraternal community,” as one leader put it, that prioritized in-person meetings. The result was the all-male Society for American Civic Renewal, an invitation-only social organization reserved for Christians. The group has about 10 lodges in various states of development so far, with membership ranging between seven and several dozen people.

I suppose the conversation in some of these clubs might turn toward calling out the army to put black people in their place, but I don't really care. Deplorable people needs homes, too. I think the notion that western civilization is collapsing are ridiculous, but if that's how you feel, quit bitching and build a fortress against it. Graham describes a project under way to move lots of Christian conservatives to a couple of small towns in Tennessee where they will be numerous enough to set the agenda. I doubt they will have much better luck than the liberatrians who tried to take over New Hampshire, but I sincerely hope they at least succeed in find a place where they feel at home. 

No happy with the way things are? Stop posting Trump memes and build something more to your liking.

Tim Wu Wants to Regulate Social Media

At the NY Times, Tim Wu protests the Supreme Court's view that the editorial choices of social media platforms represent "free speech":

Over the past decade or two, however, liberal as well as conservative judges and justices have extended the First Amendment to protect nearly anything that can be called “speech,” regardless of its value or whether the speaker is a human or a corporation. It has come to protect corporate donations to political campaigns (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010), the buying and tracking of data (Sorrell v. IMS Health in 2011), even outright lies (United States v. Alvarez in 2012). As a result, it has become harder for the government to protect its citizens. . . .

In the name of protecting free speech, courts have also made it difficult for lawmakers to protect people’s privacy and repeatedly struck down efforts to protect children. For example, Vermont passed a law to prevent pharmacies from selling prescriber data in 2007, but the Supreme Court struck it down in 2011, presuming that the sale of data is a form of speech. And last summer, after California passed a law to prevent social media companies from tracking and extracting data from children, a federal court blocked it, arguing, in effect, that the surveillance of children is also a form of speech protected by the First Amendment.

The next phase in this struggle will presumably concern the regulation of artificial intelligence. I fear that the First Amendment will be extended to protect machine speech — at considerable human cost.

In our era, the power of private actors has grown to rival that of nation-states. Most powerful are the Big Tech platforms, which in their cocoon-like encompassing of humanity have grown to control commerce and speech in ways that would make totalitarian states jealous. In a democracy, the people ought to have the right to react to and control such private power, as long as it does not trample on the rights of individuals. But thanks to the Supreme Court, the First Amendment has become a barrier to the government’s ability to do that. Free speech rights have been hijacked to suppress the sovereignty of humans in favor of the power of companies and machines.

I think this is a strong argument in theory, but in practice I wonder about trusting state legislators to make these choices for us. As even Wu admits, the Texas and Florida laws in question in this case are pretty bad and might force platforms to promote the feeds of people who threaten to sue them.

Steve Bannon Declares War on – What, Exactly?

David Brooks interviews Steve Bannon, quite fascinating (NY Times). Bannon is all about anger, all about fighting:

Bannon:  I’m not a journalist. I’m not in the media. This is a military headquarters for a populist revolt.

but it remains entirely unclear to me what he is rebelling against, unless it is the nature of the universe, or at least the nature of human society.

The best definition of populism I ever heard came from a long-ago news article about a guy running for the Virginia Utilities Commission, who went around telling everyone, "They're screwing us, and I'm sick of it."

And the heart of Bannon's schtick an an assault on "elites." Whoever they are. Like this:

Bannon: Well, I think it’s very simple: that the ruling elites of the West lost confidence in themselves. The elites have lost their faith in their countries. They’ve lost faith in the Westphalian system, the nation-state. They are more and more detached from the lived experience of their people.

Brooks: When did you come to see the world this way? I mean, obviously, you were at Harvard Business School and Goldman Sachs. Did you have a front-row seat and think, “Oh, this sucks”?

Bannon: I took Michael Porter’s classes at Harvard back in the ’80s, and globalization was — Harvard, at that time, treated this as the second law of thermodynamics. It was a natural property that could not be questioned. And then I went to the M. & A. department at Goldman Sachs and I worked with Hank Paulson. I was put on a lot of things to sell companies. You could just see America was being gutted. You had Mike Milken and the junk bond guys, and they were after these companies. And you go out there, and the companies were not particularly well run.

The guys were always going to the country club, and the management was very detached from labor — you see this evisceration, you saw these jobs going, and they were never coming back.

And, ok, it sucks that Wall Street guys can gut companies and make people's jobs disappear. I complain about it all the time. But it seems like a strange issue to use against Joe Biden, who might be the most pro-labor, anti-free trade president of my lifetime. Much more so than Trump was, I would say. But bigger questions come in when we ask who else, besides Wall Street guys, is in the elite. I'll come back to this.

Brooks: Let’s get back to the big narrative. Do you think immigration is the core issue here? That seems to be one issue that drives populist support everywhere.

Bannon: Immigration, spending — it’s the lack of confidence and self-loathing of their own civilization and their own culture. That’s the spiritual part that’s at the base. Immigration is just the manifestation of a loss of self-confidence. And it’s shocking.

Speaking as a pro-immigration moderate, I want to ask, how is immigration a symptom of a lack of self-confidence? I would say it is a sign of confidence. For me it reflects a belief that America is a great place for any sane, healthy person who wants to work hard, with plenty of room for millions more people who meet that description. I love our culture so much I want to share it with as many more people as we can readily fit it. I want to see America grow and thrive and prosper, and that is why I support immigration. Bannon likes to say that he is not an ethno-nationalist, just a nationalist; but without the ethno-, what's the complaint about immigrants who want to live the kind of life Bannon extols?

Not that Bannon doesn't have arguments:

I came up in the golden age of Pax Americana, a working-class dad who had a housewife and five kids. All went to Catholic schools. I mean, a guy who was a foreman and then lower-level white-collar management. That’s the kind of thing we aspire to have in this country. If you look at it country by country, it’s all the same. The lack of jobs, the lack of opportunities, the lack of self-confidence.

And I say, this is baloney. Anybody who wants to live at the level of working families in the 1960s – no air conditioning, one land-line phone, one car per family, etc. – can do it easily. I know people who have. To the rest of us, they seem poor, but in world-historical terms they are still rich. These days Americans need two salaries to support a family of four because we have opted to pursue a much more lavish standard of living. Maybe Bannon thinks there was some way we could have gotten much richer without all the economic changes of the past 50 years, but I doubt it. Certainly nobody else in the world has managed it. I have said this before, but I will say it again: it is just stupid to blame the system or the government or the elites for choices that we have made for ourselves. We opted for more stuff, and so we have to work for it.

And as for any lack of jobs, unemployment is under 4%.

How do immigrants fit it?

What we should be doing is cutting the number of foreign students in American universities by 50 percent immediately, because we’re never going to get a Hispanic and Black population in Silicon Valley unless you get them into the engineering schools. No. 2, we should staple an exit visa to their diploma. The foreign students can hang around for a week and party, but then they got to go home and make their own country great.

This is the worst nonsense yet. It is very common on the right to complain that somebody – white men, natives, whoever – can't get into college because some other group of people is taking up all the places. But in America, anybody who wants to go to college can. My local community college takes anyone (anyone) with a high school diploma or GED. I say that the problem is the reverse of what Bannon posits, which is that our colleges are full of students who shouldn't be there at all. And many of the students agree, which is why half or more of them drop out. Anybody with the brains and drive to become an engineer can go to college here and, and rather than being over-full, most engineering departments are constantly scrambling to find students. I suppose it's true that foreign students take up places at Harvard and Stanford that might have gone to natives, but who cares? Go someplace else and stop whining that other people are better students than you are.

Bannon: Our movement is metastasizing to something that’s different than America First; it’s American Citizens First.

Brooks: What does that mean?

Bannon: It means Americans have to get a better deal.

How? Personally, I think Americans get a great deal. Taxes is one of Banon's issues, so, ok, we could theoretically lower them, but that would mean spending less, and we all know what a hard problem that is.

But how else? Instead of offering actual ideas for changing things, Bannon just doubles down on the rhetoric of war:

We’re not reasonable. We’re unreasonable because we’re fighting for a republic. And we’re never going to be reasonable until we get what we achieve. We’re not looking to compromise. We’re looking to win.

So you’re going to go to war with the existing administrative state and the Praetorian Guard deep state. My point is, let’s, in the transition, get all the federal contracts. Close them all down. Let’s get MAGA in there. Right. Let’s get our guys in on the contracts. It’ll be a hostile takeover of the apparatus.

Let me refer back to my favorite example of what the government actually does: help build long-distance powerlines. Let's say the fantasy Trump administration decides to fire everyone at FERC and appoint MAGA people. What would they do differently? Would a MAGA administration be more aggressive about building powerlines? Or would it take the side of the populists who fight new powerlines through their neighborhoods? Would they continue the loan guarantees that help build the lines, or discontinue them because they are an expense that helps rich guys on Wall Street? 

How about the National Park Service? If anybody in America believes in American history, it's the NPS, where they proudly stand watch over our battlefields, presidential birthplaces, and so on; they think the national park is one of America's greatest creations, and they think the parks we have are one of the things that makes the US special and wonderful. Are we going to fire them for being leftists and replace them with MAGA people? Why? How would MAGA people run the parks differently? Sure, there are programs that could be cut, but most of the NPS budget goes for maintenance, law enforcement, safety, and administration.

Bannon seems to think that the "administrative state" is run by the "elites", so abolishing it would somehow help the rest of us. But without the administrative state, who is going to keep watch over the Wall Street guys and keep them from looting pension funds? Who is going to keep corporate polluters from poisoning our water? I know lots of people in the administrative state, and they see themselves as waging a constant battle against the country club elites that Bannon also sees as his enemies.

I simply don't see how Bannon's us vs. them framing makes any sense in these contexts, or in many others.

The one position Bannon holds that is at least clear and consistent is isolationism. He says he would cut off all aid to Ukraine tomorrow, and presumably forget about defending Taiwan and South Korea. Ok, that would save a lot of money, and it does represent a major break with the conservatism we have had for the past 75 years. I doubt it is a good idea, even for the Americans Bannon wants to put first. But even more it highlights how narrow and ultimately selfish Bannon's concerns are. He wants to lift his middle finger, not just the the pension-looters of Wall Street, but to everyone who doesn't look, act, and think exactly like him. 

The motto of this movement seems to be, to hell with everyone else, what's in this for me?

Summer Garden

Hollyhocks! Self seeded. And dahlias that survived the mild winter. It's a joy to have this explosion of flowers by the front door.

This has been a rough year for deer attacks, but for some reason I have the best bloom of hydrangeas ever; normally the deer eat all the buds early in the spring.

Gladiolas, last week before the deer ate them all.

Raspberries. One day last week, at 12:20 in the afternoon, bright, sunny, temperature over 90 degrees, a lone doe came wandering into the yard, nibbling on the berries right in front of us. I mean, have some respect.

More flowers.

And Kidu around his first birthday, which we decided to celebrate on the summer solstice.

The Perils of Desire

Wes Cecil is a philosophy professor with a big following on YouTube. His lectures are at an undergraduate level but they are clear and often amusing, so if there is some philosopher or topic you want an introduction to, he is a good option. Two of my sons are big fans.

I was moved to write about Cecil by this lecture, The Accursed Share. The topic here is desire. As Cecil notes, all traditional societies are intensely suspicious of desire. The Buddhists have taken this the farthest, arguing that the supreme goal of human life is to completely extinguish desire. But skepticism about desire runs in different ways through Stoicism, Confucianism, Christianity, and so on. When nineteenth-century romantic rebels tried to come up with the most radical slogan they could imagine, they hit on "Do what thou wilt."

Cecil says that most cultures practiced arranged marriage because they absolutely did not trust young people to choose mates rationally, since the young are blinded by desire. We've all seen this happen, he says, people hooking up because of intense sexual attraction even though everyone around them can see disaster looming: "pain coming in 5, 4, 3, 2 . . ."

But we celebrate desire. Cecil says he is fascinated by the lies cultures tell their children. In our society, the big lie is, "You can be anything you want." That is, our big lie foregrounds desire. The most important thing you can do is figure out what you want, so you can get it.

Cecil spends much of this lecture asking where our desires come from, especially our desires for material things. These cannot, he says, really come from inside us, because we evolved in societies where none of the thing we covet even existed. You can't have a natural desire for a flashy car. These desires must come from outside us, from our society.

All of which is basically true. It is true that all the old philosophical traditions are suspicious of desire, and that many of the things we covet are recent inventions of dubious value. But note the anti-freedom agenda here; traditional cultures are especially dubious of any desire to be other than what you are. If you are born a peasant, you should strive to be a good peasant, by imitating the ways of your forebears. If you are born an aristocrat, you should strive to be a good aristocrat, by imitating your aristocratic ancestors. And if you happen to be an outsider or newcomer, well, then you had better hide that as best you can by imitating the old families around you.

Which raises questions for me about the extent to which frowning on desire is at base a mechanism of control. I have long wondered if the evolutionary point of our sometimes outrageous sexuality is to shake things up, to break up these mechanisms of control and spread genes around in a more random way.

I certainly acknowledge that from a historical perspective it is bizarre that we use up so much breath telling young people to pursue their dreams.  But what is the alternative? We don't have ancestral plots of land that we can tend, or ancestral houses we can preserve. We can't work in the same factories our fathers worked in. Not only can we choose our own careers, we must; there is nobody else to do it for us. I work in a field that did not even exist when my father was young. 

I am not sure there is much value in thinking too much about the strangeness of our obsession with desire, because I think we are stuck with it.

Nor do I see much point in wondering which desires are somehow our own and which come from outside us. We all live in societies and take our notions of the good life from what we see around us. On the other hand I don't think there is anything more deeply rooted in our evolutionary selves than the desire for respect. So if you want a vacation house because all your colleagues have vacation houses, is that internal or external? An absurd concoction of consumer capitalism, or a deep-seated desire to be thought worthy by your peers? I think this is a meaningless question.

I would sum up the situation in wealthy western countries like this: we are wealthier than anyone in the past, and have more freedom than anyone in the past, but instead of filling us with joy this makes us anxious. No matter how much we have, we always want more; no matter how safe and secure our homes, we lie awake worrying. So far as we can tell we are not any happier than our ancestors. For every person who is thriving in our rapidly changing world, seizing opportunities that never before existed, another is floundering in indecision at the array of choices and outcomes before us.

Philosophy lectures will not solve any of this. What good would it do us to be suspicious of our desires? What could we rely on instead? Part of me cringes at song lyrics like, "How will I know? Trust your feelings. . . ." But what else could we trust? Many of the people who complain about our consumerism and general cult of desire also mock our advice industry, the explosion of self-help books and happiness gurus and so on. Of course the problem with advice gurus is that they disagree about everything, so you still have to pick the advice that best suits your own desires.

I think we have proved by now that neither freedom nor material abundance will make us happy. But neither will hewing to tradition. We need to find new paths, because history's storm surge has washed away the old ones. By all means, interrogate your desires; try to figure out which ones are reasonable, and which ones point toward shipwreck. But don't give up on them, because in the end they are all we have to guide us.

The Disinformation Manifesto

From Scott Alexander/Siskind's fantasy presidential debate:

Alexander: Mr. Trump, you’ve been accused of being one of the chief spreaders of misinformation, both personally and through your website Truth Social. What do you have to say for yourself?

Trump: GK Chesterton said that fairy tales were more than true, not because they tell us that dragons are real, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. In the same way, I think misinformation is more than true - not because it tells us there are pedophiles in pizza parlors, but because it tells us that pizza parlor pedophiles can be discovered and dragged into the light.

The COVID vaccine might not literally contain a microchip that lets Bill Gates control your mind. But we really do grant unaccountable tech billionaires root access to our culture. And seemingly pro-social requests really can be a vector for establishing control. I, Donald Trump, might not literally lead a euconspiracy of patriotic Americans who are about to blow the lid off the corrupt Biden administration and liberal establishment. But it really is true that even in the darkest night, when all seems lost, there are seeds of hope visible to those who search for them, and that even the most invincible-seeming tyranny can fall in an instant if enough people push at it.

So who cares about the literal truths? The average American lives in a dull apartment building in a decaying city, his subsistence dependent on the whims of macroeconomic forces he cannot comprehend, let alone control. You want to tell him to spend his tiny sliver of time on Earth thinking about interest rates and carbon credits? We need to re-mythologize the world! We need to re-weave the rainbow, re-haunt the air, re-gnome the mine! If the scientists have robbed us of trolls under bridges, we will replace them with Satanic cults in state capitols. If they take our soma, we will invent adrenochrome.

If I’m elected president, I plan to double down on this. I will spread rumors of griffons in the Rocky Mountains, allude to unspeakable things beneath the deserts of Nevada, and question whether the Gateway Arch in St. Louis is a mystical portal to dream-realms beyond the setting sun. Not because any of these things are true. But because they are more than true. They’re what makes this country great. 

Links 28 June 2024

Street scene by Tokyo-based photographer RK

Fascinating review of The Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa, a Japanese man who was one of the early leaders of the opening to the West in the nineteenth century, one of the finalists in Scott Siskind's annual book review contest.

The Smithsonian acquires the largest known collection of slave badges from Charleston, South Carolina, which slaves working away from their homes had to carry. 

Right now LLM AIs can write political messages about as persuasive as those written by humans. This paper argues that it will be very hard for them to become much more persuasive, since order of magnitude increases in computing power seem to yield at most a tiny increase in persuasiveness. Right now there isn't any evidence that superhuman intelligence will be good for much. E.g., AI analysis of things like protein shapes is much faster than having humans do it, but the AI has not made any major discoveries or found any new approaches. Still waiting for the first radical new idea to come from AI.

Kiosks: photographs by David Navarro and Martyna Sobecka of Eastern Europe's disappearing tiny shops.

Auroville, a failed attempt to create a utopian community in southern India based on western political ideas and Indian spirituality; founded by anti-colonial activists, it nonetheless ended up recreating some of colonialism's sins.

Kevin Drum reviews the texts about Israel/Palentine issues that got three Columbia deans suspended, finds them unobjectionable. In a situation of complete mistrust, the banal can seem insulting or threatening. Speaking of which, really sad story in the NY Times about tensions at the UCSF medical school, doctors accusing each other of "harm" and "oppression," statements that minority patients feel "unsafe" with Jewish doctors, etc. 

Major paper arguing that dingoes were domesticated animals before they went wild in Australia. I always thought this was so obvious that I never paid much attention to the debate, but apparently there are biologists who insist that dingoes are wild animals with none of the usual genetic markers of domestication. (NY Times, paper)

Dona Tartt (author of The Goldfinch) explains that there never was a golden age of art; artists have always been beset by the demands of money, politics, ideology, and so on. Art somehow endures because we value this "uncanny force bursting into the world, " with its glimpses of "the outlying lands beyond opinion and ideology."

The poetry of ambivalence.

Sabine Hossenfelder reviews some new evidence that creates big problems for most Dark Matter theories, 6-minute video.

In our world there is a constant rhetorical trope of distinguishing between "traditional" and "modern" parenting, usually with the idea that traditional is good. But, in fact, people have raised children in many different ways going back as far as we can see. Except for some really basic points – breastfeeding, lots of mother-baby contact – there is no consistency among traditional peoples. (I have some thoughts on human social diversity here.)

The University of Austin tries a new method for hiring faculty.

Kraut's 32-minute video at YouTube seems to be a decent introduction to the rise of Japanese militarism in the 1930s. But since I still haven't found a good book on this topic I won't claim to be able to judge. Sadly the rest of the series he projected on this topic seems not to exist.

Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) is one of the most widely assigned literary works in the US these days. But I never knew that her brother John S. Jacobs was also an escapee and an abolitionist. John Jacobs was a sailor who went, among other places, to Australia, and it was there, in 1855, that he published his own personal narrative. It rings with anger – the subtitle is, "The United States Governed by 600,000 Despots" – and it makes people wonder how much the other slave narratives were toned down by white editors so as not to alarm voters. It was rediscovered by an Australian researcher and has now been published. (U of Chicago Press, NY Times, wikipedia)

Mildly interesting essay on how Michael Foucault's analysis of power is being used in the contemporary discourse: "Foucault’s ingenious methods for analyzing power have now emerged as but one more strategy for the maintenance and expansion of existing institutional power." Also good on how bleak Foucault's vision of society was; to him, everything anybody says in any context is likely to be a play for power.

NY Times feature on the clothes worn by the top prospects in the NBA draft. Some pretty nice duds, when you consider that a lot of these guys are 19. Props to the guy who admitted his mother picked out his Yves Saint Laurent suit. Incidentally picks 1, 2, and 6 were all Afro-French; the first American taken was a white guy, which hasn't happened since 1977. After starting out white and then going mostly African American the NBA has become a world leader in multi-culturalism.

Germany's latest census revises the population down from 84.1 million to 82.7 million. The government says the higher figure was just an error. The next time you are tempted to believe official figures with decimal points in them, consider that the German government can be 1.6% off in its count of people, who are much easier to count than most other things. How accurate are economic statistics in Myanmar or Nigeria?

Status of fusion report from Construction Physics. Conclusion: "there’s a good chance a working fusion reactor is near," but it won't be cheap, and with the price of solar and geothermal power falling so fast, by the time fusion power works we may not want it. On earth, anyway.

The men spend who spend long airplane flights doing absolutely nothing.

The pirate king of 10th-century Japan.

Nice photo sets from two recent contests: one for drone photography, and one in color photography.

Summary thread on Russia's recent offensive around Kharkiv (Twitter/X, Threadreader)

The rambling thoughts of a miserable, completely checked-out Russian soldier, who finds everything pointless. (Twitter/X)

Scarred by Fires I Never Even Saw

Random Image from Our Report on the Fire Cleanup

Back in 2020 there were catastrophic fires in the hills all around San Francisco Bay. My company had a role in the cleanup from these fires, because many historic structures were destroyed – old ranch houses, a perfectly preserved logging camp from the 1910s, cabins built by the CCC in the 1930s, one of America's first Boy Scout camps, etc. We sent people to these sites to photograph the remains before heavy machinery was brought in to scrape the debris away, and on some sites to monitor the work to try to limit the impact to any historical stuff left behind. I never went to California on this, but I had a support role and reviewed all the documents we produced. This is on my mind because some questions about missing documentation just came back to me two weeks ago.

Ditto, Damage from the CZU Lightning Fire

Back in the 1970s, when I was a young teenager, I went through a phase of wanting to be an architect. I read all the books on architecture I could get from the public library, perused glossy magaines, and so on. At that time there was a lot of excitement about west coast pseudo-ecological design, from million-dollar redwood houses built in redwood groves (with hot tubs and conversation pits) to hippie shacks. Some of these builders made a point of not cutting down any trees but finding ways to nestle their houses among them.

Reading through the material coming back from the fire clean-up I saw dozens of reports of what happened to those houses: burned to nothing. One story that made me particularly sad was about a sort-of hippie town called Last Chance where about twenty like-minded people built cabins or A-frames in the redwoods and lived out their off-the-grid dreams. The place was incinerated, nothing left but the concrete pad on which their community center had sat. Three people were killed because they were too slow to flee.

So, anyway, the NY Times has a feature today about a beautiful little house built on the coast of Washington, where “the steep, six-acre lot is shaded by Douglas fir trees.” The owners say stuff like:

I think it’s amazing. It produces this sense of belonging and quietude by engaging with the site’s circumstances and ambient conditions. It’s a divine place.

And all I can think is, it's going to burn to ashes. If you're thinking that being on the coast of rainy Washington will protect it, sorry, no; western forests burn. All of them. It's just a matter of time.

Denis Villeneuve's "Dune"

Last night I watched Part II of Denis Villeneuve's Dune with my youngest son. Dune was one of the key books of my adolescence, and I read it at least three times; he has never read it. We both thought the movie was excellent. 

It is visually magnificent, the acting is good enough, and even the action sequences are ok. I have developed a strong allergy to dumb things in movie action scenes, so much that I can hardly stand to watch the average sci-fi thriller, but this movie was better and the dumb things mostly flashed by quickly. Enough of the plot was included across the two films (5 hours 21 minutes in total) for my son to follow the story and for me to reimmerse myself in it. I recommend it. 

I thought the business of the Benne Gesserit and their prophecies was particularly well-handled. These witchy women have spread prophecies across the galaxy that they then use to reinforce their power, but the question of whether those prophecies are true seems to hang open; certainly characters in the book disagree about it, and when they seem to be fulfilled it is in a way no one expected.

Dune is just an awesome book for a certain sort of teenage boy. Whether it is for anyone else I couldn't say; there is some heavy gender weirdness that I imagine might bother some girls, and neither the story nor the mythos is robust enough to survive educated adult skepticism. But it completely drew in my 15-year-old self and resonated powerfully in my imagination for at least a decade. I was especially taken with the idea of a hero who is trained in both the feminine mysticism of the Bene Gesserit and the masculine ways of war and calculation, thus combining masculine and feminine powers. I think for me it ranked behind only the Lord of the Rings in captivating me and launching my reveries.

It pleases me that it has finally been put on screen in a version good enough that I can happily share it with my sons.