27-Year-Olds Today

Back in 2002, the Department of Education began following 15,000 high school sophomores to find out how they made the transition to adulthood. In 2012 they handed out massive questionnaires to all these folks, and they have now published the results. The Atlantic has an interesting summary. If they stayed on the traditional schedule, these folks would have graduated from college in 2008, just in time for the big crash and the start of the Great Recession. The chart above shows how much education these folks have gotten by 2012. The researchers asked them all as high school sophomores how much education they expected to get; almost exactly half said they expected to get bachelor's degrees, so 17% have fallen short of their goals in the department. Money had a big impact here; of students whose parents were in the top 25% by wealth, 60% had bachelor's degrees, vs. only 15% of those in the poorest quarter. It also helped a lot to go directly into college. Of those who did, 11% have master's degrees and 42% bachelor's, so more than half finished their undergraduate work in a timely fashion. Of those who waited more than 13 months, only 6% have finished a bachelor's degree.

Interesting chart showing how far they live from where they were going to high school in 2002.

Overall, 49% are single, 28% are married, and 23% cohabiting with a romantic partner. Only 23% live with their parents.

And one more, showing how much money they earned. At the time of the survey, 69% of this cohort were working more than 35 hours a week;  40% have spent time unemployed since 2008. Across all education groups, 80% say their finances are stressful. Interesting.

Nonviolence and Gun Ownership

Historian Nicholas Johnson explains the “what and why” of Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms:

This black tradition of arms takes root early and ranges fully into the modern era. It is demonstrated in Frederick Douglass’s nineteenth century advice of a good revolver as the best response to slave catchers. It is evident in mature form in 1963, when Hartman Turnbow of Mississippi fought off a Klan attack with rifle fire. Turnbow considered this fully consistent with the principles of the freedom movement, explaining, “I wasn’t being non-nonviolent, I was just protectin’ my family.”

The black tradition of arms has been submerged because it seems hard to reconcile with the dominant narrative of nonviolence in the modern civil-rights movement. But that superficial tension is resolved by the long-standing distinction that was vividly evoked by movement stalwart Fannie Lou Hamer. Hamer’s approach to segregationists who dominated Mississippi politics was, “Baby you just got to love ’em. Hating just makes you sick and weak.” But, asked how she survived the threats from midnight terrorists, Hamer responded, “I’ll tell you why. I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom and the first cracker even look like he wants to throw some dynamite on my porch won’t write his mama again.”

Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun

Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842) rose to fame as the court painter of Marie Antoinette, which seemed like a good career move at the time but led to certain problems later. Not least, her identity was so defined by her association with the unserious queen that posterity has had trouble taking her seriously, too. She had talent, yes, but she often put it in the service of the precious and adorable. Consider this Portrait of Lady Perceval (1804) -- it is lovely and full of life, but it hardly seems to belong in the era of Napoleonic grandeur and Byronic brooding.  She would have done better in our unserious age.

It probably didn't help that she looked like one of her own creations. Self-Portrait in  a Straw Hat, 1782.

Self portrait, 1790. According to the Getty:

Vigée Le Brun's father, a portrait painter, died when she was twelve, so she taught herself to paint by copying the paintings of established masters in collections around Paris. Later in life, after studying the paintings of Peter Paul Rubens, she adopted his technique of painting layers of brilliant color on wood panels to achieve animated, polished, and supremely attractive portraits of European royalty and aristocracy.

She painted Marie Antoinette and her children no less than 30 times.

Above, the notorious Lady Hamilton, whose hobbies included seducing admirals and having her portrait painted in the guise of various wicked women from myth and history (1791).

When the Revolution came, Vigée Le Brun fled into exile and became a wandering artist, painting portraits of royalty and nobility across Europe. She went first to Rome and then to Russia, where many leading nobles sat for her -- La comtesse Skavronskaia (1796). The pillow is an intriguing touch.

Portrait of Princess Belozersky, Detail (1798)

Here is a fascinating historical item: this is no maid, but the Queen of Prussia, Luise of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, wife of Friedrich Wilhelm III (1801). This was the height of Romantic naturalism, when the most stylish women wore their hair down, their dresses loose and their hearts on their sleeves. With huge pearls, so nobody really mistook them for maids.

Anna Ivanovna Tolstoy (1795).

Prince Ivan Baryatinsky (1796).

And a self-portrait with her daughter (1786). When she returned to France in 1805, after 13 years of exile, she remarked that "her only true happiness has been in painting."

Peacemaking Monks in Kiev

As the conflict between the protesters and the government of President Yanukovych surges back and forth, leaving more than 50 corpses, several Orthodox monks have stationed themselves between the two sides, trying to prevent further violence. Rather than trying to engage with either side, they just pray. At one point they chanted the Easter service: “Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life. . . .”

Archaeology in Patterson Park and the Battle of Baltimore, 1814

I've just started working on a job I am very excited about, trying to relocate the earthworks built around Baltimore in 1814 when the British attacked the city -- you know, Francis Scott Key and the bombs bursting in air and the star-spangled banner yet waving and all that.

The earthworks in Patterson Park were built by militia and citizen volunteers in August and September, 1814, in response to the British invasion of the Chesapeake. The work may have begun when the first British landings were made, but it was pushed forward after the American defeat at the Battle of Bladensburg on August 24. On September 12, the British landed about 4,000 soldiers and marines at North Point and these men advanced along North Point Road toward the city as a force of frigates and bomb ships made their way across the shoals off Sparrow’s Point. An American force tried to block their way at the head of Bear Creek, but in the Battle of North Point the British pushed them aside and continued marching on the city. On the afternoon of September 13 they arrived in front of the earthworks and got a look at this formidable position, bristling with cannon and manned by several hundred regular soldiers, several detachments of sailors and marines, and about 10,000 militia, along with 110 cannons.

The British hoped to attack Baltimore from land and sea, but to get ships into position to support the land force they had to pass Fort McHenry and the adjacent barrier of sunken vessels and chains. When Fort McHenry held out under the intense bombardment of September 13-14, the British land force was left without naval help. The British land commander, Major General Robert Ross, was killed at North Point, and his replacement, Colonel Arthur Brooke, anguished about whether to attack the city. If I took the place, he wrote in his diary, I should have been the greatest man in England. If I lost, my military character was gone for ever. In the end, he decided not to risk it. The British turned back, and the Americans claimed the victory.

The naval part of this battle is well commemorated at Fort McHenry, the land fighting much less so. Most of the North Point battlefield has been developed, and the city’s defenses swallowed by its growth. However, one section of the earthworks, including a key bastion, was in what is now Patterson Park, and they were visible as recently as 1907 (above).

An even better clue to finding the earthworks (since the ones by the pagoda might be later reconstructions) is this map of a Civil War regimental camp made in 1862. In this image the earthworks are clearly marked as being from the War of 1812; a square behind them is labeled "Magazine of 1812."

Our plan is to use remote sensing (magnetometry and ground-penetrating radar) to map out the buried earthworks as best we can, and then dig trenches by hand to expose a few cross-sections. We also hope to pinpoint that magazine (which would have been dug to a depth of six feet or so) and see what was thrown in it after the battle. We will make an attempt to find remains of the militia camps, but given how much has happened in the neighborhood since 1814 this is a long shot. Maybe some of the officers were sticklers for regulations and insisted on digging latrines. We will be working on Saturdays this April and we welcome volunteers.

Our historical research will be directed toward learning something about the 10,000 men who were behind those earthworks. They came from all over Maryland, some even from Virginia, Pennsylvania and Delaware. With so many names to work with we ought to be able to find a few dozen for whom we can write little biographies, men who left letters or diaries or lots of other records, or whose memories were later written down by family historians. So if anybody who reads this knows about an ancestor who was part of this battle, we would love to hear from you.

All of this is tied to the 200th anniversary of the battle coming up in September, and we hope to get in the news and generate a lot of public interest in the event and its remains. Our client is Baltimore Heritage, a small nonprofit devoted to historic preservation and neighborhood revitalization; funding for our work is coming from the American Battlefield Protection Program of the National Park Service. You can follow the project on a blog being run by Baltimore Heritage here, and I will also be posting regular reports.

The NIH Worries about Bad Science

Francis Collins, head of NIH, and Lawrence Tabak, one of his top deputies, have published an editorial in Nature complaining of “a troubling frequency of published reports that claim a significant result, but fail to be reproducible.” It is interesting to see that the heads of big science funding bodies are aware of these problems and starting to think about ways to combat them:

Factors include poor training of researchers in experimental design; increased emphasis on making provocative statements rather than presenting technical details; and publications that do not report basic elements of experimental design. Crucial experimental design elements that are all too frequently ignored include blinding, randomization, replication, sample-size calculation and the effect of sex differences. And some scientists reputedly use a ‘secret sauce’ to make their experiments work — and withhold details from publication or describe them only vaguely to retain a competitive edge. What hope is there that other scientists will be able to build on such work to further biomedical progress? . . .

Exactly. But as I have argued, the biggest obstacle to reform is the meritocratic nature of the scientific world and of our society more broadly. In a world where more people want to be research scientists than there are jobs for them, there has to be some way of deciding who gets the good slots in the system, and the measure we use is journal publication.

Perhaps the most vexed issue is the academic incentive system. It currently over-emphasizes publishing in high-profile journals. No doubt worsened by current budgetary woes, this encourages rapid submission of research findings to the detriment of careful replication. To address this, the NIH is contemplating modifying the format of its 'biographical sketch' form, which grant applicants are required to complete, to emphasize the significance of advances resulting from work in which the applicant participated, and to delineate the part played by the applicant. Other organizations such as the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have used this format and found it more revealing of actual contributions to science than the traditional list of unannotated publications. The NIH is also considering providing greater stability for investigators at certain, discrete career stages, utilizing grant mechanisms that allow more flexibility and a longer period than the current average of approximately four years of support per project.

This is an interesting change; perhaps if researchers in their 30s can get seven or eight years of funding rather than four they will do more careful work and not rush their publications. But they will still face the "publish or perish" test eventually, so we'll have to wait and see if these measures make any difference.

Celts to Vikings 2014

Met my students for the first time tonight. It went pretty well, although I talked too much. Combination of nerves and inadequate preparation, I guess; plus I was thrown off by missing my first class and starting a week behind.

We set some of our themes for the class: barbarians and Romans, especially, and my notion that medieval Europe results from the fusion of their worlds;  and we began our exploration of Europe's two different models of male-female relations and the status of women by reading some Roman texts on famously virtuous women.

Next time I will slow down and push my students to talk more.

The Pope's Doves, or, Hopes for Peace in a Savage World

So the pope and two schoolchildren released two "peace doves" from the Vatican balcony.

But Rome is a tough place for tame doves. The first was promptly attacked and bloodied by a gull.

The second suffered the same fate at the hands of a crow. More pictures and video here.

Snow Leopard

Caught by a camera trap in northern Pakistan. More at National Geographic.

Copernicus vs. Ptolemy, or, Today's Fact about How Science Evolves

Physicist Frank Tipler:

Many have even claimed that Copernicus was not superior in predictive power over Ptolemy. I myself decided to check this claim, by looking at Tycho's notebooks. I discovered that between 1564 and 1601, Tycho compared Copernicus's predictions and Ptolemy's predictions with his own observations 294 times. As I expected, Copernicus was superior. So Copernicus' theory was confirmed as experimentally superior to Ptolemy long before Galileo. 

I suppose you have to have read a lot of history of science to be as awed by this discovery as I was, but I really must have read in a dozen places that Copernicus' theory was not any better than Ptolemy's at predicting where the planets would be seen. (To be accurate it required the refinements introduced by Kepler, who showed that orbits are elliptical and the speed of planets increases as they near the sun.) But if it really was better, even if not perfect -- and Tycho Brahe was the most accurate naked eye astronomer in history -- that puts its rapid acceptance among astronomers in a completely different light.

The Recovering Libertarian

Scott Parker has written an essay about how and why he stopped being a libertarian. Some interesting passages:

I found my way to libertarianism in my teen years when I began reading some of its introductory texts and was attracted to the internal consistency of its policies. If you accepted that the individual was sacrosanct and the government’s only role was to protect the individual, everything else pretty much followed. Unlike mainstream liberalism and conservatism, which were constantly engaged in negotiations between social and economic freedoms, libertarianism was systematically clean and neat. So much so that I quickly stopped concerning myself with how ideas played out in the world. The ideas themselves were enough. . . .

It felt good to be libertarian. I could win political debates (to my satisfaction) by applying the internally consistent reasoning I so admired to any issue. My reluctance to compromise was a virtue that straightened my posture. I took my rigidity as a sign not of narrow-mindedness but of integrity, the consequence of careful advancement from first principles. This particular kind of coherency put me self-satisfactorily and peacefully to sleep on many nights.

I think this is a big part of libertarianism's appeal, as it was of communism's: it has an answer for everything, reasoned out from simple first principles. To a certain kind of mind this is much more appealing than trying to sort through the mess of real problems.

But the truth an ideologue is at pains to accept is that no life can live up to ideology. We are a messy species living messy lives. And we are lucky for this. The intellectual libertarian wants the world to be the kind of ideal world it never can be. He (and it’s often he) is unable to live with ambiguity and compromise. The beautiful (it is a kind of beauty) logical edifice of libertarianism is built on the faulty premise that this is the kind of world that is built on logical edifices.

I like this last line; the human world is indeed an illogical world, and no sort of pure logic will ever untangle it. What we need instead is compassionate empiricism.

Famous Last Words

Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.

--Ludwig Wittgenstein

Helmets and Shields of the Renaissance

Say what you want about Renaissance princes, they had lovely toys. Medusa shield of Charles V.

Burgonet of Guidobaldo II della Rovere, made in Milan around 1533.

Parade shield of Henry II of France, c. 1555.

Lion helm made at Milan, c. 1550.

Engraved portrait of Henry II of France at the Age of 28 by Niccolo della Casa, 1547; sadly, that lovely suit of armor does not survive.

Henry VIII's famous fool helmet, made by Konrad Seusenhofer, c. 1513.

Parade shield depicting Emperor Charles the V at the Battle of Mühlberg, made in Milan around 1570.

Helmet of Charles V, by Filippo and Francesco Negroli, Milan, c. 1545.

Yet more of Charles V's gear, also made by the Negrolis, this set from 1533.

Fox-faced helmet of Emperor Ferdinand I, made at Innsbruck by Hans Seusenhofer and Leonard Meurl, c. 1528.

The 2014 Edge Question: What Scientific Idea should be Retired?

This year's Edge question is not as interesting as some earlier questions, but I guess they can't win every time. I found a few answers interesting; except as noted, all the text is quoted from these authors' replies:

Altruism (Tor Nørretranders)

This concept is rooted in the notion that human beings (and animals) are really dominated by selfishness and egoism so that you need a concept to explain why they sometimes behave unselfish and kind to others. But the reality is different: Humans are deeply bound to other humans and most actions are really reciprocal and in the interest of both parties (or, in he case of hatred, in the disinterest of both). The starting point is neither selfishness nor altruism, but the state of being bound together. It is an illusion to believe that you can be happy when no one else is. Or that other people will not be affected by your unhappiness.

Knowing is Half the Battle (Laurie R. Santos and Tamar Gendler)

Children of the 1980's may fondly remember a TV cartoon called G. I. Joe . . . Following each of these moralizing pronouncements came the show's famous epithet: "Now you know. And knowing is half the battle."

While there may be some domains where knowing is half the battle, there are many more where it is not. Recent work in cognitive science has demonstrated that knowing is a shockingly tiny portion of the battle for most real world decisions. . . . The lesson of much contemporary research in judgment and decision-making is that knowledge— at least in the form of our consciously accessible representation of a situation—is rarely the central factor controlling our behavior.

Me: this horrible idea goes back at least to Socrates, and despite 2400 years of contrary experience I still see versions of it all the time, e.g., if only people had more information about nutrition they would eat better.

Information Overload (Jay Rosen)

There's no such thing as information overload. There's only filter failure.

Large Randomized Controlled Trials (Dean Ornish)

It is a commonly held but erroneous belief that a larger study is always more rigorous or definitive than a smaller one, and a randomized controlled trial is always the gold standard . However, there is a growing awareness that size does not always matter and a randomized controlled trial may introduce its own biases. We need more creative experimental designs.

The Uncertainty Principle (Kai Krause)

Mental Illness is Nothing But Brain Illness (Ian Gold and Joel Gold)

That a theory of mental illness should make reference to the world outside the brain is no more surprising than that the theory of cancer has to make reference to cigarette smoke. And yet what is commonplace in cancer research is radical in psychiatry. The time has come to expand the biological model of psychiatric disorder to include the context in which the brain functions. In understanding, preventing and treating mental illness, we will rightly continue to look into the neurons and DNA of the afflicted and unafflicted. To ignore the world around them would be not only bad medicine but bad science.

Habitable Zone (Dimitar D. Sasselov)

Me: amen to this. The notion of a "habitable zone" assumes all life in the universe will be like earth's, which is a dreary failure of imagination.

Rational Actor Models (Susan Fiske)

The idea that people operate mainly in the service of narrow self-interest is already moribund, as social psychology and behavioral economics have shown. We now know that people are not rational actors, instead often operating on automatic, based on bias, or happy with hunches.

Sadness is Always Bad, Happiness is Always Good (June Gruber)

Left-Brain/Right-Brain (Sarah-Jayne Blakemore)

This is pseudo-science and is not based on knowledge of how the brain works.

The Self (Bruce Hood)

It seems almost redundant to call for the retirement of the free willing self as the idea is neither scientific nor is this the first time that the concept has been dismissed for lacking empirical support. . . . . Yet, the self, like a conceptual zombie, refuses to die.

String Theory (Frank Tipler)

Me: The anti-string theory forces are sensing blood these days.

Common Sense (Robert Provine)

We fancy ourselves intelligent, conscious and alert, and thinking our way through life. This is an illusion. We are deluded by our brain's generation of a sketchy, rational narrative of subconscious, sometimes irrational or fictitious events that we accept as reality. These narratives are so compelling that they become common sense and we use them to guide our lives. In cases of brain damage, neurologists use the term confabulation to describe a patient's game but flawed attempt to produce an accurate narrative of life events. I suggest we be equally wary of everyday, non-pathological confabulation and retire the common sense hypothesis that we are rational beings in full conscious control of our lives. Indeed, we may be passengers in our body, just going along for the ride, and privy only to second-hand knowledge of our status, course and destination.

The Universe (Seth Lloyd)

Science is Self-Correcting (Alex Holcombe)

Cause and Effect (W. Daniel Hillis)

The cause-and-effect paradigm does not just fail at the quantum scale. It also falls apart when we try to use causation to explain complex dynamical systems like the biochemical pathways of a living organism, the transactions of an economy, or the operation of the human mind. These systems all have patterns of information flow that defy our tools of storytelling. A gene does not "cause" the trait like height, or a disease like cancer. The stock market did not go up "because" the bond market went down. These are just our feeble attempts to force a storytelling framework onto systems that do not work like stories. For such complex systems, science will need more powerful explanatory tools, and we will learn to accept the limits of our old methods of storytelling.

Mouse Models (Azra Raza)

A recent scientific paper showed that all 150 drugs tested at the cost of billions of dollars in human trials of sepsis failed because the drugs had been developed using mice.

Statistical Significance (Charles Seife)

Simplicity (A.C. Grayling)

Collapse of the Wave Function (Freeman Dyson)

According to the rules of quantum mechanics, the motions of objects are unpredictable. The wave-function tells us only the probabilities of the possible motions. When an object is observed, the observer sees where it is, and the uncertainty of the motion disappears. Knowledge removes uncertainty. There is no mystery here.

Me: This seems remarkably clear and straightforward, so much so that I am wondering how this got to be the subject of raging debate. Is Dyson leaving something important out? Anyone out there know?

Certainty (Richard Saul Wurman)

Immigrant Success, or, You Can't Have Everything

Except for the children of millionaires, the most successful people in America are immigrants from India, whose family income is twice the national average. (They also have the lowest divorce rate.) Chinese, Korean, Caribbean and West African immigrants are also doing quite well. As Jewish immigrants did before them. Why? Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld:

It turns out that for all their diversity, the strikingly successful groups in America today share three traits that, together, propel success. The first is a superiority complex — a deep-seated belief in their exceptionality. The second appears to be the opposite — insecurity, a feeling that you or what you’ve done is not good enough. The third is impulse control.

You remember Amy Chua as the original "tiger mom." But  here she is just presenting data, not giving advice, and the data is very interesting.

It’s odd to think of people feeling simultaneously superior and insecure. Yet it’s precisely this unstable combination that generates drive: a chip on the shoulder, a goading need to prove oneself. Add impulse control — the ability to resist temptation — and the result is people who systematically sacrifice present gratification in pursuit of future attainment. Ironically, each element of the Triple Package violates a core tenet of contemporary American thinking.

Absolutely. We hate the whole idea of ethnic groups feeling inherently superior, yet the data shows that people from such groups are more successful. Our whole paradigm for mental health is built around escaping from feelings of inadequacy, and yet such feelings motivate people to work hard and succeed:

Each of the three traits has its own pathologies. Impulse control can undercut the ability to experience beauty, tranquillity and spontaneous joy. Insecure people feel like they’re never good enough. “I grew up thinking that I would never, ever please my parents,” recalls the novelist Amy Tan. “It’s a horrible feeling.”

So there you have it. Raise your children to be happy and confident and they will, on average, earn less money and go less far in their careers than the children of immigrants who instill a deep insecurity and a painful need to be worthy of the family.

Ryan McGinness, or, The Cosmic Giggle

Ryan McGiness was born in 1972 and grew up in Virginia Beach, surfing, skating, and sharing his peers' obsession with brand names and hot trends. He studied design at Carnegie-Mellon and then went to New York to become an artist. And he is succeeding famously, with major shows and installations all over.  (Black Hole/Pearl White, 2010).

I discovered him because of a huge multi-panel work in the new atrium of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, which carries the title Art History is not Linear (2010).

He has a thing for images that communicate something -- recognizable bits of the global visual culture. He calls these "units of meaning," and most of his art is collages of these images thrown together in ways that he vaguely hints mean something more than the sum of their parts. According to his web site, he

pulls from signage, advertising, and the graphics of the skate world from which he comes to make bold and expressive works that play with symbols, text, and meaning.

(Destiny vs. Ambition, 2008)

The Richmond Times-Dispatch called him an "info-age Warhol"; curator John Ravenal of the VMFA says he "plays with the boundary between high and low culture."  He says that his overlapping images represent our mental world, and our need to extract information from an effectively infinite web of competing signs. (The Cosmic Giggle, 2013)

I am not sure what to make of these. They are different and not boring, but they don't really speak to me. (Spiral Dynamics of Evolution, 2013)

They have, I might say, the virtues and vices of our age: they are exciting, colorful and information-rich, but they are also busy, crowded, a little garish, and shallow; they try to make up for their lack of clarity and depth with a dazzling display of knowledge and graphic prowess. But they are interesting.  (Everything is Everywhere, 2013) Many more on his web site.

Raymond Aron, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the Limits of Being Right

World-famous philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre was not the best student in his graduate school class. That was Raymond Aron (1905-1983), who had the top score on their exams and then won a prize for his dissertation on Max Weber and the philosophy of history. Then the careers of that whole generation were derailed by World War II. Aron at least was not surprised, since had had been in Germany in 1933 and came back telling everyone that war was inevitable. After France fell to the Nazis, Sartre hung around Paris, womanizing and wrestling with philosophical concepts too obscure for the Gestapo to care what he was up to. Aron fled to London to serve the Free French cause and ended up editing their newspaper.

After the war Europe was divided into democratic and communist camps, and Sartre led most of France’s intellectuals in championing communism. This was a decade after Stalin’s show trials that made it clear to anyone paying attention what his regime was like, but Sartre still found ways to justify everything. While Stalin’s thugs were clamping down in eastern Europe and killing or jailing thousands of “enemies of socialism,” Sartre was singing the praises of revolution. Sartre’s philosophy was very much concerned with self knowledge, with avoiding the “bad faith” of deceiving yourself. He wrote even more about the problem of freedom and what it means; his most famous work, Nausea, features a character who experiences his own freedom as a sickness. And yet all of his wrestling with nausea and staring into the face of nothingness somehow always brought him back to the party line.

Meanwhile Sartre’s old friend and classmate Raymond Aron had become one of France’s leading anti-communists. He grew so angry with the callous way Sartre (and Simone de Beauvoir) justified Stalin’s brutalities that he published a letter declaring their friendship at an end. Aron moved on from philosophy to sociology and history, but his politics were so unfashionable in the postwar years that he had to wait until 1955 before he received a professorship. Meanwhile he continued to work as a journalist and to write books. In 1955 he published The Opiate of the Intellectuals (1955), a frontal assault on the communist enthusiasms of his French intellectual peers that regularly appears on lists of the most influential books of the twentieth century. Aron wrote,

The man who no longer expects miraculous changes either from a revolution or from an economic plan is not obliged to resign himself to the unjustifiable. It is because he likes individual truth, that he refuses to surrender his soul to an abstract ideal of humanity, a tyrannical party, and an absurd scholasticism. . . . If tolerance is born of doubt, let us teach everyone to doubt all the models and utopias, to challenge all the prophets of redemption and the heralds of catastrophe.

But that was just one of more than forty books that Aron wrote. His main topics were sociology and what we might call the philosophy of social science, that is, what it means to interpret or understand complex human societies, what counts for evidence, and what are the limits to our understanding of the modern human world. But he also wrote about modern history, French politics, Israel – Aron was a Jew who hated the notion of a unified “Jewish people” and considered himself more French than Jewish – nuclear strategy, political science, the idea of progress, and more. His most widely read book these days may be War and Peace between Nations (1962), a highly regarded look at what “realism” in foreign relations really means.

Realism was an important word to Aron, since he considered himself above all a realist. Looking around the world in the 40s and 50s, he thought – like George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, and many others who also identified as realists – that the only real question in foreign policy was whether to ally with the Americans or the Soviets. It was no good to say that you did not like the Americans, or to complain that American capitalism, racism, and support for third world dictators was nearly as bad as whatever the Soviets were up to. It did not matter; there were only two powers in the world, and only a fool would think that France would be better off under Soviet dominance than in NATO. It was Aron’s pro-American views that brought him into conflict with de Gaulle, who considered it his mission in life to restore France’s sense of its own greatness. Aron found nationalism to be an ideology nearly as dangerous as communism, and he regarded de Gaulle’s search for Gloire absurd. Thus although Aron was generally seen as a man of the Right and wrote for a conservative newspaper, he was not comfortable with Gaullism or any other branch of conservatism. He was too independent, too skeptical that any one point of view was enough. He was an insider of sorts, but never in the true circles of power; he was offered important government posts on several occasions but he always refused. He disliked the loss of intellectual freedom that joining a government involved, did not want to be careful about what he said. He especially disliked the way de Gaulle used carefully vague words to preserve his freedom of action, making bold speeches that really committed him to nothing. If that was leadership – and it was, and is – Aron wanted no part of it.

On the big questions of his lifetime, Aron was right: he stood up for freedom against Hitler and then against Stalin, he worked for peace and democracy, he wanted France to give up its colonies and ally with the United States against communism. He was a great scholar, an important voice in French affairs, by almost any standard a huge success. At yet he considered himself a much smaller and less important man than many of those who were wrong, especially his old classmate Jean-Paul Sartre. Have you ever heard of him?

Aron knew that though he might be right, he was not cut out for greatness. He did not want to make the compromises necessary to participate in democratic politics, so he achieved nothing in that vein. His scholarly work consisted mainly of careful reviews of radical ideas produced by others, much weighing and assessing but few bold pronouncements. He had a habit, maddening to some critics, of ending long essays and even books with a question mark. With him everything was tentative, partial, uncertain, complex. He refused to over-simplify. He also refused to be moved by the sort of intentionally obscure language used by philosophers such as Hegel and Sartre. What, he asked, repeatedly, does this really mean? And yet accuracy of language and fidelity to reality as we understand it will only get you so far. As Stanley Hoffman wrote,

But what would be left of this huge mass of writings? Aron often expressed his own doubts. He always put “creators” above “critics”: Sartre, for all his political divagations, was a creator, Aron, for all his lucidity, was only a critic. His conception of man and of history made him impatient with what he called halftruths, prophecies based on a powerful but partial central intuition, such as Marx’s or Freud’s. But he admired most those who had changed man’s way of thinking in this fashion, and he knew that he was not one of them.

One admirer called Aron “the supreme destroyer of confusions and illusions.”

So we come to one of the great paradoxes of scholarship, and perhaps of all human thought: to be right is only one goal among many and not the most important. To be bold and exciting matters more. The most famous thinkers are not the ones who come closest to the truth, but the ones who devise new ways of thinking or new vocabularies. This is true even when the newness is largely sham. The ideas of the big modern thinkers – Marx, Freud, Sartre, Foucault – consist partly of old ideas in new clothes and partly of nonsense; strip away the nonsense and the received wisdom and you are left with at most a small advance in real understanding. Yet by their style, their clever rhetoric, their thunderous pronouncements, these men changed the culture in ways no careful, modest thinker ever has.

Boldness has its place in philosophy. But one of the reasons twentieth-century politics turned so awful was that a whole generation let this intellectual fascination with radical ideas and bold solutions spill over into the actual business of government. Aron took his stand against this criminal nonsense. He fought for clarity of thought because he could see what bad philosophy might lead to when equipped with tanks and interrogation rooms. At times whole human societies have been swept by what seems like madness -- the Ghost Dance among the plains Indians, Revolution among French intellectuals. The attraction to extreme beliefs and extreme actions is universal in humanity, and from time to time it overwhelms our minds. But another side of humanity is also universal: practical, down-to-earth, simple, unmoved by passion. In an age where murderous passions killed 50 million humans and threatened our planet with destruction, Raymond Aron stood up for the other side of our minds. He talked sense. In his lifetime, that was what the world needed most.