Young Conservatives and the Far Right

As David French notes in the NY Times, we have been treated lately to a string of apparently mainstream young conservaties – a speechwriter for DeSantis, an editor at the Daily Caller, a writer for Tucker Carlson, etc. – being outed for writing horrificly racist and antisemitic rants online.

To understand the cultural dynamic, I want to introduce you to an obscure online concept, no enemies to the right. A tiny fringe adopts this mind-set as a conscious ethos, but for a much larger group, it is simply their cultural reality. In their minds, the left is so evil — and represents such an existential threat — that any accommodation of it (or any criticism of the right) undermines the forces of light in their great battle against the forces of darkness. Attack the left in the most searing terms, and you’ll enjoy the thunderous applause of your peers. Criticize the new right, and you can experience a vicious backlash. The result is a relentless pull to the extremes.

I agree that this is a serious problem. I think it stems partly from all those Republican politicians (Newt Gingrich, Ted Cruz, Trump) who talk in apocalyptic terms about the nation "falling off a cliff." If you took that seriously, if you really believed that liberals were destroying civilization, wouldn't you rather ally with neo-Nazis or Vladimir Putin than Democrats? Extreme rhetoric has consequences.

The sense that attempts at compromise have not held back the left drives some of this:

One of their prime reproofs of what they might call the zombie right, the Reagan right of their parents’ generation, is that it was simply too accommodating. As they see it, classical liberal politics, which preserve free speech and robust debate as a priority, emboldened and empowered the left. Compromise, in their view, ran only one way, and conservatism conserved nothing. The left, in their mind, is winning the culture war in a rout.

Note that for young conservative, as for many young leftists, the key issues are cultural, not economic. Talk of low taxes and economic growth does not move them. They want to fight over race, gender, sexuality, and the tone of public discourse, especially as it relates to white men. Here is French on the connection to masculinity:  

And here’s where masculine insecurity enters the equation. To the new right, their opposition to the left is so obviously correct that only moral cowardice or financial opportunism (“grifting”) can explain any compromise. To fight on the right — mainly by trolling on social media or embracing authoritarianism as the based alternative to weak-kneed classical liberalism — is seen as strong, courageous and cool. It’s a sign of a fierce and independent mind. Thus, the troll isn’t just a troll he’s a man. He’s a warrior.

I see some of that. But I also see a reaction against the left-wing obsession with trauma and safe spaces and protecting everybody from "harm." That cuts against a lot of old-style masculinity; frankly I would be suspicious of any young man who didn't at least roll his eyes about college students retreating to safe rooms to watch puppy videos when a right-wing speaker comes to campus. There are a lot of young men out there looking for political spaces where they can pose as tough, and this has driven several recent political movements besides Bronze Age Pervert-style rightism: the Bernie Sanders campaign, the rise of neo-Stalinist "tankies," the Putin fanboys.

I also wonder about the very common insistence that supporters of the left or center are "grifting." I suspect the belief that all their opponents are on the take helps explain why right-wing regimes seem to always end up so corrupt. Some right wingers believe that when they were out of power they were excluded from corrupt networks that were enriching their opponents, so when they get the chance they help themselves. I don't know how else to explain the grotesque corruption that we have seen in Latin American and Balkan Fascism, the White Russians, contemporary Hungary, Putin's Russia, and so on. Can anyone name a 20th- or 21st-century right wing regime that was not terribly corrupt?

One should also note the widespread sense among young people that trying on extreme ideas is just part of online culture, in which everything is at least half a joke and you never know who is being really serious. French thinks that is dangerous:

Worse still, even when one initially embraces bigotry “only” as a form of social transgression, marinating in that environment soon turns trolling into conviction. In contrite comments to The Washington Free Beacon in response to additional revelations from his private messages, Gonzalez said, “What starts off as joking can very quickly become unironically internalized as an actual belief.”

I know, because I read them, that some old-school American conservatives are as alarmed by this as liberals. This includes not just NY Times writers like Brett Stephens and David Brooks but some very conservative Catholics (the kind who cite papal pronouncements as evidence) and a lot of Wall Street and other pro-business types.

Any political movement needs youthful energy to thrive. It seems that the youthful energy on the American right often moves in directions that older conservatives find alarming, and that ranting online about blacks and Jews is common behavior on the youthful right. What this means or portends I do not know, but it doesn't seem like a good sign.

Yemeni Artifacts "Returned" but Don't Actually Go Back to Yemen

I just learned that in February a ceremony was held to mark the "repatriation" of 77 artifacts to Yemen. The artifacts had all been seized from known smugglers, including Mousa Khouli, who sold looted artifacts via a store in New York. 

But, given that Yemen is in the middle of a civil war, and the US doesn't actually recognize the faction that controls most of the country (the Houthis), the Yemeni embassy agreed to the artifacts being kept at the Smithsonian for the time being. Which is an interesting model for other art from war-torn countries with suspect governments: the nation's ownership of the material is recognized, but their physical return is delayed until some theoretical peaceful future.

Love these funeral monuments, which date to 500 to 200 BC.

Catholic Marriage and the Rise of the West

WEIRD

One of the entries in Scott Siskind's latest book review contest covers a book that I think is grotesquely wrong, The Weirdest People in the World by Joe Henrich. WEIRD is an acronym introduced by Henirch in an older article about why westerners are different from everyone else; it stands for Western, Educated, Individual, Rich, and Democratic. Henrich thinks that westerners, and people who have wholeheartedly adopted their worldview, think about the world very differently than anybody else ever has. In the new book he offers a theory of how that came to be that I think is completely ridiculous, so much so that I probably could not explain it myself without falling into sputtering rage. So let me pass that task on to the anonymous reviewer:

Henrich's hypothesis comes from cross-cultural psychology. The West got rich because Westerners are different. People from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic societies are WEIRD – the acronym comes from a previous article of his. In particular, compared to everyone else in the world and in history, modern Westerners:

• Are individualist, not collectivist or conformist
• Feel more guilt and less shame
• Explain people's actions by their innate dispositions, not their social role
• Reason analytically not holistically
• Follow more universal norms and less relationship-specific norms
• Are more patient
• Trust strangers more and are more honest.

This psychology might make societies richer, for fairly well-known and plausible reasons. The Weirdest People in the World (henceforth just WEIRD) sets out a causal chain from cultural change to psychological change to modern economic growth. The start of that chain is surprising: an obscure set of rules pushed by the medieval Catholic church, which banned marriage between cousins. The most important argument of the book is that these rules created WEIRD psychology.

How it worked: these marriage regulations served to dismantle intensive kin networks, which are the social cement of society almost everywhere else in the world. For most people in history, family hasn't just been the place where children grow up and couples spend time together. Family has been the basic human group, and there have been extensive and precise rules dictating who counts as family (or clan) and how each person should act with respect to different relatives. The Church's regulations, the Marriage and Family Programme (MFP), aimed to replace intensive kinship, and over many centuries it was more or less successful in doing that.

As to why the ban on cousin marriage might have had that effect, it's probably best to just cite the original author of this view, St. Augustine:

For affection is now given its proper place, so that men, for whom it is beneficial to live together in honourable concord, may be joined to one another by the bonds of diverse relationships: not that one man should combine many relationships in his sole person, but that those relationships should be distributed among individuals, and should thereby bind social life more effectively by involving a greater number of persons in them....

That is, rather than investing all our relationship eggs in the one basket of family, we spread them out and make the whole community stronger.

Why this is Wrong

1) The timing is terrible. The church was pushing for the end of cousin marriage in the late Roman empire, which went on collapsing just fine. It continued to push this view through the early Middle Ages, when western Europe was a pathetic backwater compared to China and the Islamic world (and not noted for an particular style of thinking). As to when church teaching had much effect on actual marriage practices, that is a hard question, but you will find a lot of people arguing for the 11th century and nobody who thinks marriage changed much in the crucial 1450-1650 period. For Henrich to be right, you have to assume that the alchemical effect of banning cousin marriage in the 4th century AD somehow reached its fruition right around 1500, when western Europe first began to make a real move forward past its medieval backwater status.

2) Western Europe's Jews participated quite extensively in the great awakening of Europe into trade, riches, and intellectual ferment, without any relationship whatsover to Catholic marriage teaching. 

3) Many Protestant countries went back to allowing cousin marriage, including England, without this having any noticeable effect.

But there is another explanation we might consider for which the timing is absolutely spot on, and which involved Jews, and which was powerful in both Protestant and Catholic countries, and that is the opening of Europe to oceanic trade. I think it is blindingly obvious that what drove Europe toward world dominance was establishing itself as the center of a new world trading system.

Of course Henrich is not interested in wealth so much as in psychology; he started his research asking why westerners thought differently than other people. But to the extent that there is a western way of thinking, it did not begin with peasants. It began with urban elites, especially those involved in long-distance trade, and it spread only very slowly (if ever) to poor rural districts. If the crucial factor was the ban on cousin marriage, why did a different way of thinking not emerge all over the place?

I can also tell a story in which the opening to the world is what made European psychology different. First of all it eventually made them the most cosmopolitan culture in human history, with the most knowledge of the world and the most hunger for more knowledge. Every year new facts were learned about the world that challenged old models and assumptions. The vast geography of the new world, and the vast expense of trading across oceanic distances, drove the development of impersonal relationships through things like stock and insurance markets. To particpiate in this vast new endeavor you had to let go, at least a little, of ties to family and home town and embrace a wider sphere of interaction. 

I find Henrichs wildly implausible, but that doesn't really refute his argument. What refutes it is that we already have a much better model that wonderfully fits the timing of the changes he wants to explain, and their geography, and the nature of the changes, and it has nothing at all to do with cousin marriage.

Meanwhile, at the Memory Disorder Unit

The Memory Disorder Unit in Massachusetts is “the federal prison system’s first purpose-built facility for incarcerated people with dementia.” Katie Engelhart in the NY Times:

There is a prisoner who thinks he is a warden. “I’m the boss. I’m going to fire you,” Victor Orena, who is 89, will tell the prison staff.

On some days, Mr. Orena is studiously aloof — as if he is simply too busy or important to deal with anybody else. On other days, he orders everyone around in an overwrought mafioso tone: a version of the voice that, perhaps, he used when he was a working New York City mob boss decades ago, browbeating members of his notorious crime family. This makes the real prison warden laugh.

On a recent morning, Mr. Orena sat in his wheelchair beside a man with bloodshot eyes. I asked them if they knew where they were.

“This is a prison,” Mr. Orena said, brightly.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“I don’t remember,” he frowned. “I don’t know.” . . .

Down the hall from where Mr. Orena was sitting — past the activity room with the fish tank, where a cluster of men were watching “King Kong” on TV — there is a cell belonging to another man who wakes every day to discover anew that he is in prison. Some mornings, the man packs up his belongings and waits at the door. He explains that his mother is coming to get him.

“She sure is,” a staff member might say, before slowly leading him back to his cell.

Because of the long sentences we hand out to violent criminals, America now has thousands of very old men in prison, only a few of them in facilities that provide them any special care or treatment. Every time I read about this I get a feeling of the surreal; surely the long-term imprisonment of doddering old men in diapers is one of the weirder things going on in American today. Obviously these men can't just be released but I wonder how much more it costs to keep them in prison than in some other kind of facility.

Links 11 August 2023

Rooster-shaped fibula, Frankish, 500 to 600 AD

Ben Pentreath's summer in England and Tangier, wonderful garden photos.

Three women injured in river otter attack, one seriously.

The religious and erotic meanings of the threshing floor, 10-page article.

Marc Bourier's sculptures, with many tiny wooden faces.

The destruction of the Kakhovka Dam was a catastrophe for Ukraine, but exploring the exposed reservoir bottom, Ukrainian archaeologists are finding hundreds of ancient artifacts (NY Times)

Using mathematical techniques to reconstruct a Neolithic bead necklace even though the site had been seriously disturbed.

From the mad folklorist at Old European Culture, The Dragon Who Stole the Rain.

Sexual harassment and hockey romance novels.

Using multi-deminsional topology ("4D") to design new materials not imaginable in regular 3-dimensional math. Not useful yet, but might prove to be.

Using lidar to map Roman roads in southwestern Britain.

Sulfate particles cool the planet by reflecting sunlight, so pollution regulations that limit sulfur emissions may be contributing to global warming. But as Kevin Drum argues, the effect is almost certainly very small.

Newly discovered 39-million-year-old whale may have been the largest animal ever, but without a skull paleontologists don't know what it ate to get that big.

Ron DeSantis says "of course" Trump lost the election; later said that Trump's claims of electoral fraud "did not prove to be true."

Chinese archaeologists excavating the tomb complex of Emperor Wen of Han (ruled 180-157 BC) have found a complete giant panda skeleton.

On-the-job deaths in America are 92.5% men, 7.5% women. That's probably because 1) the really dangerous jobs (logging, fishing) are nearly 100% male, and 2) the biggest cause of workplace death is vehicular accidents, and men do most of the driving and have more accidents per mile than women. Men also get shot much more often even when doing the same work as women (bartenders, security guards, police).

Study finds that Covid vaccines saved 750,000 lives in the US, and that "behavioral efforts" also saved many lives, mainly by keeping people from getting sick until vaccines became available. (Marginal Revolutions, original paper)

Public schools in Cambridge, Massachusetts say they won't offer algebra in middle school because "many students continue to reel from pandemic-related learning losses and are not ready to take Algebra I before high school, and offering it only for those who are prepared would only widen the persistent disparities of educational performance among subgroups." Story comes from the Boston Globe, which is paywalled, so I can't find out if there is more going on.

New estimate says there are 20 times more rogue planets in the Milky Way than stars, most of them rather small. The current theory is that they formed around stars but were ejected from their systems by collisions or other violent events. (NY Times, EarthSky)

Update on water policy in Israel, where "almost 100 percent" of sewage water is reused and 60 to 80 percent of drinking water is desalinated seawater. Water is a solvable problem.

There are about 2,400 squirrels in New York's Central Park, 2.75 per acre. Yes, they counted. Don't ask why. And what about the Great Squirrel Migration of 1968? Which was investigated by, among others, the Center for Short-Lived Phenomena, a real institute that didn't last very long.

Ukraine Links

Ukraine needs more surface-to-air missiles.

Russian news anchor Olga Skabeeva reports finding 284,000 obituaries of Russian soldiers on social media. That raw number probably includes many duplicates, but this might be a sign that some Russians are getting concerned about casualities.

Institute for the Study of War update for August 7, with observations on the peace negotiations in Saudi Arabia: "China is not fully aligned with Russia on the issue of Ukraine."

On August 8, Russian worries about Ukraine's foothold across the Dnipro near Kherson.

And in more cross-Dnipro news, a Ukrainian probe across the river in the area of the former reservoir led to the death or capture of the entire 25-man Russian patrol sent to look for them. Part of Ukraine's strategy seems to be wearing the Russians down by forcing them to fight along the entire front.

Good account of the fighting at Hostomel Airport, the first important action of the war. I notice again that the Ukrainian government began to take defensive actions the day before Russia's invasion, so I wonder what they knew and whether the Americans told them.

How do Ukrainian soldiers learn to operate their new western weapons? How-to videos on YouTube.

Revisiting a wargame staged by the Modern War Institute in April 2022: "After applying expected geostrategic and operational developments over the remainder of this year and into the start of 2023, we determined the Russians reached an operational culmination well-short of their maximal objectives. Given the combination of Ukraine’s proven will and its capabilities in a defensive fight, the prospects for Russian forces in heavy urban combat proved daunting. By the end of the summer, Russia no longer possessed the forces to pursue major simultaneous objectives nor the combat power to conquer a major city. All was not rosy for the Ukrainians, who lacked the combat power to go on the offensive and eject Russia from the occupied territories. With neither side able to achieve decisive military effects in the offense, without exception, the combined teams predicted that without a negotiated settlement the war is headed toward an indefinite stalemate." This misses Ukraine's successes last Fall in retaking Kharkiv and Kherson but otherwise looks pretty good.

Richard Rodriguez, Transformed by Education

From a review of Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez in the April 7 TLS:

In 1976, as a young academic, Richard Rodriguez received job offers from several prestigious universities in the US, then turned them all down and left academia for good. It was an act of protest. Rodriguez, the child of Mexican immigrant parents, had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the affirmative action policies being adopted by US higher education institutions, which saw him become a "highly rewarded minority student". . . . As a graduate student of Renaissance literature he feels his social position is closer to that of his white classmates than that of "the Mexican American janitors and gardeners working on campus." In his eyes affirmative action is "a parody of social reform" whereby "the least disadvantaged were helped first, advanced because many others of their race were more disadvantaged."

Rodriguez's misgivings about affirmative action arise from his sense that education has transformed him irrevocably, distancing him from his family, his childhood and his Hispanic heritage, and awarding him the privileges of the gringo elite. His memoir, first published in 1982, describes the lonely process of transformation. . .  Rodriguez is unequivocal about the price of such an education for a so-called "minority student" like himself: at every stage the student moves further from the person they used to be, and there can be no going back.

The TLS reviewer wants this to be about race, but it is not; somewhere on this blog I have a similar post about another memoir, that one by a white, working class Englishwoman who felt the same process happening to her. Plus her parents were actively hostile to her educational aspirations, which they felt as a rejection of their whole way of life, which was an issue Rodgriguez did not have.

Taken seriously, education changes you, so if you don't want to be changed, serious higher education is something you must absolutely avoid.

Peter Coy on Marriage and Vampires

In the NY Times:

L.A. Paul, a professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Yale, began her 2014 book, Transformative Experience, by asking readers to imagine they’ve been given the opportunity to become a vampire. All their friends have become vampires, and they seem happy and stylish, not to mention immortal.

Trouble is, Paul wrote, “you cannot know what it is like to be a vampire until you are one.” And there’s no going back. She called this “a special sort of epistemic situation.” Special, yet not unusual. Paul wrote, “For many big life choices, we only learn what we need to know after we’ve done it, and we change ourselves in the process of doing it.”

Getting married is probably as transformative as becoming a vampire. . . .

By and large, as I have said here many times, getting married makes most people happier. But not everybody, and the effect is larger for men. One of the few demographic facts that the men of my acquaintance seem to all know is that married men live ten years longer, but that isn't true for women. Plus there is a real risk that things will turn out terribly for everybody, including any children, so marriage is indeed a leap into the unknown.

Antonio Muñoz Degrain

Antonio Muñoz Degrain (1840-1924) was a Spanish painter who wandered around stylistically between impressionism and more conventional techniques. He did a lot of mediocre work but a few pieces that I really like, including these. Above, View of Granada, 1881.

Before the Wedding

Sunrise

The Bathing Nymphs

A Romantic Castle

View of Bilbao

Plus he has a great monument.

Explaining American Politics in One Graph

Data comes from the American election survey, via Scott Siskind. In 2020, 84% of respondents said the government is run for the benefit of "a Few Big Interests." Siskind traced this farther back and found that 2002 was a high point, probably a post-9/11 effect, and the number in the 90s was as high as 79%.

The sense that the government cares about somebody other than you is at the root of political anger in America.

Eliezer Yudkowsky on Why UFOs are not Aliens

I agree with this completely:

I've bet $150,000 to $1,000 against past UFO sightings being revealed within 5 years to have a worldview-shattering origin.

My model of the world confidently says no to alien UFOs: Their technology would not be such that, having arrived here across interstellar distances and then remained hidden, they'd need to fly around in large visible vehicles. It is definitely the case, given the physics we already know, that the aliens can do whatever surveillance they want using far tinier devices; eg, covalent-bond-strong, micron-sized robots, like bacteria but not with proteins held together by static cling.

Superintelligence is possible - it is just flat wrong that a human is as smart as any physical system can get - and you'd expect something crossing interstellar distances to be long since superintelligent. If they wanted to stay hidden, they'd stay hidden successfully. If aliens wanted to help Earth and not hide, humans would not be dying of cancer. If aliens didn't want to help, nor to hide, the aliens would have harvested the Solar System for matter and energy.

I have enormously wide uncertainty about the distribution of true alien psychologies, or the spacefaring agencies that grow out of them. But it's uncertainty over a metric where--when we look back down at Earth and what those psychologies would mean to us--the supervast majority of probable alien intellects, would not come here across interstellar distances, quietly and hiding on arrival, and then occasionally fly around in giant visible vehicles.

I have enormously wide uncertainty over the possible range of alien technologies. But I can use current knowledge of physics and chemistry, and the advance analyses that others have done of what technological possibilities those imply, to put a lower bound under alien technology that's comfortably above "needs to use giant flying vehicles for travel or surveillance".

UFOs aren't aliens. You can approximately leave that possibility out of your thinking.

He doesn't even mention that current UFO theories require that these alleged interstellar spacecraft keep crashing.

Just because something is unexplained doesn't mean that the actual explanation is your sci-fi fantasy.

My Bibliography, Part IIa: National Park Service Reports Available Online

Two of my long-time clients, the National Park Service and the Delaware Department of Transportation, make archaeological reports available to the public online. These have been redacted to remove sensitive information, especially the locations of the sites.

Because the sensitivity of site locations is such an issue for archaeologists, my company worked with the NPS to develop a two-volume format that we use for major studies. The first volume is written as a narrative, drawing on the archaeology done for the project but not including any detailed discussion of the sites. The second volume contains the mass of detailed archaeological findings. The idea is that the first volume can be provided to the public and might also be useful to Park educators and interpreters, while only cultural resource professionals or planners would need the second volume. This has worked very well and the NPS has made many of those Volume I reports available online.

NPS Reports

"Few Know that Such a Place Exists": Land and People in the Prince William Forest Park. (2004) A historical and archeological study of what is really a pretty average 13,000 acres in eastern Virginia, which is part of the fascination. Includes some material on the search for the first European and African settlers, who are very hard to find. Incidentally I did eventually find Westwood Plantation, which I searched for during this project, across the road within the Quantico Marine Corps base.

Bold, Rocky, and Picturesque: An Archeological Indentification and Evaluation Study of Rock Creek Park, Washington, DC. (2008) I think this was the most successful of our NPS studies, patly because the size of the park and the number of historic maps available meant that we could do a really good job within the available budget. We found many different kinds of sites: extraordinary Native American camps, colonial tenancies, nineteenth-century farms and mills, a Civil War battlefield, and the homes of African Americans who came north to Washington after the Civil War.

The People of the Mountain: Archeological Overview, Assessment, Identification, and Evaluation Study of Catoctin Mountain Park, Maryland (2011) Another park where the manageable size meant that we could learn a great deal about it. The main interest was in trying to link the multipe kinds of data sets –archaeology, historic maps, other records, and oral history – into a coherent story.

Archeological Overview, Assessment, Identification, and Evaluation Study of Newly Acquired Lands at Antietam National Battlefield Maryland. (2014) I feel disappointed that we didn't find more during this study, but it did give me a chance to delve very deeply into one part of the battle, the exercise that I feel made me into a professional military historian. 

The C&O Canal NHP Study

The most remarkable thing I have done in my career was to take part in, and lead the second half of, a nine-year archaeological study of the C&O Canal National Historical Park. The C&O NHP follows the Potomac River for 184 miles, from Washington, DC west to Cumberland in the Appalachian Mountains. Here we found so much we could not come close to dealing with it all: a site with a 10,000-year stratified sequence, half a dozen Indian villages, a fortified site from the French and Indian War, colonial farms, iron mines, Civil War earthworks, plus sites related to the canal itself. The reports include what I think is the best available introduction to the history of the upper Potomac Valley in colonial times; we certainly couldn't find anything to work from, so we ended up doing a ton of research on our own. The project was done in three segments.

Cohongorooto: The Potomac Above the Falls: Archeological Indentification and Evaluation Study of C&O Canal National Historical Park, Rock Creek to Sandy Hook (Mile Markers 0 to 59) (2005)

Through the Great Valley and Into the Mountains Beyond: Archeological Indentification and Evaluation Study of Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park, Sandy Hook to Hancock (Mile Markers 59 to 123) (2009)

River and Mountain, War and Peace: Archeological Indentification and Evaluation Study of Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park, Hancock to Cumberland (Mile Markers 123 to 184) (2011)

The Socio Political Demography of Happiness

Abstract of a new paper by Sam Pelzman:

Since 1972 the General Social Survey (GSS) has asked a representative sample of US adults “… [are] you …very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” Overall, the population is reasonably happy even after a mild recent decline. I focus on differences along standard socio demographic dimensions: age, race, gender, education, marital status income and geography. I also explore political and social differences. Being married is the most important differentiator with a 30-percentage point happy-unhappy gap over the unmarried. Income is also important, but Easterlin’s (1974) paradox applies: the rich are much happier than the poor at any moment, but income growth doesn’t matter. Education and racial differences are also consequential, though the black-white gap has narrowed substantially. Geographic, gender and age differences have been relatively unimportant, though old-age unhappiness may be emerging. Conservatives are distinctly happier than liberals as are people who trust others or the Federal government.

The biggest reason American are less happy than 50 years ago is that fewer of us are married; there are other factors, but none of them are anywhere near as important.

I think the point about income is also important. Poor people are unhappy, but it seems that they are not unhappy because they are poor, but unhappy for the same reasons that they are poor. The most important causes of both are probably mental health problems, physical health problems, and addiction.

Sex-Selective Abortion and Women's Rights in India

Fascinating NY Times story about Sunil Jaglan, a village headman who has become a crusader for women's rights in India.

When the nurse stepped out of the delivery room, her face turned somber as she approached with a baby in her arms wrapped in a blanket. Her voice dropped to a hush, almost like she was ashamed, as she announced to the family: “It is a daughter.”

Nothing about the nurse’s negative demeanor surprised Sunil Jaglan, the newborn’s father. Growing up in the northern Indian state of Haryana, he was accustomed to parents’ strong preference for having sons over daughters.

But something within him snapped, he said, when he offered the nurse money as a thank you gesture, and she refused because she had not handed over a boy. . . .

That episode transformed him into an unlikely champion of women’s rights in a deeply patriarchal society. He turned the nurse’s four words, uttered almost as a curse — “It is a daughter” — into a slogan for a campaign that health officials say is responsible for saving the lives of hundreds of girls in Haryana.

When Jaglan's daughter was born, the state of Haryana had 832 female babies per 1,000 males, mostly because of sex-selective abortion, which is illegal in India but very common nonetheless. 

But of course none of this is simple. Some of what Jaglan has done seems to me unquestionably great, like, he started a social media campaign #SelfieWithDaughter, persuading Indian men to post pictures with their daughters, which took off when some cricket stars did it. But this also has an authoritarian side:

Although it was not within his authority to do so — and some considered it an egregious invasion of privacy — Mr. Jaglan made it mandatory for village families to report a household pregnancy within four weeks, a decision that angered many in Bibipur and beyond.

Through a network of women informers, he and his team of volunteers would follow pregnant women like detectives when it was suspected they were being taken for prenatal sex tests. If that was indeed the case, they would work to have the woman’s husband or her in-laws arrested, with the police operating on the assumption that the pregnant woman herself had little or no say in the decision.

This worked in Jaglan's village, bringing the gender ratio of new births back to 50-50. And thngs do seem to be changing in India as a whole; the ratio of female to male babies has risen from 876 to 1000 in 2015 to 926 to 1000 in 2021. 

I find myself wondering what issues are so important that they justify heavy-handed state intervention. We have seen long arguments about whether drug use justifies a "war." A few years ago there were a bunch of stories about Indian feminists who were smashing up the saloons where rural men were drinking away their salaries, leaving (the activists said) their families hungry. Some Americans think gun violence is such a terrible problem that the government should seize everyone's guns. So if so many families are aborting female fetuses that the gender ratio ends up horribly skewed, does that justify registering pregnant women and encouraging their neighbors to spy on them?

What should a government like India's do to promote gender equality? Can government action really change ancient attitudes about gender in village society? The questions go on and on, as they always do with me.

Without Thee

Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet,
With charm of earliest birds; pleasant the sun
When first on this delightful land he spreads
His orient beams on herb, tree, fruit, and flower,
Glist’ring with dew; fragrant the fertile earth
After soft showers; and sweet the coming on
Of grateful ev’ning mild; then silent night
With this her solemn bird and this fair moon,
And these the gems of heaven, her starry train:
But neither breath of morn when she ascends
With charm of earliest birds, nor rising sun
On this delightful land, nor herb, fruit, flower,
Glist’ring with dew, nor fragrance after showers,
Nor grateful ev’ning mild, nor silent night
With this her solemn bird, nor walk by moon
Or glittering starlight, without thee is sweet.

Milton, Paradise Lost

Farmers Praise their Gods

From one of the Songs of Inana and Dumuzi, the world's oldest body of love poetry, mostly spoken to the Goddess Inana by the young shepherd god Dumuzi. The odest texts date to around 2000 BC:

Maiden, colorful as a pile of grain, fit for the king,
Inana, colorful as a pile of grain, fit for Dumuzi!
Maiden, you are a shock of two-row barley, fully developed in loveliness,
Inana, you are a shock of two-row barley, fully developed in loveliness!

I mean, what could be more beautiful than a shock of two-row barley?

Lionel Messi and the Narrow Peak of Athletic Talent

With Argentina's World Cup win, soccer star Lionel Messi had achieved all of his career goals. Unable to get the contract he wanted to close out his long and astonishingly successful career in Spain, he decided to take the huge salary offered by an American team called Inter Miami and see what he could do in the US. Inter Miami was the last place team in North American soccer, but since Messi arrived they have not lost a single game. Messi has scored seven goals in four games. He looks, at times, like a professional adult who wandered into a high school game. His new teammates use words like "surreal" and "superhuman" and "impossible" to describe his play. While many other aging European stars like David Beckham and Zlatan Ibrahimovitz scored a lot of goals in the US, they didn't necessarily make their teams into winners. Messi is different in that he makes his whole team better, constantly setting his teammates up in ways they sometimes take advantage of but often flub.

He has also single-handedly energized the whole league, raising television ratings and driving ticket prices for some games from $50 to $500 and more. Some of the scalping frenzy might be people seizing what may be their only chance to see the famous Messi in person, so it may fade, but the money is already making a difference.

Which is fabulous if you are a soccer fan. But there is a broader point: even in a sport played by a hundred million people, with a vast global architecture to find and develop talent, the very best players stand far above the average professional and even the average star. At the top, the pyramid of ability is very, very narrow.

Tracing the Descendants of Slaves using Paleogenetics

The Catoctin Iron Furnace in Maryland operated from 1776 into the late 1800s. Until the Civil War, much of the labor was provided by slaves. Despite years of historical research and avocational archaeology around the site (some done by friends of mine), very little has been learned about them. 

Back in 1979, archaeologists working for the state found and excavated 35 burials in the way of a road-straightening project near the furnace. This appears to be the cemetery for the enslaved people who worked at the furnace. The bones have been in the Smithsonian ever since, and now a very interesting genetic study of the remains has been published in Science. (NY Times, NPR, Science) The study traced the gradual blending of African and European genes into an African American populations, that is, early people were recognizably all African or half or one quarter European, but by the Civil War the amount of European ancestry was fairly uniform. The thing that is getting a lot of attention now is that the researchers compared the DNA from the cemetery to profiles posted at 23andMe – there is a box you can check on your 23andMe form that makes your profile available to researchers – and identified more than 2,000 people who seem closely related to the Catoctin Furnace worker families. Many of them may be descendants. One reason to take this data seriously is that in our time these genes are still concentrated in Maryland, rather than randomly distributed. This study opens up a wonderful new avenue for African Americans to trace their families back into the historical void of slavery, where records almost always identify people by their first names only.

To me the most important thing about this study is its potential to break down the wall of suspicion that surrounds paleogenetics. Many, many groups around the world refuse to allow their ancestors's bones to be tested, and these days excavated human bones are almost always immediately reburied. The keeping of bones in scientific laboratories is very widely seen as a colonialist crime, and these repositories have become one of the biggest issues between archaeologists and others. But archaeologists don't keep the bones because they are evil, but because they are curious. We want to learn about the past. The Catoctin study shows the incredible potential of paleogenetics to open up new windows into the past, especially for groups whose past is not well documented. As Henry Louis Gates (one of the authors of the study) put it, “The history of Black people was intended to be a dark, unlit cave,” but with these new techniques, “you’re bringing light into the cave.”

If the bones from the Catoctin cemetery had been reburied, that cave would still be dark.

The thing about studying the past, though, is that you don't always find what you want. The Melungeons, for example, spent 200 years claiming that they were anything but mulatto –Turkish, North African, Native American, etc. – but genetics revealed that that they are mainly what their hostile neighbors said they were, a mix of white and black with a small amount of Native American. There are rumors that the leaders of some Native American groups in the eastern US have been tested and found that they have no or very little Native ancestry.

One source of conflict between archaeologists and Native Americans concerns continuity in place. Native groups trying to hold onto their homes want to claim very long residence, preferably several thousand years, but archaeologists see a whole lot of movement and mixing in Native groups, especially during the catastrophe of European invasion and conquest. 

Science is like that. Sometimes it confirms old stories, but often it does not. Sometimes it supports the claims of Native groups to have long lived in some particular spot, and sometimes it shows something very different.

So, do you want to know, or not? Millions of African Americans do want to know, and so are very excited by the potential of paleogenetics to connect them to their enslaved ancestors and perhaps even back to the parts of Africa from which they were kidnapped and sold. And wherever people really do want to know, they will find scientists who want to work with them.

Outside of Time in the Antarctic

Francis Spufford, I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination:

It seems appropriate that it should also have been in Antarctica that the Edwardian world lasted longest. After the period ended a tiny bubble of pre-war feeling and expectation persisted there in the form of Shackleton’s marooned Endurance expedition. Probably Shackleton’s men were the last Europeans on the planet still inhabiting the lost paradigm in 1916, year of the Somme: ‘I suppose our experience was unique,’ he wrote. The war had already just begun when they sailed in August 1914 to try the first crossing of the Antarctic continent, but the England they left was in the very first phase of high excitement. All they had seen was the Edwardian nation mobilising, not a single casualty list published, not a single telegram of condolence sent. The war had no colours yet except the patriotic ones. They heard their last instalment of news in Buenos Aires in October, where the received wisdom still held that the battles would end crisp and quick within six months. After that they passed beyond communication, 'not without regret’ at their exclusion from the great adventure, as if the European catastrophe already unrolling behind them were a spreading stain they had accidentally outrun. […] His book South (1919) best conveys the bursting of the bubble in an exchange of dialogue as sudden and blunt as the inrush of the new world that it brought about. As soon as the three scarecrow-like travellers had established who they were to Mr Sorlle, the manager, and what they were doing wandering through his whaling station frightening children, 'Tell me, when was the war over?’ Shackleton asked. 'The war is not over,’ he answered. 'Millions are being killed. Europe is mad. The world is mad.’

Barack Obama's Girlfriends and the Red Line in Syria

Remember this?

In August of 2013, a rebel-held suburb of Damascus was attacked with sarin gas — a nerve agent that causes lung muscle paralysis and results in death from suffocation.

The attack killed 1,400 men, women and children, and at the White House, officials asserted “with high confidence” that the government of Bashar al-Assad was responsible.

One year earlier, President Barack Obama had described Assad’s potential use of chemical weapons as “a red line” that would have “enormous consequences” and “change my calculus” on American military intervention in Syria’s civil war.

When Assad appeared to cross that line, Obama ordered the Pentagon to prepare to attack.

But of course Obama changed his mind, and instead of a massive air strike we got a deal whereby Assad handed a bunch of chemical weapons over to the Russians, and the mess in Syria ground on without much US intervention.

This event still looms large for many people: anti-government Syrians and their allies, many US military and foreign policy types, some Europeans who think it was US weakness in Syria that made Putin think we wouldn’t help Ukraine – I’ve seen this stated several times on Ukraine war Twitter – and the sort of people who think the best way to understand history is by psychoanalyzing world leaders.

Within that last category we find David Samuels. Samuels, a long-time Jewish journalist, uses an actually rather interesting interview with Obama biographer David Garrow to develop his theory that everything wrong with the Middle East is Obama’s fault. (Besides inequality, tech monopolies, and Lord knows what else.) Samuels traces Obama’s failure to stand up for Syria back to his false version of his break-up with one of his white girlfriends, Sheila Miyoshi Jager. 

Biographer Garrow tracked Jager down and got her version of their break-up, which Obama had described in Dreams from My Father. In both versions this had something to do with Obama’s turn toward blackness. But in Obama's version this was a “a passionate disagreement following a play by African American playwright August Wilson, in which the young protagonist defends his incipient embrace of Black racial consciousness against his girlfriend’s white-identified liberal universalism.” But it Jager's version the fight was about Obama’s  

refusal to condemn a Black mayoral aide named Steve Cokely who, in a series of lectures organized by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, accused Jewish doctors in Chicago of infecting Black babies with AIDS as part of a genocidal plot against African Americans. . . . It was not Obama’s Blackness that bothered her, but that he would not condemn antisemitism.

Samuels claims that the invisibility of Jager and her account of the relationship was some sort of conspiracy among Obama-loving journalists, which to me sounds like a weird description of his time in office; was there anything that some conservative did not accuse him of? But this all goes much deeper:

I have never seen any evidence that Barack Obama has the slightest personal animus toward Jews as individuals. But from his denial of American exceptionalism, and his sourness toward Israel, going all the way back to Sheila Miyoshi Jager’s account of their breakup, there does seem to be an awareness of the underlying problem posed to his politics by Jews—that is, the problem posed by Jewish group survival and their continuing insistence on Jewish historical particularity.

It’s all about the Jews! 

Because, see, the Progressive narrative is all about the noble suffering of oppressed groups and the perfidiousness of their oppressors, the White Race. Jews screw this up by being both oppressed (in the general historical sense, and in the Holocaust) and oppressors (as wealthy people in the US who own buildings in black neighborhoods).

How can Jews be “privileged white people” if they are clearly among history’s victims? And if Jews aren’t white people, then perhaps lots of other white people are also victims and therefore aren’t “white,” in the theological sense in which that term gains its significance in progressive ideology. Maybe “Black people” aren’t always or primarily Black. Maybe the whole progressive race-based theology is, historically and ideologically speaking, a load of crap. Which is why the Jews are and will remain a problem.

So, I guess, in order to maintain the narrative that history is about oppressors and the oppressed, Jews have to be wished out of existence. And that, plus a generalized Progressivism, explains why Obama worked so hard to avoid war with the “antisemitic state” of Iran. Samuels thinks that Obama refused to bomb Syria because he wanted the Iran deal (the JCPOA) so badly, and he wanted the Iran deal so badly because he hated “American exceptionalism,” the Vietnam War, colonialism, and Israel, and was at best ambivalent about Jews.

The sheer amount of political capital and focus Obama put into achieving the JCPOA during his second term, to the near-exclusion of other goals, suggests that the deal was central to his politics. It also carries more than a whiff of the kind of politics in which the American Empire is seen not just as unexceptional, but also, in some ways, as actively evil. It was a politics born out of the confluence of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, which saw a racist war abroad being used to protect a racist power structure at home. That old alliance of civil rights, anti-imperialism, and identity politics made the Democratic Party that Obama positioned himself to lead—college-educated, corporate-controlled—seem cool, allowing it to use post-1960s radical ideology as a language to sell stuff.

This kind of history simply befuddles me. If only Obama had recognized antisemitism and not lied to himself about why he ditched Jager, we could have had a peaceful, democratic Syria! Besides less inequality and tech monopolies!

But it was not just Obama who did not want to intervene in Syria, it was the vast majority of Americans, including such Obama haters as Sarah Palin. One day of bombing was not going to change the war; to have any real impact we would have had to send in a massive force and remove the Assad regime. That was not going to happen, especially under a President whose whole campaign was focused on avoiding more Middle East wars.

As for war with Iran, I think that would have been a catastrophe on par with what Russia is experiencing in Ukraine.

I think the stuff Garrow dug up about Obama is interesting, and I agree that he is a strange person who has written two dishonest memoirs. But the history of the world doesn’t really depend on the psychological quirks of term-limited Presidents.

Links 4 August 2023

Portrait on an unknown Chinese Bannerman, 1796-1820

Taylor Swift fans danced so hard in Seattle they registered 2.3 on the Richter Scale.

A claim that Nero's private theater has been discovered in Rome. And more at the History Blog.

Two sisters in their 40s who "didn't like the way the world was going" watched some videos on how to survive off the grid and then went to live in a remote Rocky Mountain campsite, where their dead bodies were recently found. They probably died from cold or carbon monoxide poisoning last winter.

The importance of high school guidance counselors. I have met two people who felt that their guidance counselors really changed their lives. One said he would never have considered applying to an Ivy League school if his counselor hadn't urged him to, and he really loved Yale; the other was someone who was very smart but went to the local state U because nobody told her to aim higher, and who felt disadvantaged because of it. If I'm remembering right she called her guidance counselor "The Ditz from Slumland."

Magic mirror used to trap evil spirits found in Israel.

Amazing story in the NY Times of two Canadian brothers who were switched at birth; one was Ukrainian, the other half Native American half French (Métis), so their ethinic identities got all confused. Both men say they'd rather not have known, and if they had found out privately they would have kept it quiet.

Ukraine Links

LPR Volunteer Murz explains the arithmetic of Ukraine's grinding attack: if Ukraine can replenish its forces and Russia cannot, Ukraine eventually wins, however slow their advance.

Alexander Gabuey says that Putin believes he can outlast Ukraine and its western supporters, and that he is putting the measures in place to allow Russia to wage a long war: increased conscription, increased arms production, redirecting Russian trade toward China and India, etc.

During the month of July Ukraine recaptured 85 square km, or 0.1% of the country.

Sargeant Mountain and Farewell to Maine

I'm already back in the mundane world, Mt. Desert far behind. On our last day my son and I joined my brother and sister in hiking up Sargeant Mountain, one of our favorite hikes, 8.5 miles, more than 1,000 feet up and then back down. Took us four hours. Every year there is something wonderful in the woods here; this year it was the lichen, vibrant from a rainy summer.

Sargeant Pond, a wonderful little oasis with many frogs, turtles, and birds.

Canada lily and bluberries above the tree line.

My son and I at the summit.

View to the north.

One of the great things about this hike is that heading back down the south trail you see this view toward the ocean for half a mile.

Farewell, rocky island where I have had so many happy days. I hope I see you again soon.

So, about Philodemus of Gadara

At Herculanuem there is a building called the Villa of the Papyri, because it was full of papyrus manuscripts that somehow survived when the whole place was buried in pyroclastic flow from Vesuvius. This discovery was greeted with rapturous enthusiasm; what lost ancient masterpieces might be contained in those charred paper logs?

As it turned out, though, most of them were books by the obscure philosopher Philodemus of Gadara (ca. 110–ca. 30 BCE), a follower of Epicurus that most people think has been forgotten for good reasons. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy tells us, "Philodemus’ claim on our attention does not rest on the originality of his philosophical doctrines." I considered a longer quotation, but trust me, even reading a summary of Philodemus's work is boring.

Which is why I was startled to find an actual quotation from Philodemus online, on a Tumblr devoted to classical art. There is, it seems, a formula called the "four-part cure" that was found at Herculaneum and seems to have escaped from the deadening obscurity that surrounds Philodemus' work. It goes like this:

Ancient Greek

Ἄφοβον ὁ θεός,
ἀνύποπτον ὁ θάνατος
καὶ τἀγαθὸν μὲν εὔκτητον,
τὸ δὲ δεινὸν εὐκαρτέρητον

Translation

Don’t fear god,
Don’t worry about death;
What is good is easy to get, and
What is terrible is easy to endure. 

So, yeah. Justly forgotten.

Jacobites and Modern Populists

Touring Britain, Ross Douthat sees memories of the Jacobite rebels everywhere, and ponders their connections to modern populism:

Among a certain kind of conservative nerd the Stuart cause has long been a secret handshake or an inside joke. But the normal way to discuss the Jacobites is to portray them as a political anachronism, royal absolutists backing a Catholic king in a Protestant and liberalizing Britain, whose rebellion became a cultural phenomenon as soon as its political chances went extinct. Doomed but glamorous, the Jacobites were destined to be rediscovered by romantics in every generation, from Sir Walter Scott’s novels in the early 19th century to the “Outlander” saga in the early 21st.

But nowadays the Jacobite era should feel a bit less distantly romantic and a bit more relevant to our own divisions and disturbances. This is true in a straightforward way for Britain itself, where the 17th and 18th century’s religious and ideological conflicts are long gone, but the not-entirely-United Kingdom finds itself once more divided along the geographic and cultural fault lines of the Stuart era. . . .

This specifically British story, in turn, is a type of the larger pattern of politics in Europe and the United States, where the gap between thriving capitals and struggling peripheries, between a metropolitan meritocracy and a nostalgic hinterland, has forged a right-wing politics that sometimes resembles Jacobitism more than it does the mainstream conservatisms of the late 20th century.

It’s not that today’s populists (a few intellectuals aside) favor the restoration of an absolute or Catholic monarchy. Rather, like the original Jacobites, they represent a hodgepodge of somewhat disparate causes, unified mostly by their oppositional and outsider status, their distance from and defiance of the Whiggish metropole. As Frank McLynn points out in his history of the Jacobites, whatever specific designs the Stuarts had in mind, their movement always included a variety of competing ideological and religious tendencies.

This is exactly what I think about the Jacobites. They did not rebel for anything in particular, just against the way Britain was going. Which was the way the whole Atlantic world was going: away from small farmers and country gentlement toward big business and big cities, away from localism and toward centralized states and homogenous cultures.

Douthat seems to think that the Jacobites might have won, but I find that laughable; by 1745 the British state was a globe-spanning power not likely to be undone by a few thousand Highlanders and their cranky intellectual friends. The forces that defeated Bonnie Prince Charlie were a small part of what the government could call on if need be. But I think he is right to compare those rebellions with certain aspects of modern populism. Modern populists are the people unhappy with the way things are going: with racial change, cultural change, economic change. Even if they win elections, though, they are not likely ever to have much power, because they have no idea how to change the direction of the world. Sure, they could make small changes: less immigration, tighter zoning laws against big box stores, etc. But the world of all white neighborhoods, rigid sexual mores, shopping at the corner store, and small farmers earning decent livings is not coming back.

Until someone comes up with an actual alternative to modernity – constant economic and technological progress, globalization, moral turmoil – its opponents will keep losing, just like Bonnie Prince Charlie and the QAnon Shaman.

The Pollinator Garden at Beech Hill Farm

Beech Hill Farm is an organic farm run by The College of the Atlantic, not far from our house. They have a store that sells their wonderful produce and various other Maine things. And out front, this garden.

Maine 2023

I'm on Mount Desert Island, staying at a wonderful house rented by my sister. This is the view from the front porch on Sunday evening.

My two younger children are here with me; the older ones were busy with their own lives. Here they work on skipping rocks, which they have finally mastered.

Sea lavender near the house.

View from Acadia "Mountain," a 700-foot hill with a wonderful view across Somes Sound toward the Atlantic.

On the way down from Acadia Mountain you can detour to the mouth of Man-O-War Brook, so called because sailing ships sent boats to this spot to refill their water barrels from this little waterfall. My son is trying to get the sailor's experience.

Today we hiked up Beech "Mountain," an even smaller hill with another great view.

The trail down from Beech Mountain passes through my favorite place on Mt. Desert, a valley of rocks covered with moss and ferns. Which has the worst light for photography anywhere I have tried to take photographs, either twilight dark or intense light and dark shadows. One would need a good camera and a tripod to capture the scene.

This is my best effort from this trip, a bit of fern in an even patch of shade.

My daughter and I take pictures of each other.

It makes me happy to be here.