The Failure of Dialogue

Last week gay activist Dan Savage and conservative Catholic activist Brian Brown sat down to debate gay rights and religion in America. The setting was as convivial as possible, over an excellent dinner in a charming home. Journalist Mark Oppenheimer moderated, then wrote an account of the event for the Times:

But even if I was no longer sober by the end of the meal, I still managed to exert enough discipline to hold the debate to an hour. It was dispiriting, but in an instructive way. Here were two Catholics — Mr. Savage born to the faith, Chicago Irish, the lapsed son of parochial schools; Mr. Brown of Quaker ancestry, but a Catholic since college, with a convert’s zeal — who could agree on nothing and could effect no change of heart in each other. . . .

I probably should not have expected anything else. Mr. Savage thinks religion is at best pointless, at worst malevolent. Mr. Brown believes that the truth of Catholicism should be apparent to anyone capable of reason. These are not compatible ways of seeing. And the homey setting did little to raise the level of the discourse.

Savage's husband, Terry Miller, said,

Brian’s heartless readings of the Bible, then his turns to ‘natural law’ when the Bible fails, don’t hide his bigotry and cruelty. In the end, that’s what he is. Cruel.

Brian Brown, unmoved, said,

There’s this myth that folks like me, we don’t know any gay people, and if we just met them, we would change our views. But the notion that if you have us into your house, that all that faith and reason that we have on our side, we will chuck it out and change our views — that’s not the real world.

No, indeed.

Sometimes, people can sit down together and come to an understanding. But sometimes there is no common understanding to be had, and all we can do in a democracy is try to keep these fundamental disagreements from tearing the state apart.

Eminent Domain and the Keystone Pipeline

A Texas state judge has just ruled that the Keystone Pipeline can use eminent domain to seize private land for construction. This leaves me wondering, what are all those Tea Party types who were so angry about the Supreme Court's Kelo vs. City of New London verdict in 2005 going to say this time? Back in 2005, as I recall, a wide range of conservatives were up in arms about the use of eminent domain to seize land for private development. The Keystone Pipeline is an entirely private enterprise, and in fact it is owned by Canadians. Yet the Sate of Texas has given it the right to take Americans' private land, whether they want to sell or not, at a price set by the court. Will anti-government types be outraged? or will they just accept this, given that building the pipeline has become a key part of the Republican agenda?

It is in fact impossible to build any sort of infrastructure -- power lines, pipelines, railroads, fiberoptic cable, roads, what have you -- without eminent domain. The state must have this right. Of course there are better and worse uses of the power, but that, it seems to me, has to be a political decision. I await a serious answer from someone in the anti-Kelo wing of the Republican Party.

(This is the southern part of the pipeline, which the Obama administration already approved. It is the northern half that remains under review, although it looks to me like Obama is just waiting until after the election to issue that approval.)

The Ephraim Sprague House, 1705-1750

I should be so lucky! These scoundrels, doing perfectly ordinary highway department archaeology just like I do, stumbled across one of the best possible archaeological finds: a house that burned down while it was still full of stuff, and then was left alone. The house, near Andover, Connecticut, burned around 1755.

The house belonged to Ephraim Sprague, who moved from Duxbury, Massachusetts to the Connecticut frontier in 1705. He was a minor gentleman, with servants and some nice stuff but not really of the elite. So his house was full of wonderfully ordinary things. Like, their root cellar burned while it was still full of potatoes, oats, corn, hickory nuts, and other things to eat.

My favorite item, of the many great things illustrated on their web site, is this white salt-glazed stoneware tea set, probably made around 1750. Note that although the tea set was destroyed by fire while still in use, and then buried in the bottom of a cellar, which was 100 percent excavated, there are still missing pieces. In my experience, there are always missing pieces; I have never found all the pieces of any broken ceramic vessel.

The house was one room deep but very long, probably a "cross passage" house of the type common in 17th-century England. It's an amazing find, and the web site is quite good, but I find myself longing for more detail and hope they publish a book.

Rape, Pregnancy, and Rationalization

I owe Congressman Todd Akin one thing: until he opened his mouth last weekend, I did not know that many anti-abortion Americans think violent rape rarely or never causes pregnancy.

This is just plain wrong. Violent rape is, so far as science knows, just as likely to cause pregnancy as any other kind of intercourse. But Akin's ramblings illustrate one of the most common reasons that people believe wrong things.

We would like for all the good things in the world to line up on one side, and all the bad things on the other, so that we could take the good side and not involve ourselves in evil. Sadly, the world is not like that. Most of the time, even the best things come with costs, and sometimes really bad things can have good consequences. This messiness is especially offensive to the highly moral.

Many anti-abortion Americans want to ban all abortions. Because they think that "human life" begins at conception, they think that all abortions are murders, and therefore that nothing justifies abortion. Most Americans, however, are thoroughly wishy-washy about abortion; they sort of dislike it on principle but think that sometimes it is less bad than other options. One situation in which most Americans think abortion should be legal is rape. Insisting that a raped woman carry her fetus to term and deliver it seems downright cruel to most people, and even to some anti-abortion activists.

So what is an anti-abortion hardliner to do with this conundrum? Why, insist that it hardly ever happens! First, reduce the number of such cases by distinguishing between "forcible" rape and other less dramatic forms -- this is the significance of Akin's comment about "legitimate" rape. Second, dream up some pseudoscientific reason why women who are "legitimately" raped -- i.e., raped with great physical trauma -- don't get pregnant. This is the teaching of Dr. John Wilke, one of the leaders of the anti-abortion movement in America, and so far as I can tell the doctrine of mysterious "secretions" that "shut down" a woman's reproductive system in response to rape originates with him.

It is, alas, a lie. Raped women get pregnant every day. So if you really want to ban all abortions, you are going to have to say to those women, I'm sorry for what happened, but this is God's plan for you and you have to see it through. There is no magical way out of this dilemma. Denying that it happens may salve your conscience as long as abortion is legal, but if it is ever banned, then the ugly truth of this choice will stare you in the face.

Atheist Ex-Pastors and the Problem of Belief

Why do people believe? Why do they stop believing?

I am pondering this because of a long Times piece by Robert Worth about Jerry DeWitt, an ex-pastor who has become an atheist leader. What strikes me about DeWitt's story is the prominence he gives to particular events in conversion both to and away from Christianity:

DeWitt was born again in Jimmy Swaggart’s church thanks to his former elementary-school teacher, who persuaded him to come along with her to Baton Rouge. He later discovered that his teacher almost died while she was being born, and that she had emerged safely from the womb only after a preacher from a neighboring town was roused from sleep to offer a blessing in the delivery room. That preacher was DeWitt’s paternal grandfather. This coincidence had seemed providential to DeWitt, a sign that he was meant to be a preacher himself.

“This story has kept you feeling that God has a destiny for you,” DeWitt said. 

I have seen many similar stories. It seems that most people approach these most general and theoretical of questions through particular, dramatic events. Obviously the ground was well-prepared for DeWitt's conversion, through having grown up in a very religious family and community. He was looking for a sign. But he did not truly convert until he saw one.

For the reverse direction, Worth says that many young atheists cite the 9-11 attacks as the event that turned them decisively against religion in any form.

The habit of reading events as signs seems to be very deeply human. It may be at the core of what it means to have a religious outlook on life:

I heard parallel stories from a number of other participants in post-religion networks. “People have a really difficult time making decisions after they’ve lost their faith,” said Amanda Schneider, who organized a local Recovering From Religion group in Santa Fe (and also helps manage the broader organization). “They used to always base it on ‘What is God’s plan for me?’ They are still looking for something miraculous to guide them.”

I find this example strange. Unless you are hearing voices, how, exactly, is God explaining his plan? In a practical sense, how does pondering God's plan help decide people whether to major in accounting or marketing? However it works, many people seem to feel much better both about their choices and about the various random things that happen to them when they see everything as part of the Plan.

I am also struck by the role suffering plays in both kinds of narratives. Many people are turned toward God by suffering or failure; Chuck Colson's prison conversion comes to mind as the nearest example. On the other hand, many believers have turned away from God after thinking hard on suffering and what it means. Bart Ehrman, one of my favorite writers on early Christianity, renounced the church a few years ago, saying that he could no longer reconcile belief in a good God with the amount of suffering in the world. DeWitt, says Worth,

found it unbearable to promote beliefs that only seemed to sow confusion and self-blame. He recalled how one middle-aged woman in his church who was suffering from heart disease asked him anxiously: “How am I going to believe enough for salvation when I can’t believe enough to heal?”

I suppose one reason I find these dramatic conversions interesting is that I just don't have that sort of personality. I have had the same attitude toward religion – curious but faithless – since I was a child, and nothing that has happened either to me or in the world has given me any reason to change. Angry atheism puzzles me as much as speaking in tongues.

The universe is a mystery. What else, really, is there to say?

Archaeology and History along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal

I spent the first decade of this century carrying out an archaeological survey of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park. This terrific park runs 184 miles along the north bank of the Potomac River, from Georgetown, DC, to Cumberland, Maryland. It is an archaeological wonderland. We spent nine years on the project, three years for each of three sections of the park. Working with our backers in the National Park Service, we produced our reports in two volumes. The second volumes include the information necessary for managing the archaeological sites, including their exact locations, and all the technical archaeological data. These are not available to the public. But we wrote the first volumes as narratives for a popular audience, excluding sensitive information like site locations. These volumes were always intended for wide distribution.

Now, working with the Western Maryland Regional Library, the NPS has put all three of those volumes on the web where anyone can download them. The first volume covers Georgetown to the Blue Ridge:

The Cohongorooto: The Potomac Above the Falls (2005).

This stretch of the river is bordered at many points by broad, flat terraces that were heavily occupied by Indians, and so this part of the park includes many amazing Indian sites. One of them has a 10,000-year stratified sequence, one layer on top of another going down 8 feet, from around 1200 CE at the top to 9,000 BCE at the bottom. This volume also includes our discussion of the Finnish role in settling the American frontier. Several of the first white settlers along the upper Potomac were Finns, whose ancestors came over to the Swedish colony on the Delaware River. After working through these sources, we ended up thinking that the Finns made key contributions to American frontier culture, including the log cabin.

Through the Great Valley and Into the Mountains Beyond (2009)

The Great Valley section is probably the least exciting archaeologically, but it does include several interesting Indian sites, our discussion of German immigration to the valley, and our account of iron furnaces in the region, anchored to the Antietam Iron Works.

River and Mountain, War and Peace (2011)

The upper segment report includes the fabulous archaeological complex at Oldtown, Maryland. Oldtown is a shortened version of "The Old Indian Town," a name that suggests the site's interesting past. From about 1715 to 1731 a Shawnee town, known as King Opessa's Town, stood here, and this volume includes our history of the town and of the Shawnee presence in Maryland and Pennsylvania. It also describes our thus-far unsuccessful search for the remains of King Opessa's Town. Before King Opessa moved in, the site had been occupied by other Indians for at least 9,000 years. We tested two villages of the Luray or Keyser Culture, the people who occupied the upper Potomac and Sheanadoah Valleys from about 1300 CE until they disappeared, rather mysteriously, in the mid 1500s. Wiped out by the Iroquois in the early years of the fur trade wars? We also tested two stratified sites that had well preserved older layers.

After the Shawnee moved out, the site was occupied by white men. First on the scene was Charles Anderson, one of those Finnish traders. (See the 1736 map above, which shows "Cha. Anderson" and "Shawno Indian Fields Deserted.") He was followed by Thomas Cresap, who set up a trading post that was visited by Christopher Gist, George Washington, and all the other luminaries of the frontier. When the French and Indian War broke out, Cresap fortified his post and stayed on, forming a militia company that was commanded by his sons. Half of Braddock's army camped at the site on their way to destruction. There were three old theories about where, exactly, Cresap's post was, and one of our accomplishments was to show that one of these theories was correct.

If you are curious about these matters, you can now read our reports. And if you are a researcher who wants more detail on the sites, write to me and I was pass your request along to the Park Service; they are usually willing to release their data to legitimate archaeologists and historians.

A Busy Day

My son Thomas went with me into the field today; here he helps Mary and Katy dig a test unit in the soybean field.

It was a gorgeous late summer day; apples ripening by an abandoned farm near the site.

When I got home, most weary, I discovered that today was Ben's first soccer practice of the season. That's him with his foot on the ball.

And now I think I'll go to bed.

A Hero Lost: Ryszard Kapuściński was a Fabricator and a Spy

Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński (1932-2007) has long been one of my favorite nonfiction authors. I think his book on the aging Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, The Emperor, is one of the greatest ever accounts of political madness, and The Shah of Shahs is nearly as good.

But what if he made it all up?

Back in 2010, a young Polish journalist published a biography of Kapuściński in which he showed, convincingly, that Kapuściński was a communist spy, and that he made up a lot of the stuff in his books. Like Neal Ascherson, who reviewed the English translation of this book for the London Review, I find myself not terribly interested in the political side. Kapuściński entered Polish public life in 1954, when the thoroughly Stalinized party completely dominated the country, and he was desperate both to get out of the country and to achieve something as a writer. If spying was the only route out, so be it. The Cold War is over and I have no interest in refighting it.

But perhaps we should have placed less trust in a man who was able to thrive amidst the lies, games, and cruelty of the Soviet system. If you are willing to lie to your friends about the extent of  your involvement with the secret police -- which Kapuściński did -- why wouldn't you lie in your books? Ascherson:

Domosławski lists many other veracity problems. Kapuściński’s agency stuff is fairly straightforward reporting, salted only with analysis and opinion. It’s in his long feature articles, and in the anecdotes he tells in his books, that he habitually exaggerated, often changing details for effect. It seems to be untrue, for instance, that he was awaiting execution by Belgian mercenaries at the Usumbura airfield; other journalists tracked down by Domosławski say nothing of the sort happened. When Kapuściński told him he was in Mexico City for the massacre in 1968 or in Santiago for the Pinochet coup in 1973, the truth was he was in Mexico ‘a month later’ and in Chile a couple of years earlier. In Bolivia, he wrote a scandalous, colourful but quite untrue story about a rebel editor; he could easily have checked it with the man himself but – he isn’t the only journalist to do this – didn’t want facts to get in the way of a great story. When a friend pointed out that a Tanzanian riot he described had happened in a different place in a different way, Kapuściński shouted at her: ‘You don’t understand a thing! I’m not writing so the details add up: the point is the essence of the matter!’ And sometimes this works. In Amin’s Uganda, he described the horror among a group of Africans who had caught a gigantic fish, swollen to monstrous size by devouring the corpses thrown into Lake Victoria. Kapuściński knew this wasn’t true: the fish was an introduced Nile perch bloated by eating the native species. And yet the story captures exactly the terrified atmosphere of those nightmare times. Again, well-founded doubts about whether he really did interview all those Ethiopian courtiers in The Emperor, and whether they really spoke to him in that melancholy, philosophical way, don’t prevent that book from being a revelatory account of the way a ‘medieval’ court felt and functioned.

I feel a little sad. I thought I had a sense of what things were really like at Haile Selassie's court, and now I wonder if I do. I do understand that in such matters the "truth" is very elusive, and of course I know that nobody really talks in the neat way journalists write down their sentences. But I thought that old Ethiopian courtiers said to Kapuściński something like what he printed, and I found that fascinating. Now I will always wonder whether they said anything like what he wrote, or even existed.

The Other Koch Brother

Billionaires Charles and David Koch have decided to spend their money promoting oil-drilling friendly libertarianism. Their brother Bill spends his collecting western memorabilia:

He paid $2.3 million for a photograph of Billy the Kid at an auction last year. He bought out the Buckskin Joe Western town near Cañon City for $3.1 million in 2010. He owns Jesse James' gun, Wyatt Earp's vest, Sitting Bull's rifle and a flag that belonged to Gen. George Custer. He has more Charles Russell paintings and Frederic Remington bronzes than most museums.

In fact he has so much western stuff that he has decided to build a whole, fake, western town to put it in:

There's a new town in Colorado. It has about 50 buildings, including a saloon, a church, a jail, a firehouse, a livery and a train station. Soon, it will have a mansion on a hill so the town's founder can look down on his creation. But don't expect to move here — or even to visit. This town is billionaire Bill Koch's fascination with the Old West rendered in bricks and mortar. It sits on a 420-acre meadow on his Bear Ranch below the Raggeds Wilderness Area in Gunnison County. It's an unpopulated, faux Western town that might boggle the mind of anyone who ever had a playhouse. Its full-size buildings come with polished brass and carved-mahogany details and are fronted with board sidewalks. . . .

The picture above was taken from a public road, but Koch is trying to get that, too, by trading the government land he owns elsewhere.

As Mat Yglesias says, this scheme is a good argument for progressive taxation.

Placing Obama on the Political Spectrum

Andrew Sullivan:

What the current movement right fails to get (but the left understands all too well) is that Obama is a moderate Republican president, and the polarization of the past three years has been a function almost entirely of the GOP's decision from 2008 on to oppose, obstruct and destroy a presidency that represented - and still represents - a massive rebuke to their extremism and failure this past decade.

They have responded by becoming an ultra-rightist, populist, revolutionary party, rather than a conservative one. Whatever its roots, it's the reason we are so far apart. Obama's moderate, pragmatic presidency isn't.

Science in the U.S. Congress

The best detail about Congressman Todd Aiken's bizarre belief that raped women can't get pregnant --

Republican Congressman Todd Akin claimed this weekend that victims of "legitimate rape" don’t get pregnant, because, "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

-- is that he sits on the House Science Committee.

The Horned God of Maryport and the Welsh Heroes of the Wall

This stone relief was found in the 1870s, during excavations at the Roman frontier fort known as Maryport. The fort is on the Solway Firth just west of the west end of Hadrian's wall, part of a series of fortifications that made it more difficult to bypass the wall by sea. The relationship between this crude stone, in native British style, and the elegantly carved Roman work found at the site is obscure. It is now in the Senhouse Museum, by the site. Below, for contrast, is of the large group of Roman altars found at the fort.

The site has been in the news this summer because new excavations have turned up evidence that the site was occupied into the sixth century, perhaps down to 600 CE.

The evidence is the burial ground of a Christian church that remained in use through the period; above is one of the graves. This continued occupation is not surprising. One of the parts of Britain where Germanic  invaders made little headway in the 5th century was the far north, presumably because the people settled by the Wall included numerous former soldiers or military families still able to defend their many strong forts. More mysterious is the cultural process that transformed them from late Roman soldiers into the Welsh heroes of "the North," (Y Gogledd), the setting of many Welsh heroic verses that were preserved in later centuries. Whatever light archaeology can shed will be most welcome.

Work, Leisure, and Technology

How do people imagine paradise? Well, for one thing, paradise is a place where nobody works. From the gardens of the Koran to the Land of Cockaigne, where already cooked animals wandered around ready to eat, escape from labor has always been part of how we imagine the perfect life.

In the 19th century, as the possibilities of labor-saving technology began to dawn on the future-minded, they imagined that at least this one part of paradise might be made real. In the future, Karl Marx suggested, people would seek self-fulfillment instead of laboring for gain. In 1930 economist John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay titled "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren," in which he projected that a hundred years in the future people would only have to work 15 hours a week to maintain their standard of living.

Here we are, 82 years on, and we work just as many hours now as we did in 1930. Richard Posner recently read a book by Keynes biographer Robert Skidelsky and his son Edward, titled How Much is Enough? Like many others, the Skidelskys imagine that with ever-improving technology, we could in the future devote less and less time to work and more and more to achieving a "good life," which they define as "worthy of desire, not just widely desired."

Posner is not impressed. It is not that these calculations are off; Keynes was almost spot on in predicting how labor productivity has risen since 1930. We really could work only 20 hours a week and have the standard of living of Englishmen in 1930. But why would we want to live with cold showers, freezing rooms, boring food, bad teeth, worse plumbing, air thick with coal smoke, and all the other inconveniences of life in 1930? No great devotee of work myself, I would certainly choose to work 40 hours a week for central heat and air conditioning, effective dentistry, comfortable clothes, tasty food, ibuprofen, and the internet. In fact, I do.

Posner is even less impressed by the Skidelskys' great esteem for leisure. If we worked half as much as we used to, he asks,

What would we do with our newfound leisure? Most people would quickly get bored without the resources for varied and exciting leisure activities like foreign travel, movies and television, casinos, restaurants, watching sporting events, engaging in challenging athletic activities, playing video games, eating out, dieting, having cosmetic surgery, and improving health and longevity. But with everyone working just 20 hours a week (on the way down to 15 in 2030), few of these opportunities would materialize, because people who worked so little would be unable to afford them. Nor could leisure-activity services be staffed adequately. . . .

The Skidelskys have an exalted conception of leisure. They say that the true sense of the word is “activity without extrinsic end”: “The sculptor engrossed in cutting marble, the teacher intent on imparting a difficult idea, the musician struggling with a score, a scientist exploring the mysteries of space and time — such people have no other aim than to do what they are doing well.” That isn’t true. Most of these people are ambitious achievers who seek recognition. And it is ridiculous to think that if people worked just 15 or 20 hours a week, they would use their leisure to cut marble or struggle with a musical score. If they lacked consumer products and services to fill up their time they would brawl, steal, overeat, drink and sleep late. English aristocrats in their heyday didn’t work, but neither did they cut marble or explore the mysteries of space and time. Hunting, gambling and seduction were their preferred leisure activities.

Of course Posner is a famous workaholic who has written far more books than anyone's career requires, but I think he has the better argument here. Leisure, in the sense of things done just for fun, is a much smaller part of what makes life worth living than people like the Skidelskys imagine. I come closer to Freud's formula for a fulfilling life, which was "love and work." And when healthy people are given great amounts of leisure, they often get so bored that they take jobs anyway. I saw a documentary once on those freaky people who hardly ever sleep, and many of them had two jobs because they didn't know what else to do with themselves.

In my utopia, people would still work, but we would try to find ways to make more work more meaningful and fulfilling: giving people greater control over their tasks, making companies into shared enterprises instead of pyramid schemes in which the CEO gets 200 times as much as you do, eliminating tedious paperwork, and so on. Work worth doing is, I think, one of the best things about life, not something we should be trying to phase out.

Today's Animal Behavior Fact that Has Absolutely Nothing to Do with Human Sexuality

Male hedgehogs have to run circles around the female as part of their mating ritual, sometimes for hours.

This was offered to me as an explanation for why the pet hedgehog in this video is running in nonstop circles.

The New Robots

John Markoff in the Times:

DRACHTEN, the Netherlands — At the Philips Electronics factory on the coast of China, hundreds of workers use their hands and specialized tools to assemble electric shavers. That is the old way.

At a sister factory here in the Dutch countryside, 128 robot arms do the same work with yoga-like flexibility. Video cameras guide them through feats well beyond the capability of the most dexterous human.

One robot arm endlessly forms three perfect bends in two connector wires and slips them into holes almost too small for the eye to see. The arms work so fast that they must be enclosed in glass cages to prevent the people supervising them from being injured. And they do it all without a coffee break — three shifts a day, 365 days a year. All told, the factory here has several dozen workers per shift, about a tenth as many as the plant in the Chinese city of Zhuhai.

This is the future. A new wave of robots, far more adept than those now commonly used by automakers and other heavy manufacturers, are replacing workers around the world in both manufacturing and distribution.

I worry about this. What are people going to do when manufacturing joins agriculture as a nearly jobless sector? It isn't that there won't be work; we'll find something to do. But will it be as meaningful to people as making things, or growing things?

Every time I read something about the new economy of "symbol manipulators," I wonder if the economist who wrote it has ever met many people without Ph.D.s. Most people, as I have said before, want work in which they either help people or work with something concrete. Like Matthew Crawford, who quit a think tank to open a motorcycle repair shop, many people despise white collar work:

. . . confrontations with material reality have become exotically unfamiliar. Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agency can be elusive. “Dilbert,” “The Office” and similar portrayals of cubicle life attest to the dark absurdism with which many Americans have come to view their white-collar jobs.

But since there is nothing I can do about it, maybe I should stop worrying about jobs lost and think instead about a world in which manufactured goods get cheaper all the time, leaving us more resources for health care, education, and entertainment.

Cultural Blending in Asia

Two examples from an exhibit showing how Islamic art fused with local traditions in East and Southeast Asia. Above, a porcelain vase from China, and below, a sarong from Indonesia. Both ca. 1900.

Everybody Loves their Mother

My grammar instincts, honed to a scalpel's edge by growing up with an English professor for a mother, and by my intense relationship with sentences and paragraphs, reject with vehemence the use of "they" and "their" as singular pronouns. This, I am starting to think, is unfortunate.

Some of you may think that "everybody loves their mother" is a bit of recent colloquial ugliness born from post-feminist fear of giving offense. But this is not so. Ever since we lost the gender-neutral pronouns that Middle English had in abundance -- both "ou" and "a" could serve -- speakers of English have struggled with how to name the unknown person. In 1850 the British Parliament, tired of seeing "him or her" hundreds of times in some documents, actually passed a law saying that "he" would serve a dual purpose: In all acts, words importing the masculine gender shall be deemed and taken to include females. Because the Irish constitution refers to the President several times as "he", some wags actually filed a lawsuit trying to block the inauguration of a female President; the Irish Supreme Court ruled that in this case he is "gender neutral."

The use of "they" as a singular pronoun can be traced back to the 15th century. Caxton's Sonnes of Aymon (c. 1489) has, Eche of theym sholde ... make theymselfe redy. But such examples are not very common, and we probably know about them only because recent grammarians have gone searching. Language historians think, though, that "they" has served this purpose in common speech for centuries. They think this -- and it is a hard thing to know, since we have almost no record of what common speech was like before the advent of sound recording -- because grammar books have waged a 250-year campaign against the usage. Along with the double negative, the confusion of number embodied in their minds the slothful habit of lower-class imprecision. Lindley Murray's 1795 English Grammar offer, as an example of "false syntax,"

Can anyone, on their entrance into the world, be fully secure that they shall not be deceived?

No, no, it must be his entrance, and he. (But where shall he find such security? Lindley did not say, leaving the eternal question unanswered in favor of correcting the grammar.)

Virginia Wolf tried to make "one" serve the purpose, but that never caught on. (Because, if you ask me, it makes you sound like some twee hypersensitive English literateur, and who wants that?) Neither did any of the proposals made over the years by language reformers, such as thon and ip. So we are stuck, and the only solution at hand is the one that has carried on through sloppy popular speech despite the fulminations of grammarians.

Unable to write a singular "they" myself, I have always just recast such sentences entirely into the plural: All people love their mothers. And thus I will probably keep doing, because my internal alarms won't be stilled.

The question I face, though, is what to do when students employ this locution? Should I take a stand on the battlements of grammatical tradition and the logic of number, and hurl red darts at such sentences? I know this is becoming common in ordinary speech, but it is still not acceptable in formal composition. Or should I stand back and let the language solve this very real problem in its own way, hoping that in a century "everybody loves their mother" will seem perfectly elegant? I wonder.

The Sadness Epidemic

In reviewing All We Have to Fear by Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield, Andrew Scull asks why diagnoses of so many mental illnesses are soaring:

They identify two problems: the psychiatric profession’s obsession with simplistic, symptom-based diagnoses, and the looseness of its criteria for defining mental states as pathology. All sorts of anxieties that are in reality part of the normal range of human emotion and experience have been transformed by professional sleight of hand into diseases. The upshot, they contend, is that whereas thirty years ago less than five percent of Americans were thought to suffer from an anxiety disorder, nowadays some widely cited epidemiological studies have decreed that as many as 50 percent of us do so. . . . 

This debate has broken out with renewed vigor over the development of the new diagnostic manual for American psychiatry, the DSM-V:

Three decades ago, the British psychiatrist Edward Hare and I engaged in a vigorous debate on this issue in the pages of the British Journal of Psychiatry. He argued that the growing number of lunatics in Victorian museums of madness were victims of a new viral disease, schizophrenia, and I countered that it was more probable that other factors were at work — namely, the amorphousness of nineteenth century definitions of madness, the decreasing willingness and ability of families to cope with difficult or impossible relations, and the eagerness of psychiatrists to enlarge their sphere of operations. Of more contemporary relevance, a range of commentators have noticed the explosive growth of depression as a diagnosis, to the point where it is now frequently termed ‘the common cold’ of psychiatry; the equally dramatic expansion in the number of children being diagnosed with ADHD; the appearance out of nowhere of juvenile bipolar disorder, which apparently became forty times as common between 1994 and 2004; the epidemic of autism, a formerly rare condition afflicting less than one in five hundred children in 1990, which has now mushroomed into a disease found in one in every ninety children. More than a few scholars have been tempted to attribute these seismic shifts not to any real alteration in the numbers of sufferers from these disorders, but to disease-mongering by the psychiatric profession and by Big Pharma, the multi-national pharmaceutical industry that obtains a huge fraction of its profits from the sale of drugs aimed at mental disorders of all sorts.

Among the most zealous critics of the expanding psychiatric empire have been two unlikely souls: Robert Spitzer, the principal architect of DSM III, and Allen Frances, who played a similarly large role in the construction of DSM IV. As the latest edition of that tome, the largest thus far and the most delayed, struggles to be born, those assembling it have been assaulted by Spitzer and Frances for creating a version built on hasty and unscientific foundations; they claim it pathologizes everyday features of normal human existence, and that, like its predecessors, it will create new epidemics of spurious psychiatric illness. Allen Frances, in particular, has taken to uttering frequent mea culpas, taking the blame for loosening the criteria for diagnosing autism in DSM IV, and thus, so he claims, sowing fear and mislabeling thousands and thousands of children.

My feeling is that it makes little difference whether we call mental problems diseases or not. The questions is, can we do anything to help people? If Ritalin helps restless kids make it through the school day, without doing some lasting harm to their brains, why not use it? If antidepressants help people that Andrew Scull thinks are just experiencing "normal sadness" get on with their lives, what's wrong with that? If there was a pill that helped everybody feel better, why not use it? (Doesn't alcohol play this role in some cultures?) I think the debate over these diagnostic criteria is a distraction from the real issue, which is whether the drugs actually help people, and whether they do long-term damage to the brain.

Today's Addition to the Language

David Frum:

My wife has a very clever line about what happens to people when they rise to a certain level of success, fame, and wealth. (Or when they are born with unusual beauty.) She says, "They've gone outside the feedback loop."

The Pyschic Surgeon, Shamanism, and the Irrationality of Disease

At Lapham's Quarterly, psychaitrist Daniel Mason describes the eerily shamanistic career of a Brazilian psychic surgeon:

Jose Pedro de Freitas, known by his nickname Zé Arigó was born in 1921 or 1922 at a farm site six kilometers outside the town of Congonhas do Campo, in the mountainous state of Minas Gerais. As a young man, he was different, tormented by headaches and a strange white light, and then, as he grew older, dreams. In these, he found himself in an unfamiliar chamber, watching gowned and aproned figures speaking a foreign tongue. One night, a severe, stout, bald man, frock buttoned to his chin—a monster, Arigó would later say separated himself from the others, identified himself as Dr. Adolph Fritz, a German killed in World War I, and announced that he’d selected Arigó to carry out his earthly work. That night of revelation, Arigó awoke screaming. He sought help from doctors and the local priest—to no avail. It was only when he obeyed the surgeon that the nightmares ceased. Speaking German (a language he had never learned) and operating without anesthesia or antisepsis, Arigó used any tool at hand—butcher knives, scissors, rusty garden shears. He removed tumors and kidney stones, scarcely shedding blood. He cured blindness by sliding a blade high behind the orbit. Other times, like Jesus and the paralytic at Capernaum, Arigó simply commanded an illness to desist. As word of his successes spread, visitors began to arrive, first the ill and then others: incredulous doctors from São Paulo, foreign parapsychologists, journalists.

As to why people continue to seek out such healers in a world of modern medicine, Mason offers this:

At the periphery of the old footage stand crowds of patients, waiting quietly: a mother with a limp child, a fashionable girl in dark glasses, a thin man, a weeping white-haired woman in a dress of blue calico. Then Arigó steps forward and takes the old woman’s head in his hands. Suddenly, the arguments over what is happening seem to vanish. What matters are the warm calloused fingers on her face, the tears, the sense of wonder, light. She did not come here looking for reason. There is no reason to illness. There is no science that can justify why disease chooses whom it chooses, or when. There is no sense in why my heart has failed me, why I am blind, why my baby is sick, why I keep falling down. We are told to distrust otherworldly cures. But illness is otherworldly, monstrous, magical. If we are to believe the impossible, then who am I to decide whether it is the phantasm spreading inside our skull, or the ghostly hands that will cut it out?

A Meteor at Alamut

A Perseid Meteor photographed over Alamut Castle in Iran, the home base of the famous Assassins. By Oshin Zakarian. From National Geographic.

American Carbon Emissions are Falling

In July, US carbon emissions fell to a 20-year low. This is mostly because utilities are gradually switching from coal to natural gas, but wind power, solar power, and improved gas mileage in cars also help. The drop is too small to make much difference in our climate future, but it points to something important: this is a solvable problem, if we cared enough to solve it.

Jade Brush Pot ca. 1795

For sale at Christie's, estimate $500,000-800,000. The scene depicts the Six Scholars of Zhuxi.

The Millionaire Trash Picker and his Crazy House

John Archer is a wealthy man whose hobby is salvage. He finds bits of antique treasure everywhere -- in trash put out on the street, in mansions that are being demolished, and in the Danvers State Hospital, an old insane asylum from which he recovered the cupola above and the doors below.

To make room for all his found treasures,he keeps making his house bigger, adding wings in every direction --"a pterodactyl of architectural detritus," Joyce Wadler called it. Above, the music room, which can seat 200. The fireplace, doors, chandelier and trim were all salvaged.

One of the bathrooms, with found tub and window.

Love that table. Lots more at the Times.

Trifid Nebula

This image exaggerates color variation to better distinguish between the gas cloud and the embedded stars.

The Ugly Campaign

In 2000 and 2004, many Democratic activists complained bitterly that their flagship campaigns weren't tough enough. They wanted Gore and Kerry to go after Bush as a lying, lazy good ole boy, a chickenhawk, and an enabler of Wall Street crooks, for starters. But neither Gore nor Kerry had much interest in matching Rove's sleaze machine with sleaze of their own. They both lost, leaving many Democrats with a sense that their guys were right, but just weren't tough enough to win.

In 2008, Americans were so sick of Bush's economy and his Iraq war that all Obama had to do was obviously not be Bush -- not much of a challenge for a black man with a Kenyan name. He took a high tone, always respectful of McCain, and still walked away with the election. I, for one, liked the high tone.

But now that Obama is in a tough race we can all see that his high tone was a tactical choice. He and his team are proving themselves to be, as their enemies like to say, "Chicago pols," with sharp elbows and a nasty streak. As Dana Milbank put it,

the Democrats are no longer simply whining about the other side being reckless and unfair: They are being reckless and unfair themselves.

I hope all those Democrats who thought Kerry and Gore were weak are happy now.

I am not, but then I rarely am all that happy with politics. Politics in a democracy, or at least our democracy, is a rough game. Attack ads work -- just ask Newt Gingrich. They may only work at the margins, but America is so closely divided now between conservatives and the rest that ads only have to move 1 or 2 percent to deliver victory. Swing voters seem to be too distracted or ignorant to understand the real issues, and so they have to be reached with slogans, sound bites, and nasty slurs.

I recognize that 2008 was, for Democrats, a rare situation, when they could just coast to victory. I certainly am not going to vote for Romney because I think Obama's tactics are sleazy -- Romney is just as sleazy, after all, and even if he weren't I think issues like torture, war with Iran, and health care are more important than campaign tactics. But the ideological choice we face, between strengthening the welfare state and unwinding it, between a belligerent attitude toward the world and a peaceful one, is so important that I yearn for two candidates like Lincoln and Douglas who would put aside their personal interests and lay the issue before the public in the most honest way they can.

The Skeletal Army of Alken Enge

Alken Enge is a small bog in Denmark where archaeologists think they have discovered the remains of an Iron Age army.  They suspect that around the year 1 these men, perhaps numbering hundreds, were sacrificed after being captured in battle. Besides skeletal remains, most of them bearing the marks of violence, that site has yielded many weapons like the remarkably preserved ax below. When the bodies were deposited, the bog was a small lake. Only preliminary work has been done so far, but a multi-year exploration is planed.

Update: more here, including lots of pictures.

 Update 2: see a report from the 2014 findings here.

Claims about Human Species in a Time of Rapid Evolution

Meave and Louise Leakey, mother-daughter paleontologists, and Fred Spoor made the newspapers last week with a bold claim about human evolution. They asserted that they had verified the existence of a new species of genus Homo, our own genus, that lived between 1.9 and 1.7 million years ago. This means, they argue, that there were at least three separate species of hominids in Africa at the time. Last week I only had time to glance at the articles, but that was enough to raise my skeptical hackles.

Because, see, for the past three million years or so our relatives, which we call either Australopithecus or Homo, have been evolving very rapidly. (We are still evolving very rapidly.) This means that it is very difficult to define species or to say which fossils belong to one species or another. Two paleontologists can look at the same fossil and place it in different species. Even the genus of some fossils is disputed; some are called Australopithecus by some paleontologists and Homo by others.

Now that I've had time to read more about these fossils, I see that many paleontologists are unconvinced by the new claims. Nature published a commentary by Bernard Wood, who said that the taxonomic approach to human evolution -- the obsession with shoehorning fossils into certain species -- is "remarkably simplistic." Which is what I say. Given that all paleontologists believe in evolution, why do they still spend so much time and energy dividing the continuum of evolutionary change into discrete blocks called genus and species?

This guy, a graduate student blogger, has an interesting take. As he notes, there is certainly a lot of variability in the hominid fossils from this period, as the comparison of these jaws shows. But how many species that represents is a very hard questions, since the fossils span the whole continuum and do not cluster into obvious types.

This guy says one of the new fossils looks to him like a juvenile Australopithecus sediba, so not even in genus Homo.

We need to change the way we think about evolution. It isn't that you have one species, and then at some point it changes into another species. View across time there is no such thing as a stable species, only an ongoing process of transformation.

No Good Catholics in American Politics

Is there a single prominent politician in America who supports all of the Catholic Church's major political goals? I can't think of one.

Most Democrats are pro-Choice, and almost all of them think health insurers should pay for contraception.

Most Republicans support interrogation tactics the Pope defines as torture, and the Church doesn't think much of their budgetary priorities, either. This has been in the news this week because the Catholic Bishops sent a "blistering" letter to the House of Representatives after they approved Paul Ryan's budget last year. This is one point on which the conservative bishops and the more liberal nuns agree; members of both groups signed a letter denouncing Ryan's budget as following Ayn Rand more than Jesus Christ.

The leaders of both parties are too militaristic, and too willing to go to war, for the Church's taste.

Which raises the question for me of what role religious faith has in shaping people's political views. Based on this evidence, it seems to be minimal. All of the major religions are so flexible on political matters that believers can always stretch them to include their own political aims. The all teach many things, and believers of any political stripe can find something to embrace in them. And if their church really cannot encompass their politics, instead of changing politically they leave their old church and set up a new one, as violent white supremacists have done.

The formation of political beliefs we hold so passionately remains one of the great mysteries of our time, and so far as I can see the process is only tangentially related to formal religious doctrine.

Kenan Malik on Morality without God

Kenan Malik was born in India and lives in England. He writes about science and the history of science and has often defended the Enlightenment and its values. This is from an interview he have to The Browser.

Many believers think that the only way to be truly moral is to follow a religion which teaches us morality. How would you respond?

Throughout their history, one of the great selling points of religions – in particular the monotheistic religions – has been their importance as a bedrock of moral values. Without religious faith, runs the argument, we cannot anchor our moral truths or truly know right from wrong. Without belief in God we will be lost in a miasma of moral nihilism. “To remove God,” as the theologian Alister McGrath has put it, “is to eliminate the final restraint on human brutality”.

Looking back on history, one might question just how successful God has been as “the final restraint on human brutality”. What really concerns me, however, is the way that religious concepts of morality degrade what it means to be human by diminishing the importance of human agency in the creation of a moral framework. From a religious perspective, it is the weakness of human nature that ensures that God has to establish and anchor moral rules.

In truth, morality, like God, is a human creation. Even believers have to decide which of the values found in the Torah or the Bible or the Quran they accept, and which they reject. What God provides is not the source of moral values but, if you like, the ethical concrete in which those values are set. Rooting morality in religion is a means of putting certain values or practices beyond question by insisting they are God-given.

Is it just religious believers who look for ethical concrete?

Not at all, secularists often do too. There is, for example, an increasingly fashionable claim that science will decide which values are good and which are bad. I’m as critical of the false certainties of a morality rooted in science as I am of the false certainties of a divinely sanctified moral code. The desire to set moral values in ethical concrete is a yearning for moral certainty – a fear that without external authority, humans will fall into the morass of moral relativism. But there can be no getting away from the fact that as humans we have to stand on our own feet, think for ourselves, create our values and practices, and bear responsibility for them.