The Far Right Movement in Germany and the Burden of History

by Jalees Rehman

A friend who was invited to serve as a visiting professor at a German university recently contacted me and asked whether staying in Germany would be safe for him and his family. His concern was prompted by the September 2017 election of the federal German parliament in which the far-right AfD (Alternative für Deutschland, translated as "Alternative for Germany") party received approximately 13% of the popular vote. AfD had campaigned on an anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim platform, and has been referred to by various media outlets as a nationalist, racist, far-right populist, right wing extremist or even Neo-Nazi party. For the first time in history since World War 2, a far-right or nationalist party would be sitting in the federal German parliament by crossing the 5% minimum threshold designed to keep out fringe political movements. Even though all other political parties had categorically ruled out forming a government coalition with the AfD, thus relegating it to an opposition role in parliament with only a limited role in policy-making, my friend was concerned that its success could be indicative of rising neo-Nazism and hatred towards immigrants or Muslims. As a Muslim and visibly South Asian, he and his family could be prime targets for right-wing hatred.

I was flabbergasted by his concern. What surprised me most was that someone living in the US would be worried about safety and racial prejudice in Germany. Violent crime rates in major German cities are much lower than those of their US counterparts. While it is true that AfD garnered 13% of the popular vote in Germany, the US president who also ran on a similar populist, nationalist and anti-immigrant platform (with promises of building walls and enacting Muslim bans) received 46% of the popular vote! Many of the views of the AfD - for example the claims that traditional Islam is not compatible with Western European culture and the constitution, that immigrants and refugees represent a major threat to the economy and safety or that multiculturalism and progressive-liberal views have betrayed the ideals of the country's heritage – are increasingly becoming mainstream views of the ruling Republican party in the US. White supremacists, supporters of confederate ideology and neo-Nazis now feel emboldened to hold rallies in the US, knowing that they might only receive lukewarm or relativistic criticism from the US government whereas such acts would be unequivocally condemned by the German government. Racial or religious prejudices held by members of the government and the ruling party can lead to severe institutional reprisals against individuals. When these views are held by a minority party, there is much less danger of immediate institutionalized discrimination and persecution by the government or law enforcement.

So why is it that the 13% vote for AfD is causing such concern, both in Germany and outside of Germany?

One of the obvious reasons is Germany's history. If the AfD emergence were to foreshadow a re-awakening of Nazi ideology, then it could indeed have devastating consequences for Germany and the world in general. But there is no real evidence to suggest that Nazi ideology is espoused by the AfD leadership or by its base. Terms such as neo-Nazism and fascism are readily used by opponents of the AfD to describe the party but the AfD tries to clearly distance itself from Nazism. The AfD does not accept membership applications from former members of the NPD – a right wing extremist fringe party in Germany with an ideology that was far closer to that of the Nazis. The AfD not only disavows anti-Semitism, it has successfully recruited many Jewish members and offered them leadership roles in the party by portraying itself as a bulwark that will protect German Jews from Muslim anti-Semitism. These approaches effectively counter accusations of Nazism but they have not convinced all. The president of the German Council of Jews, Josef Schuster, recognizes that there is a growing problem with anti-Semitism perpetrated by Muslims in Germany but is not ready to accept the AfD as an ally. It may be advantageous to scape-goat Muslims in the current political climate but who is to say that the AfD won't switch its scape-goat to Jews in the future if the latter were politically more expedient?

Part of the confusion about what the AfD really stands for is that it has rapidly evolved over the course of just a few years. It started out in 2013 as a party founded by economics professors, who were opposed to Angela Merkel's handling of the euro crisis and the loss of Germany's fiscal sovereignty in the European Union. But once it became apparent that feared massive economic crash and recession had been averted (at least transiently), it morphed into an anti-Islam and anti-immigrant party. This modified AfD ousted its co-founder, the economics professor Bernd Lucke, from his leadership role in 2015. The party gained far more traction with its anti-Islam and anti-immigrant views after Merkel's government allowed more than 1 million refugees (predominantly from Syria but also from other countries in the Middle East) to enter Germany.

During this evolution, the AfD also become increasingly populist. Jan-Werner Müller, a German political scientist and professor at Princeton University, defined the key characteristics of populism in his recent book Was ist Populismus? ("What is Populism?"). Populist movements portray themselves as anti-establishment or anti-elite, but a second key element of a populist movement is their attitude towards pluralism. Müller uses the phrase "Wir sind das Volk" ("We are the people") that was chanted by the East German demonstrators during the final months of the DDR in 1989 to illustrate anti-pluralism. The "We" can be an inclusive "We" in the sense of "We are the people, too. Let us have a say!" This may be an apt description of the DDR demonstrators where several political factions demonstrated side-by-side in opposition against the socialist dictatorship. However, in populist movements, the "We" is exclusive: "Only we represent the people!" Those who do not agree are seen as traitors. In the past 2 years, the AfD leaders and base increasingly began to claim this exclusivity. Merkel was accused of betraying Germany and colluding with leftists, environmentalists and Muslim to betray the true values of the German people. Such anti-pluralism is antithetical to democracy and is thus a major cause of concern for democratic parties and institutions in Germany. The sense of exclusivity allows populists to develop a unique zeal and promote conspiracy theories about the political establishment and media, brandishing rational criticisms as pro-establishment collusions.

AfD is not just an anti-immigrant populist party, it also embodies a broader "Neue Rechte" ("New Right") movement. This is supported by the fact that some of the AfD positions have garnered the "philosophical blessing" of German intellectuals, an expression used by Müller in his excellent 2016 essay about the AfD. Müller cites the intellectuals Marc Jongen, Peter Sloterdijk and Botho Strauβ but this list now needs to be extended to include the prominent history professor Rolf Peter Sieferle who committed suicide in September of 2016 (one year before the election). His posthumously published and scandal-provoking book Finis Germania (alluding to the Latin phrase Finis Germaniae which means "The End of Germany"), became a best-seller in the months leading up to the 2017 election.

Sieferle was a respected professor of history and sociology, and thought of as a pioneer in studying environmental history. Finis Germania appears to have been written in the mid-1990s because it refers to the atrocities of the Nazis as having occurred 50 years prior. It is a short collection of mini-essays and aphorisms, grouped together in a handful of chapters. The tone is pessimistic and cynical, pointing towards a decline and likely collapse of German heritage and Germany. The most controversial passages revolve around Vergangenheitsbewältigung, a German word for processing and overcoming history. In Germany, Vergangenheitsbewältigung primarily refers to how Germany deals with its Nazi past. The Holocaust, the guilt of the Germans who participated in committing the atrocities and the historical responsibility (historische Verantwortung) that resulted from it for modern Germany are among the most extensively discussed topics in German school curricula and public intellectual discourse.

There is no denial of the Holocaust in the book. Sieferle uses the expressions "Verbrechen" (crime) and "Greueltaten" (atrocities) to describe the genocide committed by the Nazis, as was recently emphasized by Christopher Caldwell. However, Sieferle openly criticizes the style of contemporary Vergangenheitsbewältigung in which Germans are cast as perennial villains who need to demonstrate never-ending penance to atone for their collective guilt. Sieferle uses religious metaphors in which the Holocaust is compared to a new form of Erbsünde (literally translated as "inherited sin", but it is a German expression for the biblical original sin of Adam and Eve). Vergangenheitsbewältigung is likened to a new state religion which is meant to keep Germans docile.

There is no doubt that Sieferle's book touched a raw nerve with many Germans living today who feel that they are still held responsible for crimes committed by the Nazis. Any expression of German pride or patriotism is often self-scrutinized carefully to ensure that it in no way challenges Vergangenheitsbewältigung. Especially when interacting with non-Germans, Germans may consciously or subconsciously perceive themselves being pigeon-holed as descendants of Nazi perpetrators. They go out of their way to prove that they are different from their parents or grand-parents who may have lived during their Nazi era. Sieferle specifically contrasts Germans with Anglo-Americans who do not engage in self-flagellating Vergangenheitsbewältigung. A recent poll showed that 43% of British citizens are proud of their colonial past and do not feel shame for the atrocities of the British Empire. One example of British atrocities is the diversion of food from India in 1943 to feed British soldiers that was authorized by Winston Churchill and resulted in a famine which killed 4 million Indians.

A member of a book jury initially recommended this book because it would initiate a discussion about German history and the book quickly became a non-fiction best-seller. While there is no explicit Holocaust denial in the book, the subtext of the book was seen as dallying with anti-Semitism. Modern day anti-Semites cannot deny the Holocaust because the evidence for the atrocities is so overwhelming but they instead try to cast Jews as post-war perpetrators who use the memory Holocaust as a means of suppressing dissent. Some passages of Finis Germania are ambiguous enough to provide fodder for anti-Semites. The massive popularity of a book that could potentially promote anti-Semitic ideas came as a shock to the German literary and intellectual establishments. But the rash reaction of the leading German magazine Der Spiegel to delete the book from its best-seller listturned a marginally intelligible book with fragmented ideas into a heroic anti-establishment tract. Book-shops refused to sell the book but it remained an Amazon best-seller, suggesting that the ban had not diminished its popularity. While some German writers and intellectuals supported the decision of Der Spiegel, others saw it as a form of censorship to suppress undesirable ideas.

How does this book about the German history connect to the success of the AfD and the New Right movement? A second posthumously published Sieferle book also became a best-seller: Das Migrationsproblem ("The migration problem"). This book discusses the basic challenge for a welfare state such as Germany which aims to provide excellent housing, healthcare and food for all to take large numbers of refugees or immigrants who would be eligible for all the welfare services. The stability of the welfare state depends on a balance of workers who pay into the system and the beneficiaries. It performs a semi-quantitative analysis and suggests that Germany cannot handle the influx of political and economic refugees without compromising its welfare state character. The book also touches on the cultural differences between indigenous Germans and "tribal" refugees who hail from aggressive cultures. This second book also became a best-seller but it is the combination of the two themes that may form the intellectual foundation for the success of the AfD. Finis Germania decries the culture of collective guilt which in turn has lead Germans to be so docile that they accept millions of refugees as their inherited burden even if it undermines their economy and culture.

The AfD has tried to avoid public discussions of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in order to escape accusations of anti-Semitism and instead focused on Islam, immigrants or refugees. However, in a widely criticized speech, Björn Höcke – the leader of AfD in Thuringia – referred to the Berlin Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame" in January of 2017. He suggested that German history was crippling contemporary Germans and there was a need to re-think how Germans should handle their past. The federal AfD leadership was taken aback by these overt and public comments about a taboo topic and initiated a process to remove him for the party. However, Höcke remains an AfD member and has received support from many other AfD leaders. The success of the AfD may suggest that his speech may have been an intentional ploy to link German frustration with collective guilt to voting for AfD as a means to escape from the burden of the past.

How should Germany move forward after the success of AfD? As a Muslim German of South Asian descent, I am of course worried about the racist, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and populist rhetoric promoted by the AfD. There is no easy solution for how to deal with the rise of the far right but we can glean insights from this election and the success of far right movements in the United States or other countries. Censoring or banning books that simply express unpleasant view-points is the wrong approach. Denouncing 13% of German voters as Nazis, fascists or "deplorables" would be equally wrong. Burying our heads in the sand and hoping that right-wing populism will just disappear would be a folly. There is a sense of panic about the results of the German election but we can also see it as a wake-up call. Many countries have seen a rise in right-wing populist movements but the social and historical context of each movement is different and needs to be analyzed contextually. What is needed now is a rational analysis and the required actions.

Those of us who believe in the German democratic institutions and the power of rational dialogue need to engage the citizens who voted for AfD. One may agree or disagree with the positions of the AfD and its voters but this should not prevent meaningful dialogue. Concerns about the future of a welfare state with an imbalance between payers and beneficiaries are not unreasonable. The concerns revolving around immigration, refugees, the right to experience national pride and Vergangenheitsbewältigung should be addressed without condescension or throwing around insults and clichés. Another major concern voiced by AfD supporters is that key decisions about the future of Germany are made unilaterally by the government elites without engaging in a meaningful discussion with the electorate. Voters felt disempowered and ignored. This may also explain why the AfD received more than 20% of the vote in some parts of East Germany (the former DDR). Former DDR citizens wrested their freedom to vote and participate in public policy-making from a dictatorship less than 30 years only to find that the post-DDR Germany was also ignoring their opinions. The government and members of parliament have to learn how to routinely meet citizens so that they can listen to their concerns.

Condescension and hatred against the supporters of far right populist movements only strengthens them and their resolve to fight democratic pluralism. By peacefully and rationally engaging fellow citizens, Germany will be able to avoid the fate of the United States where a far right movement now controls the government. The historical responsibility of Germany lies in providing balance and reason in a world that could succumb to populism and chaos.

References:

Jan-Werner Müller. Was ist Populismus?. Suhrkamp Verlag, 2016.

Rolf Peter Sieferle. Finis Germania. Verlag Antaios. 2017

Rolf Peter Sieferle. Das Migrationsproblem. Manuscriptum Verlagsbuchhandlung. 2017 

The US and North Korea: Posturing v pragmatism

by Emrys Westacott

On September 19, Donald Trump spoke before the UN general assembly. Addressing the issue of North Korea's nuclear weapons program, he said that the US "if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, . . . will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea." And of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, he said, "Rocket Man is on a suicide mission for himself and his regime."

There is nothing new about the US president affirming a commitment to defend itself and its allies. What is noteworthy about Trump's remarks is his cavalier talk of totally destroying another country, which implicitly suggests the use of nuclear weapons, and his deliberately insulting–as opposed to just criticizing–Kim Jong-un. He seems to enjoy getting down in the gutter with the North Korean leader, who responded in kind by calling Trump a "frightened dog," and a "mentally deranged dotard." Critics have noted that Trump's language is closer to what one expects of a strutting schoolyard bully than a national leader addressing an august assembly. And one could ask interesting questions about the psychological make-up of both men that leads them to speak the way they do. From a moral and political point of view, though, the only really important question regarding Trump's behavior is whether or not it is sensible. Is it a good idea to threaten and insult Kim Jong-un.

As a general rule, the best way to evaluate any action, including a speech act, is pragmatically: that is, by its likely effects. This is not always easy. Our predictions about the effects of an action are rarely certain, and they are often wrong. Moreover, even if we agree that one should think pragmatically, most of us find it hard to stick to this resolve. How many parents have nagged their teenage kids even though they know that such nagging will probably be counterproductive? How many of us have gone ahead and made an unnecessary critical comment to a partner that we know is likely to spark an unpleasant and unproductive row? And if one happens to be an ignorant, impulsive, narcissist, the self-restraint required in acting pragmatically is probably out of reach. Which is worrying when one considers how high the stakes are in the verbal cock fight between Trump and Jong-un.

There can be various motives behind issuing a threat. You could be signaling something to a third party (e.g. that you are a dangerous enemy, or a loyal friend). Or you could be looking to bolster your own confidence. But insofar as you are thinking about the party you are threatening, a threat is usually intended to have one of two consequences.

            1. Cause a conflict through provocation.

            2. Forestall a conflict by instilling fear.

Every reasonable person agrees that a war between the US and North Korea would be catastrophic. It could very easily and quickly lead to millions of deaths in both North and South Korea. Even if one is callous enough to discount the consequences to North Koreans, the proximity of Seoul to the border, with a population in the greater metropolitan area of 24 million, means that North Korea could almost certainly wreak havoc even if it only used conventional weapons.

So a threat that risks provoking a conflict is horribly irresponsible. Threatening Kim Jong-un is thus only sensible if it makes war less likely by instilling fear. Is it likely to do this? We don't know. To know how the recipient of a threat will react, you have to understand that person's mindset. But Kim Jong-un's mind is fairly opaque, at least to most Western observers.

In the absence of good information about what Kim Jong-un is really thinking, one naturally falls back on general principles that supposedly describe human nature, and therefore apply to him just as they apply to us all. Most people, it is said, are rational and self-interested; therefore, they won't normally act in ways that is wildly opposed to their own self-interest. And the same can reasonably be assumed of Kim Jong-un. But can it? The problem here is that the inference just drawn is invalid. From the fact that people are rational and self-interested, all that follows is that they won't usually act in ways that they perceive to be against their own interests. If their perceptions are mistaken, they may very well accidentally screw themselves over. So to predict how Jong-un will react to Trump's threats, we need to know not what will actually benefit him, but what he thinks will. Which brings us back to the opacity problem.

Dictator's minds are often hard to fathom because their view of the world is likely to be somewhat distorted. There are several reasons for this.

·        They tend to be arrogant and hubristic, with an exaggerated sense of their own ability and power. (Think of Hitler invading the Soviet Union in June 1941 and six months later declaring war on the US.)

·        They are often suspicious going on paranoid, so they don't trust good information. (Think of Stalin in 1941 ignoring all those who told him that Hitler was about to attack.)

·        They are typically surrounded by sycophants who tell them only what it is assumed they want to hear.

These factors also explain why dictators often fail so spectacularly to do what would best serve their own interests. It's common for them to be portrayed, even by people who loathe them, as fiendishly shrewd and cunning. But this shrewdness is often quite narrow in scope. Plato got this right over two thousand years ago in the Republic. Tyrants, he argued, are pitiable rather than enviable. They think they know what is in their interest, but they don't.

Take Saddam Hussein, for example. He could have forestalled the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. But believing, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that there would be no invasion, he chose not to quash once and for all reports that he had weapons of mass destruction. By the end of the year, his sons were dead and he was in prison awaiting trial and eventual execution.

Or consider the Syrian dicatator Bashar al-Assad. Between 2000, when he assumed power, and 2010, he presided over a relatively stable country. But his brutal treatment of dissidents and his intransigent resistance to reform eventually led to a civil war which since 2011 has killed over 400,000 people, rendered millions homeless, and caused over five million people to flee the country, much of which now lies in ruins. Assad may be indifferent to the fate of ordinary Syrians, but his life and reputation would surely be much better had he pursued policies that didn't lead to this national disaster.

So one can't be certain that Kim Jong-un will only ever do what is (as opposed to what he believes to be) in his rational self-interest. For that reason, Trumps childlike posturing and sabre rattling are fantastically irresponsible. The uncontroversial bedrock principle that should underlie and inform US policy is that war would be catastrophic. Just about anything would be preferable. With respect to US foreign policy, therefore, war would represent an absolute failure. But it is not clear that Trump grasps this. A recent tweet read: "Just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at U.N. If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won't be around much longer! The casualness of this reference to people not being around–that is, to them and countless others being wiped out through military action–is numbing.

On another occasion, Trump declared that when it comes to North Korea, "talking is not the answer." That is as wrong as it gets. The only acceptable long term future is one in which the parties involved sit down and negotiate. Instead of offering deliberately provocative threats and insults, the US should do the following:

·      State clearly that while they will always defend themselves and their allies, the US will not initiate any military action against North Korea.

·      Express a desire for an improved relationship between the US and North Korea, with the long-term goal of full diplomatic relations.

·      Propose, and work hard to achieve, both one-on-one talks between the US and North Korea, and multilateral talks involving South Korea, China, Japan and Russia to reduce military tension on the Korean peninsular.

·      Propose similar talks to explore the development of economic activity linking North Korea and other countries.

Some people will object that these proposals amount to rewarding North Korea's "bad" behavior. They argue instead for economic sanctions rather than talks, preferring sticks to carrots. It is possible they are right. Yet in the history of international relations, economic sanctions have rarely achieved their purpose. More importantly, in this case it is quite possible that tighter economic sanctions could make things worse–that is, make war more likely if they make the North Korean government feel weaker and more desperate. What matters isn't what someone "deserves," but what works. To say it again, when the stakes are so high, pragmatism should be the order of the day.

Donald Trump is no Leroy Jethro Gibbs

by Bill Benzon

Donald Trump, of course, is the forty-fifth President of the United States. He is a real person, but Leroy Jethro Gibbs is not. He is the central character in NCIS, one of the most popular and longest running shows on network television. Gibbs is a Senior Special Agent in the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

The Trump campaign is known to have targeted NCIS viewers. Why? What appeal would a show like NCIS have for Trump voters?

The honor to serve

Let’s look at a scene from an episode in season seven, which started airing in 2009. The episode is called “One Shot, One Kill”. It opens in a video game arcade where some teen-aged boys are blown away by the skill of Marine Corps sergeant. We cut to a recruiting office where the sergeant is giving the boys the hard sell about hitching up. He’s talking about Iraq: “Been in the corps 16 years. Closest I’ve ever come to a bullet is...” Shatter! Wham! Splatt! He’s shot. Slumps over on the desk.

Gibbs and his team are called in to investigate. In the course of their investigation the recruiter who replaces the first one is also shot. In both cases, sitting at the desk, shot from long distance, through the window. Sniper.

Gibbs decides he’s got to go under cover. He’ll pretend to be a Marine recruiter, which will be easy form him as he had once been a Marine. To protect Gibbs bullet-proof glass is placed in the window and he wears a bullet-proof vest. Three microphones are placed outside so that, when the shooter fires, their Forensic Specialist, Abby Sciuto, can pick up the sound and use it to triangulate the shooter’s location. We then scoot over there and make the arrest.

We’re in the recruiting office, Gibbs looking sharp in his old Marine uniform. One of his Senior Agents, Kate Todd, is in uniform as a captain. She’s there to profile potential recruits as they visit they office. The major who heads the recruiting unit wants to stay; after all, he’s lost two men to this sniper. Gibbs objects. The major insists.

The matter is resolved (c. 34:39):

Gibbs: Major, your mission is to protect our country. Our mission right now is to protect you, and your marines. Allow us the honor of doing our job.
Major: Good luck Gunnery Sergeant.

That phrase – “the honor of doing our job” – may be the ideological and ethical heart of NCIS. I can see why it resonates with Trump voters. It resonates with me, and I voted for Hillary.

Gibbs knows that, in undertaking this assignment, he’s putting himself in harm’s way. He’s done that before, when he was a Marine sniper. He’s got his values. He serves a cause larger than himself. He serves his country, without hesitation.

NCIS is a show where values are clear and duty calls. Oh, there’s muck and murk along the way, but the fundamental moral structure of the universe is clear. It’s a show were the workplace is “like family.” People are loyal to and trust one another. Sure, there’s conflict and tension, plenty of bickering, but we’re all in this together. For country and family.

Everything in its place

We can see a bit of that family tension in a scene from the first episode of the second season, “The Good Wives Club”. Gibbs is onsite with his team, consisting of Senior Special Agent Tony DiNozzo, Special Agent Kate Todd, and Tim McGee, a probationary Special Agent who has just joined the team. Gibbs has just introduced the team to Lt. Commander Willis, head of security at a base where a woman’s dead body has been found. As Gibbs continues to talk with Willis we hear this conversation (1:36):

DiNozzo (talking to Todd): When Gibbs introduced us he introduced you, then McGee, then me. Why’d he mention me last.
Todd: You are kidding.
DiNozzo: No. For Gibbs to mix up the seniority order like that, just seems weird that’s all.
McGee: I don’t think it really means...
Dinozzo: Probie...
Todd: I wouldn’t put too much stock in it.
DiNozzo: Why do you say that?
Todd: Well, because I don’t think it has anything to do with seniority.
DiNozzo: What do you think it has to do with?
Todd: My guess would be level of intelligence and general competence. DiNozzo holds up his hand and turns to McGee.
McGee just barely begins to speak: I didn’t say anything.
DiNozzo: It’s what yer thinking, Probie.

DiNozzo’s insecurity is a real but also a minor issue. Todd’s witty reply is a bit insulting, as it’s meant to be. This is playful banter. Their willingness to play around like this is evidence that they trust and respect one another.

The world of NCIS is one where seniority is important. It’s our world. And it’s a military world, though NCIS agents are civilians the crimes involve the military. The fact that the show would devote time to a scene like this indicates the importance of order to the show: a place for everything, and everything in its place.

After that bit of conversation we shift to the crime scene and the show goes about its business. The crime is solved (the criminal, in this case, commits suicide) and the episode ends with this bit of banter (41:53):

Gibbs: DiNozzo, Kate, McGee. M-TAC now!
DiNozzo: DiNozzo, Kate, McGee. DiNozzo, Kate, McGee! [In order by seniority.]
Todd: Beatnik gone? [He’d just complained of a ‘beatnik’ playing bongos in his head.]
DiNozzo: Yeah.
Todd: Cool.

Think about that for a bit. At the beginning of the episode a senior agent gets his nose bent out of shape because his boss doesn’t introduce his team in order of seniority. That’s a minor matter. And that minor matter, nonetheless, gets resolved at the end of the show. That is very elegant writing, elegant craft.

In the large, a crime has been committed. A woman has been murdered, several women in fact. There is a breach in the social fabric; world is out of order. Gibbs’s team is called in. They solve the case. Order restored, fabric repaired.

And that’s what crime shows in general are about, restoring order in the world after a crime has been committed. Moreover, many of the crimes in NCIS are acts of terrorism. The show premiered in September 2003, two years after 9/11, an event that put terrorism on everyone’s mind – much like the nuclear arms race was on everyone’s mind at of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s (remember ‘duck and cover’ and civil defense and fallout shelters?). THAT is surely an aspect of NCIS’s general appeal and one that would be particularly appealing to Trump supporters, who are particularly anxious about the nation’s borders.

What’s particularly interesting about NCIS is that this dance of order and disorder is written into the show’s texture. DiNozzo’s status anxiety is a running motif in the show. Beyond that, consider the show’s three more or less intellectual characters: Medical Examiner Dr. Donald “Ducky” Mallard, NCIS Forensic Specialist Abby Sciuto, and Special Agent Tim McGee (MIT graduate and computer whiz). In a typical scene Gibbs will ask one of them What’s going on? They’ll start rambling on about this that and the other, mostly technical details, until Gibbs cuts them off and demands, What’s the point? He’s clearly annoyed and so, I strongly suspect, is the audience. I know I am.

The work they’re doing, their reasoning, is of course important in solving the crime. But Gibbs trusts them. He doesn’t need to know the details. He needs to know what they do next. The details just get in his way as he makes those decisions and takes those actions. When he cuts off their rambling and they cough up the goods, order is restored – not in the large, the crime at hand, but in the small, the texture of interaction between individuals. Of course, in bringing them to the point, Gibbs is also asserting his authority over them, the authority of the man of action over the rambling intellectual – another feature that presumably would be attractive to Trump voters (and to many others as well).

Personal interest vs. public duty

Let’s now turn our attention to a deeper issue. For it turns out that Gibbs himself has committed an egregious breach in the social fabric. When Gibbs was in the Marines his first wife and daughter were murdered by a Mexican drug-dealer. Gibbs in turn shot the drug-dealer, leaving an empty shell casing at the scene. He was never caught. Yes, the drug-dealer was a “bad hombre’; he deserved what he got. But, yes, Gibbs is guilty of murder.

Consider a scene in the next to the last episode, number 23, of season seven, “Patriot Down” [2]. Abby Sciuto, the Forensic Specialist, had been invited to Mexico to give a lecture. While there she was asked to look into a 20-year-old case involving a murdered drug dealer, the drug dealer Gibbs had murdered. She figured out that the shell casing must have come from Gibbs’ gun (don’t ask how, it’s complicated). We’re now in Abby’s lab. Gibbs has just consulted Abby on the current case and turns to leave. She prevents him from doing so (c. 36:33):

Abby Sciuto: The evidence in my report says that you killed Pedro Hernandez. And you're not even willing to talk to me about it.
Gibbs: I didn't think I needed to.
Abby: I owe you everything.
 You're Gibbs.
 No one needs to know the truth about the Hernandez investigation.
 I am willing to do anything for you.
 I just need you to tell me what to do.

Gibbs: No, you don't Abbs.
 I've only ever needed you to do one thing.

Abby: My job.
 But it's different this time. I mean it has to be, right?
Gibbs: No, it doesn't.
 [...]
Abby: Gibbs...
What do I do?

Gibbs: You send in the report to the task force. All of it.
Abby: I know. You shouldn't have to tell me, right?
Gibbs smiles and kisses her on the forehead.

That last gesture, Gibbs kissing Abby on the forehead, is that a blessing? He knows what will happen when that report is read by the Mexican officials. Abby was willing to protect him, but Gibbs tells her not to.

Why, when Abby made it clear that she was willing to protect him, did Gibbs refuse her offer? The only answer that makes sense is that Gibbs respects the law and the institutions it represents more than he values his personal liberty. Yes, he had broken the law once, years ago when he was grief-stricken at the loss of his family. Since then he’s spent twenty years defending the law. He’s changed.

That kind of decision has deep roots in Western culture. In one of his early dialogs, The Crito, Plato tells how Socrates had been condemned to death. His friend Crito visits him there and explains that he has made arrangements for Socrates to escape. Socrates refuses, arguing that he lived his life within the Athenian state and that it is the laws of Athens that gave his actions meaning, even though he may have criticized the state. For him to run from the state even though it had condemned him unjustly would be to undermine the foundation of his life.

The same with Gibbs. He shot and killed a man. He felt that he was justified in doing so and, I suspect, most of the people in the show’s audience would have felt so as well. But he broke the law. He has now spent two decades of his life in service to that law. For Gibbs to ask Abby to spike her report would be to make a mockery of the law and therefore of the last two decades of his life.

Recall the center of that conversation:

Abby: I am willing to do anything for you.
 I just need you to tell me what to do.

Gibbs: No, you don’t Abbs.
 I've only ever needed you to do one thing.

Abby: My job.
 But it’s different this time. I mean it has to be, right?
Gibbs: No, it doesn’t.

Gibbs is in effect telling her that her duty to the law, to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, to the country, outweighs, must outweigh, her personal loyalty to him – and personal loyalty counts for a lot in Gibbs’s world. But he doesn’t actually say anything like that. It is up to the viewer to understand that that’s what’s going on.

What would Donald do?

Now, let us ask: If Donald Trump were in a similar situation, what would he have done? Just look at his conduct toward the Justice Department over the investigation of L’Affaire Russe, as Lawfare’s Ben Wittes likes to call it [1]. In particular, consider his treatment of James Comey, how he tried to recruit Comey’s personal loyalty and how he fired him when Comey did the right thing and refused. I have little doubt that if Trump had been in Gibbs’s place, he’d have ordered Abby to falsify her report and destroy the evidence. Donald Trump is no Leroy Jethro Gibbs.

Donald Trump walks all over that crucial distinction between his personal interests and his duty to the country as President. That is what is at issue in his refusal to release his tax returns and his refusal to divest himself of his business interests. That is what is at issue in those tweets from his personal account where he leaks, demeans, rages, contradicts, preens, parades, and bloviates all over the public record 140 characters at a time. That is what is at issue in making his son-in-law – the young hot-shot real estate mogul who made a dumb deal for a property at 666 Fifth Avenue – Roving Ambassador Plenipotentiary and General Fixer-Upper for Just About Everything. The list goes on and on. As far as I can tell, Trump is in it for the money and the adulation. He makes no distinction between service to Trump and service to the United States of America.

Why, then, if the real Donald Trump is so very different from the fictional Leroy Jethro Gibbs, why would any one attracted to NCIS vote for Trump?

In this particular instance, Gibbs was not in any danger when he told Abby to perform her legal duty. We learn in the next episode that someone else intercepted that report before it could reach Mexico. Gibbs was free. But still knows what he did, and so did Abby, and that someone else.

Of course, the audience couldn’t have known in episode 23 that the report would be quashed in episode 24. Still, this is a television show and TV shows have unspoken rules. One of them is that the central figure always comes out “clean” in the end. And Gibbs did. Remember – I certainly did – that, even if he stepped outside the law, he was revenging the death of his wife and daughter. That loss itself was a motif that appeared from time to time in the series. That’s what makes this bit of fictional flimflamming emotionally and aesthetically acceptable – to Trump voters and, I admit it, to me as well.

As for the distinction between one’s interests as an individual person and one’s duties and responsibilities as a law enforcement officer, I submit that, unless the distinction is already deep in your blood, as it were, it’s all but invisible. While NCIS makes the distinction, it doesn’t talk about it very much. And that, explicit talk, is important. Without such talk we can respond to Gibbs’s sense of duty – as, for example, we saw it in the first scene we looked at – without really thinking about his ability to distinguish between his personal interests and his public duty. I fear that Trump supporters are either oblivious to that distinction or the emotional satisfaction they get from Trump’s various actions and pronouncements outweighs their concern about the separation of public and private interests. He uses their fear and anxiety to feed his megalomania.

God save the Queen!

By way of contrast let’s look at The Crown, an original Netflix series about Queen Elizabeth II of England. The first season starts with Elizabeth as a Princess and shows her transition to being Queen. The distinction between her acts and feelings as a private individual and her duties and responsibilities as the Queen is a major, if not THE major, theme of the season.

In episode five, “Smoke and Mirrors”, we have the coronation [3]. Here she is discussing the ceremony with her husband, Philip. He urges her to televise the ceremony. She resists for awhile, then (c. 39:05):

Elizabeth: I'll support you in the televising.
Philip: You won't regret it.
Elizabeth: On one condition. That you kneel.
Philip: Who told you?
Elizabeth: My Prime Minister. He said you intended to refuse.
Philip: I merely asked the question. Whether it was right in this day and age that the Queen's consort, her husband, should kneel to her rather than stand beside her.
Elizabeth: You won't be kneeling to me.
Philip: That's not how it will look. That's not how it will feel. It will feel like a eunuch, an amoeba, is kneeling before his wife.
Elizabeth: You'll be kneeling before God and the Crown as we all do.
Philip: I don't see you kneeling before anyone.
Elizabeth: I’m not kneeling because I'm already flattened under the weight of this thing.
Philip: Oh, spare me the false humility. Doesn't look like that to me.
Elizabeth: How does it look to you?
Philip: Looks to me like you're enjoying it. It's released an unattractive sense of authority and entitlement that I have never seen before.
Elizabeth: And in you, it's released a weakness and insecurity I've never seen before.
Philip: Are you my wife or my Queen?
Elizabeth: I'm both.
Philip: I want to be married to my wife.
Elizabeth: I am both and a strong man would be able to kneel to both.
Philip: I will not kneel before my wife.
Elizabeth: Your wife is not asking you to.
Philip: But my Queen commands me?
Elizabeth: Yes.
Philip: I beg you make an exception for me.
Elizabeth: No.

This conversation, unlike the one between Gibbs and Abby, is quite explicit about the distinction between the private person and the public official. You can’t miss it.

For what it’s worth, The Crown was released on November 4, 2016, four days before the presidential election in the United States. I can’t help but thinking that that was timed to coincide with a likely win for Hilary Clinton, making her the first female head of state for the United States. That did not happen. But the issue at the center of that show has turned out to be agonizingly relevant to the election's outcome.

This distinction, between personal interest and public duty, is of course not specific to heads of state. In the modern world it applies to all government officials at all levels, from the local cop on the beat, to the county clerk, the mayor, the head of the transportation department (city, county, and state), the governor, and right back up through Congressmen and Senators, Cabinet officers, and the President and Vice-President. All of them, everyone, are enjoined from using their public positions for private purposes. Many of them fail in that duty, sometimes in minor, sometimes in major ways. That’s what corruption is, the use of one’s public position for private gain.

Nor is corruption merely a public offense. It is anathema, if all too common, in the world of private business as well. People working for corporations are not supposed to give favors to personal acquaintances.

The institutions of our society are built on that important and very fragile distinction. Your interests as a private individual must be kept separate from your duties as an employee of an organization, public or private. That is why Trump’s behavior is so egregious and so dangerous. He is a threat to The Constitution itself, not simply in this or that particular, but to its very existence. He undermines the rule of law.

He is no Leroy Jethro Gibbs. He is no Queen Elizabeth II. He’s an insecure bully from Queens who was born on third base and thinks he hit a home run. He is not worthy of the men and women who voted for him and he demeans and diminishes those who, in a desire to serve their country, serve directly under him.

He should be impeached. Only then can we restore honor and dignity to the Federal Government. Only then can we restore America’s place in the world.

* * * * *

[1] Lawfare is essential reading for anyone concerned about the vicissitudes of the Trump Presidency. Look at the items filed under Donald Trump. Concerning the point at issue in this essay, the distinction between the private individual and the public official, I recommend Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic, What Happens When We Don’t Believe the President’s Oath?, and Quinta Jurecic, Body Double: What Medieval Executive Theory Tells Us About Trump’s Twitter Accounts.

[2] For the dialog from this episode I used a transcript by bunniefuu from Forever Dreaming.

[3] For this dialog I used a transcript from Springfield! Springfield!

* * * * *

I have a number of posts at New Savanna about Trump and about NCIS.

How to thrive as a fox in a world full of hedgehogs

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

The Nobel Prize winning animal behaviorist Konrad Lorenz once said about philosophers and scientists, “Philosophers are people who know less and less about more and more until they know nothing about everything. Scientists are people who know more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing.” Lorenz had good reason to say this since he worked in both science and philosophy. Along with two others, he remains the only zoologist to win the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. His major work was in investigating aggression in animals, work that was found to be strikingly applicable to human behavior. But Lorenz’s quote can also said to be an indictment of both philosophy and science. Philosophers are the ultimate generalists, scientists are the ultimate specialists.

Specialization in science has been a logical outgrowth of its great progress over the last five centuries. At the beginning, most people who called themselves natural philosophers – the word scientist was only coined in the 19^th century – were generalists and amateurs. The Royal Society which was established in 1660 was a bastion of generalist amateurs. It gathered together a motley crew of brilliant tinkerers like Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren, Henry Cavendish and Isaac Newton. These men would not recognize the hyperspecialized scientists of today; between them they were lawyers, architects, writers and philosophers. Today we would call them polymaths.

These polymaths helped lay the foundations of modern science. Their discoveries in mathematics, physics, chemistry, botany and physiology were unmatched. They cracked open the structure of cells, figured out the constitution of air and discovered the universal laws governing motion. Many of them were supported by substantial hereditary wealth, and most of them did all this on the side, while they were still working their day jobs and spending time with their families. The reasons these gentlemen (sadly, there were no ladies then) of the Royal Society could achieve significant scientific feats were many fold. Firstly, the fundamental laws of science still lay undiscovered, so the so-called “low hanging fruit” of science was ripe and plenty. Secondly, doing science was cheap then; all Newton needed to figure out the composition of light was a prism.

But thirdly and most importantly, these men saw science as a seamless whole. They did not distinguish much between physics, chemistry and biology, and even when they did they did so for the sake of convenience. In fact their generalist view of the world was so widespread that they didn’t even have a problem reconciling science and religion. For Newton, the universe was a great puzzle built by God, to be deciphered by the hand of man, and the rest of them held similar views.

Fast forward to the twentieth century, and scientific specialization was rife. You could not imagine Werner Heisenberg discovering genetic transmission in fruit flies, or Thomas Hunt Morgan discovering the uncertainty principle. Today science has become even more closeted into its own little boxes. There are particle astrophysicists and neutrino particle astrophysicists, cancer cell biologists, organometallic chemists and geomicrobiologists. The good gentlemen of the Royal Society would have been both fascinated and flummoxed by this hyperspecialization.

There is a reason why specialization became the order of the day from the seventeenth century onwards. Science simply became too vast, its tendrils reaching deep into specific topics and sub-topics. You simply could not flit from topic to topic if you were to understand something truly well and make important discoveries in the field. If you were a protein crystallographer, for instance, you simply had to spend all your time learning about instrumentation, protein production and software. If you were a string theorist, you simply had to learn pretty much all of modern physics and a good deal of modern mathematics. Studying any topic in such detail takes time and effort and leaves no time to investigate other fields. The rewards from such single-minded pursuit are usually substantial; satisfaction from the deep immersion that comes from expertise, the enthusiastic adulation of your peers, and potential honors like the Nobel Prize. There is little doubt that specialization has provided great dividends for its practitioners, both personal and scientific.

And yet there were always holdouts, men and women who carried on the tradition of their illustrious predecessors and left the door ajar to being generalists. Enrico Fermi and Hans Bethe were true generalists in physics, and Fermi went a step further by becoming the only scientist of the century who truly excelled in both theory and experiment; he would have made his fellow countryman Galileo proud. Then there was Linus Pauling who mastered and made seminal contributions to quantum chemistry, organic chemistry, biochemistry and medicine. John von Neumann was probably the ultimate polymath in the tradition of old natural philosophers, contributing massively to every field from pure mathematics and economics to computing and biology.

These polymaths not only kept the flame of the generalist alive, but they also anticipated science ironically coming full circle. The march of science from the seventeenth to the twentieth century might have been one toward increasing specialization, but in the last few years we have seen generalist science again blossoming. Why is this? Simply because the most important and fascinating scientific questions we face today require the meld of ideas from different fields. For instance: What is consciousness? What is life? How do you combat climate change? What is dark energy? These questions don’t just benefit from an interdisciplinary approach but they require it. Now, the way modern science approaches these questions is to bring together experts from various fields rather than relying on a single person who is an expert in all the fields. The Internet and global communication have made this kind of intellectual cross-pollination easier. And yet I would contend that there is a loss of insight when people keep excelling in their chosen fields and simply funnel the output of their efforts to other scientists without really understanding in what way it’s used. In my own field of drug discovery for instance, I have found that people who at least have a conceptual understanding of other areas are far more likely to contribute useful insights compared to those who simply do their job well and shove the product on to the next step of the pipeline.

I thus believe there is again a need for the kind of generalist who dotted the landscape of scientific research two hundred years ago. Both the poet Archilochus as well as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin have fortunately given us the right vocabulary to describe generalists and specialists. The fox, wrote Archilochus, knows many things while the hedgehog knows one big thing. Generalists are foxes; specialists are hedgehogs.

The history of science demonstrates that both foxes and hedgehogs are necessary for its progress. But history also shows that foxes and hedgehogs can alternate. In addition there are fields like chemistry which have always benefited more from foxes than hedgehogs. Generally speaking, foxes are more important when science is theory-rich and data-poor, while hedgehogs are more important when science is theory-poor and data-rich. The twentieth century was largely the century of hedgehogs while the twenty-first is likely to be the century of foxes.

Being a fox is not very easy though. Both personal and institutional forces in science have been built to support hedgehogs. You can mainly blame human resources personnel for contriving to make the playing field more suitable for these creatures. Consider the job descriptions in organizations. We want an “In vivo pharmacologist” or “Soft condensed matter physicist”, the job listing will say; attached would be a very precise list of requirements – tiny boxes within the big box. This makes it easier for human resources to check all the boxes and reject or accept candidates efficiently. But it makes it much harder for foxes who may not fit precise labels but who may have valuable insights to contribute to make it past those rigid labels. Organizations thus end up losing fine, practical minds who pay the price for their eclectic tastes. Academic training is also geared toward producing hedgehogs rather than foxes, and funding pressures on professors to do very specific kinds of research do not make the matter any easier. In general, these institutions create an environment in which being a fox is actively discouraged and in which hedgehogs and their intellectual children and grandchildren flourish.

As noted above, however, this is a real problem at a time when many of the most important problems in science are essentially interdisciplinary and would greatly benefit from the presence of foxes. But since institutional strictures don’t encourage foxes to ply their trade, they also by definition do not teach the skills necessary to be a fox. Thus the cycle perpetuates; institutions discourage foxlike behavior so much that the hedgehogs don’t even know how to be productive foxes even if they want to, and they in turn further perpetuate hedgehogian principles.

Fortunately, foxes in the past and present have provided us with a blueprint of their behavior. The essence of foxes is generalist behavior, and there are some commonsense steps one can take to inculcate these habits. Based on both historical facts about generalists as well as, well, general principles, one can come up with a kind of checklist on being a productive fox in an urban forest full of hedgehogs. This checklist draws on the habits of successful foxes as well as recent findings from both the sciences and the humanities that allow for flexible and universal thinking that can be applied not just in different fields but especially across their boundaries. Here are a few lessons that I have learnt or read about over the years. Because the lessons are general, they would not be confined to scientific fields.

1. Acknowledge psychological biases.

One of the most striking findings over the last three decades or so, exemplified by the work of Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic and others, is the tendency of human beings to make the same kinds of mistakes when thinking about the world. Through their pioneering research, psychologists have found a whole list of biases like confirmation bias, anchoring effects and representativeness that dog our thinking. Recognizing these biases doesn’t just help connect ideas across various disciplines but also helps us step back and look at the big picture. And looking at the big picture is what foxes need to do all the time.

2. Learn about statistics.

A related field of inquiry is statistical thinking. In fact, many of the cognitive biases which I just mentioned arise from the fundamental inability of human beings to think statistically. Basic statistical fallacies include: extrapolating from small sample sizes, underestimating or ignoring error bars, putting undue emphasis on rare but dramatic effects (think terrorist attacks), inability to think across long time periods and ignoring baselines. In an age when the news cycle has shrunk from 24 hours to barely 24 seconds of our attention span, it’s very easy to extrapolate from random, momentary exposure to all kinds of facts, especially when the media’s very existence seems to depend on dramatizing or exaggerating them. In such cases, stepping back and asking oneself some basic statistical questions about every new fact can be extremely helpful. You don't have to actually be able to calculate p values and confidence intervals, but you should know what these are.

3. Make back-of-the-envelope calculations.

When the first atomic bomb went off in New Mexico in July, 1945, Enrico Fermi famously threw a few pieces of paper into the air and, based on where the shockwave scattered them, came up with an accurate estimate of the bomb’s yield. Fermi was a master of the approximate calculation, the rough, order of magnitude estimate that would give the right ballpark answer. It’s illuminating how that kind of thinking can help to focus our thinking, no matter what field we may be dealing with. Whenever we encounter a fact that would benefit from estimating a number, it’s worth applying Fermi’s method to find a rough answer. In most cases it’s good enough.

4. Know your strengths and weaknesses.

As the great physicist Hans Bethe once sagely advised, “Always work on problems for which you possess an undue advantage.” We are always told that we should work on our weaknesses, and this is true to some extent. But it’s far more important to match the problems we work on with our particular strength, whether it’s calculation, interdisciplinary thinking or management. Leveraging your strengths to solve a problem is the best way to not get bogged down in one place and being able to nimbly jump across several problems like a fox. Hedgehogs often spend their time not just honing their strengths but working on their weaknesses; this is an admirable trait, but it’s not always the most optimal for working across disciplinary boundaries.

5. Learn to think at the emergent level that’s most useful for every field.

If you have worked in various disciplines long enough, you start realizing that every discipline has its own zeitgeist, its own way of doing things. It’s not just about learning the technical tools and the facts, it’s about knowing how to pitch your knowledge at a level that’s unique and optimal for that field. For instance, a chemist thinks in terms of molecules, a physicist thinks in terms of atoms and equations, an economist thinks in terms of rational individuals and a biologist thinks in terms of genes or cells. That does not mean a chemist cannot think in terms of equations or atoms, but that is not the most useful level of thinking to apply to chemistry. This matching of a particular brand of thinking to a particular field is an example of emergent thinking. The opposite of emergent thinking is reductionist thinking which breaks down everything into its constituent parts. One of the discoveries of science in the last century is the breakdown of strict reductionism, and if one wants to be a productive fox, he or she needs to learn the right level of emergent thinking that applies to a field.

6. Read widely outside your field, but read just enough.

If you want to become a generalist fox, this is an obvious suggestion, but because it’s obvious it needs to be reiterated. Gaining knowledge of multiple fields entails knowing something about those fields, which entails reading about them. But it’s easy to get bogged down in detail and to try to become an expert in every field. This goal is neither practical nor the correct one. The goal instead is to gain enough knowledge to be useful, to be able to distill general principles, to connect ideas from your field to others. Better still, talk to people. Ask experts what they think are the most important facts and ideas, keeping in mind that experts have their own biases and can reach different conclusions.

A great example of someone who learnt enough about a complementary field to not just be useful but very good at his job was Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was a dyed-in-the-wool theorist, and at first had little knowledge of experiment. But as one of his colleagues said,

“He began to observe, not manipulate. He learned to see the apparatus and to get a feeling of its experimental limitations. He grasped the underlying physics and had the best memory I know of. He could always see how far any particular experiment would go. When you couldn’t carry it any further, you could count on him to understand and to be thinking about the next thing you might want to try.”

Oppenheimer thus clearly learnt enough about experimental physics to know the strengths and limitations of the field, imparting another valuable piece of advice: know the strengths and limitations of every field at the very least, so you know whether the connections you are forming are within its purview. In other words, know the domain of applicability of every field so that you can form reasonable connections.

7. Learn from your mistakes, and from others.

If you are a fox trying to jump across various disciplinary boundaries, it goes without saying that you might occasionally stumble. Because you lack expertise in many fields you are likely to make mistakes. This is entirely understandable, but what’s most important is to acknowledge those mistakes and learn from them. In fact, making mistakes is often the best shortcut to quick learning (“Fail fast”, as they say in the tech industry). Learning from our mistakes is of course important for all of us, but especially so for foxes who are often intrinsically dealing with incomplete information. Make mistakes, revise your worldview, make new mistakes. Rinse and repeat. That should be your philosophy.

Parallel to learning from your mistakes is to learn from others. During her journey a fox will meet many interesting people from different fields who know different facts and possess different mental models of thinking about the world. Foxlike behavior often entails being able to flexibly use these different mental models to deal with various problems in different fields, so it’s key to keep on being a lifelong learner of these patterns of thought. Fortunately the Internet has opened up a vast new opportunity for networking, but we don’t always take advantage of this opportunity in serious, meaningful ways. Everyone will benefit from such deliberate, meaningful connections, but foxes in particular will reap rewards.

8. “The opposite of a big truth is also a big truth” – Niels Bohr

The world is almost always gray. Foxes must imbibe this fact as deeply as Niels Bohr imbibed quantum mechanics. Especially when you are encountering and trying to integrate disparate ideas from different fields, it’s very likely that some of them may seem contradictory. But often the contradiction is in our minds, and there’s actually a way to reconcile those ideas (as a general rule, only in the Platonic world of mathematics can contradictory ideas not be tolerated at all). The fact is that most ideas from the real world are fuzzy and ill defined, so it’s no surprise that they will occasionally run into each other. Not just ideas but patterns of thinking may seem contradictory; for example, what a biologist sees as the most important feature of a particular system may not be the most important feature for a physicist (emergence again). In most cases the truth lies somewhere in between, but in others it may lie wholly on one side. As they say, being able to hold opposite ideas in your mind at the same time is a mark of intelligence. If you are a fox, prove this.

These are but a few of the potential avenues that you can explore for being a generalist fox. But the most important principle that foxes can benefit from is, as the name indicates, general. When confronted by an idea, a system or a problem, learn to ask the most general questions about it, questions that flow across disciplines. A few of these questions in science are: What’s the throughput? How robust is the system? What are the assumptions behind it? What is the problem that we are trying to solve? What are its strengths and limitations? What kinds of biases are baked into the system and our thinking about it?

Keep on asking these questions, make a note of the answers and you will realize that they can be applied across domains. At the same time, remember that as a fox you will always work in tandem with specialized hedgehogs. Foxes will be needed to explore the uncharted territory of new areas of science and technology, hedgehogs will be needed to probe its corners and reveal hidden jewels. The jewels will further reflect light that will illuminate additional playgrounds for the foxes to frolic in. Together the two creatures will make a difference.

In Favor of Small States – Are Meganations too Big to Succeed?

by Bill Benzon

One of the most interesting effects of the Trump presidency has been the response various cities and states have had to the Trump administration’s blindness to global warming: They have decided to bypass the federal government and go their own way on climate policy, even to the point of dealing with other nations. Thus Bill McKibben states, in “The New Nation-States”:

The real test will come in September next year, when “subnational” governments from around the world gather in California to sign the “Under2 MOU,” an agreement committing them to uphold the Paris targets. Launched in 2015 by California and the German state of Baden-Württemberg, the movement now includes everyone from Alsace to Abruzzo to the Australian Capital Territory; from Sichuan to Scotland to South Sumatra; from Manchester City to Madeira to Michoacán. Altogether: a billion people, responsible for more than a third of the world’s economic output. And every promise they make, sincere or not, provides climate activists with ammunition to hold each government accountable.

Moreover, the number of articles reporting on the weakening of the nation-state as a form of government seems on the rise – I link to a number of them at my home blog, New Savanna.

Thomas H. Naylor, September 14, 2012

This would not be surprising to the late Thomas Naylor, a scholar and activist who taught economics at Duke University, Middlebury College, and the University of Vermont and who, as a consultant, advised major corporations and governments in over 30 countries. Naylor believed that nations such as the United States were too large to govern effectively and so should devolve into several smaller states. I am presently working with his estate to edit a selection of his papers and am reprinting one of them below. He completed it on December 3, 2012, a few days before he died from a stroke.

Optimizing Ourselves into Oblivion

by Jalees Rehman

The short story "Anekdote zur Senkung der Arbeitsmoral" ("An anecdote about the lowering of work ethic") is one of the most famous stories written by the German author Heinrich Böll. In the story, an affluent tourist encounters a poorly clad fisherman who is comfortably napping in his boat. The assiduous tourist accidentally wakes up the fisherman while taking photos of the peaceful scenery – blue sky, green sea, fisherman with an old-fashioned hat – but then goes on to engage the lounging fisherman in a conversation. The friendly chat gradually turns into a sermon in which the tourist lectures the fisherman about how much more work he could be doing, how he could haul in more fish instead of lazing about, use the profits to make strategic investments, perhaps even hire employees and buy bigger boats in a few years. To what end, the fisherman asks. So that you could peacefully doze away at the beach, enjoying the beautiful sun without any worries, responds the enthusiastic tourist.

I remembered Böll's story which was written in the 1960s – during the post-war economic miracle years (Wirtschaftswunder) when prosperity, efficiency and growth had become the hallmarks of modern Germany – while recently reading the book "Du sollst nicht funktionieren" ("You were not meant to function") by the German author and philosopher Ariadne von Schirach. In this book, von Schirach criticizes the contemporary obsession with Selbstoptimierung (self-optimization), a term that has been borrowed from network theory and computer science where it describes systems which continuously adapt and "learn" in order to optimize their function. Selbstoptimierung is now used in a much broader sense in German culture and refers to the desire of individuals to continuously "optimize" their bodies and lives with the help of work-out regimens, diets, self-help courses and other processes. Self-optimization is a routine learning process that we all engage in. Successful learning of a new language, for example, requires continuous feedback and improvement. However, it is the continuous self-optimization as the ultimate purpose of life, instead of merely serving as  a means to an end that worries von Schirach.

She draws on many examples from Körperkult (body-cult), a slavish worship of the body that gradually replaces sensual pleasure with the purpose of discipling the body. Regular exercise and maintaining a normal weight are key factors for maintaining health but some individuals become so focused on tracking steps and sleep duration on their actigraphs, exercising or agonizing about their diets that the initial health-related goals become lose their relevance. They strive for a certain body image and resting heart rates and to reach these goals they indulge in self-discipline to maximize physical activity and curb appetite. Such individuals rarely solicit scientific information as to the actual health benefits of their exercise and food regimens and might be surprised to learn that more exercise and more diets do not necessarily lead to more health. The American Heart Association recommends roughly 30-45 minutes of physical activity daily to reduce high blood pressure and the risk of heart attacks and stroke. Even simple and straightforward walking is sufficient to meet these goals, there is no need for two-hour gym work-outs.

Why are we becoming so obsessed with self-optimization? Unfortunately, von Schirach's analysis degenerates into a diffuse diatribe against so many different elements of contemporary culture. Capitalist ideology, a rise in narcissism and egotism, industrialization and the growing technocracy, consumerism, fear of death, greed, monetization of our lives and social media are among some of the putative culprits that she invokes. It is quite likely that many of these factors play some role in the emerging pervasiveness of the self-optimization culture – not only in Germany. However, it may be useful to analyze some of the root causes and distinguish them from facilitators. Capitalist ideology is very conducive to a self-optimization culture. Creating beauty and fitness targets as well as laying out timelines to achieve these targets is analogous to developing corporate goals, strategies and milestones. Furthermore, many corporations profit from our obsession with self-optimization. Companies routinely market weight regimens, diets, exercise programs, beauty products and many other goods or services that generate huge profits if millions of potential consumers buy into the importance of life-long self-optimization. They can set the parameters for self-optimization – ideal body images – and we just obey. According to the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, such a diffusion of market logic and obedience to pre-ordained parameters and milestones into our day-to-day lives results in an achievement society which ultimately leads to mental fatigue and burnout.  In the case of "working out", it is telling that a supposedly leisure physical activity uses the expression "work", perhaps reminding us that the mindset of work persists during the exercise period.

But why would we voluntarily accept these milestones and parameters set by others? One explanation that is not really addressed by von Schirach is that obsessive self-optimization with a focus on our body may represent a retreat from the world in which we feel disempowered. Those of us who belong to the 99% know that our voices are rarely heard or respected when it comes to most fundamental issues in society such as socioeconomic inequality, rising intolerance and other forms of discrimination or prejudice. When it comes to our bodies, we may have a sense of control and empowerment that we do not experience in our work or societal roles. Self-discipline of our body gives our life a purpose with tangible goals such as lose x pounds, exercise y hours, reduce your resting heart rate by z.

Self-optimization may be a form of Ersatzempowerment but it comes at a great cost. As we begin to retreat from more fundamental societal issues and instead focus on controlling our bodies, we also gradually begin to lose the ability to dissent and question the meaning of actions. Working-out and dieting are all about How, When and What – how do I lose weight, what are my goals, when am I going to achieve it. The most fundamental questions of our lives usually focus on the Why – but self-optimization obsesses so much about How, When and What that one rarely asks "Why am I doing this?" Yet it is the Why that gives our life meaning, and self-optimization perhaps illustrates how a purpose-driven life may lose its meaning. The fisherman prompted the tourist to think about the Why in Böll's story and perhaps we should do the same to avoid the trap of an obsessive self-optimization culture.

Reference:

von Schirach, Ariadne. Du sollst nicht funktionieren: für eine neue Lebenskunst. Klett Cotta, 2014.

Working On The Blockchain Gang, Part 1

by Misha Lepetic

"These are the guys that were 
too tough for the chain gang."
 ~ Bomber

Back in the mists of time, at the dawn of the World Wide Web, the promise of an open, decentralized, disaggregated network seemed to stretch limitlessly past the horizons of doubt and cynicism. Most iconically, John Perry Barlow's A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace began with the stirring, uh, rejection: "Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."

Suffice to say, this stern invocation has not aged well. For one thing, Barlow's declaration is merely concerned with governments, and doesn't mention corporations. Perhaps this was because Barlow delivered these remarks at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 1996, and the matter required a certain deference. Perhaps he was under the sway of the idea - fashionable at the time - that history had indeed ended, with democracy and neoliberalism the unquestioned victors. Perhaps corporations, and capital generally, were not such a matter of concern twenty years ago as they are today. Nevertheless, in only a few years, the Wild West promise of the Web led to the giant pile-on of capital that would fuel the first dotcom bubble and its subsequent collapse, around 2001. 

The resurrection of internet entrepreneurship following that first, intemperate bender resulted in a different model, with a somewhat subtler promise. ‘Web 2.0', as it was popularized circa 2004, was premised on the idea that information was no longer static, and that participants could interact with content, and that content could be assembled, on the fly, for a specific viewer. A bit further behind the scenes, Web 2.0 benevolently assumed a rich ecosystem of application programming interfaces that would allow for seamless communication of data requests between platforms that were burgeoning with information. You can think of an API as recipe book for how to interact with a given site's data, or a membrane that allows certain requests and not others. 

So our notion of the Web was abstracted upwards, from scrappy libertarians doing whatever they wanted in some curiously disembodied space, to one that was more about to giving platforms the freedom they needed to interact with one another. This had several consequences (and I realize that I am being very simplistic here, but bear with me for the sake of the subsequent argument). On the one hand, the stage was set for the evolution of social media networks, which are more or less the ne plus ultra of Web 2.0. On the other, and inseparable from the first, was the growth of the vast and unregulated infrastructure that tracked users' online behavior.

Eventually, most every click, transaction and purchase would come to be harvested, mostly for the benefit of targeted advertising, but, following Edward Snowden's 2013 revelations of NSA surveillance, who is to say for what other purposes? In any event, it's not unreasonable to posit that your data has been bought and sold many, many times over the course of, say, the last decade, if not longer, and this is not changing any time soon.

It should also be mentioned that, in the course of the growth of social media, the previous notion of the ‘open Web' was utterly and decisively sacrificed. Alexis Madrigal's recent Atlantic piece goes into greater detail:

In June of 2007, the iPhone came out. Thirteen months later, Apple's App Store debuted. Suddenly, the most expedient and enjoyable way to do something was often tapping an individual icon on a screen. As smartphones took off, the amount of time that people spent on the truly open web began to dwindle… By 2013, Americans spent about as much of their time on their phones looking at Facebook as they did the whole rest of the open web… Most of the action [now] occurs within platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and messaging apps, which all have carved space out of the open web.

Of course, being beholden to these giants means not just conducting the majority of one's online activities within the confines of a handful of sites. It also means that these sites are positioned to continue capturing the lion's share of revenue from these activities. As Madrigal notes, at the launch of the iPhone, five companies (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon) were worth $577 billion. Today, that value, in the form of market capitalization, is nearly $3 trillion.

*

Obviously, this is good news if you're a shareholder, or an employee (or both). It's not such good news, however, if you're an entrepreneur looking to build out the next innovative Web-based business. A startup's success depends on its eventual conversion to profitability, or its acquisition of sufficient market share, leading to a buyout. In both cases, the current context, where five companies set the terms for what is desirable scale, creates a paradox for startups: how to create sufficient momentum, when so much of consumers' attention seems to have been alreay acquired and walled off by those charmingly known as the ‘Five Horsemen'.

Fortunately, John Perry Barlow's libertarian ghost has never ceased haunting the circuitry of our global cyber-substrate. Not long after the launch of the iPhone, an anonymous coder going by the moniker Satoshi Nakamoto proposed BitCoin, or more accurately, the BitCoin protocol. Nakamoto, whose true identity may or may not have been revealed, intimated that he had achieved one of libertarianism's holy grails: the divorce of currency from government-or, for that matter, any institution. To do this, he welded together two separate concepts: the idea that computers would generate currency by performing calculations, and that the record of ensuing transactions of that currency would be held in common (animations always help here).

The first bit, known as ‘mining', is fairly easy to explain if we use the example of frequent flier miles. A traveler puts in a bid at a fixed price for a ticket and flies with the airline that awarded the bid. In return, the traveler earns a number of points, which can then be used to redeem discounts or free tickets for further travel. However, in this case the points are only applicable within the ecosystem of that airline - you can't transfer points to another airline, nor can you sell your points on an open, secondary market. BitCoin extends that model significantly. 

The second bit is much more interesting, and may in fact point to the next big paradigm shift in the battle of who ‘owns' the World Wide Web. This is the record of ensuing transactions, or, in BitCoin terms, the ‘distributed ledger'. In order to ensure that BitCoin remains autonomous, Nakamoto proposed that all transactions of the BitCoin system be held in common, throughout the same network of machines that are performing the mining function mentioned above. All transactions are visible, even while each transaction's participants are anonymous. As long the ledger sitting on every node matches up with every other node's copy, the system holds and BitCoin remains in business. No central authority is required - the network itself is the clearinghouse. And anyone can join the network and support the blockchain.

This technology is known as the ‘blockchain', simply because, after a certain period of time, each newly generated block of completed transactions is appended, or chained, to the preceding series of transaction blocks. Thus the entire history of the system resides on the system, available for inspection by any of its members. This entire arrangement is made possible by the confluence of a number of factors: the deployment of some clever cryptography that ensures anonymity; and the ever-decreasing costs for bandwidth, storage and processing power that enable computing to occur on a planetary scale. 

Where it gets interesting is when blockchain technology is deployed beyond currency applications. To be clear, the blockchain is insufficient by itself - even if we are looking at applications that are not financial in nature, there still has to be a system of incentives in place, incentives that will entice individuals to join, participate and grow the network. So while one of BitCoin's primary concerns is navigating the interface between the generation and transaction of virtual currency with the translation of that currency into other forms of currency, such as dollars or yen, other applications of blockchain can be incentivized by purely internal and abstract ‘tokens'. These tokens, earned or bought in much the same way that BitCoin is earned or bought, buys the rights to do things within the network. In a way, this is not dissimilar to our frequent flier example above - you earn the right for additional travel, but only within the context of the awarding system.

How does this fit into the earlier discussion, where I was bemoaning the loss of the ‘open Web' to the platform tyrannies of Amazon, et al? If we're to go by their proponents, these new ‘token networks' are exactly the cure for the trend of enclosure to which the Internet has been subject for the past decade. Thanks to the blockchain, recordkeeping can be anonymous, secure and decentralized. And thanks to tokens, incentives exist for individuals and groups to join the network and participate in its growth. The more valuable the network, the more actors will want to join - and the more valuable that network's token will become. 

Moreover, the rules are clear to anyone who wants to join, and no participant need worry about any central authority suddenly deciding to change the terms of service, or siphoning off fees or data to enrich shareholders who are really silent partners in an outdated rent-seeking scenario. Like anything else, policy is determined by the network. So it's easier to now see that token networks may be the most substantial challenge to the corporatist model of how the internet has evolved lately. At its most gloriously imagined, such a network virtually runs itself (in both senses of the term). All the trappings of corporate continuity, such as boards of directors, shareholder meetings and such, are eliminated. At least, that's how it's supposed to work.

All of this sounds terribly abstract, and I realize that I still haven't suggested what such a token network is supposed to do. It's difficult enough to wrap one's head around how BitCoin works in the first place, and when you remove the conceptual comfort that the notion of ‘currency' provides, it's not easy to divine what purpose this might have, except for perhaps separating Silicon Valley venture capitalists from their own, in fact very real, money (always a possibility). It's also valid to ask, How much of a fringe phenomenon is this? Will it really make a tangible difference in people's lives, or the economy in general? Or will it be yet another flash in the pan, breathlessly promoted by an increasingly out-of-touch tech culture that can't seem to propose solutions to anything remotely approaching a real-world problem?

Next month I'll look into these concerns, as well as examine a few examples of non-monetary token networks. I'll also examine the larger issues at stake, and speculate on how token networks might collide with the more established social, economic and especially political worlds. Until then, please consider these words from John Perry Barlow's manifesto, which actually have aged rather well: "In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat."

If you believe Western Civilization is oppressive, you will ensure it is oppressive

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Philosopher John Locke's spirited defense of the natural rights of man should apply to all men and women, not just one's favorite factions.

When the British left India in 1947, they left a complicated legacy behind. On one hand, Indians had suffered tremendously under oppressive British rule for more than 250 years. On the other hand, India was fortunate to have been ruled by the British rather than the Germans, Spanish or Japanese. The British, with all their flaws, did not resort to putting large numbers of people in concentration camps or regularly subjecting them to the Inquisition. Their behavior in India had scant similarities with the behavior of the Germans in Namibia or the Japanese in Manchuria.

More importantly, while they were crisscrossing the world with their imperial ambitions, the British were also steeping the world in their long history of the English language, of science and the Industrial Revolution and of parliamentary democracy. When they left India, they left this legacy behind. The wise leaders of India who led the Indian freedom struggle - men like Jawaharlal Nehru, Mahatma Gandhi and B. R. Ambedkar - understood well the important role that all things British had played in the world, even as they agitated and went to jail to free themselves of British rule. Many of them were educated at Western universities like London, Cambridge and Columbia. They hated British colonialism, but they did not hate the British; once the former rulers left they preserved many aspects of their legacy, including the civil service, the great network of railways spread across the subcontinent and the English language. They incorporated British thought and values in their constitution, in their educational institutions, in their research laboratories and in their government services. Imagine what India would have been like today had Nehru and Ambedkar dismantled the civil service, banned the English language, gone back to using bullock cart and refused to adopt a system of participatory democracy, simply because all these things were British in origin.

The leaders of newly independent India thus had the immense good sense to separate the oppressor and his instruments of oppression from his enlightened side, to not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Nor was an appreciation of Western values limited to India by any means. In the early days, when the United States had not yet embarked on its foolish, paranoid misadventures in Southeast Asia, Ho Chi Minh looked toward the American Declaration of Independence as a blueprint for a free Vietnam. At the end of World War 1 he held the United States in great regard and tried to get an audience with Woodrow Wilson at the Versailles Conference. It was only when he realized that the Americans would join forces with the occupying French in keeping Vietnam an occupied colonial nation did Ho Chi Minh's views about the U.S. rightly sour. In other places in Southeast Asia and Africa too the formerly oppressed preserved many remnants of the oppressor's culture.

Yet today I see many, ironically in the West, not understanding the wisdom which these leaders in the East understood very well. The values bequeathed by Britain which India upheld were part of the values which the Enlightenment bequeathed to the world. These values in turn went back to key elements of Western Civilization, including Greek, Roman, Byzantine, French, German and Dutch. And simply put, Enlightenment values and Western Civilization are today under attack, in many ways from those who claim to stand by them. Both left and right are trampling on them in ways that are misleading and dangerous. They threaten to undermine centuries worth of progress.

The central character of Enlightenment values should be common knowledge, and yet the fact that it seems worth reiterating them is a sign of our times.

To wit, consider the following almost axiomatic statements:

Freedom of speech, religion and the press is all-important and absolute.

The individual and his property have certain natural and inalienable rights.

Truth, whatever it is, is not to be found in religious texts.

Kings and religious rulers cannot rule by fiat and are constrained by the wishes of the governed.

The world can be deciphered by rationally thinking about it.

All individuals deserve fair trials by jury and are not to be subjected to cruel punishment.

The importance of these ideas cannot be overestimated. When they were first introduced they were novel and revolutionary; we now take them for granted, perhaps too much for granted. They are in large part what allow us to distinguish ourselves as human beings, as members of the unique creative species called Homo sapiens.

The Enlightenment reached its zenith in mid-eighteenth century France, Holland and England, but its roots go back deep into the history of Western Civilization. As far back as ancient Babylon, the code of Hammurabi laid out principles of justice describing proportionate retaliation for crimes. The peak of enlightened thought before the French enlightenment was in Periclean Athens. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, Athens led the way in philosophy and science, in history and drama; in some sense, almost every contemporary political and social problem and its resolution goes back to the Greeks. Even when others superseded Greek and Roman civilization, traces of the Enlightenment kept on appearing throughout Europe, even in its dark ages. For instance, the Code of the Emperor Justinian laid out many key judicial principles that we take for granted, including a right to a fair trial, a right against self-incrimination and a proscription against trying someone twice for the same crime.

In 1215, the Magna Carta became the first modern document to codify the arguments against the divine authority of kings. Even as wars and revolutions engulfed Europe during the next five hundred years, principles like government through the consent of the governed, trial by jury and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment got solidified through trial and error, through resistance and triumph. They saw their culmination in the English and American wars of independence and the constitutions of these countries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By the time we get to France in the mid 1750s, we have philosophers like John Locke explicitly talking about the natural rights of men and Charles-Louis Montesquieu explicitly talking about the tripartite separation of powers in government. These principles are today the bedrock of most democratic republics around the world, Western and Eastern. At the same time, let us acknowledge that Eastern ideas and thinkers – Buddha and Confucius in particular – have also contributed immensely to humanity's progress and will continue to do. In fact, personally I believe that the concepts of self-control, detachment and moderation that the East has given us will, in the final analysis, supersede everything else. However, most of these ideas are personal and inward looking. They are also very hard to live up to for most mortals, and for one reason or another have not integrated themselves thoroughly yet into our modern ways of life. Thus, there is little doubt that modern liberal democracies as they stand today, both in the West and the East, are mostly products of Western Civilizational notions.

In many ways, the study of Western Civilization is therefore either a study of Enlightenment values or of forces – mainly religious ones – aligned against them. It shows a steady march of the humanist zeitgeist through dark periods which challenged the supremacy of these values, and of bright ones which reaffirmed them. One would think that a celebration of this progress would be beyond dispute. And yet what we see today is an attack on the essential triumphs of Western Civilization from both left and right.

Each side brings its own brand of hostility and hypocrisy to bear on the issue. As the left rightly keeps pointing out, the right often seems to forget about the great mass of humanity that was not only cast on to the sidelines but actively oppressed and enslaved, even as freedom and individual rights seemed to be taking root elsewhere for a select few. In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, as England and America and France were freeing themselves from monarchy and the divine rights of kings, they were actively plunging millions of men and women in Africa, India and other parts of the world into bondage and slavery and pillaging their nations. The plight of slaves being transported to the English colonies under inhuman conditions was appalling, and so was the hypocrisy of thinkers like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington who wrote about how all men are born equal while simultaneously keeping them unequal. Anyone who denies the essential hypocrisy of such liberal leaders in selectively promulgating their values would be intentionally misleading themselves and others.

Even later, as individual rights became more and more codified into constitutions and official documents, they remained confined to a minority, largely excluding people of color, indigenous people, women and poor white men and from their purview. This hadn't been too different even in the crucible of democracy, Periclean Athens, where voting and democratic membership were restricted to landowning men. It was only in the late twentieth century - more than two hundred years after the Enlightenment - that these rights were fully extended to all. That's an awfully long time for what we consider as basic freedoms to seep into every strata of society. But we aren't there yet. Even today, the right often denies the systemic oppression of people of color and likes to pretend that all is well when it comes to equality of the law; in reality, when it comes to debilitating life events like police stops and searches, prison incarceration and health emergencies, minorities, women and the poor can be disproportionately affected. The right will seldom agree with these facts, but mention crime or dependence on welfare and the right is more than happy to generalize their accusations to all minorities or illegal immigrants.

The election of Donald Trump has given voice to ugly elements of racism and xenophobia in the U.S., and there is little doubt that these elements are mostly concentrated on the right. Even if many right-wingers are decent people who don't subscribe to these views, they also don't seem to be doing much to actively oppose them. Nor are they actively opposing the right's many direct assaults on the environment and natural resources, assaults that may constitute the one political action whose crippling effects are irreversible. Meanwhile, the faux patriotism on the far right that worships men like Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson while ignoring their flaws and regurgitates catchy slogans drafted by Benjamin Franklin and others during the American Revolution conveniently pushes the oppressive and hypocritical behavior of these men under the rug. Add to this a perverse miscasting of individual and states' rights, and you end up with people celebrating the Confederate Flag and Jefferson Davis.

If criticizing this hypocrisy and rejection of the great inequities in this country's past and present were all that the left was doing, then it would be well and good. Unfortunately the left has itself started behaving in ways that aren't just equally bad but possibly worse in light of the essential function that it needs to serve in a liberal society. Let's first remember that the left is the political faction that claims to uphold individual rights and freedom of speech. But especially in the United States during the last few years, the left has instead become obsessed with playing identity politics, and both individual rights and free speech have become badly mangled victims of this obsession. For the, left individual rights and freedom of speech are important as long as they apply to their favorite political groups, most notably minorities and women. For the extreme left in particular, there is no merit to individual opinion anymore unless it is seen through the lens of the group that the individual belongs to. Nobody denies that membership in your group shapes your individual views, but the left believes that the latter basically has no independent existence; this is an active rejection of John Locke's primacy of the individual as the most important unit of society. The left has also decided that some opinions – even if they may be stating facts or provoking interesting discussion – are so offensive that they must be censored, if not by official government fiat, then by mass protest and outrage that verges on bullying. Needless to say, social media with its echo chambers and false sense of reassurance engendered by surrounding yourself with people who think just like you has greatly amplified this regressive behavior.

As is painfully familiar by now, this authoritarian behavior is playing out especially on college campuses, with a new case of "liberal" students bullying or banning conservative speakers on campus emerging almost every week. Universities are supposed to be the one place in the world where speech of all kinds is not just explicitly allowed but encouraged, but you would not see this critical function fulfilled on many college campuses today. Add to this the Orwellian construct of "micoroagressions" that essentially lets anyone decide whether an action, piece of speech or event is an affront to their favorite oppressed political group, and you have a case of full-blown unofficial censorship purely based on personal whims that basically stifles any kind of disagreement. It is censorship which squarely attacks freedom of speech as espoused by Voltaire, Locke, Adams and others. As Voltaire's biographer Evelyn Hall – a woman living in Victorian times – famously said, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Seemingly a woman in Victorian times - a society that was decidedly oppressive to women - had more wisdom to defend freedom of speech than a young American liberal in the twenty-first century.

This behavior threatens to undermine and tear apart the very progressive forces which the left claims to believe in. Notably, their so-called embrace of individual rights and diversity often seems to exclude white people, and white men in particular. The same people who claim to be champions of individual rights claim that all white men are "privileged", have too many rights, are trampling on others' rights and do not deserve more. The writer Edward Luce who has just written a book warning about the decline of progressive values in America talks about how, at the Democratic National Convention leading up to the 2016 U.S. election, he saw pretty much every "diversity" box checked except that belonging to white working class people; it was almost as if the Democrats wanted to intentionally exclude this group. For many on the left, diversity equates only to ethnic and gender diversity; any other kind of diversity and especially intellectual or viewpoint diversity are to be either ignored or actively condemned.This attitude is entirely contrary to the free exchange of ideas and respect for diverse opinions that was the hallmark of Enlightenment thinking.

The claim that white men have enough rights and are being oppressive is factually contradicted by the plight of millions of poor whites who are having as miserable a time as any oppressed minority. They have lost their jobs and have lost their health insurance, they have been sold a pipe dream full of empty promises by all political parties, and in addition they find themselves mired in racist and ignorant stereotypes. The left's drumbeat of privilege is very real, but it is also context-dependent; it can rise and ebb with time and circumstance. To illustrate with just one example, a black man in San Francisco will enjoy certain financial and social privileges that a white man in rural Ohio quite certainly won't: how can one generalize notions of privilege to all white men then, and especially those who have been dealt a bad hand? The white working class has thus found itself with almost no friend; rich white people have both Democrats and Republicans, rich and poor minorities largely have Democrats, but poor whites have no one and are being constantly demonized. No wonder they voted for Donald Trump out of desperation; he at least pretended to be their friend, while the others did not even put on a pretense. The animosity among white working class people is thus understandable and documented in many enlightening books, especially Arlie Hochschild's "Strangers in their Own Land". Even Noam Chomsky, who cannot be faintly accused of being a conservative, has sympathized with their situation and justifiable resentment. And as Chomsky says, the problem is compounded by the fact that not everyone on the left actually cares about poor minorities, since the Democratic party which they support has largely turned into a party of moneyed neoliberal white elites in the last two decades.

This singling out of favorite political groups at the expense of other oppressed ones is identity politics at its most pernicious, and it's not just hypocritical but destructive; the counter-response to selective oppression cannot also be selective oppression. As Gandhi said, an eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind. And this kind of favoritism steeped in identity politics is again at odds with John Locke's idea of putting the individual front and center. Locke was a creature of his times, so just like Jefferson he did not actively espouse individual freedom for indigenous people, but his idealization of the individual as the bearer of natural rights was clear and critical. For hundreds of years that individual was mostly white, but the response to that asymmetry cannot simply be to pick an individual of another skin color.

The general response on the left against the sins of Western Civilization and white men has been to consider the whole edifice of Western Civilization as fundamentally oppressive. In some sense this is not surprising since for many years, the history of Western Civilization was written by the victors; by white men. A strong counter-narrative emerged with books like Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States"; since then many others have followed suit and they have contributed very valuable, essential perspectives from the other side. Important contributions to civilizational ideas from the East have also received their dues. But the solution is not to swing to the other extreme and dismiss everything that white men in the West did or focus only on their sins, especially as viewed through the lens of our own times. That would be a classic ousting of the baby with the bathwater, and exactly the kind of regressive thinking that the leaders of India avoided when they overthrew the British.

Yes, there are many elements of Western Civilization that were undoubtedly oppressive, but the paradox of it was that Western Civilization and white men also simultaneously crafted many ideas and values that were gloriously progressive; ideas that could serve to guide humanity toward a better future and are applicable to all people in all times. And these ideas came from the same white men who also brought us colonialism, oppression of women and slavery. If that seems self-contradictory or inconvenient, it only confirms Walt Whitman's strident admission: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes." We can celebrate Winston Churchill's wartime leadership and oratory while condemning his horrific orchestration of one of India's worst famines. We can celebrate Jefferson's plea for separation of church and state and his embrace of science while condemning his treatment of slaves; but if you want to dismantle statues of him or James Madison from public venues, then you are effectively denouncing both the slave owning practices as well as the Enlightenment values of these founding fathers.

Consider one of the best-known Enlightenment passages, the beginnings of the Declaration of Independence as enshrined in Jefferson's soaring words: "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." It is easy to dismiss the slave-owning Jefferson as a hypocrite when he wrote these words, but their immortal essence was captured well by Abraham Lincoln when he realized the young Virginian's genius in crafting them:

"All honor to Jefferson--to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression."

Thus, Lincoln clearly recognized that whatever his flaws, Jefferson intended his words to apply not just to white people or black people or women or men, but to everyone besieged by oppression or tyranny in all times. Like a potent mathematical theorem, the abstract, universal applicability of Jefferson's words made them immortal. In light of this great contribution, Jefferson's hypocrisy in owning slaves, while unfortunate and deserving condemnation, cannot be held up as a mirror against his entire character and legacy.

In its blanket condemnation of dead white men like Jefferson, the left also fails in appreciating what is perhaps one of the most marvelous paradoxes of history. It was precisely words like these, written and codified by Jefferson, Madison and others in the American Constitution, that gradually allowed slaves, women and minorities to become full, voting citizens of the American Republic. Yes, the road was long and bloody, and yes, we aren't even there yet, but as Martin Luther King memorably put it, the arc of the moral universe definitely bent toward justice in the long term. The left ironically forgets that the same people who it rails against also created the instruments of democracy and freedom that put the levers of power into the hands of Americans of all colors and genders. There is no doubt that this triumph was made possible by the ceaseless struggles of traditionally oppressed groups, but it was also made possible by a constitution written exclusively by white men who oppressed others: Whitman's multitudinous contradictions in play again.

Along with individual rights, a major triumph of Western Civilization and the Enlightenment has been to place science, reason, facts and observations front and center. In fact in one sense, the entire history of Western Civilization can be seen as a struggle between reason and faith. This belief in science as a beacon of progress was enshrined in the Royal Society's motto extolling skepticism: "Nullius in verba", or "Nobody's word is final". Being skeptical about kings' divine rights or about truth as revealed in religious texts was a profound, revolutionary and counterintuitive idea at the time. Enlightenment values ask us to bring only the most ruthless skepticism to bear on truth-seeking, and to let the facts lead us where they do. Science is the best tool for ridding us of our prejudices, but it never promises us that its truths would be psychologically comforting or conform to our preconceived social and political beliefs. In fact, if science does not periodically make us uncomfortable about our beliefs and our place in the universe, we are almost certainly doing it wrong.

Sadly, the left and right have both played fast and loose with this critical Enlightenment value. Each side looks to science and cherry-picks facts for confirming their social and political beliefs; each side then surrounds itself with people who believe what they do, and denounces the other side as immoral or moronic. For instance, the right rejects factual data on climate change because it's contrary to their political beliefs, while the left rejects data on gender or racial differences because it's contrary to theirs. The religious right rejects evidence, while the religious left rejects vaccination. Meanwhile, each side embraces the data that the other has rejected with missionary zeal because it supports their social agenda. Data on other social or religious issues is similarly met with rebuke and rejection. The right does not want to have a reasonable discussion on socialism, while the left does not want to have a reasonable discussion on immigration or Islam. The right often fails to see the immense contribution of immigration to this country's place in the world, while the left often regards any discussion even touching on reasonable limits to immigration as xenophobia and nativism.

The greatest tragedy of this willful blindness is that where angels fear to tread, fools and demagogues willingly step in. For instance, the left's constant refusal to engage in an honest and reasonable critique of Islam and its branding of those who wish to do this as Islamophobes discourages level-headed people from entering that arena, thus paving the way for bonafide Islamophobes and white supremacists. Meanwhile, the right's refusal to accept even reasonable evidence for climate change opens the field to those who think of global warming as a secular religion with special punishments for heretics. Both sides lose, but what really loses here is the cause of truth. Since truth has already become a casualty in this era of fake news and exaggerated polemics on social media, this refusal on both sides to accept facts that are incompatible with their psychological biases will surely sound the death knell for science and rationality. Then, as Carl Sagan memorably put it, unable to distinguish between what is true and what feels good, clutching our pearls, we will gradually slide, without even knowing it, into darkness and ignorance.

We need to resurrect the cause of Enlightenment values and Western Civilization, the values espoused by Jefferson, Locke and Hume, by Philadelphia, London and Athens. The fact that flawed white men largely created them should have nothing to do with their enthusiastic acceptance and propagation, since their essential, abstract, timeless qualities have nothing to do with the color of the skin of those who thought of them; rejecting them because of the biases of their creators would be, at the very least, replacing one set of biases with another.

One way of appreciating these values is to actually resurrect them with all their glories and faults in college courses, because college is where the mind truly forms. In the last 40 years or so, the number of colleges that include Western Civilization as a required course in their curriculum has significantly reduced. Emphasis is put instead on world history. It is highly rewarding to expose students to world history, but surely there is space to include a capsule history of the fundamental principles of Western Civilization as a required component of these curricula. Another strategy to leverage these ideals is to use the power of social media in a constructive manner, to use the great reaches of the Internet to bring together people who are passionate about them and who care about their preservation and transmission.

This piece may seem like it dwells more on the failures of the left than the right. For me the reason is simple: Donald Trump's election in the United States, along with the rise of similar authoritarian right-wing leaders in other countries, convinces me that at least for the foreseeable future, we won't be able to depend on the right to safeguard these values. Over the last few decades, conservative parties around the world and especially the Republican party in the United States have made their intention to retreat from the shores of science, reason and moderation clear. That does not mean that nobody on the right cares about these ideals, but it does mean that for now, the left will largely have to fill the void. In fact, by stepping up the left will in one sense simply be fulfilling the ideals enshrined by many of its heroes, including Franklin Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Susan B. Anthony and John F. Kennedy. Conservatives in turn will have to again be the party of Abraham Lincoln and Dwight Eisenhower if they want to sustain democratic ideals, but they seem light years from being this way right now. If both sides fail to do this then libertarians will have to step in, but unfortunately libertarians comprise a minority of politically effective citizens. At one point in time, libertarians and liberals were united in sharing the values of individual rights, free speech, rational enlightenment and a fearless search for the truth, but the left seems to have sadly ceded that ground in the last few years. Their view of Western Civilization has become not only one-sided but also fundamentally pessimistic and dangerous.

Here are the fatal implications of that view: If you think Western Civilization is essentially oppressive, then you will always see it as oppressive. You will always see only the wretchedness in it. You will end up focusing only on its evils and not its great triumphs. You will constantly see darkness where you should see light. And once you relinquish stewardship of Western Civilization, there may be nobody left to stand up for liberal democracy, for science and reason, for all that is good and great that we take for granted.

You will then not just see darkness but ensure it. Surely none of us want that.

Dismantle the Poverty Trap by Nurturing Community Trust

by Jalees Rehman

Would you rather receive $100 today or wait for a year and then receive $150? The ability to delay immediate gratification for a potentially greater payout in the future is associated with greater wealth. Several studies have shown that the poor tend to opt for immediate rewards even if they are lower, whereas the wealthy are willing to wait for greater rewards. One obvious reason for this difference is the immediate need for money. If food has to be purchased and electricity or water bills have to be paid, then the instant "reward" is a matter of necessity. Wealthier people can easily delay the reward because their basic needs for food, shelter and clothing are already met.

Unfortunately, escaping from poverty often requires the ability to delay gratification for a greater payout in the future. Classic examples are the pursuit of higher education and the acquisition of specialized professional skills which can lead to better-paying jobs in the future. Attending vocational school, trade school or college paves the way for higher future wages, but one has to forego income during the educational period and even incur additional debt by taking out educational loans. Another example is of delayed gratification is to invest capital - whether it is purchasing a farming tool that increases productivity or investing in the stock market – which in turn can yield greater pay-out. However, if the poor are unable to pursue more education or make other investments that will increase their income, they remain stuck in a vicious cycle of increasing poverty.

Understanding the precise reasons for why people living in poverty often make decisions that seem short-sighted, such as foregoing more education or taking on high-interest short-term loans, is the first step to help them escape poverty. The obvious common-sense fix is to ensure that the basic needs of all citizens – food, shelter, clothing, health and personal safety – are met, so that they no longer have to use all new funds for survival. This is obviously easier in the developed world, but it is not a trivial matter considering that the USA – supposedly the richest country in the world – has an alarmingly high poverty rate. It is estimated that more than 40 million people in the US live in poverty, fearing hunger and eviction from their homes. But just taking care of these basic needs may not be enough to help citizens escape poverty. A recent research study by Jon Jachimowicz at Columbia University and his colleagues investigated "myopic" (short-sighted) decision-making of people with lower income and identified an important new factor: community trust.

The researchers first used an online questionnaire (647 participants) to assess trust and asked participants to choose between a payoff in the near future that is smaller and a larger pay-off in the distant future. They also measured community trust by asking participants to agree or disagree with statements such as "There are advantages to living in my neighborhood" or I would like my child(ren) to be raised in the neighborhood I currently live in". They found that lower income participants were more likely to act in a short-sighted manner if they had low levels of trust in their communities. In a second online experiment, the researchers recruited roughly 100 participants from each state in the US and assessed their community trust levels. They then obtained real-world data on payday loans – a sign of very short-sighted financial decision-making because people take out cash advances at extraordinarily high interest rates that have to be paid back when they get their paycheck – for each state. They found that the average community trust for each state was related to the use of payday loans. In states with high average community trust ratings, people were less likely to take out these payday loans, and this trend remained even when the researchers took into account unemployment rates and savings rates for each state.

Even though these findings all pointed to a clear relationship between community trust and sound financial decision-making, the results did not prove that increased community trust is an underlying cause that helps improve the soundness of financial decisions. To test this relationship in a real-world setting, the researchers conducted a study in rural Bangladesh by collaborating with an international development organization based in Bangladesh. The vast majority of participants in this study were poor even by Bangladeshi standards, earning less than $1/day per household member. The researchers adapted the community trust questionnaire and the assessment of financial decision-making for the rural population, with live interviewers asking the questions and filling out the responses for the participants. After assessing community trust and the willingness to delay financial rewards for greater payouts in the future, half of the participants received a two year intervention to increase community trust. This intervention involved volunteers from the community that acted as intermediaries between the local government and the rural population, providing input into local governance and community-level decisions (for example in the distribution of social benefits and the allocation of funds for development projects).

At the end of the two year period, participants who had received the community intervention showed significant increases in their community trust levels and they also improved their financial decision-making. They were more likely to forego immediate lower financial rewards for greater future rewards when compared to the villagers who did not receive any special intervention.

By combining correlational data from the United States with an actual real-world intervention to build community trust, the researchers show how important it is to build trust when we want to help fellow humans escape the "poverty trap". This is just an initial study with a limited group of participants and a narrow intervention that needs to be replicated in other societies and with long-term observation of the results to see how persistent the effects are. But the results should make all of us realize that just creating "jobs, jobs, jobs" is not enough. We need to invest in the infrastructures of communities and help citizens realize that they are respected members of society with a voice. Empowering individuals and ensuring their safety, dignity and human rights are necessary steps if we are serious about battling poverty.

Reference

Jachimowicz, J. M., Chafik, S., Munrat, S., Prabhu, J. C., & Weber, E. U. (2017). Community trust reduces myopic decisions of low-income individuals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 201617395.

Under The Radar, Part 2

by Misha Lepetic

"Machines…quell the revolt of specialized labor."
 ~ Marx

In my previous post, I wrote about alternative ways of viewing the encroaching effects of automation on employment. I suggested that, instead of viewing it as a zero-sum game, with industry hell-bent on automating everyone's jobs out of existence, that it is rather a phenomenon driven by firms' needs to maintain profitability and market share. In this sense, automation - and technology more generally - is an optimization function, but only in a ‘local' sense. The character of employment required by a firm is only commensurate to the needs that it can foresee in the near future. So for all the talk of a ‘post-work' future, we won't get there any time soon.

Nevertheless, this leaves open an important succeeding question: What does the technological substitution of labor actually look like, and what, if anything, can be done about it? The first thing that ought to be made clear is that the process of substitution is neither neat nor obvious. Introducing a single robot into the workplace does not necessarily displace a single human being. Indeed, in the case of industrial manufacturing, it may be more: a factory making cell phone parts in Dongguan, China, recently automated much of its operations and saw its headcount plummet from 650 to 60 workers. In a further blow against humanity, the output of the factory increased nearly threefold, and product defect rates declined from 25% to less than 5%. 

It's worth noting that a factory making cellphone parts is an ideal subject for automation. A fully automated factory floor is the final reductio that, one might argue, began with Adam Smith's exposition of the power of the division of labor. But regardless of the factory's output - whether it's Smith's pins or components for mobiles - the fact is that we are making the same thing, thousands of times over. However, while significant, this kind of specialized manufacturing is but a fraction of global economic output. 

As one leaves the carefully controlled confines of a plant, technological substitution becomes less effective. Consider the phenomenon of driverless cars, another favorite bogeyman of automation's Cassandras. To continue with the example of the above factory, let's look at the problem of distribution. The firm may opt to replace its drivers with autonomous vehicles, but at the moment there is an enormous difference between designing a self-driving car that will handle the predictability of long stretches of open road, versus the intricacies of city driving, where potholes, unpredictable pedestrians and other phenomena create much riskier scenarios. And in the case of firms whose very business model is distribution (such as UPS), a human being is still needed to perform the final handoff of the package to its recipient. 

These fairly obvious remarks nevertheless intend to illustrate a larger point: automation is never not human-assisted. The question then becomes what proportion of a job is automated: as in the case of the truck driver, a journey may be 80% long haul, which is handled by the automated system, but the remaining 20% of navigating urban areas, or delivering the product to its recipient, is still the driver's ‘job'. For the firm, this is a decidedly awkward position. Whereas the factory is an ideal type - automate everything, fire 90% of your staff, and watch productivity and quality soar - interaction with the supply chain, or customers, or just the world itself, still requires people, and people expect to be paid. 

*

Interestingly, this process is not just manifest in the stubbornly physical world, but also services that we might at first blush consider to be the exclusive domain of code. I am thinking about such things as chatbots, content monitoring of social media, and training of artificial intelligences on data sets of one sort or another. Writing in the Harvard Business Review, Mary Gray and Siddharth Suri note that

The truth is, AI is as "fully-automated" as the Great and Powerful Oz was in that famous scene from the classic film, where Dorothy and friends realize that the great wizard is simply a man manically pulling levers from behind a curtain. This blend of AI and humans, who follow through when the AI falls short, isn't going away anytime soon.

Shreeharsh Kelkar puts it another way: technology in the workplace is not apart from labor, and the interaction between labor and technology should be seen as

…an assemblage that embodies a reconfigured version of human-machine relations where humans are constructed, through digital interfaces, as flexible inputs and/or supervisors of software programs that in turn perform a wide-variety of small-bore high-intensity computational tasks (involving primarily the processing of large amounts of data and computing statistical similarities). It is this reconfigured assemblage that promises to change our workplaces, rather than any specific technological advance. The [research] agenda has been to concentrate on the human labor that makes this assemblage function, and to argue that it is precisely the invisibility of this labor that allows the technology to seem autonomous.

Crucially, the fact is that this incomplete technological substitution is furthermore a dynamic process, and one that sees employees' contributions as ever-receding, where work is never stable, but rather occupying a margin that is not unlike piecework. If your job is really about "doing the things that automation can't do…yet" then all sorts of other things break down. The idea of mastery of a profession is eroded, and the prospects of a stable career are diminished. Riffing off of Marx, the laborer is not only alienated from the product of their labor, but is further alienated by the processes of capital that allow ever less consequential input into the creation of that product. On a larger scale, we can speculate that the ever-elaborating infusion of technology into what were human-only tasks leads to, as Gray and Suri put it, "the rapid creation and destruction of temporary labor markets for new types of humans-in-the-loop tasks." 

The speed of this creation and destruction is a defining feature of the current situation, and questions the effectiveness of older, established programs that were designed to aid worker retraining, such as the Trade Adjustment Assistance Program, first funded in 1974. When one takes into account that, according to  more than 90% of jobs created between 2005 and 2015 were contract gigs (ie, not full-time), "Retraining for what?" becomes a legitimate question. Obviously, these part-time arrangements do not all belong to the ‘human-machine assemblage' postulated above, but at the same time this does not lend comfort to the recevied wisdom that technology will continue to create new opportunities for labor that are equal to or better than what came before. In fact, that position has come increasingly under attack.

*

Just as technology cannot be viewed as monolithic, neither can the workforce. It's worth asking who will bear the brunt of these changes, and what recourse there might be. In software there is the concept of LIFO, or ‘last in, first out', used to describe the order in which items can be added to and removed from a data structure. This idea may be applied just as easily to the workforce - those who are the most recent arrivals tend to have the most tenuous hold. A recent piece in Foreign Policy speculated on the implications of automation on women, who entered the workforce substantially only during the mid-20^th century:

Women are projected to take the biggest hits to jobs in the near future, according to a World Economic Forum report predicting that 5.1 million positions worldwide will be lost by 2020… Men will see nearly 4 million job losses and 1.4 million gains (approximately one new job created for every three lost). In comparison, women will face 3 million job losses and only 0.55 million gains (more than five jobs lost for every one gained).

One could make similar arguments for other segments of the labor force that have faced structural challenges, for example, minorities, immigrants and those possessing only a high school education. Moreover, the rapidity with which temporary labor markets will continue to evolve privileges the agile, who can not only adapt to new work, but can also physically relocate to new markets. Unfortunately, there is strong evidence that labor mobility has been declining across the United States since the 1970s. (This is yet another strong argument for universal healthcare.)

As far as recourse goes, labor is vastly ill-prepared. As Brishen Rogers noted in a thoughtful review of automation, unemployment and the prospects for universal basic income written for the Boston Review, 

Our labor and employment laws still envision the economy of the 1930s, which was dominated by massive industrial firms with hundreds of thousands of direct employees. Those laws rarely touch modern "fissured" work relationships such as Uber's relationship with its drivers, Walmart's relationship with its suppliers' workers, or McDonald's relationship with its franchisees' workers. Those laws also limit workers' ability to unionize or bargain effectively since they encourage bargaining at the firm or even plant level whereas today's modal workplace is growing ever smaller. Workers have fewer and fewer means to exert power on their own behalf.

In fact, this idea of power, or rather powerlessness, is perhaps the single greatest indicator of the difficulties in store for the labor force. With unions in disarray, the technologically-driven deskilling of the workforce continues apace. For example, a New York Times profile of Travis Kalanick, the CEO of ridesharing service Uber, noted that "roughly a quarter of [Uber's] drivers turn over on average every three months. According to an internal slide deck on driver income levels…Uber considered Lyft and McDonald's its main competition for attracting new drivers." Uber's technology platform is so easy to use (and its recruitment process so tolerant) that, rudely put, if you can flip burgers you can also be an Uber driver, and vice versa. 

The point about technology as a form of power over labor cannot be overstated. This is, in fact, its primary consequence. As Brishen Rogers notes, "technology is not a substitute for menial labor in this story but rather one among many tools to keep labor costs down by exerting power over workers." In order to effectively interface with encroaching automation, it is necessary that human interactions with technology be measured, evaluated, stored and recalled whenever needed. Thus the Guardian observes that

In the logistics sector, companies are using technology not to replace warehouse staff and couriers, but to put them under increasing surveillance to control their working patterns, reducing employee autonomy, skill and dignity. Wrist-based technology allows bosses to monitor activity minute-by-minute, including bathroom breaks.

If labor is to formulate new and effective means of dissenting from the emergent status quo, it is here that the battle must be met. The fully automated factory, while most plainly visible, is nevertheless a red herring compared to the myriad ways in which labor has already submitted to a status that grows ever more fraught with contingency. When he wrote "Machines were the weapon employed by the capitalists to quell the revolt of specialized labor," Marx was not thinking of the wristbands that Amazon workers wear, but I can't imagine he would have been that surprised, either.

Why We Should Repeal Obamacare and not Replace It with Another Insurance Plan: Thinking Out of the Box for a Health Care Solution

by Carol A Westbrook

Before you, progressive reader, quit in disgust after reading the title, or you, conservative reader, quit in disgust after reading a few more paragraphs, please hear me out. I'm proposing that we repeal Obamacare (The Affordable Care Act, ACA) but not replace it with another medical insurance program. Instead, I propose that we re-think the entire concept of how we provide health care in this country.   

The ACA's stated purpose is "to ensure that all Americans have access to high-quality, affordable health care." Regardless of whether or not you believe good health is a fundamental human right, it is inexcusable for an affluent, first world country like ours not to provide it for its citizens. The good health of our nation is vitally important to its success, guaranteeing as it does a capable workforce, a strong military, and a healthy upcoming generation. However, I have seen the results of Obamacare from many perspectives, including that of a physician provider in a rural community, as well as that of a personal user of both insurance and Medicare. I do not believe the ACA succeeded in meeting its objectives.

It is true that the ACA provided health care insurance for millions of Americans who didn't have it previously, expanded Medicaid for the uninsured, got rid of the pre-existing condition exclusions, allowed our grown adult children to remain on our policies longer, and started the ball rolling on electronic records. These are great results.

But the ACA also caused the cost of health insurance to skyrocket, caused many people to lose their coverage, and, for some, their jobs. It forced many small doctors' practices to close, especially in rural areas, resulting in an overall decline in the quality of care in many regions. It limited patients' choices of physicians and hospitals, separating patients from their longstanding doctors. There were no checks on health care costs, which even today continue to increase. But worst of all, it mandated that our health care would be taken out of the hands of doctors and put into the hand businessmen--the insurance companies.

To elaborate on these points:

1. Obamacare's requirement that insurance companies determine our health care meant that decisions would be based primarily on the companies' profits, rather than on their customers medical needs. In other words, your insurer determines which provider, lab, or hospital you can use, which drugs it will reimburse, and how much it will pay out for your claims, always with an eye on their bottom line. And every dollar that a business keeps for its shareholders or its executives' salaries is one less dollar that is paid out for your health care. Your illnesses are subsidizing an industry.

2. Medical insurance is not a health care plan. It is insurance, which means it is a shared risk program. By definition, insurance collects money from its participants, and uses this pool to pay for its participants' medical costs. However, if the only people who sign up for insurance are ill and need payout, then there won't be enough money in the pool and everyone will have to pay more, or they their insurance pool can pay only a fraction of the costs. The result is higher premiums and higher co-pays, or company will go out of business. Both things happened with the ACA. We saw Obamacare premiums skyrocket after the first year, and private insurance followed suit. Many insurance companies chose to leave the Obamacare market, and in some areas only one insurer remained, leaving no market cost.

3. Health insurance in the US is traditionally tied to a job. Because of the ACA mandate that businesses with 50 or more full-time employees provide insurance to the full-time workers, many either lost their jobs or had their hours cut so the business' number of employees would drop below the mandate to avoid the high costs. Additionally, many workers have seasonal work, and never had benefits. With lower incomes and some assets such as savings, cars, and homes, these uninsured workers were not destitute, but they couldn't afford the high Obamacare premiums but their income was still be too high for a subsidy. Previously these working poor would take their chances; now, they have to pay tax penalties or buy high-cost health insurance, neither of which they can afford. 

4. Obamacare did nothing to contain health care costs, which continue to rise. It's simple economics: with an increased number of insured, leading to increased demand for services in a fixed background of providers, the cost of these services increases. Unlike Medicare, no checks were built into what hospitals or pharmacies could charge.

5. Obamacare required implementation of provisions such as fully electronic medical records, electronic prescribing, and participation in large "accountable care organizations." Such mandates were impractical, unaffordable, or impossible for independent physicians and small practices, especially those in underserved rural areas. Many were forced out of business.

6. The combination of an increased demand for health care in a stable field, along with the closing of many practices, led to people turning to for-profit care centers, pharmacist providers, and poorly trained PA's and nurse practitioners for their care, instead of licensed medical doctors. The result was lower quality health care.

7. For the ACA model to be viable, everyone had to be insured, even those who were in good health, or pay a tax penalty. This makes sense from an insurance perspective, but it is anathema to the American way of life, which maintains that personal health decisions should be your own.

If Obamacare is repealed, then how can we still provide health care in the US? The problem is not the politics, but the health care system itself. Here is how I would do it.

1. The most important step is to lower the actual cost of health care. The US spends almost 20% of its GNP on health care because our insurance pays whatever is asked, even though we don't know what the real cost is! This is twice as much per person as every other first-world country--whose medical services are at least as good as those in the US!

How do we contain these costs? First, I would limit the amount that can be charged for medications, for physician services, for tests and for hospitalizations. Every other country does this, and we do it here, too, for Medicare. This is extremely unpopular with lawmakers, who rely on big money from the pharmaceutical, insurance, and hospital industry lobbies. We need lawmakers who are not influenced by lobbyists.

Next, we should have open, transparent pricing for all drugs and services, so people can comparison shop, perhaps even offering rebates if they save money for their payor.

Third, I would make medical training be tuition-free, and expand the number of physicians and residency positions, thereby increasing the supply of doctors who are comfortable working for lower salaries. Most doctors-to-be are not in it for the money, but find their school debts are so high that they have no choice but take high-paying jobs, forgoing work in a rural or inner-city practice.

Fourth, I would get rid of the middleman. Health care has become a profit center to generate income when money changes hands, or to provide jobs for themselves based on hospital administration and health-related government bureaucracies, many of which are not necessary in order to provide medical care.

2.  Medical insurance should not be tethered to employment, which automatically excludes those who are unable to work or cannot get a job--the ones who need health care the most! No other country in the world does it this way.

3.  There should be other options for health care coverage in addition to risk pool-based insurance. If health care costs are low enough, many may choose to pay for what they need and use, adding catastrophic coverage only. Insurance costs will become low enough that many will choose to participate; others may join cooperative organizations in which people pool resources and pay out as needed. Still others may choose to pay outright for their medical care. These options will make health care a truly free market.

4.  My personal preference is to develop a universal, free health care system, as you find in most other first world countries. One way to do this is to start with Medicare. Currently, all you need is a social security number and be age 65 or older to qualify for basic hospital services (Medicare A), while you can must pay for outpatient care insurance on a progressive, income-based schedule (Medicare B). Supplemental insurance is required to pay for medications and additional services. Medicare tightly regulates how much can be charged for clinical services (but not medication). Why not offer this to Americans of all ages? Many states are considering offering a single-payor solution, but it is unlikely to be viable for our entire country unless other cost reforms are in place--see point #1, above. And for many it may just be too "socialist" to be acceptable.

It is surprising that we have yet to come to terms with the recognition that we all pay for everyone else's health care in some way or another. From the underinsured who use emergency rooms as their primary care doctor, to the uninsured brought to the ED after an auto accident, to the indigent or the mentally ill who are in dire straits, to the elderly person who does not have the resources to pay for medications and is hospitalized--eventually this comes out of our tax money, or indirectly out of our own costs for medical care. Even healthy young adults who never need to see a doctor and eschew buying medical insurance will eventually grow old and die, too, and somehow we have to pay for their care as well. We might as well own up to this and make health care a reality for all.

Adapted from my April 1, 2017 post on Ask-An-Oncologist.com

Let Them Make My Cake: Exporting Burden, Importing Convenience in the Externalization Society

by Jalees Rehman

On 5 November 2015, an iron ore tailings dam burst in Bento Rodrigues near the Brazilian city of Mariana, releasing 60 million cubic meters of a reddish-brown mud-flood. This toxic flood buried neighboring villages and flowed into the Rio Doce, contaminating the river with several hazardous metals including mercury, arsenic and chromium as well as potentially harmful bacteria. The devastating and perhaps irreparable damage to the ecosystem and human health caused by this incident are the reason why it is seen as one of the biggest environmental disasters in the history of Brazil. The German sociologist Stephan Lessenich uses this catastrophe as a starting point to introduce the concept of the Externalisierungsgesellschaft(externalization society) in his book Neben uns die Sintflut: Die Externalisierungsgesellschaft und ihr Preis ("Around us, the deluge: The externalization society and its cost").

What is the externalization society? Lessenich uses this expression to describe how developed countries such as the United States, Japan and Germany transfer or externalize risks and burdens to developing countries in South America, Africa and Asia. The Bento Rodrigues disaster is an example of the environmental risk that is externalized. Extracting metals that are predominantly used by technology-hungry consumers in developed countries invariably generates toxic waste which poses a great risk for the indigenous population of many developing countries. The externalized environmental risks are not limited to those associated with mining raw materials. The developed world is increasingly exporting its trash into the third world.

The US, for example, are the world's largest exporter of paper trash, exporting scrap paper worth US$ 3.1 billion each year. The US is also the largest producer of electronic waste (E-Waste), estimated at more than 7 million tons of E-Waste per year (PDF). Every new smartphone or tablet release generates mountains of E-Waste. One would hope that these can be recycled but true recycling and re-using of electronic components is quite costly and time-consuming and it is often not clear which electronics actually get recycled. To track the fate of electronics, Jim Puckett from the Basel Action Network and his colleagues placed GPS-tracking devices in old electronics that were dropped off at US-based recycling centers. They found that a third of the "recycled" electronics were shipped overseas to countries such as Mexico, Taiwan, China, Pakistan, Thailand and Kenya. Puckett used the GPS signal to identify the sites where the E-Waste ended up and visited such a location in Hong Kong, where found that the "recycled" electronics were being dismantled in junkyards by migrant workers from mainland China who were not wearing any protective clothing to protect them from the hazardous materials released during the extraction of salvageable E-Waste materials. There are many regulations that restrict the trading of E-Waste but the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) estimates that up to 90% of the world's E-Waste is traded or dumped illegally.

Exporting environmental risks to developing countries by either outsourcing high-risk extraction of raw materials or simply dumping hazardous waste is just one example of externalization according the Lessenich. Health risks and poverty are also outsourced. Lessenich's concept of the externalization society isn't just another critique of the global inequality that we so often hear about. The fundamental principle of the externalization society is the interdependence between the "imperial lifestyle" of wealth and comfort in the developed world and the "wretched lifestyle" of poverty and hardship in the developing world. If those of us who live in the developed world want the convenience of upgrading our smartphones every few years or buying cheap cotton t-shirts, then we need those who manufacture these products in the developing world to be paid lousy wages. If those workers were paid humane wages and their employers instituted health insurance or pension plans then the cost of the products would be incompatible with our current economy and lifestyle which are fueled by consumerism and the capitalist imperative of incessant growth.

The pillars of the externalization society are indifference and ignorance. We are indifferent because we see the differential in lifestyle as a Selbstverständlichkeit – a German word for obviousness or taken-for-grantedness. They were born in developing countries, so of course they have to struggle – tough luck, they ended up with the wrong lottery tickets. This Selbstverständlichkeit also extends to the limited mobility of the people born in the developing world. They lack the birthright of the developing world citizens whose passports allow them to either travel visa-free or obtain a visa to nearly any country in the world with minimal effort. This veneer of Selbstverständlichkeit is easiest to maintain if "they" and "their" problems are invisible and thus allow us to ignore the interdependence between our good fortune and their misery. We might see images of the toxic flood in Brazil but few, if any, members of the externalization society will link the mining of cheap iron in Brazil to the utensils they use in their everyday life.

A decade ago, disposable single-use coffee pods such as the Keurig K-cups or the Nespresso pods were extremely rare but by 2014, K-cup manufactures sold a mind-boggling 9 billion K-cups! A new need for disposable products that had previously been met by standard coffee machines arose without considering the environmental and global impact of this need. In theory, the K-cups are recyclable but this would require careful separating of the paper, plastic and the aluminum top. It is not clear how many K-cups are properly recycled, and the E-Waste example shows that even if items are transported to recycling centers, that does not necessarily mean that they will be successfully recycled. Prior to the advent coffee pods, our coffee demands had been easily met without generating additional mountains of disposable plastic and aluminum coffee pod trash. Out of nowhere, there arose a new need for aluminum which again is extracted from the aluminum ore bauxite – another process that generates toxic waste. Instead of feeling a sense of absolution when we drop a disposable item into a recycling bin, we should simply curtail unnecessary consumption of products in disposable containers.

How do we overcome the externalization society? We can make concerted efforts through advocacy, education and regulations that restrict exporting environmental waste, improve health and safety conditions for workers in the developing world and try to restrict our consumerist excesses by clarifying the interdependence between wealth in the externalization society and the poverty in the developing world as well as the moral imperative to abrogate the inequality and asymmetry. Numerous advocates have already attempted this approach for the past decades with limited success. Maybe instead of appealing to the ethics of interdependence, a more effective approach may be to educate each other about the consequences of the interdependence. When millions of refugees show up at the doorstep of the externalization society, "they" are no longer invisible. One can blame wars, religious extremism and political ideologies for the misery of the refugees but it becomes harder to ignore the extent and central role of the underlying inequality. Creating humane working and living conditions for people in the developing world is perhaps the most effective way to stop the so-called "refugee crisis".

Global climate change is another threat to the externalization society, a threat of its own making. Transferring carbon footprints and pollution to other countries does not change the fact that the whole planet is suffering from the consequences of climate change. Political leaders of the externalization society often demand the closing of borders, erecting walls and expanding their armed forces so they are less likely to have to confront the victims of their externalization but no army or wall is strong enough to lower the rising water levels or stabilize the climate. The externalization society will end not because of a crisis of conscience but because its excesses are undermining its own existence.

Reference

Lessenich, S. (2016). Neben uns die Sintflut: Die Externalisierungsgesellschaft und ihr Preis. Hanser Berlin. 

Politics Trump Healthcare Information: News Coverage of the Affordable Care Act

by Jalees Rehman

The Affordable Care Act, also known as the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act", "Obamacare" or the ACA, is a comprehensive healthcare reform law enacted in March 2010 which profoundly changed healthcare in the United States. This reform allowed millions of previously uninsured Americans to gain health insurance by establishing several new measures, including the expansion of the federal Medicaid health insurance coverage program, introducing the rule that patients with pre-existing illnesses could no longer be rejected or overcharged by health insurance companies, and by allowing dependents to remain on their parents' health insurance plan until the age of 26. The widespread increase in health insurance coverage – especially for vulnerable Americans who were unemployed, underemployed or worked for employers that did not provide health insurance benefits – was also accompanied by new regulations targeting the healthcare system itself. Healthcare providers and hospitals were provided with financial incentives to introduce electronic medical records and healthcare quality metrics.

As someone who grew up in Germany where health insurance coverage is guaranteed for everyone, I assumed that over time, the vast majority of Americans would appreciate the benefits of universal coverage. One no longer has to fear financial bankruptcy as a consequence of a major illness and a government-back health insurance also provides for peace of mind when changing jobs. Instead of accepting employment primarily because it offers health benefits, one can instead choose a job based on the nature of the work. But I was surprised to see the profound antipathy towards this new law, especially among Americans who identified themselves as conservatives or Republicans, even if they were potential beneficiaries of the reform. Was the hatred of progressive-liberal views, the Democrats and President Obama who had passed the ACA so intense among Republicans that they were willing to relinquish the benefits of universal health coverage for the sake of their political ideology? Or were they simply not aware of the actual content of the law and opposed it simply for political reasons?

A recent study published by a team of researchers led by Sarah Gollust at the University of Minnesota may shed some light on this question. Gollust and her colleagues analyzed 1,569 local evening television news stories related to the ACA that were aired in the United States during the early months of when the health care reform was rolled out (between October 1, 2013, and April 19, 2014). They focused on analyzing local television news broadcasts because these continue to constitute the primary source of news for Americans, especially for those who are age 50 and higher. A Pew survey recently showed that 57% of all U.S. adults rely on television for their news, and among this group, local TV new (46%) is a more common source than cable news (31%) or network news (30%).

Gollust and colleagues found that 55% of the news stories either focused on the politics of the ACA such as political disagreements over its implementation (26.5%) or combined information regarding its politics with information on how it would affect healthcare insurance options (28.6%). Only 45% of the news stories focused exclusively on the healthcare insurance options provided by the law. The politics-focused news stories were also more likely to refer to the law as "Obamacare" whereas healthcare insurance focused news segments used the official name "Affordable Care Act" or "ACA". Surprisingly, the expansion of Medicaid, which was one of the cornerstones of the ACA because it would increase the potential access to health insurance for millions of Americans, was often ignored. Only 7.4% of news stories mentioned Medicaid at all, and only 5% had a Medicaid focus.

What were the sources of information used for the news stories? President Obama was cited in nearly 40% of the stories, whereas other sources included White House staff or other federal executive agencies (28.7%), Republican (22.3%) or Democratic (15.9%) politicians and officials. Researchers, academics or members of think tanks and foundations were cited in only 3.9% of the news stories about the ACA even though they could have provided important scholarly insights about the ACA and its consequences for individual healthcare as well as the healthcare system in general.

The study by Gollust and colleagues has its limitations. It did not analyze TV network news, cable news, or online news outlets which have significantly gained in importance as news sources during the past decade. The researchers also did not analyze news stories aired after April 2014 which may have been a better reflection of initial experiences of previously uninsured individuals who signed up for health insurance through the mechanisms provided by the ACA. Despite these limitations, the study suggests that one major reason for the strong opposition among Republicans against the ACA may have been the fact that it was often framed in a political context and understated the profound effects that the ACA had on access to healthcare and the reform of the healthcare system itself.

During the 2016 election campaign, many Republican politicians used the idea of "repealing" the ACA to energize their voters, without necessarily clarifying what exactly they wanted to repeal. Should all the aspects of the ACA – from the Medicaid expansion to the new healthcare quality metrics in hospitals –be repealed? If voters relied on the local television news to learn about the ACA, and if this coverage – as is suggested by Gollust's study – viewed the ACA predominantly as a political entity, then it is not surprising that voters failed to demand nuanced views from politicians who vowed to repeal the law. The research also highlights the important role that television reporting plays in framing the debate about healthcare reform. By emphasizing the actual content of the healthcare reform and its medical implications and by using more scholars instead of politicians as information sources, these media outlets could educate the public about the law.

There are many legitimate debates about the pros and cons of the healthcare reform that are not rooted in politics. For example, electronic medical records allow healthcare providers to easily monitor the results of laboratory tests and avoid wasting patient's time and money on unnecessary tests that may have been ordered by another provider. However, physicians who are continuously staring at their screens to scroll through test results may not be able to form the interpersonal bond that is critical for a patient-doctor relationship. One could consider modifying the requirements and developing better record-keeping measures to ensure a balance between adequate documentation and sufficient face-to-face doctor-patient time. The ACA's desire to track quality of healthcare delivery and penalize hospitals or providers who deliver suboptimal care could significantly improve adherence to guidelines based on sound science. On the other hand, one cannot demand robot-like adherence to guidelines, especially when treating severely ill, complex patients who require highly individualized care. These content-driven discussions are more productive than wholesale political endorsements or rejections of the healthcare reform.

Healthcare will always be a political issue but all of us – engaged citizens, patients, healthcare providers or journalists - need to do our part to ensure that this debates about this issue which directly impacts millions of lives are primarily driven by objective information and not by political ideologies.

Reference:

Gollust, S. E., Baum, L. M., Niederdeppe, J., Barry, C. L., & Fowler, E. F. (2017). Local Television News Coverage of the Affordable Care Act: Emphasizing Politics Over Consumer Information. American Journal of Public Health, (published online Feb 16, 2017).

Post-truth, post-shame politics

by Emrys Westacott

How does one criticize and resist politicians who have zero concern for truth?  This is one of the problems posed by the Trump presidency . Trump, throughout his campaign, and now in office, lies as easily as he breathes. To take just one example, in a meeting with the National Sherriff's Association on Feb. 7th, he said that the murder rate in the US is the highest it's been in 47 years. In fact it is currently lower than in most of those years. Lists of Trump's blatant lies can be readily found on many web sites. 

Obviously, Trump is not the first politician to tell whoppers. Politicians who are in the pockets of the banks, the oil companies, tobacco, pharmaceuticals, weapons manufacturers, and so on have long suppressed, denied, or bent the truth for reasons of self-interest. But the brazenness of the lying is unusual. In normal, rational, civilized discourse, there are background conventions understood by all parties. According to philosophers like Paul Grice and Jürgen Habermas, these provide a framework that makes most ordinary communication possible. One of these conventions is that what we say is supposed to be true. Another is that we are supposed to be sincere. There are contexts where these conventions may not hold in the usual way--e.g. when we are haggling at a yard sale--but most of the time they are in place. Imagine how it would be if they weren't? If you were to ask someone for directions or for the time, you couldn't assume they'd try to tell you the truth. So in such a world you would never bother asking. Without assumptions of this sort in place, the most banal conversations would become pointless since we'd have no reason to think that anything being said was tethered to reality.

The gold standard regarding rational discourse is science, which prides itself on its disinterested search for objective truth. But the same conventions operate in many other spheres. Historians, journalists, judges, and sports commentators, all feel the same obligation to respect hard evidence and eschew contradictions.

In normal, rational, civilized discourse, the rules of the game state that if your claims are flatly at odds with clear evidence, or if your claims are contradictory, then you shouldn't just keep asserting them. Ideally, you should concede that you must be mistaken. But if that requires too much loss of face, you should at least accept that your position is problematic and slink away to work on it some more. So if I claim that Brisbane is the capital of Australia, and you produce your smart phone displaying a Wikipedia page identifying Canberra as the capital, I ought to just say, "OK, I was wrong." If that's too hard to do, I might look around for a face-saving exit: "OK, but I think Canberra used to be the capital." Or "I thought I read somewhere that they were going to move the capital." What's not acceptable is for me simply to keep asserting what is patently contrary to the indisputable evidence. If I do that, I throw away the conventions that allow conversations to have a purpose.

Authoritarians are not favorably disposed toward objective truth since its support cannot be relied upon. What matters to them is not being right but being in power. So they typically first suppress the truth, through censorship, intimidation, and violence, and then, if possible, control it in the sense of getting their own propaganda accepted as true. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four depicts a society where this situation has become established in an extreme and irreversable form. The protagonist, Winston Smith, resists by asserting to himself that two plus two equals four; but the Party have the power to insist–and if they wish, to convince him–that two plus two equals five.

Trump and his gang certainly seem able to get millions to believe utter nonsense. And they are no doubt looking to extend their control over the flow of information, especially from federal agencies, in order to make things harder for their critics. But it is hard to imagine an America where dissent is suppressed and marginalized the way it is in normal dictatorships. Saying this might sound naive to some: but we are talking here about the closing down of the New York Times, and the outlawing of Saturday Night Live. And dire though the current condition of American democracy is, such developments are almost inconceivable.

The Trumpsters have, however, by accident or design, hit upon something else they can do with truth, given the difficulties of suppressing or controlling it: they can devalue it. They do this first, by throwing into the political debates bucketloads of falsehoods; and second, by constantly questioning the integrity and reliability of our usual sources of information, including the mainstream media, scientists, scholars, and government agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency or the Dept. of Health and Human Services. One hoped-for effect of this is to spread a skeptical attitude towards such sources. So those people who are not appalled by Trump but who recognize that much of what he says is probably false, are no longer sure that there is any source of information that can be trusted. That situation, where truths and falsehoods are swirling around the public sphere, and many people don't believe there is any way to decide which is which, obviously represents a victory for those who traffic in lies.

 At bottom, though, what is novel about the attitude of Trump and his flunkeys isn't so much their indifference to truth as their complete lack of shame. Again, according to the traditional rules, if an important person makes an important public statement and is then confronted by crystal clear evidence that what they've said is false, they ought to be and–would be–embarrassed. If it was also clear that they that what they were saying was false, they might even blush. In a different time, long ago and far away, the British defense minister John Profumo resigned from parliament as soon as it became clear that he had lied to parliament about his involvement with a 19 year old model.

A total lack of any sense of shame must be a prerequisite for the job of being Donald Trump's press secretary; so Sean Spicer seems admirably suited to the position. He has little trouble repeating palpable falsehoods, such as that Trump's inauguration drew the biggest crowds ever (even though he simultaneously asserted that "no one had numbers"), or that Trump's belief that there were millions of illegal voters in the 2016 election "is based on studies and evidence." Brazenness of this sort is actually a particular kind of insult. It's akin to a restaurant manager stating baldy that he has no available tables to a would-be customer who can see quite clearly that the restaurant is half empty. Violating the conventions of ordinary discourse in this manner is a way of expressing utter contempt for those being addressed. 

But compared to his boss, Spicer is a rank amateur. No matter how clearly Trump is shown to be wrong, he just does not do "Sorry, I was mistaken." He probably can't help himself in this though; it is exactly what one would expect from someone with a severe narcissistic personality disorder. His attitude is that of God to His plaintiffs and critics in Phillip Appleman poem's "God Grandeur": "I never apologize, never explain."

Shame can be a powerful moral force both on individuals and society. In his book The Honor Code, Kwame Anthony Appiah describes how shame played an important part in bringing an end dueling in Britain, foot binding in China, and slavery in America. A pressing question in American politics today is whether there are enough Republicans in Congress who are still capable of being shamed into opposing Trump for the good of the country. At present, they serve as his enablers. Some of them may cringe inwardly, but they choose to ride the tiger, figuring that the death of truth is a price worth paying if it helps them to hold onto their seats or push through their agenda of cutting taxes for the wealthy, shrinking government, deregulating business, and so on. 

The times are certainly dark. But if Trump continues on his current trajectory, and if his chief advisor Steve Bannon is able to steer things further toward the destructive chaos he desires as the precondition for a more radical authoritarianism, the vestigial shame of a few Republicans may be one of the few things keeping a deeper darkness at bay. Meanwhile, those in the political arena, in the media, and in academia who daily expose and denounce Trump's lies perform the important function of keeping alive the notion that truth matters. And those who protest in every other way serve the valuable function of making Trump's enablers worry about their prospects for re-election. For there is nothing so effective as self-interest in prodding awake the slumbering conscience. 

Walls, Bans and Border Patrols: The Fearsome Fallout for Children

by Humera Afridi

At the age of ten, my biggest fear was a dread of heights. Childhood weekends were sun-drenched (chlorine-filled) idylls during which I worked myself up to fling my body off the high board at the Sind Club into the gleaming swimming pool below. I lived in Karachi, and, yes, in a bubble.

We were surrounded by inequity, yet my ‘innocence’ or, rather, naivete remained intact. I was certainly aware of the sudden, politically motivated strikes and pained by the striking poverty—lame beggars who hopped over to car windows at traffic stops; gangs of wily, threadbare children left to roam the danger-filled streets. Nevertheless, within the highly-selective, members-only club, the harsh world outside with its mayhem of cars, motorcycles, trucks and water lorries threatening to run over the cripples weaving their way through the honking maze, seized to exist for me. The water shimmered, spangled with sunlight; I can still recall the sensation of my toes curling on the edge of the cement precipice, and a frisson of nervous excitement overcoming me in those excruciating moments before leaping towards the joyous shouts that rose to greet me as I plummeted. The beleaguered world of the city at large disappeared.

That life seems unthinkable, unconscionable, today, especially after having lived away for many years, first as an expatriate and then an (accidental) immigrant. But that was how things were: the disparity was deep-rooted and historical. Even as a child I learned to build invisible walls.

Fast-forward to the next generation and a change of setting: my son who is nine and a half, born and raised in America, possesses an awareness around issues of social justice and race, and nuanced identity politics—LQBTQIA is the more current, more inclusive term I learned from him two weeks ago—that simultaneously awes and alarms me. Even as I am grateful for his attunement and ability to perceive and articulate feelings arising from instances of injustice that he witnesses, hears about, or personally experiences, a part of me wonders: isn’t he too young to know all this? Isn’t it too soon to have to create the space in his mind to sort through a myriad possibilities of how to be? And what about facing the facts—far too many— of a cruel and unjust world?

But the age of innocence has vanished. And children aren’t exempt. Last week, over an ice-cream after school, he casually slipped in, “Mom, today I pulled my teacher aside because I was feeling really depressed.”

Words to make a mother’s heart sink.

“Depressed is a big word, sweetheart! What exactly were you feeling?”

“Really, really sad, mama. About the Muslim ban.

As a child, I worried about high diving. My son, just shy of ten, on the other hand, is anguished that I will not be allowed back home to New York next week when I return from my trip to France. He worries that he will never get to visit his ancestral village in Northwestern Pakistan, something he’s been hankering for in recent months. “If we go to Pakistan, will they let us back in? How will I learn Urdu? How will I ever learn Pashto if I can’t go to Pakistan?”

At his school, they hold community meetings during which they raise concerns and break down the damaging effect of words like “hate” which have been tossed around liberally since the election campaign. Teachers and students have been sharing their feelings of vulnerability in the face of the new America unfolding before us, seeing how as a community they can support each other to feel safe and secure. To enable these conversations, the students are empowered with facts and the vocabulary to engage in sincere, heartfelt exchanges.

When I think back to my childhood, my most prominent memories are the feel of the hot sun on my face, the confusing thrum of water swallowing me as I rocket into the depths, the cool, green ice-cream soda bottle, slippery with condensation, after my swim. Politics formed, at best, a background murmur in the domain of the grownups, which I didn't tune into, and which wasn't shared in a meaningful or serious way with the children. I  was an apolitical child; illiterate in the ways of how society actually worked—a cringe-worthy realization—especially in contrast to my son, who speaks about the effects of the policies being revealed each day by the new government, who feels the discriminatory gaze of the new president on him and experiences it viscerally, sees that gaze eviscerating the hopes of bereft Syrian refugee children and their families, and feels it so deeply that he has actually lain on the ground and heaved sobs, or then exploded with anger and promised to personally “tackle” the leadership.

My gentle, guitar-loving nine-year old: it's heart-wrenching to witness his sadness and worry. How does a mother protect her child from all the noise and ugliness while at the same time provide him with the tools to feel empowered? These are urgent times and innocence, it seems, has become collateral damage, a ‘war-time’ casualty. Three weekends in row, he has attended marches, protests and demonstrations demanding justice and equality, and freedom of the press, and protested the Muslim ban. I celebrate his participation. Will this be the stuff of his childhood memories?

It is ironic that the demonization of select groups of people by the new American President is precisely what is awakening and alerting my son and his young generation to the American values of dignity, justice, equality, diversity, unity and individual freedom, inspiring them to stand and uphold these ideals. What joy to witness him chanting: This is what democracy looks like!

For those who have been directly labeled and targeted by the leadership, how much more onerous their challenge is right now. To be perceived as an embodied threat. How does a young child take that in? What does it do to a developing psyche? And how dare we, in this late age, let the lessons of so many devastating wars and genocides go unheeded?

There is a photo that haunts me to this day.  

It is of a young boy looking through the metal bars of a barrier dividing Afghanistan from Pakistan at Torkham. I took the photo in January 2002 when I tried to enter Afghanistan across that border. (In the end I didn’t go. I was notified that if I did, I would be breaking Pakistani law and would most likely be imprisoned upon my return). In the wake of the recent travel ban in the Unites States that has devastated so many families, I’m reminded of the time when America lunged at Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks and the heartbreaking scenes of chaos at the Pak-Afghan borders, the dismal refugee camps. Today, as a mother, I wonder if that boy was an orphan. Perhaps, that’s why he was standing there alone. What became of him, what ‘choices’ were left for him in his war-devastated country? Did sadness and disappointment in time turn to anger and a desire for vengeance?

As families are torn apart and terrorized by the draconian laws of the new government and the bullying of border patrol officers, we must remember that the economic, emotional and social aftershocks will shape the new generation of warriors— perceived through one lens as knights and knightesses and through another as potential ‘terrorists.’ Much healthier then, surely, to let children play ball in the park and splash in swimming pools? Why is it so difficult to cast off divisiveness in favor of a path that seeks, instead, peace, harmony, unity, and dignity for all?

Plastic Words are Hollow Shells for Rigid Ideas: The Ever-Expanding Language of Tyranny

by Jalees Rehman

Words are routinely abused by those in power to manipulate us but we should be most vigilant when we encounter a new class of "plastic words". What are these plastic words? In 1988, the German linguist Uwe Pörksen published his landmark book "Plastikwörter:Die Sprache einer internationalen Diktatur" (literal translation into English: "Plastic words: The language of an international dictatorship") in which he describes the emergence and steady expansion during the latter half of the 20^th century of selected words that are incredibly malleable yet empty when it comes to their actual meaning. Plastic words have surreptitiously seeped into our everyday language and dictate how we think. They have been imported from the languages of science, technology and mathematics, and thus appear to be imbued with their authority. When used in a scientific or technological context, these words are characterized by precise and narrow definitions, however this precision and definability is lost once they become widely used. Pörksen's use of "plastic" refers to the pliability of how these words can be used and abused but he also points out their similarity to plastic lego bricks which act as modular elements to construct larger composites. The German language makes it very easy to create new composite words by combining two words but analogous composites can be created in English by stringing together multiple words. This is especially important for one of Pörksen's key characteristics of plastic words: they have become part of an international vocabulary with cognate words in numerous languages.

Here are some examples of "plastic words"(German originals are listed in parentheses next to the English translations) – see if you recognize them and if you can give a precise definition of what they mean:

exchange (Austausch)

information (Information)

communication (Kommunikation)

process (Prozess)

resource (Ressource)

strategy (Strategie)

structure (Struktur)

relationship (Beziehung)

substance (Substanz)

progress (Fortschritt)

model (Modell)

development (Entwicklung)

value (Wert)

system (System)

function (Funktion)

growth (Wachstum)

supply (Versorgung)

quality (Qualität)

welfare (Wohlfahrt)

planning (Planung)

Even though these words are very difficult to pin down in terms of their actual meaning, they are used with a sense of authority that mandates their acceptance and necessity. They are abstract expressions that imply the need for expertise to understand and implement their connotation. Their implicit authority dissuades us from questioning the appropriateness of their usage and displaces more precise or meaningful synonyms. They have a modular lego-like nature so that they can be strung together with each other or with additional words to expand their authority; for example, "resource development", "information society", "strategic relationship" or "communication process".

How about the word "love"? Love is also very difficult to define but when we use it, we are quite aware of the fact that it carries many different nuances. We tend to ask questions such as "What kind of love? Erotic, parental, romantic, spiritual? Who is in love and is it truly love?" On the other hand, when we hear "resource development', we may just nod our heads in agreement. Of course resources need to be developed!

Pörksen published his book during the pre-internet, Cold War era and there have been new families of plastic words that could perhaps be added to the list in the 21^st century. For one, there is the jargon of Silicon Valley that used by proponents of internet-centrism. Words such as digital, cyber, internet, online, data or web have entered everyday language but we rarely think about their actual meaning. The word internet, for example, technically refers to a bunch of servers and input devices and screen connected by cables and routers but it has taken on a much broader cultural and societal significance. An expression such as internet economy should elicit the important question of who is part of the "internet economy" and who is left out? The elderly and the poor have limited access to the internet in many countries of the world but we may gloss over this fact when we speak of the internet. The words innovation, integration, global and security/safety have also become key plastic words in the 21^st century.

How do these plastic words become vehicles for the imposition of rigid views and tyranny? Two recent examples exemplify this danger.

The British Prime Minister Theresa May justified Britain's decision to leave the European Union after a campaign characterized by anti-immigrant prejudice and nationalism in a speech by invoking Britain's new global role:

"I want us to be a truly Global Britain – the best friend and neighbour to our European partners, but a country that reaches beyond the borders of Europe too. A country that goes out into the world to build relationships with old friends and new allies alike."

It is difficult to argue with the positive connotation of a Global Britain. Global evokes images of the whole planet Earth, and why shouldn't Britain forge new relationships with all the people and countries on our planet? However, the nationalist and racist sentiments that prompted the vote to leave the European Union surely did not mean that Britain would welcome people from all over the globe. In fact, the plastic words global and relationships allow the British government to arbitrarily define the precise nature of these relationships, likely focused on maximizing trade and profits for British corporations while ignoring the poorer nations of our globe.   

Similarly, an executive order issued by the new American president Donald Trump within a week of his inauguration banned the entry of all foreigners heralding from a selected list of Muslim-majority countries into the USA citing concerns about security, safety and welfare of the American people. As with many plastic words, achieving security, safety and welfare sound like important and laudable goals but they also allow the US government to arbitrarily define what exactly constitutes security, safety and welfare of the American people. One of the leading enforcement agencies of the totalitarian East German state was the Stasi (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit - Ministry for State Security). It allowed the East German government to arrest and imprison any citizen deemed to threaten the state's security – as defined by the Stasi.  

How do we respond to the expanding use of plastic words? We should be aware of the danger inherent in using these words because they allow people in power – corporations, authorities or government agencies - to define their meanings. When we hear plastic words, we need to ask about the context of how and why they are used, and replace them with more precise synonyms. Resist the tyranny of plastic words by asking critical questions.

Reference:

Pörksen, U. (1988). Plastikwörter: die Sprache einer internationalen Diktatur. Klett-Cotta.

English translation:

Poerksen, U. (1995). Plastic words: The tyranny of a modular language. Penn State Press.

Data Nihilsm and Agnothology

by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

For those of us who work in the Sciences, the last decade or so has been a boon to research and new discoveries. This has been facilitated by the massive data collection and data analysis which would have been inconceivable just a few decades ago. The rapid change in the Sciences has been described as the forth paradigm of Science i.e., data intensive discovery. As a side consequence of these changes, many of us thought that the time has finally arrived where data will be the absolute arbiter of truth. If the global events of 2016 in general and the US elections in particular are any indication then we were dead wrong thinking this. One may even ask, in an era of post-Truth, fake news and alternate facts, is data really that relevant? One can do all the fact checking in the world but it won't matter if the person to whom the evidence is being presented gives the rejoinder, “What does evidence have to do with it?” Welcome to the brave new world of Data Nihilsm, a term coined by Terry Morse to denote outright denial of data. Closely related to the study of data nihilism is Agnothology or the study of culturally induced ignorance.

As a data scientist, I imagined that an argument based on careful analysis of data coupled with sound statistical reasoning and proper used of machine learning should be enough to convince any person of one’s argument. However in many contexts this may actually have the opposite effect. For one, the previous statement may actually sound elitist and there is strong evidence that if people have strong convictions about a certain belief then offering contradictory evidence may actually strength their belief instead of weakening it. Thinking about why people act this way becomes easier if we rather drop the assumption that people are rational and start thinking that people’s rationality is mediated via emotions. Leibniz theorized that one day we would have machines that will be able to calculate answers to any question for us and so people instead of arguing will just say let us calculate. One might argue that the data driven society that we are currently building is taking us close to this ideal. However there is a hidden assumption in this assertion that that all people evaluate evidence in the same manner. The presence of conformation bias and other cognitive biases in humans tell a different story altogether. People are more likely to be skeptical and thorough in investigation if evidence presented to them goes against what they already believe. Even things like what people perceive as the scientific consensus varies from person to person. Thus Creationists pounce over any alleged evidence that “proves” that the theory of evolution is false while neglecting any data that goes in its favor. The point is not whether one can use data to make one’s point but rather evidence is powerless if one has already made up one’s mind, to quote Salman Hameed who studies the public perception of the theory of evolution.

Robert N. Proctor, a professor at Stanford, who also coined the term Agnothology is a pioneer in this area and did a classic study of how the tobacco industry willfully spread ignorance regarding the hazards of tobacco. The tobacco industry employed a massive advertising campaign to create doubt in the mind of the public about the veracity of claims regarding the harmful effects of tobacco. The industry created confusion in the minds of people by pointing out that the studies regarding the harmful effects of tobacco had been done on mice and not people. So-called experts were called to talk about the other side of the debate when in fact there was no other side and the evidence was unequivocal. Inadmissibility of evidence or data nihilism is however different from culturally mediated ignorance. The information age only makes things worse by enabling the creation of echochambers. Thus the Internet has created a free for all lunch buffet of information where cherry picking the facts can be used to prove anything. If that does not work then one does not even need to cherry pick anything, one can just invent alternative facts and feed them to a populace willing to eagerly believe and regurgitate the ‘facts.’ In a quote from BBC, Professor Proctor summarizes and warns, “Even though knowledge is ‘accessible’, it does not mean it is accessed.”

The current political climate of data nihilism did not arise in a vacuum. In the nineties we had the culture wars including the assault on Science in public schools. Post-modernism also played a role in relativizing truth; the Sokal Affair comes to mind here. All this may sound gloomy as journalists even wrote about the death of facts as early as five years ago but now people are even questioning whether one can no longer even trust the data that the government is collecting. This problem is however not unprecedented or unique to the United States. The history of the 20^th century is testament to data manipulation by different communist regimes and ideologically driven research agendas like Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union that led to nothing. Denialism is not necessarily a Liberal vs. Conservative phenomenon. Vaccine denialism is a rampant problem in some sections on the left and no amount of evidence can convince a person if they have already come to the conclusion that the world is only six thousand years old.

Then there is the Dunning-Kruger Effect where people will low competency tend to greatly overestimate their ability in a given area of expertise. Couple that with culturally induced ignorance and we have a recipe for disaster. Confucius had a maxim that real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance. How does one even begin to talk to people who think that they have the best of knowledge and all their opponents are ignorant? The dominant paradigm among the elites and the educated in the West, especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall, has been that people are rational creatures who are motivated by self-interest. The rise of populism and authoritarianism in the world as of late has been a grim reminder that people are far from rational. The phenomenon of data nihilism and culturally induced ignorance do have one thing in common, an appeal to values. Perhaps not all is lost; it may still be possible to change people’s minds and have a semi-rational discussion. Studies show that people are more likely to change their minds if there is an element of social desirability involved. If a person thinks that changing their position in a certain context is non-threatening or desirable then they are more likely to engage and even change their position. If you are a conservative then perhaps you won't change your mind on climate change if you hear it from a scientist but a sermon from your pastor will convince you. Similarly a vaccine denier does not need to hear about the advantages of vaccination from a scientist but rather from a celebrity. Thus one can appeal to people’s values and one can have a discussion; present them with something threatening then they are unwilling to listen. Chris Mooney described this best in his words; “you don't lead with the facts in order to convince. You lead with the values—so as to give the facts a fighting chance.” So data scientists and journalists have a harder task at hand, not only do we have to use data to tell stories but also we have to use idioms and framing that makes the other side listen. That solves half of the problem i.e., the presence of ignorance but if the problem is just data nihilism then all bets are off.

THE LIMINALITY OF LYME DISEASE

by Genese Sodikoff

One does not normally think about infection, illness, and recovery in terms of a three-staged "rite of passage" as European ethnographer Arnold van Gennep defined it, although catching a disease certainly involves a period of physical transition and disruption of our sense of self.

Of course, a "rite of passage" conventionally refers to a ceremony that marks a change in status, such as a wedding or commencement, where one social identity is shed and another assumed. Van Gennep's three stages include the separation from peers, a liminal or in-between period, and reassimilation into society with a new status. But if we loosely apply this concept to other life experiences, such as illness, we begin to see a structure to the stories that make up our lives.  

Say an individual goes from healthy person, to ill patient, and finally to some resolution. At this point the individual has either returned to the prior state of healthiness, dies, remains somehow marked by the period of suffering, or persists in a state of impaired health, neither here nor there. Certain diseases seem to occupy the liminal space, casting their victims into medical limbo as neither diagnosable nor well. Chronic Lyme disease is one of those. Since the source of prolonged suffering is contested by doctors, many sufferers must seek help at the edges of the medical mainstream.

To turn back to the "rite of passage" schema for a moment, anthropologist Victor Turner was intrigued by Van Gennep's demarcation of a liminal period, the "betwixt and between" stage. In the late 1960s, Turner elaborated the concept, finding it rife with both social ambiguity and possibility. For Turner, liminality evoked an unstructured space, an opposition to the dominant structure at the edges of the cultural mainstream. It is here where people experience "communitas," a spirit of camaraderie and equality. Liminality is counter-cultural, a state of flux in which the dominant structure is recast in the image of the oppositional force until that new image becomes the structure from which to pull away.

Liminal pathology comes to mind with chronic Lyme disease and other contested medical conditions that are difficult to cure and often deemed illusory or psychosomatic. Medical anthropologist, Dr. Abigail Dumes of the University of Michigan has carried out an ethnographic project on chronic Lyme disease in the American Northeast, on its believers and naysayers and the battle over what constitutes evidence. Her forthcoming book chronicles the perspectives of doctors, scientists, and patients who have divided perspectives of the disease.

It is important to note that no one disputes the existence of Lyme disease, known to many by the bull's-eye rash that often (though not always) follows infection. Chronic Lyme disease refers to symptoms that linger, sometimes for years, after the regular course of antibiotics ends. The persistent presence of Lyme antibodies in the bloodstream can mean either past exposure or active infection. This is another source of contention between the camps: whether Lyme antibodies indicate the immune system has vanquished the disease (giving a "false positive") or is actually still at war. Dumes explains that diagnosis relies on an antibody test rather than isolating the bacteria from the body because Borrelia burgdorferi and its DNA are difficult to culture and isolate from patients' bodily fluids.

Chronic Lyme disease is not recognized by mainstream doctors, so patients' symptoms are chalked up to other possible causes. In contrast, "Lyme-literate" doctors do recognize the disease, as do its sufferers. Lyme-literate proponents recommend an intensive and extended course of antibiotics to treat symptoms, including fatigue, joint pain, vertigo, neuropathy, and cognitive impairment, while mainstream doctors consider such treatment ineffective and potentially harmful.

The occurrence of Lyme disease dates back thousands of years, and today it is the leading vector-borne disease in the United States. Small mammals, as well as deer, are reservoir hosts of the bacteria. Approximately 30,000 new cases per year are reported, but the actual number is probably closer to 300,000. Infection rates are increasing; in fact, they have doubled since the early 1990s. Lyme disease burdens the northern United States more than the South, though incidence of Lyme or Lyme-like symptoms in the South is climbing. The more moderate climate of the Northeast (less severe and later winters than in the Midwest and Canada) has been favorable to more dangerous strains of Borrelia for people. Late summer is the feeding period for larval deer ticks, and infected nymphs (juvenile ticks, the size of tiny specks) feed in spring. Scientists report that in the Northeast, persistent infections of Lyme disease, caused by the more virulent bacterial strains, are tied to the long gap between larval and nymphal tick feeding times. In contrast, the severe winters of the Midwest end up shortening the duration of tick feeding, as well as the gap between nymphal and larval feedings. As a result, fewer cases of Lyme disease in the Midwest have been reported.

However, as the climate warms, Midwest winters are becoming more like Northeast winters have long been, foreshadowing an increase in Lyme infections in the Midwest. To make matters worse, a new species of Lyme-causing bacteria, Borrelia mayonii, was recently discovered in the Midwest. Meanwhile, the warmer atmosphere has enabled ticks to move steadily northward towards Canada, bringing Lyme with them.

Another factor contributing to the rise of Lyme disease in the Northeast are housing developments in former wildlife habitats. Suburban sprawl and people's desire to live near nature have brought humans, woodland mammals, and ticks into close contact. Dumes reflects on the conflicting views of wilderness in the North American imagination: Nature is deemed both soul-soothing and dangerous. For well-to-do Northeasterners who value properties that abut woodlands, the proximity to nature enriches people's lives, even as Lyme disease has wreaked havoc on many people's health.

You have to adapt to Lyme zones. Dumes recounts the bodily practices adopted by residents who have suffered Lyme disease. Family members often do the daily routine of intimately scouring each other's bodies for ticks, including all the nooks and crannies where ticks are prone to hide. People don knee-high socks outdoors, even in the heat of summer. They slather their skin with repellent, and toss their clothes in the dryer to roast off ticks before going indoors. Some deliberately choose white-furred pets so ticks will be more visible. Each household has its Lyme-inspired rituals, but tick checks are the common denominator. These folks dread re-infection and fret over their children playing outdoors, yet they are loath to give up the beauty and restorative effects of the forest.

The disease is caused by a spiral-shaped bacterium, Borrelia burgdorferi, named after its scientist discoverer, Willy Burgdorfer. It is transmitted from from small mammals and birds to people via the saliva of blacklegged or deer ticks. (Adult ticks favor deer as hosts.) Lyme refers to the town in Connecticut where in the mid-1970s a cluster of patients in Lyme and nearby rural areas manifested unusual symptoms, including fever, chills, rashes, arthritic joints, severe fatigue, and headaches. The cause of these ailments was a mystery, one that compelled a pair of determined women from the patient pool to further investigate on their own, contacting scientists, self-advocating, and pushing the boundaries of medical science. I suppose their efforts turned these women into "edgemen," Victor Turner's word for the folks at the margins of the mainstream. It was not until 1981 that Burgdorfer and colleagues identified the spirochete that causes Lyme.

For over eighteen months, Dumes interviewed and observed patients, doctors (both mainstream and Lyme-literate), Lyme scientists, public health workers, politicians, and patient advocates to understand the two sides of the debate about the existence of chronic Lyme disease--that is, Borrelia-caused malaise that lingers beyond the 10 to 21 days regimen of antibiotics.

Regarding the divided camps, Dumes remains firmly nonpartisan, as it is not the job of the anthropologist to determine the truth or falsity of a disease, but to analyze how social groups construct and experience their realities, whether inside or at the margins of the medical establishment. She investigates why the dominant paradigm of "evidence-based" medicine, built on randomized control trial design, has managed to intensify the disagreement around chronic Lyme disease rather than forge consensus.

As Dumes points out, evidence-based medicine is what informs clinical guidelines, and these determine insurance coverage, treatment plans, and public health advisories. So the stakes are high for patients. Evidence-based medicine, she explains, shapes ideas about the "right ways to be sick" (the medically explainable ways), with familiar symptoms corresponding to objective "signs" in the body. It also fosters ideas about the "wrong ways" to be sick (the medically unexplainable ways) that involve a symptomatology that doesn't neatly correspond to microscopic signs and can only be described "subjectively" by the patient.

Dumes says that in mainstream medical parlance, chronic Lyme disease is a "medically unexplainable illness," as opposed to "Lyme disease," which is understood to be diagnosable. If you suffer from Lyme-related "illness," your clinically ambiguous symptoms thrust you into the liminal space of medical alternatives. In the liminal zone, you are at odds with the mainstream medical authority yet determined to collect the kind of evidence that will legitimize your condition.

The sense of community among chronic Lyme patients and Lyme-literate doctors is evident in patient support groups and shared views on the causes of chronic Lyme and its effective therapies. Through interviews with patients, Dumes learned that many attribute their condition to the profusion of toxins in the environment and in their bodies. These patients believe that highly toxic environments (both external and internal) enable pathogens such as Borrelia to thrive. For them, our modern-age bodies are seen as "toxic swamps," fertile for Lyme.

The worry over toxicity derives in part from patients' concern about their reliance on pesticides to keep ticks at bay. To detox after performing the necessary evil of spraying and applying insecticide to the skin (and patients are well aware of the contradiction), many Lyme patients eat organic and use chemical-free products as much as possible. The preference for an organic lifestyle is often accompanied by the embrace of complementary and alternative therapies. These are usually alongside a regime of antibiotics (another acknowledged contradiction).

For example, Dumes describes the Rife machine, an apparatus invented in the 1930s and tested by the medical establishment for a while. The Rife machine, no longer accepted by mainstream doctors, emits a range of electromagnetic frequencies. The theory is that bacteria and viruses can be rendered inactive if targeted with the correct frequency. Beyond Lyme, some patients, I have read elsewhere, believe that the Rife machine helps to cleanse their systems of neurotoxins, reduce co-infections, and strengthen their immune systems. Since it can run a couple thousand dollars, Dumes told me that some patients have developed a sharing economy so that more may benefit. Chronic Lyme patients may also seek out a range of other often pricey holistic health products and treatments, such as BioMats, infrared saunas, and hyperbaric oxygen chambers. To some, it's all snake oil; to others, the sources of real relief. 

Looking back on the patients from Lyme, Connecticut, who in the 1970s embarked on a quest to figure out what happened to them, it is easy to imagine them in a similar situation, occupying that liminal state of neither acutely ill nor healthy. They were laid low by a disease without a name or cure, and without much will by the establishment to demystify the symptoms. After time wore on and they never fully recovered, were they considered malingerers? The evidence of a microbe, Borrelia, and its vector, the tick, transformed not only the clinical approach to a constellation of symptoms, but also the perception of the "right way to be sick." The evidence also transformed northeastern semi-rural culture, the everyday habits, thoughts, and emotions of people living at the forest edge.

The Hit Aesthetic

by Misha Lepetic

"Wonder was the grace of the country."
 ~ George W.S. Trow

At a recent cocktail party, the conversation turned to conspiracy theorists and how to engage them. I offered a strategy that has served me fairly well in the past: I like to ask my interlocutor what information they would need to be exposed to in order to change their minds about their initial suspicion. To be clear, I think of this more as a litmus test for understanding whether a person has the capacity to change their minds on a given position, rather than an opening gambit leading to further argument and persuasion. Climate change is a good example: What fact or observation might lead a person to consider that global warming is happening, and that human economic activity is responsible for it? It is actually quite surprising how often people don't really have a standard of truth by which they might independently weigh the validity of their argument. Of course, in today's ‘post-truth' world, I suspect that it is just as likely that I might be told that nothing can change a person's mind, since everything is lies and propaganda anyway.

I was pleased that another person at the party made an even better suggestion. She said that she would ask not only what would change a conspiracy theorist's mind, but from whom they would need to hear it. This vaults the act of interrogation from a context grounded purely in individualism and individuals' appeals to authority, to something distinctly more social. It also specifies the importance of not just facts, but from where those facts emanate. Because as much as we would like to believe ourselves independently reasoning beings, that we come to our conclusions through a rigorous and sacrosanct process of discernment, we are still very subject to having our opinions shaped by others. This may seem somewhat obvious, but in these times, when new ways of sensemaking are in high demand, I believe this provides an important opening. 

*

Interestingly, this cocktail chatter echoed a much more deeply elaborated mode of thinking, developed by the French theorist René Girard. If much of what drives us is desire, Girard postulated that desire was something that we learned from each other (and not to be confused with needs: consider the distinction of needing to eat, versus desiring one food over another). Desiring is therefore an intrinsically social experience. And we learned not just to desire from one another, but what to desire. We may be born free, but we don't know what to want of the world until we look around and see what others are wanting for themselves. Girard called this ‘mimetic desire'. This is desire as imitation, and as contagion. The corollary, of course, is that it doesn't really matter if we are born free or not; we only become fully human when we enter into this web of desiring what others desire, and having others learn to desire what it is we ourselves covet.

One manifestation is in that old American saying about ‘keeping up with the Joneses': a social vector that is extremely well-suited to commerce, with the proviso that money is to be made from leveraging desire most efficiently when coupled with manufactured scarcity. Consider, for example, the multi-day lines that form in anticipation of a new make of Nike's Air Jordan sneakers: it is an act of collective taste-making where the goal is to obtain exactly the same object for which everyone else in line. The same may be said of stock market bubbles (and the underlying ‘greater fool' theory of investing), neighborhood competitions around Christmas decoration, or any other phenomenon that somehow expands from something socially acceptable to irrational and perhaps even systemically dangerous.

But Girard's theory has an explanatory power that goes beyond the material aspect; it encompasses matters of opinion as well. How do I settle on knowing what I know about the world? For Girard, this is also a mimetic process. Although he did not address technology very much in his writings, here is an interesting thought experiment: what if mimetic desire, instead of being captured in the physical form of goods, could be reproduced endlessly, with little to no friction preventing its amplification? What if it were, for all intents and purposes, free? 

*

The roles that so-called ‘fake news' and social media have played in this election cycle will be discussed for years to come. In a world of bespoke filter bubbles, it is easier than ever for us to only desire the things that already resonate with our existing worldview. In addition to seeking out the opinions of politicians, journalists and commentators with whose positions we already agree (and want more of), social media has inserted a crucial (inter)mediating step: we access these professionals through the good offices of our friends, or people we would like to be our friends.

This may seem banal, but keep it in mind when looking at the numbers: by a recent, widely cited Pew Research poll, 62% of Americans get their news from social media, with 18% ‘doing so very often'. Additionally, Facebook was the most widely accessed source, with Twitter and YouTube coming up relatively distant second. Importantly, despite all the discussion around the algorithms that serve up the information that we consume on these platforms, it is our relationships with the people we trust that constitutes the ‘last mile' of service delivery by which this information reaches our eyeballs. This is further abetted by the structural incentives of the social media platforms themselves. As Mike Caulfield writes,

…conspiracy clickbait sites appeared as a reaction to a Facebook interface that resisted external linking. And this is why fake news does better on Facebook than real news. By setting up this dynamic, Facebook simultaneously set up the perfect conspiracy replication machine and incentivized the creation of a new breed of conspiracy clickbait sites.

Here we return to the notion of conspiracy. It allows us to ask what role conspiracy thinking plays within a mimetic context. Obviously, it's one thing to want the same sneakers that the cool kids on the block are sporting. It's entirely another to jump on the bandwagon of a worldview that has produced everything from Trutherism to Birtherism to PizzaGate. If one accepts mimetic desire as a motivating force for the generation, dissemination and adoption of opinion, then fake news - and social media itself, which is the agar upon which fake news feeds - is merely symptomatic. There is another aspect to Girard's theory, that of the scapegoat, that takes us further.

For Girard, the bubble factory of mimetic desire isn't just how culture is created. With too many people chasing too few goods, mates or other social signifiers, the rivalries produced over and over again by mimetic desire eventually precipitate a crisis that threatens to reduce society to a Hobbesian war of ‘all against all'. There must be a mechanism by which society can hold itself together in the face of such forces, and for Girard it was the notion of the scapegoat:

When violence is at the point of threatening the existence of the community, very frequently a bizarre psychosocial mechanism arises: communal violence is all of the sudden projected upon a single individual. Thus, people that were formerly struggling, now unite efforts against someone chosen as a scapegoat. Former enemies now become friends, as they communally participate in the execution of violence against a specified enemy.

History bears witness to a number of practices where we can see this ‘scapegoat mechanism' at work. More often than not, these practices are so culturally important that they are regularly repeated, and in fact may very well be ritually encoded. Written in 1922, JG Frazer's still-magisterial ‘The Golden Bough' devotes several chapters to its function. A single example will suffice to illustrate the unifying power of the scapegoat:

In civilised Greece the custom of the scapegoat took darker forms than the innocent rite over which the amiable and pious Plutarch presided. Whenever Marseilles, one of the busiest and most brilliant of Greek colonies, was ravaged by a plague, a man of the poorer classes used to offer himself as a scapegoat. For a whole year he was maintained at the public expense, being fed on choice and pure food. At the expiry of the year he was dressed in sacred garments, decked with holy branches, and led through the whole city, while prayers were uttered that all the evils of the people might fall on his head. He was then cast out of the city or stoned to death by the people outside of the walls.

As Frazer demonstrates, the phenomenon of the scapegoat - whether human or animal - manifests not just in Greek and Roman culture but throughout the world. It is a catalyst by which society reaches a consensus with itself that, whatever its internal differences and disagreements (the ‘rivals' of Girard's mimetic process), there is a larger, more important threat to be overcome. Obviously, there is an open line to divinity here, as the scapegoat's sacrifice to the gods creates the expectation that relief will be provided, or a pathway to salvation opened (as in the case of Jesus Christ). 

Crucially for Girard, the process only works when it is conducted unconsciously. That is, everyone must believe that the scapegoat is actually guilty of the transgressions. For example, even in the ancient Greek case cited above, the full weight of belief transforms the blameless poor man into a vehicle for gathering up all the plague within the city's walls, and, with his death outside those walls, its dissolution. Conspiracy thinking functions in a very similar fashion: applied to the recent election, Hillary Clinton has never not been guilty, and Donald Trump has never not been a fascist thug. What is lacking is a ritually encoded means by which this malevolent presence can be expunged, so that society might move on. One could contend that, for at least the former scenario, Trump could have indeed put Clinton in jail for her sins, which are of course the sins of her husband as well. But the fact that Trump blithely put this possibility out of mind almost immediately following his victory implies that Girard's requirement of belief (or at least, suspended disbelief) in the scapegoat is not fulfilled. What we then have is a fully functioning scapegoat mechanism that is nevertheless denied its consummation. 

*

There is a more important point to be made about Girard's requirement of belief. All of the above would be of passable interest as far as analytical approaches go (in fact, I'm certainly not the first person to bring this up, having been inspired by this piece in The New Inquiry). The extraordinary additional wrinkle in this story, as The New Inquiry and others have pointed out, has been Peter Thiel's role. In a nutshell, Thiel is a libertarian Silicon Valley billionaire who embodies Randian ideals to an almost caricaturish extent. He was one of the first outside investors in Facebook. More recently, he acquired notoriety as the man behind the lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker. For our purposes, however, it's more appropriate to note that he was one of René Girard's students at Stanford. 

Girard's influence on Thiel is quite clear. The notion of the scapegoat is explicit in Thiel's own writing, specifically in Zero To One, Thiel's contribution to innovation and entrepreneurship. As noted by The New Inquiry, Thiel writes:

The famous and infamous have always served as vessels for public sentiment: they're praised amid prosperity and blamed for misfortune… [It is] beneficial for the society to place the entire blame on a single person, someone everybody could agree on: a scapegoat. Who makes an effective scapegoat? Like founders, scapegoats are extreme and contradictory figures.

For Thiel, it is thanks to this Girardian process that society progresses at all. The problem is that, more often than not, it's people like him - the wealthy, the founders, the leaders - that wind up becoming scapegoats. The difference is that Thiel, thanks to his position and resources, is now actually able to intervene in this very process. This was the case with Gawker: spurred on by his personal beef, Thiel identified the site as a factory for the manufacturing of scapegoats, and bided his time until the perfect case presented itself, which he then used to destroy Gawker. 

But other Girardian mechanisms are worth keeping around. For the reasons described by Mike Caulfield above, Facebook is a streamlined machine for reproducing mimetic desires, for creating rivals in desire and therefore for fomenting social tension. The difference with a platform like Facebook is it is a thoroughly quantified domain. Suddenly, there is an opportunity to guide and channel these passions. Scapegoats will continue to be generated, but if the process can be influenced, however subtly, then we have effectively replaced the prior, ritually encoded consummation of the practice of scapegoating with one that is is micromanaged by algorithm. More importantly, at least according to Thiel's worldview, we will avoid scapegoating the ‘wrong people'. 

This theorization points to a hard truth for not just public opinion in general, but journalism in particular. Writing recently in The Guardian, Caitlin Moran struck a hopeful tone:

I think things are going to get worse for newspapers before they get better. We're living in a post-truth age and people don't seem to care, because we're drunk on the internet; and I think things will have to get a bit messier before we start wanting to have facts again. The tone of politics right now is one of shouting and trolling, and that tone has absolutely been set by social media. At some point, probably when society and the economy have got much worse than they are now, we'll reinvent the idea of having a creditable, trustworthy press.

Unfortunately, I am extremely skeptical that a return to a dignified public discourse is imminent, or even possible. If we buy not only into the Girardian scenario, but one which is moreover actively guided by those in the position to do so, then it is difficult to conceive of the kind of event or trend that will provide a turning point and return us to a prelapsarian idea of ‘truth' or ‘journalism' or even ‘media'. More broadly, as George WS Trow wrote in the New Yorker almost 40 years ago, "To a person growing up in the power of demography, it was clear that history had to do not with the powerful actions of certain men but with the processes of choice and preference." It seems sensible to assert that structures of power that can exploit these processes will maintain a steady upper hand, compared to those that seek to disrupt them. If we take Girard at his word, mimesis may well be sufficient unto itself, as it has been for a long time already.

Data Science and 2016 Presidential Elections

by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

Much has already been written about the failure of data science in predicting the outcome of the 2016 US election but it is always good to revisit cautionary tales. The overwhelming majority of the folks who work in election prediction including big names like New York Times' Upshot, Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight and Princeton Election Consortium predicted Clinton's chance of winning being more than 70 percent. This is of course not what happened and Donald Trump is the president elect. And so on the night of November 9^th people started asking if there was something wrong with Data Science itself. The Republican strategist Mike Murphy went as far as to state, "Tonight, data died." My brush with election analytics came in in late 2015 when I was looking for a new job and talked to folks in both the Republican and the Democratic Data Science teams about prospective roles but decided to pursue a different career path. However this experience forced me to think about the role of data driven decision in campaigning and politics. While data is certainly not dead, Mike Murphy observation does lay bare the fact that those interpreting the data are all too human. The overwhelming majority of the modelers and pollsters had implicit biases regarding the likelihood of a Trump victory.  One does not even have to torture the data to make it confess, one can ask the data the wrong questions to make it answer what you want to hear.

We should look towards the outcome and modeling approaches for the 2016 US presidential elections as learning experiences for data science as well as acknowledging it as a very human enterprise. In addition understand what led to selectively choosing the data and to understand why the models did not as well as they should have, it would help us to unpack some of the assumptions that go in creating these models in the first place. The first thing that comes to mind is systematic errors and sampling bias which was one of the factors that results in incorrect predictions, a lesson that pollsters should have learned after the Dewey vs. Truman fiasco. That said, there were indeed some discussions about the unreliability of the pollster data run up to the election. Although the dissenting voice rarely made it to the mainstream data. Obtaining representative samples of the population can be extremely hard.

It is notoriously difficult to predict which registered voters are going to actually vote in the elections. Fewer registered Democrats actually went to the polls to vote for Hillary Clinton than they had voted for their Democratic nominee in the last few elections. It is already well known that Hillary would have comfortably won had that not been the case. The opposite is also true, many people who are on the alt-right who normally do not engage with the electoral process voted for Donald Trump. There are many factors that determine how does one obtain a representative sample of the population. The Investors Business Daily (IBD) correctly predicted the outcome of the elections and in their own words they were able to do so because most of the other pollsters collected most of their data by calling smartphones while they polls that they conducted were representative sample even the types of phones that were used. It may be the case that IBD may have gotten lucky because even their approach, as far as we know, does not take into account voter apathy.

The real story about Data Science and the elections may be that even in the age of Big Data we have preciously little data to make robust predictions about the electorate even though we may pretend that that is not the case. Just because a simple model predicted that Trump would win the presidency doesn’t mean the model is correct, there are just too few data points to make predictions with reasonable confidence. Many folks in the data science community observed that the Republicans were far behind the Democrats in terms of building a strong data science and may lose the elections because of this reason. Of course they were dead wrong about this. Cambridge Analytica is the British analytics company that led the Data Science efforts at the Trump campaign. It is now being touted by many outlets as the engine behind Trump’s success after the fact, while others have decried that most of it is just post victory myth making. One of Cambridge Analytica’s claims to fame is that they use psychographic data to make predictions about election choice. Many outsiders observe that even a sample size of a few million is not enough to generalize over a population of 350 million. The PR folks at Cambridge Analytica has played up the media fascination with the idea of data science team winning the elections What is however left in these accounts is that before the election day Cambridge Analytica put the chance of winning of its candidate to be 20 percent which they upgraded 30 percent as voting began. This does not exactly sound like predictions of winning in advance or actionable insight for strategizing. Thus, many journalists have stated that the claims of data science winning the elections are vastly exaggerations with there being no secret sauce to their data science approach.

If we are to take a critical eye to Cambridge Analytica then it is only fair that we apply the same critical eye retroactively to the previous elections and the success of Nate Silvers of the world. It may well be the case that the success of the predictions of the last elections was a fluke but there are important lessons that one can learn from flukes. One of the most insightful comments came from Pradeep Mutalik “that aggregating poll results accurately and assigning a probability estimate to the win are completely different problems.” The former is relatively straightforward while the later involves a host of assumptions that are not always clear and many a times are more art than science. Lastly there is the issues of how the populace and the media, both of which are not rocket scientists when it comes to interpreting the probability of winning or losing elections. Those with some know how of probability would be surprised to learn how many people are out there who think that a probability of 60 percent of winning implies almost certainly winning. Pradeep Mutalik of Yale has rightly pointed out that probabilistic forecasts should be done away with or if we to use them they should with margins of error disclaimers. Perhaps our predictive technology is not as good as we think. It is as good as or bad as the way targeting ads work, which is another way of saying not that well. One cannot really blame the data when the data that we select already have the conclusions that we want built into it. Alternatively we should stop worrying about the predicting the weather as much. Perhaps the outcomes don’t matter as much as we like to think, certainly Nicholas Nassim Talib thinks so.

Prelude and Exordium to the Ordination, Coronation, Inauguration, and Installation of the Grand High Singularity, Donald of Trump, Ruler of Universes Known, Unknown, Unimaginable and Phantasmagoric

by Bill Benzon

What then are we to make of the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, an event as preposterous as the title of this essay? However fervent his supporters were, and are, it appears that, come Election Day, not even Trump thought he would win. And now he’s stuck with having to govern. He’s caught the tiger by the tail and now he’s got to hold on to stay alive.

To be sure, I wasn’t at all happy voting for Hillary, for she seems to be more of the same. Obama is in many ways an admirable man and leader, but he’s also the Drone president and, though he did something about health care – Thank you, Obamacare! – he also seems to be out of the Clintonist triangulation Wall Street school of governance. Of course, Hillary is also a Clintonist, and even more of a hawk than Obama.

No, Hillary did not fill me with joy. I felt the Bern.

But Donald Trump? I cannot comprehend. Hence the term “singularity” in that preposterous title. The term is best known in the context of computing and artificial intelligence, where The Technological Singularity is when the machines become self-aware, bootstrap themselves into Superintelligence, and take over the joint, lock stock and barrel o’ monkeys. I think that’s nonsense, but the machines surely have been busy.

For one thing, they’ve been automating people out of jobs – hence much of the anger Trump has been able to capture and convert through promises of jobs he’ll have trouble delivering in the long-term, though perhaps he can pull off an employment spike with infrastructure maintenance, repair, and even new construction. If so, more power to him. But when that’s over, what does he do with the ensuring despair and anger? Scapegoat us into more war?

And then we have those Russian hackers interfering with the election. More tech. Did Trump put them up to it, or one of his minions, or was it entirely a Kremlin play? Does it matter? I suppose it does, but at what level, policy, strategy, or tactics (to invoke von Clausewitz)? It’s high tech, just like those Obama drones are high tech – Obamacare too, and factory automation, not to mention high frequency trading, Siri, and every damn thing else. Of course we’re angry that the Russkies would meddle in our internal affairs, as well we should be. It's terrible. But we’ve been meddling in the affairs of other countries for decades, using high tech low tech lethal tech, whatever it takes to topple another government tech. We don’t deserve the moral high ground here.

So much for technology. Yes, it’s in play. But so is global climate change. That’s all out there, in the world as it were.

The singularity I’m thinking about is different. It’s in our conception of ourselves and the state. Our basic modes of apprehension and action. Will the rule of Donald Trump lead us to reconfigure the body politic? That too would be a singularity, a point after which everything is changed.

Boundaries, Public and Private: The Crown

The one thought I’ve got on this whole wretched business is this: boundaries. And that brings me to the new Netflix series, The Crown. It’s about Queen Elizabeth II of England. It started streaming recently, perhaps no earlier than the beginning of November, and I began watching it a couple days before the election. It struck me that this timing was likely no coincidence, a TV show about a woman becoming the British monarch even as a woman was about to become President of the United States. But, Hillary lost, didn't she?

But there's a deeper coincidence, a matter of thematic counterpoint. One of the major themes of The Crown, perhaps THE major theme, is the conflict between personal life and public duty, with Elizabeth opting for public duty. In contrast, the Presidential election seems to have been dominated by confusion between private life and public life.

Let’s start with The Crown. Elizabeth’s father, King George VI, became king when his brother, Edward VIII, was forced to abdicate. Why? Because he decided to marry Wallis Simpson, an twice-divorced American socialite and, of course, a commoner. That is, it is because her uncle chose to put his private happiness above his public duty, that Elizabeth was in a position to become monarch. This much of the story is told in flashback, but Edward, now merely the Duke of Windsor, figures prominently in the early episodes and he returns in the final episode of the season.

In the second episode we see two examples. Elizabeth’s husband, Philip, has two demands: 1) the family keep his name, Mountbatten, and 2) that they remain in Clarence House, one of the royal residences, which they’ve just renovated, rather than moving to Buckingham Palace, which is not particularly homey. Elizabeth is find with this but the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, is against, as is her uncle Edward (the one who abdicated). Duty wins out in both cases. In the fifth episode Elizabeth gets crowned. Philip requests that he not have to kneel before the new sovereign during the ceremony. Elizabeth refuses.

And so on. There are other incidents throughout the ten episodes and each is surrounded by conversation. But always, personal feeling and public duty are put at odds, coming to a wrenching climax at the end of the season, where Elizabeth invokes duty to thwart her sister’s desire to marry a divorced man.

In the 2016 presidential election perhaps the most obvious collision between public and private was depicted in the video tape where Trump brags about his sexual harassment; and that was just one in a number of incidents of sexual harassment. There is nothing new in the wayward sexual behavior of powerful men, but in previous decades the press didn’t report it, not for Roosevelt, or Eisenhower, nor John Kennedy. That changed with Bill Clinton and the Lewinsky scandal in his second term. Just why the change, I don’t really know. But it has happened.

Other issues were about public-private confusion as well. Continuing with Trump, there’s his apparent tax avoidance, which may well have been legal, but was presented as a failure of civic duty, his use of his foundation, and other issues. And there’s his relationship to his vast business interests, a matter that is far from resolved. On the Clinton side, there’s the use of a private email server for conducting public business and there’s the Clinton Foundation: did they trade political favors for donations to the foundation?

What, if anything, should we make of this? I don’t quite know. What I’m suggesting, though, is that there is some kind of inverse ‘resonance’ between the appearance of The Crown at this time and the current atmosphere surrounding presidential politics in the United States. This issue has become salient in the culture and shows up in both the Netflix drama and the Presidential Election. Has Trump been elected despite his narcissistic confusion between the public and private or almost because of it? His lack of a coherent political doctrine is, in effect, the absence of a public political personal. This strikes me as being fundamental, for it is a matter of the basic categories through which we structure our lives.

Trump rejected GOP doctrine to get the nomination. In rejecting Hillary Clinton, the voters rejected Democratic doctrine. The net result, then, is the rejection existing political doctrine, Republican as well as Democratic, in favor of Brand Trump. Trump stands, not for a body of ideas, much less a body of conservative ideas, but for himself.

The Trump Singularity?

When I look back over the history I’ve lived through, the only political event that seems comparable to Trump’s election is the collapse of the Soviet Union. The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 was a shock, as was the verdict in Bush v. Gore in 2000, when the Supreme Court handed the Presidential Election to George W. Bush. But the collapse of the Soviet Union was something else.

I’d been raised during the height of the Cold War. I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. And I remember reading articles about bomb shelters, how and where to construct them, what supplies to stock them with, and how likely they will protect you against an atomic attack. I’d even identified a spot in the back yard where I figured that our family bomb shelter ought to go, though I don’t remember ever discussing this with my parents so perhaps my thoughts on that partook more deeply of fantasy than reality.

On a slightly different note, I remember the day in the fall of 1957 when my father took me out into the back yard in the evening, pointed to a light in the sky and said, “that’s Sputnik.” Just how, back then, I weighed the fact that it was the Russians (who did it) against the fact that it was humans (who did it), I don’t recall. But surely my father wanted me to experience the wonder rather than the politics. As for whether or not that tiny tiny light was actually Sputnik, probably not. In this context the point is simple: the Russians.

The Berlin Wall – the fabled Berlin Wall, Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner”, the line between East and West – came down in 1989. The Soviet Union was dissolved in late 1991. It was over, the Cold War had ended. There was a lot of talk about swords-into-ploughshares, talk about “the peace dividend”, and even the end of history – none of which I found persuasive. The Cold War was over, but it’s not as though sites for conflict had disappeared. On the contrary, they were all over the place.

It’s not, mind you, that I had ‘predicted’ 9/11 and the aftermath. Nothing like it. Rather, I simply did not believe that the Cold War international dynamics. The ‘top layer’, if you will, had been removed, but much remained. And what remained is what we are now living with. A large and powerful nation-state, the USSR, disappeared. Yet what remained was still an international order dominated by nation states.

Is the ascendency of Donald Trump to the leadership of the ‘free world’ an event of that magnitude? We have no way of knowing, not at this point. But I do think that is the scale at which we have to think.

If so, just what has happened? Will Trump reign for two terms, or only one? Will he be impeached? And what happens after Trump? That’s the question.

If, as I argued in the previous section, Trump represents the triumph of the personal over the political, it represents the unraveling of the skein of basic ideas that has governed our public life since the 18th century. Will the American political system return to business or usual or not?  Will Trump usher in an era of crony capitalism in the United States that will cascade throughout the world so that transnational corporations will play the role of feudal lords and come to dominate a world of impoverished nation-states and their citizen peasants? Will we collapse into neo-Feudalism, as my friend and colleague Abbe Mowshowitz has argued?

If not that, then what?  Will we have the imagination and courage needed to create new social forms out of the wreckage of the current world order? Will we have the time?

Are American Professors More Responsive to Requests Made by White Male Students?

by Jalees Rehman

Less than one fifth of PhD students in the United States will be able to pursue tenure track academic faculty careers once they graduate from their program. Reduced federal funding for research and dwindling support from the institutions for their tenure-track faculty are some of the major reasons for why there is such an imbalance between the large numbers of PhD graduates and the limited availability of academic positions. Upon completing the program, PhD graduates have to consider non-academic job opportunities such as in the industry, government agencies and non-profit foundations but not every doctoral program is equally well-suited to prepare their graduates for such alternate careers. It is therefore essential for prospective students to carefully assess the doctoral program they want to enroll in and the primary mentor they would work with. The best approach is to proactively contact prospective mentors, meet with them and learn about the research opportunities in their group but also discuss how completing the doctoral program would prepare them for their future careers.

The vast majority of professors will gladly meet a prospective graduate student and discuss research opportunities as well as long-term career options, especially if the student requesting the meeting clarifies the goal of the meeting. However, there are cases when students wait in vain for a response. Is it because their email never reached the professor because it got lost in the internet ether or a spam folder? Was the professor simply too busy to respond? A research study headed by Katherine Milkman from the University of Pennsylvania suggests that the lack of response from the professor may in part be influenced by the perceived race or gender of the student.

Milkman and her colleagues conducted a field experiment in which 6,548 professors at the leading US academic institutions (covering 89 disciplines) were contacted via email to meet with a prospective graduate student. Here is the text of the email that was sent to each professor.

Subject Line: Prospective Doctoral Student (On Campus Next

Monday)

Dear Professor [surname of professor inserted here],

I am writing you because I am a prospective doctoral student with considerable interest in your research. My plan is to apply to doctoral programs this coming Fall, and I am eager to learn as much as I can about research opportunities in the meantime.

I will be on campus next Monday, and although I know it is short notice, I was wondering if you might have 10 minutes when you would be willing to meet with me to briefly talk about your work and any possible opportunities for me to get involved in your research. Any time that would be convenient for you would be fine with me, as meeting with you is my first priority during this campus visit.

 Thank you in advance for your consideration.

Sincerely,

[Student's full name inserted here]

As a professor who frequently receives emails from people who want to work in my laboratory, I feel that the email used in the research study was extremely well-crafted. The student only wants a brief meeting to explore potential opportunities without trying to extract any specific commitment from the professor. The email clearly states the long-term goal - applying to doctoral programs. The tone is also very polite and the student expresses willingness of the prospective student to a to the professor's schedule. Each email was also personally addressed with the name of the contacted faculty member.

Milkman's research team then assessed whether the willingness of the professors to respond depended on the gender or ethnicity of the prospective student.  Since this was an experiment, the emails and student names were all fictional but the researchers generated names which most readers would clearly associate with a specific gender and ethnicity.

Here is a list of the names they used:

White male names:  Brad Anderson, Steven Smith

White female names:  Meredith Roberts, Claire Smith

Black male names: Lamar Washington, Terell Jones

Black female names: Keisha Thomas, Latoya Brown

Hispanic male names: Carlos Lopez, Juan Gonzalez

Hispanic female names: Gabriella Rodriguez, Juanita Martinez

Indian male names: Raj Singh, Deepak Patel

Indian female names: Sonali Desai, Indira Shah

Chinese Male names; Chang Huang, Dong Lin

Chinese female names: Mei Chen, Ling Wong

The researchers assessed whether the professors responded (either by agreeing to meet or providing a reason for why they could not meet) at all or whether they simply ignored the email and whether the rate of response depended on the ethnicity/gender of the student.

The overall response rate of the professors ranged from about 60% to 80%, depending on the research discipline as well as the perceived ethnicity and gender of the prospective student. When the emails were signed with names suggesting a white male background of the student, professors were far less likely to ignore the email when compared to those signed with female names or names indicating an ethnic minority background. Professors in the business sciences showed the strongest discrimination in their response rates. They ignored only 18% of emails when it appeared that they had been written by a white male and ignored 38% of the emails if they were signed with names indicating a female gender or ethnic minority background. Professors in the education disciplines ignored 21% of emails with white male names versus 35% with female or minority names. The discrimination gaps in the health sciences (33% vs 43%) and life sciences (32% vs 39%) were smaller but still significant, whereas there was no statistical difference in the humanities professor response rates. Doctoral programs in the fine arts were an interesting exception where emails from apparent white male students were more likely to be ignored (26%) than those of female or minority candidates (only 10%).

The discrimination primarily occurred at the initial response stage. When professors did respond, there was no difference in terms of whether they were able to make time for the student. The researchers also noted that responsiveness discrimination in any discipline was not restricted to one gender or ethnicity. In business doctoral programs, for example, professors were most likely to ignore emails with black female names and Indian male names. Significant discrimination against white female names (when compared to white males names) predicted an increase in discrimination against other ethnic minorities. Surprisingly, the researchers found that having higher representation of female and minority faculty at an institution did not necessarily improve the responsiveness towards requests from potential female or minority students.

This carefully designed study with a large sample size of over 6,500 professors reveals the prevalence of bias against women and ethnic minorities at the top US institutions. This bias may be so entrenched and subconscious that it cannot be remedied by simply increasing the percentage of female or ethnic minority professors in academia. Instead, it is important that professors understand that they may be victims of these biases even if they do not know it. Something as simple as deleting an email from a prospective student because we think that we are too busy to respond may be indicative of an insidious gender or racial bias that we need to understand and confront. Increased awareness and introspection as well targeted measures by institutions are the important first steps to ensure that students receive the guidance and mentorship they need, independent of their gender or ethnic background.

Reference:

Milkman KL, Akinola M, Chugh D. (2015). What Happens Before? A Field Experiment Exploring How Pay and Representation Differentially Shape Bias on the Pathway Into Organizations. Journal of Applied Psychology, 100(6), 1678–1712.

President Trump: The Unknown Unknowns

by Omar Ali

Trump has been elected President. Having participated in a week-long social media freakout to deal with this shock (a fact I did not recognize about myself until a couple of days ago), I have some thoughts and I would like to put them out so that I can be enlightened by feedback. It is the only way to learn.

Very qualified people have written some good pieces already about the why and the how. I am posting links to them below, along with some random thoughts about the articles. They are not the whole story (what is?) but I think all these articles are must reads. My own comments are more like invitations to tell me off, or tell me more...

After these links and comments, I sum up my own thoughts and end with some questions.

You are still crying wolf, from Slate Star Codex. (I don't think Trump is particularly racist or sexist (relative to most 70 year old males, of any ethnicity) and he is obviously socially liberal compared to traditional Republicans. But the possibility is there that this shallow man (more or less socially liberal, a conman, ignorant) will be manipulated by his newfound advisers into disasters (initially abroad) that could have endless branching and mutating unintended consequences here and abroad. That could be a truly transformative crisis... Racism and the rise of the KKK (real and imagined) are small potatoes compared to the storms that could potentially be unleashed in the world... Muslims, being intimately connected to the worldwide crisis in very direct ways, will likely face the consequences within the USA too; but the crucial point is that the whole shitstorm is likely to proceed along tracks that are occasionally parallel, but mostly completely unconnected with the identitarian postmarxist postmodern worldview that dominates the elite Eurocentric Left today... Incidentally, if the ordure does hit the fan (I hope it does not, i hope the much-maligned current world order survives or at least, has a soft landing), then Blacks and Latinos, like other citizens, will fight for America. I suspect that the fantasy worldview that emphasizes supranational and subnational identities well above national ones will prove very flimsy; flimsier even than "class solidarity" proved to be in the first world war...the elite Left's freakout about the KKK and the coming age of Jim Crow is not completely wrong, but misses the biggest threats and their likely consequences. Which is not to say that no connection can be made between racism and the international order, but the race-obsessed post-truth glasses of the new postmarxist Left do get them into endless wrong turns and dead-ends in terms of priorities to be tackled.

I personally think Muslims are pretty much the only group who are actually likely to face government actions that will target entire groups for the real or imaginary behavior of some of them. And the mainstream Democratic party, the ACLU, Americans who believe in the  constitution and the rule of law, and fair-minded Republicans will all be needed by them in order to help protect them against excesses. In terms of race, minorities will likely face law-enforcement excesses (as they do today, but these could increase). Occasional public confrontations (some very nasty), as well as indirect effects, arguable effects and fake effects are all possible, but they are not the main plan, or the main threat.

Meanwhile, there is also a mainstream Republican majority that has many longstanding Republican projects ready to go (tax cuts for the rich, supreme court appointments, Medicare privatization, benefit cutbacks, more prisons and prosecutors, renewed marijuana enforcement?) that will be painful for poor people and excessively nice to rich people. But world changing crises, if any, are more likely to start abroad)

The End of Identity Liberalism. NYT (Mark Lilla) (the "prediction" tone of the headline is misleading. It is not going to end. It may not be in power in the federal or state governments, but this meme-complex is fully entrenched in universities and among liberal intellectuals and they will only double down now that Trump has won. EVERYONE is doubling down on their favorite agenda, these people will double down on theirs. And because fear is such a powerful motivator, they will get even more traction in their own constituency. In war, lines harden, people have to tribalize. We will have to line up with all the liberals talking about the "pefrormativity of Whiteness" and suchlike because they will be OUR tribe. We will have no choice. War has it's rules.

Stephen Bannon Speaks (this is my own blog post, which has links to two long pieces about Stephen Bannon; he describes himself as wishing to be the Thomas Cromwell of the age. Leaving aside the minor detail that Thomas Cromwell was beheaded by the King he served, I see where he is coming from; Cromwell’s historic achievements were real and lasting. My impression (and I am not a historian, so I look forward to being corrected) is that he smashed and grabbed all the monasteries and materially ended the domination of the Catholic church in England. He improved the administration, promoted the Protestant reformation in England and left England a stronger kingdom than it was when he became its dominant minister… before he was finally beheaded by his beheading-friendly king. Not being a supporter of Trump, I hope Bannon is not 10% as successful or as talented as Cromwell was)

Trump Country, and Trump Supporters (from Mother Jones) (the usual supporters of the modern Republican party: richer people, evangelicals, small business owners, all voted for Trump more or less as usual, this is about the new supporters he mobilized and the old supporters he mobilized for his candidacy versus traditional Republicans. It is well worth reading, a great work of ethnography.. though no attempt is made at drawing any deeper lessons. Since it was published in Mother Jones, the deeper lessons may be left-leaning for most readers, but I can also see people drawing the lessons Bannon is preaching (TBF, some of them are left wing too)..I suspect both (mainstream Left AND Bannonism) are likely to be wrong.  So we are still waiting for the pieces about what to do next. No one intelligent seems to think that Trump can fix their problem, so what happens next? Some people will say that there is no solution for a lot of these people...a callous way of putting it would be that they will die of poor health, drug abuse and violent crime, kept away from gated communities by armed guards and drones. But who will live in those communities and under what code of life will they live? Will most of humanity find a new and relatively comfortable equilibrium?  a better equilibrium? Or maybe there is no deeper pattern. One foot in front of the other...)

The Right Way to Resist Trump. NYT. Luigi Zingales. (This article is good, but it seems unlikely that the Democrats will be able to stay off super-elite liberal issues and freakouts. Trump's own mistakes, infighting within his team, and the iron hand of the market (aka economics, a voodoo science about which nobody knows much) may ruin his administration so much that he will lose to whatever choice the Dems make next time, but I do have my doubts about the Democrats switching to some new "on-message" message that people like this columnist would approve of... During the campaign we heard about how Trump is easily manipulated into biting at every story that he should just leave well alone...well, that applies to the Democrats in spades. And Trump seems to know this and he will relentlessly use this fact to create fake controversies about some Broadway musical or some bathroom labeling issue, where the entire liberal media will be against him and the Nixonian silent majority will think "those liberal elites really ARE idiots" and so on....it will be a horrible four years (I still hope, not 8)

To sum up, I think we had a close election; one that the Democrats could have won, in spite of all of Trump's newly mobilized voters because he also had such huge negatives. But as it is, they did not win. Relatively contingent events probably played a part in their loss (Comey), but that should not obscure the fact that something huge has happened on the Republican side. A trash-talking socially liberal outsider, with a reputation as a conman (or at a minimum, a shady businessman, which is pretty much the same thing) took over the Republican party in the face of near-total establishment disapproval and then generated enough excitement in his core constituency (disaffected White people, rich and poor)  to win a US general election. And he did this in spite of being rejected by almost every traditional newspaper and media outlet in the country (even at Fox, some hosts were ambivalent). And he did so with an unconventional campaign that relied on voter excitement and (frequently negative) media coverage rather than on the kind of professional political operation that has characterized all recent American presidential campaigns. This is an event worth paying attention to.

But having taken him seriously, we still have what his own chief strategist calls "a perfect vessel", waiting to be filled. But with what? Partisan commentary almost necessarily has to try and freak-out their support base for or against the incoming administration, and may be grossly exaggerated. But there are some grounds for thinking it may not be business as usual. My preference is clearly for business as usual (because I tend towards the belief that change will happen anyway, but it is better if it happens slowly and imperceptibly; of course, this is not how providence sometimes operates, so real life can and does deviate from my personal desires) so I personally will be relatively at ease if Trump turns out to be mostly talk; relying on distractions and culture wars to keep his constituency from noticing that nothing has changed for the better in their life, in short, just another modestly corrupt Republican administration; consistent in serving the short-term interests of the "top 1%" , willing to damage the long term interests of America (and the world at large) if it means more profits in the short term, and more than likely, losing the next election. Hopefully without terminally tarnishing the dignity and gravitas of the office of President.

 It may turn out this way. Which will be unpleasant, but life will go on until the next election and then perhaps the next (modestly corrupt) Democratic administration. Such is the best case scenario. And I hope this less than exciting outcome does come to be.

But suppose it is not business as usual? Then I am looking for insights about two scenarios:

1. World War Z. The big changes will start abroad in this scenario, and most will probably be unintended. We will soon have a National security adviser who thinks that war against Islamism (or as he prefers to call it, Islam) is the defining feature of the world today. Without getting into any long discussion of whether this is true or not, look at it this way: there is no competing Islamic civilization out there in terms of unity, material progress or military strength. Even if we imagine (as Islamists sometimes do) that superior fellow-feeling and social organization (a patriarchal but otherwise egalitarian religion, resistant to culture-destroying postmodern memes; their view, not mine) means that they win in the long term, even Islamists recognize that in the short or medium term this "victory" involves getting invaded by competing infidel powers with better artillery and missiles. 

So let us imagine Flynn has his way. What would such a war look like? His views are frequently incoherent and it is by no means clear where they will end up. e.g. he seems to regard IRAN (not Pakistan, Turkey or Saudi Arabia, the big three Sunni hopes) as the main threat and regards Russia as both threat and ally. There is just no rational way to predict what happens next based on these reported views... The US would presumably want to smash any and all Islamic counties that don't cooperate, but isn't it then a given that China, Russia and the US would also compete against each other in this new "scramble for Africa" (the Muslim world being only one order of magnitude more capable than Africa, while the big three are several orders of magnitude more materially capable than any Muslim country)?  Who will line up on what side? Will it be mostly covert, low intensity warfare or will things spin out of control (the "scramble for Africa" being followed by World War One)? What about India? Japan? Latin America? The Baltics? Poland? Ukraine? This is a very complex system. Start a disturbance at a few critical points and the transitions can become totally unpredictable.

Think about it this way and it is easy to reach the comforting conclusion that this scenario is so nightmarish that "saner heads will prevail". The current international order will survive. I certainly hope so, but then again, that is probably what many sane people thought in 1913. I look forward to your thoughts.

2. From Dawn to Decadence...to collapse?

The amazing rise of Western civilization and its steadily increasing dominance of the globe in the last 500 years have given it an aura of inevitability and permanence. Not in terms of particular nationalities (particular powers rise and fall), but in terms of intellectual paradigms and visions of reality. But alongside this dominance are well established currents of doubt, pessimism and rejection, from Ivan Illych to Dugin (and even, in a way, Bannon). I am not including the currently fashionable postmarxist postmodern current in Western universities, with its rejection of tradition, authority and "dead White males" and its glorification of identity politics and not so critical "critical studies". This current seems just the next (last?) stage within the Western tradition itself; more a sign of its bankruptcy than the vision of an alternative (simply put, because it's major themes seem to have such tangential,incidental, and minimal, contact with actual biology, history, culture or science). Anyway, without getting too far into this potentially book-length debate , suppose this really is terminal decadence, then what comes next?

The unknown unknowns get really interesting at that point.

I, of course, have no good idea about what comes next. But who does? I await your suggestions about reading material 😊

Meanwhile, a few random videos that have little or no connection with one election and one president.. (the first one in particular does not imply complete agreement with his detailed views; mostly I posted it for his questions 😊 )

 

 

 

 

 

We Elect Soundbites

by Saurabh Jha

In 2004, India’s Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP), the incumbents, lost the election to the Congress party. Their loss was a surprise. Though polling is not an exact science, least of all in the sub-continent, what made the loss even more surprising was the election slogan used by the BJP - “India Shining.” India seemed to be shining. There was an economic boom, particularly in cities like Hyderabad and Bangalore. The Indian cricket team almost beat Australia in Australia, and had just beaten Pakistan in Pakistan. The Indian cricket team usually got walloped by these countries. The successes on the cricket pitch were extrapolated to the happiness of the proletariat.   

I was in Hyderabad, Telangana, at the time. The youth had optimism and spoke about making crores (10 million rupees), not just lakhs (100 thousand rupees). Satyam, a computer giant, was building, literally, a computer village in Hyderabad. Though the skies were polluted in Hyderabad, everywhere you went there was beer, biryani, and belief. It was a good time to be in Hyderabad.

I visited a village less than 100 kilometers from Hyderabad, in the Ranga Reddy District, partly to fulfil my desire for “poverty porn.”  The sky there, though less polluted than Hyderabad, seemed darker. Suicide of farmers, because they couldn’t pay their loans, was particularly high in that village.  It was the sort of place where people still died from snakebites. The villagers couldn’t give a crap about India’s success in cricket – such joys are a bourgeoisie indulgence. For them, India wasn’t shining and it annoyed them to hear that India was shining, India was the same old, same old. Over two thirds of Indians live in villages. It is the villagers who decide who governs the nation. By rejecting the soundbite, “India Shining,” the villagers rejected the BJP.

In the 2008 elections, Americans gyrated to “Hope and Change.” I never understood what exactly was hoped for, and what one should change to. I’m still unclear. I presume “change” meant “be less capitalistic” and “hope” was a promised utopia where we’d all be our brother’s keeper – although if everyone was going to be kept who would do the keeping?

Shortly after Obama beat McCain, I was in Danville, a small town in Pennsylvania. It is said that Pennsylvania is Alabama between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Danville is Alabama central. Things are different in Danville from Philadelphia, where I live. You know you’re entering Philadelphia when you see billboards of mustachioed plaintiff attorneys. In Danville, the billboards advertise guns, not lawyers. Whilst Philadelphians swooned to Obama’s “Hope and Change” melody, there seemed little evidence of swooning in Danville.  I admit I didn’t survey everyone in Danville, but the barman who served me a drink pithily said something I’ll never forget. I asked him if he was happy with Obama’s victory. He replied, “What fucking hope? What fucking change?” I suspect his questions were rhetorical.

For many of my colleagues - Ivy-league-educated doctors, who drive Priuses and Teslas, who know which red wine to pair with steak, who meditate to Bikram Yoga, and eat non-American cuisine, usually sushi, at least once a week - that someone voted for Donald Trump, not Hillary Clinton, strains their credulity. “I don’t get it”, they say. But such intellectual savants miss a point. People, including they, don’t vote for the greater good; people vote for soundbites. In this election, Trump had the catchier soundbite. Trump’s soundbite, “Let’s make America great again,” is genius in its simplicity. It captured America’s great past, instilling pride and nostalgia. It emphasized the dismal present, or at least convinced you that the present is dismal. And promised a bright future. It’s all of history in a single Tweet. “Let’s make America great again” is the heir apparent to “Hope and Change.”

A friend, who supports Trump, challenged me to name a specific policy of Hillary Clinton’s that would arouse the masses. I thought carefully and said, “minimum wage.” “LGBT rights.” Reproductive justice.” He was nonplussed. I then imagined how the barman in Danville would have reacted if I came in shouting “minimum wage, reproductive justice, hope and change.” The best soundbite Mrs. Clinton had at her disposal was “Never Trump,” which seemed to have spectacularly backfired.

If Mrs. Clinton had mastered the science of policy making, Mr. Trump owned the rhetoric of democracy. And rhetoric gives science a run for its money. Democracy has always been about soundbites. “India Shining” failed not because it was a soundbite, but the wrong soundbite. In 1971, Indira Gandhi romped to victory by using a clever slogan, “Garibi mitao”, which means “remove poverty”.  Mrs. Gandhi never explained how she would remove poverty. Nor has Mr. Trump explained how he will make America great again – he doesn’t need to. Soundbites have an inherent appeal in a democracy – they’re a heuristic of sorts.

But soundbites aren’t just expedient, but necessary. It’s unlikely that many voters, even those with a PhD in economics, calculate an expected value of the benefits and harms of presidential candidates before voting. And even if they did, it would be a forlorn endeavor because of Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. The theorem, devised by an economist, Kenneth Arrow, says that it is not possible for choices of individuals, which vary, about competing public policies to be retained by the group. This means that when different people prefer different things to different extents, and you add their preference to derive a preference for the group, the result is that everyone is unhappy. This sounds like common sense – you can’t please everyone about everything all the time – but Kenneth Arrow got a Nobel Prize for this intuition.

The only way to achieve unanimity in governance is a dictatorship. The alternative is a soundbite. A soundbite is a crafty dictator. Rather than forcing you to obey, the soundbite coaxes you into suspending cerebral activity. Better a soundbite than a dictator. I hope.

Spying Jokes in the DDR: Cold War Humor and Political Resistance

by Jalees Rehman

Political jokes were no laughing matter for the East German state security service., The Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS, more commonly known as the "Stasi") viewed humorous quips about the political leadership as a form of political resistance during the Cold War years. The culture of repression enforced by the Stasi in the DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik, the official name of East Germany) outlawed anti-government propaganda and sedition, and these anti-sedition laws enabled the Stasi to arrest citizens who shared political jokes.

Just a few months after the Berlin Wall was constructed, the Stasi arrested a 32-year old building painter at his workplace in the town of Sassnitz, hand-cuffed him and drove him to an undisclosed location. The Stasi agents provided no explanation for his arrest until late at night when he was lay down on a plank bed in a prison cell, trying to make sense of what crime he had committed. Exhausted and befuddled, he was just about to fall asleep when Stasi prison guards dragged him out of his cell into an interrogation room and informed him that he had been arrested for sedition. A Stasi interrogator wanted to know exactly what his opinions were about the party leadership, the relationship between the DDR and the Soviet Union and which Western radio channels he listened to. The painter provided all the details in a reasonably honest manner, without hiding his critical views.

The interrogator then asked him to write down every political joke he had ever heard or shared. He knew of nine jokes that he had told and wrote them all out for the Stasi. Here is one of the nine jokes:

Three DDR citizens are sitting in a prison cell and talking about why they have been arrested. The first says, "My watch always went ahead, and I would arrive too early to work so they said I was spying." The second says, "My watch was always behind, I always came too late so they said I was engaged in sabotage. The third said, "My watch always worked perfectly, I always arrived on time, so they said my watch must have come from the West."

After spending several months in Stasi custody where he underwent repeated interrogations, he was sentenced to three years in prison for engaging in anti-government propaganda and sedition by a penal court. The summary report by his Stasi interrogators was a central piece of evidence in the mock trial and it specifically listed the political jokes as well as the names of fellow citizens who heard him tell the jokes.

The journalist Bodo Müller describes the fate of this painter in his recent book "Lachen gegen die Ohnmacht: DDR-Witze im Visier der Stasi" (Laughter as medicine against impotence: DDR jokes in the crosshairs of the Stasi) as an example of how seriously the Stasi approached the matter of political jokes, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. Müller was a DDR journalist who had been arrested and imprisoned by the state authorities after a failed attempt to escape in 1985. After the reunification, he was granted access to the secret files the Stasi has kept on him. Müller found out that the Stasi had kept a file on him since the 1970s, long before his attempted escape. He had been flagged because he collected and told jokes mocking the DDR leadership since his teenage years. When perusing the Stasi files about his activities, he learned that secret Stasi informants among his acquaintances had provided detailed information about the exact dates of when he had begun telling jokes, details that Müller himself had long forgotten. In fact, Müller had written down several hundred jokes about the DDR government and hidden those notes in the wall behind his kitchen sink. Fortunately for him, the Stasi never found his joke stash despite conducting secret searches of his apartment to find signs of conspiratorial activity.

Reading his Stasi file inspired Müller to scour 40,000 pages of now declassified Stasi files to understand the depth of the Stasi involvement in monitoring and persecuting jokesters. It appears that the DDR authorities aggressively pursued joke-tellers in the 1950s and 1960s but had relented somewhat by the 1980s. Perhaps they had realized that some degree of political humor allowed the DDR citizenry to blow off steam without engaging in activities that might pose an even greater threat to the regime. Or perhaps political jokes had become so widespread that containing humor by arresting perpetrators would have been futile.

How did the West German authorities view political joke-telling in the DDR? The West German intelligence agency BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst, now the primary foreign intelligence agency of the reunified Germany) recently declassified documents which revealed that one of their divisions monitored political humor in the DDR as a barometer of resistance in the DDR. The historian Hans-Hermann Hertle and the journalist Hans-Wilhelm Saure reviewed the declassified BND materials in their recent book Ausgelacht: DDR-Witze aus den Geheimakten des BND (Mocked: DDR jokes from the secret files of the BND). The BND emphatically denied that they actively disseminated political jokes to undermine the DDR leadership but the BND did have agents in the DDR who reported on the latest comedic developments. A number of the jokes compiled by the BND remarkably overlap with those found by Müller's research in the Stasi files.

Here are some examples of the jokes told by DDR citizens documented in the BND records:

 

What is the difference between an egg and a DDR citizen? An egg can only be broken once.

 

Reagan, Gorbachev and Honecker [DDR leader from 1971-1989] are talking to God. Reagan asks when the US will experience race problems like South Africa. God responds, "In five years!" Reagan is relieved and says, "Great, I will no longer be in office at that time!" Gorbachev asks God when the Soviet Union will no longer depend on wheat imports. God answers, "In 30 years!" Gorbachev is dismayed and says, "Too bad, I will no longer be in office at that time!" Honecker asks when the DDR will catch up with the West in terms of technology. God hesitates and then says, "I will no longer be in office at that time."

 

How was the legacy of Karl Marx divided? The East inherited the Manifesto, the West inherited the Capital.

 

What is a 3/8 joke? Three years prison for the listener, eight years prison for the joke-teller.

 

Why aren't there any bank robberies in the DDR? The robbers would have to wait 14 years for the escape car.

 

Why do DDR athletes always win Olympic bobsledding events? People in the DDR grow up squished between walls while racing downhill.

 

The majority of these jokes found in the BND files were collected in the late 1980s, just a few years before the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the DDR. The growing number of jokes and widespread usage may have been indicative of the shifting mood and increased political defiance among the broad DDR citizenry towards the late 1980s, especially when the authoritarian DDR regime stood our as being even more reactionary than the Soviet Union under Gorbachev.

It may be an interesting undertaking to similarly analyze political or anti-authoritarian humor in other totalitarian settings, both historically as well as in the present. Does increased telling of jokes about contemporary religious and political leaders in religious or political totalitarian systems, for example, foreshadow their downfall? Humor as an indicator and even a vehicle for bringing about political or ideological change is an exciting area of research that could yield important insights into the psychology of resistance and revolution.

Even though the BND meticulously collected political DDR jokes, it is not clear that these jokes were adequately analyzed and that they provided valuable intelligence. Instead, it appears that they represented a missed opportunity for the BND which was blindsided by the political change in the weeks leading up the resignation of Erich Honecker and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Perhaps the best – albeit unintentional- joke in the BND files is a statement made on September 26^th 1989, two weeks before the famous Leipzig mass demonstration against the DDR government and seven weeks before the opening of the Berlin Wall: The BND stated that the protestors belonged to marginalized groups who would have little political impact.

 

References

1. Müller, Bodo (2016). Lachen gegen die Ohnmacht: DDR-Witze im Visier der Stasi. Ch. Links Verlag.

2. Hertle, Hans-Hermann and Saure, Hans-Wilhelm (2015). Ausgelacht: DDR-Witze aus den Geheimakten des BND. Ch. Links Verlag.