The Federal Reserve

This is a sort of unusual topic for me, but I decided to write a little about it because Donald Trump has been attacking Jerome Powell, who is the current chairman of the Federal Reserve. As an investor, I have been following the Federal Reserve for many years. In case you don't know, the Federal Reserve was set up partially to depoliticize policy decisions regarding the financial system in the U.S. and to protect it from abuse by political operatives. I think it important to understand this, especially now, when news coverage is clearly inadequate. I'm getting very tired of PBS NewsHour.

After I graduated from college in 1972, inflation gradually rose to high levels. At that time, I also think that the U.S. economy began to restructure due to foreign manufacturing competition, particularly from Japan. The Vietnam War, which was unjustified, was also costly, and a strong inflationary trend developed. Political parties tend to kick the can down the road, such that they can blame their errors on future administrations. During this process, the Johnson, Nixon and Ford administrations oversaw inflationary pressures that lasted for several years. By the time that Jimmy Carter became president in 1977, inflation was taking off. Carter appointed Paul Volcker chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1979, and he served until 1987. During Volcker's tenure, the Federal Reserve took draconian actions in which they intentionally raised interest rates in order to reduce inflation. My first house was purchased with a 13% mortgage rate in 1980. Volcker is now considered to have been one of the best chairmen. Later on, Alan Greenspan got mixed reviews as chairman, because he mishandled the dot-com bubble in 2000 and laid the groundwork for the Great Recession, from 2007 to 2009, by deemphasizing financial regulation before he left in 2006.

In my opinion, Jerome Powell is doing a good job as chairman, as was Janet Yellen, his predecessor, and he has generally been reducing inflation and improving employment since the pandemic, his two main mandates. The situation with Trump now is so transparent that, to a knowledgeable audience, he is simply confirming to them that he is ignorant and self-centered. Trump and his advisors want to forestall an economic slowdown, with unemployment, by introducing economic stimulus through interest rate reductions, which would cause inflation. Trump's tariff program is inflationary. So far, because the Federal Reserve is specifically designed to prevent rash policy actions promoted by politicians, and because Trump can't replace him until next year, when his term ends, we still have some protections. Trump wanted to remove Powell ahead of time, but he seems to have received enough pushback to stop for now. Even so, he continues to belittle Powell publicly, not caring that Powell is obviously more competent than he is.

I still can't predict the exact timing of the collapse of the Trump administration, but it seems to me that he has created a situation from which he will never recover. At the moment, it looks as if he will not succeed in creating any benefits for low- and middle-income voters, the Republicans will lose seats in Congress, and he will generally lose his influence.

While I am still quite disappointed with how the news media has been handling the Trump phenomenon, there are now some pretty good voices out there. I particularly admire Jennifer Rubin, who currently communicates through The Contrarian. Ironically, Rubin was previously known as a conservative. What counts for me is that she has a brain that actually works and isn't a congenital money-grubber. From speaking to a couple of random Vermonters recently, I was also heartened to see that there is a simmering Trump hatred here, and probably everywhere – a positive sign indeed.

The Current Situation

Since I'm still having a lot of trouble finding something to read, I thought that I'd write a bit about the world situation, particularly the return of the chaos-inducing Donald Trump, and what this means for all of us. There is a palpable sense of despair and panic at the moment, and I'm sure that millions of people would like assurances or guidance of some sort. 

First, let me specifically describe how I see Donald Trump. I see him as a stupid person who has been obsessed for most of his life with being perceived as important. From what I observe, he seems to have no particular talent, and he lacks the intelligence and creativity to come up with anything useful for others. In every public appearance of him that I've ever seen, he presents himself as a successful executive whom others flock to for advice. But this is all made-up, and no savvy people take him seriously. As a result, he became surrounded by sycophants who were generally also stupid, and, particularly after he was coached by Roy Cohn, he became extremely hard-nosed, is accustomed to using his underlings to do his dirty work for him, and he also became comfortable lying constantly. It seems that his primary business tactic was to work with small players for services and underpay them in order to maintain a profitable business. His main skill, to this day, is the avoidance of paying full prices for services that he has commissioned. Because of his enormous inheritance from his father, it was easy for him to win court cases against people who lacked his resources. As a matter of habit, he has continued the same technique right up to the present, and because no other person as unscrupulous as he is had ever reached his political level in the U.S. before, he was able to evade jail time for obvious crimes. In historical terms, one would expect that he would be in jail now.

The other aspect of Trump's ascent is the general political entropy that has occurred in the U.S. since about 1993. When business-friendliness became popular in both parties, the power of money gradually took over politics in the U.S. This is more conspicuous today than ever with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Sundar Pichai, Tim Cook and Rupert Murdoch, among others, attending the second inauguration of Trump. This isn't a real show of support and simply reflects a calculated attempt to benefit their businesses. In private, to them Trump fits the definition of a useful idiot. To be fair though, I also have to point out that the tech billionaires have their own set of psychological deficiencies. The point really is that the U.S. was not originally intended to be the world headquarters for pathological money-grubbers, and this is the spectacle that we're witnessing now.

I'm not about to predict world history for the next one-hundred years, but it isn't that hard to see how things will end for Trump. The rule of thumb is probably "Once an idiot, always an idiot." This means that Trump isn't about to successfully create a new world order for oligarchs. The more likely scenario is that Trump will completely screw things up, because that is what he usually does. He doesn't have a coherent ideology, and, for the billionaires, this is just a temporarily convenient arrangement for them. Because Trump doesn't understand or care about the needs of others, it isn't possible for him to intentionally make a positive contribution to society. This means that it is impossible for him to have a positive legacy when he leaves office. Only he and his friends will benefit, there will be no useful policies enacted, and the U.S. federal government may be left in shambles. The people who voted for him will generally be worse-off, and he and his advisors will probably continue to be charged with crimes. The powerful people who are supporting him now have already prepared their justifications and alibis, and the world will move on. No significant new world alliances will be formed, and within four years, Trump will have permanently departed. His health seems to be poor, and he could potentially die from natural causes while still in office. People like him are not usually assassinated, but that is also a possibility.

I won't belabor my points and will just say that Trump will eventually be remembered as the stupid fat guy who screwed things up for the world for a few years. If you can just sit tight and weather this, you should be fine. There are still real questions about where new technology is taking us, whether climate change will be addressed, etc., but that has almost nothing to do with Donald Trump.

Are Private Universities Corporate Proxies?

Dating back to the 1960's, I've always had difficulty understanding campus protest. I mean that not in the sense of not understanding the concerns of the protesters, which are usually readily apparent, but in the sense of the logic of campus protest itself. My cognitive dissonance usually occurs more with private colleges and universities than with public ones. In the U.S., public universities are readily funded by state governments, and most of their students are residents of those particular states, so there is a discernible connection between the protestors and the local political process. Since this is supposed to be a democratic country, it makes more sense that protesters would express political views at a government-administered institution than at a private one. Of course, not all protests are political in nature, and I suppose that non-political protests can make sense anywhere.

The strange thing to me is that, for example, if a student at a private university disagrees with U.S. funding of the Israeli military that results in the killing and displacement of thousands of innocent Gaza civilians, there is an established process for addressing that concern: they could contact their congressional representative or senator or protest outside Congress. Their university has little or no connection to the relevant government proceedings, and its students do not necessarily have any say in university policies. Moreover, private universities are not funded by taxpayers, and the processes by which they fund themselves are not necessarily democratic. One might argue that private colleges and universities are "communities" that can build their own consensus through internal discussion or protest, but that view doesn't have legal footing: students are not true stakeholders and ultimately have no authority in how their private college or university is administered.

The situation with the Vietnam War was quite different from the Hamas-Israel War, because the U.S. itself was the aggressor. In that instance, general political objection to the war seemed reasonable. These days, college and university protests often call for the ending of purchase of stocks of the companies that are located in the country of the principal offenders. For example, colleges and universities were discouraged from buying South African stocks during apartheid and, more recently, the stocks of large oil companies that contribute to global warming. Now the protesters are calling for the divestment of Israeli stocks. While, theoretically, that can be construed as a suitable disincentive for Israel to continue the war, I don't consider that methodology appropriate for a couple of reasons. 

First, in the case of private colleges and universities, investment choices are beyond the purview of their students. The students are essentially customers. Their college or university may be around for hundreds of years, and its administrators have to figure out how to fund it well after the current students have departed. The protesting students can be seen as behaving like the customers of a traditional delicatessen who collectively march in and demand that the owners immediately change the menu to include only vegan and gluten-free items. The fact is that the customers don't own the store, and if they dislike the menu, no one is forcing them to buy food there. Also, more subtly, private colleges and universities in the U.S. are actually participating in the capitalist ecosystem of the country. In order to ensure the health of their institution, it is in their interest to produce graduates who go on to become wealthy and leave them bequests in their wills. The small colleges that didn't follow that model are dropping like flies now. I find it hard to take seriously the "values" of most private colleges and universities. Even when there are stated educational goals, their importance is purely symbolic when you consider the actual tasks required to sustain a private college or university over time. Most of them are devoted to the development of future donors purely as a matter of survival. That is why they coddle their alumni. The richer their alumni, the better.

Second, as a personal matter, I dislike the divestment argument because it trivializes the underlying conceptual framework of what is actually occurring. In this instance, I would rather hear a discussion of the errors made by Netanyahu and the long-term consequences of his behavior. The news media are missing in action as usual and aren't advocating a specific actionable plan. The protestors also seem to be sleepwalking through history and are unable to provide a coherent description of the situation. What, exactly, is the explanatory value of the word "hate"? With better journalism and more effective protest, the Gaza conflict might already have ended. Moreover, the current crisis has been brewing for decades, with the underlying problems festering for many years.

One of my corollaries here is that student protestors seem to be in denial of the fact that they and their universities inhabit a corporation-dominated world.

The Election

Since it looks as if the U.S. presidential election has been decided in favor of Joe Biden, and I've been wasting so much time following it, I thought I'd say a few things so that I can move on to other topics.

Donald Trump's fitness for office has proven to be lower than ever this year. It's hard to imagine anyone doing a poorer job handling the coronavirus pandemic, and the scale of his lies would have been unfathomable a few years ago. What stands out to me is that he has come this far, given that we can now see how stupid many of his decisions have been, even when you examine them within his framework of corrupt self-interest. He unquestionably lost votes by willfully ignoring scientific advice on the pandemic; he could simply have followed the advice of a competent medical team, and the death count would have been considerably lower. The pandemic has slowed the growth of the U.S. economy, and if it had been controlled sooner, the medium-term economic outlook would be better than it is now. It is also surprising to see how much time and effort Trump wasted on the fabrication of corrupt behavior by Hunter and Joe Biden in Ukraine. There was nothing to find there, and he risked removal from office by precipitating his impeachment. If the Republicans in the Senate weren't also corrupt, he would have been removed from office in February. At the moment, he is spouting fantasies about voter fraud, which are going nowhere. It is obvious that he is completely indifferent to the responsible transfer of power and the stability of the federal government.

Because Donald Trump himself is an inherently uninteresting topic, I find it more fruitful to think about the conditions that allowed him to be elected in the first place and gave him a good chance of winning a second term. There is more to be concerned about here, because those conditions will be in place long after Trump is gone. From my point of view, the main underlying problem is voter gullibility. Almost half of the voters in 2016 and 2020 voted for him, acts that I find fundamentally irrational. It was well known in 2016 to anyone who took the time to study his past that Trump had no experience or interest in governing and was guaranteed to engage in self-serving behavior. It was also clear that whatever policies he had were uninformed and would be used primarily for his own benefit. During his years in office, he took credit for the strength of the economy, which he didn't deserve, and alienated many foreign allies. Most dictators around the world were glad to see him in power. Those voters who supported Trump seem to occupy a different sociological group from those who voted against him.

I have a reasonable amount of experience in Republican versus Democratic thinking, because I have lived in both geographic regions. The contrast between so-called "conservatives" and "élites" has some basis in reality, though those terms hardly describe the actual complexity. In the U.S., practically everything comes down to money, and the grievances of the conservatives usually amount to thinking that they deserve more of it, meaning that they should have better jobs and lower taxes. Jobs were not always an issue for conservatives, but have become more so in recent years, with the rapidly changing economy. In my view, particularly in rural areas, many of the economic woes are the result of increased automation and competition from abroad in manufacturing, as well as the decline in extractive industries such as coal mining. The élites, or, more generally, liberals, tend to be urban-based and work in service and tech industries that aren't affected by declines in manufacturing or mining. I have little sympathy for conservatives who listen to nonsense from politicians like Trump when they should be thinking about what kind of education they need and where they should live in order to get good jobs. Many of the so-called élites simply got good educations and were willing to move for job opportunities. Rather than getting government off the backs of people, the government should be incentivizing poor conservatives to get the proper training and move if necessary, as suggested by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. If you accept the premise that capitalism is good, as most conservatives do (I don't), you must accept that the responsibility of corporate executives is to move jobs to wherever the costs are lowest. It is a contradiction of capitalism for conservatives to demand that jobs be brought to their regions simply to provide them with well-paying jobs. 

Besides the above, I think that Americans have become lazy, self-entitled and jealous, and that for purely political reasons the Republican Party has chosen to cater to whiny conservatives just so that they can remain in office. The so-called Republican vision is actually a farce with no economic basis, and it is clear that Donald Trump has no understanding of or interest in economics. On the global stage, the Chinese are laughing about how their cooperative culture doesn't cause them to go through the pains that Americans inflict upon themselves with their culture of selfishness. Looking at Trump's personal characteristics, what stands out to me is that his supporters would probably like to emulate his selfishness and narcissism. With respect to world history, this is a sign that the U.S. may be on the verge of a serious decline in both political and economic leadership, and that China is on the ascent and may soon be calling the shots. Given the degraded nature of Trump's personality, I'm not sure that I would object. The question is ultimately whether China's leaders represent the most eusocial aspects of mankind.

The Political Scene

Politics isn't exactly one of my favorite topics, but the current situation in the U.S. seems extraordinary, so I'll continue to comment on it occasionally. The scene here in Vermont isn't dramatic and can even be amusing at times: in the Democratic primary for governor, a transgender woman just defeated a fourteen-year-old boy and two others to win the nomination. However, the conditions in Washington, D.C. aren't as sanguine. The recent death of TV personality Robin Leach reminded me of "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," which I used to watch years ago. Adnan Khashoggi, the billionaire Saudi arms dealer, was a quintessential subject for the program; his grotesque lifestyle was said to cost $250 thousand per day. Khashoggi was no doubt a role model for Donald Trump, who also appeared on the program. Subsequent to a reduction in Khashoggi's wealth, Trump bought his yacht, and, of course, renamed it after himself. Looking back, you can also see how Trump had an affinity for the Gambino crime family, with which he had business connections. Although Trump seems to have been a shameless social climber, he never graduated from the ranks of con artists and crooks, and his self-professed business acumen doesn't stand up to close examination.

I don't have any special insights or information about Trump's probable fate, but it seems unlikely that his presidency will end well for him. He has the looming Mueller investigation, possible criminal charges in New York, potential impeachment after the 2018 midterm elections, and, if he survives long enough, the 2020 presidential election, which I doubt he would win. Before it's all over, we may learn that the Trump Organization is propped up by money laundering for Russian oligarchs. Trump held the illusory belief that he would somehow escape the close scrutiny that all presidents face, and that his indiscretions could be suppressed indefinitely. In most respects, Donald Trump is demonstrably stupid. On the whole, Trump merely seems like an anomaly to me, a sign of dysfunctional times. He is fundamentally less interesting than the conditions that allowed him to be elected. How, one asks, did voters elect to the presidency a candidate who lies constantly, surrounds himself with criminals, has little understanding of foreign or domestic policy, economics or law, and has never shown any interest in public service?

This plays into my narrative about the inadequacy of traditional democratic governmental structures in a capitalist society. The two critical parts that cause failure are the stupidity of voters and the amorality and greed of private interests. At the most basic level, what has happened is that corporate media companies such as Fox News have become proficient at convincing disgruntled white males that Donald Trump can improve their economic status. In a classic case of voter misattribution of cause and effect, Trump has been given credit for the strong economy in the U.S., which would have occurred anyway without him. The reality is that Trump's ideas are obsolete or discredited ones from the 1970's and 1980's, and that his advisers are amateurs and opportunists who lack both the ideas and the skills to produce the results that his supporters expect. Trump's tax cut mainly benefits the rich and will lead to larger deficits in the future, which will restrain economic growth. Trump's tariff strategy is reducing prices of agricultural commodities and hurting farmers, while raising costs in some industries and disrupting international commerce in a manner that is unlikely to benefit anyone. His support of the coal industry, which is economically doomed regardless, may increase global carbon emissions. Trump's supporters fall into two main groups: a majority who are ignorant and a minority who seek immediate financial or political gain from his policies. This is not to say that voters who dislike Trump and vote against him are making better decisions, but that voters in general are ill-equipped to deal with complex national and international issues.

For these reasons I return to the idea that self-governance ought to be replaced by an algorithmic form of government. A sophisticated algorithmic constitution based on principles of equality, fairness and protection of the individual could replace the current U.S. constitution, leaving no room for interpretation or manipulation. The current system of government permits a continuous assault by special interests, both domestic and foreign. Because human status or rank is always relative, people compete to own larger houses and properties, and there is no theoretical upper limit that would prevent them from owning, say, larger planets, if it were possible. If capitalism has in fact played a role in human progress, one can now almost safely say that it has outlived its usefulness. The current trajectory, with an incompetent American president like Donald Trump, is moving us toward a needlessly overcrowded world characterized by pointless competition, which in the long run may benefit no one.

Girl Power

While I find the political situation in the U.S. deplorable, with the arrival of a vulgar, uninformed, bombastic, self-interested and dishonest president, I've noticed that the strong reaction against him may bring unexpected benefits. Feminism in the U.S. seems to move in waves over many decades, and the appearance of Donald Trump on the national scene seems to have precipitated a new one, which is impressive in its ferocity. Although it may be arguable whether Trump caused the #MeToo movement, it seems as if the latest round of sexual harassment protest dates to October, 2016, with the release of the Access Hollywood audio tape, in which Trump discussed women with Billy Bush. Trump was subsequently accused of sexual harassment by several women. A women's movement specifically targeting Trump began in 2016, and this, I think, recently led to the dismissal of several prominent male public figures from their jobs on the basis of sexual misconduct. The speed with which famous men have been removed from corporate, political and film positions is surprising when you consider how entrenched and unchallenged that behavior was until now.

As I've said, I like to view human behavior from a biological standpoint, and in this respect Trump is a typical male. He tries to dominate the situations he's in and cultivates an aura of success, and this is consistent with the behavior of many species, in which males go to considerable lengths to attract females. Other males are outdone in displays of fitness, including physical characteristics and the ability to win contests. Among humans, being a rich alpha male usually guarantees the privilege of mating with women, the net result of which is the production of children. When you closely examine the shortcomings of most alpha males, it becomes readily apparent that there is not necessarily any social benefit derived from the process, which seems biologically to have had to do mainly with their reproduction. Though they may have other talents, Trump-esque men often have far less to offer society than meets the eye, and when you examine them in the context of the highly complex modern world, they tend to be anachronisms who have wildly overstated their capabilities. If Trump were a peacock, would you vote for him? Some characteristics often associated with males, such as competitiveness, may serve purposes unrelated to attracting mates, but that has always been one of their primary functions.

The mating strategies of women are obviously quite different from those of men. They also need to exhibit fitness, which indicates that they are likely to produce healthy offspring, but in their case, if they are sufficiently attractive, they choose among suitors rather than compete with other women directly. In nature, receptive females usually acquire mates effortlessly, whereas some males compete unsuccessfully with other males and do not reproduce. Thus, females have less biological incentive to act aggressively. On the contrary, women, as members of a eusocial species, have an added incentive to offer and receive help from other women in the interest of raising their offspring, which is a daunting task due to the unusually long time period from birth to independence in our species. Of course, women can be aggressive, but under normal circumstances this does not involve physical confrontations or intimidation, which are common among men.

I am bringing this up because I think that greater political participation by women and increased inclusion of women in leadership roles would have a positive influence on society, particularly if it followed the leadership of autocratic demagogues such as Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin. In a general biological sense, women have no incentive to assert their power for its own sake and are more likely to be sensitive to social needs than aggressive men. Although Putin is popular in his country and certainly knows how to run it to meet his goals, those goals are not the same as the long-term goals of all Russians. Putin is a Soviet-era autocrat whose policies are not likely to endure for long after he leaves office. The situation with Trump is somewhat worse, because he is incompetent even as an autocrat and therefore has nothing to offer Americans on any level at all. During his tenure, the federal government is losing what little coherence it had, and he is exposing the country to unnecessary new risks.

Because I look at our world biologically, a government in which females dominate must also be examined closely. While such a government might be characterized by greater order and more careful allocation of resources, as in a hive dominated by a queen bee, the goal of creating a large factory to produce and raise offspring is not necessarily what Homo sapiens wants or needs at this stage in its evolution. In the past, when I lived in the suburbs of Chicago, I sometimes felt as if I were trapped in a hive of women who were obsessed with raising their children, as if that was the only thing that mattered in life. Thus, while there is much to be said against alpha males, the female opposite is not exactly everyone's cup of tea.

Nevertheless, it is encouraging to me that women seem to be uniting in large numbers against Donald Trump, because, if they follow through and vote, his tenure will end sooner than it might otherwise. Fortunately, minorities and young people of both sexes also find little to like in Trump or today's Republican Party, and their popularity is dwindling. I am heartened that I am not the only one who feels that Trump's exit couldn't be soon enough. Though Trump's behavior may be rooted in inherited tendencies that once played a role in our survival as a species, it would be an absurdity of the highest order to suggest that, given his behavior since he took office, he could be of any benefit whatsoever to mankind.

Trump

Although I'm hardly at all interested in politics, I thought my readers might like to know my reaction to the unexpected Trump victory. As I had been following the polls closely in recent weeks, like many I was surprised by this outcome. However, on reflection, there are similarities between this election and the election of George W. Bush in 2000, and Bush's reelection in 2004 was already a confirmation to me of the incompetence of voters – hence my continuing skepticism regarding the wisdom of the existing democratic process. In this case it is difficult to predict how Trump's presidency might evolve, because he is less ideologically rigid than he presented himself, and his real strengths are in photo ops and his sheer aggressiveness. Put in a historical perspective, there is nothing new here, as H.L. Mencken wrote in 1926:

No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.

My presidential vote was superfluous because I live in a Democratic stronghold. I voted for Hillary Clinton only because I did not want to support a third-party candidate who might inadvertently contribute to the election of Trump by reducing the number of Clinton votes in another state, as Ralph Nader did for Bush in 2000. It is impossible to know, but Ralph Nader may have changed world history for the worse by reducing Al Gore's vote count in 2000. In this household we had a small panic about the election results and someone began to look into real estate in France, but we have since settled down.

ISIL

Though I don't particularly like to comment on current events, it seems appropriate to say something about the terrorist attacks in Paris of November 13. There is a general consensus in developed nations that ISIL (or ISIS or Da'ish or Daesh) is an unfathomable organization whose destruction must be stopped by a coordinated international effort. That much is clear, but from a political and journalistic standpoint I haven't seen the events described in the same way that I think about them, namely, as a biological phenomenon. No doubt this is a highly complex situation, but I think the best way to look at it is through the lens of science.

What seems to stump commentators is the brutality of ISIL in conjunction with what looks like the absence of a coherent ideology. ISIL is wreaking havoc in the name of Islam when no one can see the teachings of Mohammed in its behavior. World leaders and journalists are at a loss to explain it in the familiar language of religious conflict. From my point of view this is a perfect opportunity to drop comfortable Western ideology and look at ISIL as a Malthusian phenomenon with the help of modern science. Although ISIL exists in real time, it can be studied in the same way that archaeologists, for example, are studying the collapse of Pueblo society in Mesa Verde, Colorado during the late 1200's.

Broadly speaking, what is occurring probably has to do with overpopulation, political instability, environmental change, in-group and out-group conflict and instinctive male behavior. It would appear that ISIL was conceived and is being operated by out-group male Muslims whose life prospects, for multiple reasons, whether they live in the Middle East or Europe, are inadequate. In a situation like this, religion is at best a pretext for violence and it may be a waste of time to look for coherent ideology. ISIL is following an ancient survival model that can be found throughout human history and has nothing to do with the contemporary templates that we use to describe the world.

What is different this time is the high population levels in the Middle East, where disruption has implications thousands of miles away and potentially throughout the world. Obviously this is an enormous topic that I can barely touch here. I'll just mention a couple of aspects that relate to some of my earlier posts. First, I think it is important to see beyond ideology such as political correctness in situations such as this. As I said earlier, the PEN protesters who didn't want Charlie Hebdo to receive a free speech award could not have had a good conception of the underlying causes of the January, 2015 attacks in Paris. They were probably thinking along politically correct lines something to the effect that the satirical magazine made Muslims feel insulted. If these Muslims had been students in America, perhaps they would feel "unsafe." No trigger warnings were provided! Is that how we ought to interpret these events? No, it isn't. Second, this is an opportunity to see how inadequate the arts and religion can be for dealing with occurrences like this. I am thinking specifically about Michel Houellebecq's novel, Submission, which I just reviewed. Although Houellebecq gets some credit for concocting an imaginative outcome for France in light of its growing Muslim population, the novel is actually rather inadequate if you are looking for an understanding of why so many Muslims live in France today or why the Middle East is in turmoil. The point here is that even if it isn't the responsibility of novelists to solve world problems, Houellebecq should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt and certainly should not be magnified to the status of a major thinker on the basis of his work. Similarly, if you regard Marilynne Robinson as a serious author, consider here that it is biology, not religion, that is driving these events. Religious traditions are malleable, and there is little to prevent outlier groups from diverting them to serve their purposes. If religions were static ideologies there would be far fewer varieties of them in the world than presently exist.

It is a mistake to think that our current social norms such as political correctness are going to be broadly applicable to other cultures on different continents. As humans, we have a very long history of resorting to religion and art to assuage the stresses of life, and it can be difficult for us to think beyond them. Admittedly there is an unsatisfying, counterintuitive aspect to modern science, and we tend to resist it even when it is our best option for understanding life's complexities. However, we stand a better chance of comprehending ISIL by studying disintegrating societies of the past than we do by falling back on the comforts of our cultural perspective, including religion and art.