A Depressing Blog?

As stated, the main purpose of this blog is to record my thoughts. A very small number of people read it, each with varying regularity, and I put in a secondary effort to meet their needs, if known, though there are limits to my flexibility in this regard. If I were writing purely to entertain others or, say, to amuse myself by inventing a persona that isn't me at all, I probably wouldn't bother keeping it up. I don't get much feedback on the overall tone of the blog, but a couple of offline comments have come up recently that I thought I might as well address.

One of my readers would rather see posts that project optimism about the future. That reader usually agrees with me, but gets a little rattled by interpreting my tone as relentlessly downbeat. In fact I don't think I'm particularly negative, and this is merely my personality expressing itself, and that includes a certain obsessiveness with honesty and facing reality as it presents itself. In my view we are barraged with misinformation throughout our lives, and I am the kind of person who likes to know all of the bad news up front so that I can address it. Some people would rather adopt a strategy in which they avert their attention when something unpleasant is about to occur and instead think happy thoughts, but apparently I am more the hardcore realist. My kind of realism is neither negative nor positive and simply seeks the truth or an approximation of the truth, which is usually the best we can hope for. The difference between me and more idealistic people is that they feel relieved when they have a good feeling and I feel relieved when I think I know all of the pertinent information, even when it has negative implications. My preferred strategy is to know what's going on now so that I don't have any unpleasant surprises later. In my experience, Pollyannaish people are not really happier in the long run, because their delusional thinking is likely to catch up with them sooner or later unless they somehow manage to live from cradle to grave in a protective bubble, which certainly is possible, but in my case if there ever was a protective bubble it broke long ago.

Another reader who knows me fairly well said recently that if psychiatrists read my blog they would recommend that I be put on a suicide watch. Here again is the impression that I am extremely downward-looking, as if the world were coming to an end - my world anyway - and I might as well just die. This reader knows that that would be an inaccurate assessment of me, since I don't fit the profile of a depressive person at all, though by the same token I'm never going to win an award for being upbeat or happy-go-lucky. All I'm really doing is trying to see things as they are and contemplate how to navigate life as best as possible without being sidetracked by the roaring background noise that everyone faces.

There is another aspect to my personality that hasn't specifically been mentioned, and I'll discuss that a little too. My orientation to the world is rational, especially when it comes to my writing. This can make me seem cold and emotionless to highly empathetic people. I am usually looking at the reasons behind things, whereas they tend to be more emotional and are attuned to the well-being of others. An example of this occurred early in my career. One of my co-workers who was only in his late 30's died suddenly of a heart attack. I had liked him and was sorry that he had died, but was not particularly shocked, as he was morbidly obese, drank a lot, smoked, got no exercise and had a fat girlfriend on top of it all. For someone like me, when certain behavior has a predictable outcome, I don't empathize as much as some people do. This extends to all areas, such as smoking cigarettes and then getting lung cancer. In this instance, another co-worker became quite put off by my muted reaction to the death, but I don't go in for theatrics just to suit other people's expectations. For the purposes of the blog I want to clarify that I am not a psychopath lacking empathy for others. Although I will react to the opinions you express, this is a place where I can be as rational as I like and never have to apologize when I don't comply with standards that are at variance with mine.

Intellectual Stimulation

It is probably true of my readers that, like me, they seek a certain amount of intellectual stimulation. Working and other day-to-day pursuits have always seemed a little repetitious to me; in a way they seem like biding time, and I get a sense that I should be figuring things out better rather than plodding along mindlessly in a routine. There is a tendency in society to reward people for going with the flow and not thinking too much, as in "Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; he thinks too much: such men are dangerous" (Julius Caesar). Life is easier for the employers of docile and compliant workers, and jobs keep people off the streets, where they might commit crimes, join gangs or foment political unrest. I see the American Dream as part of a thought control conspiracy that works better than communist propaganda ever did. In the 1960's, people used to jokingly say "America, land of the home, free of the brave." "Maggie's Farm," by Bob Dylan, has been my theme song ever since I first heard it in 1965. The song ends with these lines:
Well, I try my best
To be just like I am
But everybody wants you
To be just like them
They say sing while you slave and I just get bored
I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.

Dylan's old rebelliousness still appeals to me, but I parted company with him long ago when it became apparent that he has no interest in ideas and in every way is an anti-intellectual. Although I didn't end up in a career that required much brainpower myself, I have always been interested in ideas and have found it somewhat of a challenge to get intellectual stimulation. Some of the difficulty had to do with living in places like Terre Haute, Indiana and Dixon, Illinois, but even college towns and urban areas seemed to have their limitations. My friends and acquaintances from college were more mentally alert than my co-workers, but you could hardly consider them stimulating conversationalists. Thus I turned to books, periodicals and trips to Europe for my mental health.

Since the 1980's, besides reading a variety of books, I've gone on and off the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, each several times. Currently, besides the Times Literary Supplement and Nature I get most of my journalistic reading from 3 Quarks Daily. I've now had it with the Times Literary Supplement again and am giving up on Nature because most of its articles have very narrow ranges and are extremely technical. I'm going to switch to Boston Review and Nautilus based on a few articles of theirs that I've read. I prefer reading printed pages to screens, and that isn't likely to change. Although I'm fairly happy with 3 Quarks Daily, it doesn't feature many in-depth articles and doesn't come in print. I've mainly given up on Internet discussions, but may still make posts from time to time. In addition to this I continue to read about astronomy, which is literally and figuratively a huge topic.

I seem to have a love-hate relationship with intellectuals. On the one hand they are the best-read people around and have the potential to enlighten you on a variety of topics, but on the other hand they tend to be careerist hacks who don't have an original idea in their heads and use whatever knowledge they possess to divert attention from the fact that they don't know anything important and in most respects behave like trained monkeys. After reading them for years, I find that the literary magazines consist mostly of obscure articles that function much like reality TV for PhDs, in which you might learn, for example, that such-and-such eighteenth century literary figure had a difficult relationship with his wife, which subsequently led to an affair with such-and-such contessa. Whether the literary figure's writing was worth reading in the first place doesn't often come up, and in most instances it probably wasn't worth reading then and is even less worth reading now. You begin to feel as if these articles are parlor games for the damned living in hell. I am lucky to find one in ten articles in literary magazines remotely interesting.

A topic that I tend to avoid is politics, which is quite popular among educated people. I quickly lose interest in these types of discussions, because, as I've said, I don't think that either democracy or capitalism are viable on a long-term basis, and most of this discussion takes them for granted. The so-called left likes democracy, and the so-called right likes capitalism, and there has been no progress on this in my lifetime. I had hopes that scientific people would be an improvement over humanities people, but, while as a group they seem more honest and more likely to find usable solutions to the problems facing mankind, they are locked into a constraining career hierarchy that limits their ability to effect change for the better. There seem to be stupid turf wars over money in research and academia that inhibit the production and implementation of useful ideas on all fronts. The literary and intellectual magazines seem as if they are offshoots of academia that share its weaknesses while adding some of their own, such as selecting articles that will keep them afloat financially whether or not they contain any good ideas.

My hope is that there are more Tony Judts and Czeslaw Miloszes out there who will one day eloquently address the issues of our time, but finding them now seems more difficult than ever.

Intelligence in Context

When I question the competency of experts it may seem as if I'm saying something along the lines of "Why do the people in charge seem so dumb?" I have criticized politicians, academics, intellectuals, journalists, artists and writers. However, from a Darwinian point of view intelligence is merely one aspect of the natural selection that gave rise to Homo sapiens and made us a successful species. According to Darwinian theory, multiple characteristics play roles in the evolution of a species, and singling one out because it seems more important than others may be a mistake over longer periods, because natural selection never stops working. Therefore, when people don't seem as smart as they ought to be, it may simply be a matter of characteristics other than intelligence displaying their importance in the evolutionary process. In other words, you don't necessarily have to be smart to succeed in the fields mentioned.

Though mankind hasn't been observing itself scientifically for very long, there is some evidence that natural selection is operating now, and in ways that may have nothing to do with intelligence. An article in Science discusses how the Dutch may have come to be the tallest people in the world, and apparently intelligence is not a factor. In this case natural selection seems to favor tall men, who have more children in the Netherlands than short men for reasons that aren't entirely clear. The researcher behind the article speculates that Dutch women associate male tallness with greater ability to support children. At its root, Darwinism comes down to determining why one type of organism outnumbers a similar type of organism, and the difference can often be explained in terms of simple physical characteristics such as height, or in this instance the social perception of the importance of height. Similarly, if you look closely at people who are successful in various fields, including those fields that require a lot of education, complex characteristics such as intelligence may play a smaller role than you might expect.

I recently came across a 2003 interview with the well-known writer David Foster Wallace who suffered from depression and hung himself in 2008. I have read a couple of his essays but none of his fiction, and I think he considered himself a serious writer. At the time of the interview he was teaching English and said:
I have a lottery-prize-type gig at Pomona: The formal duties are light, the students all have way better SAT scores than I did, and I get to do more or less what I want. I'm doing Intro Fiction right now, which is fun because it's a chance to take kids who are very experienced in literary criticism and paper-writing and to show them there's a totally—in some ways diametrically—different way to read and write.
Although this example doesn't exactly fit what I'm saying here, I find it useful. Wallace was probably a pretty smart guy by any measure. He did well academically at Amherst and studied briefly at Harvard before becoming a literary sensation in the U.S. However, there is no clear connection between whatever intelligence he may or may not have possessed and his subsequent career. The point is that he became a magnet for conventionally intelligent students at Pomona College who perhaps thought that he could impart wisdom upon them which would enhance their careers later in their lives. My theory is that no students who studied with David Foster Wallace will have significant literary careers, because ultimately the skills associated with successful literary careers have almost nothing to do with academic credentials or conventional intelligence. In the case of Wallace's career success it seems as if his mental illness and luck probably played at least as important a role as intelligence and education. Extrapolating from this example specifically to creative writing programs, you typically have faculty with commercial literary success and students who hope to do the same. As in the case of Wallace's students, creative writing students, at least the ones in better-known programs, probably have, on average, excellent academic credentials and high intelligence by conventional measures. I think that very few of these students are likely to have successful literary careers, unless you lower the bar considerably and count low-circulation literary publications that are unlikely to provide the equivalent of a living wage without full-time academic employment. It appears to me that in the academic route to a writing career, intelligence plays little or no role in determining whether or not a student succeeds professionally.

The conclusion that I draw from this is that, while intelligence may be an asset in many fields, it is not essential for success in most fields, and other characteristics may be more important. In the course of my life I have noticed that intellectual capacities do vary, but much of the time intelligent people are merely fast learners, and slow learners often catch up with them and function with equal proficiency. With respect to experts, their intelligence or lack of it may similarly have little relationship to their status within their professions. Truth and falsity, which are more the focus of this blog, operate on a different scale from intelligence, and it is important to keep in mind that the people whom I criticize may or may not be intelligent.

The Peter Principle

The Peter Principle is a concept popularized by Laurence J. Peter (1919-1990) in his humorous 1968 book of that name. According to the principle, employees within an organizational hierarchy tend to rise to their level of incompetence. This occurs because the skills in which one has demonstrated proficiency are often different from those that are required to perform competently in higher-level jobs. Although this is a fairly loose idea without much research behind it, it was and still is recognized and discussed in business schools. One context in which it can come up is that of high growth corporations in which the entrepreneurial founders have the wrong skill sets needed to manage large organizations, and they are often replaced by professional managers who have better administrative skills.

This idea is similar to the ideas in many of my posts if you broadly expand it beyond corporations. Similar phenomena can be seen in politics, the professions, academia and journalism, and among intellectuals, artists and writers. What I've noticed time and again is that an aura surrounds those who rise in their fields that isn't necessarily commensurate with their actual knowledge or ability. Some of that aura is created by others who unconsciously confer a mystique to recognized leaders, and some exists in delusional or lazy thinking among the leaders themselves when they come to believe that they must know something that other people don't or possess some special talent because they've been successful so far. One of the most spectacular recent examples of this was the premature awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama after he had been president for less than nine months. The expectations were so high for Obama during his presidential campaign in 2008 and early in his first term that people projected capacities and ideas onto him that we now know with certainty that he did not possess. His thinking on foreign policy seems to have turned out to be roughly the same as that of George W. Bush, and what differentiates him seems to be little more than a tendency to proceed with greater caution. Certainly his track record in foreign policy looks shaky now, with more instability in the Middle East and the continuation of American aggression by means of drones and other covert methods of dubious legal standing. If he wasn't the successor to the aggressive and reckless Bush, Obama would now stand out more clearly as a confused military aggressor. The events are a bit too current to permit full historical judgment, but I suspect that Obama will be seen as a conventional president who brought no new ideas with him, did not demonstrate any particular talent as a leader, and probably thought more highly of himself than has proven to be warranted. It is almost inconceivable that the Nobel Committee would have awarded him the Peace Prize if they had seen into the future of his presidency. In my opinion, the American public and the Nobel Committee were lulled into complacency by misreading Obama's actual competencies. He was a significant contrast to both George W. Bush and John McCain, who exhibited macho decisiveness and poor judgment, and he successfully sold himself as a thoughtful and articulate leader who would skillfully push through carefully thought out policies. As a practical matter he proved to be poor at taking action or winning people over. In retrospect he looks like a charismatic lawyer and academic who got in way, way over his head, and in the meantime he has served the interests of his wealthy backers, who come from the same cadre that supported Bill Clinton and now Hillary.

I have been shocked and disappointed by the questionable competence demonstrated by those doing well in many fields. Not long before the Great Recession, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan was considered God incarnate by many economists, even as his polices helped precipitate the recession. Many within the New York intellectual establishment supported the Iraq War. They have also been complicit in the manipulation of U.S. foreign policy to serve Zionist interests that have probably cost U.S. taxpayers trillions of dollars while cementing America's reputation in the Middle East as self-serving imperialists. On the literary front, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers, comes to mind. The book is filled with sophomoric flourishes and failed attempts at profundity, yet it succeeded at launching Eggers' career as a respected American literary writer. It seems as if Eggers came to be considered a great writer by audaciously stating that he was a great writer, without even qualifying the statement. Eggers may have other talents, but his literary success based on that book is not a good sign. As you know, I consider the American literary scene a disaster and a desolate terrain–an artistic desert in which you travel at your peril. Regarding academia, there seems to be evidence that many faculty have embraced if not encouraged the current atmosphere of political correctness which, in my opinion, fosters an unrealistic view of the world and creates college graduates who are poorly adapted to the workforce and adult life. Adolescents who are about to be tossed to the wolves should hardly be taught that no one has a right to hurt their feelings.

The underlying explanation for this phenomenon probably has to do with the fact that we're wired to live in groups and are often unable to think beyond the conceptual boundaries of whatever group we happen to belong to. Groups in a fundamental sense are our bulwark against external threats, and group cohesion played a critical role in survival during everyone's ancestral past. Once group leaders become unassailable, there is a strong disincentive to challenge them even when they are known to be wrong. In a corporate context you might be fired, and in any career you might face a significant setback or ostracism by defying orthodoxy. So if Bill Gates, Paul Krugman, Alice Munro, Charles Simic, Bob Dylan or Barack Obama doesn't seem to know what he or she is talking about, there may not be much anyone can do to remedy it. Fortunately, at least in the case of scientists, there is science to back them up, and in the long run that won't be ignored, though ideology has been known to suppress scientific findings on many occasions. The kinds of hegemonic behavior by leaders that I'm discussing here may not subside until machines become capable of thinking and doing just about anything better than we can. At that point future historians may become dumbfounded that our species had been able to survive at all.

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Altruism is an Instinct

As a nonconformist, I have throughout my life looked on with amusement, dismay or puzzlement while others uncritically adopted whatever ideas happened to be popular at any particular time. In 1961 during his inaugural address John F. Kennedy famously said "ask not what your country can do for you–ask what you can do for your country;" not long after that the Peace Corps was founded and 1960's American-style liberalism took off. It had never occurred to me that there was an imperative to do volunteer work, and nationalism even then seemed like somewhat of a bogus concept, since I already had reservations about American life, though I would not have been able to articulate them at that time. Living in one of the most liberal states now, I still encounter a lot of the same Kennedyesque do-goodism that doesn't make much sense to me. Middlebury College, for example, is a bastion of liberalism and like many elite liberal arts colleges expects its students to demonstrate a strong commitment to community service. If I were still in high school I would probably have to go through a cognitive therapy program in order to make myself civic-minded enough to be accepted at a good college.

It occurred to me today that much of my critique of Western liberalism, particularly in regard to its assumptions about human nature, can be summed up by stating that altruism is an instinct. I have already laid the groundwork for this claim by discussing humans as eusocial creatures who have evolved cooperative behaviors that allowed the species to survive up to the present. It is an obvious enough statement, but it has enormous consequences if you think about its implications with respect to religion and morality. You can more or less throw out most existing theology and moral philosophy and start from scratch. In my view, if altruism is an instinct it should be examined in the same way as other instincts, not as a supernatural or rational phenomenon that has its roots either in a divine being or in an analytical process.

For comparative purposes, altruism is a little like sex. You feel good engaging in both of them, and why do you think that is? Your body rewards you for repeating those activities that saved your ancestors, to put it simply. They helped others and others helped them, allowing them to survive life-or-death situations over thousands of years, and that behavior became encoded in our genes, whereas less cooperative people were more likely to die and consequently their presence is less evident in the gene pool. The mechanism that executes this is probably the involuntary release of chemicals in the brain that makes you feel good when you help someone, and you can easily observe this both in yourself and in others if you just pay attention. The real reward is that rush of chemicals, which may prevent you from acting selfishly even when that might be to your advantage. I strongly doubt you'd ever see much altruism without it.

I thought of sex because that is an extreme case of chemicals influencing human behavior. Sex is far more essential than altruism and encompasses organs and neural systems in addition to the production and release of chemicals in the brain. If your ancestors hadn't been interested in sex, you just plain wouldn't exist under any circumstances, whether they were altruistic or not. In the same ways that we've created comforting stories that provide a palatable explanation for altruism, we've done it with sex. We like to attribute altruism to the inherent goodness of mankind or to the will of a benevolent god even though we know perfectly well that there is no evidence for either. In the case of sex, the accompanying mythologies also seem like a cover for something that we'd rather not think about. Thus was born the idea of romantic love, which still plays an important role in millions or billions of lives, depending on which culture you happen to belong to. In my view, excluding personal drug use, the more pleasurable an activity, the more important it is likely to be for survival, and consequently our bodies have gone to a lot of trouble to pump us full of just the right chemical mix to make us unable to resist doing it. How interested in sex would anyone be if they never experienced the accompanying feelings and sensations? They're there for a reason, and they work pretty well. The mechanisms associated with altruism are just not as noticeable given their lesser biological significance.

One might take a skeptical position on the foregoing, but proving that it is correct doesn't interest me and it is close enough to the truth for my purposes. Finding all of the related chemicals, neurons, genes, etc., would be too large of an undertaking for me, especially when you can approximate the truth via thought experiments about why some traits exist in us rather than others. Altruism isn't likely to exist either by virtue of our rational adoption of it or as a result of pure chance.

I find it important to think about altruism as an instinct vis-à-vis public policy, because others don't seem to do this, or if they do you never hear about it. In the U.S. the prevailing view, from Bill Gates to Barack Obama to David Koch to Dick Cheney, is that Americans are the altruistic good guys in white hats, and the rest of the world is full of unaltruistic bad guys in black hats, for example, ISIS, al-Qaeda, Iran and North Korea. The truth is that there are good guys and bad guys everywhere, and they can coexist in the same body. Moreover, altruism came into existence in small groups well before our modern conception of mankind arose, and it may not function at all the way we like to think of it in inter-group conflict. And, to make matters worse, there are severe misunderstandings of nature to be found in the writings of contemporary philosophers who advocate extending our altruism to other species. Of course, this all brings me back to my favorite theme of automated government. In deciding how to sort things out among ourselves, it would be useful for everyone to recognize that we are, after all, just animals and not divine beings placed here by an omniscient god.

Video of the Day

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Gardeners and Nature

Growing up, I had little exposure to horticulture. My grandmother in England had a large garden in which she grew vegetables, as did many to get through World War II, and I can recall shelling peas in her kitchen in the 1950's. My grandparents also had a bomb shelter in their back yard. But when we moved to the U.S. we lived in a rented house followed by an apartment, and we never had a garden until my last year of college. As an adult I began to grow flowers and vegetables in 1977, and I have grown at least tomatoes ever since whenever possible, probably during twenty-two summers in all. Over the last eight years I have received greater exposure to how others perceive gardening, and it has been a slight surprise to me to which I am only gradually adjusting.

My original interest in gardening stemmed from the somewhat hippieish point of view in vogue at the time, which connected it with nature. Hiking and the outdoors were popular in the 1970's, and there were still communes and ashrams around in those days, though I was never a follower of fads. I liked the idea of growing your own food, and in fact it did taste much better and was probably healthier than what was available in stores. I found flowers pleasant and I liked and still enjoy seeing them, but, as you may have noticed, I try to concentrate on what is essential, and food is more essential than decoration, so I quickly focused on vegetables rather than flowers.

I tend to look at everything as part of a continuum in nature, which in a way makes even the most cultivated and exotic flowers nothing more than prettified versions of what grows spontaneously in the wild. Technically most of our vegetables are exotic too after centuries of hybridization and, more recently, genetic modification, but food occupies a different category in my mind, because you can't live without it, though you can easily live without adornments to your surroundings. In other words, food is essential and decoration is not. As an aesthetician of the wilderness, which is where we all live whether we admit it or not, I experience a certain amount of cognitive dissonance with the thinking of gardeners, women usually, whose goal is to create aesthetically pleasing gardens and flower arrangements while not only ignoring the inherent beauty of many natural plants but also waging quiet wars against those plants which might interfere with their plans.

Since few men seem interested in growing flowers other than as a vocation, I am tending to think that flowers are the province of women, and that they fit into the context of what I said earlier about a possible female-specific desire to live in appealing, controlled environments. From a male point of view it is easy to see this as a waste of time, or at least, with respect to priorities, as far less urgent, for example, than preventing the lawn from becoming a jungle or having dead trees falling over and knocking down power lines. Based on my exposure to the local garden club, I don't think that the members have much interest in botany - curiosity is not a factor here - and their primary goal is simply to have pretty flowers and yards, something more akin to interior decoration than anything else. Besides the garden club, it could also be instructive to look at the Dutch tulip bulb bubble of 1637, during which the price of a tulip bulb became ten times that of the annual wages of skilled craftsmen. On that occasion, beyond a simple female interest in pretty things, there must have been competition to own a rare and expensive item, perhaps with prices additionally boosted by speculators. Probably female thinking regarding gardens encompasses both innate predispositions and immediate methods for attaining higher social status. Certainly some women's gardens do serve a competitive function with respect to other women.

As one who inhabits the male end of the gender spectrum, the garden club take on gardening is still somewhat of a mystery to me, though my aesthetic side is sympathetic. The thing that is funny to me is that all organisms can be beautiful in their own way, and often the visual differences simply mask similarities. I prefer to see organisms within their natural habitats going through normal life cycles. If there wasn't a babbling brook with pumped water there before, there needn't be one now. In a way, flower gardens can be as artificial as AstroTurf, another scar on the earth left by mankind. A dying old sugar maple is just as beautiful as and even more interesting to me than any new tulip.

Video of the Day

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Success

As someone who has never been particularly ambitious, I occasionally think about what motivates the people who do end up becoming notably successful at one thing or another. Some may say that most unsuccessful people simply don't have what it takes: perhaps they're too disorganized, too stupid, too lazy or, more charitably, too disadvantaged, to accomplish much of anything. Others may view those who succeed as having special talents. Some may chalk it all up to luck. I prefer to look closely at those who are thought of as successful and examine what specifically motivated them, because I think this provides a clearer picture of both the individuals and the cultures in which they live.

Speaking anecdotally, it appears that most successful people work very hard before receiving recognition. People such as John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Ludwig van Beethoven, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison and Vincent van Gogh all worked extremely hard throughout their careers. Those who aren't quite so industrious may work more deliberately and produce successful results over many years, for example Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin. The definition of success in the arts and sciences is somewhat more variable than it is in commerce. One may become famous posthumously like Vermeer or Mendel, and some excellent art has probably already been lost forever without ever being appreciated. In our age commerce triumphs, and the very rich often acquire a cultural stature that far exceeds the importance of their accomplishments. How else can you explain the current ascent of Donald Trump in the Republican presidential polls? Trump has "buffoon" written all over him, yet he is giving top Republican contenders such as Jeb Bush and Scott Walker a run for their money.

As you might expect, I tend to see the drive toward success as having evolutionary roots. Competition has historically been the province of males, who are directly or indirectly and consciously or unconsciously attempting to attract mates, produce offspring and protect them. High social status draws women like a magnet, and attractive young women still put up with the likes of old sexist geezers such as Hugh Hefner, who, I am sorry to say, remains a role model for millions of men. Women are equally interested in procreation, but biology has placed them in a different strategic position in which they must concentrate on the actual details of bearing and raising children, a situation which can be facilitated with a powerful husband. The recent cultural emphasis on gender equality has complicated the landscape in which both males and females operate, but men still tend to be more competitive than women, and women are still more interested than men in creating and maintaining safe environments that are suitable for raising children, whether they have children or not. Gender flexibility may have some biological justification, but there must be limits to that flexibility if populations are to reproduce.

The male idea of success can be seen in men's desire to compete in sports, games and at work. Being rich usually does the trick for attracting women, especially in the U.S. I have always found the case of Jacqueline Kennedy instructive. Here you had an upper-class, well-educated, attractive and intelligent woman who, in my opinion, married down for both John F. Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis. Though he had some good qualities and eventually the high status of being president of the U.S., Kennedy was the son of a rather crass and unpleasant social climber and Wall Street crook. Onassis was a crude Greek ship owner who clearly had nothing to offer Jackie besides money. Whether they think about it this way or not, men with lots of money are generally going to have better reproductive options than paupers, with a better pick of the lot than most others.

The female idea of success can be seen in childrearing and the formation of cohesive communities. Having an enriched, safe environment with lots of support provides optimal conditions for raising children. Also having the right sort of men around for protection helps, and this may partly explain why women are often attracted to risk-taking men, who otherwise might seem foolish or irresponsible. Women themselves, I find, are comparatively risk-averse and would usually rather delegate that role to men. This is probably borne out in mortality statistics, which consistently show women outliving men. Basically, from an evolutionary standpoint, having some guy die instead of you and your children is a pretty good deal. And men are accommodating anyway: they like being heroes, even at great personal cost.

Observer that I am, I enjoy seeing lives as a whole, and how, over a period of many years what once seemed like a special talent that sprang from nowhere years later looks like a rather pathetic monomania from which a person can't escape. Bob Dylan is a good example of this. Here you have one of the best pop lyricists ever, a lousy voice and passable instrumentation. He worked very hard and everything gelled for him in the early 1960's, but it might easily have turned out quite differently. He happened to be a talented writer who was in the right place at the right time, but writing was apparently not his main interest: he preferred performing in front of live audiences. Now, fifty years later, most of his lyrics are forgettable, but he is still on tour as an aged rock star, stuck in a formula from which a more creative person might have extracted himself. Similarly, I fail to see the point of how billionaires choose to live. Even one of the most likable, Warren Buffett, seems crazed: he's still working at age 84 with a net worth of $72 billion. Perhaps he has spent his life trying to prove that Harvard Business School was wrong to turn him down in 1950.

Lifelong obsessions can also be found in the arts. Vincent van Gogh, I think, expressed loneliness in many of his paintings. He had a rather difficult personality and couldn't get along with anyone for an extended period. Yet he yearned for companionship, and this appears in his painting of his bedroom in Arles, which shows everything in pairs, as if two people lived in it. His obsession, you might say in this instance, was the absence of a mate. Many artists and writers become typecast early in their careers, like villains in Westerns. They may end up spending their lives producing the genre that brought them success initially well after it serves any artistic purpose to them. In the arts, it is easiest to succeed with a brand, because the truth is that consumers of art don't really like much change. Painters and writers do this frequently: Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Stephen King, Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling, for example.

It is important to recognize that many of the people who have been successful have had net negative effects on mankind. Besides all of the deaths caused by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, there is the global pollution caused by successful industrialists, and many wars can be attributed to religious leaders from across the centuries. Even when you look at advances in agricultural and medical technologies, you have to wonder whether anyone considered the desirability of the unchecked population growth that ensued. The world population has grown from just one billion when our house was built two hundred years ago to more than seven billion today. To some extent today's refugees are the product of yesterday's technological and industrial successes.

I'm not saying that there aren't any breathtaking artistic, technological or conceptual achievements, but rather that when they occur they must be seen in context, and one person's success doesn't imply someone else's failure. Subliminal drives are what produce success, and those drives exist more or less in everyone. For those who are happy living in their own skin, being unsuccessful may at the most fundamental level mean little more than not having the most attractive husband or wife.

Child Protection

One of the topics that I discuss with my daughter is how protective she ought to be of her son while he is growing up. The norms have completely changed since I was a child and have continued to change since my children were raised. You can get a general sense of the current standards from this video. In many parts of the country children who are outside unaccompanied by an adult are considered at risk, and consequently their parents may be deemed unfit or negligent. The two aspects of this phenomenon that interest me are how it came into existence and what effects it might have on the future development of children.

There has probably been something written about how this state arose, but I'll just give my impressions. A lot of it may stem from the fact that in most families today all of the adults are working, and stay-at-home mothers are in a minority. When I moved to the U.S. in 1957, hardly any mothers in my neighborhood worked. The children walked about by themselves unaccompanied by parents and played with friends without any parental supervision. I don't recall any adults out at night with trick-or-treaters (other than the very young) even when, unlike today, Halloween extended until well after dark.  It is possible that always having mothers nearby led parents to feel that their children were safe, and that when mothers became unavailable due to their jobs a natural caution set in that caused parents to overreact. Leaving children with poorly-paid daycare workers doesn't inspire much confidence, and the fact is that many children may have experienced sub-optimal childhoods because of their daycare.

Furthermore, the public has always been at the mercy of the press, which tends to misrepresent child abduction and child abuse rates in the interest of selling advertising. The press has also been instrumental in generating public fear regarding terrorism, and collectively Americans seem to have felt far more threatened by Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein than common sense would dictate. With those two men out of the picture, the press has now shifted its focus to the perils of ISIS and an Iran with nuclear weapons. The tendency of Americans to conform makes them vulnerable to propaganda campaigns that range anywhere from the harmless marketing of consumer products to the insidious manipulation of foreign policy by special interest groups such as military suppliers and subcontractors, oil companies and Zionists.  

The present paranoia about child safety, then, seems to stem primarily from economic changes, public gullibility and perhaps a little public guilt about the increase in child neglect by busy parents. One must assume that regional legislators, social services, police and judges haven't cooked this up on their own and are merely responding to public demand. Once it started, the expectation that children will be protected may have increased spontaneously, because unattended children began to stand out and attract more attention than previously. The perception may be that twenty children seen wandering around unaccompanied is normal, but something must be amiss if there are only one or two.

What is harder to determine is the long-term effect of child over-protection. Not living in a child-rich environment, and not knowing many people under thirty, I can only speculate on this. As I have suggested in other posts, the cognitive development of younger people today seems to proceed quite differently from that of my generation. I get the sense that over-protection combined with the rise of digital media is making children less prepared for certain situations than the children of the past. When children are not allowed to spontaneously explore on their own, they may, for example, develop a poor sense of direction. If their interactions with other children are scheduled and limited, they may become socially retarded in comparison to earlier generations. This deficiency may be compounded by the substitution of social media for face-to-face interactions. If they are prevented from engaging in any risky activity, they may later be unable to cope with some situations that are easy to navigate for those with more diverse childhood experiences. An apt analogy is the role of early exposure to germs as beneficial for later resistance to asthma and certain allergies. It is too soon to tell, but I think sheltered children will tend to display some of the characteristics associated with only children, including self-centeredness and social inflexibility. On the other hand, there is also the possibility that sheltered children will acquire certain skills that they would be less likely to acquire in traditional childhood environments. For example, they might become more proficient in new technologies such as software development.

I am in the age group that used to say "Never trust anyone over thirty." The same group may soon be saying "Never trust anyone under thirty." I already feel that way about the sheltered college students who require trigger warnings for even the most innocuous of statements; they may be the wave of the future, and I don't think I'm going to be able relate to them well. Perhaps, if no one has done it already, someone should write a book about the benefits of feeding children a spoonful of dirt, releasing them into the woods alone and letting them sojourn unaccompanied in a ghetto. You can't prepare for unpleasant experiences by avoiding them entirely.

Bernie Sanders

I was hoping not to bore you with political discussions, but Bernie Sanders is one of Vermont's U.S. senators, and he is adding an uncommon dimension to the 2016 presidential race, making it seem almost as if Noam Chomsky were about to debate Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination on national television. The last few presidential elections have been dull, and there usually isn't much point in paying attention to what the candidates say. I am familiar with several of Bernie's positions, but won't go into any detail here. Rather I'll just explain what I generally like and dislike about him and leave it at that.

What is appealing about Bernie is his willingness to state in plain terms the positions that he feels strongly about. I may be slightly biased because I generally agree with him: for example, it seems obvious to me that Citizens United was one of the worst rulings in the history of the Supreme Court and that the federal government is effectively a plutocracy. In the context of how public servants should be spending their time, there aren't currently many national politicians besides Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who actively oppose the interests of those who provide most of the funding for election campaigns. As a politician, Bernie is highly accessible in Vermont and doesn't engage in double-talk when he claims to represent the people. He has honed his message with the help of years of political experience during which he learned how to win people over. His strongest card by far, and what makes him stand out the most, is his visible enthusiasm for the causes he values. That passion is contagious, and you won't find it in Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or any of the Republican candidates. Bernie is possibly the best hope in the U.S. for generating a populist movement that counters the relentless trend toward greater inequality.

Unfortunately there are a few negatives about Bernie, from my point of view anyway. Although he has cleaned up his language considerably, his still sounds a lot like an old-school socialist along the lines of Noam Chomsky, and both of them seem to be operating on a conceptually obsolete political model. Bernie loves to say "working families," which means little to me. "Working," I think, is a way of saying "worker" without the direct socialist connotations. "Families," it seems to me, is a toned-down representation of "the people," and shows a conscious effort by Bernie to cast his ideas in a framework that is familiar and acceptable to most Americans. I don't think these are the optimal frames of reference, because they refer back to an industrial period that no longer exists. While it might be argued that we still have oppressed workers, the masses must rise up, etc., the real conditions are far more complex than that, and I'm not sure how Bernie would deal with the present global economic situation. Just saying "workers unite" won't fix anything. Furthermore, I don't know how Bernie would deal with automation and AI, which are inevitably going to eliminate millions or possibly billions of jobs worldwide. Although Bernie is focusing on the real problems, I'm not sure he has the vocabulary or tools to deal with them effectively.

Bernie is a smart Jewish guy from Brooklyn, but he doesn't quite make it into the top tier of that category. The problem is that the smartest people rarely go into politics, which is one of the reasons why I usually find it uninteresting. He followed a pattern roughly similar to that of Howard Dean, another New Yorker who moved to Vermont and found it easy to launch a political career here. The influx of liberals to Vermont has made the state as a whole far more liberal than it used to be, and some old-time Vermont conservatives now consider Chittenden County, where both Bernie Sanders and Howard Dean started their political careers, a different state. However, over the years Bernie has become popular statewide. Even so, our neighbor, former Vermont Governor Jim Douglas, a Republican, says in his memoir, "A reasonable case can be made that Bernie's legislative accomplishments don't match those of other Vermont senators, but his rhetorical accomplishments certainly do." There may be some sour grapes in that statement, because even though it may be accurate, Jim Douglas would probably have liked to have Bernie's current job himself.

My guess is that Bernie Sanders is using this situation as a method of advancing his causes, and that actually becoming president is not his primary goal. At a minimum the political discussion should be more interesting than usual this time around. In the extremely unlikely event that Bernie wins the Democratic nomination for president I will vote for him. Otherwise I may vote for a third-party candidate, if at all.

Doubt the Experts Annual Meeting

The second annual world meeting of Doubt the Experts was held on July 28, 2015, and no additional meetings are currently scheduled for the remainder of this year. The only attendee other than me was John, the expat translator who currently resides in Switzerland. The meeting was held at the bar at American Flatbread in Middlebury, where we chatted and consumed beer for a little over an hour. Since I drank two pints, John advised me to take a short walk before driving home, but I told him that that wouldn't be necessary.

Of course, I'm kidding, and the only reason John was in Middlebury was that his family happens to gather here every summer. However, there appear to be a few more regular blog readers other than my family members, and some of them may also like to meet me during their travels at some point in the future. This blog is currently semi-anonymous, but I will respond to any e-mails I receive at doubttheexperts@gmail.com if you would ever like to contact me directly for any reason. Whether or not you ever plan to come to Middlebury, I am always interested in your opinions and suggestions.

Future Art

The archaeological record indicates that humans have always created what we now call art. From a qualitative standpoint, I don't think there has been any substantial improvement since the Chauvet cave paintings, the epic poems of Homer or the plays of Euripides. The aspects that change over time are the social function, the media, the style, the materials and the subject matter, but not the quality, though some periods do inevitably produce better art than others. As I wrote earlier, I don't think that the contemporary arts, or at least the ones that are widely known and with which I have some familiarity, are particularly good by historical standards, and I attribute this to commercialization, which is not to say that there isn't some better contemporary art that is presently inaccessible to the public for one reason or another.

Extrapolating into the future, if you assume that we won't become extinct and that we won't be replaced by an evolutionary successor to ourselves, I think art will become more important than ever as a pastime, because we simply may have nothing better to do. This scenario assumes that we will remain more or less the same as we are now, automation will obviate the need for most human labor, the political systems globally will maintain a higher level of equality than at present, and human conflict will fall to significantly lower levels. It is a rosy picture that may end up depending on dumb luck to materialize, but I think it is worth discussing if one takes an optimistic view on human destiny. The principal alternatives are gloomy if not unsettling.

Speculating this way, what is interesting to me is how good art would be if you took money out of the equation. In the current art world, the flow of money is a stand-in for quality measurement, with the art that draws the most money often becoming the de facto important art as far as the public is concerned. I don't think Damien Hirst, Stephen King, Steven Spielberg or Madonna are likely to make it into any future lists of great artists, and it would be an improvement for humanity if its members somehow managed to become more discerning. If money were removed from the calculation of quality, it seems plausible that a more meaningful form of measurement might replace it.

In a world in which people had no financial pressures and an abundance of free time, everyone could become an artist of one kind or another if they so chose, and this would change the rules of the game entirely. Idle people like me might, for example, write a blog as a form of art, take up painting or write poems. Systems might even be devised to provide recognition to those who felt that what they produced was important despite the absence of monetary ramifications. No doubt social status would somehow work its way into any reward scheme, but it most likely would be far less pernicious than what we experience under the current system of financial recompense.

Let this be a word of advice to those who produce art now under circumstances which they find unfavorable. Produce your art as you see fit, forget the present and think about a less philistine future, even if that means that you must earn a living doing something else.

The Dark Triad in Cyberspace

The term "Dark Triad" refers to the psychological traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy, which are all considered negative. A few days ago I read an article containing this link to a recent study of male Dark Triad behavior on social networking sites (SNSs). Although I don't engage in any social networking, unless you stretch things and count this blog, I have long been intrigued by Internet behavior and how traditional relationships have been undermined by the invasion of technology into people's lives. Among the study's conclusions:
Men who self-objectify spent more time on SNSs than those lower in self-objectification, and, supporting previous research, more narcissistic individuals reported spending more time on SNSs. Those higher in narcissism and psychopathy reported posting selfies more frequently. Narcissists and individuals high in self-objectification more frequently edited photos of themselves that they posted to SNSs. Thus, our study has provided evidence for several as yet unstudied relationships between personality traits and social media use and self-presentation. Further, it suggests that those high on Dark Triad traits may employ SNSs to execute "cheater strategies" that help them achieve their interpersonal and social goals despite their antisocial personality traits.

As is the case with many psychological studies, these conclusions seem fairly obvious and were only awaiting research to confirm them. I am wondering whether the Internet simply provides a new venue for people who already have Dark Triad characteristics or whether it actually increases the total Dark Triad population. Studies such as this one are too narrow to draw many conclusions, but I would say that Dark Triad traits have been there all along but were previously more repressed by face-to-face interactions and the relative difficulty of representing oneself anonymously. It is theoretically possible that Dark Triad characteristics would increase in the species over time if people who are predisposed to one or more of those traits reproduced more than they did in the past, but it seems more probable that the gene pool was flexible to begin with and the Internet is now rewarding such behavior, in effect making bad people out of those who would behave better under different circumstances. More people are willing to lie, cheat, etc., when they believe that there is little likelihood of their being caught and held accountable, and in any case the Internet hasn't been around long enough to change the gene pool. A further complication regarding how much influence the Internet has over behavior is the decline of civil behavior in other sectors of society. For example, the number of reported serial killers dramatically increased from 1900 to 1980, with the U.S. leading the world, and there may be multiple explanations for such phenomena that relate in complex ways to Dark Triad behavior. However, I think that cyberspace in conjunction with other social changes is probably producing more Dark Triad behavior than was present in previous generations.

To some extent the Internet seems to be normalizing over time, particularly under the influence of businesses, which now derive much more revenue through it than they used to and therefore have much more at stake. This gives it a safer appearance, but I think many of the elements of the Wild West are still present. For example, cyber-bullying, cyber-crime and Internet trolls are far from eradicated. Then there is the massive research conducted by businesses such as Facebook, Amazon.com and Google to figure out how to squeeze more money out of their users or sell that information to someone else. I suspect that beneath the surface of many websites, very little civility exists at all. I have experienced this myself at Wikipedia and at the NYRB and don't doubt that the Internet is teeming with façades concealing private agendas that are hardly kind and generous. Moreover, though I don't currently interact with many people, I get the impression that many within the under-thirty age group may lead double lives. They may outwardly placate their parents and their elders by exhibiting the behaviors expected of them while privately engaging in different behaviors which may, at their worst, fit within a Dark Triad profile. Even when their behavior doesn't seem sinister, they may be suffering from spending too much of their time in cyberspace, where they are less likely to learn many of the skills that were once considered part of being human.

Video of the Day

Click here for Weapon of Choice.

Video of the Day

Click here for Moosehead Lake Aurora.

Political Correctness is a Human Rights Violation

One sphere in which the denial of our mammalian heritage can readily be observed is that of political correctness. Those of us who are self-aware continuously recognize visceral reactions that we experience when we come into contact with certain people, and that some of these reactions may not be on the approved list. For example, I have developed both positive and negative associations with various ethnicities which consciously or unconsciously affect how I react to people, though without entailing rigid categories or unfair judgments on my part. For example, I grew up in a suburb of New York City inhabited by many lower-middle-class immigrants from Southern Italy, whom I generally found to be unrefined, and this association has stuck with me throughout my life. There was one family in particular that I got to know quite well which inadvertently encouraged stereotype formation. The mother doted on her two sons, and they could do practically whatever they liked. The older brother sometimes found it convenient to blow his nose on his bed sheet. The mother stayed home all day cooking and cleaning, and the father worked in the construction business in Queens. He drove a big black Cadillac, and I wouldn't be surprised if he had some connections with organized crime. They were nice enough people, but overall I developed a visceral dislike for the Southern Italians in the area. Later, when I lived near Chicago, I was exposed to a lot of Mexicans who mostly did landscaping or worked in restaurants. Although I came to respect their work ethic, it was obvious that the majority of them had little or no interest in becoming integrated members of American society, and they were operating within a self-imposed system of cultural isolation which made them relatively inaccessible to me. They generally seemed like poorly-educated lower class people who only wanted to work and be left alone.

In contrast to these somewhat negative reactions, I have more positive associations with some groups. The African blacks from Senegal and Liberia whom I met in college seemed intelligent, articulate and were often fun to be around. Later I worked with two Vietnamese refugees who were pleasant to encounter and seemed intelligent. My son-in-law, a Tibetan who grew up in Nepal, has a personality similar to my own. Although Americans comprise a highly mixed group, I usually place them somewhere in the middle in terms of positive and negative associations. On average there seems to be a dull, conformist, bovine quality to Americans that is hard to like but not particularly offensive. I also have mixed feelings about Northern Europeans even though I'm half English. My running theory is that the people who adapted to the harsh climate in Northern Europe may have become more cerebral than emotional, purely as a matter of survival, and as a result may have become emotionally stunted compared to Mediterraneans, who are generally more expressive.

Whether people admit it or not, they all have these kinds of reactions and take actions based on them. In my case this came into play in deciding where to live in retirement. I value low population density, an aesthetically desirable natural environment and an educated population, but as it has turned out I am also comfortable living in one of the least ethnically diverse states in the country. Vermont has a 96.4% white population, the highest of any state, though I didn't specifically consider this fact when deciding to move here. Our decision was based largely on an exploratory trip during which everyone whom we happened to encounter was white, and there were no Hispanics. We may still have chosen to move here if we had encountered different ethnic groups, but I think a case could be made for deep psychological influences underlying a preference for environments in which one feels an instinctive connection to the inhabitants, real or imagined.

The point here is that part of being human is having reactions like this, and the people who tell us to stop having them simply do not understand human nature. At best they are confusing the idea that all people must be treated equally, which is essentially a legal concept necessary to maintain fairness and order in a multicultural society, with an erroneous theory of human nature that denies the existence of known reactions that developed through an evolutionary process over the course of millions of years. Everyone has these reactions, and they are often harmless unless codified into a system such as Nazism, slavery, segregation or apartheid. In those instances the thought police, who directly benefited materially from the systems, created societies rife with inequality and unfairness. Unfortunately, the thought police in the U.S. today are just as likely to be associated with political correctness as with anything else. One may see this either as a misguided attempt by privileged liberals to put a stamp of authority on their sense of moral superiority or as a symptom of a collapsing society that attributes greater wisdom to the uninformed than they can possibly merit. Thankfully we are still able to laugh at political correctness or ignore it without going to jail.

What is Progress?

At this time of year the baby birds are leaving their nests and flying around confusedly. Yesterday an unkempt-looking little chickadee landed on the deck followed by its anxious parents, as if it were out trick-or-treating on Halloween in a dangerous neighborhood. The day before that, a baby goldfinch landed on the watering can that I was carrying and looked at me curiously for a minute before flying off. The babies of many species can be quite trusting before they learn the importance of fear.

By feeding the birds I am disrupting the local ecosystem. The goldfinch population, which constitutes the majority at the feeders, has grown over the last four years, and the trees in the vicinity are currently filled with bright yellow dots at certain times of day. They wait their turn at the feeder, and over time some of the branches have been denuded of foliage by the traffic. I'm going through about 320 pounds of sunflower kernels and 30 pounds of nyjer seed per year. The changes to the environment aren't that noticeable to me. There's now more prey available for hawks and cats, but small birds are hardly worth a hawk's effort, and there aren't many cats around. However, there are probably thousands of minute changes that you could detect if you did an in-depth study.

I don't think human populations behave all that differently from goldfinches. If you provide them with the essentials for living, all things being equal, their populations also increase. This is a phenomenon that the unpopular Thomas Malthus noticed over two hundred years ago. In current political thinking, talk of controlling human population growth intersects with racism, communism and any number of politically incorrect positions. I consider this one of the great paradoxes of our time: human population growth contributes to poverty, crime, political instability, war, pollution, climate change and mass extinctions, yet no one can discuss it without being labeled a racist, eugenicist or elitist of some sort. Illegal immigration to wealthy countries has become a fact of life, and few countries are currently able to deal with the problem effectively within their political systems.

While in some ways I am a liberal (e.g. I support Bernie Sanders), I often find this group collectively naïve about human nature. Specifically, it is a taboo to refer to people as animals even though they clearly are animals. Science increasingly shows that we are more like than unlike our fellow mammals. As I have remarked before, there is a denial of this fact embedded in our culture; it is associated with Christianity and Romanticism and oddly belies our professed belief in the separation of church and state. There seems to be an unrecognized assumption in society that man is better than nature despite the massive evidence to the contrary: man is nature, or, more precisely, part of it.

A little observation demonstrates that in broad biological terms humans aren't much different from goldfinches. Under the right environmental conditions both goldfinches and humans increase in population until factors rebalance their ecosystems. Both goldfinches and humans tend to exhibit the same basic behavior before and after population increases. Goldfinches continue to build nests, lay eggs, etc., and humans continue to build houses, have children, etc. Somehow in all of this humans are supposed to be making progress, and that is what I'm questioning here.

To be sure, there has been some progress within developed countries in terms of quality of life, health, longevity, education and knowledge, but at a more fundamental level there has been little change at all. The ideals and goals that people have now are hardly any different from those who lived during the Bronze Age. Agamemnon wanted a big house in a good location with protection from intruders, so did William the Conqueror, and so does Bill Gates. I am struck by what many wealthy people do with their money now: they build big houses in attractive locations just as wealthy people did three thousand years ago. Although it is never stated exactly as such, the American Dream implies that everyone has a right to own a large house in a pleasant location, and that is exactly how many people see it. This is easy to spot here in Vermont, to which about half of the population has moved from densely-populated regions in the Northeast, and many of them bought large retirement homes. In other words, the American Dream wouldn't quite work for them in Bayonne, Brooklyn, Bridgeport or Boston. In what way is this model an improvement for humanity, and is it sustainable?

This is sort of a "what's wrong with this picture?" post. If you live in the U.S. and absorb the ideas in circulation you may get the idea that this is a free country that encourages everyone to own a large house in a nice location and have as many children as they like. Has anyone, other than a few environmentalists, thought much about the impact of population growth? What will Vermont be like in fifty years if ten thousand new people move here every year? On a small scale I can simply stop feeding the goldfinches if they get out of control, but little attention is being paid to the much more significant problem of human population growth, which is already straining us with countless burdens.

This Blog

During the summer months I spend more time outside or away than during the winter, and though I have never been what would be considered a heavy reader I read even less now. This dries up my writing material a little, and I hope I'm not becoming too boring or repetitious. I enjoy writing, because it allows me to put down thoughts that I rarely see elsewhere. I believe that my thinking is more independent and less derivative than it is for most people, and I feel a need to counter the light entertainment, propaganda, brainwashing and conformity that I see everywhere else. From my vantage point, the narratives that one encounters in books, magazines, film, television and throughout the Internet tend to reinforce each other even as they present a version of reality that is distorted compared to what I see. Of course, you can always write me off as a disgruntled crank, but many of the things that I object to I object to deeply after considerable observation and reflection and an effort to be unbiased. I have no ax to grind about anything and consider myself fortunate.

As it is, you may have to put up with whatever eruptions burst from my brain, however coherent or incoherent they may be. Today I've been thinking about what the main theme of this blog is. It looks to me as if the central one is the illusions one maintains during one's life: if one has an open mind, one realizes that many assumptions made earlier, either explicitly or implicitly, were just plain wrong. In a way I am observing and thinking like a novelist such as Honoré de Balzac, but I am making explicit interpretations of situations, people and events rather than presenting them as stories left to the reader's judgment. Balzac understood his era well, but he certainly doesn't pass my concision test, and his writing sometimes seems clumsy. Yet he creates memorable realism with, for example, the relationship between Lucien de Rubempré and Madame de Bargeton in Lost Illusions. I found it hilarious when, after all the buildup and fanfare during their escapades in Angoulême, the two split up permanently the moment they arrive in Paris. Of course, this is all written with French sangfroid and none of the sentimentality that American readers prefer, and as in most literature no one is there to point out anything to you. I am the man on the street who is there to do it - in the real world.

Probably I'm more sensitive to the consequences of delusional thinking than most people because of the lives my parents led, as recounted earlier. If people were able to see into the future they would radically alter some of their decisions. My mother thought she was marrying a dashing war hero who would take her away to a prosperous life in England. As it was, from a combination of immaturity, war trauma and a big ego, my father was a business failure and dead at age fifty. My mother never remarried and worked in menial jobs up until age seventy-five, when her Alzheimer's symptoms became pronounced, all the while stockpiling money saved with the help of her wealthy boyfriend, who treated her like a mistress. Late in life she speculated that her parents had intentionally set her adrift in order to have one less mouth to feed in postwar Greece. Any lingering fond thoughts for my father had evaporated by then.

The conditions that anyone who is now reading this is living under are probably far better than those of postwar Europe, but the same kinds of mistakes are made over and over again, perhaps with less dramatic consequence. My impression is that many young people don't understand the world, and many adults aren't much better. Although adults become acclimated to the world with which they are familiar, they are still susceptible to making false assumptions about how conditions may change during the remainder of their lives. Thus my repeated warning that no one is running the show - and the title of the blog.

Anti-Science Bias

As I said earlier, when I was growing up I was more interested in math and science than in the humanities, but by the end of high school I took up the humanities instead. Looking back, I've occasionally wondered whether I ought to have continued in the sciences. It is impossible to know now whether I would have preferred a more technical career, but as the job market tightens now it appears to be in most people's interest to beef up on science and technology if they want good jobs in the future. I have been thinking for a long time about why people get turned off science and will say a few things on that topic.

I've noticed that even the greatest scientists often have other strong interests that have nothing to do with science. Isaac Newton owned and read more books in the humanities than in math and science. His most famous work, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which revolutionized physics and astronomy, contains few equations and follows a style similar to that of Euclid. He spent many years studying alchemy and mysticism, which today would place him among the ranks of the gullible. Albert Einstein also read widely and had hobbies such as playing the violin and sailing. In addition, as I mentioned earlier, many scientists write well - as well or better than many professional writers in the humanities - which indicates more than a superficial level of reading in non-scientific literature.

In the U.S. some parents are called "helicopter parents" and closely monitor their children in order to optimize their chances for success. The Asian "tiger moms" who have been in the news recently take radical steps to ensure that their children get top grades, particularly in math and the sciences. I consider these sociologically significant developments and think that these parents correctly recognize that their children will need this knowledge and the right credentials in order to have economically successful lives as adults if current trends continue. According to the "tiger mom" mentality, their children will become doctors and scientists or hold other top positions, while the children of many other parents will be doomed to lower-paying jobs or unemployment. This is interesting because even the wealthy class in the U.S. doesn't see things quite that way. Rather, the Bushes, the Kochs, the Rockefellers, etc., figure that they already have enough wealth and know how to keep it. Old money often becomes interested in the arts, charities or politics, and in most cases their children are set for life, making the relatively desperate behavior of "tiger moms" irrelevant from their point of view. One might argue that the rich are shortsighted in this instance, but I think that they represent some fundamental human features that aren't likely to disappear anytime soon.

My interpretation of this situation is that we are biologically and culturally predisposed to recognize and respond to the signals associated with high social status. While there is some recognition among wealthy Americans that their children need state-of-the-art educations that include science, they also recognize that the highest social status was once granted to those who didn't need to work and were, for example, merely conversant in the arts. The model in the U.S. dating from the nineteenth century and earlier has been to become fabulously wealthy by hook or by crook and then spend the remainder of your life demonstrating what good taste you have and what a nice person you are. These days, once rich, that often translates into buying ridiculously-priced art, building superfluous multi-million-dollar houses, funding research to cure AIDS, starting foundations to end child hunger, etc. The tastes among tech billionaires are a little different from those who were rich in the past, but the social function is little changed. A paradox seems to occur in parts of the upper middle class. These parents are not wealthy enough to be confident about the well-being of their children under many plausible future scenarios, and not all of them seem to have caught on to the fact that many of the professions could soon be downgraded with respect to income and social status. New software and outsourcing are already cutting into the pay of lawyers, and artificial intelligence may eventually cause a significant reduction in income among the medical and other professions. Some upper-middle-class parents still think that their children will do fine if they study, say, classics, art history or Romance languages, but economic reality is rapidly making that strategy implausible. In their case it seems as if obsolete social norms are doing their families a disservice.

Of course, in the U.S. in particular, there are more obvious sources of anti-science bias. As one of the ostensibly most Christian nations in the world, the U.S. is a stronghold for creationists and anthropogenic climate change deniers. There is also a lingering disruptiveness in the South emanating from the Civil War, making some Southerners behave like Luddites who, in a psychological sense, seem as if they would like to go back in time to the pre-industrial era during which their ancestors were able to become wealthy with slave labor. The South, though slowly modernizing, still possesses elements of willful anti-intellectualism that impede its economic and social progress and put it at odds with the developed world. Not much proof is needed to demonstrate that creationism is a pseudoscience that is best ignored, but it is still popular in the Bible Belt.

From an intellectual standpoint, the most interesting aspect of resistance to science has occurred in universities following C.P. Snow's introduction of the "two cultures" concept in 1959. Although I'm a long way from academia, there still seems to me to be an enormous rift between science and the humanities. They seem to be going their separate ways, with no shortage of enmity and little cooperation. I sometimes get the impression that the better scientists are more open-minded than the humanities academics who seem hell-bent on remaining scientifically illiterate, yet there are also a few presumptuous scientists who seem to have little understanding of the nuances of Western culture. The most arrogant and insensitive scientists use the successes of science to embellish their social prestige and don't always realize that they themselves have not escaped cultural paradigms that exist independently from the rationality that they claim to exemplify. The people who defend the humanities rightly recognize the importance to us of cultural history but at the extreme end do not represent openness to insights into reality that we would never have gained without scientific research. Extreme humanistic academics value culture so much more than science that they are comfortable living in a make-believe world that they erroneously believe can survive scientific scrutiny. As I wrote earlier, I believe that much of the popular thought in the Western tradition that pertains to ethics, political theory and human nature in general can be seen as warmed-over Christianity that harbors unquestioned theological dogma. While the worst scientific offenders are imperious bullies, the worst humanists are naïve fantasists.

To generally explain all of the above, I would say that we are in the process of an evolutionary transition. Although we are all instinctive scientists and observe and analyze the world from the moment that we are born, modern science fails to satisfy this instinct because it is too advanced and raises too many questions that we find threatening. It is one thing to invent the wheel but something else entirely to demonstrate precisely how we are related to chimpanzees. Until recently our scientific inquisitiveness did not conflict with our anthropocentric mythologies. People would rather not know that their behavior isn't all that different from that of chipmunks. Furthermore, science itself has become difficult and tedious. Gone are the days when a scientist could come up with a good idea and run experiments himself to prove whatever his theory might be. Now most scientists must diligently study abstruse topics for many years and then participate in large research teams whose projects may take decades to complete. It is possible to spend an entire career testing one theory that finally proves to be incorrect. Those who favor the humanities may not be wrong if they think that scientific jobs are like boring and meaningless desk jobs at a large corporation.

This tension regarding science may resolve itself in one of two ways. On the one hand, it is possible that the current pressures to make people more scientific will continue, and top scientists will become the leaders of society by virtue of their command of the relevant subjects. On the other hand, technology may reach a point where scientific research will be carried out through artificial intelligence, leaving people free to spend their time however they choose. I am inclined to think the latter will occur, because we are already going through scientific burnout and our brains are hitting limits that we never encountered in the past. We are good at being primates, and at the moment we are hesitant about becoming more intelligent than we have ever been. However, it is important to keep in mind that evolution has no predetermined path, and we may have big surprises in store.

In Praise of Concision

Among the features of this blog that I would find attractive if it were written by someone else are the brevity of the posts and the emphasis on getting to the point. As a reader I frequently find other writers loquacious and unfocused. From my point of view, many of the articles and books that I read are more than twice as long as they ought to be and sometimes border on unintelligibility. There are many explanations for this, and I'll touch on a few of them here.

Sometimes the fault may be mine: perhaps I don't get it when others do. That probably occurs occasionally, but most likely in specialties with which I am unfamiliar. Of course, I may be more stupid than I realize, a common human error, but for general reading I don't think comprehension is much of a problem if you are literate: when in doubt you can always look things up. I suppose that it might also be argued that my preference for concision is a matter of personal taste and may not apply to everyone. However, what I'm complaining about has to do with unnecessarily fuzzy thoughts and the insensitivity and bad manners associated with wasting someone else's time. A case can be made for unusually verbose authors such as Proust, but even there I think he would have benefited from heavy editing. I'm about halfway through In Search of Lost Time, which I started several years ago, and it may take an act of will to resume reading it. It is surely no coincidence that in person Proust's acquaintance, Claude Debussy, a far greater artist in my opinion, found him "long-winded." Though Proust writes well, I believe that his standing will decline when the mystique currently in vogue wears off. I am willing to cut some slack for writers who display an unusual sensitivity to language. It is true, however, that my interests and background incline me to favor "the short version." As a philosophy student in the Anglo-American tradition, I was encouraged not to waste words. Most of my career in the printing industry required me to write short, accurate instructions that were followed in manufacturing plants where a mistake could cost thousands of dollars in losses. Furthermore, business school taught me the importance of "the executive summary."

These caveats aside, I have to say that a lot of what I read is quite disappointing. In an earlier post I commented on commercial writing, which I believe is a very large part of the problem. The length of an article is generally going to be determined by a publisher's requirement to fill a certain space, whether virtual or printed, and this constricts the author from the outset. Regardless of the real interest of a topic or an author's knowledge of the subject, you are going to get a predetermined number of words. In this context, you might, for example, get a circuitous two thousand word essay instead of a simple "He was a minor prewar English poet whom no one ever read or should read now." This example pertains to what one encounters in literary publications such as the TLS, LRB or NYRB and calls attention to the vapidity of much literary discourse, which has become a type of pseudo-intellectualism. But pure academic writing may be worse yet. In that you are likely to encounter unnecessary jargon and references which serve mainly to demonstrate the author's knowledge; he has dedicated his life to the rote memorization of obscure facts and jazzed them up for publication with convoluted language that passes for astute analysis. While some academic writing, particularly in technical subjects, remains precise, the humanities seem to be riddled with verbal legerdemain. To explain this phenomenon one need look no further than the number of PhDs in the humanities and the "publish or perish" pressures that they live with professionally. Unfortunately we now have thousands of academics combing the same barren ground for increasingly insignificant material long after the best of it has been harvested. You could probably write a PhD on Charles Dickens's underwear.

Popular writing seems to have become a little shorter over the years. In this area my complaints have more to do with quality, and one would not expect popular authors to write better books than their readers could appreciate. Thus, a reader who is not aesthetically challenged is likely to be disappointed not only with popular television programs, magazines and films, but with the works of popular authors. Within the broad field of fiction and nonfiction, literary fiction fits into a special category of its own. You might say that over the last fifty years fiction in the U.S. has become a managed industry. Bestsellers are controlled by major publishers with no academic involvement, while literary fiction is publicized subject to approval by academics and prize juries. Literary fiction represents an incestuous relationship between academia and the publishing industry that in my opinion tosses artistic merit to the wind.

To sum up, serious readers seek writers who say interesting things concisely, without fuss, diversion or subterfuge, and in a better world that would not be such a rarity.

Writers

In a review of the late poet John Berryman, August Kleinzahler says:
For what seemed a lengthy spell, from the late 1950s well into the 1970s, the standard-bearers of American poetry were a group of manic depressive exhibitionists working largely, if not exclusively, in traditional metre and rhyme schemes, analysands all, and with self-inflating personae that always reminded me of those giant balloons of Mickey Mouse and Pluto with Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. They published and reviewed one another in journals like the Nation, Partisan Review, the Kenyon Review and Sewanee Review, with a good deal of auto-canonising. Robert Lowell, almost by default it seemed, was ceded pride of place, the 'most important American poet now at work'. Lowell and Randall Jarrell, roommates at Kenyon College in the 1930s, and to a lesser extent Berryman too, were big on rating and ranking: the top three poets, the top three oyster houses or second-basemen, the three best Ibsen plays–they seemed especially to like the number three.

It has always seemed somewhat arbitrary to me how connections and self-promotion, especially among male American writers, have often led to successful careers. Perhaps because I am less suggestible than many as to what counts as good writing, I frequently find that esteemed writer so-and-so just plain stinks, and I then start thinking about how on earth he or she succeeded. It is not uncommon for college buddies to promote each other as described by Kleinzahler. Of course, going to the right college probably makes a difference. In my last foray into American poetry I noticed that quite a few recent poets attended Harvard, Stanford, Columbia, Yale or Princeton: Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, W.S. Merwin, Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, Mark Strand, Robert Pinsky, Robert Haas, William Matthews, Sharon Olds, Louise Glück and J.D. McClatchy. Although poetry seems to be getting more diverse, it still looks as if connections at major universities help a lot.

Four of my undergraduate acquaintances once seemed to be aspiring writers, and I suppose that is fairly common among English majors. The college was better known for producing journalists, not novelists or poets, though the successful writer Barbara Kingsolver happened to attend it - majoring in biology. None of the four actually became writers, though they did produce some writing, which I saw much later and left me unimpressed. One of them became an insurance salesman and apparently sold an insurance policy to Saul Bellow. Another worked for years at a psychiatric hospital near San Francisco. One had mental problems and hardly ever worked: he became a ward of the State of California. The one I knew best seemed depressed all of his life, never married, worked as a bond trader in Chicago and died young from lung cancer. For all I know, under slightly different circumstances, the four of them might have become famous writers.

I am not personally acquainted with any successful writers, and it is hard for me to generalize about them. Most of what I now read is just journalism, and my expectations in fiction and poetry are quite low. Biographies and other types of nonfiction are more reliable for my purposes. It seems as if the most successful fiction writers are small businesses with carefully designed products made to suit large audiences. The better writers, in the U.S. at least, now seem to live in the university gulag, which offers them a semblance of job security at the cost of depriving them of diverse experiences and making them more predictable than they might otherwise be. As far as I know, there is no current equivalent to the Beats, though I'm not sure that their work was memorable either. Like Berryman, Lowell and Jarrell, they were good at self-promotion and several had good academic connections.

Rather than rehashing some of my earlier posts, I'll just say that most of the American writers that I come across produce work that is unsatisfactory to me. Whenever I find someone interesting - Julio Ramón Ribeyro or Patrick Chamoiseau - they are almost unknown here. Apparently the American marketplace and the American mind that drives it are more than a little insipid.

Politics I

Politics is a topic that I'd rather not think about, but we're entering the in-your-face phase of the 2016 U.S. elections and I would like to summarize some of my ideas in order to help clear them from my brain. The way the media handles this is something like nonstop Super Bowl coverage, and I may soon have to refrain from following the news.

In my view, the American political system is a hopeless attempt to simulate democratic participation that could only work on a much smaller scale with culturally homogeneous people and no class distinctions, including wealth differentiation. Not only does the U.S. encompass a large, culturally varied population, but corporations have long played a role in elections and are now de facto people themselves, with significantly greater political influence than any individuals. During my life I've lived in a variety of states, and the influence of businesses on the state governments has been obvious. Wealthy, industrialized states such as New York and Illinois tend to have business-dominated legislatures and high levels of corruption, whereas smaller, non-industrialized states such as Vermont and Oregon have legislatures that more closely represent the population and are generally less corrupt. On the whole, I find the Vermont government satisfactory, and I attribute this to the state's unindustrialized status and its well-educated population. There is no basis for thinking that the political environment in Vermont could easily be replicated in most other states.

As it is, I find the American presidential elections embarrassingly stupid. No matter who wins, the next president will be indebted to corporate contributors and other special interests. Whatever ideas any candidate may have, all presidents are constricted by the explicit or implicit commitments that they made to contributors. This partially explains why Barack Obama has not been much different from George W. Bush and why even the likable Bill Clinton was pro-business and anti-populist. There is little reason to expect that Hillary Clinton would represent any change in thinking from what has been going on in politics here for the last fifty years.

Although I don't think this is a popular opinion among my readers, the goal ought to be to automate government as much as possible, and this would be much easier to do if the capitalist economy were either modified or eliminated. An example of my thesis that humans are ignorant animals is that it is currently difficult for Americans to imagine a life in which they are not chasing paychecks, even when humans throughout most of their existence were not chasing paychecks. There were no employers or currencies before the last ice age, and about ninety percent of our time as a species was spent during that period. If you took business interests out of the equation, I think it would be relatively simple to organize society according to rational rules that could be made into algorithms. We may not yet be at a technological level where capitalism could be drawn to a close, but that may be closer than you think.

What I find annoying about political debate is that technology as I am describing it never seems to be considered. In the U.S., you are supposed to be either a Democrat, implying acceptance of capitalism but with attention paid to the less fortunate, or a Republican, implying acceptance of capitalism with no attention paid to the less fortunate. The only other positions Americans seem to recognize are communism, which they think results in collapsed economies and autocratic leaders, or theocracies, in which the women have no rights and are, for example, required to wear burkas. When you leave technology out of the discussion, you neglect the important fact that human labor is gradually becoming obsolete, with inexpensive technology permanently replacing people at an accelerating pace. I certainly have no difficulty imagining machines doing a better job at governing than the elected officials I've observed throughout my life.

There are too many variables in play to predict exactly how humanity will evolve over the next fifty to one hundred years. Among those are political instability, war, global warming, economic shocks and unmanaged population growth. A fairly probable scenario is that, at least among the developed countries, the need for human labor will decline significantly, even without radical changes such as the development of super-intelligence. Super-intelligence is in a class by itself, because it could result in technological change far in excess of what we currently anticipate. But even short of that, it is clear that social changes will have to occur if people no longer work or corporations as we know them cease to exist. It is quite possible that, as paid human labor declines, taxation will have to be increased sufficiently to prevent social collapse. If people can't find a living wage and the government doesn't support them, how else will they survive? The main alternative is the two-class system that you see in dystopian futuristic films, with a cruel ruling elite and impoverished masses at their mercy. It is plausible that the governments of developed countries will be forced to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations to such a high level that the incentive to work primarily for money will evaporate. If that occurs, all of the economic competition and exploitation that we currently see as normal could end.

From my point of view, the national politics that we witness in the U.S. is primarily about wealth redistribution, and the wealthy are winning. To be sure, many other issues are addressed in Washington, but that is barely audible chatter and is drowned out by the roaring torrents of money awash there.