The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk

The Centre for the Study of Existential Risk seems like one of the best ideas I've heard in years. It is a fairly new organization and is based in Cambridge, UK. Recent articles in Wired profile its members and the specific risks that they study. For me, the Centre kills two birds with one stone: it attempts both to understand the universe and to identify the most serious risks facing mankind. What is unusual is that it studies actual threats that are often ignored by governments and profit-based organizations. One of the greatest weaknesses of capitalism is its emphasis on short time periods. Capitalists usually start by thinking that they can make money through their ideas and hard work, and that if all goes well they, their families and their descendants may benefit financially. Entrepreneurs don't typically give much thought to whether their company will be around in a hundred years or what its lasting impact might be. Capitalism encourages short-term thinking related to making money, which may explain why businessmen are often dismissive of the arts and sciences. Particularly in the U.S., it is common for them to focus on their work and to oversimplify other aspects of the world by assuming, for example, that God will take care of everything else. In extreme cases they may even believe that God favors business, with the implication that government should not interfere with it. Their thinking may be that God intended the U.S. to be the world's model for free enterprise. If you start from a theological point of view like this, the problems associated with climate change aren't necessarily ones for human resolution, since God's will is being followed, and he is the final arbiter on that question. It is therefore important to have independent researchers study existential risk, because the people who inhabit the main channels of power in the world are wedded to economic prosperity and may be indifferent to it or have conflicts of interest.

I enjoy reading through the list of risks. When I mention AI, I usually refer to it as a potential solution to problems, but it may also lead to catastrophic outcomes. There are a few conventional risks that are already well-publicized, such as pandemics, nuclear war, climate change, a collision with an asteroid and food shortages. Then there are obscure ones understood by few, such as the accidental annihilation of the universe during a particle accelerator experiment. I was particularly reassured by CSER's interest in tyrannical leaders. After Donald Trump was elected president, they met to discuss whether this constituted an existential threat. Many organizations are having a hard time coming to terms with the Trump presidency, and although the news has been filled with concerns about him since the election, conventional organizations are not well-positioned to make objective, public statements about him now that he is in power. Everyone has been pressured to treat Trump respectfully because he was elected in a democratic process, and many organizations are reluctant to publicly question his suitability or competence as a political leader.

Though it is hard to say how successful CSER will be, it is better than nothing for the risks that aren't generally studied. Their academic environment has both advantages and disadvantages. If the funding isn't predominantly from special interests, it may stand a better chance of producing useful, objective work than is the case with many other public or private research organizations. However, its affiliation with stodgy, careerist academics could entail some of the pitfalls that are common in academia. For example, given my opinion of academic philosophy, I think it unlikely that philosophers as a group will be helpful in this field.

Diary

I've been reading the current print edition of Nautilus, which contains an article by Michael Lewis titled "Bias in the ER." The medical doctor, Don Redelmeier, became interested in the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman on cognitive distortions and found that doctors are subject to the same errors as others and frequently misdiagnose patients. This was reassuring to me since I have avoided doctors for most of my life and hope to do so in the future. I also know people who have self-diagnosed and self-treated conditions that doctors were unable to identify. Apparently it is not uncommon for medical doctors to make extremely poor decisions.

For obvious reasons, I have been thinking recently about the competence of politicians. In the current literature about Trump, there are theories regarding the causes of his recent behavior that range from narcissistic personality disorder to early dementia to syphilis, but you don't necessarily need to find an exotic explanation in his case. I think that he is behaving much as he always has and has probably been incompetent outside a very narrow range of situations for most of his life. As far as I can tell, he was never particularly bright but was able to compensate for this by cultivating a veneer of success and by aggressively confronting his adversaries. He is a perfect of example of an alpha male who succeeds by intimidation where more competent people often fail. You might even say in this instance that Trump was elected by his fellow stupid alpha males who also think that they know more than they actually do.

The sad thing is that, because of general human incompetence, there is no alternative hero on the horizon who might rescue us from Trump. Think for a moment about Barack Obama. He was more cerebral than Trump and carefully mulled over his decisions, but that was not enough to make him an effective or memorable president. He inadvertently alienated the voters who prefer Trump's style, and while doing so he was unable to propose or implement ideas that might have set the country on a sustainable path to prosperity and equality. Obama's problem was that he looked, acted and thought like a neoliberal college professor, and his worldview was in some respects just as biased and limited as Trump's. The job of president is difficult, and it is probably too difficult for anyone to execute well at this stage in our civilization.

Besides the above reading, I watched a depressing but sobering French film called "The Measure of a Man," starring Vincent Lindon. It depicts a middle-aged married man who has a handicapped son and is struggling to find a job. His financial counselor advises him to take out a life insurance policy as a solution to his unemployment – he may die but at least his family would be provided for. He ends up as a store detective and hates it. The film clearly shows that the way the store is managed dehumanizes everyone, regardless of race or ethnicity, both customers and employees, and is a better indictment of capitalism than one is likely to find in any American film. There has been a popular undercurrent in France that is sympathetic with communist rule, but nothing of that nature exists on any scale in the U.S. Ironically – and accurately – this film depicts the outcome of capitalism as similar to the dreaded communist outcome that Americans have been taught to fear through indoctrination since the 1950's. American politicians in both major parties are so far behind the curve that all they can do is mindlessly repeat how capitalism and liberty are the solution to all of the world's problems. Clearly they are not. Conceptually, Trump isn't entirely different from Obama or Hillary Clinton.

Diary

William, the cat, is adjusting to our domestic situation very slowly. Unlike most of the cats in my experience, he has strong tendencies to behave like a wild animal. He has tremendous amounts of energy that can only be expended by hunting outdoors for several hours each day. Even with cold weather and a foot of snow on the ground he would rather stalk birds outside than look at them through a window or play with cat toys. When you try to distract him with a toy he immediately notices that it is inanimate and is attached to an animate object – your hand – which becomes the target. In the absence of birds, mice, moles, voles and insects, he tends to stalk human hands and feet, which does not pose a problem for me, since I am always alert, but it does for others. In most respects he is like typical house cats: he thinks I'm his mother, likes to sit on my lap, and purrs and rubs against me. We have tried to get him to eat canned cat food because of the moisture content, but he refuses to eat it and loves dry food. As long as he drinks enough water he should stay healthy. In the warmer months he was eating some of the mice that he caught – I found mouse intestines and a heart in the yard. There is some risk that he could be attacked by a coyote or a bobcat, but he would put up a good fight. When he hears the coyotes howling in the distance he becomes cautious.

Cats were never fully domesticated, so you should expect a certain amount of wildness in them. However, the practice of neutering has caused the current population of domestic cats to reflect a wilder recent ancestry than was the case a few years ago. Before neutering became widespread, an adopted kitten was more likely to have been the descendant of several generations of house cats. Now, because of neutering, domestic cats are more likely to have recent feral ancestors, since a larger percentage of the current reproductive cat population is feral. The feral cats in rural areas like ours closely resemble their distant ancestors with their solitary hunting of wild prey in natural settings. Unlike most domestic cats a few years ago, William may have feral parents or grandparents.

I am still following the American political situation, with Trump's demise now looming sooner than I would have thought two months ago. Until recently there was a sense that we might have a major fascist government in store for us. After all, Hitler was in power 72 years ago and Stalin was in power 64 years ago – we were due for another fascist! However, Trump has already demonstrated that he has neither the ideological resolve nor the political skill to make any lasting impact. If you compare him to the previous American political ideologue, Ronald Reagan, he lacks the experience, the fealty to big business and the charisma to orchestrate anything significant. He can't even manage his own cabinet, and the power brokers in Washington are being forced into the realization that Trump is just a windbag who, with a lucky turn of events, just barely managed to squeeze himself into the White House. If it hasn't already, it will soon be recognized by nearly everyone that Trump does not serve their interests. His presidency will seem like a pilot for a reality TV program that got low ratings and was canceled.

My reading continues to be limited. The Philippe Roger book contains many interesting facts and a good historical perspective, but I'm only reading it in spurts. I decided that it was time to read some Jared Diamond, who seems to be another of the major thinkers of our era. My primary living intellectual hero is still E.O. Wilson, but his ideas seem to be going out of favor and he does not have a comparable successor. For the time being, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond, will have to do.

Diary

At the moment I'm not engrossed with any reading material and have been occupied with other thoughts. Looking into the future, it seems to me that historians, sociologists and economists don't possess privileged knowledge, since we are living in an unprecedented time, and when you combine that with the fact that they don't understand the present all that well you are probably justified in thinking that you can figure things out just as well as they can. Another way of saying this is that the economists who currently advise countries and businesses on how to plan their futures will all be unemployed if capitalism collapses. Even if economists had been following the scientific method, they would still have no authoritative literature for an environment in which capitalism is no longer dominant.

A potential dark family secret recently came to light which I am in the process of investigating. It requires a DNA test, and I have submitted my DNA to Ancestry.com and am awaiting the results, which should confirm or disprove my theory, which I am not at liberty to discuss here. In the meantime I am updating my family tree for entertainment. The Ancestry.com database continues to grow, and it has become easier to find and identify relatives than when I started a few years ago. There was a mystery in my ex-wife's family that I now think I've explained. One of her grandmothers was abandoned by her parents in childhood and was brought up by a half-sister of her mother. She may never have seen her mother or father again, and when her own children were growing up, whenever her grandmother visited she led them to believe that she was their grandmother. Otherwise, I have been supplementing my English genealogy, though it is still hard to find much before 1800. As of the mid-nineteenth century my English ancestors were tailors, furriers, plumbers and teachers. Prior to that they were farmers and carpenters. They lived in Scotland, Yorkshire, Warwickshire, Oxfordshire, Surrey, Hampshire and London. The only information that I can find on my Armenian ancestors is my grandfather's U.S. Social Security record: he lived briefly in the U.S. and worked in Indiana. Many countries have kept few records, and certainly there aren't many for Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. I have Armenian cousins still living in Greece and will find out what they know. One of my great-grandmothers was born in Germany and grew up in Paris, but I can't find anything about her family background. Genealogical research is not the most important of activities, but, like astronomy and geology, it enables one to see how ephemeral one's life is.

It is impossible to avoid hearing about Donald Trump without living in a cave, so I am making the most of it by speculating on how his administration might implode. That seems more likely than not, and it may just be a matter of time. I think Putin probably has the goods on him and has adopted a wait-and-see approach. Some of Trump's cabinet picks are competent people who may butt heads with him in the future. His top advisor, Steve Bannon, is a complete disaster from an ideological standpoint and may have to be demoted or fired at some point due to political pressure. Meanwhile, the Republicans in Congress are attempting to use Trump to advance their agenda, but if he falls too far out of line they will rein him in. The most notable effect so far of the Trump presidency has been the galvanization against him of the news media and nearly all educated people. Even Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, correctly stated that most Americans can't sleep at night with Trump in the White House. The politically correct set centered in college and university towns has gone berserk and will be relentlessly organizing counter-Trump measures until he's gone. There is always the possibility that Trump will reinvent himself as a more palatable persona, but I don't think he has the temperament, flexibility or talent to deter his growing army of foes. Many in Congress already consider him unstable and dangerous but are holding their tongues for now.

Diary

I've been reading How Will Capitalism End?, by Wolfgang Streeck, and had hoped that by now I would be farther into it. Unfortunately it is written in an academic style that would make Richard Feynman's head spin, and I find myself translating many of the sentences to enhance their intelligibility as I read, which slows down the process considerably. Moreover, the padding with academic baggage reminds me of my brief period as a philosophy graduate student, when I kept saying to myself "Am I supposed to find this interesting?" I dropped out after two quarters. Nevertheless, Streeck's subject is one of the most important problems facing mankind, and, oddly, it seems to be an obscure field that attracts little attention.

In the view of Streeck and his colleagues, capitalism has always been unstable, with a tendency to disintegrate. He sees the current form of neoliberal capitalism as irreversibly unstable and in the early stages of permanent collapse. The underlying "systemic disorders" he identifies are "stagnation, oligarchic redistribution, the plundering of the public domain, corruption and global anarchy." The book offers a far wider analysis of the scenario discussed by Thomas Piketty and is an important contribution to the field, but I am finding Streeck's reliance on Marxist concepts grating, because I prefer to think in rough biological terms, which have a distinct empirical element that was mostly absent in early sociological thought.

The phenomena described by Streeck are quite apparent, and you can see them playing out in real time. The election of Donald Trump after the publication of the book is a perfect example, because Trump represents the first American president to resemble a Russian oligarch. However, Trump has already demonstrated his incompetence as an oligarch and is doomed to fail, because his singularity of purpose – public admiration – is not accompanied by the knowledge or skill to control the U.S. government. Sooner or later his supporters, who were in a minority to begin with, will lose faith in him, and he will be swept out of office before you know it. Nevertheless, the sentiment that Trump exploited in order to get elected will still be present, and Streeck's analysis will hold up if a more competent oligarch emerges after Trump is gone.

Rather than think in terms such as "class solidarity," which are faintly ludicrous to me, I prefer to think in terms of organisms and resources. Humans are very good at exploiting resources – so good that they often deplete them entirely and are forced to find new ones elsewhere. We are living in an era in which a mythology surrounding the concept of capitalism gives it the aura of imparting eternal life. It is no coincidence that this mythology originated in the U.S., which is the only major world power that still embraces Christianity. Unfortunately, there is nothing magic about capitalism, and we are seeing this now, with markets exploited to their maximum doomed to diminishing future returns. It is true that once upon a time there were major markets that took many decades to exploit fully, such as the market for automobiles. Those markets are becoming rarer, which helps explain why the financial services sector has grown so much of late: it is one of a very small number of existing markets where large profits are still possible, and it depends to some degree on the theft of public funds for those profits. The Great Recession, the lack of accountability on Wall Street and the attempt by Donald Trump to eliminate regulations designed to prevent a repeat all fit Streeck's narrative perfectly.

Streeck and his colleagues differ on when the final collapse will occur, but the most pessimistic think it will be by mid-century. They seem to be at a loss when it comes to what will replace the current system and how the transition will occur. I still believe that there may be technological solutions that could solve all of the problems if they are not abused. This is where I think biological thinking opens a window that professional sociologists may not recognize. I notice that the kinds of people who are extremely successful in technological fields these days tend to project strong eusocial beliefs when it comes to the future of mankind. They often go overboard in supporting programs to help humanity and ostensibly show little similarity to the robber barons of yore or Donald Trump, who himself seems to be a misguided anachronism. As long as humans remain human, a permanent dystopian outcome is not inevitable.

Diary

I continue to be distracted by political events here but would rather not be, considering how ignorant the perpetrators are. It would be possible to use this as yet another example of the problematic nature of democracy within the context of capitalism, but I've already written about that and have drawn my own conclusions, and the weaknesses of the system are so obvious to me that they require no further discussion. How an intellectually bankrupt narcissist became "the leader of the free world" is going to keep pundits talking for decades, but I'd simply like to be rid of Trump as soon as possible, preferably by means of a humiliating impeachment.

At the moment I am receiving some solace from those intelligent Frenchmen of the past who noticed far better than contemporary Americans how distasteful life in the U.S. can be. As Philippe Roger writes:

It seemed extraordinary to the French (and even more so to literary Parisians) that people could go live over there without being forced to by the most stark necessity of blatant disgrace. "If I stay there for a year, I will die," Talleyrand wrote Madame de Staël. The fact that America could wrench such a heartfelt cry from the most rakish of political expatriates must have made an impression on his illustrious correspondent. Talleyrand's despair was not disingenuous. It was fairly common in the small but turbulent French colony of Pennsylvania: there was a general sense of withering away, pining for Paris, loss of any sense of existence. Whether it was hell on earth or an eternal limbo, the United States engulfed exiles so completely that if by chance one reappeared, it was as though he had come back from the dead....

Talleyrand had hardly set foot onto American soil in 1794 when he took a sudden dislike to the country for which he had fled the radicalizing Revolution. He poured out caustic remarks at dinners in Philadelphia and the émigré meetings that gathered in Moreau de Saint-Méry's bookstore and printshop....His frustration at finding himself both far from public affairs and unsuccessful in financial dealings he had thought would be lucrative were what lay behind his bitterness that was mostly aimed at the mediocrity of American life. Talleyrand was bored to death in hidebound Philadelphia for lack of entertainment and intrigues, banquets and banter. He was also so wasted by the anemic environment that, according to La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt , he ended up making "dutiful little witticisms no one appreciates." Spiteful toward the Americans, he found them, in turn, generally hostile to the French. Liancourt noted that it was "impossible to have a worse opinion of them in all regards, or to speak worse of them" than Talleyrand.

Not much has changed in the attitudes of the French toward the Americans, or vice versa, in more than two hundred years. To this day most Americans would be incredulous if anyone told them that they were comparatively crude, unsophisticated or second-rate, because, according to their criteria for evaluation, they are collectively wealthier than the French and therefore, by definition, they are superior. It would, for example, be self-evident to Donald Trump that the French are "losers."

You already know how I think this situation should be resolved, so I won't harp on it, but just to recap, my hope is that artificial intelligence will one day provide better governance than people have been able to effectuate on their own throughout history and up to the present.

Diary

I'm sorry to say that even I am finding the Trump presidency somewhat disturbing. Ordinarily it has been easier for me to ignore politicians who seem disagreeable or incompetent, but Trump is off the scale when it comes to bad judgment. His style is reminiscent of politicians during the McCarthy era, which had ended by the time I arrived in the U.S. and I never witnessed firsthand. In his case it is as if a gorilla has escaped from the local zoo, and, due to confusion and jurisdictional disputes among the authorities, the gorilla remains at large, terrorizing old ladies and children. Trump's repeated denial of proven facts brings to mind the worst dictators and can only be resolved either by the establishment of a de facto dictatorship or by his voluntary or involuntary departure from office. Unfortunately it may take as many as four years to be rid of him. Since I don't believe in nationalism or think that Trump's long-term effect will be significant, I am less concerned than others whom I know. However, his behavior is always attention-grabbing, and one would have to avoid the news entirely in order to escape his daily offenses.

This atmosphere has caused me to curtail my reading, but I've managed to read a little of The American Enemy, by Philippe Roger, which was mentioned by Tony Judt. It is written in a scholarly style that flunks my concision test, because Roger repeats himself and takes forever to get to the point. He also, like many scholars, neglects to tell you up front the dates associated with various people, which makes it more difficult for the reader to piece together the fragments of information. As far as I've read, he has discussed Georges Louis Leclerc, compte de Buffon (1707-1788), the French naturalist; Cornelius De Pauw (1739-1799), the Dutch geographer; and Guillaume Thomas Raynal (1719-1796), the French writer. These three, despite never having traveled to the Americas, wrote extensively about them and spread misinformation that lasted for several decades. Somehow they thought that all growth here was stunted, and that humans accordingly never developed properly and had low reproductive rates. They concluded that any Europeans who settled in the Americas would also degenerate physically. To support their ideas they came up with some real doozies, such as that the Biblical flood had left salt on the land, which inhibited growth. Thomas Jefferson became the defender of his country and wrote extensively to counter these claims; he even had a moose shot, stuffed and sent to Buffon in Paris in order to prove that large animals exist here. This book is filled with entertaining information covering several centuries, and I may read it intermittently. Up to a point, reading about national hubris of the past can be amusing, but when you have to live with it in the present it can become depressing.

I've ordered a copy of How Will Capitalism End?, by Wolfgang Streeck, which is more up my alley and is a more serious subject which I think we'll be hearing about increasingly in the years ahead.

The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution

This book, published in 2009, was written by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, two of the authors of the study of intelligence among Ashkenazi Jews cited earlier. It is an expansion of the ideas behind that hypothesis and attempts to show that human evolution is ongoing and did not, as many believe, stop about 40,000 years ago. They argue that the rate of evolutionary change in humans has increased since the end of the last ice age, about 10,000 years ago, and that this change has been driven primarily by the shift from a hunter-gatherer subsistence to an agricultural subsistence. Although I find most of their arguments persuasive, their placement of biology ahead of culture as an explanation for certain human characteristics has caused them to be labeled as racists by some. The book was not widely reviewed, but still seems to have developed somewhat of a cult following. Generally, it is consistent with many of the positions that I've taken in this blog, and I consider it to be an admirable effort to place scientific investigation ahead of unfounded academic ideology, though it may prove to be incorrect in some respects. I'll summarize it and then comment broadly on the detractors of this kind of thinking and how their objections may be resolved.

Several pages are devoted to the Neanderthals, who were, as of the time of writing, suspected of interbreeding with the first wave of humans to enter Europe. Since the book was written, that has been confirmed, with some modern humans inheriting and retaining immunity genes from Neanderthals, which is consistent with the theorizing of the authors. In general, it is becoming increasingly possible to study such matters with the help of advances in molecular biology. The heart of the book concerns the development of agriculture, which the authors believe created new evolutionary pressures among humans. On the one hand, food became more consistently available, but on the other hand farming made certain new abilities and skills advantageous. Previously, hunter-gatherers had little use for private property and escaped contact with many diseases through their nomadic existence. Because farming made them stationary, their populations grew and their proximity to livestock exposed them to new diseases, the authors speculate that immunity to disease became an important biological adaptation. Furthermore, humans were pressured to develop systems for the protection of private property, since their immobility made them more vulnerable to the theft of their food supplies. Eventually, as agricultural systems became prevalent, civilization led to governments and record-keeping. In the authors' view, genetic changes emerged during the process.

The principal example of genetic change cited is the development of lactose tolerance, which occurred more than once during this period. With a constant supply of digestible dairy milk, it became possible for populations to increase dramatically in size during a short period of time. Once large, concentrated populations came into being, it became possible for more mutations to occur over shorter periods of time, and new alleles which conferred greater fitness spread rapidly. Much of the book describes real-world genetics and gene flow. The analysis contrasts with ones such as that of Jared Diamond, who argued in Guns, Germs and Steel that cultural changes associated with food production gave those groups an advantage over other groups. Cochran and Harpending believe that natural selection occurred, that there is a genetic basis for the changes and that since then there has been a change in cognition and personality traits that conferred an advantage to those groups. Specifically, they claim that the people who first transitioned away from a nomadic life had an advantage which eventually led them to develop modern science and to initiate the Industrial Revolution. While their view can be interpreted as racist, they present it as a scientific hypothesis that has conceptual merit in its own right. They believe that the societies which practiced agriculture for the longest periods became genetically different from societies which adopted agriculture later on. As they explain:

Human evolution didn't stop when anatomically modern humans appeared, or when they expanded out of Africa. It never stopped – and why would it? Evolutionary stasis requires a static environment, whereas behavioral modernity is all about innovation and change. Stability is exactly what we have not had. That should be obvious, but instead the human sciences have labored under the strange idea that evolution stopped 40,000 years ago.

When it comes to identifying the actual groups that underwent this evolution, the book is a little unclear. The authors posit the main group as the one that first adopted the Indo-European language, also known as the Proto-Indo-Europeans. They are even murkier when it comes to identifying the actual alleles that behaviorally differentiated them from other humans. The most specific example of recent evolution offered is the one concerning inherited intelligence among Ashkenazi Jews, and though they associate this with alleles related to certain diseases, they are short on proof. However, this writing is primarily of a theoretical nature and serves mainly as a guide to future research.

On some fronts Cochran and Harpending have been attacked as racists. Cochran is probably safe professionally, since he is a self-employed physicist. Harpending was a professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of Utah and died last year from a stroke. However, they have received some positive recognition, and Steven Pinker, the cognitive scientist, supports their theory of Ashkenazim intelligence. Although I am ideologically neutral, I am shocked by the extent to which political correctness has infiltrated the world of American intellectuals. Stephen Jay Gould, the well-known paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, argued, incorrectly in the view of the authors, that human evolution could not have occurred since humans left Africa, because that was too short a time span. He also went overboard in discrediting IQ tests, which, though imperfect, do have some use and have shown that intelligence is more the result of inheritance than cultural environment. Another offender has been the evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin, who argued against sociobiology and popularized the idea that 85 per cent of human genetic variation occurs within groups as compared to 15 percent between groups, supporting the idea that all modern humans are basically the same. On this, Cochran and Harpending say:

Using the same reasoning that Lewontin applied in his argument about human populations, one would have to conclude that differences between individual Great Danes must be greater than the average difference between Great Danes and Chihuahuas.

Lewontin may technically be correct if you count all genes, but there is a lot of junk to be found in genes, and it is misleading to lump in the critical genes of an organism with ones that serve no known function. Gould and Lewontin represent the liberal dogma that is still prevalent at the New York Review of Books.

Not being a scientist, my views are the result mainly of lifelong observation. On that basis it has been obvious to me that heritable intelligence is a real phenomenon that cannot be ascribed entirely to environmental influences. Thus I agree with Cochran and Harpending that Ashkenazi Jews received a boost in intelligence through natural selection. Other aspects of their argument are too vague for confirmation anytime soon. Although there is probably something to it, we're nowhere near finding anything that would resemble the genes for complex behavior such as "the Puritan work ethic," which Cochran and Harpending seem to think constitutes a recent evolutionary development. In my view there are many real differences between individuals, and no amount of politically correct indoctrination is about to convince me otherwise. To some extent the movement to consider all people the same has a desirable side, in that it might potentially reduce conflict. However, to the extent that it ignores reality it is anti-scientific and encourages delusional thinking. It also has a theological quality which I find offensive. My own preference is to think in terms of eusociality and law and to emphasize legal equality over biological sameness. The meme that is currently circulating in favor of equality seems to deny the possibility that significant biological differences can exist between groups, and there are costs to such misunderstandings. The most obvious ones pertain to public policies such as the use of education to foster economic equality among all groups. The fact is that, for biological reasons, not all groups are going to be able to produce the same percentage of rocket scientists as the Ashkenazi Jews no matter how well-educated they become. If you fully buy into the arguments of Cochran and Harpending, you may also want to look at some world conflicts as having causes related to differences between populations that have long agricultural histories and those that have maintained nomadic or pastoral practices until recently. Whether or not such speculations are fruitful, they would certainly be more mind-expanding than the dogmatic clichés repeated perpetually in politically correct circles.

Much of the rancor that surfaces whenever there is a hint of racism or bigotry relates to the perception that one group is being considered inferior to another. My view is that, given the sloppy, random process of evolution and the general limitations of human beings as organisms, such thinking is a waste of time. It is true that some people have cognitive skills that enable them to perform tasks that others can't and that other people have other skills that are lacking in intelligent people, but there is no point to arranging everyone into a meaningless hierarchy. From a policy standpoint the only thing that is important is that people are treated equally under the law, and there is no reason to pretend that all people would have identical abilities under the right circumstances. In my futurist frame of mind I like to think that what is currently seen as high intelligence will someday be seen as a small differentiation compared to what becomes available through AI. As an exercise, I entertain myself by thinking of apps such as ones that decide which career suits you, which colleges you apply to, whom you marry, where you live, whom you vote for and which hobbies you adopt. There is no reason to think that such apps couldn't do a better job than people have been doing without them up to now. In this framework humans become simple inhabitants of the universe rather than exalted beings worthy of awe, and I find that preferable to the petty posturing and one-upmanship that seems to dominate contemporary life.

Diary

The Trump election is weighing heavily on many Americans. Liberals went into a shock from which they are slowly recovering, and his supporters seem to retain some cautious optimism. However, his popularity has already dropped according to a recent poll, and signs of buyers' remorse are starting to emerge among those who voted for him. The act of voting is saturated with emotion, and much of Trump's appeal has been his style, which is nearly the opposite of Obama's. Trump's supporters are bound to become disappointed the more they learn about him.

It is still too early to tell for certain what the Trump presidency will be like. Assuming that he isn't assassinated or dragged down by a major scandal, it will soon become apparent that he has no credible policies. This is already becoming clear in his cabinet nominees. Before even receiving confirmation they are expressing opinions which conflict with statements that he has made. As an observer I deduce from his primitive vocabulary and body language that not only does he read very little, but that he rarely engages in sophisticated discussions concerning complex subjects: his habitual thinking must be crude. If you look at his background, his success as a businessman required less skill than it would have in many other fields. Real estate is one of the easiest fields to enter, and real estate tycoons constitute the most thuggish of the billionaires. Even as a real estate billionaire, in the course of his career he has made serious blunders which eventually forced him to retreat to brand marketing rather than actual real estate development. Others own most of the real estate with which his name is associated, and he is generally considered a pariah by respectable businessmen. There is also considerable concern about him among psychologists, since he clearly exhibits the symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder, which entails the potential for seriously destructive behavior.

The possibility remains that the Trump presidency will be a complete failure. There isn't much overlap between political skills and business skills, and if anything Trump's business skills are narrow. He is already showing signs that he will be unable to work with Congress, where his bullying may be ineffective and his lack of knowledge is a handicap. Many Republicans detest him but are accommodating him only to advance their own careers, and it is unlikely that they will come to support him ideologically given that he is inconsistent in that regard. Congress won't want to finance the wall with Mexico and may be unable to produce an adequate law to replace the Affordable Care Act. As I mentioned earlier, Trump's plan to bring back jobs is economically naïve and will not create an increase in well-paying jobs. What enthuses me the most, however, regarding Trump's exit, is the timing of the business cycle. Obama walked into the worst economic situation since the Great Depression, and though his influence was probably minuscule, the economy has more or less recovered since then. In Trump's case there is a very good chance that halfway through his first term there will be another recession regardless of what he does, and, depending on the timing, he may not be able to take credit for any economic improvement and would be defeated if he ran for reelection. Politicians routinely take credit for economic improvements that have nothing to do with them, but when there is no improvement they lose that opportunity.

All of this absurdity encourages me to return to my futurist mode, in which I try to envision a world organized according to more rational principles. If any of my readers are writing novels, I still encourage them to write ones in which AI gradually becomes the curator of mankind and ensures its well-being while limiting its destructiveness for the benefit of all. A novel such as this would be more plausible than the futuristic ones produced so far by Michel Houellebecq, in which human cloning becomes the norm or France becomes an Islamic caliphate. The more I think about it, the more I become convinced how feeble human brains are and how apparent this will become in the near future as AI research advances. A few hundred years from now people will shocked by the primitive circumstances in which we find ourselves today.

I have been scrounging around for some good reading material that is of greater length than what I've been reading recently and hope to come up with something soon.

Anti-Americans Abroad

This essay by Tony Judt first appeared in the NYRB in 2003 just after the Iraq War had commenced, and I vaguely recall reading it at the time. It is a review of several French books about the United States. Anti-Americanism has a long history in Europe, and Judt briefly recounts it before examining the then-current state of affairs as reflected in these books:

Charles Dickens, like Alexis de Tocqueville, was struck by the conformism of American public life. Stendhal commented upon the country's "egoism"; Beaudelaire sniffily compared it to Belgium (!) in its bourgeois mediocrity; everyone remarked upon the jejune patriotic pomp of the United States. But in the course of the next century, European commentary shifted perceptibly from the dismissive to the resentful. By the 1930s, the United States' economic power was giving a threatening twist to its crude immaturity. For a new generation of anti-democratic critics, the destabilizing symptoms of modern life – mass production, mass society, and mass politics – could all be traced to America.

Judt seems to approve the most of Philippe Roger, who wrote:

What if anti-Americanism today were no more than a mental slavery that the French impose on themselves, a masochistic lethargy, a humdrum resentment, a passionless Pavlovian reaction? That would offer grounds for hope. There are few vices, even intellectual ones, that can long withstand the boredom they elicit. 

His reaction to the other books is mixed. Thierry Meyssan wrote a ridiculous best seller "purporting to show that the September 11 attack on the Pentagon never happened....the whole thing is a hoax perpetrated by the American defense establishment to advance its own interests." Emmanuel Todd "is right to say that asymmetric globalization – in which the United States consumes what others produce, and economic inequalities grow apace – is bringing about a world unsympathetic to American ambition." However, Judt finds poor argumentation and fallacies elsewhere in Todd's book. Jean-François Revel makes too many sweeping generalizations and goes overboard in defending America while pointing out social problems in France.

Judt concludes, somewhat off-topic, that "the Iraq crisis has exposed three kinds of weakness in the modern international system." First, the UN is inadequate for addressing such problems. Second, the EU is divided by "American mischief and European leaders' own incompetence." And third, "President Bush and his advisers have managed to make America seem the greatest threat to international stability....You don't have to be a French intellectual to believe that an overmuscled America, in a hostile international environment, is weaker, not stronger, than it was before."

Of course, Judt was fully aware that he was writing about an unfolding process, and here we are nearly fourteen years later with the situation generally looking worse. Although relations between Europe and the U.S. have superficially improved with the help of Barack Obama, who by European standards has been a more palatable president than George W. Bush, the actual conditions on the ground seem only to have deteriorated. Conflicts are still raging in the Middle East, Afghanistan is still politically unstable, the European immigration crisis is worsening, Russia has escalated its KGB tactics, the U.S. has just elected a president who makes George W. Bush seem thoughtful, and other countries are electing fascists. Unfortunately, I don't think Tony Judt would have the answers if he were still on the scene.

I am particularly inspired by Judt's expression of anti-Americanism, which, though subdued, has often been the only intelligent criticism to be found in the press here. The lack of focus by thinkers such as Noam Chomsky and movements such as Occupy Wall Street has made them seem like hollow echoes of the protests of the 1960's. Equally ineffectual, the publications of the intelligentsia seem to serve no purpose beyond the entertainment and self-aggrandizement of small, well-heeled elitist groups. More widely, in this country there is little awareness of European culture and history beyond Europe's appeal as a tourist destination for those who can afford it. As it is, not many Americans are interested in travel beyond their borders except to resorts in warm climates. The ways in which America remains deficient from my point of view have been voiced by few besides Judt. On the other hand, the outrage spawned by Trump's election and his behavior since may yet provide a solid basis for a new resistance to the crassness, materialism and shortsightedness that have come to dominate American public life. With the election of Donald Trump, the news media may have been sufficiently shamed by their dereliction of duty to work in the public interest again. At the moment he seems to be waging a losing war against the media, though only time will tell.

Diary

The holidays are drawing to a close without much fanfare. However, there was one incident that revived several thoughts that I've brought up before on this blog. On Christmas Eve during dinner at a restaurant I mentioned the article discussed here earlier which raised the question of whether the high relative IQs of Ashkenazi Jews compared to other ethnic groups is the result of natural selection. Within moments the two youngest people present got up and left the table in protest without further discussion. Things cooled down immediately, but neither of them put forth an argument or even bothered to explain what it was that they objected to about my comments. Presumably they thought that they were hearing a racist diatribe and that a proposition such as this does not even merit discussion because it is known to be false. I wouldn't have thought much of this disagreement were it not for the fact that these were two highly-educated people, one a software engineer with a degree from Yale and the other a Ph.D. in mathematics. The two aspects of this that interest me the most are how political correctness distorts rational thought and how even well-educated people may have a poor understanding of the basic logic of evolution.

As for the Ashkenazi Jew hypothesis, I am inclined to think that it is correct, though I admit that it would be difficult to prove. However, the study of this hypothesis is possible, and it could be of some use if it confirmed the connection between Ashkenazim intelligence and some of the illnesses associated with that population. That would present a similarity to the African population that acquired a resistance to malaria at the cost of sickle cell anemia, and would therefore not be an unprecedented example of natural selection acting recently within the world population. For that matter it is also known that Tibetans and Inuits, for example, possess uncommon genes that provided them with selective advantages in the environments inhabited by their ancestors.

My first point is that people who reject outright a hypothesis such as this in such a manner are operating on principles comparable to religious dogma. Although they didn't say so, I presume that they thought that I was following a model like Social Darwinism, and that my goal was to show how one group was inherently superior to another and that it therefore deserved higher status in some form. However, I am only interested in actual differences, ones that can be scientifically measured, and have no political agenda at all. It is true that some capitalists have distorted Darwin's ideas in order to provide justification and elicit praise for their excessive wealth, but that has nothing to do with science or any point that I was making. I find it incredible to see otherwise intelligent people unthinkingly subscribe to flimsy politically correct theories that have no better foundation than those held by creationists.

My second point is that evolution is an ongoing process and is happening around us all of the time. While the current human population seems to have descended from one small group in Africa and all modern humans are very similar to each other, there are still many genetic differences associated with the different habitats that humans have occupied since the migrations out of Africa began. I think that in school evolution is poorly taught, and students tend to think of it as occurring in time spans of millions of years, which is not necessarily the case. Environmental changes may accelerate evolutionary changes, and we are currently entering a period of mass extinctions: this is no time to be thinking that evolution is always gradual.

A third point, which has more to do with human cognition than with evolution per se, is that we tend to think hierarchically even when it isn't appropriate. Thus, in this instance perhaps the suggestion that Ashkenazi Jews are smart was interpreted to mean that they are better than other people. Intelligence, though important, is not necessarily a crucial characteristic, especially from an evolutionary standpoint. We think of it as important because it has become so in recent years, with a college education and advanced intellectual skills becoming more essential to employment than ever before. However, the ability to live in socially cohesive groups has also been extremely important to our survival as a species, and that probably surpasses intelligence in significance on a longer time horizon. If you are a purist about evolution, interpreting it teleologically and assuming that intelligence is its final outcome is presumptuous, because evolution only concerns itself with which species survive, and what a particular species may happen to think is its most important characteristic is irrelevant. Regarding the importance of intelligence, you can conduct experiments on this yourself: if you familiarize yourself with different types of people, it doesn't take long to notice that socially inept people are often at a disadvantage regardless of their level of intelligence.

The Wrecking Ball of Innovation

I have a copy of When Facts Change, a collection of Tony Judt's essays assembled by his widow and published in 2015. I'm not reading it straight through and will probably read only a few of them. I've just finished an essay that first appeared in the New York Review of Books in 2007. It is a review of Robert Reich's book, Supercapitalism of that year. This essay, besides serving as a reminder of how powerful a writer Judt was, is still relevant to the current political situation in the U.S., as it specifically examines the economic myopia of Reich, who was the first secretary of labor under Bill Clinton, and, by association, represents the prevailing Democratic economic viewpoint that continues up to the present in the policies of Barack Obama.

Judt isn't critical of Reich's description of the wealth gap, which has since then received far greater publicity, thanks to Thomas Piketty, but finds his complacent acquiescence to economic forces unacceptable. Reich takes it as given that we live in an economically competitive world, that the super-rich are not at fault and that the primary national goal is productivity growth. In Judt's view, the sweeping economic model adopted by Clinton distorted an earlier model in which the state was seen as responsible for all of its citizens regardless of economic factors. Under Clinton, privatization picked up steam and the existing welfare system was replaced with one that treated the poor as economic entities and accordingly made their benefits contingent upon their attempt to become gainfully employed. On these changes, Judt says:

The real impact of privatization, like welfare reform, deregulation, the technological revolution, and indeed globalization itself, has been to reduce the role of the state in the affairs of its citizens: to get the state "off our backs" and "out of our lives" – a common objective of economic "reformers" everywhere – and make public policy, in Robert Reich's approving words, "business friendly." 

He goes on to say:

If modern democracies are to survive the shock of Reich's "supercapitalism," they need to be bound by something more than the pursuit of private economic advantage, particularly when the latter accrues to ever fewer beneficiaries: the idea of a society held together by pecuniary interests alone is, in Mill's words, "essentially repugnant." A civilized society requires more than self-interest, whether deluded or enlightened, for its shared narrative of purpose....

In the early years of the French Revolution the Marquis de Condorcet was dismayed at the prospect of commercial society that was opening before him (as it is opening before us): the idea that "liberty will be no more, in the eyes of an avid nation, than a necessary condition for the security of financial operations." We ought to share his revulsion.

Judt describes the negative consequences of Reich's policy views that were already evident in 2007, before the Great Recession, before Brexit and before the election of Donald Trump:

Fear is reemerging as an active ingredient of political life in Western democracies. Fear of terrorism, of course; but also, and perhaps more insidiously, fear of the uncontrollable speed of change, fear of the loss of employment, fear of losing ground to others in an increasingly unequal distribution of resources, fear of losing control of the circumstances and routines of one's daily life. And, perhaps above all, fear that it is not just we who can no longer shape our lives but that those in authority have lost control as well, to forces beyond their reach.

The essay concludes as follows:

We may find that a healthy democracy, far from being threatened by the regulatory state, actually depends upon it: that in a world increasingly polarized between insecure individuals and unregulated global forces, the legitimate authority of the democratic state may be the best kind of intermediate institution we can devise. What, after all, is the alternative? Our contemporary cult of untrammeled economic freedom, combined with a heightened sense of fear and insecurity, is leading to reduced social provision and minimal economic regulation; but these are accompanied by ever-extending governmental oversight of communication, movement and opinion. "Chinese" capitalism, as it were, Western-style. Is this what we want?

Because the essay predates Obama's election in 2008, it is easy to see that not much has changed under eight years of a Democratic administration; thus my criticisms of Obama hold. As an observer, I am not aware of any significant move that Obama may have made to distance himself from Reich's policy views, which currently seem embedded in the party and would have continued under Hillary Clinton had she been elected. Judt's views are far closer to those of Bernie Sanders, whom I supported in the Democratic primary.

While I completely agree with Judt that the modification of political thought to accommodate economic thought over the last few decades has set the world on a dangerous path, he has hardly provided a blueprint for change. He writes of democracy in the abstract when it ultimately depends on the votes, not only of educated, informed voters, but of the less-educated and uninformed who have recently brought us Brexit and Donald Trump. In a way it is unfortunate that Judt chose history over economics, because there is no one that I know of who might have made a better economic case, had he the appropriate credentials. The economists with whom I'm familiar, including Thomas Piketty, do not seem to grasp the urgent conditions described by Judt, perhaps because their training has been narrow and they have too much faith in their profession.

If calling for greater regulation, etc., isn't feasible and even then doesn't fully encapsulate the issues at hand, the limiting factor may be human cognition. Thus, I am skeptical of the ability of a Tony Judt or a Bernie Sanders to work out an actual detailed solution to the problems caused by global economic competition. Although Judt's heart was in the right place, his view of social democracy seems outdated and sentimental to me. The best hope is that we will end up with a highly regulated society wherein AI plays a larger role than it does at present, at the exclusion of mere mortals, who tend to be incompetent, corrupt or both when faced with such daunting tasks. That is hardly what Tony Judt or Bernie Sanders had in mind, but I find it a little more realistic and perhaps less ominous than they would have you believe.

Diary

As usual, my activities have been circumscribed by holiday visitors whose presence makes it difficult for me to concentrate. Under these circumstances I imagine inhabiting a large castle and remaining alone in my chambers all day, coming out on occasion to dine with the guests. In the absence of that option, I have kept my reading light by limiting it to poetry. I am reading a collection of contemporary American poetry, and, as you might expect, I am not impressed. There are a few crazy poems that break out of the mold a little, but I tend to see them as desperate attempts to be different. I can understand why poets write them, because, as William Matthews said, the range of subject matter in published poetry – particularly American poetry – is extremely limited. I would be bored out my mind reading nothing but poems, but, on the other hand, it is still a good medium for expressing rarefied sentiments which might be awkward to express in fiction or prose. The main problem I have with the poems I read is that they seem hackneyed or mawkish, and when they are not they are likely to be excessively stylized, such as those of Jorie Graham, whom I don't think is worth reading at all. Then there are the poets whom I think of as stupid, such as Charles Simic; I always recall Auden's reference to Tennyson as "undoubtedly the stupidest" of all the English poets. Not much has changed since then.

When I read poetry it brings out the dichotomy in me between the arts and the sciences, and I realize that I don't feel entirely at home in either. I consider the arts more fun, but when the standards are set too low they become depressing. We usually watch the PBS NewsHour, which has arts segments reported by Jeffrey Brown, and we frequently find them so insipid that we turn off the TV at that point. Ironically, on one segment Jeffrey read some of his own poetry, which I thought was good. The problem here, as in most American art, is that when too much emphasis is placed on inclusiveness the bar is lowered and you soon become inundated with works of low quality produced by artists of lesser talent. In my opinion, the essay is the appropriate medium for many of the ideas that people try to squeeze into poems, and, for that matter, novels intended to shed light on subjects could just as well be essays too. The media force substantive issues into emotive packages because people are unable to assimilate them otherwise. At the other extreme, with scientific precision and mathematical rigor, even I find that something is missing, because I don't believe that it captures everything that is of interest to me. To some extent, the fuzzy thinking that occurs in the arts is balanced by the exactitude that occurs in the sciences. In most situations in which facts take precedence, science is more useful than art, but science does not lend itself to the expression of certain ideas. I think that, in addition to an intrinsic human tendency to reject the rigidity of science, science is deficient in the sense that it does not and perhaps never will offer a complete explanation for what we think of as reality.

I won't be entirely free of guests for some time, but am lining up a few books to read. I'm off fiction for the time being and am having trouble finding anything scientific that I want to read. On the agenda are Erwin Panofsky, the art historian whom I've read before, and some more Tony Judt.

Diary

My disappointment with literature is often related to its inaccuracies, which, depending on how you define art, may or may not be permissible. As I see it, fiction may distort reality in order to create certain effects or emphasize some aspect of life, but I begin to find it unsatisfactory whenever it strays too far from the truth. Problems become apparent to me when an author doesn't seem to understand people and produces inadequate representations of them. Thus, a writer such as Krasznahorkai, whose characters are ordinary and are not idealized, doesn't readily get himself into trouble with the kinds of distortions that annoy me. He has made his task somewhat easier by avoiding the sophisticated characters who often show up in fiction. I thought I would say something about how a poor understanding of human nature results in bad fiction.

As you may have gathered, I tend not to idealize people and prefer to think of them as complicated animals. In fact, they are so complicated that they confuse themselves about what they are, and this is why I try to resort to dispassionate observation when assessing anyone. Recently I have been thinking about what it means to be feral, whether you apply the term to cats or to people. In ordinary usage, a feral cat is one that did not become acclimated to humans during the window in its development that would have made it more trusting and less afraid of them. Biologically, both feral and domesticated cats are wild, and their behaviors overlap significantly, since the differences are superficial. I think a similar phenomenon occurs among humans who have had little exposure to other humans during a critical developmental period, and later, for example, have difficulty adjusting to social expectations. As in the case of cats, feral people would in most respects be the same as normally socialized people, but they would be socially dysfunctional in the absence of therapy. A feral cat might face certain disadvantages compared to a domesticated cat, such as a shorter lifespan, but in terms of its native catness it would not have lost anything. A feral person, in contrast, would fail to develop skills that he or she has been biologically adapted to develop, such as language and the ability to socialize, and this would be a significant loss.

Like Henry David Thoreau, I think that, at the extreme, social environments have the capacity to distort native humanity in ways comparable to the environmental distortions experienced by domesticated cats. Although we are an adaptive species, we are not adapted, for example, to automatically consider all humans to be the same as us. We are adapted to absorb the social norms in our immediate environment even when those norms have no basis in reality. When you grow up in an environment where everyone believes something that is incorrect, as an adult there may be nothing to prevent you from maintaining the same bad idea. To continue the cat analogy, it might be as if you were a cat whose owners thought that you shouldn't hunt because you were a house pet. In this instance the owners would be using an inappropriate paradigm and would be misunderstanding their cat. I think that an underlying cause of world conflict today is a clash of paradigms, many of which, if not all, were somewhat arbitrarily invented before the modern era by groups whose cultures formed independently.

What this means for literature is that if you live, say, in North America, and you are writing for and about college-educated, upper-middle-class people, you may have to make assumptions about your characters that imbue them with a belief system that would be unrecognizable in, say, China. Your characters may all have unknowingly adopted the social views that first formed under Christianity, were later shaped by the Enlightenment, and, in more recent years, stressed democratic values, capitalism and social equality. Far from recognizing the universal truth of these ideas, someone in China might well be baffled by them and would certainly not consider them self-evident. I run into problems with literature because I find that it is one thing to describe a peasant in his native environment while retaining a healthy skepticism about the merits of his worldview and another thing entirely to describe an upper-middle-class American in his native environment with no skepticism whatsoever about the merits of his worldview. When a writer writes about peasants, it is a given that they may be limited by their lack of education and hold erroneous beliefs, but the belief systems of the educated are rarely brought into question in literature. I noticed this while reading Proust, who is good at describing the details of bourgeois Parisian life but doesn't often question what I consider to be the stupidity of his characters, and he therefore seems to condone the petty social climbing that occupies most of their time. I thought there were glaring questions in Proust's fictional world that never came into consideration. Under an alternate view of literature, some may find Proust perfectly satisfactory, but in my view, literature isn't of much value if it doesn't have anything to say about the human condition, and that can't be done when an author becomes so entrenched with his subject that he or she is unable to think outside of the box inhabited by his or her characters. This isn't an easy thing to do, and perhaps fewer writers should attempt it.

The Melancholy of Resistance III

In the second half of the book, Valuska overhears a conversation between the director of the circus, of which the stuffed whale is but a part (no other elements of the circus are ever mentioned), and a mysterious character referred to as "the Prince." The latter is somehow associated with the mob that has been following the circus around the countryside, and he apparently orders an attack on the town in which property is destroyed, women are raped and people are killed. During the attack, Valuska by chance accompanies the mob, and, though he does not participate in its destructive activities, this finally results in his placement in a mental asylum. Mrs. Eszter seizes the moment and coordinates the recapture of the town with the army that has been summoned for assistance. In short order the criminals are rounded up, the Prince disappears and the circus leaves town. Mrs. Eszter moves back into her husband's house and confines him to a few rooms; she plans to divorce him in due course. She becomes a local hero and takes a prominent position in the town government, from which she plans to roll out her moral revitalization program.

As in Satantango, the Prince represents a sinister figure, whom some refer to as the Prince of Darkness, but in this case he occupies a less central role than Irimiás, and his workings remain even more obscure. In the end he doesn't seem particularly satanic, and in all likelihood he is pursuing some unknown political agenda. Eszter is also very roughly equivalent to the doctor in Satantango. On the whole I found this novel less engrossing than Satantango, because the satanic element is more subdued. The writing is very good, but the detailed descriptions of the characters and their activities became tiresome in the second half. I am a little perplexed by the rapturous blurbs on the cover from W.G. Sebald, Susan Sontag and Garth Risk Hallberg.

Right up to the end the theme seems to be inevitable decay. One of the victims is Mrs. Plauf, Valuska's estranged mother. Following her eulogy, Krasznahorkai describes in detail the chemical processes occurring in her body as decomposition commences. Perhaps there are a few people who might construe this novel as "visionary," as Sontag did, but I am not among them. Sure, Krasznahorkai, is a very good writer, but the excessive praise that one encounters in literary reviews is hardly convincing. As in any literary tradition, Krasznahorkai is limited by the works of his predecessors. Frankly, Kafka is boring: he was a neurotic, and his writing reflects an inability to adapt to the situation into which he was born. Similarly, Beckett is boring, because the effectiveness of his writing hinges, ultimately, on a fad – existentialism – which influenced his middle period and the works for which he is best known.

As you can see from the above, I am hardly a reformed convert to fiction. At this point I am more interested in laying bare the ignorant propaganda that currently supports its infrastructure, though, of course, I am still open to genuinely good writing.

The Melancholy of Resistance II

I'm about halfway through the book and at this point have a fairly good idea what it's about. One of the main characters, Eszter, who had formerly been the director of the town orchestra and so far seems to be the only well-educated resident there, became completely disillusioned with the town and the people, retired early and lives as a recluse. He suffers from spinal arthritis and rarely goes out. His days are spent experimenting on his piano with the harmonic theories of Andreas Werckmeister. On the threat of moving back in with him, his wife, from whom he is separated, manages to recruit him to support her rather vague crusade for "moral rearmament" in the town. The town streets are littered with trash, the atmosphere is depressing, and a strange exhibition of a whale has just arrived; visitors pay to see it inside the large wagon in which it has been towed. For unknown reasons, a number of criminally-minded men have begun to amble about in the streets since the arrival of the whale. Another major character, Valuska, is seen by most as the village idiot, but he has an enthusiastic side that appeals to Eszter, and he becomes Eszter's assistant. At a local bar, Valuska recruits patrons to act as the sun, the moon and the earth in order to demonstrate conjunction, and, as you might imagine, this doesn't work very well with drunks.

The planetary alignment theme seems to represent aesthetic harmony, which both Eszter and Valuska are seeking. In her own way, Mrs. Eszter is also trying to bring harmony to the town, albeit in a mechanical, political way. The main theme therefore seems to be how people combat the inevitable entropy that they encounter in their lives. The title seems to indicate that the protagonists are futilely resisting the inevitable, but it is still possible that there will be other developments further along in the novel. In any case, the value of Krasznahorkai's writing lies more in his ability to represent the psychic states of his characters. The whirl of his words comes closer to simulating what actually goes on in a person's mind than is expressed in ordinary prose. In this regard, James Wood, commenting on Krasznahorkai's novel War and War, says "By the end of the novel, I felt that I had got as close as literature could possibly take me to the inhabiting of another person...." This is the way I have felt too, and though I can't say that Krasznahorkai's characters are the kinds of people that I like to inhabit, one can only marvel at his talent, which puts most writers to shame.

Another aspect of the novel that interests me is how to go about contextualizing it. The question is whether Krasznahorkai's bleak and depressing settings are exaggerated stylistic inventions or roughly accurate representations of the rural, economically depressed communist Hungary in which he grew up. Although he obviously draws from the traditions of Kafka, Beckett and others, I am inclined to think that the conditions in his novels aren't that far-fetched. I am often reminded of my long stay in Dixon, Illinois, and I don't think that the people there were all that different from those in Krasznahorkai's fictional world. Fortunately, I was able to move away, but that seems to have been less of an option for Krasznahorkai's people. While I was there, like Eszter I inhabited my own world and usually avoided what little the town had to offer.

I am finding The Melancholy of Resistance enjoyable to read, but would not generally recommend it to others. It is an exotic literary production more suitable for literary aesthetes than for general readers, and I only like Krasznahorkai in small doses. I prefer him to American literary writers, because even though he tends to produce claustrophobic environments inhabited by mentally unhealthy characters, he convincingly portrays the inner lives of actual people who fall outside the narrow range one encounters in works produced by the unimaginative, upper-middle-class conformists who dominate literary fiction here. Despite the fanciful veneer of his writing, he is able to impart a form of psychological realism that is almost completely absent from most fiction these days.

Diary

I continue to be distracted from reading but may make some headway in fiction over the next few days. At the moment I am pondering this article about AI by Liu Cixin in relation to the work of CSER in Cambridge, particularly with respect to how futurists in the media tend to hype utopian outcomes while downplaying or glossing over real dangers which could lead to disastrous scenarios instead. In particular, as I've written before, I'm interested in how current political and economic systems are ill suited to address these kinds of problems. Though the positive outcome discussed in the article could turn out to be correct and parts of it are already proving so, I have yet to read a thorough examination discussing all of the structural changes that would be necessary for desirable results.

With recent events, the first thing that comes to mind is the rhetoric of Donald Trump, which is about fifty years behind the times. He was elected on the premise that he could bring back 1950's-like American economic conditions by keeping manufacturing jobs within the borders and increasing taxes on imports. I suppose you could give Trump the benefit of the doubt and say that he made these claims only to get elected and will actually do something quite different, but in the interest of caution it is more appropriate to regard him as an ignorant and dangerous opportunist. If he enacted his plan, American products would soon become too expensive for Americans to afford, and American companies would have no foreign markets because their products could be made for less elsewhere. In order to survive, American manufacturing companies would be forced to automate as much as possible, resulting in more layoffs and fewer employees. In the end, the manufacturing workers whom Trump was supposed to be helping would be either unemployed or working for even lower real wages than they had been previously. Regardless of political propaganda, automation is here to stay under any circumstances, and Cixin is probably correct in projecting that we are on the way to having a ninety percent unemployment rate – this is the real issue that requires political resolution.

Another shortcoming of the Trumpian worldview, which I haven't seen discussed, is how it ignores the fact that technology is undermining traditional economic models. Not only will fewer workers be needed, but the conditions necessary for traditional economic competition may gradually evaporate. Most people will be living on fixed incomes and have less money available for the frivolous products that corporations depend on for their revenue. Furthermore, the "added value" that underlies contemporary economic thought may become more elusive as high technology becomes widely available; what was once thought of as business acumen or creative entrepreneurship may soon be something that can be bought off-the-shelf by anyone, effectively turning creativity and "intellectual capital" into commodities. It appears likely that there will be greater and greater competition for fewer and fewer dollars, and when work is no longer necessary, most people will probably opt to skip it entirely given that the work environment will have become too competitive. As Cixin says, people are going to have to get used to a life of leisure whether they like it or not. Trump is completely off the mark, because he is stuck in a time warp in which he thinks of himself and his peers as job creators just as jobs are becoming obsolete.

There are some really vexing problems here that I'm not about to solve with my feeble brain on this blog post, but I can still make an effort. In an earlier scenario I suggested that apps could theoretically reduce the irrationality that thrives in the current electoral system by becoming part of the system and adding rationality to decision-making processes, i.e., telling people how to vote. Because there seems to be a global trend of electing incompetent demagogues, I am beginning to wonder whether a world coup by the tech giants might not be as bad an idea as it sounds. Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Bill Gates are rational people who may be more qualified to transform the world into a safe habitat for seven billion people than the ones who tend to win popular elections. At the moment a benevolent technocratic dictatorship seems more appealing to me than a world run by intellectually deficient buffoons.

The Melancholy of Resistance I

I'm gradually getting back to reading and still have a long way to go in this novel by László Krasznahorkai. It is somewhat different from Satantango in that it concerns events in a town rather than in the country, has a broader range of characters and is written in long, flamboyant sentences. It also exhibits more psychological realism by showing how each character thinks, highlighting discontinuities in perspective that very few writers even notice, let alone capture in their work. As in Satantango the narrative is driven by forebodings and signs, always hinting at some mystery yet to be revealed.

My attitude to fiction is quite jaded at this point, and I am inclined not to read it at all, so whenever I do make the effort I can only tolerate works of the highest quality. In this respect Krasznahorkai doesn't disappoint, and I think he must be one of the best novelists ever. To compare him to Alice Munro or Philip Roth or Marilynne Robinson would be a joke. I find him more interesting than Dostoevsky, Proust, Kafka or Joyce. If you take the novel seriously as a form of art, there probably aren't many other living authors worth reading today.

The thought that is preoccupying me at the moment is Krasznahorkai's use of peasant characters, which ties in with some of my lifelong meditations. One of the reasons why I like him is that he doesn't hesitate to reveal weaknesses in peasants, something that not only does not occur in American fiction but is specifically banned in the era of political correctness. Broadly speaking, the concept of a peasant does not exist in American culture, because it has been replaced by the immigrant and melting pot narrative, in which everyone becomes equal. The melting pot narrative has caused cognitive dissonance in me from the moment I set foot here in 1957, because I immediately noticed differences in people through an intuitive understanding of peasant and non-peasant mentalities. As my life unfolded I became more acutely aware that I didn't care in the least whether I made a lot of money or achieved high social status, and that this put me at odds with the dominant currents in American society.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was put off by the Italian immigrants who lived in the town where I grew up. Later, when I lived in Illinois, I noticed that it was hard for me to relate to the second or third generation Polish immigrants whom I ran into at work. In the workforce, the absence of intellectual curiosity in others became a permanent barrier separating me from them. A similar barrier existed between me and my ex-wife's family. Prior to World War II they had been farmers and grain elevator operators in western Ohio, and after the war the men turned to law, geology and business. The women married similarly and never lived on a farm again. In one generation they went from agrarian lives to professional lives, which reflected their drive for financial and social advancement. As with the Italians and the Poles, I found them unimaginative and incapable of engaging in discussion of subjects which were not part of their limited backgrounds. This prompted me to look into my own background in search of something that might help explain the origin of my different perspective.

Part of that difference is simply a matter of life experience. I was born into a middle class family in England, where I lived until the age of 7. From the ages of 7 to 18 I lived in a suburb of New York City. After that I lived for several years in Indiana and Illinois, with short stays in Connecticut, Ohio, Oregon and Kentucky. Although my experience was hardly cosmopolitan, it was certainly broader than that of my in-laws. Another part of the difference, I've decided, is family history. In my family, the agrarian roots are further back than most. In England my ancestors were tailors and furriers by the early nineteenth century, and in Turkey they were engaged in international trade by the early twentieth century. My grandfather was importing pianos to Greece and his sister was studying music in Paris while my ex-wife's illiterate grandfather was in a field plowing behind a horse in Ohio. Thus, even though education did not play much of a role in my family until the late twentieth century, on my mother's side there was significant multiculturalism by 1920, with my grandfather speaking seven languages and my grandmother having German and Armenian parents.

There is a special beauty for me in writers like Krasznahorkai, who aren't afraid to call a peasant a peasant. In his case there isn't necessarily any heroism involved, because the environment in which he writes has different cultural references from those in the U.S. Even so, it is encouraging to me to know that there is a writer of fiction out there who has a brain. That is important to me as a resident of a country that suppresses all derogatory discussion of its peasant constituency and elects crypto-peasants such as George W. Bush and Donald Trump to its highest office.

Diary

The arrival of visitors for Thanksgiving predictably disrupted my mental state. When there are people in the house temporarily and I am aware of their presence, my thinking processes change, and I am unable to read, write or do much of anything until they leave, even if there are benefits to having them here. In this instance I enjoyed the visitors, in part because one of them had better social skills than is typically the case. It was possible to develop a rapport, and some useful and interesting knowledge was exchanged, but there were still the tiresome routines of showing people around, eating at restaurants and engaging in chitchat. I am probably a little hardened against visitors as a result of having had a long succession of ones who were socially obtuse, incurious or solipsistic. If you are in the habit of avoiding interactions that are known to be unsatisfactory, when they are forced upon you they become doubly annoying. On the other hand, a little social interaction can be good for you even if you don't enjoy it, since a certain amount of practice may be necessary if you want to avoid slipping into unacceptably antisocial or eccentric behavior.

I've read very little of the Krasznahorkai novel and am liking it so far. When I'm further along I'll have more to say.

Diary

The country seems to be in a state of post-election trauma, with many Democrats in a panic and many Republicans scrambling to conjure up an illusion of political unity in which they are the key players. It must be impossible to walk past Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in New York with all the olive branches littering the sidewalk. From my point of view, though the political situation has taken a turn for the worse, it is only a minor change from one state of dysfunction to another. Instead of having a vaguely idealistic, unimaginative, conventional and ineffectual president, we will have an unprepared, egocentric and bombastic president. The checks and balances within the system, many of which are unintended, are likely to permit change only at a snail's pace, and the architecture of any change will be so flimsy as to permit its alteration or removal after a near-future election cycle. One of the inherent ironies of Trump's election is that although he seems to be ideologically pro-business, the introduction of change, and in Trump's case unpredictable change, is anathema to business, because businesses can't operate efficiently during periods of political instability.

Of course, to me the more interesting questions relate to whether the electorate is capable making good decisions in the first place, and as I've said repeatedly I don't think that it is. Rather than rehashing that, I've been thinking about what, if anything, has been different about this election, and there have been a few things. The main one has been the effect on the election by different kinds of individuals. Everyone is used to the influence of money in elections, and the narrative had been that corporations, with the help of the Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court, and special interest groups such as the Israel lobby influence election results by providing funds for advertising and campaign organization. This time Trump won mainly with free publicity, which is still a case of corporate interests affecting election outcomes, but not as they usually do, because the media corporations responsible did not have a plan to promote Trump and were merely filling their coffers with revenues that he inadvertently generated for them. Some of the other players have been more sinister. It is difficult to know exactly how the Hillary Clinton email controversy emerged and to what extent it was a coordinated effort. It seems to have started as a conventional Republican tactic to discredit a probable Democratic presidential candidate well before the election. As Bernie Sanders said, it is a non-issue, and if I didn't already know how ignorant many voters are I would find it difficult to understand how it had any impact, but Republican strategists are well aware that if they repeat something often enough millions of people will believe it. The whole "Hillary is a crook" message is so obviously contrived and false that one can only be amazed that millions of voters believed it. The sinister elements of this message relate to the probable hacking by Russia under the direction of Putin, the release of emails by WikiLeaks and the timing of announcements by the FBI. It seems likely that Putin, and perhaps WikiLeaks and insiders at the FBI all attempted to tilt the election toward Trump, and they succeeded.

What is new, then, is an effective disinformation campaign implemented with new technology by a foreign sponsor for its own strategic purposes. As far as Julian Assange is concerned, he seems to be a minor megalomaniac who is unlikely to have a significant long-term influence on world events. Of greater concern is Vladimir Putin, who sought and got the president he wanted. Also of concern is the possibility of intentional disruption of the Clinton campaign by the FBI. Presumably there will be investigations to follow. Unfortunately, the underlying problem was and still is the inability of voters to make informed decisions, and there is no quick fix for that. If voters knew what they were doing it would have been impossible for Trump to win under any circumstances, given that he has no experience and is a proven liar.

I hope to avoid writing much about politics, because I find it boring – like being forced to watch reality TV endlessly. It took me a couple of years to get sick of Obama, and even though Trump hasn't even taken office yet the image of him already makes me cringe. For the time being I will escape into literature and will be starting to read The Melancholy of Resistance, by László Krasznahorkai, to that end.

G.H. Lewes: A Life IV

After its serialization in Blackwood's Magazine in 1857, Scenes of Clerical Life was published as a book in 1858 and was well-received by the public. This was followed by the novel Adam Bede in 1859, which was extremely popular and immediately placed George Eliot in the ranks of the best living English novelists. Marian continued to write fiction for the remaining twenty-one years of her life, becoming increasingly famous. Soon she and Lewes were prosperous enough to afford a house, and their standard of living improved dramatically. Initially Marian was ostracized socially because of their living arrangement, and even friends from Coventry and family members broke off contact with her. Women would not call at their house, and only Lewes was invited to the homes of others on social occasions. As her fame increased, Marian achieved social acceptance and visitors of both sexes attended gatherings at their house. She and Lewes got into the habit of leaving on trips to the Continent as soon as she had finished each book. Their unmarried state never caused any concerns in Germany, Lewes was very well liked there because of his biography of Goethe, and German higher education suited his method of learning, since he could attend lectures and obtain specimens without being a matriculated student, which facilitated his studies, including the dissection and microscopic examination of animals.

Lewes moved away from literature but continued to write books: Sea-Side Studies; The Physiology of Common Life; Studies in Animal Life; Aristotle: A Chapter from the History of Science; Problems of Life and Mind; The Foundations of a Creed; and several revised editions of his History of Philosophy. He became more prominent as a journalist and served as the editor at Cornhill Magazine and The Fortnightly Review, which were leading journals. As a scientific writer he contributed to early editions of Nature, and as a philosopher he contributed to early editions of Mind. Although he never became quite as influential a thinker as he may have liked, he was an ardent supporter of Darwin, which put him in better graces with Huxley. Even the shy Darwin read his articles with interest and visited him once at his house. He remained at the center of London intellectual life and was probably well-acquainted with anyone you could think of from that period, but he never escaped the perception of him as a journalist and a popularizer. Ashton doesn't say so, but my feeling is that he had adopted the model of a Renaissance man from Goethe just as it was becoming untenable. He was a reasonably good writer and thinker and a perceptive critic at a time when specialization was taking over academia and research. While his range of interests and curiosity seem remarkable today, no one tries to do what he did anymore, and a sensible person like Lewes would now restrict his vocation to journalism in the absence of advanced training in a scientific field. A slightly dilettantish man like Lewes stood little chance of matching the feats either of Charles Darwin or of George Eliot, and to try both, as he did, seems absurd, especially when you consider how kind and egoless he was and how his personal responsibilities and lack of financial resources curtailed his opportunities.

Despite his professional success and Marian's rise as a major author, family problems continued to plague Lewes. When his three biological sons were old enough he sent them to a private school in Switzerland, where they were poor students, and Thornton, the middle son, was particularly rambunctious. For lack of a better idea, Thornton, nicknamed Thornie, and the youngest, Herbert, nicknamed Bertie, moved to Natal, which was then a British colony in what is now South Africa, with the aim of becoming farmers. In 1869 Thornie became very ill and returned to England, where he never recovered and died of spinal tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five. As it happened, Henry James, then a young writer, was paying a visit to George Eliot during one of Thornie's worst episodes. Bertie married in Natal but also became ill and died from bronchitis there in 1875 at the age of twenty-nine. The eldest son, Charles, lived briefly with his father and Marian in London and got a job with the post office; he married in 1865. Ironically, Agnes, the source of many of Lewes's woes, outlived everyone, including Charles; she had been disinherited by her father but nevertheless managed to survive until 1902.

One of my interests in reading this book was to examine how Lewes's outlook influenced George Eliot's. He makes his preference of realism clear in the following statement, which comes from the article "Realism in Art: Recent German Fiction," which was published in 1858:

Realism is thus the basis of all Art, and its antithesis is not Idealism, but Falsism. When our painters represent peasants with regular features and irreproachable linen; when their milkmaids have the air of Keepsake beauties, whose costume is picturesque, and never old or dirty; when Hodge is made to speak fine sentiments in unexceptionable English, and the children utter long speeches of religious and poetic enthusiasm; when the conversation of the parlour and drawing-room is a succession of philosophical remarks, expressed with great clearness and logic, an attempt is made to idealize, but the result is simply falsification and bad art....Either give us true peasants, or leave them untouched; either paint no drapery at all, or paint it with utmost fidelity; either keep your people silent, or make them speak the idiom of their class.

Citing one of Lewes's reviews, Ashton sums up his aesthetics as follows:

Lewes was clear-sighted about his criteria; he was living with a woman who was at that very moment fulfilling his prescriptions for 'true psychology in a novel', namely that it should consist in 'the presentation of the actual emotions, motives, and thoughts at work in the action of the drama'. This was the gift he recognized in Marian, as he had recognized it in Jane Austen, and, partially, in Charlotte Bronte and Mrs Gaskell.

It was exactly this kind of realism that astounded me when I read Middlemarch, and though her writing may seem dated in other respects, George Eliot's realism has, in my opinion, never been surpassed by any writer. Although I am capable of enjoying different kinds of fiction, I find realism to be the most effective and important, and the dearth of it in contemporary fiction signals commercialization and a lack of real insight in today's writers, both popular and literary.

I also chose to read this book in order to make a comparison with Jean-Paul Sartre's relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. At the most fundamental level there are strong similarities. Both couples shared very close worldviews, loved each other and supported each other's work. However, the worldviews of the couples were dissimilar and the personalities and dynamics within the relationships were not the same. Sartre/de Beauvoir were primarily anti-bourgeois when in fact they never escaped the class that they supposedly disliked. Neither of them was a good social observer, and their curiosity seems to have been badly stunted, leading to narrow ideological thinking. Most of de Beauvoir's writing seems to be a transcription from her journals and diaries, and a lack of imagination and an inability to understand people who were not like herself left her with very little material with which to work. Thus her most lasting influence will be in feminism, because her early discontent as a woman is what fueled her entire career. The missing ingredient, I think, is life experience. Although they were not materialistic, their lack of money did not cause them real hardship, because they had no children and no responsibilities. They were able to fashion a lifestyle based on immature sentiments that were never put to the test. Sartre used his money to support as many mistresses as he could afford, and de Beauvoir engaged in adventurism in search of material for her books. With what I've read so far, I find de Beauvoir quite disappointing. All of the education, discussion and collaboration in the world couldn't make either Sartre or de Beauvoir great writers.

In comparison, G.H. Lewes and George Eliot seem vastly more likable, interesting and accomplished. It is unfortunate that Lewes never wrote a magnum opus and is hardly remembered today, but it is a significant achievement to have brought to the world a great voice that would likely have remained silent without him.