Surprised by Life

                                 Surprised by Life

Roger Penrose has won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2020. He used ingenious mathematical methods in his proof that black holes are a direct consequence of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Einstein did not himself believe that black holes really exist. 

His latest efforts are to develop what he calls Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC) which says that, instead of a single Big Bang, the universe cycles from one eon to the next, each time starting out infinitely small and smooth before expanding and generating clumps of matter.

That matter eventually gets dragged into supermassive black holes which over the very long term (of the order of googol, that is 10 to the power of 100, years) ‘disappear with a pop’ by emitting Hawking radiation to set the stage for the next Big Bang.

Each universe leaves subtle imprints on the next cosmos when it pops into being, he told the audience: energy can ‘burst through’ from one universe to the next, at what he calls ‘Hawking points’.

However, this theory has gone down ‘very badly’ with his peers, he said. In response, there has been deathly silence: ‘that’s what we’ve had’.

Penrose is not a religious man. But using the models developed in his study of Black Holes he has calculated that the odds against an ordered universe happening by random chance are 10^10^30th to 1, against. The odds against life are 10^10^123rd to 1, against.

Stats

 

                                                     Stats

 Combined with World Bank data for the same year, these datasets show that the poorest 20% of U.S. households have higher average consumption per person than the averages for all people in most nations of the OECD and Europe:

From 1929 to 2018, inflation-adjusted federal, state and local government current expenditures per U.S. resident ranged from $1,021 to $20,690 per year, with a median of $11,265 and an average of $10,664. In 2018, they were $20,566, or 93% above the average:

According to the Congressional Budget Office, U.S. households obtained about 85% of their income from the market and 15% from the government in 2016. This varied by income group on average as follows:

Genes and Social Science

                                                    Genes and Social Science

Paige Harden, the left-leaning behavioral geneticist, commenting on an article criticizing her work. It contains a lot of serious problems, not the least of which is a scientist identifying herself and her work in a political context:

"In this article, Erik Parens urges me and other scientists working in the field of social genomics to “curb [our] optimism” regarding how genetic discoveries could be used to advance progressive and egalitarian social goals. In my view, however, it is Parens and other critics of social genomics who need to curb their optimism, in two ways.

First, Parens is overly optimistic that social science can ever hope to be successful without genetics. In reality, social scientists have failed, time and time again, to produce interventions that bring about lasting improvements in people’s lives. There are many reasons for that failure. But one reason is that many scientists continue to engage in what the sociologist Jeremy Freese has called a “tacit collusion” to avoid reckoning, in their research designs and in their causal inferences, with the fact that people are genetically different from one another.

All interventions and policies are built on a model of how the world works: “If I change x, then y will happen.” A model of the world that pretends all people are genetically the same, or that the only thing people inherit from their parents is their environment, is a wrong model of how the world works. The more often our models of the world are wrong, the more often we will continue to fail in designing interventions and policies that do what they intend to do. The goal of integrating genetics into the social sciences is not to design boutique educational interventions tailored for children’s genotypes. It is to help rescue us from our current situation, where most educational interventions tested don’t work for anyone. This track record of failure plays directly into the hands of a right-wing that touts the ineffectiveness of intervention as evidence for its false narrative of genetic determinism.

Second, Parens and other critics are overly optimistic that their strategy of disapproval, discouragement, and disavowal of genetic research will be effective in neutralizing the pernicious ideologies of the far-right. What is the evidence that this strategy actually works? Herrnstein and Murray published “The Bell Curve” when I was 12 years old; Murray published “Human Diversity” when I was 37 years old; and in all that time, the predominant response from the political left has remained pretty much exactly the same – emphasize people’s genetic sameness, question the wisdom of doing genetic research at all, urge caution. Yet, the far-right is ascendant. In my view, the left’s response to genetic science simply preaches to its own choir. Meanwhile, this strategy of minimization allows right-wing ideologues to offer to “red-pill” people with the “forbidden knowledge” of genetic results.

What the left hasn’t done (yet) is formulate a messaging strategy that (a) reconciles the existence of human genetic differences with people’s moral and political commitments to human equality, and (b) is readily comprehensible outside the confines of the ivory tower. Reminding people that genes are a source of luck in their lives has the potential to be that message. Parens characterizes me as making a “generous hearted but large leap” to expect that portraying genes as luck will change people’s minds, but economic research suggests that reminding people of the role of luck in their lives does, in fact, make them more supportive of redistribution.

Overall, this article portrays me and others working in this space as “soft-pedaling” the dangers of social genomics being appropriated by the far right. But I am fully cognizant of the dangers. Parens is the one who is soft-pedaling. He is soft-pedaling the enormous damage done to progress in psychology, sociology, and other social sciences – fields that are tasked with improving people’s lives – by their refusal to engage with genetics. And, he is soft-pedaling the danger of simply continuing the left’s decades-old, easily-“red-pilled” rhetorical strategy at a time with right-wing ideologies are on the rise globally."

Snow-Cholera

                                                         Snow-Cholera

Truth is slow to get traction, witness the well-established connection between citrus and scurvy before it was institutionalized. The famous Snow-Cholera epidemiological observation followed a "miasma" explanation that became the basis for an invested bureaucracy as they "followed the science." Like killing the cats during the Plague. Magness has an interesting article on the event.

In the 19th century, outbreaks of Cholera were common, and Britain deployed a “Board of Health” to manage and suppress the disease. England experienced a particularly severe wave of outbreaks in 1848 and 1849, with recurring instances over the next decade and a half. 

The Board of Health in London adopted the consensus belief that Cholera spread by miasmic properties, which is to say “bad air” that supposedly caused the disease to linger in the vicinity of sewage, garbage, and similar sanitary problems. Address these concerns and the disease would vanish, or so the logic followed. The Board of Health accordingly hired and deployed teams of sanitary inspectors around the city to oversee and regulate the improvement of sewage systems that would carry the perceived source of Cholera away.

Although the Board of Health was conceived of as a government body to lead the effort to improve and regulate sanitary conditions in accordance with scientific expertise, it quickly became an entrenched political interest devoted to the perpetuation of its own power and expansion of its own budget. 

The 19th century liberal philosopher Herbert Spencer included a devastating critique of the Board of Health in his 1851 book Social Statics, which argued that the bureaucratic properties of the agency had led it astray from its mission and even created an impediment to public health.  

Instead of taking immediate mitigation measures to prepare for an epidemic that had already stricken continental Europe, the Board devoted its energies to long-term engineering projects to improve the city’s sewer system. Some of these projects would eventually yield sanitary benefits. But they also provided lucrative money-making opportunities for politically connected contractors, and – due to the prevailing miasma theory – they largely misdiagnosed the causes of Cholera. Although the sewer improvements removed stagnant sources of waste and refuse, they also deposited them in the Thames – the major source of drinking water for the city. The “improvements,” premised on eliminating miasmas from the air, thereby further spread the water-carried disease.

Spencer’s indictment of the public health bureaucracy catalogued these and other successions of government missteps in fighting off Cholera. The public health agencies became a lucrative political interest, invested in holding up an erroneous “scientific consensus” about how the disease spread. Medical journals such as the Lancet became advocacy vehicles for expanding the public health bureaucracy’s “sanitary” oversight, along with accompanying budgetary appropriations.

Two years after Spencer wrote his chapter another Cholera outbreak hit London’s SoHo district, seemingly concentrated in the vicinity of a water pump. The outbreak is now regarded as one of the most famous events in the history of epidemiology . A physician named John Snow theorized that Cholera spread by contaminated water that carried an associated pathogen, rather than “bad air.” Facing intense skepticism from the miasma-oriented medical consensus viewpoint, Snow convinced the local council to remove the pump handle from the suspected source – the contaminated Broad Street well. Snow’s theory, as we now know, was correct and the natural experiment proved the water-born nature of the underlying pathogen.

Despite Snow’s discovery, the political interests behind the public health bureaucracy resisted its implications for the next decade as Cholera continued to ravage Britain’s cities. Just as Spencer predicted, the Board and its supportive medical establishment acted in the interest of their own perpetuation rather than true public health. 

The Lancet, whose owner Spencer identified in 1852 as an advocacy vehicle for expansive public health expenditures rather than scientific knowledge, published a harsh editorial denunciation of Snow in 1855. The General Board of Health commissioned a medical council investigation of Snow’s theory as well, attacking it as scientifically unsound. “After careful inquiry,” they wrote, “we see no reason to adopt this belief. We do not find it that the water was contaminated in the manner alleged.” Instead, the Board reverted back to the disproven but politically entrenched miasma theory: 

Thus, if the Broad Street pump did actually become a source of disease to persons dwelling at a distance, we believe that this may have depended on other organic impurities than those exclusively referred to, and may have arisen, not in its containing choleraic excrements, but simply in the fact of its impure waters having participated in the atmospheric infection of the district.

The Board’s position has since been thoroughly discredited. Indeed, it was a former rival of Snow and miasma theory adherent William Farr who statistically repeated and verified Snow’s theory during another outbreak in 1866. But the damage was already done. Although Snow’s work revealed the answer to the Cholera problem in 1854, the biggest obstacle to operationalizing this knowledge into fighting the disease was the public health bureaucracy itself and the entrenched political interests it had come to represent. Snow’s experience, in effect, proved the reality of Herbert Spencer’s assessment. Rather than improve public health, the government had only distorted and politicized the necessary scientific processes.

Identity Politics

                                                            Identity Politics 

... identity politics, has three key features. First, the creed of identity politics defines and divides Americans in terms of collective social identities. According to this new creed, our racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as individuals equally endowed with fundamental rights.

Second, the creed of identity politics ranks these different racial and social groups in terms of privilege and power, with disproportionate moral worth allotted to each. It divides Americans into two groups: oppressors and victims. The more a group is considered oppressed, the more its members have a moral claim upon the rest of society. As for their supposed oppressors, they must atone and even be punished in perpetuity for their sins and those of their ancestors.

Third, the creed of identity politics teaches that America itself is to blame for oppression. America’s “electric cord” is not the creed of liberty and equality that connects citizens today to each other and to every generation of Americans past, present, and future. Rather, America’s “electric cord” is a heritage of oppression that the majority racial group inflicts upon minority groups, and identity politics is about assigning and absolving guilt for that oppression.
According to this new creed, Americans are not a people defined by their dedication to human equality, but a people defined by their perpetuation of racial and sexual oppression.---from Appendix III — “Created Equal or Identity Politics?” — from the 1776 Report that was just released by the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission

A new creed. Is it compatible with the U.S. Constitution? And, more importantly, does anyone care? There are agreed upon rules that order societies--until no one cares and there are no rules.

                                                Keystone XL

The executive action canceling the Keystone XL pipeline showcases the problems government has with forming allegiances with special interest groups.

Keystone XL is an expansion of an existing pipeline, called Keystone, that carries Canadian crude into the U.S. It was first proposed in July 2008 by TC Energy Corp. The line, which is now partially built but not operating, was eventually expected to transport 830,000 barrels of oil 1,210 miles from the Canadian oil sands to Steele City, Neb., where it would link to existing pipelines heading to Gulf Coast refineries. Environmentalist special interest groups opposed the pipeline because they feared spills--i.e. what happens if everything is not perfect--and, probably more importantly,  the oil comes from the high greenhouse energy source Canadian sands.

Now Biden has stopped work on it.

That decision makes the environmental special interest group happy. But it costs 10,000 union jobs. 10,000. And it makes the Canadians very unhappy because a market they have developed that wants their product has been disrupted by government fiat.

So, what has been achieved? The fear of a pipeline rupture has been decreased but, when one is concerned about things working perfectly one barely knows where to start. Or stop. Cars catch fire, planes fall down. What to do? And certainly, little progress is made by drying the Canadian sands up when China is building coal-fired plants hand over fist.

Somehow the symbolism of the pipeline was more important to the politicians than the 10,00 workers, Americans getting energy or Canada. On the surface, that is hard to explain. But it also promises other hard-to-explain rules and favors that will certainly come to compensate those who were offended or angered by the original action. So the initial narrow effect of pointed political favor ripples into larger and larger areas and creates a huge grotesque formed by very small grotesques.

Ah, politicians.

 

SEC

 

                                                               SEC

 Nasdaq is calling for all its listed companies to appoint within the next four years no fewer than two “diverse” directors: at least one woman, and one person from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group, or someone who identifies as LGBTQ. Any company failing this requirement would be obligated to explain why. This new standard now faces approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission. 

The SEC's decision should be fascinating because the SEC is tasked with safeguarding the investor. There may be other, peripheral factors in their decisions but the investor is their primary responsibility. Including a social engineering component to their job complicates their job tremendously--if they take it seriously.

Sunday/Pale Galilean

                                  

                         Sunday/Pale Galilean

Today is the gospel where Christ calls the first apostles, Peter and Andrew, James and John, at the sea of Galilee. In Luke, it ends with the fishing boat miracle that so impresses Peter that he fearfully tries to leave Christ.

Brothers, boats, fishing, industry, the sea--there's a lot here for symbolic people. One element is Galilee itself. Galilee was not a firmly established Jewish community. Christ's ministry did not come from the heart of Israel. It was loosely connected to the pagan gentiles. So, what kind of existence is Christ stepping out of?

Swinburn refers to The Pale Galilean in a poem he wrote on the transitory where love, like Christianity, will fade. "Hymn to Proserpine" is sung by a pagan after the proclamation in Rome of the Christian faith. The speaker laments the displacement of pleasure, sensuality, gaity--and Death--that makes up so much of life. Hence, the "pale Galilean."

"For no man under the sky lives twice, outliving his day.
And grief is a grievous thing, and a man hath enough of his tears:
Why should he labour, and bring fresh grief to blacken his years?
Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath;
We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the fullness of death.
Laurel is green for a season, and love is sweet for a day; . . ."

It ends grimly, as a pagan would:

"Thou art more than the Gods who number the days of our temporal breath;
Let these give labour and slumber; but thou, Proserpina, death.
Therefore now at thy feet I abide for a season in silence. I know
I shall die as my fathers died, and sleep as they sleep; even so.
For the glass of the years is brittle wherein we gaze for a span;
A little soul for a little bears up this corpse which is man.
So long I endure, no longer; and laugh not again, neither weep.
For there is no God found stronger than death; and death is a sleep."

Survey

                                                              Survey

A recent poll--funded by a conservative group but done by a presumed objective polling organization--turned up some interesting observations. They stratified the answers by voting tendencies.

Question: The average U.S. household spends about $30,000 per year on food, housing, and clothing combined. If we broke down all combined federal, state, and local taxes to a per household cost, do you think this would amount to more or less than an average of $30,000 per household per year?

Correct Answer: More than $30,000. In 2018, federal, state and local governments collected a combined total of $5.1 trillion in taxes or an average of $40,000 for every household in the U.S.

Correct answer given by 43% of all voters, 36% of Democrat voters, 47% of Trump voters, 42% of males, 44% of females, 51% of 18 to 34 year olds, 46% of 35 to 64 year olds, and 38% of 65+ year olds.

Question: On average, who would you say pays a greater portion of their income in federal taxes: The middle class or the upper 1% of income earners?

Correct Answer: The upper 1%. The Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. Treasury, and the Tax Policy Center have all documented that households in the top 1% of income pay an average effective federal tax rate of about 33%, while middle-income households pay about 13%. These tax rates account for nearly all income and federal taxes.  

Correct answer given by 18% of all voters, 6% of Democrat voters, 30% of Trump voters, 21% of males, 15% of females, 11% of 18 to 34 year olds, 19% of 35 to 64 year olds, and 19% of 65+ year olds.

Question: Now, suppose we broke down all government spending to a per household cost—do you think the combined spending of federal, state and local governments amounts to more or less than $40,000 per household per year?

Correct Answer: More than $40,000. In 2018, federal, state and local governments spent a combined total of $6.9 trillion, or an average of about $54,000 for every household in the United States. For reference, the average U.S. household spends about $45,000 per year on food, housing, clothing, transportation, and healthcare combined.

Correct answer given by 48% of all voters, 44% of Democrat voters, 53% of Trump voters, 53% of males, 43% of females, 53% of 18 to 34 year olds, 52% of 35 to 64 year olds, and 43% of 65+ year olds.

Question: Do you think the federal government spends more money on social programs, such as Medicare, education, and food stamps—or does the federal government spend more money on national defense, such as the Army, Navy, and missile defense?

Correct Answer: Social programs. In 2018, 62% of federal spending was for social programs, and 18% was for national defense. In 1960, the opposite was true, and 53% of federal spending was for national defense, while 21% was for social programs.  

Correct answer given by 36% of all voters, 14% of Democrat voters, 59% of Trump voters, 40% of males, 33% of females, 23% of 18 to 34 year olds, 36% of 35 to 64 year olds, and 41% of 65+ year olds.

Against 1619

                                      Against 1619

Journalism does better when it writes the first rough draft of history, not the last word on it.

“The 1619 Project is a thesis in search of evidence, not the other way around.”

This is a long--and very cautious--article by Bret Stephens published, in fairness, by the NYT itself. Its topic is the 1619 Project, an exercise that encapsulates the modern world's ability to take the outrageous very seriously. My take is that its ambition is less than its calculated destructiveness. But even in the face of obvious disingenuous propaganda, Stephens must feel his analysis should be gentle.

"If there’s one word admirers and critics alike can agree on when it comes to The New York Times’s award-winning 1619 Project, it’s ambition. Ambition to reframe America’s conversation about race. Ambition to reframe our understanding of history. Ambition to move from news pages to classrooms. Ambition to move from scholarly debate to national consciousness.

In some ways, this ambition succeeded. The 1619 Project introduced a date, previously obscure to most Americans, that ought always to have been thought of as seminal — and probably now will. It offered fresh reminders of the extent to which Black freedom was a victory gained by courageous Black Americans, and not just a gift obtained from benevolent whites.

It showed, in a stunning photo essay, the places where human beings were once bought and sold as slaves — neglected scenes of American infamy. It illuminated the extent to which so much of what makes America great, including some of our uniquely American understandings of liberty and equality, is unthinkable without the struggle of Black Americans, as well as the extent to which so much of what continues to bedevil us is the result of centuries of racism.

And, in a point missed by many of the 1619 Project’s critics, it does not reject American values. As Nikole Hannah-Jones, its creator and leading voice, concluded in her essay for the project, “I wish, now, that I could go back to the younger me and tell her that her people’s ancestry started here, on these lands, and to boldly, proudly, draw the stars and those stripes of the American flag.” It’s an unabashedly patriotic thought.

But ambition can be double-edged. Journalists are, most often, in the business of writing the first rough draft of history, not trying to have the last word on it. We are best when we try to tell truths with a lowercase t, following evidence in directions unseen, not the capital-T truth of a pre-established narrative in which inconvenient facts get discarded. And we’re supposed to report and comment on the political and cultural issues of the day, not become the issue itself.

Those concerns came to light last month when a longstanding critic of the project, Phillip W. Magness, noted in the online magazine Quillette that references to 1619 as the country’s “true founding” or “moment [America] began” had disappeared from the digital display copy without explanation.

These were not minor points. The deleted assertions went to the core of the project’s most controversial goal, “to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.”

As fresh concerns make clear, on these points — and for all of its virtues, buzz, spinoffs and a Pulitzer Prize — the 1619 Project has failed.

That doesn’t mean that the project seeks to erase the Declaration of Independence from history. But it does mean that it seeks to dethrone the Fourth of July by treating American history as a story of Black struggle against white supremacy — of which the Declaration is, for all of its high-flown rhetoric, supposed to be merely a part.

In a tweet, Hannah-Jones responded to Magness and other critics by insisting that “the text of the project” remained “unchanged,” while maintaining that the case for making 1619 the country’s “true” birth year was “always a metaphoric argument.” I emailed her to ask if she could point to any instances before this controversy in which she had acknowledged that her claims about 1619 as “our true founding” had been merely metaphorical. Her answer was that the idea of treating the 1619 date metaphorically should have been so obvious that it went without saying.

She then challenged me to find any instance in which the project stated that “using 1776 as our country’s birth date is wrong,” that it “should not be taught to schoolchildren,” and that the only one “that should be taught” was 1619. “Good luck unearthing any of us arguing that,” she added.

Here is an excerpt from the introductory essay to the project by The New York Times Magazine’s editor, Jake Silverstein, as it appeared in print in August 2019 (italics added):

“1619. It is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619?”

Now compare it to the version of the same text as it now appears online:

“1619 is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that the moment that the country’s defining contradictions first came into the world was in late August of 1619?”

In an email, Silverstein told me that the changes to the text were immaterial, in part because it still cited 1776 as our nation’s official birth date, and because the project’s stated aim remained to put 1619 and its consequences as the true starting point of the American story.

Readers can judge for themselves whether these unacknowledged changes violate the standard obligations of transparency for New York Times journalism. The question of journalistic practices, however, raises deeper doubts about the 1619 Project’s core premises.

In his introduction, Silverstein argues that America’s “defining contradictions” were born in August 1619, when a ship carrying 20 to 30 enslaved Africans from what is present-day Angola arrived in Point Comfort, in the English colony of Virginia. And the title page of Hannah-Jones’s essay for the project insists that “our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written.”

Both points are illogical. A “defining contradiction” requires a powerful point of opposition or inconsistency, and in the year 1619 the points of opposition were few and far between. Slavery and the slave trade had been global phenomena for centuries by the early 17th century, involving Europeans and non-Europeans as slave traders and the enslaved. The Africans who arrived in Virginia that August got there only because they had been seized by English privateers from a Portuguese ship headed for the port of Veracruz in Mexico, then a part of the Spanish Empire.

In this sense, and for all of its horror, there was nothing particularly surprising in the fact that slavery made its way to the English colonies on the Eastern Seaboard, as it already had in the rest of the Western Hemisphere.

What was surprising was that in 1776 a politically formidable “defining contradiction” — “that all men are created equal” — came into existence through the Declaration of Independence. As Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1859, that foundational document would forever serve as a “rebuke and stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.” It’s why, at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery, Lincoln would date the country’s founding to “four score and seven years ago.”

As for the notion that the Declaration’s principles were “false” in 1776, ideals aren’t false merely because they are unrealized, much less because many of the men who championed them, and the nation they created, hypocritically failed to live up to them. Most of us, at any given point in time, are falling short of some ideal we nonetheless hold to be true or good.

These two flaws led to a third, conceptual, error. “Out of slavery — and the anti-Black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional,” writes Silverstein.

Nearly everything? What about, say, the ideas contained by the First Amendment? Or the spirit of openness that brought millions of immigrants through places like Ellis Island? Or the enlightened worldview of the Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift? Or the spirit of scientific genius and discovery exemplified by the polio vaccine and the moon landing? On the opposite side of the moral ledger, to what extent does anti-Black racism figure in American disgraces such as the brutalization of Native Americans, the Chinese Exclusion Act or the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II?

Monocausality — whether it’s the clash of economic classes, the hidden hand of the market, or white supremacy and its consequences — has always been a seductive way of looking at the world. It has always been a simplistic one, too. The world is complex. So are people and their motives. The job of journalism is to take account of that complexity, not simplify it out of existence through the adoption of some ideological orthodoxy.

This mistake goes far to explain the 1619 Project’s subsequent scholarly and journalistic entanglements. It should have been enough to make strong yet nuanced claims about the role of slavery and racism in American history. Instead, it issued categorical and totalizing assertions that are difficult to defend on close examination.

It should have been enough for the project to serve as curator for a range of erudite and interesting voices, with ample room for contrary takes. Instead, virtually every writer in the project seems to sing from the same song sheet, alienating other potential supporters of the project and polarizing national debate.

***

An early sign that the project was in trouble came in an interview last November with James McPherson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Battle Cry of Freedom” and a past president of the American Historical Association. He was withering: “Almost from the outset,” McPherson told the World Socialist Web Site, “I was disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective.”

In particular, McPherson objected to Hannah-Jones’s suggestion that the struggle against slavery and racism and for civil rights and democracy was, if not exclusively then mostly, a Black one. As she wrote in her essay: “The truth is that as much democracy as this nation has today, it has been borne on the backs of Black resistance.”

McPherson demurs: “From the Quakers in the 18th century, on through the abolitionists in the antebellum, to the Radical Republicans in the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the N.A.A.C.P., which was an interracial organization founded in 1909, down through the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, there have been a lot of whites who have fought against slavery and racial discrimination, and against racism,” he said. “And that’s what’s missing from this perspective.”

In a lengthier dissection, published in January in The Atlantic, the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz accused Hannah-Jones of making arguments “built on partial truths and misstatements of the facts.” The goal of educating Americans on slavery and its consequences, he added, was so important that it “cannot be forwarded through falsehoods, distortions and significant omissions.”

Wilentz’s catalog of the project’s mistakes is extensive. Hannah-Jones’s essay claimed that by 1776 Britain was “deeply conflicted” over its role in slavery. But despite the landmark Somerset v. Stewart court ruling in 1772, which held that slavery was not supported by English common law, it remained deeply embedded in the practices of the British Empire. The essay claimed that, among Londoners, “there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade” by 1776. But the movement to abolish the British slave trade only began about a decade later — inspired, in part, Wilentz notes, by American antislavery agitation that had started in the 1760s and 1770s. The list goes on.

Then there was an essay in Politico in March by the Northwestern historian Leslie M. Harris, an expert on pre-Civil War African-American life and slavery. “On Aug. 19 of last year,” Harris wrote, “I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones … repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against with her fact-checker: that the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America.”

None of this should have come as a surprise: The 1619 Project is a thesis in search of evidence, not the other way around. Nor was this fire from the right: Both Wilentz and Harris were at pains to emphasize their sympathy with the project’s moral aims.

Yet, aside from a one-word “clarification” issued in March — after months of public pressure, The Times conceded that only “some” colonists fought for independence primarily to defend slavery — the response of the magazine has been, in effect, “nothing to see here.” In a pair of lengthy editor’s notes, Silverstein has defended much of the scholarship in the project by citing another slate of historians to back him up. That’s one way of justifying the final product.

The larger problem is that The Times’s editors, however much background reading they might have done, are not in a position to adjudicate historical disputes. That should have been an additional reason for the 1619 Project to seek input from, and include contributions by, an intellectually diverse range of scholarly voices. Yet not only does the project choose a side, it also brooks no doubt.

“It is finally time to tell our story truthfully,” the magazine declares on its 1619 cover page. Finally? Truthfully? Is The Times suggesting that distinguished historians, like the ones who have seriously disputed aspects of the project, had previously been telling half-truths or falsehoods?

Almost inevitably, what began as a scholarly quarrel became a political one.

About a month before the project’s publication, Silverstein reached out to the Pulitzer Center to propose a 1619 curriculum for schools. Soon thereafter, the project was being introduced into classrooms across the country.

It’s one thing for a newspaper to publish the 1619 Project by way of challenging its subscribers: After all, they pay for the product. It’s quite another to become a pedagogical product for schoolchildren who, along with their parents, in most cases probably don’t subscribe. This was stepping into the political fray in a way that was guaranteed to invite not just right-wing blowback, but possible federal involvement.

That’s exactly what has happened. When “1619” was spray-painted on a toppled statue of George Washington, many people took angry or horrified notice. When Hannah-Jones tweeted that “it would be an honor” for the summer’s unrest to be called “the 1619 riots,” the right took notice again. For many, the 1619 Project smacked of fake history coming from the “fake news” — with results that were all too real. As unbidden gifts to Donald Trump go, it could hardly have been sweeter than that.

Sure enough, last month Trump suggested he would cut off federal funding to any public school using it in its curriculum. He even proposed establishing a “1776 Commission” to help “restore patriotic education to our schools.” Many Americans shudder at the thought of what the president might have in mind by “patriotic education.” But ideas have consequences. They aren’t always the ones that authors — or publishers — anticipate or desire.

Beyond these political disputes is a metaphysical question that matters. What is a founding? Why have generations of Americans considered 1776 our birth date — as opposed to 1781, when we won our independence militarily at Yorktown; or 1783, when we won it diplomatically through the Treaty of Paris; or 1788, when our system of government came into existence with the ratification of the Constitution?

The answer is that, unlike other dates, 1776 uniquely marries letter and spirit, politics and principle: The declaration that something new is born, combined with the expression of an ideal that — because we continue to believe in it even as we struggle to live up to it — binds us to the date.

Contrary to what the 1619 Project claims, 1776 isn’t just our nation’s “official” founding. It is our symbolic one, too. The metaphor of 1776 is more powerful than that of 1619 because what makes America most itself isn’t four centuries of racist subjugation. It’s 244 years of effort by Americans — sometimes halting, but often heroic — to live up to our greatest ideal. That’s a struggle that has been waged by people of every race and creed. And it’s an ideal that continues to inspire millions of people at home and abroad.

For obvious reasons, I’ve thought long and hard about the ethics of writing this essay. On the one hand, outside of exceptional circumstances, it’s bad practice to openly criticize the work of one’s colleagues. We bat for the same team and owe one another collegial respect.

On the other, the 1619 Project has become, partly by its design and partly because of avoidable mistakes, a focal point of the kind of intense national debate that columnists are supposed to cover, and that is being widely written about outside The Times. To avoid writing about it on account of the first scruple is to be derelict in our responsibility toward the second.

All the more so as journalists, in the United States and abroad, come under relentless political assault from critics who accuse us of being fake, biased, partisan and an arm of the radical left. Many of these attacks are baseless. Some of them are not. Through its overreach, the 1619 Project has given critics of The Times a gift."

“For obvious reasons, I’ve thought long and hard about the ethics of writing this essay. On the one hand, outside of exceptional circumstances, it’s bad practice to openly criticize the work of one’s colleagues. We bat for the same team and owe one another collegial respect.

“On the other, the 1619 Project has become, partly by its design and partly because of avoidable mistakes, a focal point of the kind of intense national debate that columnists are supposed to cover, and that is being widely written about outside The Times. To avoid writing about it on account of the first scruple is to be derelict in our responsibility toward the second.

“All the more so as journalists, in the United States and abroad, come under relentless political assault from critics who accuse us of being fake, biased, partisan and an arm of the radical left. Many of these attacks are baseless. Some of them are not. Through its overreach, the 1619 Project has given critics of The Times a gift.”
 

Zwolinski and Libertarianism

 

                                                 

                         Zwolinski and Libertarianism

Philosopher Matt Zwolinski has been debating the libertarian response to the Virus and has this article with some broad, interesting implications.

After giving it much thought, I think I finally understand what’s going on here. The reason that libertarians disagree with each other so much about the best policy response to COVID is, I think, the same reason libertarians disagree with each other about the best policy response to climate change. Libertarian theory, by itself, simply isn’t much help in figuring out what to think about problems like these.

One of the core – if not the core – libertarian insights is an idea that has sometimes been called the “moral parity thesis” – the idea that if something is wrong for a private individual to do, it’s wrong for an individual or group of individuals in government to do as well. Stated that way, the idea sounds obvious, almost trivial. But as philosophers like Michael Huemer have shown, when applied consistently, it yields radically libertarian implications. It implies, in the words of Murray Rothbard, that “war is mass murder, conscription is slavery, and taxation is robbery.” In these cases, libertarianism provides us with moral clarity by reducing apparently complex phenomena to simpler cases where our intuitions are clearer.

But what does this idea tell us about a genuinely complex phenomenon like global climate change? If the scientific consensus is correct, and human activity is causing climate change that will (if not adequately addressed) cause serious harm to future people, then there’s a good case to be made that something has gone wrong from a libertarian perspective. People now are acting in a way that is causing harm to other people’s bodies and property. Doesn’t that violate the Non-Aggression Principle?

Well, maybe. The problem is that climate change is a phenomenon marked by two characteristics with which, to be frank, libertarianism doesn’t deal with very well. The first is risk. If I club you over the head and take your money, there’s no question that I’ve violated your rights. But what if I merely engage in an action that imposes some risk of harm on you, like driving under the influence of alcohol (or driving at all, for that matter!), expelling pollutants from my smokestack (or my lungs!), or burning fossil fuels? Libertarianism, as such, simply doesn’t have a good canonical answer to these questions. Barring all risky activity would grind civilization to a halt. Disregarding risk is lunacy. And trying to distinguish between “reasonable” and “unreasonable” risks threatens degeneration into utilitarianism.

The second characteristic of climate change is that whatever negative effects it produces are the unintended consequence of a large aggregation of individual decisions, none of which is necessarily harmful in itself. In that way, climate change is a kind of spontaneous order – though unlike the spontaneous order of market coordination, it’s a harmful order rather than a beneficial one. What should libertarians say about such phenomena? If Jones acts permissibly in performing action X, does his action become impermissible by the mere fact that 100,000 people also perform X, and that the aggregate result of their action is imposition of harm on Sam? Answering yes seems to run afoul of the spirit (if not the letter) of the moral parity thesis. Answering no, in contrast, seems to leave individuals’ bodies and property vulnerable to potentially seriously harmful invasion by others.

I’ve written elsewhere about these issues as applied to the question of environmental pollution. But it’s pretty obvious that contagious diseases such as COVID raise precisely the same questions. Gathering with many others during a pandemic in a restaurant, or a mass protest, doesn’t automatically harm them. But it poses a certain risk of harming them. And, from a public health perspective, no single individual’s action is going to have any measurable impact on the spread of the disease or the strain on the country’s medical system. But the aggregate impact of individuals’ decision makes all the difference. So going to that restaurant, or that protest, isn’t exactly like punching somebody in the nose. But it’s not exactly unlike it, either.

Of course, the moral parity thesis isn’t the only libertarian insight. David Hart’s points about government failure are well-taken, as are libertarian insights about the ability of individuals to self-organize to accomplish public goals. (As Nozick reminds us, “people tend to forget the possibilities of acting independently of the state.”)

Still, when faced with problems like climate change and COVID, it should come as no surprise when libertarian responses are all over the map. These simply aren’t problems that libertarian theory is especially well-suited to address. And so libertarians, in seeking to address them, wind up falling back on their own personal values, preferences for risk, and assessments of the empirical evidence. Since libertarians presumably disagree amongst themselves on these matters as much as they disagree with anyone else, so too are their views about policy.

Buffett and Gold

                             

                                     Buffett and Gold

The debt continues to rise and the hardliners continue to predict inflation. No inflation has occurred. This discrepancy between predictions and reality has gone on for decades. A new thesis now preaches debt means nothing. The days of the bond vigilantes are over.

Warren Buffett has not been a fan of gold. There has been a belief that investing in gold was akin to betting against America. But things may be changing. According to a filing released Aug. 14, Berkshire Hathaway bought about 21 million shares of gold miner Barrick Gold, spending about $563 million.

Buffett’s conversion to gold might be a signal for other stock market investors. But some things stay the same. The company pays a dividend.

A Lost Star Trek

 

                                      A Lost Star Trek

Not many people know this obscure episode, because it was shot during the third season as an “extra,” to be used in a fourth season that never materialized.  But here is the basic plotline.  Kirk and the Enterprise visit a planet that, by mistake, received errant TV transmissions of “The Beverly Hillbillies” centuries ago.  The inhabitants of that planet, being highly impressionable, have since organized their society along those principles and with Appalachian clothing, albeit with less couth manners.  These creatures are mostly backward, but they have two special powers.  First, neither Vulcan neck pinches nor phasers “set on stun” affect them, and second they have the ability to just walk through the otherwise protective shields of the Starship Enterprise.

In the episode, these “Penetrators,” upset at the backward state of affairs on their own planet, and encouraged by a nearby Klingon commander, attempt to take over the bridge of the Enterprise, using pipe bombs, chemical irritants, and Molotov cocktails, throwing one of the latter at Chekhov.  Their motives are varied, but their manner is undeniably hostile and they arrive in a great swarm.  Kirk issues orders to respond vigorously, and the intruders are stopped.  This is, after all, the bridge of the Enterprise.

It is protected by a single, sliding door.

One member of Starfleet Command, an enemy of Kirk’s since they were classmates together at the Academy, attempts to have Kirk tried on charges of authorizing excess force against the Penetrators.  But neither the Starfleet admirals nor the television audience side against Kirk.  It was, after all, the bridge of the Enterprise that was being stormed.  The Command also issues a statement recognizing the red-shirted Enterprise security guards for their (usual) valor in such extreme and perilous circumstances.

(Cowen)

Complaints and Solutions

                                 Complaints and Solutions

A problem with populist movements is that they usually are based on assumptions and accusations that have no real legal solution, I found the following somewhere:

As is often the case with populist movements, the frustration at the heart of this enterprise is rooted in a mix of reality and fantasy. Some of its complaints—economic, cultural, political, intellectual, historical, and otherwise—reflect genuine abuses, inequalities, and policy mistakes that have exacted serious costs in the middle and lower educational and economic tiers of our society while mostly advantaging the upper tiers. These are the kinds of things that a political program could try to redress in various ways. But some of its complaints are based on an excessively sinister set of assumptions about the motives of American elites, in unfounded assertions about the actions of those elites, or in fevered conspiracies of abuses of power without a basis in fact. These kinds of complaints can’t be redressed through acts of governance because the problems they describe aren’t real, and so politics can only take them up rhetorically—by voicing them or somehow acting them out. These two sorts of complaints are often intertwined in complicated and confusing ways.

So the methods of rallying support may not be subject to legal intervention and solution as they are not real. Thus frustration is a certainty. More, the fantastic arguments are easier; good identification of problems and precise solutions are hard. The Right certainly does not see themselves either in legislation or in cultural discussion and feel marginalized and disrespected. in that, they are probably right.

Sunday/Lamb

                                    Sunday/Lamb

In today's gospel, John the Baptist points out Christ passing nearby and cries, “Behold, the Lamb of God.” The reference is to the sacrifice of lambs common among Jewish worship. Gentle and innocent. And probably a death sentence.

Two of John's followers leave him to follow Christ. "What are you looking for?" Christ asks. So Christ starts with a universal question Then Christ changes one of the men's names. An eventful encounter.

The Lamb
BY WILLIAM BLAKE

Little Lamb who made thee

Dost thou know who made thee

Gave thee life & bid thee feed.

By the stream & o'er the mead;

Gave thee clothing of delight,

Softest clothing wooly bright;

Gave thee such a tender voice,

Making all the vales rejoice!

Little Lamb who made thee

Dost thou know who made thee



Little Lamb I'll tell thee,

Little Lamb I'll tell thee!

He is called by thy name,

For he calls himself a Lamb:

He is meek & he is mild,

He became a little child:

I a child & thou a lamb,

We are called by his name.

Little Lamb God bless thee.

Little Lamb God bless thee.

Graphs

                                  Graphs

[Government] spending rates would be lower if all programs were required to be tax-financed. Government, however, may have access to both debt issue and money creation as alternative revenue sources. These allow the government to spend without taxing, which is almost the ideal setting for elected politicians. By creating deficits, the government is allowed to finance desired programs that provide benefits to potential voters without overt increases in rates of tax.

At the close of July 2020, the national debt was 126% of the nation’s annual economic output, or 4.2 times its average over U.S. history:

From 1929 to 2019, federal government current expenditures and receipts—expressed as a portion of gross domestic product—have varied as follows:

Qualifications

                                                            Qualifications

From an advertisement at the University of California-Davis for an assistant professor of sustainable aquaculture and coastal systems:

As one of the country’s leading R1 institutions, UC Davis seeks candidates with exceptional potential for research, teaching, and inclusive excellence. In addition, the successful candidate will demonstrate an understanding of the barriers preventing full participation of members from historically underrepresented and marginalized student communities in higher education, such as (but not limited to) women, underrepresented minorities, individuals self-identifying as LGBTQIA+, veterans, individuals with disabilities, economically disadvantaged groups, first-generation, undocumented students, or students with any intersections in between. Successful candidates will help advance UC Davis’ strategic goal of improving access and building an inclusive community for all marginalized populations. The successful candidate also will have an accomplished track record (calibrated to career stage) of teaching, research, or service activities addressing the needs of underrepresented minorities, and a clearly articulated vision of how their work at UC Davis will continue to contribute to the University’s mission of serving the needs of our diverse state and student population. Applicants’ track record of engagement and activity related to diversity, equal opportunity, and inclusion as well as their plans for future engagement will be a significant part of the overall evaluation of the candidate’s qualifications for a faculty appointment.

Diminishing Returns

                                      Diminishing Returns

Influenza is deadly. Before this year it routinely killed around 20,000 people each winter in the UK – sometimes far more. Influenza can develop, like Covid, into pneumonia, hospital admission, and oxygen up your nose. All too often, it means intensive care, ventilators, and, tragically, death. As recently as the year 2000, more than 56,000 people died from influenza or pneumonia in England alone.

Now, surely, no one would classify thousands of deaths from influenza as any less awful than thousands of deaths from Covid. It, therefore, follows that if we are prepared to lockdown to protect the vulnerable from one virus that kills, we must do so to protect them from the other. Every winter. Isn’t that just logical and humane?

This is from some satirical suggestion playing on the idea that only 100% survival is acceptable in any circumstance. No effort is too much, no sacrifice too great.

These are the people who deny the concept of scarcity. And they avoided the direct confrontation of that illogic by locking down the economy and creating a scarcity of jobs, earnings, and commerce.

A Philosophy for and of Our Time

 

                                                    A Philosophy for and of Our Time

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

H. L.  Mencken's famous one-liner has become a more important observation because society, as a huge and diverse group with a bell-curve of abilities, requires simplification when you communicate with it. The essence of advertising. "Mmm-mmm good!" "Built tough!" A single, pointed distillation. An essence.

Intellectuals, and eventually the only place they could find work, the university, have sought truth and explanation but only physicists have sought formulas. Now we all do. We all seek the one, single summation of the complexities of creation and, in the social world, that is Critical Theory.

What used to be the intellectual explaining the complex ingeniously simply has become simple men seeing the complex simply. 

This means we have gone from insightful to simplistic. The conspiracy theories of the Right and the Critical Theories of the Left have one common denominator: They are easy.

Eduction-free Zone

 

                                      Eduction-free Zone  

So much of the country's problems are a function of poor appreciation--or understanding--of the foundation of the nation. Certainly, the problem in Washington must raise some significant doubts about the intellectual and educational capacity of the land, even those who claim a fundamental understanding of the nation. How misguided do you have to be to believe that the Founders intended for the Vice President to be able to select the next president regardless of official election results?

The Washington demonstration should challenge everyone in the country to rethink the nation's education system. It is otherwise simply inexplicable.

The Cadaver Synod

 

                              The Cadaver Synod

The House is considering impeaching Trump sometime in March or April when he is out of office. Righteous revenge never sleeps. And “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Reminds one of  the Cadaver Synod

Stephen VI, the successor of Boniface VI, influenced by Lambert and Agiltrude, sat in judgment of the former pope, Formosus, in 897, in what is known as the Cadaver Synod. The corpse was disinterred, clad in papal vestments, and seated on a throne to face all the charges from John VIII. The verdict was that the deceased had been unworthy of the pontificate. The damnatio memoriae was applied to Formosus, all his measures and acts were annulled, and the orders conferred by him were declared invalid. The papal vestments were torn from his body, the three fingers from his right hand he had used in blessings were cut off, and the corpse was thrown into the Tiber, later to be retrieved by a monk.

Following the death of Stephen VI, Formosus' body was reinterred in St Peter's Basilica. Further trials of this nature against deceased persons were banned, but Sergius III (904–911) reapproved the decisions against Formosus. Sergius demanded the re-ordination of the bishops consecrated by Formosus, who in turn had conferred orders on many other clerics, causing great confusion. Later the validity of Formosus' pontificate was re-reinstated. The decision of Sergius with respect to Formosus has subsequently been universally disregarded by the Catholic Church, since Formosus' condemnation had little to do with piety and more to do with politics. (from Wiki)

(Damnatio memoriae is a modern Latin phrase meaning "condemnation of memory", indicating that a person is to be excluded from official accounts. Erased.)

Sunday/Baptism

 

                                                        Sunday/Baptism

Today is the Baptism of Christ, where Christ joins human ritual and symbolism and is baptized by John. There is a tolerant, understanding quality about his joining; one can see a smiling condescending Christ among us as he agrees to the event. But it is more, a peculiar, complex scene where Christ--a mosaic himself--is caught in a moment as part of a larger mosaic, where Christ is both complete and part of something larger, a scene to drive Arians mad.

Claritas. The dry-eyed Latin word
Is perfect for the carved stone of the water
Where Jesus stands up to his unwet knees
And John the Baptist pours out more water
Over his head: all this in bright sunlight
On the façade of a cathedral. Lines
Hard and thin and sinuous represent
The flowing river. Down between the lines
Little antic fish are all go. Nothing else.
And yet in that utter visibility
The stone’s alive with what’s invisible:
Waterweed, stirred sand-grains hurrying off,
The shadowy, unshadowed stream itself.
All afternoon, heat wavered on the steps
And the air we stood up to our eyes in wavered
Like the zig-zag hieroglyph for life itself.
(Seamus Heaney)